I
I’m not
one to pay attention to dreams. But this dream I remembered, though only its
blueprint. The details and nuances change with the telling. I have preserved
the blueprint and have been carrying it with me like mental baggage I can’t
seem to shed for a quarter of a century now. The doorbell rings at my Zagreb
apartment. I open the door and people I’ve never seen before come pouring in.
“Who are you? How dare you barge in without my say-so?” I shout. “This is my
apartment!” A woman, meanwhile, is changing her baby’s diaper on my bed, a man
goes into my bathroom (“Hey, that’s my bathroom!”), somebody opens the fridge
and begins taking out food (“How dare you! That’s my refrigerator!”), I fume
and threaten (“I’ll call the police!”), but they don’t hear me. I’m invisible
to them. My apartment fills with people and nothing seems to stop them. “How
can so many of them fit in here! As if they’re not people but a deck of cards!”
I think in my dream.
A few
months after I dreamed this, war broke out in my country, Yugoslavia. Tens of
thousands of refugees dispersed across the globe, some even finding their way
to Afghanistan. With a brand-new, only just valid passport from the newly
minted state of Croatia, I left my country. Or I should say my country left me.
I know now that the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of refugees who are
knocking on the doors of the European countries did not leave their countries.
Their countries left them.
No
matter what we call them — guided by the etiquette of political correctness —
whether emigrants or émigrés, migrants, refugees, exiles, or asylum-seekers, we
all know whom we’re talking about. This is our shared cultural meme. European,
Christian civilization began with people seeking refuge. All of us have
internalized the image of God banishing Adam and Eve from paradise, wagging his
rage-filled index finger. This image is a part of our lasting cultural legacy.
I set out into the world when the then president of Croatia — with that same
godly ease and menacing finger — announced he was the “Croatian George
Washington” and declared Croatia to be “heaven on earth.” Today, when I watch
jihadist videos, I note that they are ever ready to wag that finger. Wielding
it like a sword, they threaten those who refuse to obey with horrible
punishments.
We all
have refugees as part of our mental vocabulary: the notions of expulsion,
exodus, exile, are built into the very foundations of our civilization and
personal lives. Yet we tend to close our eyes to the numbers (at the end of
2014, some 60 million people had been displaced, the most since World War II),
to the images of the dead bodies washing up on the shores of Italy, Spain, and
Greece, to scenes from refugee ghettos, to the geographic site — the island of
Lampedusa — one of the symbolic topoi of the “migration crisis.”
Marjola
Rukaj, Albanian photographer, takes portraits of refugees, but also the small
things the refugees are carrying with them, with all their symbolic potential.
She takes pictures of cell phones, trinkets, a ribbon, a bracelet, a necklace.
Examination of one of Rukaj’s photographs froze the blood in my veins. The
picture was of an inexpensive necklace and, suspended from it, a razor-blade
charm. I experienced the razor blade as a miniature passport allowing the crossing
of the last border, between the world of the living and the world of the dead,
an exit, as if into death, a poisonous snake we carry with us like a pet, to be
set free from the cage only once and never more.
While we
close our eyes, migrants are making their way, using superhuman strength and
tenacity. According to a report by the Norwegian government, in November 2015,
more than four thousand migrants crossed the narrow Norwegian-Russian border,
thereby opening a new and unexpected “arctic route.” Russian law forbids
traversing the last dozen miles on foot, so they covered those last miles
riding children’s bicycles over the frozen wastes. Perhaps some of them riding
bicycles warmed themselves with visions of the lights of Paris, unaware that at
that very moment, on November 13, 2015, terrorists had turned Paris into a site
of bloodshed, violence, and fear. Reality becomes fantasy at this point. Life
is not a dream; life is cinema, hunger games.
No doubt
many of my former countrymen — themselves refugees 20 years ago and now
law-abiding taxpayers in Western European countries — are dead set against the
idea that this new wave of refugees will become their fellow citizens. The
countries which stepped out from behind the Iron Curtain, such as Hungary,
Bulgaria, and Romania, have since hastened to raise new — barbed-wire —
curtains, without a thought to the fact that a Hungarian, Romanian, or
Bulgarian child, not just a Syrian child, could become entangled in the wire.
Countries like Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia over the last several years have
been treating refugees like tennis balls for their games of petty, local,
embittered political tennis.
Today a
large portion of the world is tight-rope walking. It is difficult to say on
which side these tight-rope walkers will fall or whether they will fall at all.
The landscape is not attractive: down below are fields sprouting rolls of
barbed wire and swastikas, and the view of the other shore is murky at best.
Nobody can guarantee there isn’t a crazed suicide bomber crouching there on the
other, well-lit shore. Nobody can tell yet whether tight-rope walking is the
new lifestyle, the new code, the new morals, the new politics. Terrorism is
amoral, as Jean Baudrillard declared after September 11. Have we, the citizens
of the world, been so overcome by fear that we, too, have become amoral?
Europa
was, herself, a migrant; according to one mythical version she was the daughter
of a Phoenician king, born in the city of Tyre in what is Lebanon today, and
astride a bull — her lover, Zeus — she reached the shores of Europe. Reaching
the other shore astride a bull is every bit as spectacular as riding across the
last dozen miles of ice on a child’s bike.
Refugees
and migrants serve as a mirror, a test, a challenge, a summons to confront our
values. The events, some of them visible, others less so, which have followed
since the “migrant crisis” was identified, are being added to the crossword
puzzle. The people fleeing their countries are the beginning and end, the cause
and effect, they are the deck of cards from which the near future of the world
will be read. And whoever knows how to read these cards will know what lies
ahead for us.
II
I don’t
know when it was that I first met Meliha, a Bulgarian woman who cleans apartments
in Amsterdam. All I remember is that she introduced herself as Meli …
“Meli
isn’t a Bulgarian name, is it?” I asked.
“Well
not everyone who comes from Bulgaria is … Bulgarian,” she said cautiously.
Meli’s
background was Bulgarian Turkish. She was from a distant village somewhere in
the northeastern end of the country. Her parents apparently did little but have
children, producing a brood of 17. Three of them died, said Meliha, and 14 of
us are left. Carried away with their procreational vigor, the parents seem to
have failed to note that in communist Bulgaria they’d had decent medical care,
readily available contraception, and the right to abortion. Having spent his
reproductive role, her father died like the salmon after spawning. Her mother,
the queen bee, lives the life of a fertility goddess: her children look after
her and after one another, the older ones raising the younger.
Meliha
and her four sisters were renting an apartment together in Amsterdam. They were
all working as house cleaners and all of them also had jobs at Albert Heijn,
the largest and best-known Dutch supermarket chain. Albert Heijn is such a
powerful company that they put a supermarket up in the middle of Museum Square
in Amsterdam, rubbing elbows with the cultural giants of the Van Gogh Museum,
the Rijksmuseum, and the Stedelijk. The Albert Heijn supermarket is the fourth
“giant”: it keeps an eye on museum visitors, passersby, and denizens of the
Museum neighborhood. Many, having purchased a bottle of water and a sandwich at
the Albert Heijn supermarket, recline on the supermarket’s architecturally
appealing slanted grassy roof.
Meli and
her sisters cleaned the supermarket twice a week, and they reported this part
of their earnings to the Dutch tax collectors. Their regular payment of taxes
would be key on the day when they went to the Dutch authorities to request
Dutch citizenship. Meli arrived in the Netherlands at the age of 19; now she is
28. She was born in the year the Berlin Wall fell. This detail meant something to
me but not to her. She works every day from morning till night, and stops by my
place when she can, on Sundays.
Meli
barely has a fourth-grade education. She never traveled around Bulgaria, she’d
never been to Sofia, the closest being the Sofia airport from where she flies
to Amsterdam. She cycles through the streets of Amsterdam like a true Dutch
woman. And when she stops by my place to visit I often sit her down at my
computer. We work on the basics, the names of the capital cities and countries
of Europe …
“How can
you not know! You need to know where you are in the world,” I insist. She
laughs. Her smile exposes a sharp tooth growing over another tooth.
“And you
should go to the dentist, for God’s sake, to have that tooth taken care of!”
She laughs again. She has no intention whatsoever of going to the dentist.
Meliha
and I speak in Bulgarian. Her Bulgarian is not strong. Mine isn’t much better.
Mine was left behind somewhere in my childhood, I learned what I knew while I
was visiting my grandparents, my mother’s parents, who lived in Varna. With
their death, our family vacations spent on the Black Sea also came to an end.
Meliha has never been to the Black Sea. Just like her sisters, she bought a
house in her village and a small apartment in a nearby town. She rents out the
apartment. Meliha is a successful young woman, especially if one considers what
her chances for success were to begin with. She renovated her house following
urban standards. Thanks to her ties to Bulgarian trucking she managed to arrange
to have all the furniture she’d bought in Amsterdam delivered to her village.
Everything is now brand spanking new in her house.
“I’ll
come to see this miracle for myself,” I say.
“Come,”
she says, and laughs.
“I’ll
come once you’ve put in a jacuzzi.”
She
laughs; she has plans for a jacuzzi.
III
Frank is
a manual laborer. He ripped down walls in my apartment, removed all the rubble,
and prepped the apartment for the electricians, plumbers, and other
tradespeople. He did this all in three days, for a surprisingly modest wage.
And over those three days I learned that Frank was the son of a Dutch
Protestant minister, that he’d been married, had no children, was well educated
and had a job, and then one day he abruptly decided to abandon it all. He
closed his bank accounts, his tax numbers, his phone numbers, he de-registered
his addresses and completely removed himself from the system. The jobs he did
as a manual laborer he found through people he knew. Frank’s girlfriend’s phone
number was Frank’s only contact point. I paid him with a pang of guilt; I felt
he was charging too little for the job he’d done. We said our goodbyes. For
some reason I thought I’d never see him again.
With no
forewarning, Frank showed up at my door some 15 years later. He joined me for
coffee, and we talked. In the meanwhile he’d bought a house in a distant
mountain village somewhere in southern Bulgaria, near the border with Turkey.
And his girlfriend is with him. He helps the villagers build and repair their
houses and, in return, the villagers teach him how to work the land, cultivate
vegetables, set up beehives …
“So what
are you doing in Amsterdam?” I asked.
His
Dutch passport had expired, and without a passport he couldn’t travel; he was
worried he might have difficulty renewing it, because the Dutch authorities
could no longer find a single item in his file but his birth certificate to
prove that he was a Dutch citizen. Frank had done far too thorough a job,
apparently, at removing himself from the system.
A Bulgarian
woman in the Netherlands, a Dutch man in Bulgaria, this is only one of the
millions of similar stories of today’s Europe. If there is anything truly
relevant in the current inflation of intellectual narratives about European
identity, a European future, the European crisis, Europe after the wall, new
European walls — then it should be the narrative of the magnificent, remarkable
circulation of human material. Human cargo. Wars, murders, genocides, political
systems, states and borders, ideological and religious systems, nationalisms —
all this pales in comparison to the fates of ordinary people. Sure, if Frank
had moved to Bulgaria during the communist years, maybe he wouldn’t have needed
a Dutch passport anymore, maybe he’d never have been able to leave Bulgaria
again. Sure, if Yugoslavia hadn’t come apart at the seams, if a mob of brutal
thugs, elected by the democratic majority, hadn’t grabbed power, I wouldn’t
have ended up in Amsterdam and I would never have made the acquaintance of
Frank and Meli. Nor would Meli have ended up in Amsterdam if Bulgaria had not
become a member of the European Union, followed by the transition and state-run
thievery that brought Bulgarian citizens to the verge of starvation. Meli is
not in Amsterdam for the tourism; Meli is here to feed herself and her large
family, which was brought into the world by her worry-free, childish parents.
Whatever the case, the entire world relies for its existence on worry-free,
childish parents.
IV
Meliha
has an iPhone, the most recent, expensive model. She shows me pictures of a
wedding. Of her 10 sisters she will soon be the only one who isn’t married. The
weddings are grand, expensive, with a long guest list and shimmering dresses.
One of Meliha’s sisters married a Turkish man in Istanbul. The wedding was
colossal. They found a groom for Meliha as well, but he wasn’t worth mention, a
fool … and this other one, whose picture she shows me on the screen, handsome,
muscular, with a modern haircut ending in a cowlick on his forehead …
“Now that
one likes to be in charge,” I say, touching his picture on the screen
tentatively with two fingers as if it were a dead mouse.
“True,”
she says. Meliha may be short on experience, but her discerning eye ticks like
a Swiss watch.
Bulgarians,
it should be said, have, at times, humiliated their Turks, compelling them to
work the nastiest and most poorly paid jobs, and to change their name and
faith. Today Bulgarian women dash off to Turkey, where they work as house
cleaners, nannies, and maids; the Turkish middle class is on the rise, has need
of their services, and is willing to pay. Bulgarian women do the same work in
Istanbul as Meli does in Amsterdam, as Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, and
Albanian women do in Italy, as Slovakian women do in Austria, as Lithuanian
women do in Switzerland, as …
And
while the European political bureaucracy spreads its wings in Brussels, and
while prominent political thinkers fling philosophical mortar now and then at
the ideological construct of Europe, and while petty European fascists nestle
into European commissions like laying hens, clucking loudly and every so often
producing a “serpent’s egg,” and while in many transitional countries there is
not so much as the letter D left of democracy, everyday European life continues
to push in various directions, and on invisible cyber-papyrus, millions of European
human fates are being recorded.
What happened with Meli was a miracle. She, who’d been
so reticent simply because she had a vocabulary of barely five hundred words,
she whom I’d coached in European geography, she had learned to speak Dutch. I’d
never have known she’d mastered it on the sly if Dutch friends of mine hadn’t
stopped by one Sunday while Meli was visiting. She conversed with them with
real eloquence in Dutch. That Sunday, in the presence of my friends, it was
hard to stop her. Meli’s self-decolonization happened in language, through
language, with the help of language. This is why I’m beginning to think she
will never go back. Where can she go back to? A native language where the best
she can do is stutter?
V
Europe
bristles with paradoxes. Paradoxes are what keep it alive. This, of course, is
not something that those who build the barbed-wire walls and fences know about;
they’re convinced they are in control. In the Storm campaign for which Croats
feel particular pride, they expelled more than two hundred thousand fellow
citizens, Serbs. Ten years hence the population of Croats began to shrink.
Right now the shrinking is accelerating from one month to the next. Croats are
leaving the country, their heaven on earth, in search of better jobs, and this
is not the first time this has happened in their modest history. Whoever can is
fleeing, those with little or no schooling, those with a plenty of schooling,
the young, the old … they are going wherever they are welcome: Ireland,
Denmark, Faroe Islands. Such as a young man, Ivan, from Slavonia, whom I sat
next to on a flight to Zagreb last Christmas. He couldn’t have been much over
18, a manual laborer, he mixed mortar, carried bricks …
“How’s
it going for you on Faroe?”
“Great,
there are plenty of people there from around here. It’s just a bit on the cold
side,” he said and laughed.
When he
talks, he swallows parts of words and compensates by drawing out the rest, as
do people from Slavonia. He speaks, though he is clearly unused to
conversation; words confuse him, yet I feel he enjoys being the center of
somebody’s attention, no matter how fleeting or random. He is going to his
village, going home for the Christmas holidays, and then he’ll return to Faroe
…
“So what
will you do while you’re in Slavonia?”
“Dunno,
have me a look…”
“What
will you have a look at when you just told me your parents died and you have no
family left?”
“Well, I
don’t…”
“Why
go?”
“To see
how the house is doing…”
“But you
said your house is crumbling and you have no electrical power…”
“Well, I
don’t…”
“So what
will you do there?”
“Dunno,
have me a look…” The young man dug in his heels and a hard expression flitted
across his face like a shadow.
At that
moment, in the plane as it was landing at Zagreb airport, I felt as if the
young man, too, was a shadow, like Meliha, and like Frank became with his
voluntary self-exclusion. They, like millions of others, lead parallel lives.
These are people with no voice yet they are motivating, advancing, and
sustaining European life. They are the invisible Europe.
VI.
George
Steiner, one of the last top-notch European intellectuals with a strong
humanistic bent, in his oft-cited The Idea of Europe (2004) ennumerates five
postulates defining Europe. The first are the “café,” as a place for creating
and exchanging intellectual values. Indeed, Europe is crisscrossed by cafés,
which are key to the cultural and intellectual history of Europe. Take the
Odeon, for instance, in Zurich. A glance at its clientele, which included Franz
Werfel, Stefan Zweig, Frank Wedekind, Karl Kraus, William Somerset Maugham,
Erich Maria Remarque, Klaus Mann, James Joyce, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, Hugo
Ball, Franz Lehar, Arturo Toscanini, Albert Einstein, Vladimir I. Lenin, and
Leon Trotsky, bears out George Steiner’s assertion. The second postulate is
“geography” or “walkability,” the “human scale.” One can master the distances
in European cities and countries on foot. The third postulate, which sets Europe
apart from other geographic constellations, is the constant commemoration of
the cultural past or reminders of it. Streets, squares, and buildings in
European cities bear the names of major European writers, philosophers,
painters, scientists, statesmen, reminding us of how inextricably interwoven
are the European past and present. The fourth postulate on which the idea of
Europe relies is the interweaving of two powerful traditions of civilization,
the dual origins of Europe, where, metaphorically put, one parent comes from
ancient Athens, the other from Jerusalem. The fifth postulate underpinning the
idea of Europe and the European is a continual awareness of a possible end to
European civilization, the presentiment of this end, the awareness of potential
apocalypse. The presentiment of the end is not merely a subject for the
ruminations of philosophers such as Spengler and Hegel; it has its roots in the
European experience of the two World Wars, the Holocaust, and mass destruction.
Hundreds of millions of people were killed in these wars, and six million
European Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Many parts of Europe were razed
to the ground. The firm commitment never to let this happen again was flouted
by the relatively recent “Yugoslav” wars (1991–2001), in which, as if the
warring parties were following a textbook, many of the same things were
repeated: the ethnic cleansing, destruction, expulsion, genocide (Srebrenica),
the camps, the forced resettlement, and the refugees.
George
Steiner — who senses the coming of the collapse of Europe, the incursion of the
barbarians, and the fading of European ideas — seeks a way out through cultural
utopia, through dreaming a new dream of enlightenment, through focusing on
things of little utility and on truths: “The dignity of homo sapiens is exactly
that: the realisation of wisdom, the pursuit of disinterested knowledge, the
creation of beauty. Making money and flooding our lives with increasingly
trivialised material goods is a profoundly vulgar, emptying passion.” Steiner
condemns the “despotism of the mass-market and the rewards of commercialised
stardom” because of which the best minds of Europe are embracing “the edenic
offers of the United States.”
At the
rare moments where Steiner lapses into a typical European lament, the reader
might stop and recall just how much Europeans have gained from the idea of
America. And how much America itself has gained from the many émigrés who went
there from Europe. Perhaps there is relevance in a story told by a guide on a
tour boat on which I cruised around Manhattan a few years ago, about how the
eastern shoreline of Manhattan was fortified with rubble transported from
Europe during World War II, when the ships returning to the United States after
delivering aid to England would load rubble from the Blitz as the ballast
necessary to stabilize the ship. Who knows, maybe the eastern shoreline of
Manhattan was built on rubble from Coventry Cathedral! Even if this story isn’t
true, the metaphor still holds. People didn’t flock to America to save their
lives, ensure a better future, or take advantage of “edenic offers,” but for a
set of ideas which America exemplified: the “dream,” the simple things of
freedom, choice, tolerance … America is a land of settlers, it exists thanks to
the people who settled there, who are settling there, and who will settle
there. Millions of lives are built into American culture, into the literature,
architecture, movies, art, science, medicine, technology. Many of these people
came from Europe. There is nothing sadder than a country whose borders are
bristling with barbed wire, yet none of the refugees have any intention of
staying. Through Greece, Turkey, Serbia, Hungary, Croatia, and other countries,
the refugees seek only passage. Bad countries are merely corridors, and the
refugees know this better than anyone.
During
Yugoslavia, there were many factories, institutes, streets, and schools named
after Nikola Tesla. Socialist propaganda expressed by the slogan knowledge is
power rang out on all sides. Nikola Tesla was a living example that the
enlightenment sentiment espoused by communism was possible. During the recent
war, the monument to Tesla in Gospić was destroyed, along with his family home
and museum. Until recently the home where Tesla grew up in Smiljan was
surrounded by mine fields, but now it has been rebuilt and made into a museum.
For the tourists, of course. The main square in Gospić used to be called Nikola
Tesla Square. Today it is Stjepan Radić Square. Countless squares and streets
in Croatia bear the name of Franjo Tuđman, a third-rate politician, and the
first president of the Republic of Croatia. The new Zagreb airport is also
named after Tuđman. Although he was born in Croatia, Nikola Tesla was
ethnically a Serb, which is the main obstacle to his inclusion in the Croatian
pantheon. In Serbia, many streets, squares, and schools, as well as the
Belgrade airport, bear the name of Nikola Tesla. For Tesla, at least as far as
the Serbs are concerned, was a Serb.
In the
United States, there is a statue to Nikola Tesla at Niagara Falls. Yugoslavia
gave this copy of a statue by Yugoslav sculptor Frano Kršinić as a gift to the
United States. In New York City, a corner of Bryant Park was recently named
Nikola Tesla Corner. A statue has been installed on Long Island at a key site
for Tesla’s scientific work. There are busts of Tesla at many American
universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, Michigan, and MIT.
This
fragment of a story about Tesla confirms the respect for education, science,
invention, enlightenment, progress — everything Tesla personified — and which
the culture of the United States values far more than they are valued by the
cultures from which Nikola Tesla came. Inclusivity — a great idea that still
attracts people to America. Walls and barbed wire will not prevent them from
making the trek, drawn by the pull of ideas of a better, more humane, creative,
and dignified life. Even if they arrive at their destination disappointed,
stripped of rights, humiliated, they will do their best to make real the ideal
they set out to attain. Maybe they will be invisible, maybe they will not have
the right to vote, but they will be the people who sustain life and lift human
standards, the standards of the humane. The zero-tolerance policy will sooner
or later backfire on those who are advocating for it. It embitters the life of
many who have lived here for generations. The true despair begins when we
suddenly feel there is nowhere left to emigrate to, that all destinations are
equally bad, that there is nothing beyond the wall. The only hope left for us
is that we haven’t yet been faced with the last wall. We haven’t, have we?
2015–2018
This essay was originally commissioned in 2017 for a three-day workshop in Essen, organized by Praxis Europa, “a coalition of people from academia, civil society, business, administration and the culture sector, who wish to engage with the idea of a democratic, just and sustainable Europe, and to end the threat of its disintegration.” An excerpt first appeared on Literary Hub, and this full version will appear in Ugrešić’s forthcoming collection of essays, The Age of Skin (Open Letter Books).
Translated
by Ellen Elias-Bursać
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