7.
“You know, not everyone who speaks Bulgarian is Bulgarian,” Meli offers cautiously. She’s actually trying to tell me that she’s a Bulgarian Turk. For some reason Meli thinks this is important. She came to Amsterdam to work as a cleaner, she barely finished grade school, which is partly explained by the fact that she’s got seventeen siblings. It seems her parents were born to procreate, and the second they were done, began decomposing like salmon after mating. Her father died, and like some matriarchal goddess, her mother lies wasting away in a Turkish village in northeastern Bulgaria, the clan’s young tending to her. Meli cleans Dutch houses and apartments. She lives in a rented Amsterdam apartment with three sisters and a brother. They all earn their keep cleaning and thus support the extended family. Meli’s never traveled anywhere, doesn’t know any place besides Amsterdam and her native village. She’s never been to Sofia. It’s not quite that she never thinks of herself though, she’s bought herself a house in the village, next to those of her older sisters. She’s slowly furnishing it. She’s twenty-two years old, but she’s not thinking of getting married, she’s too old. She chuckles and admits that she can’t remember the names of all her brothers and sisters.
8.
Wioleta Sroka, she says, accosting me at the airport. It’s me, your assistant. There are heaps of other volunteers, but I wanted to be assigned to you, you and no one else. We’re the ABBA generation, you and me, aren’t we?
Mrs. Sroka is a heavyset middle-aged woman with long, disheveled hair dyed flaming red. The cut, the bangs, the limp locks falling halfway down her back, it’s a look she hasn’t changed since the seventies. She must have been pretty when she was young. She’s still got that primary accumulation of self-confidence of those who where physically attractive in their youth. She talks a lot, her voice croaky. She’s also got that smoker’s fan of ancient fine lines above her lips, yet for whatever reason is quick to tell me that she’s never smoked a cigarette in her life.
She doesn’t leave my side, barges into my hotel room uninvited, scopes the place out — the hotel is new, it’s got five stars, that’s irrelevant, you know how sloppy they build these days. . She obviously has no intention of going anywhere, heads out onto the balcony, checks out the view, insists on waiting while I get ready. To go where? To the formal opening of the congress. No, I say, I’m exhausted from the trip, I’d rather stay in. Shall I wait for you in the lobby? No, thanks, there’s no need, I say. It’s as if she’s going to burst into tears. Fine, I’ll come and get you tomorrow morning, she says, almost offended.
She doesn’t leave me alone for a second. When I meet other conference guests she takes a bunch of business cards from her bag, handing them out indiscriminately. That’s me, she says, running her finger under the name on the card. She hands me a bunch too. She’s got green ones and yellow ones, which would I prefer? She stands guard for me outside the restroom, like she’s scared I’ll give her the slip. She looks like a former ABBA groupie, a gone-to-seed Agnetha clone.
She’s constantly inserting herself in the frame, chin-wagging with the TV crew, that’s me, she parrots, palming off her business cards and running her finger under her name. That’s me! As the camera starts to roll she fixes my scarf. There, she says, satisfied.
Apparently it’s time I ate. I try to abscond with an acquaintance for lunch. No luck, she and I go to lunch together. She’s a widow, her second husband died recently. She doesn’t go on annual vacation, what’s the point of annual vacations when you’re on your own? Better to volunteer for stuff like this, it’s way more interesting, and besides, she’s a poet herself, she publishes in literary magazines. She pulls out a thin volume of poetry, placing it in front of me. That’s me, she says, pointing at the name on the cover. Yes, she’s got two sons from her first marriage, they’re big boys, she’s already a grandmother, but she doesn’t see her boys much, they rarely call. She’s retired, but you can’t live on three hundred euro a month. She and her mother combine their two pensions and somehow survive.
Her second husband was an angel, a real angel, they met at clay pigeon shooting. . What? Clay pigeon shooting, people get together and shoot clay pigeons. Here you go, that’s him, she says, taking a picture from her wallet. A good-natured chump in a hunting jacket and hat looks up at me from the picture. There’s a feather in the hat, a feathery souvenir fallen from a mighty angel’s wing. They were married for five years and he went within six months, pancreatic cancer. . She’s been on her own since then, lives with her ninety-two-year-old mother. Mom’s doing okay, everyone in the family lives to a ripe old age, it’s in our genetic code, she says. She’s decided to just get on and be happy with her life, her lot, to stay active. She insists we have a photo together, just me and her, then her, then me and the students, then her, then me and some folks who came to the reading, then her, me, and the acquaintance I caught up with at the congress. .
I recently came across a photo on the Internet. Wioleta Sroka and me, a couple of gone-to-seed ABBA groupies, Frida and Agnetha. We’re standing there on some steps leading to God only knows where. .
9.
Caught in motion, the fragments assembled here are randomly stored images: a gesture, body, phrase, way of behaving, tone of voice, a snippet of conversation, a haphazard and disconnected internal slide show. Only in retrospect do I see the common associative thread: Not one of these images is happy — though it’s true that none is particularly unhappy.
We dreamed a lot in communism, and that was the best part about it, said Carlos, my slip of a taxi driver. This best part will never find a place in any museum of communism for the simple reason that it’s intangible: It crouches hiding in literature, in film, in painting, in the architecture of an epoch that believed it was creating a new world. In turn this new world gave birth to a new art, a good part of which spent its life in the underground, because the world that created it quickly lost any connection to the real existing one. The art in question had an oneiric power. The other truth is that many of its consumers were dreamers too.
In Rio de Janeiro, Santiago Calatrava is building a museum that promises to be one of the most beautiful buildings in the world: the Museu do Amanhã, the Museum of Tomorrow. The museum’s content will apparently be devoted to the “eco-sustainable development of the planet.” Couched in this kind of bureaucratese, the content doesn’t seem particularly alluring, perhaps because the oneiric architectural beauty of the future museum is — in and of itself — the content. The very name of the museum trips a light in the future visitor’s head, bringing to mind many things: the awareness that man inhabits a planet surrounded by other planets; the awareness that there is a future for which we are responsible, for which we refuse any responsibility, the future being something that presently worries us least; the awareness that one day future inhabitants of the earth will judge us, that this judgment will be in accord with what we have bequeathed to them, the kind of world we have passed down as an inheritance, the art, music, living spaces, literature, the kind of people, cities, parks, values. . Yet it’s entirely possible that things are much simpler than this. Perhaps only a country that believes it has a tomorrow (even if this tomorrow is named the 2016 Olympic Games) dares build museums.