Europe and America are bound by an umbilical cord. Like my friends, I prepared for the recession. I ordered many tins of tuna fish from a Yugoslav dealer in Amsterdam who supplies the diaspora with products from home. Adriatic tuna is the best; the tins are square, flat, and thin. You can pack an entire library with them: the European classics — Proust, Kafka, Joyce — in front, and behind, tins of tuna. Like in Russian homes during communism: in front, the classics of socialist realism, and behind, the dissidents.
February 2009
CAPTAIN, SIR, WE HAVE PLENTY OF COFFEE!
The lips pursed in the shape of the letter “O.” “Pu”—a little door bulging with pressure from within. A mouth full of morsels. O-pu-lence. “Lence”—rings like a brass bell. The word swells, then pops like a fountain gushing with sprays of gold coins. Opulence: rivers flowing with milk and honey, plump pancakes dropping from the sky.
“What image does the word opulence evoke for you?” I ask a friend.
“An American refrigerator!” he shoots back.
The American refrigerator is an accurate representation for many Eastern Europeans — especially those Yugoslavs who watched American movies from their earliest childhood — of the mythical “horn of plenty.” The image of that vast American refrigerator, so full to overflowing that food tumbles out of it; the picture of the fridge (what a warm, soothing word!) out of which the half-awake American pulls a plastic half-gallon jug of milk or orange juice and chugalugs it down; or removes a whole tub of ice cream, brandishes a soup spoon, and sitting cross-legged on a comfortable sofa, clicks on the TV and slurps the ice cream from the tub as if it were soup. This has been etched on the imagination of Eastern Europeans for generations as the clearest and most appealing image of wealth and ease.
There are as many notions of opulence as there are people! To know what it means to be full, you have to be hungry; to know what wealth is, you have to be poor. In an episode of that old American mammoth soap opera Dynasty, Joan Collins’s Alexis and her lover Dexter are soaking in a jacuzzi, sipping champagne. Dex scoops something up with a spoon from a bowl and downs it.
“Hey, go easy with the spoon,” says Alexis, chronically vulgar, “that’s caviar!”
The director probably thought it gauche to zoom in on the salty roe, yet the audience still needed to register the couple’s indulgence, hence Alexis utters her improbable sentence. Out of place in the scene of luxury, of course. The champagne, the caviar, the jacuzzi: simple symbols of opulence the media have foisted on the imaginations of the poor in America and all over the world. Yet during the famines that followed the Red Revolution, many Russians had so much caviar that they were sick of it; there was absolutely nothing but caviar to eat. Those who were short of a spoon scooped it up with their bare hands.
Poverty knows affluence best. Maybe that is why one should go rummaging around the open markets, the flea markets, the big retail chains for the poor, and see the pile of “garbage” that the poor spend their money on. Because “garbage” is the most precise expression for a poor person’s general impression of opulence. Perhaps it is only in this context that we can make sense of why the Vanderbilt family imported, brick by brick, lavish sixteenth century Italian rooms and built them into their “cottages” in Newport; and why today’s rich Russians blast great holes in the Montenegrin cliffs to build villas that are reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum, with swimming pools from which the swimmer gets an eagle’s eye view of the azure of the Adriatic.
Peer into a poor apartment where the largest wall in the living room is wallpapered with a lavish sunset. Or into the little city gardens done in plastic grass with a flock of plastic flamingos and plastic frogs swimming in a plastic fountain. Peek into the stores selling gilded nylon brocade, synthetic lace, polyester silk and satin. Check out the Eastern European hot springs that date from the communist period, where weary Western retirees purchase accessible pleasures: a swim in the shabby pools, a massage with the hotel masseuse, a pedicure.
The idea of opulence is the meeting point between the poor and the rich. We all encounter each other at that place, as if it were an old abandoned railway station at which trains never arrive or depart. We came to the station, it seems, when God banished us from paradise. For opulence exists only in paradise. Everything else is a substitute, regardless of whether the silk is real or synthetic.
There was a popular ad for Franck coffee on Croatian television back in the early nineties. A space ship with its crew. Sudden turbulence. The horrified expressions on the astronauts’ faces signal that the spaceship will never return to earth. A stewardess wearing a Gagarin costume steps into the captain’s cabin and smiles brightly: “Captain, Sir, we have plenty of coffee!” An explanatory line of text runs along the bottom of the screen: “The first Croatian expedition into outer space.” The ad was a nostalgic evocation of a time of turbulence on the former Yugoslav market when there were coffee shortages, while at the same time announcing that a new Croatian future was coming in which there would always be coffee. For three things signified opulence in Yugoslavia: coffee, detergent, and cooking oil. Yugoslav women went over the border by bus on day trips to Trieste or Graz to buy their supplies. For no apparent reason one of the must-have items on the list was raisins. My mother’s cupboard at one point was nearly bursting with little packets of them, and I nearly burst with pity for my mother.
Opulence is kept shut away in the realm of the imagination. For death usually lurks just beyond it. (Moths will get into it! Mice will nibble it! Fire will reduce it to ashes! People will snatch it! The banks will go bust! The money will be gobbled by inflation!) There is nothing lurking beyond poverty but the necessity of survival.
When I was a child, we lived in a small town near Zagreb, a couple of miles from the Zagreb-Belgrade highway. In summer the traffic of Turkish and Greek guest workers on their way home from Western Europe inched along the road. One day the local police knocked at our door and asked my mother to help as an interpreter. That very day the Bulgarian ambassador to Mali had been on his way home for a hard-earned summer vacation, and just where the exit splits off the highway toward our town, the ambassador had collided with another car. His wife was killed instantly; he and his two little girls were unharmed. There were many formalities to attend to, far too many for the local police, but the poor man and his children also needed to be cared for. So the Bulgarian and his two little girls were our guests for several days. When the ambassador departed, he left behind two large sacks of peanuts he had been taking to Bulgaria in the trunk of his car. He probably felt it no longer appropriate to deliver them home along with the news of the death of his wife. Perhaps this was his expression of gratitude; he had nothing else to give us. None of us had ever seen or tasted a peanut before. Our whole neighborhood roasted peanuts with us in the oven, shelling the unsightly husks and nibbling at the unusual oval seeds for months. From the horn of plenty, peanuts showered down upon us.
I have disliked peanuts ever since. Opulence should be left where it can do the least harm — in the realm of the imagination. I make an effort, as much as I can, to steel myself to its siren call. That Captain, Sir, we have plenty of coffee will do for my daily dose of happiness.