Whatever the case, the homeland and the state meld in an alloy, two concepts merged into one, a traditional marriage: the homeland — the female emotional charge; the state — the male rational side. The alloy comes more readily into focus after the first call to military service and the first tax bill. A divorce between homeland and state is not permissible, and the notion that the homeland might be a Utopian project is out of the question. So it is, for instance, that the poem by the Croatian poet S. S. Kranjčević (I have a homeland, I hold it in my heart, with all its hills and plains/Where will I spread out this Eden? In vain I ask the world, and choke back my pain) is interpreted in schools as a Croatian document confirming the exclusive Croatian copyright to hills, plains, pain, and Eden.
A person needs to trudge down a long and hard road on the way to figuring out how to relate to things, among them the homeland/state. Profound insights do not come dropping out of the sky like the roast chickens of fairy tales. When I left my homeland of Croatia, the one which had slipped out of my Yugoslav homeland, and turned up here in the Netherlands, my feelings were at first confused. I didn’t know how to think about homeland. And then — though this took some ten years of cogitation — I discerned within myself an unusual urge. As soon as I turned up in a new country or city, the first thing I’d look for is — a hair salon! My hair grows slowly, and I haven’t much to spare, so getting a haircut is not a high priority. When I go to the hairdresser’s, I don’t get all the bells and whistles, I just have it cut. So my neurotic urge to have my hair cut would be difficult to classify as simple female vanity.
I will not list all the cities and countries where I’ve had my hair cut, but as evidence of my competence I can say with a certainty that that the cheapest haircut currently available in New York City is at salons run by Uzbeks, no longer with the Russians the way it used to be a number of years ago. The able Uzbeks will cut your hair in Brooklyn for ten dollars. Not even the barbers in the Serbian town of Čačak will pick up a pair of shears for that kind of money.
I thought about what all this means, and I wondered whether my neurotic urge to get my hair cut in each new place I visit is a form of masochism or a ritual form of internal apology — apology for what I don’t know. In the Netherlands I long felt that I had been missing something. Yes, I had friends, a tax accountant, my own dental hygienist; I had mastered the many facets of ordinary life that made life more ordinary. Then, as a result of the deficit I mentioned earlier, I embarked on painful introspection, until at last I stumbled upon a moment of epiphany: my biography suddenly emerged as a chronicle of all my haircuts. In Amsterdam I have changed many hairdressers, the fancy ones, the famous ones, and the cheapest ones at the barbershops run by Moroccans, but none of these felt like a comfortable shoe on a weary foot. And then Liesbeth took over the hair salon in my neighborhood.
Liesbeth is a tall, large, young woman with a very pale complexion, who must have grown up on Dutch cheese and milk. Liesbeth has blue eyes and a slightly melancholic look, perhaps from her porcelain complexion. All in all, she has a charming face, which looks diminutive next to her vast posterior. It is difficult not to notice Liesbeth’s behind, especially because she prefers tight pants. Liesbeth has a different hairdo and hair color every time I see her. Sometimes she dyes her bangs platinum blue while the rest of her hair is black. Liesbeth knows that the hairdo of the proprietress is the best ad for a salon. She has a boyfriend every bit as large as she is, and the two of them are like young walruses; they adore each other, and together they adore a poodle. Liesbeth has the tiniest poodle in the world, the size of a squirrel, except that unlike a squirrel her poodle has a short tail. The poodle, unusually docile and adorable, never barks, or at least I have never heard it. It spends most of its days in a little basket that Liesbeth sets by the window, so that the poodle won’t be bored. It is a little odd that Liesbeth’s salon is always empty. I call in advance to make an appointment for a haircut, and she invariably hesitates a moment, consults her calendar, no, ten o’clock wouldn’t be so good, how about eleven. We go back and forth about the time, although I know that Liesbeth is free at ten and eleven, and whenever I want. Liesbeth’s salon is done up in bright colors, the door is violet, the door frames light green, the walls pink. Whenever I cycle by Liesbeth’s always empty street, I can see her out on the grassy patch in front of the salon walking her poodle on a slender leash. Liesbeth is large, the poodle is small. She looks as if she is walking a mouse. She and I speak of nothing but the haircut, whether I want it this way or that, shorter or longer. The conversations are pointless because she cuts my hair exactly the same way each time, and each haircut is every bit as bad as all the others.
I don’t know why, but sometimes a fear gnaws at me that Liesbeth, with her shears and her poodle, might vanish like a soap bubble one day. The murky stab of terror drives me to dial her number.
“When would you like. 11:00?”
“What about 12:00?”
“Sorry, that won’t work. 12:15?”
“OK.”
With a sigh of relief I hang up.
As far as hair is concerned, this is what I recently learned: In ancient cultures, the act of cutting the hair was a symbolic sacrifice for the good of the people. Through history long hair was worn by martyrs, hermits, the holy, kings, warriors, aristocrats, dignitaries. The servants and the underclass had short hair. Cutting hair was a ritual of obedience, sacrifice, grief, disgrace, punishment, and self-punishment.
After the long, painful, and geographically diverse experience I have gained traipsing through hair salons, the very essence of the homeland/state finally became crystal clear to me. Yes, I am the perfect subject! I am what every homeland-mother desires.
February 2009
A POSTCARD FROM BALI
The “postcard” is here a literary genre that presupposes three things: the presence of its author in a particular place, brevity, and randomness of content. The reality is that nowadays people send e-mails from Bali. The postcards I stumbled across in a small shop at a Bali resort reminded me of Eastern European ones, sixties-style. Back then, few had cameras, and digital cameras were in the distant, inconceivable future.