Postcards, frankly, just aren’t around anymore. What Bali has is Vespas: everyone’s got one. This makes traffic lights and gas stations few and far between, so they sell gas in plastic bottles, like homemade plonk. All in all, settlements on Bali have little in common with the European conception of urban planning; they are more like Slavonian village lanes, popping out one after the other like sausages: Kuta, Legian, Seminyak. . I was after 47 Raya Seminyak Street. It turned out that street numbers, if there are any, don’t mean a thing. Raya Seminyak Street actually has two number 47s, and for some reason none of the local residents, not even the traffic police, seem able to mentally internalize house numbers. Places are remembered by their function: one of the number 47s was some kind of store, the other a massage parlor.
This type of thing, like many other things, is the stuff of life off the resort. Because on Bali you have life on the resort and life off the resort. Tourists live on the resorts, the Balinese off. The Balinese go around grinning like Cheshire cats, while tourists’ lips seem firmly jammed together by invisible pegs; you first have to take the peg off and return the smile, which is pretty tiring if you’re out of practice. On Bali there’s a “Center for Laughter,” opened by a former-tourist-turned Bali resident. The woman decided to recoup the money she had invested in annual holidays and transform her annual holiday into a lifelong calling, passing on her smile know-how to incurable sourpusses. Bali is the “Island of the Gods,” and many here have experienced similar enlightenment, including Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the global bestseller Eat, Pray, Love—six million copies sold and counting. When the film version hits the cinema, a lot of women are going to be hurtling off to Bali in search of their happiness — and their Javier Bardem.
Joss sticks burn everywhere, and yearning for any kind of sensation, physical, emotional, spiritual, financial, everybody burns with them. The locals’ lives revolve around tourists, something I know a little about from my former homeland. I once saw a little boy in a small Adriatic town holding a plastic yogurt container with some water and a jellyfish in it, hollering: “Buy the jellyfish that stung you!” There are similarly ingenious hucksters here too. In a large opening in the rocks near Tanah Lot, an enterprising Balinese dressed as a Buddhist monk offers tourists their chance to stroke the head of a bulging, allegedly deadly, serpent-like creature. Like many tourists that day, I too stroked the head of the docile slow worm, leaving his owner a few rupees.
Balinese supermarkets reminded me of early communist supermarkets: frozen fish and meat, “Nivea” cream with the kind of obsolete packaging that’s no longer sold in Europe, a handful of symbolic products — English biscuits well past their expiration date, inedible Japanese rice crackers — just enough to satisfy a tourist who needs a fix of nutritional nostalgia. The cosmetics section, with all its skin-whitening creams and potions, was disconcerting to say the least.
Indonesia had its place in my childhood imaginary, albeit a humble one. As a little girl I eloquently pronounced the names Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru, and Sirimavo Bandaranaik; sarongs, skullcaps, and flowers in my hair were part of my childhood landscape. How so? Because of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Non-Aligned Movement brought exotic images to Yugoslavia — either they came to us, or Tito went to them—and Indonesian, Egyptian, Ceylonese, and Indian children waved their miniature flags, just like me.
There is a small well-integrated community of former Yugoslavs on Bali. Some came as hippies, others as hippies who missed the party the first time, and some as eager entrepreneurs. A woman from Korčula opened a sandwich shop, a guy from Belgrade is involved in tourism, and there are a few young Slovenians living as surfers, actively practicing life as permanent holiday. “Even God forgot me,” said one of my countrywomen who has lived here for the past eighteen years. Given where we were (Bali is the “Island of the Gods,” right?), the melancholy of her sentence was hard to process, particularly in light of Elizabeth Gilbert’s diametrically opposed experience.
In complete contrast to Elizabeth Gilbert, I didn’t go to Bali for self-discovery, but to briefly forget who and what I am. I didn’t experience self-discovery in the form of a charming Brazilian businessman like she did, but self-discovery didn’t completely pass me by either. Each to her own, I guess. My self-discovery was waiting for me on the hotel courtyard’s bookshelf, which was full of books other guests had left behind. Seeing the covers, with their large embossed gold letters, I didn’t hold out much hope of finding anything to read, let alone one of my own books. Dan Brown, Elias Khoury, Danielle Steel. . there were also a few Russian books by writers I’d never heard of, which just means that the Russians had made it to Bali too. I took out Dmitri Gluhovski’s novel Metro 2033. The entire world is in ruins, humanity is devastated, Moscow polluted by radiation and inhabited by monsters. The few surviving humans hide in the Moscow underground, where terror and hopelessness reign. Artiyom, the hero, makes his way through the entire underground in order to save his metro station, and perhaps the whole of humanity with it.
On the last page of the book — I only managed to read a small snippet — I stumbled upon a written appeal. The book’s publisher and members of the Russian PEN organization announced the establishment of a “Warm Heart” fund and asked readers to send in donations to support down-and-out contemporary Russian writers. They desperately need your help, the appeal read. There are well-known authors among the writers, war veterans (from the Second World War), and former camp inmates who these days literally can’t put food on the table. By my reckoning, half a million readers would have read the appeal, about the same number as the book’s print run. Optimistically, I thought that if those half-million had left the book behind somewhere, on a park bench, in a café, in the metro, or in a resort like this one on Bali, the real numbers could be off the charts.
To cut a long story short, I jotted down the bank account number. Instead of buying Elizabeth Gilbert’s illuminating chronicle of self-discovery, I decided to send the equivalent sum to the writers who’ve discovered the very bottom of their useless profession. Because I also have a “heart.” What’s more, it seems that it’s still “warm.”
June 2010
BATTLE ROYALE
The word impossible has been and must remain deleted from our dictionary.
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Everyone understands the IKEA thing: you get caught once, you’ll go back to the scene of the crime. Somebody calculated that no one has ever been to IKEA and walked out with less than five items. I tried it once. Before heading in I swore to myself that I wouldn’t buy anything, but I ended up at the check-out with a candle, two small wooden hooks, a packet of paper serviettes, a rubber placemat, and a little green plastic flower. I felt like a kleptomaniac. Even if I’d have gotten past the check-out empty-handed, I would have caved at the little food section near the exit and bought a jar of Swedish cranberry jam, dry Wasa crackers, a bad coffee from the machine, and the kind of crappy hotdog I only ever buy at IKEA, and in the streets of New York, which is of course a completely different story.