“Well, the script is different. .” I say.
“Look, this is bird, this is a wolf’s muzzle, a scorpion, a comb, an eye, a star, a snake, a burdock, an amulet. . Fruit usually means fertility, this zig-zag line denotes water and eternity, this eight-pointed star is divine, this Z-shaped line is light, a snake is wisdom, and a rose, as you know, usually means love. Having a rug with a tarantula in the house is excellent protection against all kinds of insects. . A horse means freedom, a peacock is a holy spirit, although truth be told, I can’t stand the bloody things. A camel is just another symbol of wealth and happiness, and a dog is a protector of the home, but that one you could’ve worked for yourself.
“A hen-pigeon, this one here, is an SMS from God, a snake usually means a win of some sort, and a fish happiness. . Of course, every symbol, every line and color can also mean something completely different. There’s no firm collective agreement on coded language. Because then it wouldn’t be coded, would it?”
“Of course not. .” I say.
“I hope your need to read all the feminist books in my shop is now clear?! Starting with this little pure silk rug — look at how it shines! And I’m going to give you an exercise to help. Just think of it as obligatory reading. It’s easy to carry, and the text is short. I won’t tell you what it says of course, you’ll have to work that out for yourself, but take my word for it, pretty lady, it’s perfect for you, perfect. If you don’t figure it out, use it as a mouse pad, put it on the wall, polish your shoes with it, do whatever you like, but buy it you must!” he says, his tone putting a full-stop on our conversation.
Pressed again the wall, I take out my credit card and, what do you know, I pay without further ado. In the shop doorway, the Turk palms his business card off on me.
“Will you write about me in one of your books” he asks, smiling broadly.
“Why would I?”
“So people find out about me and my rugs! All publicity’s good publicity.”
“I definitely will,” I mumble, glancing at the business card. Adem, his name is Adem.
Drained, I set off for the hotel. All I want is a hot shower and to slip into bed. On the way it occurred to me that he’d forgotten to ask for the Turkish title of my book. Oh Adem, you sly dog, you.
7.
That evening in the hotel room I unrolled the little rug of pure silk. I looked for the symbols and tried to crack the coded language. I couldn’t see a thing. I even gave it a little shake, thinking a message might fall out. I didn’t expect fortune-cookie-type wisdom, actually; I would have been happy with the standard, We’re sorry, all of our operators are currently unavailable. The rug, however, didn’t say boo. It was like a mobile phone with an empty battery. I flipped it over a few times, seeing if it would do the shiny trick. It didn’t. Adem was the battery charger, without him it simply didn’t “work.” I folded it up (it was about four A4 pages in size) and stuffed it in my suitcase. I paid 250 euro for a Turkish apple tea and a one-on-one literature lesson from an Istanbul rug merchant.
In the morning, at Istanbul Airport, waiting for a flight to Zagreb, I tried to piece together the random details of my travels (my fly’s hop: Bucharest-Istanbul-Zagreb). The pieces didn’t fit. I tried stitching them together with the metaphorical thread of the fly, but that didn’t work either; the thread broke, and the pieces flew everywhere. I thought about the navigation of reality; about how we interpret reality, stitches, colors, threads, and symbols; about how we read people, situations, and details; about perspectives; about how the language of reality, in which we normally swim like fish in water, can in a flash become terrifyingly unintelligible, and then, in another, worryingly self-explanatory. I kept thinking of Adem, the prince of liars, the teacher of optics and holograms, the master of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t tricks, the philosopher king: Yes, madame, each of sees as much as we are given to see. .
Suddenly a Turkish fly landed on the edge of my coffee cup, a sinek, and I felt a strange sense of relief. I just sat there and watched it. I thought about the fact that I hadn’t managed to capture the substance of my travels, and I conceded defeat. Then I reassured myself with the idea that, who knows, maybe the point of everything we do isn’t in the capture, but rather in the hunt. And then, as unexpectedly as an unannounced fly, I remembered the lines of a Croatian nursery rhyme:
Three butchers tried to skin a fly’s hide
But hopping here, then hopping there,
The fly left them to chide and stare.
And as I headed off towards the gate for Zagreb, from the edge of the coffee cup, the sinek, the fly (an angel in the diminutive?), watched me go. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me.
December 2010
[1]Joseph Brodsky, “A Cat’s Meow,” in On Grief and Reason.
DANGEROUS LIAISONS
Upton Sinclair, author of the novel Oil!, would have stayed a half-forgotten American literary classic had there not been a film adaptation of the novel There Will Be Blood (2007), with the entrancing Daniel Day-Lewis in the main role, which briefly blew the dust off of Sinclair’s name.
Having seen the movie, I thought back to the shelf of books in my mother’s apartment and the book cover of the first Yugoslav edition of Oil!, which was titled Petrolej. There were pencil drawings all over the inside: those, said my mother, were my first childish scribblings. It was the time of post-war poverty, and the cover of a book doubled as a drawing pad. Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, Maxim Gorky’s The Mother, and Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy were not, perhaps, my mother’s favorite books, but they sold in the bookstores of post-war, socialist Yugoslavia. These and a few others were the first titles in the home library of my young parents.
I don’t remember whether I ever actually read Oil! Probably not, but if I did, back when I was a student — earnestly dedicated to comparative literature — I wouldn’t have dared say so out loud. At that time, defense of the “autonomy of the literary text” was something nearly sacred to every student of comparative literature, and I certainly perceived myself as battling on the front lines. In my student days “literary autonomy” was closely tied to values and literary taste. In simple terms, we felt that good writers did not embark on politics — or write about life in overly real terms. Real life was left to the bad writers and those who flirted with politics. “Literary” literature was “in.” The Yugoslav writers were never seriously infected with the virus of socialist realism, which does not mean, of course, that there weren’t those who compromised. But resistance to the tendency to ideologize and politicize in literature, despite the occasional line penned to glorify Tito, lasted unusually long after the enemy, socialist realism, was dead and buried. There were many good writers, thanks to this, who wrote fine books. There were bad writers, on the other hand, who were labeled “good” because they “didn’t get caught up in politics”; just as many good writers were deemed bad because they had no bone to pick with the regime, or at least didn’t do so publicly; just as there were bad writers who were deemed good only because they had taken a public stand against the regime. The fine Croatian writer Miroslav Krleža, long since dead and buried, bears a stigma even today for his friendship with Tito.