I was also a bit nonplussed by their dates of birth: their mental development lagged far behind their age in years. Maybe exile was a kind of regression. At their age they might well have been gainfully employed and bringing up children, yet here they were, hiding behind school desks. The state of exile had brought all kinds of deeply suppressed childish fears to the surface. Suddenly the sight and touch of Mother were no more. It was like a nightmare. We would be in the street, in the market, on the beach, and, whether through our fault or hers, our hands would disengage and Mother would vanish into thin air. Suddenly we faced a world that seemed terrifyingly large and hostile. Gigantic shoes advanced menacingly toward us as we made our way through a jungle of human legs, our panic growing…
I often had the impression of seeing a kind of hologram of that fear in the shadows flitting over my students’ faces. “In emigration you are prematurely old and eternally young — at the same time,” Ana once said, and therein, to my mind, lay a profound truth.
In response to the question about what they expected to get out of the course, Uroš wrote, “To come to,” which, given the way he used it, seemed to mean not only “recover from a shock,” “regain consciousness,” “come back to life” but also “come back to oneself,” as if it presupposed a space and an individual floundering in that space and searching for the road home. I was first unnerved, then frightened by Uroš’s response. Was I prepared to deal with that kind of need?
CHAPTER 5
The lay of Holland’s land is horizontal;
It tapers off, when all is said and done,
Into the sea, the which, when all is said
And done, is also Holland…. In Holland
One cannot mountain-climb or die of thirst,
Let alone leave behind a clear-cut trace
By leaving home astride one’s bicycle
Or yet by setting sail. Our memories
Are but another Holland. And no dyke
Can hold them back. Which means that I’ve
Been living here in Holland a lot longer
Than all the local waves that roll on with
No landing. Like these lines.
Occasionally, when confronting my own image in the bathroom mirror, I felt a fleeting desire to know where I actually was. I had never asked questions like that as long as Goran and I were together; I had never asked questions at alclass="underline" there seemed to be no time for it. Suddenly I had time to spare, and it made me very anxious. It was as if there were too much time and too little me. More and more often I was overcome by an unpleasant sensation, a numbness I’d never known before. I kept examining myself, the way one examines one’s mouth with one’s tongue, hoping to get my feeling back, but the self-induced anesthesia was powerful and refused to yield. I had no idea where it had come from or when it had come on.
Very soon after I moved in, the flat started making me nervous. The poky, windowless bathroom with its shower, white tiles, and concrete floor had a nightmarish feel to it; it was like a quotation from an old black-and-white movie. I kept trying to spruce it up; I bought little gewgaws — a nice soap-dish, an expensive towel with a hand-embroidered lace border; I redid the lighting. The new lights revealed thin accumulations of dirt in the indentations between the tiles, and one night I spent hours removing the dirt with an old toothbrush in a headstrong attempt at transfiguring the looscape by brute strength. The wall of the tiny hallway was painted a gray-green halfway up from the floor and divided from the other half by an ugly green line. The floor was covered with black linoleum, which gave the flat the aura of a hospital or penitentiary. I did everything I could — I bought a vase, a lamp, a black-and-white poster of the skyline of New York — but their presence merely pointed up the anxiety of absence. The absence of what? I had no answer. I wondered whether another space would have made me feel better. I wasn’t too sure. At night, wound round with darkness and a woolen blanket, I would sit at the window in my armchair and stare out through the bars on the qui vive for noises and voices, for a pair of shoes or a cat darting past. The space was definitely not me. But then again I wasn’t me, either.
My angst in the basement flat grew with tropic alacrity, like a passionflower, a passiebloem, the creeper that decorated house walls and garden gates in many parts of town. I kept finding myself grabbing my bag, flinging a coat over my shoulders and racing out of the place, not knowing where I was off to.
The city, which was like a snail, a shell, a spider’s web, a piece of fine lace, a novel with an unusually circular plot and hence no end, never ceased to baffle me. I was constantly getting lost and had the greatest trouble remembering street names, to say nothing of where the streets themselves started and stopped. It was like drowning in a glass of water. I had the feeling I might well — if like Alice I should lose my footing and fall into a hole — end up in a third or fourth parallel world, because Amsterdam itself was my own parallel world. I experienced it as a dream, which meant it resonated with my reality. I tried to puzzle it out just as I tried to interpret my dreams.
The most fascinating thing about it was the sand. I would stand next to a house that was being demolished and watch the rotten beams coming down and the water spurting up out of the invisible depths through an ugly hole in the sand. I would watch workers repairing the Amsterdam cobblestones, prizing them up out of and setting them back into the sand. Sand provided the city with a metaphorical as well as literal foundation and provoked an almost physical reaction in me: I constantly felt it in my mouth, hair, and nostrils.
I couldn’t get over the number of signs and signals—“fingerprints”—by which the inhabitants of the city made it clear that they belonged. I thought the signals childlike and consequently touching, like the breadcrumbs Hansel and Gretel sprinkle behind them to guide their way home. Every one of them — the figurines of cats climbing the fronts of old houses, the flags hanging out of the windows, the posters and even family photos, especially of newborn babes, inscriptions and slogans, tiny sculptures, toys, teddy bears, African masks, Indonesian vajang dolls, models of ships, miniature replicas of typical Amsterdam houses — had one and only one message: “I live here. Look! I live here.” I had the feeling that all the “still lifes,” the ikebanas, the “installations”—even the simple window decoration of a cheap Ikea vase housing an inspired two-guilder Xeno “shipwreck”—bore witness to the inhabitants’ subconscious fear of evanescence. The doll’s houses embedded in doll’s houses, the infantile urban exhibitionism, the imprints left willfully in the sand — on some level they all resonated with my own angst, whose name and source I was unable to put my finger on.
I lived very close to the railway station and found myself increasingly drawn to the main hall, where I would stand staring at the timetable, as if the display of arrivals and departures could provide the key to my angst. Once, on an impulse, I took a train to The Hague, walked through the city, and returned a few hours later. From then on, I made a habit of taking trains to places not particularly meaningful to me. I would go north, to Groningen and Leeuwarden, or south to Rotterdam, Nijmegen and Eindhoven, east to Enschede; I would go to the nearby cities of Haarlem, Leiden, and Utrecht; I would go to places simply because the sound of their names appealed to me: Apeldoorn and Amersfoort; Breda, Tilburg and Hoorn; Hengelo and Almelo; or Lelystad, whose name reminded me of a lullaby. The Netherlands was poignantly small. Often I simply got out, walked up and down the platform, and took the next train back to Amsterdam. The journey alone calmed my nerves. I would gaze out of the window, my mind blank, the Dutch lowlands tempering my angst. I took pleasure in the absolute, undisturbed constant of the horizontal in motion. I also came to appreciate the signs and would read out their words flashing past in the rhythm of a children’s counting rhyme: Sony, Praxis, Vodafone; Nikon, Enco, JVC; Randstad, Philips, Shell; Dobbe, Ninders, Ben…And just as we seem to fancy people more for their faults than for their virtues, so I gradually developed a sympathy for that landscape of absence, the straight, light green line of the horizon, the cold nocturnal vistas with their full moons and flocks of large white geese shining in the dark, or the frozen shadows of cows idling in the road like friendly ghosts.