Refusing to be ill and sit home, I did what you are never supposed to do: hitchhike while feeling poorly. Probably a fluke that the third lift I got after leaving Paris was one straight from somewhere in Southern Germany all the way to Slovakia. Feverish, I rode these 100s of kilometres, lapsing in and out of sleep. The last thing I remembered in Bavaria was a radio announcement that deer were on the motorway, then I snoozed all through Austria and when I was finally shaken awake, it was to the familiar hiss and lilt of a Slavic language.
I couldn't resist and celebrated the arrival in the new country with some zmrzlina quickly snaffled from the roadhouse café. A great word for a great thing: Zmrzlina means ice-cream. Listening closer to the language spoken around me, intelligible tatters of speech wafted over to my ears, some of them sounding like archaisms to the Russian-speaker's ear.
I was on the northern fringes of the continuum of mostly southern Slavic languages whose conspicuous absence of vowels inspired a nineties Onion article about Bill Clinton airlifting A's,I's and E's to the area since they were obviously in dire need of them. In reality, it is the letters "R" and "L", semi-vowels in English, function as full ones here, I was told. That's how you get people with names like Vlk Trlin, which I would like to pretend was the name of my next driver, but that would be taking too much literary licence.
It took me three rides to get across the country, lengthwise. Each driver turned out more forthcoming than the precedent one. The first bought me coffee, the second bought me lunch, the third one dinner and drove a 80 km detour to drop me off at the border. Some 20 kilometers before it we sailed past a war monument. A first sign of the real East. "Russia is not very far from here", the locals said when we chatted with them at the garage where we stopped for tea. My driver, a very knowledgeable man, proudly informed me that the country's actual name was now "Ukraine".
The penultimate small town before the border was called Lúcky. And that's how I felt.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
A farewell without sadness
Literary tourism. Here in Paris, whenever I get bored on a sunny day, I swing myself on my bike and take the time to seek out the next in line out of a list of addresses. So far I have been round not all, but at least some of the places that the Great N lived in (there is a great number of them). Like Rue Saigon, a small side street leading away from the Algerian consulate, Rue Boileau, quite near the "gaunt arches" of boulevard Exelmans that are described in "That in Aleppo, once...", or Avenue de Versailles, where apparently V.N. wrote Sebastian Knight, his first full novel in English. I even made it to the Café de la Paix, where V. N. desastrously lunched with Bunin in January 1934. Unpleasantly shocked by the excesses of the nearby Opera house's gilded statues, I marvelled at these two Parises of ours that never overlap in space nor time.
Two Parises. One culled together in the first half of the century in the West of the city, where the free-flying particles of Russian émigré society, set loose by the revolution, had found a place to sink down and come to a precarious rest ('precarious' at least in the case of the Nabokovs, since Vera was Jewish), constructing their new lives wafting around the area nearby that Russian church, St. Nevsky, whose spires become gradually narrower to culminate in small golden onion-domes, and which is situated not very far from the Arc de Triomphe. Being the staunch atheist that he was, the Great N probably made it a point of never going there, but his abodes are never that very far, sprinkled around the posh parts of town, sometimes even in sight of the city's steely landmark, the Eiffel Tower, that unsightly tapering bulk of glinting metal.
The other Paris, mine. Times certainly have changed: the great expulser, the Soviet Union, has collapsed long ago, and Russian émigrés are not aristocracy on the skids, but oftentimes simple small town girls much like my friend Sasha, stern beauties who use skinproducts and too much make-up, and who in the past managed to fish a foreign husband after studying French at university, but by now have come round to divorce on a whim.
In space, my Paris is one of North-Eastern bar districts, seedy suburbs and underground hide-outs.
I'll give you a run of the places I am most likely to be found at: My school - a dilapidated structure under the melancholy autumn skies of Clichy, a part of the greater conglomerate of Paris made famous by Henry Miller who sent the main-character of one of his novels round scamming the hotels of the area. I actually like the oversized shoebox that we take our classes in, especially because it reminds me of run-down Moscovite Khrushevas (Soviet style tower blocks), but I agree to file this kind of predilection under the idiosyncracies of my personal taste. Worth remembering in my mind are the large, stout maple trees biding their time waving their branches in the cool winter winds over the grey water masses of the Seine slowly labouring along.
Among the places I frequent most often is also my friends' house in the northern suburb St. Denis, where, into the bargain, I was let live on the sofa for three months when I first arrived. Most notable are sundays, with their wildly animated markets: surrounded by so many fat mamas draping their luxuriant bodies in colourful tissues, milling about, brandishing yam roots, if it wasn't for the Gothic cathedral's watchful eye over the market place, you might just think yourself in a cooler, cloudier kind of Africa.
As for myself, I finally came to live in Pantin, a suburb which you can reach from St. Denis on slow, crowded city busses, that would dandle along the angular urban landscapes of grey, experimental 60's architecture.
Near where I live, right on the massive, noisy round-about of the ring-road that constitutes my gateway into Paris proper, there is a superbly sorry example of this, a quirky, square-edged church. The real curiosity however constitutes the cross in front of it. A towering metal cross. The part at the very top is either painted a deceptively reflection-like sky-blue or is made of a sky-reflecting material, the rest of it being clad in drab beamless grey. It has an incomplete ladder leaning against the cross-piece, as if someone had come to detach Jesus and then, once the job was done, forgotten to take the thing back home, and this was now so long ago that by this time most of its rungs had fallen off. The whole construction is clearly a metaphor waiting to be mused about.
As for my house myself, it is on a quiet street. I like the colourful tiling on the floor in the entrance hall and the way that, on a sunny day, the light falls from the skylights in the roof of the three-storey house in straight beams, as if cut out with the large, dangerously rotating blade of a heavy machine, straight into the somber entrance hall at the bottom of the staircase and make the dust moats dance before your eye. As you mount the stairs, the handrail, cut out of dark wood, is chunky and cool at the touch of your palm, and the sound of your footfall is muffled by an old, green carpet, threadbare in some places.
If ever I make my way into the heart of Paris, I can be seen riding my bike along the stout arches of Barbès and Belleville, here shading the hustle of bootleg cigarette sellers, North Africans selling vegetables on stands improvised out of stacked cardboard boxes, and pickpockets rubbing shoulders, there sheltering the living rooms of homeless people from the rain, replete with sofas and ash trays on low metal tables. At night the tall roofs of Belleville lend themselves to ambulation. Above the black burst of the Paris sky, below the slick seal skin of rainy asphalt roads.
If I venture south, my Paris is underground. The meshwork of the dark and dusty wetlands of the catacombs, where wide-eyed youth roam until it's sunday afternoon to the low-pitch rumble of the boomboxes attached to their rucksacks.
Imagine the shock when I got lost on my bike west of the Latinquarter for the first time and saw what the area around the Val de Grace looked like above the earth. Irradiant white limestone buildings and stonen statues of long lost dignitaries.
Two Parises. One culled together in the first half of the century in the West of the city, where the free-flying particles of Russian émigré society, set loose by the revolution, had found a place to sink down and come to a precarious rest ('precarious' at least in the case of the Nabokovs, since Vera was Jewish), constructing their new lives wafting around the area nearby that Russian church, St. Nevsky, whose spires become gradually narrower to culminate in small golden onion-domes, and which is situated not very far from the Arc de Triomphe. Being the staunch atheist that he was, the Great N probably made it a point of never going there, but his abodes are never that very far, sprinkled around the posh parts of town, sometimes even in sight of the city's steely landmark, the Eiffel Tower, that unsightly tapering bulk of glinting metal.
The other Paris, mine. Times certainly have changed: the great expulser, the Soviet Union, has collapsed long ago, and Russian émigrés are not aristocracy on the skids, but oftentimes simple small town girls much like my friend Sasha, stern beauties who use skinproducts and too much make-up, and who in the past managed to fish a foreign husband after studying French at university, but by now have come round to divorce on a whim.
In space, my Paris is one of North-Eastern bar districts, seedy suburbs and underground hide-outs.
I'll give you a run of the places I am most likely to be found at: My school - a dilapidated structure under the melancholy autumn skies of Clichy, a part of the greater conglomerate of Paris made famous by Henry Miller who sent the main-character of one of his novels round scamming the hotels of the area. I actually like the oversized shoebox that we take our classes in, especially because it reminds me of run-down Moscovite Khrushevas (Soviet style tower blocks), but I agree to file this kind of predilection under the idiosyncracies of my personal taste. Worth remembering in my mind are the large, stout maple trees biding their time waving their branches in the cool winter winds over the grey water masses of the Seine slowly labouring along.
Among the places I frequent most often is also my friends' house in the northern suburb St. Denis, where, into the bargain, I was let live on the sofa for three months when I first arrived. Most notable are sundays, with their wildly animated markets: surrounded by so many fat mamas draping their luxuriant bodies in colourful tissues, milling about, brandishing yam roots, if it wasn't for the Gothic cathedral's watchful eye over the market place, you might just think yourself in a cooler, cloudier kind of Africa.
As for myself, I finally came to live in Pantin, a suburb which you can reach from St. Denis on slow, crowded city busses, that would dandle along the angular urban landscapes of grey, experimental 60's architecture.
Near where I live, right on the massive, noisy round-about of the ring-road that constitutes my gateway into Paris proper, there is a superbly sorry example of this, a quirky, square-edged church. The real curiosity however constitutes the cross in front of it. A towering metal cross. The part at the very top is either painted a deceptively reflection-like sky-blue or is made of a sky-reflecting material, the rest of it being clad in drab beamless grey. It has an incomplete ladder leaning against the cross-piece, as if someone had come to detach Jesus and then, once the job was done, forgotten to take the thing back home, and this was now so long ago that by this time most of its rungs had fallen off. The whole construction is clearly a metaphor waiting to be mused about.
As for my house myself, it is on a quiet street. I like the colourful tiling on the floor in the entrance hall and the way that, on a sunny day, the light falls from the skylights in the roof of the three-storey house in straight beams, as if cut out with the large, dangerously rotating blade of a heavy machine, straight into the somber entrance hall at the bottom of the staircase and make the dust moats dance before your eye. As you mount the stairs, the handrail, cut out of dark wood, is chunky and cool at the touch of your palm, and the sound of your footfall is muffled by an old, green carpet, threadbare in some places.
If ever I make my way into the heart of Paris, I can be seen riding my bike along the stout arches of Barbès and Belleville, here shading the hustle of bootleg cigarette sellers, North Africans selling vegetables on stands improvised out of stacked cardboard boxes, and pickpockets rubbing shoulders, there sheltering the living rooms of homeless people from the rain, replete with sofas and ash trays on low metal tables. At night the tall roofs of Belleville lend themselves to ambulation. Above the black burst of the Paris sky, below the slick seal skin of rainy asphalt roads.
If I venture south, my Paris is underground. The meshwork of the dark and dusty wetlands of the catacombs, where wide-eyed youth roam until it's sunday afternoon to the low-pitch rumble of the boomboxes attached to their rucksacks.
Imagine the shock when I got lost on my bike west of the Latinquarter for the first time and saw what the area around the Val de Grace looked like above the earth. Irradiant white limestone buildings and stonen statues of long lost dignitaries.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
We sit like Platon's ideals in front of our fickle, monstrously distorted shadows, projected behind our backs by the force of a single frail flame of a candle propped up in the sand at our feet. The thick traces of soot on the ceiling melt and morph like shapeshifting ghosts when you put your head in your neck. When you stare straight ahead the vault of the sky stretches white with starlight out from under this fuliginous arch.
Mars is laboriously slowly making its way through Taurus. Along the frayed edge of a neighbouring mountain ridge a first corner of grey augurs the idle advent of the following day.
The inside of the cave echoes with the music produced by Pedro on his Hutsul dulcimer. There are no words for this beauty. These are the most wondrous, fairy tale-like sounds I've ever heard. Vasya sits beside Pedro, blowing the Jew's harp.
I absolutely wanted my new friend Vasya here with me when playing stone age in the cave city Mangup. With his long scraggy dreads that reach down to his waist and his wild, tangled beard which right now hangs seperated in two braids of different sizes from his chin, he looks the closest to a paleolithic man I have ever seen.
Mars is laboriously slowly making its way through Taurus. Along the frayed edge of a neighbouring mountain ridge a first corner of grey augurs the idle advent of the following day.
The inside of the cave echoes with the music produced by Pedro on his Hutsul dulcimer. There are no words for this beauty. These are the most wondrous, fairy tale-like sounds I've ever heard. Vasya sits beside Pedro, blowing the Jew's harp.
I absolutely wanted my new friend Vasya here with me when playing stone age in the cave city Mangup. With his long scraggy dreads that reach down to his waist and his wild, tangled beard which right now hangs seperated in two braids of different sizes from his chin, he looks the closest to a paleolithic man I have ever seen.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Livadia
Livadia - Where the sea is the distance, and lies unreal, softer, softest, under a livid sky.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Under Quarantine
Wies is 22 and still lives with his mum and dad. It may seem strange at first, but when you see how he actually lives, you understand. What he calls his home is a massive complex of houses, with a beach just at the back of his living room. Squatted in the early 80's by a group of hippies among whom his parents, the lodgings have been constructed in the 1920's as a hospital complex immediately opposite the international harbour Rotterdam. The idea was that sailors staggering onto land with their heads in the clutches of fevers brought about by vicious tropical diseases could be stacked away immediately from society at large. The street is up to this day called Quarantaineweg and neighbours are few and far in between.
What a luck that the day I made it there, I just happened to come down with swine flu. Perfect place to cough and sneeze and feel miserable.
The symptoms could be excrutiating: At every breath my aching lungs rattled like a beat-up toy car sent to lumber round the model race track one last time. The air wheezed in and out of my respiratory tract, crackling and going through my clotted windpipes like sludge moves through a sieve crusted with dried mud at the end of a long day of sifting for nuggets of precious metal in a silty river. And indeed the search would yield: From time to time my dried lips would part and spit out an half-liquid and amorphous marble of gold.
Whenever I decided I could get up now and drag my body two steps across the room, the plan was foiled at once: I'd have to turn round, plunge back into bed from instant exhaustion, and sleep would crash back over me in cold waves of fever and fatigue. Again I'd be paralysed in horizontal position, stapled to the bedsheets.
What a luck that the day I made it there, I just happened to come down with swine flu. Perfect place to cough and sneeze and feel miserable.
The symptoms could be excrutiating: At every breath my aching lungs rattled like a beat-up toy car sent to lumber round the model race track one last time. The air wheezed in and out of my respiratory tract, crackling and going through my clotted windpipes like sludge moves through a sieve crusted with dried mud at the end of a long day of sifting for nuggets of precious metal in a silty river. And indeed the search would yield: From time to time my dried lips would part and spit out an half-liquid and amorphous marble of gold.
Whenever I decided I could get up now and drag my body two steps across the room, the plan was foiled at once: I'd have to turn round, plunge back into bed from instant exhaustion, and sleep would crash back over me in cold waves of fever and fatigue. Again I'd be paralysed in horizontal position, stapled to the bedsheets.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
By means of finger on world-map, we travel. We imagine the house we are going to move into in Kirgistan, imagine the fruit we are going to pick from trees along the streets in our village, imagine ourselves cook large pots of гречка for our house full of hungry hitchhikers. We push on the months by pure willpower and already follow the road we are going to hitch down to Tibet. Mountains tower up higher and higher before our inner eyes. Ultramarine blue lakes plunge deeper and colder between their tops. Our fingertips travel on and on, cross borders at random, get lost in Indian jungles and so rainforests are made to grow straight out of those Himalayan slopes, volcanoes appear in their place, rivers waver and whirl, become waterfalls, become a sea we sail across, and -clink- we are celebrating next new Year's Eve at the Equator. Our fingers retrace their path. Pages of my passport flash by and fill themselves with visas - long hours waited in queues at embassies, money, stamps, stickers, signatures -all here and gone in a flash.
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Travelling with a large fish
Hitchhiking came in the shape and colour you usually get it in Muslim countries: lifts within the blink of an eye, out of their way helpful and friendly drivers, quick kidnappings for improvised barbecues.
The roads were better and the donkeys alongside it not as beat up as those in Morrocco, or neighbouring Algeria.
The presence of well-fed and handsome odd-toed ungulates must surely be "proof that trickle-down economics really work. Even the lowest layer of society is reached!", as John remarked.
As far as tourist touts go, I learnt to say "no, thanks" in as accent-free an Arabic as I could master pretty quickly; John just professionally stuck to the old axiom that "silence is the unbearable repartee" (G.K. Chesterton said it first).
Despite his often eloquent pronouncements, travelling with a thoroughly monolingual Englishman is best likened to travelling with a large fish.
Whenever a local talked to him John just helplessly goggled with his mouth agape like a herring on land.
And although there were some pleasant moments on sandy hilltops (the things they call dunes down there) it can't be a compliment to Tunisia's natural sights when I say that I thought that the best bit of our trip was the night when we drunkenly snuck into the dinosaur park to have our pictures taken with nocturnal brontosauri.
The roads were better and the donkeys alongside it not as beat up as those in Morrocco, or neighbouring Algeria.
The presence of well-fed and handsome odd-toed ungulates must surely be "proof that trickle-down economics really work. Even the lowest layer of society is reached!", as John remarked.
As far as tourist touts go, I learnt to say "no, thanks" in as accent-free an Arabic as I could master pretty quickly; John just professionally stuck to the old axiom that "silence is the unbearable repartee" (G.K. Chesterton said it first).
Despite his often eloquent pronouncements, travelling with a thoroughly monolingual Englishman is best likened to travelling with a large fish.
Whenever a local talked to him John just helplessly goggled with his mouth agape like a herring on land.
And although there were some pleasant moments on sandy hilltops (the things they call dunes down there) it can't be a compliment to Tunisia's natural sights when I say that I thought that the best bit of our trip was the night when we drunkenly snuck into the dinosaur park to have our pictures taken with nocturnal brontosauri.
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