Zagreb, Croatia -- under the meager rainshadow of the train platform. across the tracks some sort of monstrous communist-era building has mounted on it two floodlights that spray parallel arcs of twinkling white-lit raindrops [indecipherable] riding the wind in surges. lightning made purple by some atmospheric confluence veins the sky. the platform shelter is riddled with network of cracks and gaps through which rainwater mists or drips or pours, depending on the character of the rent. the wind is blowing [indecipherable]
I remember the lightning, the way it made the sky purple in lines and flashes. The drainage system was a wreck.
A day earlier, I was enjoying the sun in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I still have some family there, but I wasn't nearly organized enough to look them up (should have). I had arrived the day before on a night train from Vienna (small, convoluted, bloated from an addiction to tourism). It was raining and dark, so I slept on the platform with a homeless guy. I woke up at seven. It was bright and clear. I explored. My hostel was excellent--a former prison-turned artists' atelier/creative space/gallery-turned hostel. It's called Hostel Celica. Look it up if you're ever in Ljubljana.
Slovenia was interesting in no small measure because of the undeniable echoes of its desire to Westernize.
Every country of the former Soviet Bloc has this, to an extent--a compulsion to present itself as as capital-W Western as possible. (Each country has its own goofy, selfconscious catchphrases you'll inevitably hear if you spend enough time talking to locals. Czech Republic: "Prague is West of Vienna" Slovenia: "We're not Slavic, we're 'Venetic'" Bosnia: "We hosted the Olympics once" &c.) It was interesting. A short example: I exited the train station and saw a modest plaster-and-brick house just outside the station. On the side, in neat grey letters, someone had painted in English: COMPUTER COMPANY. A decal of a computer adorned the window, as if to further demonstrate the point. There was a homework-on-the-fridge quality to it.
A further point of endearment: my surname being recognized and treated with an easy familiarity, the way "Johnson" or "Moore" would be in the US. It's a weird sort of privilege/convenience, something difficult to describe, and probably inexplicable--to some degree--to someone grew up with a name store clerks could always spell without help.
My final stop was Bosnia. When I bought a one-way ticket to Sarajevo, the Croatian ticket taker raised her eyebrows and repeated my destination sotto voce. Yes, I said.
The train was nearly empty. Cigarette ash was smeared on nearly every surface of my compartment. I fell asleep quickly. Shortly after three a.m., a uniformed man entered my compartment. He was a short, fat man in an ill-fitting uniform with Cyrillic lettering. I gave him my passport. He asked where I was from in the US. When I said Alaska, his face lit up. He pushed a hand into his chest (as though pledging to some unseen entity) and told me visiting it was his dream. He said it not like it was tangible dream, but more in the manner I would describe wishing to visit the moon: something tremendous not only for its own sake, but also for the elegant impossibility of its realization. I told him it was beautiful there and he repeated it as though fingering a rosary: "Yes, it is beautiful there. It is beautiful there. It is beautiful." He corrected himself after a few repetitions: "She is beautiful."
The city itself was bullet-riddled and fascinating. The skyline is stippled with minarets. Graveyards dot the hillsides. Most of the death dates fall in the mid-90s.
I went to the old Olympic stadium and visited the museum. I was the third visitor in the month of June.
There's an identifiable manner in which a person who has experienced war in his or her native country carries this experience. I talked to some Bosnian students at one point. They were about my age which means they were, what, eight or so when the war ended? At one point, a girl named Manuela mentioned laughingly that we'd all be dead in 2013 anyway. Thinking she was referencing the Mayan calendar, I asked if she meant 2012. No, she said, there's going to be war as Europe has never known in 2013. Someone asked her what she meant. She shrugged and said she'd heard it from a man on television. He said the living would envy the dead, she said.
Most people I've encountered who lend credence to apocalyptic theory do it with a sort of earnest acceptance of or even enthusiasm for its fantastic quality, the unreal nature of things like "the end of time" and death and destruction on a massive scale. Manuela regarded this future war in an entirely different way. She talked about it like the weather. She could have been talking about whether traffic would be bad next Monday.
I realized, sitting there, that certain things were real for her that would never be real for me.
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