Dubravka Ugresic - Europe in Sepia

3See Ante Lešaja’s Bibliocide: the Destruction of Books in Croatia in the 1990s .

1.

A taxi driver was waiting for me at London Heathrow, holding a piece of paper with my name on it. He introduced himself and kissed my hand. Never in my life has a taxi driver kissed my hand. Carlos, he said his name was Carlos. He was a small man, with a round face and hazel eyes like marbles. As we drove my eyes fell on his chubby little hands. He’s just a teddy bear, a living toy, I thought. His voice silky and soft, restrained, almost feminine.

Carlos was Romanian, from a small provincial town, and unsurprisingly his name wasn’t actually Carlos, it was Octavius. “Octavius” had had the guys from the taxi co-op in stitches, so they called him Carlos. He lives in London, shares a tiny flat with another couple of Romanians, five hundred pounds a month, all he can afford. He’s divorced; in Romania he’s got an ex-wife and a teenage daughter. Over here he met a Romanian woman with a similar story, with an ex-husband and a teenage son. He wants to start a new life with her, with Nausica. In London? London’s not bad, but no, not in London. So where then? In Australia, somewhere on the east coast, near the ocean. . Communism was good, because with the chronic lack of other amusements, people read a lot. As a kid he adored Jules Verne. All of us, us “Easterners,” we adored Jules Verne. In one of Verne’s books he’d stumbled across a description of Australia, a description now imprinted in his brain like a barcode. It’s true that right now it all seems like a distant dream; there’s a heap of bureaucratic hurdles to overcome, among other things, he wants to take his daughter with him, and she, the love of his life, her son. But he’s sure that one day he and Nausica will end up out there in Australia, somewhere near Great Barrier Reef, in the Coral Sea. .

“In communism we dreamed a lot, and that was the best part about it,” he said, as if drawing silk from between his lips.

Carlos dropped me off at the hotel, carried my luggage right to the reception desk, and handed me his business card with the number of his taxi firm.

“If you need a taxi on the way back, call this number. And don’t forget, it’s Carlos, ask for Carlos. .” he said, imparting a little dry kiss on my clumsy hand.

2.

A sixty-something woman, her bearing unusually upright, long straight gray hair, a smattering of coquettish afro plaits, her face lined and tanned as if she spends most of the day outside. Blue, expressionless eyes, a gaze that never meets her interlocutor, a yoga bunny, for sure. . Her voice sounds calmly from her lips, she’s happy with her life, her lot; true, things went downhill a bit when her brother died, she adopted his son, but then he died too, now she doesn’t have anyone, her mom’s dead, but at least she made it to the ripe old age of eighty-eight. Yes, it’s true, people around her are disappearing, yesterday they were here, today they’re no more. She spits the last phrase out resolutely, flicks her long gray locks and abandons the subject. She gesticulates wildly, as if wanting to bat her interlocutor’s stare from her face. She flaps her arms like wings, shooing away prying eyes. Of course she’s working, she’s got heaps to work on, projects and stuff, yeah, she was just there, there too, but now she’s off somewhere else, and after that. .

3.

They put their bare legs up on the chair, caress the smooth skin of their calves, massage their toes, and then grab their phones, stroking and caressing them as they just did their calves. They laugh, flash healthy, toothy smiles, throw their hair back, twirling curls in their fingers. They take chomping bites, like on TV — you know the show, the one with an anorexic actress feigning a wolf’s appetite. They murmur their mmmmmms, sigh, their mouths full, gourmand pleasure in overdrive. They’ve got tinny, almost metallic whines. Cartoon-girls. Tiny fingers, slender as birds’ claws, they tap away, enamored with the screens on their phones. From time to time they shoot out a brisk glance, not looking at anyone or anything, just like hens.

4.

There’s a guy on the plane, in the seat in front of mine, radiant with a wretch’s delight. Having bought a ticket, the seat’s all his for a whole two hours. He makes himself right at home, and then for some reason starts beating the back of his head against the head rest, once, twice, thrice. He must be checking if he’s still alive, whether the head rest is really his, or maybe he just wants the back of his head to make the acquaintance of the kind of head rests you get in planes. Christ, who would know what this creature wants. Maybe he doesn’t want anything, maybe his body is making the seat’s acquaintance of its own accord. He just wriggles away, exploring the space around him. Here we go — he finds the button on the side and reclines his seat with a jerk. At that very moment I’ve just opened my tray and put my book and plastic cup of coffee down. The steaming coffee ends up in my lap. The second the plane touches down he’ll be first up, opening the overhead locker, getting his stuff out, Duty Free crap, this much I know. And I automatically hunch my shoulders, because his stuff is already falling on my head. . Somewhere from a seat behind me there’s a woman’s laugh, a strange sentence nibbling my ear: It must be that gall stone I had removed that’s making me laugh.

5.

I put my odds and ends down on the counter. The checkout girl punches in the prices, pausing at the kohlrabi. She frowns, waving it at a colleague:

“You know what this is?”

“No idea.”

She looks inquiringly at me, but I just shrug, I’m not telling her what it’s called. The line behind me sucks up her confusion. In the end a woman in line loses patience and yells out. .

“Kohlrabi! It’s kohlrabi, for Christ’s sake!”

The checkout girl finds the name and code number and swiftly enters the price.

At home I take the kohlrabi and drown it in warm water together with my freezing hands. I think how the same scene with the kohlrabi has already played out three times, and that each time it was a different checkout girl. Then I take a knife and carefully peel the kohlrabi. Kohlrabi, “German beet,” kohlrübe, knolkhol, nookal, gedde kosu, navilu kosu, moonji, munji haakh. .

Then I wonder whether checkout girls should know the names of everything they sell. And I wonder how is it that they’re not even curious. But I let it go, I realize I’m asking too much. Most checkout girls are just kids, I mean, they look like kids. A lot of them wear hijabs. Why do I think they should care about some old beet they don’t even eat? Their fates are already long settled, pre-coded, a checkout girl is herself a commodity, already imprinted with a barcode, strichcode, code a barres, codice a barre, čarovy kod . . Yes, soon she’ll find a little man, bear his children, and one day those kids will have the run of the supermarket. Alongside the supermarket the benevolent city fathers will build a children’s playground, and benches, so grandmas and grandpas can sit down while they watch the kids play, while Mama’s at work at the supermarket, while Mama’s doing the shopping. There’ll be temples a short stroll away, one, two, three, for every faith a temple. Life is arranged in such a way that it can’t be better — here, we’ve everything we need. Old men in long white robes sit on the benches, drawing bread from plastic bags. With languid, beatific waves they toss out little pieces, feeding the visible pigeons and invisible rats. Maybe they’re sitting there thinking that every being on earth deserves to eat its fill; that every being on earth should know its species and breed, its name and its price. .