Trivial mythologies

The heart at the moment a plane makes its decline elevates—one might even be forgiven fearing it could be coughed up. But the heart is only dislocated for a breath. Travel has always been that interval of detachment, that proof of possibility, that first of a return flight. At the end of April, I bought a one-way ticket to Belgrade.

In the land of my birth life has made few changes, allowing me to slip back into it discreetly. The songs on the radio then have started appearing on the retro stations & have been replaced with more hopeful, summery tunes. Shop assistants are kinder & their shelves fuller. Book vendors have flourished as people look for answers to the universe & political discontent. [Bad bookstores mark progressed societies for their disregard to high thinking—we haven’t reached that level of progression yet, thankfully for me.]

Living, generally, is much slower in the nations developed “otherwise” to capitalism. Serbia is a country you can’t lay down in without having someone cover you with a blanket; over-hospitality has created a culture of fearing drafts & believing in the divine power of slippers. Everyone knows one or another woman in debt on account of some guest. There is no monetary limit on warm reception here: the measure of a person is not by their achievements or car [most don’t drive], but on the grace of their hospitality. Crude capitalism is yet to make its mark on the people, yet to bring all the air-conditioners that will close apartment balconies & doors [or individuals from communities].

What do they see of capitalism? A monastery-mad great aunt tells me, "It's these houses left abandoned 11 months of the year—mansions! Serbs working in foreign countries build them to show us what's coming, though they're the only ones that can afford them for now." In the silence I feel accused as one of those deserters, yet I haven't even enough for a winter coat. "Those houses are hollow," she says to close off the conversation.

I watch these pink & gold-gated monuments shrink away, shining to the last behind a hill. Between it & the next are mud homes with dipping roofs, reminiscent of failing spines, or half-built, abandoned concrete structures that echo the bombed out shells of 1999. It's hard to say which of these three structure types is most like a gravestone: the capitalist hope, the rural fact of being, or a history that the people want desperately to renounce.