Dangerous Times

This past spring I trav­elled to sev­eral Canadian cities. The vis­its were short, one to three days each, and they reminded me of a slo­gan that was pop­u­lar in the for­mer Yugoslavia: Get to know your coun­try in order to love her. It was meant for res­i­dents and tourists, but it also reminds me that each school year, in early fall or late spring, our teach­ers would take us to dif­fer­ent parts of the for­mer Yugoslavia. We would usu­ally go to a national park or to the sites of the most impor­tant bat­tles in the Second World War. Later, when the coun­try became more pros­per­ous, teach­ers (sup­ported by par­ents) decided that kids knew enough about their home­land and took them on shop­ping excur­sions to Trieste, Italy or Thessalonica, Greece. At that time our coun­try needed love more than ever before but nobody seemed to care. Schoolkids were more inter­ested in study­ing the shop­ping rit­u­als of the West, and after 1991 the holy sites of the world war years began to dis­ap­pear from our col­lec­tive memory.

On each of these sites there was a small museum or memo­r­ial cen­tre with an exhibit: pho­tographs, weapons, uni­forms, boots, medals. The cus­to­di­ans would take us on quick tours, first inside their muse­ums, then across the bat­tle­fields. Their voices were monot­o­nous, except when they glo­ri­fied the Communist Party, but we didn’t pay atten­tion any­way. We could hardly wait to get back to the hotel: there we ran down the cor­ri­dors, mak­ing noise and find­ing secret places where we could smoke our first cig­a­rettes, kiss the girls and fon­dle their breasts. The girls would shriek and gig­gle but they would not leave. Once in a while some­body would whis­per a warn­ing and we would breath­lessly lis­ten for our teach­ers’ foot­steps. Now I know that they knew where we were and what we were doing because they did the same thing when they were schoolkids on a field trip, but at that time, when we were teenagers, it seemed that things would never change. I thought that I would always remain a teenager and couldn’t imag­ine that our teach­ers had ever been any­thing but teachers.

One of the things I learned on those school trips — besides the geog­ra­phy of the human body — was that we actu­ally kept chang­ing all the time. Even rev­o­lu­tions even­tu­ally wear out and turn into some­thing else. However, this time, on my short trips across Canada, I learned that change is not always good. It seemed that peo­ple every­where blamed change for the loss of safety.

In Ottawa I stayed in a nice b&b near the Byward Market. When I asked the owner where I should go for a late evening walk, she told me not to go too far. “Ottawa has changed,” she said, “and is not as safe as it was when we came here fif­teen years ago.” I heard a sim­i­lar warn­ing in Vancouver when I asked a recep­tion­ist at the Metropolitan Hotel where to go for a short walk on my first night. “Don’t go down there,” he said, wav­ing his hand in the direc­tion of Pender Street, “that neigh­bour­hood is not good any more, it’s safer the other way.” In Edmonton, when I asked how safe it was, my friend told me: “Edmonton safe? You must be kid­ding! Maybe it was in the six­ties and sev­en­ties, but not now.” And down­town Calgary, which was just a bor­ing place a year or so ago, is a bor­ing and dan­ger­ous place today. 

I say all of this to the taxi dri­ver who’s dri­ving me home from the air­port. He does not speak much, but he nods his head to the rhythm of my sentences.

“When cities and towns change,” I con­tinue, “coun­tries change as well. They change just like peo­ple, and they also grow old and some of them die. At least mine has died, although one might say that she died giv­ing birth to seven small countries.”

“And what coun­try would that be?” the dri­ver asks.

“Yugoslavia.”

“Oh,” he says.

“I wrote a novel about that,” I tell him. “Its title is Snow Man, but per­haps I should rename it Snow Man and Seven Dwarfs.” I expect him to chuckle but he remains seri­ous. “But these coun­tries should not com­plain,” I con­tinue, “for they will always remain small and it will be eas­ier for kids to travel in order to learn about them and love them. However, they have to be care­ful, for small­ness comes with a price: the smaller the coun­try, the stronger the claus­tro­pho­bia. That’s the rea­son why it is not easy to feel claus­tro­pho­bic in Canada — there’s always at least one bor­der that can­not be seen, even if you climb the high­est mountain.”

“I under­stand,” the dri­ver says when we stop in front of my house, “but what about all these peo­ple who talk about the lack of safety? If peo­ple do not feel safe in the towns you have already vis­ited, how bad must it be in Toronto or Montreal?”

“I don’t know,” I tell him, “but noth­ing hap­pened the last time I was there.”

“Good for you, sir,” he says. He gives me a receipt and dri­ves away.

As I enter the house, I think I should have told him that our mem­ory can be very selec­tive. I don’t remem­ber, for exam­ple, the names of all the bat­tle­fields I vis­ited as a schoolkid, but the geog­ra­phy of some girls’ breasts is still vivid — or, should I say, pal­pa­ble inside me. But it is yet another trick of our mem­ory as those geo­gra­phies, those land­scapes, do not exist any more, just like the land­scape of my own body at that time. In other words, change is real but I can still pre­tend that it is not. How long can I go on pre­tend­ing? And if I wake up in the mid­dle of the night, should I lis­ten care­fully for any strange sound? Should I be afraid? “No,” says the voice behind my back, “you shouldn’t.” I turn around. There’s nobody there. And sud­denly I don’t feel safe at all.