MEMORY BOX MARGINALIA

Vladislav Beronja

University of Michigan

 

I. Reliquiae Reliquiarum

But all that, and I, never really were anything more,

Than some mist, moments, a whisper in China

That whispers, like a heart, yet colder and quieter:

That Neither Ming, nor yang, nor yin no longer remain

Nor Tao, cherries, nor the mandarin.

Nobody and Nothing.

Miloš Crnjanski, Lament nad Beogradom1

 

               No wonder Nietzsche considered forgetting to be a strength, since only memory can putrefy a person’s will and unravel their whole identity. (If God is a keeper of all memory, he is a deeply resentful God.) Despite this, I know of people who keep their memories tucked away in a shoe box, in a dusty basement or under their bed. Periodically, they will open these treasure chests, perhaps to experience that paradoxical embrace of pleasure and pain that is most often present when we look at old photographs. Kundera’s wonderful insight that “in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine”² should be interpreted accordingly.

 

Even my own childhood, viewed from the distance of the present, abounds in these memory boxes of sustained purity, despite, or precisely because of the backdrop of war:

 

During the years of my adolescence, before the war, before I became a refugee, my mom, my brother and I used to visit my grandparents every summer in Croatia. As it happens, in the early seventies my grandparents traveled to Prague, where they acquired a figurine of the good solider Švejk. They hung the Švejk on an austere light fixture in their bedroom, where it remains to this very day. Right as we entered their apartment, my grandparents would take my brother and me into their bedroom and spin the Švejk figurine. The two of us could lie in my grandparent’s bed for hours watching the good soldier in his uniform, the color of sapling conifers, continually spin. There was a warm breeze coming from the open bedroom window. Beyond diaphanous curtains a view of the river, a coast lined with tall poplars and chestnut trees, a ruin of an old building in the distance with a crumbling façade, small barges cradled on the calm, watery surface: transcendent peace of Romantic pastoral landscapes. A chorus of children’s voices and laughter passed along with a breeze like a disappearing melody. The conversation of adults in the living room occasionally brought us back from our reverie, but only to remind us to spin the Švejk once again. Ah, in the bosom of the family where one is secure and bonds between people are forged in ancestral love where we share a common hearth and drink from the same cup!

 

Then, the Berlin wall was demolished, the Soviet empire collapsed, Reagan declared the triumph of liberal democracies in Eastern Europe, Yugoslav politicians started planning a civil war, Croatia, then Bosnia, declared themselves independent states, Bosnia was occupied, my family was separated, losing most of its meager possessions, the dead Tito transformed from a father of the nation to an oppressive tyrant, bombs and bullets whistled above our heads, many people disappeared into the ground, the war came and went, the politicians filled their pockets, the people were robbed, my father and mother reunited in America, as refugees. They are still looking across the ocean to the Old World, in the distance.

 

My own Europe seems to be a laboratory of History: between East and West, capitalism and communism, Christianity and Islam, it is as if it was destined for perpetual return of the same.

 

The Švejk still twirls in the eye of my memory. It is an image surrounded by darkness which I cannot illuminate. The background in which the figurine lives has disappeared, forever.

 

In vain I try to remember this lost world. It is trapped in another language that I am beginning to forget. I project a horizon to this image:

 

Švejk remains for me the Bohemian resilience to the violence of war. His weapon is humor and seeming naiveté, or as Benjamin says, he is a man who meets “the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.”³ My grandparents’ choice to hang that literary character in their bedroom meant that I was rooted in a liberal, educated paterfamilias who instilled both reason and imagination in my young self. They were a part of the progressive and moral class who believed not in superstitious religion but, perhaps naïvely, in ultimate triumph of goodness and justice over violence and chaos, through labor and education that engendered a creative and expressive spirit in a human being.

 

               However, the light of memory rarely illuminates the darkness of Pandora’s Box, where the threads of truth and chaos surreptitiously mingle to weave our sorrowful destinies. All history perhaps, is a history of violence, but that fact in no way prevents our nostalgic gaze. The eyes of memory also need a feast, especially in the moments of most dreadful hunger.

 

               It has been said that Kafka’s favorite story came from The Treasure Chest by Johann Peter Hebel. In the story, a young groom-to-be goes to work in the coal mine a day before his wedding, and there, he meets his death. Shortly after, the Napoleonic wars begin and the mine goes into disuse, with the body trapped inside it. However, fifty years later, the miners once again dig through the rubble and find the boy’s dead body, unaffected by the scars of time. The bride, who never married after his death, rejoices at the discovery of her groom, saying that now she can finally die herself, for it was God’s will for her to see him before her own death.

 

               Walter Benjamin correctly remarked in his essay, “The Storyteller,” that the time in the story is essentially opposed to the time in the novel. His profound admiration for Hebel and Leskov derived, in my opinion, from his own hope-bound conception of the “messianic time.” The history of modernity, like the coal mine in Hebel’s story, is essentially rubble that seeks reconstruction. While the time in story is restorative—the bride reunites with her groom—the time in the novel is unrelenting in its brutality. No destiny is spared the loss that awaits us all. Georg Lukàcs called it “transcendental homelessness.” Refugees, then, should feel perfectly at home inside a novel, but they yearn for the storyteller.

 

II. Momento Mori

 

Sorrow appears as a color, as a scent or a sound, and this is why sorrow resists the photographic lens and cannot be captured by it. For it is not optic experience alone that invokes the feeling of sorrow, the synthesis of colors, scents, and sounds is exceptionally important in producing this unequivocally crestfallen condition, which is often salty as a tear—bitter and graphically unrealizable—so that it is more of a scent than a sound, more a color than a form, more a dream than reality, and more a shadow of an idea than a harshly spoken word.

 

Miroslav Krleža, Izlet u Rusiju⁴

 

               After the war, my mother wanted to return to the apartment in Bosnia where we had left all our belongings. We had escaped with two handbags filled with clothes, some cash, cigarettes for my mother.

 

 Some other family was living there, surrounded by the ghoulish presence of things of those who once lived there. When we first came back, after seven years of exile, we suspiciously looked for change, in people and places. We only observed: Safeta was still roasting her coffee on the balcony; Lemo in his garage, was still eating bread soaked in milk out of his metal cup; Ina has grown into a woman. There was also the absence of others, who appeared and lingered for a moment as faded mirages upon empty spaces of memory, which reason and purpose soon corrected.

 

We did not want conversation, reminiscing: it was, after all, the same story of misery that everyone knew. My mother wanted to get out quickly and painlessly. She was there, after all, because of our family albums where were recorded the years of her pregnancies, my and my brother’s early adolescence, family gatherings. . .

 

We were greeted with dissimulated hospitality by our “hosts.” The woman anxiously looked at the wood stove, fearing for the worse – that my mother might take their warmth for the winter.

 

I looked around the one-bedroom apartment, given to my mother by the government that was no longer in tact, to see what was saved and what stolen or destroyed. The books: the Cyrillic Bible and the complete works of Ivo Andrić, were all probably used as scapegoats in a burning ceremony. The paintings that remained were destroyed by water stains, their frames used as heating in the wintertime, others stolen or sold on the black market.

 

The woman went into the bedroom and came back with three thick photo albums. The memories were saved, after all. They destroyed religion, literature, art, but somehow, the albums were left alone, protected, perhaps, by the ghostly aura of photographs within. We left, fulfilled.

 

Those photo albums were carried across the ocean that separated the old world from the new. Years later, I would look through them, since memory somehow called, as I was sitting on the porch one summer afternoon.

 

Here were the tombstones of my adolescence, upon whose altar I offered glistening pearls. I felt upon me the inexorable gravity of time in its unmerciful, relentless pull that absorbs individual destinies, leaving behind only the bittersweet taste of tragedy, for gods to feast on.

 

I saw my mother, veiled in silver light, offering her bare breast to my brother. She too has changed, like Lot’s wife in my memory: Her fragrance unfolds a memory of embrace— pleasure in propinquity. Incandescent sunrise yet the East is so far, and

I am frightened that she will turn into a salt pile.

 

Yet, if someone else was looking at these photographs, they would not be able to come upon the truth of my existence. My grandfather’s artistic eye framed my life in the moments of bliss. Behind the photographs, a feeling which only I could sense, there lay a repressed, residual absurdity of suffering, misery and pain. Indeed, there was an infinite distance from the reality and those moments firmly sedimented in concrete memory. The flames on birthday cakes forever captured in time – infinite youth; and the years of my life blown away, fluttering like doves before alighting into the abyss of forgetfulness – infinite change.

 

               It all seemed like those paintings by Monet, in which stone cathedrals are reduced to an infinite number of light particles, ready to vanish after the sun sets. Illusion disappears, and we realize that our senses take us for a fool, leaving us with doubt and agony. One sees a thing, where there is only a shadow. The cathedral was there, for a moment: I felt its presence within me as a living God. But where is it now? Eternal night surround me. I no longer perceive it. The moment was fleeting, and that sublime feeling ephemeral, and I, like Job, am left in the ash pit, where no light penetrates.

 

Notes

1 Miloš Crnjanski, "Lament nad Beogradom," in Tri Poeme (Belgrade: Prosveta, 1965), 36, author’s translation.

 

2 Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper and Row, 1999), 2.

 

3 Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2002), 149.

 

4 Miroslav Krleza, Izlet u Rusiju. Sabrana djela Miroslava Krleze (Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1985), 59.