In Which This Shapeshifting Exhausts Us Fully

Say You Believe Me

by SUMEJA TULIC

My lonesomeness in Belgrade is every weirdo’s dream.

Most nights I curl in my hotel bed and watch cable television reruns of Sex and the City and Twin Peaks. If I am in a room that ends with the number 3, I get a balcony that overlooks the park and the parliament. Instead of staging an honoring service for Ivo Andric who lived in the same premises during 1933, I take a cup of coffee and, at times, think of Special Agent Dale Cooper or someone else — random, fictional, inaccessible and according to some dogma forbidden or dangers — I would gladly share my room with. In the afternoon, couples, awkward threesomes, loners and who-not will stand in front of the cinema next door. They will pass the Humphrey Bogart life-sized statue on their way in, and I will completely forget them.

As it gets darker outside, the towers and the thin and tall endings of buildings meet up, there, in the rosy and purple mash up of fog and sunset. Beneath them, in unpredictable sequences, the city's many lights will blaze and shortly disappear.

As in any other telling about loneliness, this one implies heartbreak too. Mine in Belgrade was like my nana’s stroke — it took time to notice its occurrence and took a lifetime to sort out its consequences.

He was the embodiment of the imperfections in reaction to which I metamorphose into one crazy but hopefully lovable deer. I guess he is that chemical agent that summons the combination of sweet and fuck in me. You see, when I’m not sure of things, I dilute the matter additionally by using terminology from domains I know nothing about. This is why chemistry, biology and deer have hijacked this paragraph.

In winter, I wear a boyish coat and pair of sinkers and stroll around. By the way, pretending to be a feminized boy is my No. 1 safety rule in walking alone at night. Obviously, No. 2 is looking like a poor person (not to be confused with hobo chic!). If I were to tell anyone what I see each time I go out at night, it would sound like a bunch of unconnected fixations on shops run by the Orthodox church scattered here and there; girls working in fast food places; shades of oily green lights that cut through trees and parked cars; the touching symmetry of the bridges crossing Sava.

The nervous exchanges of looks and polite smiles with strangers at night are like the sudden skype calls of unknown creeps drawn to your profile picture. There is something utterly wild and stupid that makes me pick their call. I guess it is the same thing that compels characters in horror films to walk alone into the woods. That is why when I am passing by the Terazije tunnel I let go of my hand, waiting for someone to take it in his own.

As the night progresses, the cars go wilder. And then, it all comes crashing into one silent hour, when I can only hear the old elevator taking tipsy guests to their rooms. On the other side of the city, around the times thieves break in houses, the animals at the Belgrade Good Hope Garden zoo become louder.

To portray the surreal nineties in Belgrade I recount the events in the Belgrade Good Hope Garden. The zoo’s first chimpanzee, Sammy, used to escape often and when he did it in 1990, the manager of the zoo made a televised appeal for his recovery and organized a rooftop expedition to lure Sammy back. With trade sanctions imposed, the manager made several appeals for carrots and cabbage and asked the city to provide hot water for a newborn hippo.

Then there was the incident with the elephant called Twiggy that was lent for breeding purposes by a Dutch zoo. Apparently the Dutch, compelled by the genocide in Srebrenica, asked for Twiggy back. As Twiggy failed to breed, the director of the Belgrade zoo resisted her return. I am not sure what happened to Twiggy after this. Also, I am not sure where are Nijas and Azra, the two camels that Muammar el-Qaddafi brought to Belgrade during a conference of nonaligned nations.

Mornings come fast in hotel rooms, even faster when you have to leave for work. There is that part of the morning appreciated only by those who got off from school or work to finish an assigned errand or to attend an out of office meeting. With the expected amount of exaggeration that goes into every metaphor — it feels like a free trip to a place you cannot afford to travel to. The joy I get from it in Belgrade is double the one I have in my hometown.

As I am map-illiterate, I will get lost on my way to point B for sure. Straying away from the usual streets bring unexpected sceneries and often a chance to feel home when you are really miles away from it. Once in Stockholm I took an early walk before breakfast and on my way I stumbled upon really tiny school children walking with their parents to school. The way they waved and shouted sweet hellos to each other from a considerable distance stayed with me to this day.

My favorite Belgrade intermediary connecting points so far are a flock of pigeons that flew, despite the cold rain, over the city's fortress, and my own reflection in the display of the municipal library covered with Danilo Kis posters. For a moment it seemed we were having a conversation. As I was entertaining this idea, I was already at the Slavija Square, between a bus and a tram, inches away from a speeding car. If your flight ever gets delayed, and you are forced to stay over, the airport minibus will take you to Hotel Slavija. Wake up earlier and immerse your self among sleepy Belgradians crossing the Slavija intersections with a cigarette or a warm pastry in their hand.

The cab drives to the airport are usually composed of 20-minute Yugo-nostalgic rants that cathartically culminate in conspiracy theories that perfectly explain the violent crumbling of the old country. I hate nostalgia, but what I hate more is being an asshole to a middle aged man opening himself to a random person. So I lose myself in these conversations, nod my head and agree loudly with complete nonsense.

Obviously, I’m not that cool someone you bring to meet your bandmates. The essentials of cool imply withstanding silence around new acquaintances and suppressing the urge to impress. I fail at both. I spent a great deal of elementary school being the substitute teacher to my classmates. The power I drained from my classmates’ submissiveness still powers my confidence, so I am OK with not meeting the band. Your band sucks anyways!

Last time I saw him, my deer routine failed me. All that shape shifting is tiring. Pretending to be prey for sake of huntsmen’s affection is deadly. 

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Sarajevo. You can find her website here and her flickr here.

Photographs by the author.

"Predictable Miracles" - Work Drugs (mp3)

"Lost Weekend" - Work Drugs (mp3)

In Which We Regret Our Mother Did Not Smoke

Compound

by SUMEJA TULIC

I remember the bathtub at the end of the compound, all rusty, its sides suddenly white and then rusty again. Somebody had put this small tub there, at the end of the world, where apocalyptic riders and misfits turned leaders traded goods. A silly wire separated the compound, a European socialist enclave, from the Desert. I knew nothing about the end. I didn’t really know death yet, but I was always scared there. On these soft, lemonade-like afternoons, my father would take my sister and me to the tub. I understood that The Shining was a horror film before seeing it because of the shining from the half-garbage, half usable random items that were around the tub. The fact that someone put a bath there, and that my father took us to it so that we could "bathe" frightened me.

We would bathe in our underwear while he talked to men who passed by. Mostly men working in the same firm as he did, mechanics or manual workers. Men who couldn’t sleep in the afternoon because they were genuinely strange or just plain pedophiles unable to resist glancing over the four and five-year olds putting on a show of content and amusement for their father, the lazy mustache guy who silenced his guilt over not taking his family to the sea by taking them to a miserable setup that included stray dogs barking from the other side of the fence.

My father loved swimming more than my mother, at least longer than he loved her. I know he is himself there in the sea. A very different man than the one I know. He gets to be who ever he truly is. He gets to be the man he will be at the end of it all. Released from life, forgiven, walking through Paradise in shorts.

My father doesn’t keep a journal and I’ll never know how right I am about him. To know him I’ll just keep at loving men like him. To feel that hollow and muted horror that accommodated his fatherly love on those afternoons in that tub, I will take the street with the dimmest lights and the hungriest, creepiest cats at night.

This has little to do with the love of a father who stopped his car once in the middle of a sandy storm so that I could pick poppies. Before I stepped out of the car, he folded his shirt around my face. I looked like a hippy Bedouin picking flowers in a midst of a storm. I sat in the car later while tears rolled over my cheeks. I wasn’t sad the poppy pedals were everywhere but where they should be. Instead, I cried because my mother, sitting in the front seat, couldn’t understand my father and me. She was young then and her disapproval was much more cold and poetic. Today she is oblivious of who I am, by choice.

Still, nothing comforts me more than seeing her sleep. It reminds me of the times when she was young and could sleep forever. Eventually she would wake up and turn her blue eyes on like a set of neon lights. She could see through my pathetic little girl’s sorrows and would offer me a cup of black coffee at the age of nine. My sorrows were baptized in coffee mugs, I think. If only my mother smoked. My sorrows could have choked and killed in an ashtray. Instead, they lived to be 29.

Childhood is the short description of our entire lives.  Everything else is a remake.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Sarajevo. You can find her tumblr here.

Photographs by the author.

"Lost On The Way Home" - Chromeo ft. Solange (mp3)

"Come Alive" - Chromeo ft. Toro Y Moi (mp3)

In Which We Stand Too Close And Too Long Beside The Window

Personal Histories

by SUMEJA TULIC

The day we were born our mothers knew that we would be lonely and odd and that we would seek unsustainable happiness that would perpetuate a life of melancholy. So they chose to ignore the faith cast upon us, and for it, they have ignored us.

We would keep our trembling, bleeding fingers in our jacket pockets so that nobody can tell that we are thinking of death, that purple fright that is simply staying on the beach after the sunset, with no gas in the car, no bread and no blankets. I don’t know about yours, but my mother sure didn’t like to sew torn pockets, while all the other mothers smoked cigarettes and discussed curtains.

There was that time we wore those jeans and perfect shirts and decided to be perfect children. First, I unbuttoned the top button on my shirt and felt too relaxed for a perfect child. I thought, it is possible to be good and great and relaxed, but then the ends of my hair started to curl.

I became nervous, ate a tomato and its tinny and sleazy seeds kept gluing themselves on my shirt. Beautiful girls with long hair called me out to play. I stayed by the mirror, looking at my ugly, crying face, the tears that glimmer the freckles beneath my eyes and around my nose, and the front teeth that summed up the unwanted ten year old me that would make you crazy in some ten years. You did not go through this make-believe fashion show. You fell down the moment you stepped outside of your house, and, dirty and angry, as you did most of the time, you gave up.

I was born to a monotonous line of peasants and do-gooders, who were skeptical of all things mystical and transcendent, but God. Besides, for them, God wasn’t transcendent. He was a certainty, there in that empty corner facing East and in a basket full of apples, cheese and cream. You were born to merchants, to some teachers, all in all, to people who stand too close and too long beside the window. For all that, I am a naïve daring bitch, and, you are sensitive, hurtful son of a bitch.        

If I live to be old, I’ll confess all my betrayals. One by one, the friends I wanted and never had and consequently still want. The times I choked Shut up! I hate you! Shut up! so that dinners could end romantically. Lies, wicked plans, ridiculousness, disregard and disobedience we called My Personality. If you live to be old and dumb, you’d make me a friend.

You would speak to me as if we have just met, and I don’t know a thing about the dungeon where you keep memories of people that made you insecure. You will talk of those unfulfilled dreams of yours more fondly than of the children you bore. Old, honest, probably deaf creature who still can’t bring himself to acceptance.

Yes, both of us could have done better.

If you took a monk for a lover, you would have needed to show more. I wrote this several times in SMS I never sent to you. You never wrote and erased anything to me. Children who start reading early on in their lives, (a) become deviant perverts, (b) lonelier then others, (c) people oblivious of their cruelness. Thinking of you, I encircled (e) all of the above.       

When it rains I think of the waste emptiness within everybody. People will bear it until the afternoon and fill it with food and sex, at night. When it rains you are yourself and you are browsing the bookmarked motels, the bed and breakfast places by the sea.   

Rain or no, I hope you agree with me that we are all statues in the park at dark, noticed only that time when we were inaugurated in the darkness, ignored by everyone but the dogs who stop to pee at our bare bronze feet.It grosses me out when I see old people eating bananas. I hate when I talk about my family. I used to like both. I used to like you too but then your bedsheet started to smell like library books, used, abused, read while smoking. I'd love to sleep there forever. Well, until you grow old and start eating bananas. It disgusts you that you were circumcised and you loath that the paradigm of all your failures is just that — an inch or two less of your majestic dick.

When I was five or so, my ears were pierced in my fathers’ village, somewhere between the houses of my grand uncles and the hayloft. They gave me a mirror and a red lipstick and said Soon you’ll look like Betty Boop. Hours after, my ears were still red and warm. I felt strange and taken. When you were six or so, that one day you were so happy and successful at everything, your grandmother said Come! I want to tell you something. As she whispered it to you, a rush of heat, discomfort and disappointment washed your cheeks.

It is because of things like these that we completely trust and forgive each other.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Sarajevo. You can find her website here and her flickr here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the only Arab city.

Photographs by the author.

"The Blind Man" - The Happy Mess (mp3)

"Kissing Mirrors" - The Happy Mess (mp3)

The new album from The Happy Mess is entitled Songs from the Backyard and it was released on October 14th.