The smell of my teenage sweat and tears – and all those years – has crept from under the entrance door into a faraway flat on a faraway island.
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The Best Kind
of Visitor
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Renowned writer Olja Knezevic,
MA from London, England exclusively for the Urban Book Circle (UBC), Canada. |
Roaming alone, through this huge Londonarium.
At 10 AM, I sit on a bus; an hour later I can be in Kensal Rise, for example. One beep of the blue Oyster-fabulous and I can be anywhere and back before it's children pick-up time. Seize the day the homemaker’s way. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but we all have our “saved by public transport days”, no?
I get off the bus. In Kensal Rise, I stare at the same Georgian-council succession of buildings next to the unoriginal High Street, just like in any other London village. I know there’s The Heart of this Rise somewhere, but it’s too well-hidden for me today. I have no desire to discover it. My lips are glued together by a long, bus-ride silence; my ears spilling with my iPod’s sweet, nostalgic tones: Meditteranean macho whispers about wounded sea-gulls, adaggio-mixes, rock-ballads that bring back memories of balmy nights spent sitting with friends on the hometown’s Central Library steps when we made plans – before the war of course – to become avant-garde yet filthy rich. Then the war broke out and we never went avant. Will we ever?
In silence, I sit on the bus to go back to my SW part of town.
Last week I had a full house. Well, the “full-kind-a-house”, considering the way I live my new life, the kind of life in which my daughter asks why we never have any guests. But last week, my mother came to visit. Also, some new neighbours moved in on our floor: a single mum and her son. We said “hi” in front of the lift: she is black, elegant and serious while her son is eight and still won’t eat – just like my daughter. Later, we (my mother and I) overheard the new neighbour sing in a magical soprano while she was – rather noisily, too – tidying up her flat. I loved it that she didn’t seem like another quiet type of neighbour. Sometimes, I miss the loudness of my old neighbourhood.
“He-ey, baby,” she sang. “There ain’t no easy way out. Mmhm. I will stand. My. Ground. And I won’t. Back. Down.”
When she finished singing, my mother applauded. I poked her with my elbow.
“Bravo!”, Mother shouted. “Bravo!”, louder now, before I closed our entrance door in front of her face.
Ten minutes later, the beautiful neighbour rang our doorbell. Our doorbell here sounds like a scream; it always startles me. “Change this monstrous sound!” Mother said.
“I can’t,” I said. “We’re just renting the place, remember?”
“Well then at least open the door.”
The neighbour brought us cake. My mother hid the neighbour’s cake somewhere; come to think of it – where is it? Mamma served her some Swiss roll instead. Oh, the roll-cake made by her; with the layers of rosehip jam so thin, so precise. The neigbour didn’t touch it, but she did have a cup of Turkish coffee. I promised to read her fortune from coffee grounds the next time she visited. “Not on a Wednesday,” I said. “Coffee turns cheeky on Wednesdays.”
The neighbour hasn’t come back for the fortune-telling session. My mother went home: Gatwick – Montenegro. Husband is still away on a business trip; children have clubs after school. I am back from Kensal Rise and I can cross that destination out from my “to-see” list. Our fridge is empty. The sky is merciless, angry and grey. The traffic too loud; people too quiet. London is a stranger. The ever-increasing bills of living in a foreign country are spread like playing cards over the dining table. And that table has been falling apart for some time now, but we are adamant not to replace it with a new item – because it is always “just one more year” before we leave.
At 10 AM, I sit on a bus; an hour later I can be in Kensal Rise, for example. One beep of the blue Oyster-fabulous and I can be anywhere and back before it's children pick-up time. Seize the day the homemaker’s way. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but we all have our “saved by public transport days”, no?
I get off the bus. In Kensal Rise, I stare at the same Georgian-council succession of buildings next to the unoriginal High Street, just like in any other London village. I know there’s The Heart of this Rise somewhere, but it’s too well-hidden for me today. I have no desire to discover it. My lips are glued together by a long, bus-ride silence; my ears spilling with my iPod’s sweet, nostalgic tones: Meditteranean macho whispers about wounded sea-gulls, adaggio-mixes, rock-ballads that bring back memories of balmy nights spent sitting with friends on the hometown’s Central Library steps when we made plans – before the war of course – to become avant-garde yet filthy rich. Then the war broke out and we never went avant. Will we ever?
In silence, I sit on the bus to go back to my SW part of town.
Last week I had a full house. Well, the “full-kind-a-house”, considering the way I live my new life, the kind of life in which my daughter asks why we never have any guests. But last week, my mother came to visit. Also, some new neighbours moved in on our floor: a single mum and her son. We said “hi” in front of the lift: she is black, elegant and serious while her son is eight and still won’t eat – just like my daughter. Later, we (my mother and I) overheard the new neighbour sing in a magical soprano while she was – rather noisily, too – tidying up her flat. I loved it that she didn’t seem like another quiet type of neighbour. Sometimes, I miss the loudness of my old neighbourhood.
“He-ey, baby,” she sang. “There ain’t no easy way out. Mmhm. I will stand. My. Ground. And I won’t. Back. Down.”
When she finished singing, my mother applauded. I poked her with my elbow.
“Bravo!”, Mother shouted. “Bravo!”, louder now, before I closed our entrance door in front of her face.
Ten minutes later, the beautiful neighbour rang our doorbell. Our doorbell here sounds like a scream; it always startles me. “Change this monstrous sound!” Mother said.
“I can’t,” I said. “We’re just renting the place, remember?”
“Well then at least open the door.”
The neighbour brought us cake. My mother hid the neighbour’s cake somewhere; come to think of it – where is it? Mamma served her some Swiss roll instead. Oh, the roll-cake made by her; with the layers of rosehip jam so thin, so precise. The neigbour didn’t touch it, but she did have a cup of Turkish coffee. I promised to read her fortune from coffee grounds the next time she visited. “Not on a Wednesday,” I said. “Coffee turns cheeky on Wednesdays.”
The neighbour hasn’t come back for the fortune-telling session. My mother went home: Gatwick – Montenegro. Husband is still away on a business trip; children have clubs after school. I am back from Kensal Rise and I can cross that destination out from my “to-see” list. Our fridge is empty. The sky is merciless, angry and grey. The traffic too loud; people too quiet. London is a stranger. The ever-increasing bills of living in a foreign country are spread like playing cards over the dining table. And that table has been falling apart for some time now, but we are adamant not to replace it with a new item – because it is always “just one more year” before we leave.
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So, I have regressed; so what? My mother is again, after decades of growing up, the most beautiful face to appear on the doorstep. I love opening my door to her. She is my most wanted visitor, the one I can choose to entertain or not; the one I can talk-or-not to, while we visit those places where it’s boring and cold when I’m on my own, regardless of the place’s importance and grandiosity. And only with her do I feel free and uncivilized enough to sulk and say: “No, mum, again, this is not a good photo. Take one more.” Then one more, and again, and again – and to infinity and beyond – taking photographs in the zones where that activity is strictly prohibited.
She accepts my suggestions for a “waste-no-time-lunch”, without despising me for being cheap. “Let’s just go to Pret,” I tell her.
And then she says to me: “Why did we have to skip a proper lunch, then pay to come all the way here and look at this poor cow’s head, with blood and flies? I could look at the same scene for free at my butcher’s Temo in Podgorica. But I wanted to have lunch made by Jamie Oliver! Or that beautiful Nigella girl. Does she also have a restaurant?”
We take some more forbidden photographs of pills and animals. When the gallery’s security approaches us, she blinks really fast and asks in her impossible language: “Ist verbotten?” Soon, we are followed by the whole team of security people.
Outside, on the street, I save her life again because she always looks in the wrong direction, sees no cars coming her way and (proudly) marches on. I pull her back onto the pavement. “I know,” she growls, pushing my arm away. “I know.” There can be nothing her daughter knows and she doesn’t.
She wants to get to know Bob Geldof, who crosses Albert Bridge almost every day, like we do.
“This man is so cute, always with his bicycle next to him, never under him,” she says of Bob. “And he is a legend.”
But the best thing my most wanted visitor has to offer is – her time with grandchildren. That’s the famous “quality time”, for all of us.
She cooks for them one of her meals that start with olive oil, bell-peppers and onions, and to which she then adds – “from the fingertips or as much as your nose allows” – everything edible she finds in the house.
She also slow-cooks my children. They bubble gently on the pleasant warmth of her rhythm, instead of burning down in flames of deep-fried hysteria that is their average evening with me. Even the TV is off now. There’s a soft sound from a distant radio playing from an unidentified corner of the apartment. I don’t know how to behave. Can I just...relax? Yeah, but what about my arms, my legs, my collapsing back, my vocal chords – what do I do with those? Can I just sit like this and stare at my cup of – tea? Sage, ginger, hibiscus – what? I never drink tea. My mother drinks tea; and now we all do. She winks at her grandchildren and jerks her head towards me.
“Your mother,” she says to them about me, “hasn’t changed a bit. When she was a teenage girl, she used to stare and keep quiet like this whenever there was trouble. Like, once, when I went to her school for parents’ evening and they told me she’d been in detention for writing on the school’s walls. I asked her teachers and her principal to show me what she had written and they said “all of this”, and only then did I pay attention to the walls: they were filled with her handwriting. Lyrics from songs. ‘Oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood’, ‘How long shall they kill our prophets?’, ‘Horror is what sets us free’. Stuff like that. They said they’d consulted the translators from counter-espionage. My spectacles got misty. I didn’t know where to run, which way to exit the school. I had to give them cash to repaint the walls. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked your mother. Tsk tsk tsk...”
My son is throwing sideways glances at me, the dusting of hair above his upper lip crooked in a smirk. His grandma has just added another step on the generational ladder; another mirror where his mum’s reflection could multiply. He realizes now that, yes, even I was a teenager once, with some old-fashioned, but still “problematic” behaviour. Even I could upset the grown-ups. He wants more of those stories.
My daughter asks her big brother to translate the anecdotes “a little bit” to English.
The smell of my teenage sweat and tears – and all those years – has crept from under the entrance door into a faraway flat on a faraway island.
My mother has seen all my reflections. The genes, the upbringing, phases and metamorphosis – she has witnessed all of them. My children only know this recent part of me, the part that has moved them abroad and then freaked out frequently, in front of them and even on public transport. And there’s nobody in this huge city to tell them: “No, she’s more than that. She’s so much more.” Nobody here knows that for sure. At best, everyone here has known me for as long as my children have known me. Sometimes, that’s great: I can reinvent myself, like a celebrity; or, to my children, I can lie that I was always like this: reliable, serious and paranoid. (“And that’s why I’m still alive”, I can say.) But mostly, it’s not so great, both for parents and kids: the identification material runs out as soon as we, parents, are no longer blindly trusted. Where are the witnesses to confirm or beef-up our stories, however self-censored? Where are the countrymen with the similar eccentricities, intensity and sense of humour?
My mother is that witness, that countryman, the reappearing one. That’s why she is the most wanted visitor for us, in this town.
Whenever she leaves I feel like an abandoned child. And I only have one morning, two bus rides and some nostalgic songs to rely on, before I dive into my new life again.
She accepts my suggestions for a “waste-no-time-lunch”, without despising me for being cheap. “Let’s just go to Pret,” I tell her.
And then she says to me: “Why did we have to skip a proper lunch, then pay to come all the way here and look at this poor cow’s head, with blood and flies? I could look at the same scene for free at my butcher’s Temo in Podgorica. But I wanted to have lunch made by Jamie Oliver! Or that beautiful Nigella girl. Does she also have a restaurant?”
We take some more forbidden photographs of pills and animals. When the gallery’s security approaches us, she blinks really fast and asks in her impossible language: “Ist verbotten?” Soon, we are followed by the whole team of security people.
Outside, on the street, I save her life again because she always looks in the wrong direction, sees no cars coming her way and (proudly) marches on. I pull her back onto the pavement. “I know,” she growls, pushing my arm away. “I know.” There can be nothing her daughter knows and she doesn’t.
She wants to get to know Bob Geldof, who crosses Albert Bridge almost every day, like we do.
“This man is so cute, always with his bicycle next to him, never under him,” she says of Bob. “And he is a legend.”
But the best thing my most wanted visitor has to offer is – her time with grandchildren. That’s the famous “quality time”, for all of us.
She cooks for them one of her meals that start with olive oil, bell-peppers and onions, and to which she then adds – “from the fingertips or as much as your nose allows” – everything edible she finds in the house.
She also slow-cooks my children. They bubble gently on the pleasant warmth of her rhythm, instead of burning down in flames of deep-fried hysteria that is their average evening with me. Even the TV is off now. There’s a soft sound from a distant radio playing from an unidentified corner of the apartment. I don’t know how to behave. Can I just...relax? Yeah, but what about my arms, my legs, my collapsing back, my vocal chords – what do I do with those? Can I just sit like this and stare at my cup of – tea? Sage, ginger, hibiscus – what? I never drink tea. My mother drinks tea; and now we all do. She winks at her grandchildren and jerks her head towards me.
“Your mother,” she says to them about me, “hasn’t changed a bit. When she was a teenage girl, she used to stare and keep quiet like this whenever there was trouble. Like, once, when I went to her school for parents’ evening and they told me she’d been in detention for writing on the school’s walls. I asked her teachers and her principal to show me what she had written and they said “all of this”, and only then did I pay attention to the walls: they were filled with her handwriting. Lyrics from songs. ‘Oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood’, ‘How long shall they kill our prophets?’, ‘Horror is what sets us free’. Stuff like that. They said they’d consulted the translators from counter-espionage. My spectacles got misty. I didn’t know where to run, which way to exit the school. I had to give them cash to repaint the walls. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked your mother. Tsk tsk tsk...”
My son is throwing sideways glances at me, the dusting of hair above his upper lip crooked in a smirk. His grandma has just added another step on the generational ladder; another mirror where his mum’s reflection could multiply. He realizes now that, yes, even I was a teenager once, with some old-fashioned, but still “problematic” behaviour. Even I could upset the grown-ups. He wants more of those stories.
My daughter asks her big brother to translate the anecdotes “a little bit” to English.
The smell of my teenage sweat and tears – and all those years – has crept from under the entrance door into a faraway flat on a faraway island.
My mother has seen all my reflections. The genes, the upbringing, phases and metamorphosis – she has witnessed all of them. My children only know this recent part of me, the part that has moved them abroad and then freaked out frequently, in front of them and even on public transport. And there’s nobody in this huge city to tell them: “No, she’s more than that. She’s so much more.” Nobody here knows that for sure. At best, everyone here has known me for as long as my children have known me. Sometimes, that’s great: I can reinvent myself, like a celebrity; or, to my children, I can lie that I was always like this: reliable, serious and paranoid. (“And that’s why I’m still alive”, I can say.) But mostly, it’s not so great, both for parents and kids: the identification material runs out as soon as we, parents, are no longer blindly trusted. Where are the witnesses to confirm or beef-up our stories, however self-censored? Where are the countrymen with the similar eccentricities, intensity and sense of humour?
My mother is that witness, that countryman, the reappearing one. That’s why she is the most wanted visitor for us, in this town.
Whenever she leaves I feel like an abandoned child. And I only have one morning, two bus rides and some nostalgic songs to rely on, before I dive into my new life again.
The Best Kind of Visitor
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Column & Photographs: Olja Knezevic
All rights reserved 2014. Copyright © Olja Knezevic
Illustrated by Sarah Riordan
All rights reserved 2014. Copyright © Sarah Riordan
All rights reserved 2014. Copyright © Urban Book Circle
C O N T A C T
Published by Urban Book Circle on January 10, 2014
Urban Book Circle® (UBC)
All rights reserved 2014. Copyright © Olja Knezevic
Illustrated by Sarah Riordan
All rights reserved 2014. Copyright © Sarah Riordan
All rights reserved 2014. Copyright © Urban Book Circle
C O N T A C T
Published by Urban Book Circle on January 10, 2014
Urban Book Circle® (UBC)
