There is no home nor joy like old friends. I reconnected with old friends, and with this city stewing under a new onslaught of traffic, under the vibrating potentiality of a delayed-in-delivery revolutionary moment, and pressed down upon by today’s eggshell sky.
Yesterday’s sunnier outlook.
The universities have not run for most of this school year, and no one is sure they will open up for operations again next year amid the ongoing student protest movement against various tentacles of official corruption and in the shadow of the protesters’ unmet demands. Normal life suspended in the fermata of banal inertia or hedonism. This is the atmosphere. Hipsters congregate in their questionable fashion and bored repose at repurposed grain silos adorned with monumentally proportioned paste-ups and murals (I should have gotten a picture), new immigrants work remotely clustered together in laptop-friendly cafes run by their fellow expatriates, and people still have to hustle from one end of this city to the other to survive. Belgrade was big before, it feels leviathan now in its Schroedinger’s anteroom of forking histories.
I didn’t have it in mind to comment on any of this. I didn’t even think I had prepared any such sweeping impressions.
I had coffee in Dorćol, where a miscommunication left me stranded to walk to the Silos on foot past the metropolitan department of sewers, overgrown and crumbling factories, and edge-of-metropole housing that was soon to be joined in the accident of proximity by high-rises simulating luxury. The wind was blowing cold off the Danube, and the hipsters abided under blankets. I ate perch across the river with my old friend and laughed and caught up on the baggage we had taken on since last we met. Last night I met my friend, a poet and singer, creative genius and real human being (may we all one day manifest as people), and her partner for traditional Serbian fare in Dorćol. She gifted me some books of poetry, and signed my copy of one of her books.
Another old friend and homeboy from grad school who has stuck it out here let me in on the secret of a DIY Russian/Armenian/Serbian rock festival happening at a small art space near Vukov Spomenik. I was a tourist in the gathered youth, observing its customs as from behind the obstructed glass of a diving bell. The headliner turned out to be a longtime Belgrade group of kraut/psych stalwarts called Tapan. From the first notes it was a foregone conclusion that I would miss the last bus back to my corner of the city.
Today I meet with more old friends an colleagues. And still the wind blows off the confluence of the Danube and the Sava, those mighty rivers that cut this city from white stone.