I stood
, pulled down the first video that came to hand, and popped it into the VCR. Then I went back to the couch, gave the spread enough of a shake to send the scraps of wallpaper that had alighted on it to the floor, and lay down….
It was Philip Kaufman’s adaptation of Kundera’s
Unbearable Lightness of Being
. I had read the novel twice. Besides, I had my doubts about cinematic adaptations of literary works: even the best seemed unworthy of their models. The very first frames put me on my guard: Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche may have looked more Czech than many Czechs, but Binoche was trying to speak English with a Czech accent and the only words she got right were
Anna Karenina
. I was also put off by the way the film poeticized everyday Communist reality: the effective shots of ugly naked bodies in a shroud of steam or old men playing chess in a swimming pool, the scenes of run-down Czech spas (which could well have been in Croatia) and Prague streets (so reminiscent of Zagreb). Perhaps my irritation resulted from the reflex reaction (What can
they
know about
us?
) that I had heard so many times and that was merely the arrogance of the colonized
and thus of no more consolation than the arrogance of the colonizers. In that scheme of things the perfectly innocent Kaufman became the colonizer of the territory that only I at that moment had the right to inhabit.
But when the black-and-white documentary footage of the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia came on the screen, when I saw the Russian tanks entering Prague, the scenes of protest and violence in the streets culminating in the close-up of a Russian soldier aiming his revolver at the onlookers, including Binoche, I was, well, bowled over. That revolver was aimed at me. Binoche, who had been skillfully inserted into the footage and was frantically snapping pictures of the tanks, no longer got on my nerves. Not only had the film suddenly become “authentic” it had become personal, my “personal story.” Or so I felt, at least. And I felt the tears running down my cheeks.
What was going on? I wondered. I was only six when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia, so there was no way I could purely and simply identify with the story. I embarked on a round of feverish calculations: if, as the liner notes told me, Kundera’s novel came out in 1984 and Kaufman’s film was shot in 1987, then the film dates from two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and four years before the outbreak of the war in Yugoslavia, which means I could have seen it (though I did not) in Zagreb. My head started swimming from the pointless calculations, and before I knew it I had completely lost my way in time. I was like those Japanese soldiers left behind in the Philippine jungles after the War and who, when found, thought the War was still going on. I’d jumbled up everything—time frames, camera frames—and was incapable of sorting it out. What had taken place far in the past now seemed recent, and the most recent events had moved back in time. My only point of reference seemed to be
that dated video. I looked around like a shipwrecked sailor newly washed ashore. I was in a flat not my own in a city not my own in a country not my own, surrounded by crumbling walls and the smell of must. The remote control in my hand was still working, but the batteries in my internal control mechanism had gone dead: no amount of button pushing could get me going. I wondered when the things that had happened had found time to happen and what made me experience Kaufman’s movie as if it were CNN’s lead item for the day and the fragile Dayton Agreement, signed only two years previously, as if it were ancient history to which I could afford to be supremely indifferent.
The blow I had just received proved much more complicated than it had seemed at first. Words like “phantom limb syndrome” or “nostalgia” are arbitrary lexical labels meant to denote the complex emotional blow that comes of loss and the impossibility of return. They imply that it makes virtually no difference whether we make our peace with the loss or experience relief at being able to let go of the past or of the desire to return to it. Because the blow does not lose its intensity thereby. Nostalgia, if that is the word for it, is a brutal, insidious assailant who favors the ambush approach, who attacks when we least expect him and goes straight for the solar plexus. Nostalgia always wears a mask and, oh, irony of ironies, we are only its chance victim. Nostalgia makes its appearance in translation—most often a bad one—after a complicated journey not unlike the children’s game “telephone.” The words the first player whispers into the ear next to him pass through a whole chain of ears until it emerges from the mouth of the last player like a rabbit out of a magician’s hat.
The blow that had recently hit me in the solar plexus had undergone a long and complicated journey, passing through any number of mediators and media until, mediated for the umpteenth
time, it turned up in the form of—Juliette Binoche. Binoche was the last in the line of transmitters, the one who translated my personal pain into my language. At the perfect moment. Because at a different time her translation might have been gibberish. At that and only that moment Kaufman’s images, much like the ideal Coca-Cola commercial, were able to launch a sudden subliminal attack on me, and I totally fell apart.
Even though I felt the only story I had a proper copyright on was the “Yugoslav story,” at that moment all stories were mine. I wept in my innermost being over the imaginary tangled web that bore the arbitrary label of Eastern, Central, East-Central, Southeastern Europe, the other Europe. I couldn’t keep them straight: the millions of Russians who had disappeared into Stalin’s camps, the millions who had perished in the Second World War, but also the ones who had occupied the Czechs and the Czechs who were occupied by the Russians and the Hungarians (they too occupied by the Russians) and the Bulgarians who fed the Russians and the Poles and the Romanians and the former Yugoslavs, who basically occupied themselves. I was beating my head against the wall of a generalized human loss. Like a Balkan keener I wailed my agony over one and all, only my agony was mute. I grieved for the Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Budapest, Sofia, Bucharest, and Skopje facades that were coming down. I was touched by the endearingly bad taste of a chocolate wrapper of my youth (to say nothing of the literal bad taste of the chocolate), I bemoaned the swatch of a melody that happened to ring in my ear, a face that emerged at random from the darkness, a sound, a tone of voice, a line of verse, a slogan, smell, or scene. There I sat, staring into the landscape of human loss and weeping my heart out. I even shed a tear for Kaufman’s trick shots, which had after all brought my feelings to a head, and another for my celluloid Binoche.
Then I thought of my students. They would be moved by the same landscape. The problem was, their metamorphosis had only the scantest chance of success: they were a second too late, a fraction of a second. No, their metamorphosis would end in failure. I could sense it in their internalized stoop, in the hint of gloom in their eyes, the invisible slap on their faces, the lump of vague resentment in their throats.
Any minute now, any second, a new, completely different tribe will arise from the post-Communist underbrush bearing doctoral dissertations with telling titles like “Understanding the Past as a Means of Looking Ahead.” They will be the children of Tomáš and Tereza, who returned to Czechoslovakia only to die there, because returning spells death and remaining spells defeat. They will be the orphans of Tomáš and Tereza. They will set out on their run like salmon, but other times mean other streams and other fellow travelers, people who really are “looking ahead” and who will no longer “understand the past” or at least not in the same way. And these new team players from the “gray backwaters” of Mongolia, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria, Belarus, Moldavia, Latvia, and Lithuania, these transition mutants will storm European and American universities and finally learn what needs learning. They will form a vibrant young contingent of specialists, organizers, operators and, above all, managers, experts in business management, political management, ecological management, cultural management, disaster management—the management of life. They will be a genus that propagates itself with inhuman rapidity, as if propagation were their sole aim in life. They are the type that always lands on its feet, that has no qualms about living off the misfortunes of the people they help, because even misfortune needs to
be managed: misfortune without management is merely failure. They are the people who will look after the disabled in Bulgaria, Bosnia, Belarus, Moldavia, and Romania; of the orphans in Bosnia, Georgia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Azerbaijan, and Armenia; of the minorities in Europe and the Roma everywhere; of sex professionals and victims of the white, black, and yellow slave trade; of refugees, emigrants, immigrants, and migrants; of the homeless. They are mutants who will be as efficient as laboratory viruses in spreading, spreading their nets and networks, their umbrellas and umbrella organizations, their centers, their links. They will become the heads of audiovisual and telecommunications departments, the net and web people. They will be the self-confident designers of their own careers and of the lives of others. They will be deep thinkers, voracious readers, and consummate stylists. They will have multiple identities: they will be cosmopolitan, global, multicultural, nationalistic, ethnic, and diasporic all in one. They will wear any number of hats and be flexible in the extreme, ever ready to define and refine themselves, reflect and deflect themselves, invent and reinvent themselves, construct and deconstruct themselves. They will be the champions of democracy in these transitional times, and since everything is and has always been in a state of flux the words
mobility
and
fluidity
will be like chewing gum in their mouths. They will be progressive and aggressively young, the well-paid commissars of
European integration and enlargement
, the harbingers of the new world order, the creators of
unique postnational political units
, of
new national and postnational constellations
, advocates of
globalization as opposed to localization
and vice versa, advocates, zealous advocates of whatever happens to be in need of advocating. Born in the Ukrainian hinterland, they will study medieval history in Kiev, English business terminology in Birmingham, and write dissertations on “What Medieval History
and Business Terminology Have in Common.” They will flock from Vilnius to Warwick to learn about micro- and macroeconomics, to specialize in
good governance and sustainable peace in war-torn societies
. They will come from Voronezh, Kaunas, Timişoara and Pécs to work for NGOs, the EU, the UNHCR. They will come from Ulan Bator with MBAs to study
modeling policy instruments
. They will come from Yerevan, from Alma Ata, from Veliko Tŭrnovo, from Tashkent and Varna and Minsk to become
the leaders and future elite in a unified Europe
. They will come from Iaşi in Romania and Ruse in Bulgaria and Tetov in Macedonia with doctorates in pastoral Orthodox theology in their pockets, spend a few years in Fribourg studying international relations, join think tanks in Salonika, Boston, and Prague, and hold a series of handsomely remunerated
briefing sessions
in a Romanian, Bulgarian, or Lithuanian institute on the topic of Euro-Atlantic integration and the politics of defense, flaunting their rampant bastardization. They will be linguistically gifted, speaking several languages and creating a Eurospeak of their own, peppering it with personal coinages. They will always write the word
Enlargement
with a capital
E
, because for them it heralds a new era, a new humanism, Renaissance, and Enlightenment rolled into one. Their buzzwords will be
management, negotiation technology, income, profit, investment, expenses, hidden communication
, and the like. Quick to position themselves, forever with an eye to the main chance, resilient as the proverbial cat with nine lives, they will be
hardworking, communicative, loyal, discreet, tolerant, friendly
, and
skillful in coping with stressful situations
. They will show a special interest in
diplomatic privileges
. They will come from Samara after short stints in Coca-Cola Samara and Samara Light and Power and enroll in the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Mediterranean Academy of Diplomatic Studies. They will spice up their applications with phrases like
Challenge is my propeller
and
Perfection is my ulti
mate goal
and jargon like
the contemporary self, the bastardization of our age, postcolonialism, marketization, recruiting tactics, sensitivity training
, and
contacts
.
But on their way they will forget that the
very
flexibility, mobility, and fluidity that catapulted them to the surface leave a nameless mass of slaves down below. All through the gray backwaters people will be eking out precarious livings by manufacturing the goods the West European magnates call for. They will be rummaging in dustbins for food, going on benders, giving birth to homeless children who will give birth to more homeless children. They will sell their sperm, their kidneys; they will sell any organ that will fetch a price on the global black market. They will rent out fresh East European sexual organs to the weary ones of Enlarged Europe. They may also help out their brothers, lay Croatian customers, say, traveling to Bulgaria (where human flesh is cheaper). And some of them will travel all the way to the shores of Western Europe, where the more fortunate will pick asparagus in Germany and tulips in Holland and the less fortunate will scrub toilets.
My students appear to have missed the boat, as have I, for that matter, but only by a second. We stood there with our mouths open for a second too long and missed our chance to enter the new age. All we can do now is run our legs off to keep in place. The loser bug has made its way into our hearts and weakened the muscles there.