This surprised me the first time I saw it with my own naive eyes, my shock registered not the vast destruction of a 5 story building but the freshness of it. The hole was wide and I imagined paper blowing wind off the desks freshly exposed to the sun, swivel chairs still turning in awe. The Chinese embassy, an 'unintentional' target of the U.S. bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was an intentional route for my tour guides on my evening entry into Belgrade in January 2006. I am thinking about Belgrade because of Kosovo, whose name decorates walls all around the capital in predictable graffiti.
This summer sitting on the edge of a slow grey fountain staring, slowly melting and staring at ladies shoes while nervously smoking too many cigarettes. At the conference of students from KIJAC University in Pristina, one woman stood out from the crowd. Slender hands and a small neck, she reminded me of my sister. She was quieter than the rest and spent most of the night talking with V. the long haired alchemist who never changed his black clothes. She was delicate and tiny, her name was Fluterella, butterfly. She made videos. Yestereday I read in the papers that Serbs in Belgrade never did anything for the Kosovar Albanians. I know that this is not true, having attended a conference hosted by the Belgrade Circle this summer. I do know that the Serbs who hosted this conference were unsympathetic to the frightened Albanians, who had been stopped and hassled at the border. I know that the guest speaker didn't appear and most of the students stayed in their groups.
The students from KJAK offered me a ride back with them to Pristina, but Buddy had given me glib and mud. 'It's nothing but a skeleton, hot and heavy and full of corruption. There are so many girls there...' he laughed and twirled his purple cigarette with the gold trim. His eyes were too large for his misshapen head and he risked his neck to travel into Pristina weekly, to teach and get laid by young Albanian women. 'Pristina is dead' he laughed deeply. I tried to imagine myself traveling to and working in the city. The bus would come to a grinding halt after 14 hours of dirty bumpy travel and I would get out, crawl to the nearest hotel and take a job carrying bags to the top floor. My legs would become strong and I would see the desert wind blow red sand through the city during the day. At night I would write, perhaps I would work for a newspaper and sell the story of the Serbs like Buddy who snuck in, to work, to sex, to snort the air and piss on the hotel bathroom floors. Surely someone would care that Serbs worked in Pristina, no one thought Serbs worked in Kosovo. I would wait in my corner of the hotel, folding grey towels and tapping out stories on the keys, until the day when Kosovo declared independence. Then surely there would be violence and a story, I would be on the ground, maybe I would speak a little of the language. I would be one of the only Westerners there, embedded and learning from the inside out what Kosovo was like, if it was really dead.
Instead of traveling South with KJAK, I sat at the head table, in the corner position, where no woman who wants to get married will sit. I was paraded through the authentic restaurant grounds and laughed with a fat NYU graduate about Craigslist and Maria Todorova and her son with a Odepial complex. The wine went from my head to my heart and the students left to find discos on the Danube. V. urged me to take a picture of him in the middle of the chairs that had been put on top of the table that night. His black clothes and stark appearance standing like a pole in the middle of a thousand colored chair legs.
The former Yugoslavia has split into 5 independent states now. I think it should be so. After seeing the fear and the tears, hearing the stories of how life was ripped from these students, how everything was halted, after the war. After seeing how Serbs consider Kosovo theirs but hate the inhabitants and refuse them access to the rest of the country. Kosovo is the cradle of their civilization but it has been changing for years and these changes can't be ignored. After fighting with my contingency, my position was solidified. Spain, Romania, Russia, Cyprus all disagree.
I know now that all of those: fat NYU, V., my contingency, those in Romania, in the United States, will all be watching the television, as the world does to check, every few hours, to make sure there hasn't been any violence. For Kosovo's sake, I hope that Serbia relaxes it's grip and the tension does not mount. I still feel an absence in my heart when I think about the bus pulling out of the station in Belgrade without me. There was a smile on someone's face that day, but not mine.
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