The dust of the mouse era

(March 10, 2011, Time No. 1053)

photo: Olja Petronić

Maybe that's not such a bad definition of a life: periodically losing addresses. My trouble is only that this life, the one from the definition, is exactly mine, so I can't establish sufficient ironic or other distance. Anyway, it happened to me for the first time when I was three years old, but then I was too young to suffer because of it; the next time, four years later, it hurt a lot. I believe, actually, that it never stopped hurting, it just changed forms, occasions, circumstances. And since then, it has happened every few years, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker. And always actually forced, by someone else's will, force majeure or a terrible set of circumstances that didn't care to ask my opinion.

Moving in such circumstances leaves you without an address, thus without a home. Maybe you'll get another one someday, but that gamble is something you wouldn't wish on anyone you love. And I moved more or less constantly, while some others are born, live and die at the same address, and think it's completely normal.

It usually happens that after a lost address there are some remains of a life that is no longer there, little by little they appear to you from the expected or unexpected side, to remind you, to call you, to hurt you. Usually, some key that no longer opens any locks remains in your pockets, and you don't dare to throw it away, as if by doing so you would betray and sell something that is yours. And what is that? yours actually? Didn't life just prove to you again and again, for the umpteenth time, yes nothing is yours? And that everything passes you by, in a course that you don't determine, because you don't actually determine a single course, not even the one in which you slide towards death, with each loss of address you become terribly older, with each new set of more-unnecessary-keys, more terribly dead than before?

Misarska 12-14, third and fourth floor, was my first, real and only Belgrade address. I moved there in 1994, a whole lifetime younger, and I stayed there. I have never, and would never want to leave. When I arrived, I had no idea at first - although I liked her right away - that I was just getting an address, but she got under my skin, and it was impossible to get her out, and I didn't even try. Of course, I have a different address on my ID card, but I don't really have anything intimate with it. Furthermore, when I moved to Mišarska, I lived as a tenant, and a tenant is a man without a real address, so that address, Klare Cetkin 1, doesn't count either, no matter how dear it is to me. Later, when I moved into my apartment on the Zemun highlands, I acquired some sort of stable address, but that was later, and that's a completely different story, and it could never mean to me what Misarska 12-14 means, like tucked away the witchcraft epicenter of my world, like that heavy anchor with which I resisted the Belgrade basket, the one that kept me in place, so that I wouldn't go who knows where, to the point of no return. How am I going to do now, without that center, what will keep me from flying away or from scattering in all directions? And how, after all, will I orient myself in this dishearteningly chaotic city, suddenly without a Starting Point?

On the night in which I am writing these lines, the one from the first Thursday to Friday in March, I am left without the address from the title. Midnight has already struck, no one has been on the third or fourth floor of Mišarska 12-14 for a long time, only the night porter is dozing downstairs and wondering when that hairy madman will go to rest. And I'm still here because these lines can and must be created only there, in the last moment when the already badly wounded, but still alive heart of my Mišarska beats. I turned on the oil radiator, so I warm myself, up here, in the "worst" little room in the newsroom, the coldest in winter, the hottest in summer, and yet inalienable. my address. When I type these lines and turn off the computer, I will go to bed, and already in the morning Ivan H. will turn off the vital functions of the electronic heart of our Hall 9000, and clack-clack, we'll put things in the queue and go to hell. In that future that has actually already begun, and for those who read these lines is very much the present, I will once again become the Man Without an Address. If you meet me somewhere, know that you have met a refugee, an arsonist, a floodgater, a suitcase carrier, a fucking Ahasuerus.

Before that, here now, tonight, I will go through all the rooms again, half already stripped and packed, I will take a deep breath the dust of the mouse era, to protect me, if he can, from evil and spells in the cruel future (the future, I speak from experience, is always cruel!), I will go out to the snowy terrace, our terrace, my terrace, the one where I so many times, especially on summer eves, felt and touched the zen of the quiet pleasure of existence, and the one where, secretly, so that no one could see, I cried out the agony and death of my father, and so many others, which are only mine . I will go out on that bumpy terrace with a cracked floor to look once more at the witch's roofs, and the quiet, narrow alley below them, those two hundred and six steps, the length of that alley. Which, dear God, I don't know if I will ever dare to pass, because I have only one heart. And then, I say, I'll go, go away, already hopelessly older than I was last night.

It could be about those sixteen, seventeen mouse years to tell countless anecdotes, countless gentle and rude information of our youth, but somehow I don't feel like it right now, and I guess I'm not a man of anecdotes. Of course, this will live Time and further on, and I guess I am with him and in him, but I don't know about the others, but I will no longer have addresses, I know that well, no matter what they are, there will only be some technical place for receiving postal items and executing new issues of newspapers. And in your Now, in that harsh future where you read these words written on the last night of Misharska, the silence and darkness of the dead will reign in Misharska 12-14, on the third and fourth floors. Nobody's dumb, everything was covered by snow, as an old funny song says. Soooo, a gentle female vocalist responds to that, with that holy indifference of a being without a history.