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One Day in Mandalay
December 12, 2013
Alice, the innkeeper of Peacock Lodge, in Mandalay offers me the option of staying an additional day and I accept … one of the advantages of having flexible time and believing in guides. I also alter my travel plans on Alice’s suggestion to break up the long slow train ride to Lashio, so I am only doing the viaduct leg by train. I’m eager to go to these places, but for today just cruising around this city I almost feel familiar with seems the perfect thing to do. And doing yoga, reading, relaxing, writing, and getting onto the Internet, are all so much more acceptable on the road than at home. Mark that revealing fact, Mr. B.
Anyhow, from the time I step out the door of the Peacock my day is just enchanted, beautiful, wondrous, and, yes, even divine. I snag a ride in a pick up on a side road outside the guesthouse where I’m staying and somehow actually find myself where I wanted to go, the pagoda at the top of Mandalay Hills. Interestingly, I remember nothing about the pagoda or the hilltop although I was here w Joy less than a year ago, but each encounter I have with the physical environment evokes a pleasant memory and a warm feeling in me.
I’m sincerely invited to join a luncheon picnic with a half dozen young men and women seated on a sheet on the tile floor outside the pagoda that looks delicious but which I decline. Then, on a wooden bench working a poem, a robed monk in his late thirties sits down next to me, asks in broken English where I am from, and wants to know about my travels in and impressions of Myanmar. So there we are just chatting away fabulously, his English is actually not that bad, he’s simultaneously helping me with my Burmese, and I’m being as frank and probing as I normally am, given the restrictions imposed by the language impediments. Turns out learning English is one of his ambitions, he’s a serious student of the language, has read some Shakespeare and Dickens and a number of monks at his monastery in central Mandalay are studying English together. When I ask if I can visit his monastery with him, he asks what day I had in mind, I say today, and just like that we’re in a little blue pickup truck taxi on our way to the ShweYaye Sung Monastery compound behind the big Maha Mani Buddha statue in the middle of town.
When we get to the monastery U Ke Tu, for that is his name, insists on paying my 4$ taxi fare, but relents when I remind him he is a poor monk living on alms he collects begging in the morning and the grace of his parents. He takes me to his room inside the monastery. He introduces me to monks we encounter saying, “This is my friend.” He lives in a room with three other monks on a straw pallet on the floor. The room is cluttered with mostly books. We sit on his mat and practice English and Burmese. A half a dozen other monks join us. We laugh a lot. One of the monks asks what my “ambition” is, but it turns out he meant what was my work. I say that at twenty I was a soldier, at twenty-five an anthropologist, at thirty a farmer, at thirty-five a hospital administrator, and at forty-five a lawyer, which I still am today although mostly retired. We try to define retired, and “mostly retired.” I correct their pronunciation. We spent a lot of time on the “sm” sound of smart, and on differentiating between p and b, between d and t. Ke Tu, to test out his language skills, sings a beautiful pop love song in English that I am vaguely familiar with and that I understand about half of what he is saying. (“I am sailing, I am sailing, cross the ocean, passed high seas. I am flying …”). I play them Joy singing her song about her mother, and then play Jimmy Durante from music I’ve downloaded on my laptop singing “Make Someone Happy.” The words seem particularly apt, even profound in a Buddhist monastery. We try to talk about Buddhism but it is impossible. I say something about my spiritual “ambitions.” We try to talk about the difference between religion and “spirituality,” but the word “spirituality” doesn’t even appear in the English to Burmese dictionary we refer to, and its definition of “spirit” is more confusing than helpful. I am invited to dinner and decline. I’m also a bit unsure about this, but I think I was also invited to bathe, which I also declined.
We’ve been sitting on the mat at least two hours. I say I have to go. Ke Tu tells me it was his “lucky” day that we met. I say it was “magical,” and “exceptional,” and that it has made me very happy. As we are leaving the monastery we run into the head abbot who I am introduced to and to whom I say in pretty poor Burmese, “It is a pleasure to meet you (tweiya da wan thaba de), which evokes a huge laugh. The abbot just laughs and laughs. It is contagious. I have a few photos of him. He is the most Buddha look a like person you have ever seen. Ever. (See photo above)).
Ke Tu and I continue toward the street. Young monks are bathing with buckets of cold water pulled up from a well. Naturally, they are laughing. Ke Tu takes may hand and we walk hand and hand together. He intertwines the fingers of his right hand with those of my left. We are both aware something out of the ordinary has been shared between us and while our separation and my departure are the most ordinary and familiar of human experiences, there is a poignancy that makes it very hard for me to separate, knowing as I do, that like many of my experiences on these travels and towards the end of my life, they are not likely to be repeated or reencountered, that they exist only in the present and in memory.
Ke Tu insists I ride back into town on the back of a motorcycle “taxi,” which I do without helmet and aware of the risks, but when in Mandalay … The taxi deposits me after dusk at a downtown market. Men are playing some kind of board game I have never seen before. I am asked if I play. I say, “No, I play checkers,” as I pull out my traveling checker set to show them what I mean. An older man in the crowd says with a big smile and good humor, “Ha! I am checker champion. You play? Winner get one thousand chat?” And there we are playing Burmese checkers (far more interesting than the American checkers I grew up with) right on the sidewalk under a streetlight as a decent sized crowd of men gathers. When I am forced to jump a piece of his he says, “You eat!”
In the first game I make a rookie move and it is all over. In the second game we agree to a draw. And in the third game, in a moment of checker brilliance I’d like to repeat some day soon, I see a number of moves down the board and force him into a fatal position that neither he nor the kibitzing crowd of more than twenty onlookers sees until it is too late, and when I make my penultimate move which forces him into an obviously fatal position I pump my fist once up in the air and the crowd literally cheers and claps, good naturedly teasing the “champion” on his defeat at the hands of this foreigner.
At times I feel as though I can only take so much more pleasure, have rarely been this ecstatic, am really enjoying my travels, all in part a tribute to my truly favorite guide, Sacajawea Joy, the prophetess of the notion that it can and will just keep getting better, that we can attain and tolerate more and more pleasure and a feeling of excitement and delight as a dominant state of mind and being. The word Joy uses is euphoria, by which she means a utopian ideal of emotional bliss. I’m in favor of that. It’s just a little exhausting without practice. But you just had to see this monk laughing.
MYANMAR
TRAVEL DIARIES
Shwebo, Sagaing, Myanmar
It’s not an everyday occurrence that two formerly Jewish guys around 70 years old, born in New York City, who went to the same high school a few years apart and didn’t know each other, who went to the same college, overlapped a few years, and didn’t know one another, love the Museum of Natural History in NYC, are not afraid to wear longjyi and sandals walking around together for a day in Mandalay, have unmarried sons taller and far different than they are, each son with a half sister who shares their father’s paternity, an Asian girlfriend, biblical names, and each man a six foot two inch tall Buddhist with multiple cardiac stents who found the sex trade in Thailand appalling and have been traveling separately in Asia for around three months, ending up in Myanmar for different purposes, but manage to get together for a few days at the end of each man’s journey in Myanmar, to criticize monotheism and come to visit the Burmese town of Shwebo in Sagaing state, where crowds of Burmese people young and old gather to stare and smile as the men wander about, marveling at the pale aliens’ ability to walk and say “Minglaba” at the same time, as well as to say “thank you,” and “nice to meet you” in Burmese. No not everyday.
Steve and I arrive in Shwebo on Tuesday afternoon and check into the Winn Guesthouse Hotel, more green walls, no decent lights or lamps, entire generations and lineages of old garbage and dust under the beds (well who told you to look, I say blame it on doing cobra in yoga), but with reasonably priced rooms and reasonably quiet. Afterwards we stroll the streets, I think of it as sauntering, of a decent sized town, smaller and dustier than Monywa or POL … and absolutely devoid of any foreigners, which was the major reason why I’d picked it, other than it’s 4 hour proximity to Mandalay.
Before long, it won’t surprise you, Mr. Ko Kyaw Minn, who says he is a retired primary grade English teacher, which may explain in part why the Burmese kids here speak such poor English and can’t sing “Old MacDonald,” Ko Kyaw’s English is that poor, that unintelligible, his ability to hear English and understand it beyond primitive, that Mr. Ko Kyaw has adopted Steve and I, kind of like how leeches adopt people. Do we mind if he wanders around town with us, and do we want to visit his home where he lives with his mother, son, and sisters, his wife apparently having decided within the passed few months that one Ko was more than enough Ko, something I understand quite soon, although Steve is a bit more forbearing, so I’ll call him Steve’s guide, not mine, an innocent enough retired soul, looking for entertainment in a small and dusty town, and a free pastry or cup of tea if that should happen, who genuinely wants to be of service, and inevitably is, recommending restaurants, getting us directions to the Internet café, translating for us, introducing us to at least a dozen people each of whom he says is his “best” friend, and telling us each repeatedly –to me annoyingly – that he will never forget us.
Naturally, when we tell Ko we want to visit the pottery making villages along the Irrawaddy River, about twenty miles east of us, the next day, Ko is quick to offer to find us motorcycle taxis who will charge us what he says and what sounds like a reasonable fee … and he does, showing up in the doorway of our room before 9 A.m., one of the motorcycle taxis being his son’s motorcycle, which Ko so obligingly will be driving, “if that’s okay,” which of course it is, especially if Steve is his passenger rather than me, as I find his constant ingratiating narrative just a bit too much, preferring the strong silent types in my two legged featherless guides
The immigration service … Steve’s line about tragedy or farce
The women at the pagoda building fund drive
The guesthouse owner in Kyauk Myaung
And the pottery villages are nothing less than spectacular. I mean spectacular. Abundant with special soils of red and yellow clay, dozens of amazingly talented potters, throwing immense pots, larger and heavier than I can lift, moved about with specially fitting harnesses, carried between the shoulders of two men, brought to wood fed kilns, that burn for close to 48 hours straight, some of the massive kilns capable of holding eighty to one hundred of the big pots as they are being fired, before they are moved on beds of straw by oxen drawn carts down to the river for shipment south and beyond. We watch a three-foot diameter pot being thrown. The skill of the potter who works in tandem with an assistant is otherworldly.
Back in town we revisit the graphic silkscreen t-shirt producer who does shirts as business promotions and had refused to sell some feed company shirt but said he’d make me a shirt … and when I get back 24 hrs later he has 2 shirts for me that he gifts to me … and refuses to take any american or myanm money, but does accept it when I take the shirt off my back- shiva
MYANMAR
TRAVEL DIARIES
Jumping Cat Monastery
Inle Lake is surrounded by steep mountains, and dozens of traditional Burmese, Shan, and Intha villages that cannot be reached by means other than boat. And pagodas that cannot be reached other than my foot. The lake rises and falls depending upon the season and the grace of the gods, goddesses, and “nats” of water and rain. Some of the village houses stand on stilts in the water whatever the height of the lake. Others are seasonal or on wetland or at the very base of roadless mountains. All trading and travel needs are met with the use of boats. The scenery includes young boys riding water buffalo, men and women washing clothes, field workers and children waving, fishermen with nets, dugout canoes being paddled while standing – using one leg to move the long thin paddle through the water. Harvesting watercress, tomatoes, squashes, and corn being grown on floating islands made of river silt and river muck created over the centuries by people with nothing more than their backs and their shovels who do not greet you by asking, “How are you?” but rather, “Are you happy?” This is a bipedal human aquatic culture practicing aquatic farming with ecological awareness on small footpaths and busy boat lanes with bamboo dams, wonderful woven bamboo retaining walls, bamboo stakes and ties, bamboo houses and fences, And bamboo’s consciousness of strength, flexibility, versatility and utility in a land of earthly industry, of farming, weaving, carving, craft, and of diligent labor.
There is a floating restaurant named “Nice.”
And equally surreal, amazing, and somehow ordinary is this immense floating wooden temple and home for monks whose name translates to “Jumping Cat Monastery” and which actually has jumping cats. You are invited to come here to see and contemplate people who do not walk or run except inside their houses, whose entire terra firma is often only twelve square feet of bamboo flooring filled with mats, bedding, a wood cooking stove, some pots and pans, family photographs, potted plants, posters of soccer teams from England, clothes drying on hooks, and bells ringing.
I had wanted to leave some of my nephew Mile’s ashes with the jumping cats, relatives of whom once lived in his home, but wasn’t sure what the monks would want, so I just eased ashes of him into the lake to become one with the fishes, and the silt, and the floating islands which support the plants that feed the people who grow and live and thrive and die here, and who ask when you enter their waters if you are happy.
MYANMAR
TRAVEL DIARIES
Tools of Palestinian Terrorism
The Palestinian terrorists
Offer us food until we are full
And then offer more
In order to explode us
Serving us tea, coffee, juice, soda, milk, water
Until we are sprouting
Demanding we say things
Only people being tortured would say,
Like please, I can’t take any more, I will tell you anything
Only please stop forcing such kindness and hospitality on me
Please, no more meats, greens, rice, falafel
No more olives, lemons, grapefruit,
Or four different kinds of oranges we must learn to distinguish the tastes of
The bitter, the sweet, the Spanish, the French collaborationist
The zatar, the hummus, home made cheeses, bread
Admiring pictures of our grandchildren
As if such caring will cause us to drop our guard
Quoting Wordsworth to make us cry
Introducing us to their daughters
The teachers and the poetesses
Their grandchildren
The artists and the singers
Their son in laws
The professors and the engineers
Who must go through four checkpoints
To get to work
A twenty minute trip
That takes two hours
Their entire family
Terrorists all
Offering us a bed, a roof, a song
A drive on the tractor to their occupied fields
To plant olive trees with us on a hillside.
“And why are you not afraid?”
Asks the distracted Israeli soldier
At the wall and the gate to our fields
His fingers tracing absently over his machine gun
“They are terrorists.
They kill people.”
And you say nothing
Having noticed well
Who holds the power
And who the real terrorists are.
While our hosts tell us tales from Byzantine days
And sing to us, all of them, in English,
“We Shall Overcome.”
POEMS FOR PALESTINE
Hippies Help Their Neighbors
We are moving as a group across an open meadow filled with wildflowers, red clover, timothy hay, and the sweetest smelling Vermont air, on a slightly breezy sunny summer afternoon 1971, clouds drifting in from the west. It is a moment we are each and all aware is precious. Perhaps some of us are stoned, or tripping. But what would you expect of a dozen longhaired twenty and thirty year old men and women with five gorgeous children riding on a flat bed wooden hay wagon, drawn by a magnificent team of horses, hippie revolutionary communists, living on a former dairy farm less than three miles below the Canadian border and on a mission?
The day is spectacular. Clouds rush by draw off Lake Champlain into the foothills and onto the plain that includes southern Quebec, the occupied colonial foreign country in our backyard where Vietnamese warrior negotiators sought refuge and material support from both the Quebec Liberation Front in Montreal and from the American left.
The lovingly cleaned and oiled chains and harnesses on the horses, which we’ve purchased from an old farmer who hadn’t used a piece of horse drawn equipment in over twenty years, jingle and shine in the sun. The horses are gleaming, sweating, moving steadily and comfortably in the traces. Peter clucks to the team, “Haw, Jim. Haw.” The squeak of the wagon, the crunch of the wheels on the earth, the buzz of insects and the whisper of wind fill the air.
Beth Pratt, eight years old, riding bareback astride Jim, the older calmer heroic gelding, leading our common artistic entourage calls out, “Look!” She is pointing toward the swamp, toward the old logging trail that leads through the woods to our neighbor’s property over two miles away on the now never used old logging trail through the woods. Charlie, her father, rises up on one elbow, holds his rifle in his extended left arm high into the air. His hair blows in the wind. His skin is smooth. He is close shaven. There is no hair on his chest or back. He remembers even now that a profoundly immoral war is being waged in Vietnam, a war that is in the minds of the communards every day, along with whales and other species at the edge of extinction, the impending silent spring, and huge mountains of bullshit, lies, and deceit, while the broad democracy movement, the unfulfilled promise of universal self-determination built on Indian bones and the theft of Indian land, built on the backs of slaves, and the sweat of the working masses, is still to be reborn. “Uhuru,” Charlie shouts. It means freedom in Swahili.
“Look,” Beth calls again, a broad smile crossing her face as the wind pulls the corners of her mouth back to the edges of her ears. It is Kisha, our three legged wonder dog, hoping and running to meet the wagon, bouncing through the meadow as best he can to join us. The smile on Kisha’s face is as broad as the smile on Beth’s. Can anything be more beautiful than this day, this team of horses, this wounded dog, these beautiful people? Life is good.
We are on our way to Ken and Grace Spooners, our neighbors, each of whom is easily eighty years old. They live on the same farm on the top of the hill that they have lived on for over fifty years. The have a herd of maybe thirty cows that Grace still milks two times a day by herself, or sometimes with hired help, Ken having lost a leg to cancer a few years back. They have a team of horses older than they both are, which they never use but cannot bear to part with. They have a yard filled with cats, and a sign posted on their property that says, “No Hunting.” They mean it.
“Anyone hunts on my land,” says Grace, “is sure to be cursed. Fellow shot a deer in that lower pasture maybe thirty years ago and danged if he didn’t poke his eye out the very next year riding around careless like on a tractor.”
We stand in awe of the Spooners. They are the real people we seek to emulate: honest, hardworking, knowledgeable, kind, even politically savvy and liberal. They have telephoned us late in the morning to say the weather looked ominous, that they had some recently mowed hay down in a field almost all of which has been baled, maybe five hundred bales at most, but that they would never be able to get the hay into the barn before the rains come and if they leave it out it will be ruined. Might we be able to send over a man or two to help them get the hay in before the storm hits, they ask.
Naturally we are all tremendously eager to respond to the call and help the Spooners, and by the time we’ve discussed who might go over to help them, and how we would get there, and what impact it will have on the day we had planned, it has turned into a spontaneous little adventure that almost everyone wants to be part of. So we hitch the team to the flatbed wagon and off we go, over the meadow and through the tremendously beautiful world we have the privilege to live in, a world we are aware of and take great pleasure in. The Earthwork communards often said when at a loss for words to describe the choices we are making that we seek to “walk in beauty,” and that mantra guides us on our mission, where a sense of beauty and proportionality is a matter of common reverence. We are so much the creatures of our teachings and expectations.
We emerge from the logging trail through the woods into the Spooners’ old apple orchard. The ride to the Spooners’ would have taken us more than half an hour in a fast pickup truck on county roads. It has taken little more than an hour riding with a ton of people on an old wagon cutting through the woods. We ride up to the Spooner’s farmhouse through their hay meadow.
“Looks like five hundred bales easily,” says Charlie.
“Maybe five gazillion,” says Adrian, all of five years old. “Five hundred gazillion,” says Dylan, who knows the number of stars in the sky and specializes in kitchen chemistry and animal ears.
“Whatever it is, let’s do it fast,” says Barbara pointing to the sky.
Ken and Grace are on their porch waiting for us, smiling and waving like kids. It is delicious to see them. We have so few contacts outside the farm. And they are quite literally thrilled to see us, people who have given them hope for the future. Their old tractor and hay wagon are hitched and ready to go.
“Should we use the horses and the tractor both,” asks Marcel.
“No, let’s rest the horses,” says Peter, “it’s probably just as fast loading one wagon with a full crew as loading two wagons with half crews.
“Do you folks want some milk and cookies,” Grace asks.
“Milk and cookies!” the kids scream. We have not had cold milk or cookies in years it seems.
Grace has already put out a plate of cookies, a pitcher of milk, two jugs of lemonade, and some napkins. We act like the starving savages we are. There has been so few of these simple pleasures in our harsh and pristine world and the kids tear into the cookies without the slightest sense of manners or propriety. I am embarrassed to my bourgeois core, but Grace seems oblivious and delighted.
“What nice children,” she says more than once. “And I see they like my cookies.”
“Like your cookies? Grace did you make these? Where do you find the time?” The women are particularly in awe.
“I made them last evening,” said Grace, “it was my grandmother’s recipe you know, and I make them just the way she did. The trick is to chill the dough before you bake the cookies, never understood why, but it makes them sweeter and softer.”
“Let’s let these folks get to work, Grace,” says Ken.
“Good Lord, just take your sweet time, Mr. Ken Spooner,” says Grace.
And in a flash everyone has had a cookie, maybe two, and the lemonade and milk is completely gone, disappeared, without a crumb or a drop left, as if starving locust or scavenger ants had marched across the porch devouring everything in sight. And now the communal horde, who have hardly even had enough fresh water to brush our teeth with for over a week, are ready to work.
“An army marches on its stomach,” says Grace. “Louise dear would you go into the kitchen and bring out that other plate of cookies, please?”
“Ken, we really got to get rolling,” Crow says. “Let’s have one of the women drive the tractor. Let’s put two men up on the wagon stacking. And let’s have six people in the field throwing the bales up onto the flatbed. Time’s a wasting.”
“It’s a plan,” says Charlie, “let’s move it.”
Libby gets into the tractor seat. It is for Crow another of those moments when incredible beauty appears. It is what he longs for, what he seeks and reveres. Libby appears as simply the most beautiful woman he has ever seen, a Botticelli-like figure with reddish tinted golden wavy hair sparkling and blowing in the breeze. It is breath taking. Spiritual. This is real, he thinks. It is not sexual. His gaze shifts to the sky that is backlighting Libby and creating the aura around her. The sky is still bright and sunny in the east but heavy gray clouds are moving in from the west. The breeze has picked up and the leaves of the trees are rustling. Pine needles fall and tufts of milkweed drift across the surface of the earth. It is a moment of seeing what is real, or so it feels, a moment of remembering what is real, what is important, of why we are doing what we are doing and more specifically why he is doing it. “Walk in beauty,” he says to himself. He looks from Libby to Charlie and Peter. They are magnificent. Breugels. He loves feeling so positive, loves the love welling up from his chest, filling his head, tasting it. A delirious energy filling him. “We are the people,” he yells.
“Uhuru,” Charlie yells.
“Come on, brothers,” says Marcel.
Hutcher is standing in the field with a bale in his hand quietly waiting. The reward of collectivity is productivity.
Peter and Crow climb onto the flatbed. Barbara, Lou, Mary Pat, and Shannon stay back with Grace, Ken, and the children where they’ll find more than enough to do around the barn and the house to help out a neighbor. They love socializing with Ken and Grace whenever they’re able anyhow.
“Can we do anything for you, Grace,” I hear Lou say over the hum of the tractor as it pulls away.
“Well there is some wood I could use brought up to the house. And the horses haven’t been walked in over a week. And I’ve got a load of wash downstairs that could use hanging and drying.”
“No drying today,” says Shannon pointing to the sky and everyone laughs as if it was a tremendous new joke.
It is hard to find enough folks on most Vermont farms to carry out the duties and tasks demanded of the family dairy farmer. If you don’t have kids or a working extended family you are generally sunk. It is part of the reason so many small Vermont dairy farms are forced out of operation. The margin of profit is simply too small and the need for grunt level manual labor too great to support the operation of a profitable herd. Ken and Grace survive in part because their income is supplemented by social security and Ken’s disability check. They pay a local man to help with the milking and the mucking out of the stalls. He appears most days. It eats up any profit they might have made, but it sustains them in the only life they know. They could surely give up the herd, but a purposelessness and ennui would befall them and they would wither and die. And they know it.
Harvesting hay is crucial to any dairy farm’s operations. It is the base feed that will sustain the herd through the long Vermont winter. If you have to buy hay you are in trouble. It is often simply not available, and when it is available it’s ghastly expensive. Cutting and raking hay is a one-person job with the right equipment, as is running the hay baler. But bringing in the bales takes at least three people to be efficient and usually four people make for the best operation: one person, the physically weakest, drives the tractor, one person stacks the bales as they are thrown up onto the wagon, and two people throw up the hay bales from both sides of the wagon. There is a very specific pattern that bales are stacked in, maximizing the space on the wagon, stabilizing the load, and keeping the upper tiers of bales from falling as the stack grows higher and higher, usually six or seven tiers high, and totaling as many as seventy five to eighty bales of hay per wagon load. It can take well more than an hour to stack and unload one wagon.
But these are The People, the hardworking real people, energized, super charged super efficient people, high on lemonade and cookies. Charlie is so pumped up he’s throwing bales completely over the wagon, from one side off to the other side such that Hutcher has to quietly and stoically load back onto the wagon twice as many bales as he should. Charlie has taken off his shirt and is wearing only boots, dungaree pants, and work gloves. The sharp ends of the hay sheaves are puncturing his forearms and he is bleeding. He loves the blood.
“Easy big guy,” Crow tells him, but Charlie is virtually running from one forty or fifty pound bale to the next, tossing them from as far as ten yards away up onto the flatbed. In less than thirty minutes the wagon is piled to the absolute limit and headed back to the barn with everyone laughing and walking besides it.
When we reach the ramp into the haymow Libby has a hard time backing the load in reverse into the barn for unloading.
Ken has limped off the porch and is calling out directions. “Cut her to the left, no hard left.”
It is very difficult to back up a wagon on a long hitch under any circumstances; and a fully loaded hay wagon makes the effort just that much harder. Besides which, you are backing up on a ramp into the haymow that at its peak falls off ten feet to the ground below. If the wagon wheel goes over that edge you are going to lose the whole load and risk busting up the wagon, flipping the tractor, and injuring the driver. If there is only one person on your crew he or she better know how to get the wagon backed up into the barn. But with eight people there is a choice. The tongue of the wagon, usually a single piece of tapered hardwood or channel iron at least eight feet long and not more than two inches wide and two inches thick, runs from the axle that attaches to and turns the front wheels of the wagon to the tractor. It is held onto the tractor, being pulled or pushed and swinging back and forth, on nothing more than a bolt which goes through a metal plate attached to the tip of the tongue that slides into a hole on a metal track on the back of the tractor. A cotter pin usually holds the bolt down and keeps it from bouncing off or disconnecting from the tractor.
“Hey, let’s unhook the whole rig and just push it in,” says Barry.
Everyone thinks this is between a good and a brilliant idea except Ken, who has come down off the porch and is overseeing operations with a worried look on his face. In his day he could have backed that wagon up into the barn single handedly … and on the first try too.
“Hey ladies,” Libby yells out like a truck driver, “get your sweet buns over here.”
Barbara and Lou walk over. The gaggle of kids follows them.
The ramp is on an incline. The loaded wagon weighs well over three tons, but with eight people lined up in front of it to take the pressure off the tractor Libby can back up just softly enough for Peter to lift the pin out of the hitch and not move the wheels one inch. Once the wagon is disconnected Peter steers the wagon by swinging the tongue ever so easily first left and then slightly right while the remainder of us push the loaded wagon up the ramp and into the hayloft. We are cheering with the miracle of our strength, a dozen sweaty men and women now throwing the bales off the wagon, laughing and cheering, drunk with the sheer physical power of our collective. The hay is off the wagon and stacked in the hayloft in less than ten minutes. It is nothing short of a miracle to Ken whose eyes are wide.
The wagon is walked by hand back down the ramp, reattached to the tractor, and rolling back into the field virtually without pause. Everyone is into it now. Shannon, Grace, all of the kids, running around shrieking in the coming wind like whirling dervishes. It’s clearly right that we did not use the horses to gather the bales. Good as they are, they would have been made nervous and distracted by the noisy hand waving crowd of people rushing and milling around them. There are times when the technology is simply too efficient to argue with.
The wagon is loaded a second time in less than half an hour. The slowest part of the operation has been just moving the tractor through the field to where the bales lie. There are enough people so that distant bales are shuttled closer to the wagon’s path. We are back at the haymow, unhitch the load, and push it into the barn like old experts.
“Look at them go, Ken,” says Grace, nearly dancing with delight. “These folk are sure to have the best darn dairy farm in all Franklin County in no time at all. Yes sir, in no time at all.”
Oh dear Grace, if you only knew.
COMMUNE STORIES
01 – First Italy … or not
I’ve been in Italy with plans to continue there. My dear friend Carmine, who is moving back after 40 years in the US to the little walled Renaissance farming village he was born in in Italy, has asked me to join him for a visit there. And, of course, I jump at the chance to combine such a trip with the return trip I have been promising myself to Bosnia for decades, when I no longer have decades. Besides, Carmine is a fascinating curious fellow who will be able to show me aspects of Italy not generally seen. Ah but then he says he can no longer get away. There is too much on his plate. His sister has cancer. His brother has troubles. Carmine is closing the garage that has been the foundation for his fortune, his pride and province. And trust me, when I say fortune I mean fortune, because money likes Carmine, is drawn to him, accumulates in his pockets and his apartments in Boston and Italy, in trust fund documents he cannot read. But lest you get carried away with envy for Carmine’s good fortune remember this. Six years ago his beloved only son Daniel, to whom the business was intended to go, and for whom life was partly lived, was driving home on his motorcycle after a long week working with his father in the garage when his motorcycle met an immovable object and Daniel breathed his last. The same year Carmine divorced. The same year his only daughter married. The same year his first grandson was born … Daniel having made the space for Dino.
I am also drawn to Italy by the fact that through the miracle of Facebook I have found my dearest childhood friend and literal blood brother Alan, who I have not seen in over 60 years. The pictures of this now 76 year old man with his cane, pot belly, and twinkly eyed smile reveal a face quite familiar to me, evoke a warmth and wonder quite familiar as well. I write Alan to say I am coming to Italy and that I would love to see him. Yet all he sends back is his smile. So I write more extensively, my life an open book before him – marriages, children, careers, political proclivities, narratives, poems, entreaties, confessions – all revealed on my Facebook pages and in my words to him – and all I get back is his smile, hanging in the air with anticipation, like that moment after a symphony performance has been completed, before the start of heartfelt applause.
Fine, mon bon ami, survivor of the Nazi horror, escapee from occupied France, refugee in Bronx tenement project apartment, if I cannot get a word out of you on the Internet I will invade the tiny Italian alpine village where you have taken refuge and root you out by dint of my own ferocious curiosity and attention. But no, that will not be possible Alan writes, finally, he is in Sicily for vacation. Nothing more, nothing less. And I am left with only memories of his parent’s Bronx apartment, of afternoons we loved one another as boyhood friends do, of the protective aura I believed I offered this small, quiet, shy refugee, and of the kindness he showed me, the warmth and appreciation, nay, perhaps admiration, he felt for his American friend.
Okay, no Alan, no Carmine, so why spend any more time in Italy when my central purpose is really to return to Lijesnica, the Bosnian village I lived in 52 years ago? Who needs boulevards lined with blossoming heavily fruited orange trees and cannoli? Who needs fountains overflowing with tourists and young lovers kissing in doorway? I’m going back to Bosnia.
And in a flash it is so.
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
02 – Arrival/Orientation
When I leave Rome it is literally a beautiful spring day, flowers and flesh appearing fresh and blooming everywhere. I fly on Croatia Airlines, the late day local run stopping in Split, Zagreb, Sarajevo and Dubrovnik. The turbulence on the short flight legs is dramatic, complete with the occasional sense of being in an elevator or on a roller coaster in free fall, being lifted it seems out of one’s seat as the floor drops away. People are literally whooping in fear or delight, children crying, the stewardesses apologizing for having to suspend their beverage service in Italian, Serbian, and English. Each take off, joy ride, and landing lasting 30 – 40 minutes.
In Split everyone must get off the plane and go thru Croatian Customs to enter the country before re-boarding the same flight. In Zagreb, less than an hour later, we again de-board to again go through Croatian Customs to exit the country. It’s like going from the independent country of New York to the independent country of California with a stop over to discharge and pick up passengers in the independent state of Texas, where everyone must exit the plane and go through Texas customs before re-boarding the same flight to go onto California.
Besides, a sudden serious snow storm has hit Sarajevo, home of the 1984 Winter Olympics, and the plane literally skids to a stop and then waits for the plows which it follows in as it taxis to the terminal. This evokes a memory of the only other time I landed by plane in Sarajevo, in 1964, where the airbus I flew on from Belgrade was filled to its maximum standing room capacity, a plane packed like a subway car at rush hour in NYC, where people were literally standing shoulder to shoulder, smoking, carrying burlap sacks of vegetables, a chicken or two, and where the landing was also literally one long skid, kind of like a seaplane, in a muddy cow pasture.
Naturally there are no cabs at the Sarajevo airport at midnight, the buses have stopped running, and in case I failed to mention it, it is snowing. Hard. But the Hertz counter is opened and the clerk has a friend who he can call who will drive me to my hotel for a special late night snowstorm rate which I gladly pay. The most memorable part of that ride, other than the amusement park quality of the sliding and skidding, is when I am able to communicate to the driver in my very broken Serbo-Croatian and with his very marginal English that I am returning to Sarajevo for the first time in over fifty years and when the driver understands what I am saying taps my thigh warmly three of four times and says that I have come back “makes his heart happy”. Me too moj prijatelj. Me too.
By next morning I’m happily at rest in the best Airbnb I have ever been in … and not just because it costs only $168 for a week and has been stocked with beer, wine, rolls, salami, butter, apples, oranges, coffee, tea, but in addition has two rooms, four beds, an amazing view out over the old residential part of the city, 2 TVs, a washer and drier, and a nice shower. This is not the Sarajevo I remember. And with that I cannot resist a little socio-political history.
When I was here in ’64 Bosnia was part of an artificial geo-political construct known as “Yugoslavia,” a merger of Bosnia and Herzegovina with the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes first named “Yugoslavia” after World War I. Prior to WW I Bosnia had been a feudal landless-peasant society governed and mercilessly exploited for centuries first by the Ottoman Turkish empire starting in the mid1400s and then without so much as a pause to take a free breath by the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s ruthless occupiers until the 1920s when the new the new Yugoslavia was formed, feudalism abolished, landowners stripped of their lands, and significant agricultural reforms instituted.
A significant challenge to the success of this new united nation, of course, was that Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosnians had intensely different ideas about what their new society should look like, how it should be governed, and to which foreign powers it would look to and align with for economic and political assistance, and, as such, attempts to thwart ethno-nationalism failed to placate the competing interests of the parties, particularly the Croats and the Serbs. Thus by the late 30s Croatians were seeking independent nation status and allied with the fascists in Italy and Germany while the Serbians were generally identified with and looked to side with their ethnic and religious allies in Russia. Not good for Muslims, other Bosnians, or the 20,000 Bosnian Jews who had descended from a Jewish community in Sarajevo which had become well established after the Jewish expulsion from Spain in 1492 and which contributed to Sarajevo frequently being referred to as “the Jerusalem of Europe” because of its tolerance of Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and where one square in the city center famously housed a Catholic church, and Eastern Orthodox church, a mosque and a synagogue.
The Catholic Croat fascists, thus emboldened and empowered by their alliance with the invading armies of Germany, Italy, Bulgaria, and Hungry then sought to do to the Bosnian Serbs what had so “successfully” been done to the Jews. And in this tragic context there arose two resistance movements, one the Cetniks in Serbia, a guerilla force resisting the wide spread ethnic cleansing of Serbs being carried out by the Croatian fascists, the other a communist partisan army led in Bosnia by the Stalin loyalist Josip Broz, aka Tito, who by war’s end had consolidated his control over the former Yugoslav territories and instituted under his dictatorship what he saw as visionary egalitarian communism, which, of course, first required the extermination of literally hundreds of thousands of Croats, anti-communists, Muslim intellectuals, and the criminalization of the teaching of Islam and even the wearing of the veil.
By the 1960s – the only time I was previously in Bosnia – Tito, a dictator in a land long used to the autocratic rule of kings and foreign empires, had actually become a very popular fellow, jobs were plentiful, education and health care were free, roads were being improved, factories were being built, and a pride in multi-ethnic tolerance prevailed. All of which was deeply felt in the tiny Bosnian village of Lijesnica where I lived and about which I wrote my Master’s thesis.
I will later, but before returning to Lijesnica, also very briefly and inadequately refer to the absolutely tragic events that unfolded in the early 1990s when nationalist Serbian forces seeking to unite all of the former Yugoslavia under Serbian rule systematically terrorized, assassinated, raped, ethnically cleansed, and otherwise exterminated whole villages of Bosnian Muslims and laid siege to Sarajevo for over 1400 days. But that for later. For now, I am here, happy, and eager to drink the coffee and eat cevapi.
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
03 – Sarajevo to Mostar and the Tunnel of Hope
The days quickly blur into one another. The snow melts slowly. It is easy to walk down the mountain into town in about 20 minutes and almost everyone does. Almost no one walks up the mountain (except school children) making it look like a one-way street. And while there is no bus service up the mountains taxis from the center of old Sarajevo are ubiquitous and under 2$ gets me dependably up the steep incline to my apartment on Okrugla Street.
There are two places I feel I must go before leaving Sarajevo and my impatience thrills me. First is to the “Tunnel of Hope,” a half mile long tunnel that was dug during the Serbian siege of Sarajevo from the Sarajevo side underneath the Sarajevo airport landing strip to the other side. Historians estimate that more than 1 million trips were taken through the tunnel, allowing the import of millions of tons of food, guns, crates of ammunition, and humanitarian aid. Without the tunnel it is hard to imagine how much more severe the cost in human lives and suffering would have been. My taxi driver tells me he made many trips back and forth through the tunnel and that he was seriously wounded three times during the three year occupation, but that only once was it life threatening, as if the shrapnel and bullet wounds in his back were simply the price one paid for being a fighting aged man at the time in Sarajevo.
I find my visit to the tunnel deeply moving, actually bringing me to tears, inspired/touched by this example of human cruelty, courage, and fortitude. The one still accessible tunnel entrance was/is literally inside the home of a very ordinary family who lived near the airport and who began the project without aid or assistance other than inspiration. I crouch my way through the dampness. When I finish my visit I go outside to await my ride and look for a coffee shop. The only coffee shop I see is closed and the woman who lives next door to the tunnel entrance, who collects vehicle “parking fees” from non-Bosnia tunnel visitors and sells little trinkets, sees me looking around. “What are you looking for?” she asks me. “A good cup of coffee,” I reply. “Hajde vam” (Come on, you) she says wagging her finger and bidding me inside. “Sjesti!” Sit, she commands and then disappears into the kitchen, leaving two grandchildren staring at me and laughing. I can smell the Turkish coffee even before she delivers it. When my ride appears she makes him sit and drink coffee also. It is very good coffee. My driver says the woman is recently widowed. He suggests there is an opportunity for me here. I refuse politely. I offer the woman money. She refuses politely.
My other must visit place is Mostar and its famous bridge. This is a UNESCO world heritage site and rightly so, and even though the original bridge was bombed to smithereens – as well as over half the town destroyed – what has arisen from the ashes is vibrant and unique. I will not say more, if you are interested google it.
Finally, I spend a day just wandering around Sarajevo seeing what I can see. I find the University anthropology department but no one there speaks English – in contrast to my welcome 50 years ago when I was served coffee, šljivovica (plum brandy), and pastries by a distinctly bilingual host department at 9AM.
I get a haircut, well shave.
I get my shoes shined, well sprayed.
I get lost. My favorite thing.
I watch a couple of chess games played on a big board in a town square, see an angry man physically attack a crazy person while onlookers do nothing but say tsk tsk, go to my now favorite coffee shop, eat more cevapci, lot’s more cevapci, wave goodbye to my favorite cat, and try not to jump out of my skin with excitement that tomorrow I head for Maglaj!
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
04 – The Town of Maglaj
The bus ride from Sarajevo to Maglaj is wonderful. The new road hugs the Bosna River, crossing from side to side over a series of bridges and winding its way through tunnels, small towns, and smaller villages. The hillsides are lush and green. The fertile Bosna River valley floor is cultivated in carefully tended gardens, small orchards, and smaller vineyards. Great care has been and is being given to these plots where rows of green vegetables are emerging, the river itself rushing northward, away from its source and the sea, the water churning and brown, buffeting the river’s banks with the urgency of hundreds of mountain tops filled with winter’s melting snow.
And then there is Maglaj, the old town, its mosque and fort and village square much as I remember them. And the new town, communist realism on the western bank … public housing, a thirty room hotel built in the seventies that I turn out to be only one of two guests at, broad boulevards, “modern” stores from the 1980s, dogs sleeping in packs in parks, men gathered together yelling, gesturing, and smoking, clutches of women, young children, baby carriages, one or two sidewalk cafes, the sounds of church bells, the call of the muezzin from the mosque. There is not much to do in Maglaj. The name translates to fog. Cars beep to pedestrians and wave. The pedestrians wave back. It is a small town. It is spring.
I walk across the bridge into the old town. Men sitting at a small tavern wave me over, ply me with questions in Serbo-Croatian and German, questions I do not understand the meaning of. But I laugh. And they laugh. And I repeat that I do not speak or understand Serbo-Croatian and they laugh and tell me they are no longer speaking Serbo-Croatian, that they are speaking Bosnian. Then they take out their cell phones to show me photographs. And I take out my cell phone and show them photographs. And I finally remember not to finish my cup of Turkish coffee, which they insist must now be called Bosnian coffee, so that they do not refill it. And I resist the plum brandy, and the meats, and the sweets. But when they suggest that they drive me to a good restaurant down the river, the “best” restaurant, at least I think that’s what they are saying, I take the opportunity to go, though not before attempting to pay my bill, which is refused, because one of my companions has already taken care of it.
The restaurant, named Riva, is straight out of a Hollywood movie set; an outdoor terrace right on the river, a covered open air terrace above that, and a dark cavernous indoor dining area, complete with bar and music I now know to call Bosnian. The waiter who speaks a smattering of English recommends I have the specialty of the house, a thin piece of beef wrapped around some cheese and smoked meat served with what are clearly garden fresh broiled potatoes and fantastic grilled mushrooms. I order a beer. Halfway through my drink a huge hornet decides to take a bath inside the glass and once soaked and not a little drunk swims desperately in circles unable to extricate herself from her drink or climb up the long steep smooth glass walls of her liquid prison. So I pour the beer out onto the terrace floor and watch the hornet doing headstands in an apparent effort to dry off or show off. Then somersaults. Then chasing her tail. Followed by more headstands. Next time I’m cutting her off earlier. Somersaults?
I believe somewhere in the Talmud we are told that one who saves a life saves the world and I am inordinately happy when after 15 or so minutes of these gymnastics the hornet flies away and even happier still when the waiter introduces his friend who speaks decent English and offers to be my guide, which I gratefully accept.
His name is Armin, we agree on a price, and we establish that we shall meet at the hotel at 10 A.M. the next day unless his wife is delivering their first born, in which case he will understandably have to go with her to the hospital, which is indeed what happens. I like it, my eager expectation of revisiting Lijesnica a source of real anticipatory excitement, which then reminds me of a story my Uncle Sol told of his time as the commanding general’s driver and aide in World War II. They were travelled up out of Africa through the boot of Italy toward Rome when in one small Italian village they left a few pairs of new shoes for the children in a one room schoolhouse. And when they drove back down through the same town about a week later they found the shoes still sitting brand new and unused on the floor inside the schoolhouse.
Why hadn’t the children worn the new shoes, the general asked. Well, because they were still appreciating the feeling of anticipation of wearing new shoes, the general was told, and once worn the pleasure of the anticipation would be over. It’s how I feel about Lijesnica and the fact I will not see it for another day. That it will still be there tomorrow. That I will get to continue to enjoy my anticipation.
So a few words about Lijesnica in 1964 when I spent three months there and it had a population of about 1500, very few houses with electricity, and none with running water or indoor plumbing. The socio-cultural categorization of the residents at the time was that of rural “peasantry.” It had been so since the middle ages. Their livelihood was subsistence level agriculture … a small garden, a cow, some sheep, a few chickens. No one was an employee or a wage earner. Yet it was clear, even in 1964, even to my relatively untrained eye, that this way of life was nearing an inevitable end. That the extended family (zadruga) lands which passed by equal division to each son, who then divided the land further among their sons, was no longer capable of sustainable subdivision. That the demands and desires for more modern, comfortable, expanded lives, for electricity, television, plumbing, perhaps a small old car, could not be realized by subsistence agricultural peasants. That women and children could no longer be kept down on the farm.
And into that milieu the Tito government and the social planners therein constructed a pulp and paper mill, right across the River Bosna, a source of employment, wages, electricity, and the steady stench of sulfur. And it was there in Lijesnica, in the neighborhood of Sehici, in the house of the universally disliked Party apparatchik who profited from the modest rent I paid, that I lived and which I intended to revisit. Just when, however, is another story. Here’s why.
On the next morning right at our appointed meeting time Armin calls to say his wife is in labor and he must drive her to the hospital in Zenica. Fair enough. I can entertain myself in Maglaj for a day, I’m not in any hurry. I sleep a lot. I do yoga. I meditate. I visit two cafes, literally right next door to one another, two bakeries, literally right next door to one another, two groceries, literally right next door to each other. I don’t get it. And there must be a reason. Perhaps related to inheritance. Call an anthropologist. But alas no anthropologist of even remote competence is to be found. I will say this, however, the bakeries are each fantastic, no really, fantastic, and I quickly determine my favorite, as apparently everyone in Maglaj has a favorite, and both appear to be prospering.
As for Armin, he calls the next morning, his wife has still not delivered, he is back on his way to Zenica to be with her. Yes, wonderful, I say. I too am waiting for a baby. Does he know the sex? Yes, it is a girl, which Armin says is “okay for the first child.” And does she have a name? Yes, the one his wife picked. And why did she alone pick the name, I ask? To be sure it was not the name of one of his exes, he says. We laugh. Ach, men!
I climb to the old castle.
I watch an impressively large group of people gather for a funeral at the mosque in the square where the old weekly market was held.
I am reminded of an event that unfolded here in the Maglaj market on a market day in 1964 amidst cows, gypsies, musicians, Catholic peasants in their familiar costumes, and lamb roasting on a spit at what was the big social event of the week. I noticed a Catholic man from a hill village wearing a very unusual back pack which I asked if I could examine and he took off to show me. What it was was a complete furry skin/hide of a calf which had been separated in one piece from all of the calf’s meat and bones and preserved to a remarkable degree of softness and pliability as a united one-piece entity. The deboned de-fleshed skin of the rear legs had been sown to the skin of the forelegs to create the shoulder straps. The hide of the neck and head had been separated from the skull and was the waterproof top covering for the back pack, complete with a bone button and a button hole to secure it to the bag. The bag itself was a complete entire one-piece sack made of calf hide with beautiful markings. I had never seen anything like it and never have since. I asked if I could buy it. The man asked for a ridiculously low amount, maybe seven dollars. A man from Lijesnica came over to tell the Catholic peasant that he could keep the bag for seven dollars. A crowd gathered. The bag owner said, okay six. The man from Lijesnica said something about how his teeth weren’t worth six dollars. The crowd grew larger, the bargaining fiercer. The young American anthropologist saying “it’s okay, it’s okay” just a voice lost in the babble. The man from Lijesnica proud to be my agent. The anthropologist from America mortified that he was to own the bag for under six dollars. (I think the final price was five.) I took the bag to the village. I wore it. I proudly showed off what I had purchased, the skill involved in its creation, the effort, the folksy artistic mastery. No less than four of the villagers asked me to sell them the bag. They’d give me more than I’d paid for it. And why did they want it I asked. Because they didn’t want me to take it back to America and embarrass them, because people in America would think they were backwards and unsophisticated. Needless to say I took the bag home. I showed it off. I wore it proudly. When my then wife and I had a trial separation in NYC in 1967 where I was teaching at my alma matter I left the bag hanging in a closet. My then wife took a lover. The lover took the bag.
I am drinking more coffees at more kafanas, eating more bakery products, telling more and more people I can’t understand a word they are saying, feeling a bit more a sense of the flow of life here. Also no sense of the flow of life here. There are those who are proud and happy to be Bosnians. And there are those who long to belong to a larger county. “Who cares what we call it,” I understand one man to say, “I’d be happy to call it Serbia if I could have my father back.”
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIES
05 – The Village of Lijesnica
In 1964, when I spent three months in Lijesnica it had a population of about 1500, very few if any houses with electricity, and none with running water or indoor plumbing. The socio-cultural categorization of the residents at the time was that of a rural peasantry. It had been so since the middle ages. The Lijesnican peasants’ livelihood was subsistence level agriculture … a small garden, a cow, some sheep, a few chickens. No one was an employee or a wage earner. There were no tractors in the village. Yet it was clear, even in 1964, that this way of life was nearing an inevitable end. That the extended family (zadruga) lands which passed by equal division to each son, who then divided the land further ad infinitum among their sons, was no longer capable of sustainable subdivision, that the demands and desires for more modern, comfortable, expanded lives, for electricity, television, plumbing, perhaps a small old car, could not be realized by subsistence level agricultural peasants and that “modernity” in some form would inevitably overtake them.
So what did I find upon my return? What I found after fifty-two years of progress was both predictable, unpredictable, and somehow immensely sad, not necessarily for all Lijesnicans, but surely for American romantics. First, the factory had now been there over half a century. It had expanded, shrunk, expanded and shrunk, its high workforce numbering about 5000, its low about 1000. The acres and acres of industrial waste the factory gifted to the land along the river were a stunning testament to the passage of time. Abandoned trucks and box cars littered the view as far as the eye could see. Pyramid high piles of sawdust, scrap bark, and slag were lined up one after another like huge bishops on a chess board. An ever present weeping drooping pillar of smoke competed and merged with the fog hanging in the valley. Junk car lots like pimples that would make New Jersey proud. Many deserted and crumbling old houses. A sprinkling of new houses about as densely (or sparsely) settled as the old. A few small gardens and a few larger obviously consolidated fields. Almost none of the homeowners were Sehicians or their descendants. There were notable exceptions. Most of all I would say things had deteriorated, at least from an American aesthetic and cultural perspective. For what Lijesnica now looked like to me was a rural slum, an Appalachian factory town not nearly as pretty as the little village it had been, with far more trash and the smell of sulfur and defeat, or at least passive acceptance of something less than victory, something other than dreams realized having replaced hope, again with a few notable exceptions. And even though some of the roads had been roughly paved, the majority of lanes remained impassably rutted and muddy and my overall impression was of anomie, of isolation, of pathos. But I wasn’t there long enough to really know. And I’m not a real anthropologist.
So here’s the highlight of my afternoon in Lijesnica where I was guided by the kindness of Erwin who worked at the only hotel in Maglaj, Hotel Galeb (eagle), and his lovely bride to be Irma who accompanied me. A man standing out feeding his lone sheep at the last house in the village – a descendant of Sehicians (given his last name was Sehic) directed me to the biggest farmer/landholder in the village, a man named Mohammed Sehic, who was apparently the last in the line of Sehicians who actually worked the land for survival. Mohammed’s father, who was still alive and lived with Mohammed (see photos) had actually been away in the Yugoslav Army the summer I was in Lijesnica, but one of the few photographs I still had showed his father, Mohammed’s paternal grandfather, sitting in a circle of workmen constructing a house in Lijesnica, all a cause of great excitement. (Well, okay, modest excitement, as these were shy and not very excitable folk.) The father and Mohammed and I talked about the old days, about how hard they had been, but how rewarding was the sense of community, of belonging, of hope that infused the population experiencing the promise of the new Yugoslavia. Not that life was bad for Mohammed. He had acquired a substantial portion of the zadrugal lands over time and had become a dairy farmer, selling milk from his herd of twenty-seven gorgeous, fat, well fed, and very clean bovines. Really, these cows had been in their stanchions all day … and Mohammed did not know an important guest from America such as I would be visiting … and I’ve visited 100s upon 100s of dairy farms (another story for another time) … and this was the cleanest occupied barn and cleanest stanchioned herd I have ever seen.
Besides which, Mohammed really liked it when I told him my profession because he needed a good lawyer and we had a good laugh. But really, Mohammed wanted to know, really, what brought me to Lijesnica, what was my last name, what was my religion or ethnicity?
And I am reminded of one of the many times I faced this notable what religion are you question, in this particular instance in the middle of a long line on my first day in the army approaching a sergeant seated at a table filling out cards with the information necessary to issue each man his dog tags. When I reach the table the sergeant found my name and military identification number on my card and asked my religion. I’m not sure why but I just wasn’t able to answer. I don’t think it was because I was afraid of anti-Semitism, or ashamed of being Jewish, quite the opposite, I was always rather proud of being Jewish. It was more a sophomoric sense that I didn’t think religion was anyone’s business, or of any great significance, I mean this is the United States Army, is it not, and we were all equals right, brothers in arms. I mean what did it matter? It seemed almost unpatriotic to make such separatist declarations.
“What’s your religion?” the sergeant asked me again in a Southern drawl.
Still I continued to stand there quite mute and struck dumb.
“What’s wrong with you,” he growled, “what’s your religion?”
But I just stared at him, unable to answer, unable to form the words, the sergeant growing more and more exasperated, and clearly thinking I’m a moron or something, and rightly so.
“I said, ‘what is your religion?!'” He said this very slowly, very slowly, through gnashed teeth.
And I just stared at him, unaccountably frozen, holding up the line, delaying victory over the forces of evil.
“Who are your people, boy,” he finally yells exasperated and menacing.
Oh. I was startled. My “people”? Not my religion? My people? “Why Hebrews sir,” I say.
“Hebrew,” he repeats and writes it down.
“Next,” he called.
Two days later, when I was issued my dog tags, they said just that, “Hebrew.” I still have them. I don’t think there are or were many other Hebrews in the U.S. Army, but they are surely my “people” as I understand it. And when it comes time to identify my mortal remains left scarred and unrecognizable on some desolate field of battle I will be far more comfortable being declared a Hebrew than I would being called Jewish anyway. I’d like to be buried with them for some later day archaeologist. But back to Lijesnica.
“Jewish,” I tell Mohammed. It’s so much easier.
Really? Jewish? But what really are you doing here, he asks. And again with the help of Ervin, my translator and earnest guide, I explain why I was here fifty years ago and why I wanted to come back.
I cannot say any of this makes much sense to Mohammed, but his father is smiling ear to ear, motioning for me to sit next to him on the couch, patting my knee in what I’ve come to recognize as deeply felt warmth and affectionate. There really isn’t much more to say. The visit to Lijesnica all feels so immensely anti-climactic. Not disappointing, really, real is real, and many loves from 50 years ago don’t look all that good today, nor do I. But it is so sweet to remember. And then Lijesnica is in my life’s rearview mirror … forever.
Alright, I’ve had my climactic moment, what next? I’ve got over two weeks before my scheduled return flight from Prague and the only thing on my agenda is to meet Djorgje in Croatia. So I take a bus to Doboj, BiH, thinking it might be worth a day or two and am promptly dissuaded of that brilliant notion by a little walk around town. Next? Did someone say “Zagreb.” Maybe it was Djordje, the Buddhist imp and guide. Yeah, it was Djordje. Yeah, Zagreb, bus in four hours. Next.
The black and white picture above was taken in 1964 in the Moslem Bosnian village of Lijesnica. The men are all part of a Catholic village work crew that was in Lijesnica on this day when they spilled the blood of the goat they slaughtered on the roof rafters of the house they were building before joining the peak and celebrating with a toast and the young anthropologist. Zhivali!!
CROATIA
TRAVEL DIARIES