Distant Memories

When I arrive in a city for the first time, my conclusions typically arrive on the next plane.

Belgrade 2017

When I arrive in a city for the first time, my conclusions typically arrive on the next plane. In the first hours I listen closely to the tones of a new language and observe the tempo of new streets—always failing to resist my impulse to describe and interpret what I see, despite knowing that I’m missing context and absolutely sure to be wrong. Of course in just a short time I disagree with those early perceptions, as I begin to discern how my understanding of the new city contains obvious and predictable errors. What first looked rather simple is, in fact, much more complex. And this cycle of disagreeing with the innocent, foolhardy impressions of my earlier selves persists, week two disagreeing with week one, week three disagreeing with week two, though it doesn’t even end if those weeks become years—as each new impression continues to add nuance and complexity and contradiction to what I previously assumed was true.

In Belgrade, however, there aren’t any conclusions for me to embrace, nor do I have any insights about the city’s rhythm, as the downtown streets blur together in my mind, the boulevards and crowded sidewalks and rows of restaurants appearing as mere sketches. It is a capital city, nudged against the Danube, a central spot for a few thousand years, but with a character that’s a bit opaque to the outsider. On my first visit I spent one afternoon searching for a museum that had, I eventually learned, closed long ago. During that trip Belgrade seemed just beyond my comprehension, and even humdrum conversations felt stilted, somehow impenetrable, while my second visit to the city came with a car crash that couldn’t be described as an accident in any language and, later, included a restaurant fire and broken apartment key. For reasons that are properly blamed on the writer of this sentence, the city has refused to be anything but elusive, almost stubborn in its ambiguousness, and that hasn’t changed despite my efforts to understand.

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All of these memories came back to me with Téa Obreht’s 2011 novel The Tiger’s Wife—a peculiar, but intriguing, labyrinth for readers. Obreht puts us in the Balkans and pretty close to what seems like Belgrade just after a war, but we’re not in a specific country; she puts us in the 21st Century, but not at a specific moment. We’re roughly sure that the geography is east of the Adriatic and just west of Romania; recent Balkan history seems pertinent, too, although the amount of mythology and superstition and pure strangeness in her novel means that we’re not too comfortable in believing the Balkan history that we already know—which seems, in the end, just about right.

Our narrator for this puzzle is a young doctor, Natalia, who pieces together memories from her past while we piece together this intertwined novel. Stories from Natalia’s grandfather come juxtaposed with contemporary events. Readers are left to sort all of these haphazard memories—the circuitous novel has a way of jumping in time, primed to retell the grandfather’s story from two generations ago right before telling you about Natalia’s present moment, in what comes across as both convoluted but necessary—because all of these stories upon stories eventually start to form a clearer picture of this fictional country’s history, and all the layered memories of past wrongs is what defines the present struggle. Both Natalia and her grandfather are physicians, a profession that manages to focus on lifesaving while having an intimacy with death that only a soldier can surpass. In this shadowy, perilous world Natalia crosses a border to help orphans, the children of the most recent war; we’re also provided with her grandfather’s childhood memories, as he was a child during an earlier war; while the most recent memories come from Natalia’s own childhood, as she, too, was a child during a war.

The war had altered everything. Once separated, the pieces that made up our old country no longer carried the same characteristics that had formerly represented their respective parts of the whole. Previously shared things—landmarks, writers, scientists, histories—had to be doled out according to their new owners. That Noble Prize-winner was no longer ours, but theirs; we named our airport after our crazy inventor, who was no longer a communal figure. And all the while we told ourselves that everything would eventually return to normal.

Even for a novel set in a country that’s unnamed, or perhaps unmentionable, the Belgrade-born Obreht gives careful readers sufficient clues to something more tangible, such as how Belgrade is a city that named its airport after Nikola Tesla. Although it would be a mistake to assume that The Tiger’s Wife simply hides its real setting—the novel is more subtle and complex and ambitious than a mere retelling of the past in one country. What we have, instead, is a rather loose illusion, one that points the reader toward the reality of a particular city in the recent past, while still remaining vague enough to represent something a little larger and more general, so that we’re not constrained by the history of a specific war and a specific country—we are, in other words, inside the more expansive world of a novel.

Yet that doesn’t negate the importance of borders in this fictional world, especially when Natalia takes that perilous trip across a frontier in the beginning, her role as a physician superseding her role as a citizen from one faction. But when the borderlines shift then accent and inflection determine the sides in an internecine war—which means that a white lab coat isn’t sufficient to dismiss the long memories of ancient schisms. Even the shortest of sentences leads to conclusions and unleash haunting pauses. “I’d said enough for him to realize that I wasn’t from around there.” Because land and borders are such vital parts of this story, it is still difficult to not wonder more about Belgrade, about how the memories of recent wars have influenced the novel, even though Obreht keeps us in a mythical world, and our post-war narrator never mentions the city.

At least English speakers do have Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as a definitive book for the region, one that, nearly ninety years later, points toward a better understanding of the fissures still present in language and culture and religion. Part travelog, part history, part social study, and part personal narrative, Rebecca West is the best entry into the Balkans for English speakers, and for understanding how memories of distant events remain so fresh. Though her experience of Belgrade was ‘flavourless’ when compared to the excitement and lusciousness of more rural areas nearby, her words are a useful way to nudge yourself into the subject, to understand the history behind a street, or to begin to discern the context underneath an ancient dispute—with the depressing fact that words written so long ago are still relevant today.

So far the history of Belgrade, like many other passages in the life of Europe, makes one wonder what the human race has lost by its habit of bleeding itself like a mad medieval surgeon.

West writes in 1941, in the midst of war, with nearly a thousand years of history behind her words; Obreht writes The Tiger’s Wife in 2011, in the aftermath of a more recent war. I can’t help but notice the neat symmetry in how West disguised most of the real names in her book, using pseudonyms and composites to conceal real people, while Obreht disguised the names of real places in her novel.

For both West and Obreht, we have shifting borders and obscure allegiances, we have long memories and an inability to forget, which are ingredients for the bloodiest and most interminable of conflicts, the conflicts that persist through generations, the conflicts where the smaller the difference implies the bigger the struggle, in what every outsider will see as the “narcissism of minor differences,” that worst form of conflict, the reason why a family dispute is the most vicious, which, Obreht knows, is even true in fictional countries.

When your fight has purpose—to free you from something, to interfere on the behalf of an innocent—it has a hope of finality. When the fight is about unraveling—when it is about your name, the places to which your blood is anchored, the attachment of your name to some landmark or event—there is nothing but hate, and the long, slow progression of people who feed on it and are fed it, meticulously, by the ones who come before them. Then the fight is endless, and comes in waves and waves, but always retains its capacity to surprise those who hope against it.

But the moments of conflict aren’t the focus of The Tiger’s Wife. We’re much more focused on how the conflict persists long after the bullets stop. In how the conflict from one generation bleeds into the next generation and ends up defining a culture and people and even a city. In how memories persist long after a war and reverberate through the years. In how distant, cataclysmic events alters the character and our understanding of a place. Reaching the end of a war is simply the beginning of figuring out what the war means.

We were seventeen, furious at everything because we didn’t know what else to do with the fact that the war was over. Years of fighting, and, before that, a lifetime on the cusp of it. Conflict we didn’t necessarily understand—conflict we had raged over, regurgitated opinions on, seized as the reason for why we couldn’t go anywhere, do anything, be anyone—had been at the center of everything. It had forced us to make choices based on circumstances that were now no longer a part of our daily lives, and we kept it close, a heavy birthright for which we were only too eager to pay.

To grow up in the aftermath of war is to grow up with a greater than usual silence. What was spoken during the war, what was yelled from the rooftops, is what’s unspoken in your childhood. It explains why war is occasionally described as a dispute about memory—and you can easily slot, however crudely, that definition into nearly all wars. Who originally owned the land? Who arrived first? Who gets to tell the story? Debates about the significance and truth of the past frequently trigger conflicts today. Those people in your country are our people; that border is in the wrong spot; your people don’t belong over here. Perhaps you can even take the corollary and state that every lasting peace is really just a successful effort to forget.