It took me a long time to understand that it is perhaps because of war and my childhood displacement that I have developed a sentimental fixation on things that exist in a particular place, the quiddity of a thing fixed in an unfixable world. Even as I say it, I catch myself wanting to explain to myself what it is I am doing, and why, as though every single thing did not intersect with space, as though it were not the most ordinary thing in existence. But I think what I’m doing when I’m doing this is coming into the presence of the object with a sense of estrangement, so as to see it anew. And so I find myself looking for things that survive, that leave a scar in the landscape, that silently observe the city’s transformations, erasures, deaths.
Before we’d managed to get out of Bosnia, I thought the war had come to make me an exile, its sole purpose to send me into the world to fulfil my destiny on some distant shore. You do what you can, even megalomaniacally at age twelve, to make your position bearable in what is not meant to be borne by a single person, what cannot but must be borne, so millions do it singly and perhaps that way together shoulder the burden. Except that I don’t really believe that. What you suffer is always yours alone, however much we grow our pains of love when loved ones suffer; no, what we suffer on their behalf is added to the total and never shared. Even what your mother suffers is hers alone, and yours only what you give yourself on her account.
I find this minimal separation be-tween oneself and the world more and more necessary, especially now with the technological imperative to dissolve the borders of creature and objects and imbue everything with connection, which is one way to erase individual distinction and autonomy. More and more, I find in this separation the very quiddity of all things.
And I think about that stricken little old tree that persists alone there on the side of the Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, a welter of uneven cobblestones pressing around its trunk. There is an ineffable aura to the specificity—the thisness, as I think of it—of that particular tree in that particular place. Thorvaldsen himself had the cunning and foresight to return from his long industrious exile in Rome before he died, so as to shore up his legacy in the homeland. In Italy he had too many rivals to wrestle with for attention from posterity. In Denmark, he was unprecedented—they built him a museum, the first anywhere devoted to a single artist.
And I think of Teresa Saporiti, a soprano born in 1763, who worked with Mozart in the 1780s and survived into the photographic age, dying in 1869.
And I think of that lizard I saw crawl out into sunlight from a crack in the side of the wellhead in Campo Santa Margherita in Venice, and how I marveled at the magnificence of its address.
And I think of that tiny strawberry shrub sprouting among the stones of Via Giulia in Rome.
And I think of the pair of squabbling kittens that lived in a crack in a doorway of the Badi Palace in Marrakesh, below the huge languid storks nesting high above on top of the palace walls.
And I think of Dr. Ruzmir’s wall, the mythic seven-foot wall of my childhood, edging one side of the plum orchard where I spent my early years in various games and stratagems, whiling away the hours which then seemed endless and in infinite supply, and of how that wall still stands in a place that no longer exists.
Back in 1992, as soon as we’d fled to the next town to stay with family, I’d begun holding on to things—empty cigarette packs, of all things, strange to me now, as I’ve always hated smoke—which I now think of as my first small revolt against war and impermanence, against the new transience of things. I’d discovered that things disappear, that time is not in endless supply. After all, my country had already disappeared. My mother did too, having found herself behind enemy lines, and for eight months we did not know where she was nor she where we were.
I remember one day that summer, waiting for the bomb after the air siren had sounded, the bomb being the dreaded krmaca, as we knew it—The Sow—a huge bomb that planes would drop, and this thing would tear through all the floors of a house, as I’d gathered, and leave a crater where one had seen a house the day before, and I bargained with god to save me, and if he had to take me then at least to keep my mother safe. Even I could disappear, I then knew. There were many such lessons in the transience of things.
I think about that war more than usual lately, and about my lingering on single objects more or less fixed in space, which I’ve come to ascribe to the biographical datum of displacement, of loss of homeland, hometown, home. And because I was a child in that other war, I cannot stop thinking about the children of this one, the unspeakable fact of Gaza, its erasure, of disappeared children, and mothers, the wiping out of a world of exiles, exiles in their homes and tents who are wiped out or driven into exile by other sons of exile.
As for my town, the world I left behind, when I visit almost everything is perfectly there, even Ruzmir’s wall, but not Ruzmir, and not the thousands of others who, like me, find themselves elsewhere. We are separated from ourselves, in a way, and yes, the mark is there but not the ghost, so that now its full quiddity, for me, has disappeared into memory, and all I can do to retrieve it is to ruminate on it, and then trap it in the amber of words.
Elvis Bego is a writer in Copenhagen, where he is at work on a novel.