#midnight in chernobyl is really good but man is it heavy!

[eurosleaz]

finished one book and then quickly started another (the damnation game by clive barker)

[baybelwax-blog]

My mom still asks my dad to sing those songs, sometimes

My mom and I had dinner together several nights ago. I don’t see her much these days, despite us sharing a single-bathroom, two-bedroom house. She’s at work, or exhausted from work, a lot.

We sat down, and she asked me about school, about the thickly-accented Scottish history teacher I’ve been imitating all week, about Rhys, about the worrisome knocking noise my new-used car’s making, about this writing blog, about when I would be contacted by the University of California in regards to my recently-submitted application. She told me she didn’t like my tattoos. She ordered an oaky red wine from the two-page drink menu –

one of those restaurants in which impeccably-groomed, vampire-like waiters drop hot towels from silver tongs into your hands after you’ve finished your dinner, the entire menu contains dairy, a wide (and impressively eclectic) selection of French and Californian wines is offered, the selection of wines is wider than the selection of entrees, organic mints are delicately tucked into the bill.

To keep our conversation afloat, I asked my mom what she gathered of Trump’s recent immigration ban. She’s the foreign section editor at the Los Angeles Times; she’d lived, breathed, digested international airport protests and federal judges’ exhaustive assessments of the measure’s constitutionality the past couple of days.

My mom relishes in analyzing the inner politics and literary output of Times’ newsrooms, so work’s always a good thing to ask about.

She sipped her wine, and merely, briefly commented something about living in a country headed by a president with a diagnosable mental illness.

I waited for her to say something more.

She said the whole thing reminded her of my dad’s attempts to emigrate to Egypt from Sudan, after their engagement. My parents have always carried on an international sort of love – a strong marriage, despite the physical distance frequently inserted between them.

“That was a long time ago,” she said, when my dad looked strikingly like the young Mick Jagger, a handsome and blushing thing, wore his hair in a voluminous brunette bowl cut.

She hadn’t told me this story before.

My mom had seeped into her thirties, she estimated, and was living in Cairo, in an apartment whose balcony hung lavishly over the Nile River. A young and heavenly foreign correspondent, sharp-witted, with an ability to charm information from sealed bureaucratic lips, and a potent writer. She permed her hair faithfully every three months, and most frequently wore garments stitched with periwinkle threads and buttons. She crowded her bookshelves with yellowed editions of Keats and Hardy. Always kept a Siamese cat and a Persian rug. She’d met the pope, and had travelled to the majority of the continents.

In her early years of foreign correspondence work, she was assigned to write about, was engrossed in, and – despite professional journalist protocol – was emotionally-stirred by the blood and rubble of the Bosnian civil war.

My family visited Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the early-2000s. I was a little girl. That’s one of my earliest memories. I remember the trek to the Janković family graveyard, which perched between the damp, scraggly, but impressive brown hills that loomed behind the house my grandfather built, where my dad grew up. I slept in the bed that’d he’d slept in when he was my age. I most vividly recall the tattered Chernobyl-esque shopping malls and government buildings, which had been crippled in the war, that stood – hunched – as grim reminders of a city whose street gutters once, not too long ago, gurgled blood. My aunt and uncle, and my dad especially, tirelessly distracted my eyes from the ruins filling the car’s windows as we drove through the city. I can understand now that what they felt was shame.

My dad is Serbian, raised in present-day Bosnia-Herzegovina. A product of the formerly great Yugoslavia. If you ask his nationality, he’ll respond defiantly “Yugoslav” – only reluctantly, will he differentiate between the present-day states, and call himself a Serb, or sometimes a Bosnian-Serb.

I’ve always admired that small detail, that firmness, about him. I wonder what it’s like to have that strong, that ingrained, of a nationalistic sense.

My mom offered these contextual details, for the purpose of her story:

conflict touched my dad when it arrived in Sarajevo, in 1992. The city was a frictional mélange of Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats. Bosnia had recently declared independence, following Croatia and Slovenia, both of which had severed their allegiances with the Yugoslavian federation a year earlier.

The Bosnian-Serbs, supported by the Yugoslav’s People’s Army, injected defenses throughout Bosnia, fiercely seeking to secure Serbian territory.

The American newspapers, mom said, called it an “ethnic cleansing” – a “genocide” effectuated by Bosnian-Serbs – of the Muslim Bosniak and Catholic Croat peoples.

My dad fled his Bosnian homeland as conflict broke like an egg yolk, its sticky yellow permeating everything, suffocating, stinking. He evaded the draft, evaded the holy war that asked he point machine guns in the faces of his coworkers, neighbors, friends.

He found work on an oil rig ship, that was to port in Libya. When Libya was no longer safe for a Christian Serb, he uprooted again, and built a sort of life in Sudan.

It was there, in Sudan, that my parents met at a mutual friend’s St. Patrick’s day party. My dad arrived late – tardiness remains a habit he hasn’t managed to kick – as my mom was shouldering her purse, plotting her polite and apologetic exit.

“The Serb’s here!” someone called. Kim the writer was intrigued, having recently returned from reporting in Bosnia.

She said, Kim, the utterly biological and passionate human, too, was intrigued, by the broad-shouldered man who stood, commandingly, strikingly, in a brown leather jacket, which he wore with a simultaneous sharpness and ease.

They talked animatedly in a corner of the garden patio all evening, which glowed beneath stringy lights tangled in the palm fronds overhead. Mostly, they spoke about my dad’s roots in the bleeding country. About the politics, the divided peoples, the unique heartbreak of civil war.

“We made out all night and stuff, too,” she added insouciantly, poking her tongue at the crimson wine that stained the corners of her lips.

That night was shadowed by checkered-tablecloth dinners, by pensive and silent midnight strolls beneath date trees and crescent moons. Eventually, was shadowed by love. Then, by one failed marriage proposal. Then, by one successful marriage proposal, which occurred in an aluminum rowboat bumping against the Nile’s evening current. In the boat, my dad sang sweeping ballads about despairing Serbian women warning their husbands fighting away in Greece not to fall in love with the lovely Grecian women – to come home to the gorgeously Slavic, hardened wives that loved them.

My mom still asks my dad to sing those songs, sometimes.

My dad, still living in Sudan after their engagement, promised to join the young reporter he adored so feverishly, freshly, youthfully in Egypt. They envisioned a small, pretty life together, touched by the Nile’s fertile banks. He began the burdensome application work for a visa. Several weeks later, it was rejected.

He applied again, to be put before another wall. And several more times, over a period of months. All were rejected. On several occasions he was permitted to board his scheduled flight to Cairo – only to be held in Egyptian customs upon arrival – and to ultimately, despairingly, in a fit of yelling, board a flight back to Sudan. My mom flew to Sudan as often as was feasible to see him. My dad lived in an oil refinery dormitory, which was ostentatiously decorated with a twin-size bed and small window that cast a square of moonlight on the floor.

During this time, throughout the middle east and Europe, the dividing lines between Muslims and Orthodox-Christian Serbs were laced with barbwire – oozed blood, tumult, and fresh memories. As soon as my dad, in his visa applications, was discovered to be a Christian Serb, he was immediately, uncompromisingly barred from entering predominantly Muslim Egypt.

For my parents, one month apart became three, became six, became eight.

My mom navigated Egyptian political circles, being a newspaperwoman who reported predominantly on middle eastern politics. She’d frequented dinner parties given on occasion in the gold-trimmed dining room of Sudan’s Egypt-stationed ambassador. She’d spoken with him at length about Sudanese-Egyptian trade negotiations – and several times about the young man who permeated all of her thoughts, back in Sudan, who slept in an aluminum frame single bed, and subsisted off of farmers’ market date fruits and polaroid photographs.

The ambassador had sewn a sort of paternal, sympathetic affection for my mom over the course of their professional relationship. Admired her dignity, objectivity, and prose. Admired her ability to be on her own. I think he really wanted to help her.

Several more months passed. It was getting harder to see over the wall that had been erected between them.

My mother isn’t religious, although she considers herself a spiritual person; and she considers herself to have been in a state of desperation, at that point. It was several days before Christmas, not that Christmas is some large, commercial affair in Cairo – but which accentuated her solitude, thickened the barbwire between her and her fiancé, made the heaviness of her heart a meatier burden to lug around –

on this evening twenty-something years ago, the sun was unthreading in long, yellow strings to the Nile’s banks.

(In the small minutes between Egyptian day and night, when the line between the two is erased – when the sky spills into a citrusy pink cocktail that you’d be set back $16 for at a chic Manhattan rooftop bar –  even I, who have been lucky enough to have watched in transfixion several of these sunsets, might be led to believe that something like God is pouring everybody’s drinks.)

To no one in particular, leaning against the white iron balcony fencing –

my mom said, “please.”

Deciding, then, to speak directly to God:

“bring llija to Egypt.”

Fluttering palm fronds, and the white noise of full-throttle traffic jams and street vendors. There wasn’t much else, much less anything remarkable. Not that she’d anticipated there would be. She’d waited a long time for God to come into her life, and here she still was, waiting.

Ilija is derived from the Hebrew “Elijah.” Saint Ilija, in the Macedonian Orthodox church,  is revered as a ninth-century prophet who supposedly arrived at the gates of Heaven in a chariot of fire.

In the entryway to my childhood home, my parents hung an oil painting of St. Ilija, awaiting admission.

Ilija is also my dad’s name. It was also he who jingled the apartment doorbell perhaps ten minutes thereafter, wearing the handsome leather jacket my mom had met him in, skin smelling of sandalwood aftershave and cool night air, carrying a dozen fiery red roses in the nook of his elbow.

The ambassador, whose dining room was trimmed neatly with gold, had arranged that a visa be specially granted for the young man sleeping fitfully, dreamlessly, far away in an oil refinery dormitory.

My mom still isn’t religious, but claims that in a world colored by things like civil wars and lovers’ separation, miracles happen every now and then.

My mom ended her story abruptly. She does that, a lot. I think it’s because her sensibilities as a writer conduct the way she navigates life, in general:

“let things speak for themselves,” she said to me once, for example, editing one of my school essays, “overstatement only takes away from the effect.”

I said, “you never told me that story,”

She just shrugged, and flagged down the waitress to order another glass of wine.

My dad still finds all sorts of occasions to bring my mom flowers.