October 1 (Day Nineteen)
This morning while Lindy goes off with Veronica for tea, I sit in the park down the street from the hotel with the goal of finishing Guarding Hanna so that Miha and I can talk about it in the evening. The day is a bit chilly, as befitting autumn, leaves yellowed, but the sun itself is hot. I lie back on the bench after finishing the next-to-last chapter. I feel as though I am outside of time, merely alive. There is no one I will ever recognize here, mostly old people out for Sunday walks, men in wheelchairs talking Slovenian to each other. My appurtenances are gone. There is no English, no football game on T.V. here, no plan for the day. The world has a nostalgic, dreamlike feeling.
The Italian-Slovenian regional connection continues to reveal itself. When Lindy gets back, she reports that Veronica actually grew up in Trieste, while her family is Slovenian on one side, half-Slovenian, half-Croatian on the other. She is going back to Trieste next week to join with some local poets there in a reading. During their meeting, she and Veronica explored the possibilities of translating a number of Slovenian female novelists into English, so Lindy returns, quite stoked, notepaper filled with lists of potential writers, publishers, translators, and grants.
What we thought we could do today is walk toward Tivoli Park, eating lunch on the way. I have mapped out a route that takes us by the only moderately interesting restaurant I can find in the Lonely Planet dining section that is open on Sunday for lunch. If it were any other day, it would be maybe our fourth or fifth choice. The description reads, “Pod Roznikom, Cesta na Roznik 18…known locally as ‘Cad.’ It serves southern Slav-style grills like pljeskavica (spicy meat patties) with ajvar (roasted red peppers, tomatoes and eggplant cooked into a purée) and starters such as prebranac (onions and beans cooked in an earthenware pot).” That last item was what hooked me. Also, not far beyond Pod Roznikom is the zoo, so that seems a fruitful trajectory.
My route involves a number of street changes out of Preseren trig. in a direction in which we haven’t gone yet on our own, roughly northwest, through the museum and finance district, perhaps replicating our path to the Writers’ Guild with Miha. These are notable things that we pass on the way:
Crews are setting up in Argentinski Park and a crowd gathering for what looks like a concert.
A graffito in English on a wall on Wolfova is worth scribbling down: “Fuck You I Am Free.”
On Ejavceva a group of people have gathered, almost completely blocking the street with policija and camera crews. Once we make our way through the crowd to the front, we see that they are filming either a commercial or a scene from a movie in a small plaza between institutional buildings. What holds our attention is that the set-up casts a sort of optical illusion. The collection of actors and actresses posed in frozen stances prior to each shoot turns out to be mostly cardboard cutouts with life-size photographs pasted on them so that, at a distance, they look like regular people. Every five minutes or so, the director, who is continually agitated in a totally stereotyped fashion (and for real), reaches a peak of yelling; there is a moment of repose; and then four young people run through the mannequins and people pretending to be mannequins. A lot of hoopla over nothing, it is still fascinating to watch. These dashes last only a few seconds, after which the director screams, “Cut!” Only then does it become clear which of the statues are alive. After they gradually go into their poses again, and the whole sequence is repeated.
A man carrying a baby in front of him from a sling over his shoulder turns out, surprisingly, to be a mannequin, but the teenager next to him whom I was sure was cardboard moves and walks away.
We stand there through three of these shoots because it is compelling to see some of these statues suddenly stir while others, by not moving, become perceptibly cardboard props. Meanwhile, as people turn into mannequins, after a while I forget which are which, whether a particular figure is alive or not, and have to wait again for the shoot. The artistry of the disguises and acting is earmarked by the fact that I am wrong more than I am right.
The whole shebang is a bizarre unintended performance piece on the street; that is, a scripted performance piece that is also a natural piece of performance art once you factor in the larger context of pedestrians, onlookers, crew getting bottled water and chomping from their buffet table, overwrought director, and repetitions and variations. I recall, from my old college cognitive-psychology textbook (circa 1964), how the mind imposes what it thinks it sees onto pure perceptual streams. Only when something contradicts the imagined form does the gestalt change, and then it changes so instantaneously that it is near impossible to track the transition. Much as the vase on the textbook page turns into silhouettes of two women facing each other without anything in between, and the face of a crone with a wart on her nose becomes a full-figured stylish woman demurely fashioning a hat, so these mannequins become people and people flatten into cardboard mounts.
We continue along Ejavceja cesta to Cesta 27 April, then after a long exhausting walk, crossing a highway, reach Cezna na Roznik. It is not at all as I pictured it on the map; it never is. There it looked like city streets gradually turning into park, but in reality the countryside begins early on, and the map’s scale changes without warning so that we are making radically less headway against cartography than we were at first. If we had known it was this far, we would not have walked. Either we would have tried to figure out the buses or chosen a different itinerary and destination altogether, but now we are very hungry and way too far along to bail on this route.
When we finally get there, Cezna na Roznik turns out to be a loop, something that wasn’t clear from the way the words were labeled on the map but is obvious once we see it. Given that the loop looks to be half a mile or so all told, we do not want to enter the wrong side of it and have to make the entire length. A street sign that we notice then seems to contradict the map in that it shows Pod Roznikom straight ahead rather than down Roznik. We stand on the street deliberating. It is pretty deserted out here, so there are no pedestrians to ask. However, we see an embassy down the street with a policeman in front, so we walk there. He apparently does not speak English, but hears the name of the restaurant and points ahead out into a field in the center of the loop. Now we understand the sign. Pod Roznikom is on the street’s further intersection with the loop, about four blocks worth of walking along the field. It takes maybe two blocks to get to the intersection, and then we begin the last leg under total exhaustion.
Cad is also different from anything we pictured. he setting of the restaurant is not urban at all but like a country club with the field playing the role that a golf course might. The site is surrounded by gigantic parking lots with guards directing streams of vehicles in and out. Absolutely no one other than us is arriving on foot.
The establishment itself comprises several Tyrolian buildings such that it is unclear where to go, as there are people milling around everywhere. In fact, it is pure chaos. In the center is a courtyard area. Tables are packed together on a patio, and they are all full. Two individual restaurants are actually separated by the plaza, but one of those is so full that lines of people waiting to get in pack the entranceway, many of them whole families with four and five young children. No point in going there. The quieter restaurant has some empty tables, but no one is seating people and no one is waiting to get in. After we stand there for a while, calculating it as the better possibility, we come to the conclusion that this half is a private and exclusive club and there is no way to avoid the mob scene.
If we hadn’t walked so far and weren’t in a rural area, we would have chosen another restaurant at once, but it would take over an hour to hike back into the city proper from here, and we are famished. Next we try to make contact with a maitre d' who is seating people outside. He explains in English that the wait for tables on the patio is over an hour and we are better off trying inside. Given the hordes there, that seems unpromising, but closer examination shows that what we thought were families waiting on tables inside were actually lined up for the patio. Once we fight through their crowd, we grok that there is no line inside, but there are also no tables available. We each do a thorough search. It is a giant restaurant in itself, with two separate rooms, one of them winding far back, the other relatively small with nine tables full of people, none of them with less than six diners and several with ten or more, lots and lots of children of all ages. There are even a few small tables in an isthmus between the two restaurants, but those are full too: each with a couple. Even as we are pondering what our next move is, the woman at one of them says in English that they are leaving and will give us their table.
We try to find a strategic place at which to wait, but the landscape is perilous. Strings of waiters are barreling in and out of the kitchen which itself is bursting with steam. Carrying huge trays of platters, they are reckless in their trajectories and haste. Their body language seems to say, “I don’t care if this whole tray goes flying and the food ends up crashing to the ground; there are fucking far too many people here and I need to plow through this and get a breather. If losing a tray will get me a break, then dare me to drop one by getting in my way.”
It is hard not to dare them inadvertently, and we get yelled at in Slavic more than once. The couple we are waiting on can’t get the attention of anyone to receive their check, let alone start the process of paying it, so they light up cigarettes and lapse into intense conversation such that it seems they have lost interest in leaving or us. They even pull back mostly finished desserts from the center of the table when they were stacked one atop the other and begin poking at the crumbs with forks.
It is clearly beyond our authority, or language skills, to get someone to bring them a check, and we are actually not sure what to do next when Lindy, peeking around the corner into the room, sees that there is actually one small, previously unnoticed table in the corner and a couple has just gotten up from it. Even as we spot it, a previously invisible woman in some official role points to it for us. A half hour after arriving at Pod Roznikom, we are finally seated.
We experience ever dwindling relief for another twenty minutes, for it is as though we are among mannequins from the shoot. No one clears the table. We have no menu. We see only one waiter serving this room, and he is a madman, carrying towering trays, shouting as he moves, practically throwing food in front of people so that it leaves the plates, then charging back into the kitchen. If he’s it, we’re talking about one waiter for more than fifty people.
I finally can’t stay passive. When he next enters the room, I stand up quickly and ask rhetorically, “Is there a waiter for this table?” I await the explosion.
“Yes, I am your waiter. You see that. You also can see I am busy.” Thus chastened we sit another ten minutes. Suddenly he reappears, clears and sets the table so fast that it seems dirty glasses and napkins are turning into clean ones. That is, he does not clear it and then set it. He does them both together. Then he is gone. A few minutes later two menus land on the table, tossed from some distance, how I don’t know because, by the time I look, he’s got both hands on his overstacked tray.
Wonderfully the menu lines up with the guidebook and has English translations there. We find not only prebaranac but ajvar without meat patties. We realize then that we better get our entire order together and be ready to speak it quickly because we are going to have a small window and he is not going to tolerate dawdling. As these are tapas kinds of dishes, we add spinach pies, vegetable kabobs, and two beers to the above and, when he appears before us for our order, we rattle it off in a mixture of English and attempted rendering of Slovenian names. All he says back is the correct pronunciation of the roasted peppers and beans and onions, actually rather beautiful in their fluid state compared to our consonant-laden phonetic attempts.
The fifteen minutes before the food seem to fly by because at least we are going downhill now. Lindy plays with a baby at the next table, and I catch up on my journal.
It all comes crashing down on the center of the table, along with two of the largest hard rolls I have ever seen, shaped like UFOs. I am sure I have eaten better meals and healthier food than at Cad that day, but our 15:20 lunch seemed like the best food in the universe, particularly the earthenware pot of gruel and the UFO rolls.
It is late enough in the day, close enough to the zoo’s closing time, that we question whether we should go there at all but, after finding out from a biker on the street that it is just 400 meters ahead (and also that there are buses from the zoo back to the city center), we continue on ahead. Either I don’t have a feel for meters yet or he was being optimistic because it took winding around several more bends, maybe another kilometer, before we picked up the crowd streaming from the zoo parking lot.
Too bad, we learn as we pay for entrance, the buses don’t run on Sunday.
The Ljubljana Zoo is not one of the high points of the city. All zoos are sad, and this one is particularly so: the tiger and elephant both pacing insanely in their enclosures, the humans acting like animals (that is, a zoo of mostly primates, some in cages, some walking with their young, apparently intelligent, but how to explain the intelligence expressed by the guy who keeps holding his dog up to the bars of the monkey cage, almost wedging it through, the dog yelping, the monkeys squealing, and the ostensibly more intelligent primate yelling for his wife to photograph him). Perhaps the most appealing sight at the Ljubljana zoo for me was the gamboling zebras, because they always seem like combinations of symbols and real animals, especially now that they have been called yebras. I like their “z’s” and their iconic stripes.
We spend only a half hour at the zoo and then begin our trek back to the city. As we are totally exhausted, the thought of retracing our long path is very unappealing, but the only alternative resembling a shortcut is through a self-enclosed rectangular matrix on the map marked Rozna dolina. We passed its outskirts on the way here: a little suburban village of near identical houses and gridded numbered streets. The map shows that, just as we can enter it from above, we can exit it below, and doing so will save a lot of the way back. After all, our route coming was determined by the location of the restaurant, and we can go back any way we want.
Lindy is worried that we will get into the grid and find no egress at the bottom and thus have a lot of extra walking, but I figure the map can’t lie, and many streets lead out to Trzaska cesta, a major route into town. Insisting that we at least try it, I am somewhat dragging her against her will and am walking too fast in a hurry to confirm that we can get out of this grid. She reminds me of my bad habit and suggests an alternative to always snapping at me to slow down. Choosing a graffito we saw a few minutes earlier, she offers the code “Melancholy Girl” every time I am getting ahead and she is rushing to keep up. This makes the path through the likely Socialist-era village of suburban houses and well-kept lawns more carefree, as it leads ("melancholy girl") onto Skrabceva ulica, then into Tivoli itself.
Tivolska cesta is much more the kind of landscape that we wanted on this day than the hilly woods around the Cad and the zoo; it is a realm of ponds, ducks, kites, museums, and wooded lawns. We might like to dawdle here but have run out of time and are meeting Miha who has offered to take the contents of my backup flash drive onto his hard drive and save my files for me.
Having to select some street out of the park under or over the railroad tracks, we choose Carcarjeva cesta rather randomly from the map to get to go through a tunnel. It is fortuitous because its lit passageway contains an entire outsider museum, elaborate murals of high artistic acumen invaded by traditional tags, as for instance the maroon 57.Orthodox Boys or Lupsa Ljubim. In some tunneled areas, tags, graffiti, and cartoon images flow together in rambling Lascaux-like vistas representing different dimensions and intentions; for instance, a crude black Y in the midst of some red twirls with teardrop and oval, perhaps representing a skeletal ghostlike creature, stands on lavender tags in its hypothetical feet area; they are almost unreadable but perhaps actually saying Moontag. It is flanked to the left by a happy-faced five-pointed star in a light blue field in a spray-painted black bubble above a red, wavy-lined UFO with lines such that it could also have been the Loch Ness Monster peering above waterline. The “sky” around these is various dots and shapes plus a gigantic red circle with orange dribbling inside, effectively the sun of this system. The first planet orbiting it is a little red heart icon marked “heart” in black.
The best mural, filling a whole wall, is done totally in black and white, using the concrete as its white, very black paint. Its crisp appearance is stained only by later, cruder milieus of occasional blue, brown, and pink tags and yellow spray paint. Intricate in its detail, the mural shows an entire magical or science-fiction city, its many towers looking like computer code with their white-blocked windows, connected to each other by odd pipes, vents, and weird structures that look like wishbones, donuts, and small bananas coming out of large hollow hot dogs. There are also futuristic aerials and a range of highly complex sci-fi variations on Gothic themes such that the mediaeval turns post-modern and surreal. The towers are so close together that their visible parts arise out of one another. A huge domino sits asymmetrically on one tower, four dots and then one dot, each one the size of two windows. Various signs on the sides of buildings and hanging in front of them on long vertical billboards read: Mehki Hotel; Jepsur Huh, Meomet Bar; KINO; Jezus Fast Food (twice, wedged into the upper quadrants of a Cross); Juda Burger; Esso Bar; Po Zouri Zadnja Veceria; Yes We Are Open; Tudi Ti Brut; Deja Yu; Center Za Samporioc Sizif; Stanley’s Lounge (this on raised block letters freestanding across the top of one of the lower buildings, a giant flaming ball atop the scrunched words, its flames one of the areas contaminated with the yellow of extraneous graffiti). This city on some imaginary world or in some future time has a split Slavic-Anglo identity.
Further on, we come to a whole new gallery that uses raised sections of walls plus portals to integrate relief into paintings, as when a peasant man and woman in a light yellow field decorated with black fleur-de-lis-like objects surround a portal in the concrete which becomes a window between them onto Cyrillic tags on the orange spray-painted far wall.
It takes half as much time—and four “melancholy girls”—to get back to Preseren trg, compared to what it originally took to get to the Cad from there. No longer late for Miha, we sit on the statue of Preseren with the locals, me with a lemon and coconut gelato, Lindy with a chocolate and cherry one.
Miha quickly pulls my files off the flash disk onto his computer. He will hold them and also email them to me as a backup if needed, when I get home. Because he is short on time, we agree to meet at 22:00 and have tea on the Park patio to discuss his books and how we might get involved with Scala, his American publisher, in republishing them in English. He is open to hearing a few optional minor suggestions about Guarding Hanna.
At dinner time Lindy takes me on Veronica’s route to the center of the city, avoiding the student area and shops and skirting the river. Finding Chez Erik closed on Sunday night, we return to Zlata Ribica and order pretty much the same dishes over again. The stage on the other side of the river features a guy with a violin and another guy with a guitar. Although the music isn’t particularly interesting, we stand and watch, and I write in my journal: “Ljubljana, even though small, is a great city of the Earth, a city of bikes even at night, a city (post-Tito) still reaching for an identity, a city with too many mindless smokers.”
Miha and I sit for an hour with tea on the near-empty patio, discussing publishing. “Who knows?” he says. “Maybe King of the Rattling Spirits would be a better book to start with.”
I promise to read it.
I offer three suggestions about Hanna: 1. Having Waiting for Godot appear on Hanna’s television is too symbolic and heavy-handed; best to let the Beckett parallel be discovered, if at all, by the reader; 2. It is not made clear enough, the book being through Dogsbody’s mind, that the main character is not as ugly as he seems, e.g. that the description of his own looks is a mixture of hyperbole, parody, and solipsism; and 3. Too much physically confusing stuff happens during the chase scene near the end when the focus should be the discovery that, far from being asked to guard Hanna, Dogsbody, like Clint Eastwood’s cop in The Gauntlet and so many other American movie characters, is being set up to fail.
Miha finds all of these fair and interesting, and we build up some excitement about finding a new American audience for Hanna. We hug; he says, “Safe trip,” then glides off into the night on his bike.