MILAN TODOROV: APRIL

 Milan Todorov

APRIL

For a long time now, I have been thinking about changing the furniture in my living room. I browse various offers through online catalogs. I find a flaw in every single one. I see companies trying to sell me worn-out leather sets as new—almost new, well-preserved, without a scratch, and so on. I don’t like other people’s things, because I am convinced that furniture remembers the traces of чужих hands, touches like a once beautiful, now somewhat bitterly ironic mature woman, forgotten and slightly unhealthy in her mockery. I can barely accept even brand-new items from a factory.

I am especially sensitive when it comes to beds. I imagine all sorts of scenes, mostly obscene. Who lay there to test the loveseat or the elegant sofa? Who was thrusting themselves into a seven-thousand-euro Chesterfield armchair?

At one point, I thought it might be best to take out a loan in dinars and repay it over the next year or two in monthly installments.

In my favorite evening shopping mall, on the ground floor, there is a small IKEA studio where, as it says at the entrance, you can buy, plan, or simply ask for advice from the sales staff at your service. Besides that, in the display window stood a promising slogan: Spring is in the air.

I went in and noticed a salesman in a yellow blouse with the company logo, but he was busy showing a younger couple a kitchen trolley or some such trinket that may look nice until it begins—like all old things—to simply get in your way.

I tried to get his attention, but he ignored me. I realized that what mattered most to him was to sell something to someone; there was no time for conversation.

I was about to turn around and leave when a young saleswoman appeared (interestingly, all the employees seemed to be under thirty), and I explained what I wanted.

“Yes,” she said, “we approve loans for more than two years as well, and without interest. But how long that will last, I really don’t know,” she sighed.

“Do you give loans to pensioners?”

“Of course, to retirees—provided they are not older than seventy.”

So that’s how it is, I thought, swallowing a lump the size of a meatball. Even in Sweden—because the company was known for its Swedish meatballs—there is discrimination against the elderly.

But what can you do.

I then sat down in a small, newly opened café with Sri Lankan specialties called Curry Souls and ordered a tea made of “soul spices,” that is, ginger, which I had never tasted before.

Then came that Pakistani. Actually, before him came a fat Romani woman in tight jeans, with a large backside, holding a folder with a picture of some innocent child who supposedly needed money for an operation. I told her to fuck off. I kept my hands over my eyes. I didn’t want to look at her. When she didn’t move away from the table where I was sitting with my wife, I opened my eyes with effort. Everything was still blurry. Still, I understood that she was thinking how to respond. It was obvious that in her world such exchanges were common, and that they often escalated into long barrages of curses, sometimes ending in bloody fights, knives, and reconciliation through sex in the dark. I hate that kind of deception where children are exploited for money instead of honest work. At one moment, I felt the smell of her unwashed body. Then she stretched herself, as if trying to gain a height she didn’t possess, at least for a verbal confrontation, but she must have seen something in my eyes—a readiness, something raw, a willingness to defend myself and harm whoever attacked me.

She left on tiptoe.

Sri Lankans, it seems, are very accommodating people. I don’t know how they stand with Americans and their intentions to seize half the world, but judging by these—two dark-skinned waiters and one such cook with a white hat—they won’t cause trouble for the new world that arrives every single spring. I would prefer they shaved and tidied their long, messy hair, especially the cook, but that is not part of this story.

The waiter appeared quickly, carrying a tray with two glass cups shaped like goblets, filled with a cloudy yellowish tea, steaming. He smiled slightly and bowed.

Apart from that scene, it would have been a perfectly ordinary Monday, a day when there are very few visitors in the mall.

Only an occasional teenage girl would pass by the bar, her short top revealing her navel—the beginning of her world, perhaps of the world itself. White, tight skin, nothing but flesh and a heart beating who knows how fast and why. I am unable to determine that. I sit and feel useless.

A man grows most tired of familiar things.

Then that Palestinian. He simply rushed in, like someone in a hurry, passing through, yet unable and unwilling to hide his joy at seeing in you—in an older couple quietly sipping ginger tea—something he could not quite escape: a world of confusion and illusion, yet also a secret, uncertain belief that he had done everything right in life.

He was poorly dressed—black plastic jacket, worn fake Nikes—but wore a fur collar of some kind of fox; later, thinking about it, I came to the vague conclusion that it must have been a desert fox.

Behind him, five or six meters away, his numerous children and a small woman with sharp black eyes followed timidly.

I looked at him sideways. I had no intention of dealing with another beggar.

He approached our table—not too close, but not far enough to go unnoticed—and in broken English began to admire my partner’s blonde hair, her naturally blue eyes and eyebrows, all with a wide smile, showing healthy white teeth.

“Fuck off,” I said, in a foul mood.

He didn’t know Serbian, but he stopped. I realized he had understood. Curses are a universal language—the Esperanto of this planet.

That was the moment when our fragile, newly formed relationship began to crack. He was a man in his prime, clearly uprooted from his natural habitat, and I was someone still carrying on my back the old sins of a beaten and barely surviving land.

I asked him where he was from. Deliberately, I avoided using my limited knowledge of colloquial American English.

He didn’t understand Serbian, but it was clear he was trying.

I asked: Iraq, Iran, Syria?

“No,” he said hoarsely. “Palestine,” he added, as if confiding a secret.

“I’m broke,” I said after all.

And he vanished. Just as cheerful as when he arrived.

It was an encounter that, due to my hasty and rude reaction—something not typical of me—further ruined our day.

My wife said she no longer felt comfortable there, and we left the small Sri Lankan restaurant, which was half empty. As I paid the bill, I kept glancing around as if I were guilty of something.

I waited to see what would happen next.

In any case, I had little will to burden myself with other people’s misfortunes. No, I had nothing against that dark-bearded Palestinian, especially since he had asked for nothing. Yet I couldn’t simply overlook his presence and that small event in which, truth be told, nothing really happened—just as in great events, whose meaning we often understand only years later. The young man was clearly searching for what we simply call a better future, while I secretly feared the future and, whenever it was mentioned in my presence, I would usually smile sparingly, convinced that the good times were somewhere behind us, as is the case with all who do not believe in miracles.

And so I stopped thinking about the Palestinian. I admit I felt sorry for him. He hadn’t been offended when I told him I was broke. He remained smiling. With a hurried step, he moved on into the arched hall, then down the escalators to the lower levels, his four children and his wife following, her eyes scanning everything around.

He appeared again a few days later. He didn’t notice me, but his wife pointed me out. He didn’t approach then. Only when I smiled—not as a friend, but as someone also struggling, with different demons, in a different way—did he gather the courage to come closer.

The same smile, the same teeth, asking for nothing, learning quickly.

“Do you have money?” I asked in Serbian, expecting he wouldn’t understand, assuming he might receive some aid from the refugee commission—nothing sufficient for a secure future, of course, but still something, a first bandage against the fear of hunger and dying in exile.

My view of Palestine had been a mixture of sympathy and misunderstanding, shaped by a naive outsider’s sense of its pre-Christian past, imagining lands once more fertile than ours today.

Mostly, I pictured it as a scarf over chessboards, and the face of Yasser Arafat—reddish, marked with moles and clusters of pimples—was for me the symbol of a people without a land.

But now, as Israel together with America attacked Gaza and then Iran, the scale tilted toward the lost land of Palestine.

Still, I felt I knew almost nothing, that my understanding of their past—the reason, as I grasp it, for their wars—was naive.

Mostly I sat in that same corner of the Curry Souls café, thinking of it as a quiet harbor where I could drop my old anchor without the obligation to sail away at any moment. I no longer thought about history. In any case, it disgusted me—a cunning, treacherous cat with a hundred lives.

“Do you have money?” I asked him again, louder, over the music that in megamalls prevents a person from thinking too much about themselves or the future, pushing them instead toward conformity, toward the facelessness of the surrounding world, with hints of sin in the glances of certain young, well-built mothers already weary of married life.

Then he said, in clear Serbian, with a pained expression, as if from a great distance:

“I don’t.”

“How come you don’t have money?” I asked, seeing in the background his wife with those instinctive eyes of deception and fear of failure.

“Children,” he said, shrugging.

At the mention of children, I reached for the left pocket of my jacket, where my small black wallet was. In a flash, I thought how I had always preferred large waiter-style wallets, yet had now settled for small black ones that fit easily into tight sports jackets.

He smiled widely, showing his white teeth and whites of his eyes, watching what I was doing.

I opened the wallet. It had two compartments. One for large bills, the other for smaller ones.

I quickly flipped through them and finally pulled out a red note and gave it to him.

“Buy something for the children for dinner.”

He took the banknote and disappeared instantly. I followed his silhouette and his family. They fled from the expensive fast-food shops and vanished into the crowd flowing toward the lower floors, past a display that read: Spring is in the air.

I thought it was nothing unusual. On weekends, there is always a chaotic rush here for no clear reason.

I felt relieved. I had done what I could. I could walk quickly again; my feet didn’t hurt as they sometimes do on cold days of this warlike spring. I even began to drive somewhat aggressively, cutting off sluggish vehicles, ignoring their almost panicked honking. I started thinking again about certain things not fit for public mention.

But that is not the end of the story.

A week later, I saw my approachable Palestinian addressing a middle-aged, overweight man who waddled like a duck, licking an ice cream from a large purple cone. The Palestinian spoke to him with beautiful gestures, but the man didn’t even look at him.

The compassion of the world is short-lived and fickle. I wanted to tell him that, but I didn’t. He stopped, looked at me with the same wide smile, shrugged, and walked away.

It is important to keep a smile and cheerfulness, because life is what trembles within us, while the losses it brings are things beyond our power.

After all—

On this earth, it is worth living if only for the trembling of April.

I recalled a line by Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet I had recently read in Polja, a literary journal from Novi Sad. The sentence sounded good—almost like consolation.