Down the Block There's a Riot

The signs around me still caused some ping of internal alarm (though I knew the chances of actual danger were remote). Airports, simply put, are not the kind of place you like to see placards telling you where to go in the event of an air raid. 

Then again, such things aren’t terribly uncommon when a nation is at war. 

I sat in the large atrium of David Ben Gurion Airport, happily arrived, checked, and thoroughly grilled by El Al security (what did you do in Jordan last year? how did you teach a class if you don’t know Hebrew?), I sat looking at the flight board. I double checked to make sure my flight back to JFK was still happening (of course it was) and to see if the the travel plans of any of my remaining TALMA brethren would be interrupted by any last minute cancelations. However, as the calm that only comes from realizing your travel plans are going exactly as you had planned settled over me, I began thinking about what my mother (I’m sure you’re reading this, Ma, taking a break from all the wedding excitement) always seems to say to me in such situations:

“You are never far from disaster.”

It’s a barb in good humor. My southern family is inclined to worry. Anxiety runs in our bloodlines with the same frequency as brown hair, freckles, or acidic sarcasm and it manifests just as potently. We work in fretting the way an artist might work in marble or pastels. 

In a way, however, my mother has a point. 

Sample comments over the history of my life include:

“He threw WHAT at another kid in Mission Friends?” (a toy car and the son of a bitch had it coming)

“Well, Randy. You’ll never guess what our son did today. He made a dumb waiter out of an Easter basket and all the shoe laces he could get his hands on.” 

“I have no idea why he thought dryer fresh, just folded wash cloths looked enough like Easter eggs for him to feel he should hide them all over the back yard.” (My cousin Megan should also remember this, so should Jennifer since she’s the one who tattled). 

“I tried to warn you before the wedding. Making him the ring bearer was a dreadful choice.” 

“I’m so glad I paid a plastic surgeon to fix the scarring over your eye from your accident so that you could turn around and get your eyebrow pierced.” 

“I told you the chemistry set was an awful idea. Maybe if we move the desk, no one will notice the stain.” 

Rambunctiousness, really. 

My best hypothesis is that my early childhood chicanery stemmed from an underutilized imagination. After I started school, most of these issues went away. I channelled my penchant for mischief into more constructive endeavors (like writing, painting, theatre, cooking, and developing a love of chardonnay and frozen margaritas) and metamorphosed into the well-bred, composed, highly functioning adult you see today. 

I say all this to say that it was only natural that before I left for Poland, I would get a healthy dose of reminding that the crisis in Ukraine, like Ebola, could spread rapidly and without warning. 

I honestly have no clue what they were talking about. In their minds, I’m some patrician sitting in a tree near the frontline, a sniper in a make-shift militia, shivering while fighting off the advancing Red Army. It seemed almost laughable. 

And, especially in retrospect, I can appreciate the humor of the situation. 

So why am I writing this? You’re probably asking it. I do find a good narrative sets up a commentary on global affairs in a more comforting way.

While I was at a bookstore today (side note: I found the English section and came away with enough Truman Capote and J.D. Salinger to last me the next couple of weeks), I waited in line to pay and, like any red-blooded consumer, scanned the shelves of magazines and confectionary used to squeeze pennies out of shoppers with poor impulse control and access to disposable income.

I begin to notice something quite common on all of the magazine covers. They all feature Putin and they all either mention or also depict Stalin. I don’t speak Polish, but the message is clear. 

I immediately assume sensationalism. Magazines are digging into a nations not-so-distant past to drum up sales. It is at that moment, things seem to come full circle.

I think back to the good-natured plug at Fulbright orientation, reminding us to eat apples (boycotted by Russia currently) with the same gentle guidance of “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.” I couldn’t fathom something as simple as eating apples to be a political statement. However, after a few glasses of apple juice and munching a macintosh on the train from Warsaw to Poznan and running across a magazine shelf drawing uncomfortable parallels to a time just before Warsaw saw the Palace of Culture and Sciences rise from the ground like that volcano in Mexico which sprouted from a field in a matter of weeks, I have to do some serious thought into the political climate I walked into.

I think back to what my mother said, silently agreeing that I am (by coincidence) never too far from trouble. 

I pause here to remind everyone of two things: 

Primarily, I don’t know jack about the inner machinations of former Soviet-bloc politics. I have literally no answers and thus cannot reach any conclusion beyond the vocal acknowledgement of my observations. 

Secondly, I am not an alarmist. The point of this is more of a reflection of what I’ve seen rather than a verification of Cold War paranoia. 

Also, I’d kill right now for a hot apple brandy. Can you imagine? In a clear glass mug with a cinnamon stick, steam hovering just slightly above the rim? Is it the alcohol or the smell of apples and cinnamon that is more warming, more filling? It just sounds too divine. 

I don’t recall a day that I’ve been here that I don’t come across some reminder of recent history. There are statues all over the place commemorating the catastrophic loss of life that occurred in Poland at the hands of both invading Germans and Soviets. Entire cities were reduced to rubble (only a thousand people were in Warsaw by the end of the war in Europe). These monuments are solemn, grim, and in many ways are exactly what I would imagine them to be.

I’m not entirely sure what to say. I embark on my research knowing that many of the conversations will be …academically unpleasant. I say this to indicate that I cannot possibly relate to or even understand the process of healing and relapse in chaos which have marked the 20th century here. It’s a process of stitching and hemorrhaging that can’t be comprehended by those of us who were raised on the narratives of the United States in war time. 

When I think of this, I think of Simonova’s sand art. Granted, she was Ukrainian, but there are certainly parallels in narrative. I showed this clip in virtually every class I taught. It was haunting and it was beautiful. There are thousands of possible comments and questions that can arise from a video that is less than 10 minutes long. However, the same one always came up (it’s frankly what I thought the first time I saw it), “Why is everyone crying?” 

There’s the obvious answer. It’s an artistic statement about the history of a people who in a very short amount of time became experts on loss. 

By the time the video ends, we are left with an image of a child (newborn when the war began, now a toddler)  making some faint, bittersweet contact with the ghost of someone whose love he is unable to remember, a love he will spend his entire life only understanding in hearsay and family anecdotes. 

This concept of national loss and national healing is still quite elusive to me. I’m not totally sure what to make of it. However, I feel as though the early stages of this blog would be entirely artificial and incomplete without some reflection on my part over the current state and its relationship to the past century. 

This place was home to the first truly democratic elections in the former Soviet bloc. It houses a history and culture of perseverance, beauty, art, science (Chopin, Copernicus, Sklowdowska-Curie, Wajda, Szymborska, Warlikowski…to name a few). Yet in a modern context, it is also associated with atrocities that are measured in bullets, bomb shells, and unfathomable destruction. 

It’s odd to consider and I realize that my point is not something easily graspable (largely because I’m not sure that I have one and I may just be verbalizing everything that swarms around the hornet’s nest that is my mind right now). Imagine granite blocks etched with the bronze faces of the men and women who were taken by something terrible sitting in a park in front of an immaculate, plush opera house with immaculate tracings in gold leaf.

The Spartan and Athenian existing simultaneously. 

It’s a dreadful metaphor, I recognize this. 

I also recognize that I am yet again pouring sentiment like thick gravy over something that I never intended to be an exercise in emotional outpouring. 

However, I doubt that I could explain the impact that seeing those magazines had on me without some elaboration. 

In honesty, I’m not certain why that image disturbed me as much as it did. 

I didn’t have the guts to take a photograph. Seriously. How would you respond to someone who took a picture of the checkout line? 

However, imagine if you will a picture of Stalin and Putin, both blood-red with the communist banner hanging in the background, surrounded by candy on all sides. Stalin looks ample, healthy and is covered with waving, though tamed hair. Putin, by contrast, looks thin, hairless, and thoroughly untrustworthy. It’s as though you walked into to Willy Wonka’s chocolate room (the Gene Wilder version because obviously) and saw the two of them playing chess. It’s like something out of Orwell. The adjustment from fear to temporary indulgence is so immediate that I guess some pause isn’t out of the question. 

Around this time, however, a woman tapped on my shoulder and pointed the open cashier who had just been calling me for the last few seconds. 

I chuckled to myself as I walked over, wondering if maybe slowing down a line to gaze at a magazine stand was the kind of disaster from which my mother feels I’m never far . 

In Search of Apple Brandy, 

Kyle