Gatherers and Hunters (9 page)

Ljubljana

In the days when Slovenia had taken the first steps to independence from Yugoslavia by creating its own ‘national airline' – I am thinking of the late summer of 1989 – in those times, if you walked through the markets or inner streets of Ljubljana with its old Austrian colours and sturdy wooden decorations, there was already a fine notation of difference. ‘That man selling leather jackets, he is a Serb', my host remarked to me. ‘And that other one is an Albanian, the one at the flowerstall'. To me, they all looked Balkan and my sight, like my listening ear, was still far too superficial, stuffed with novelty and a willingness to focus on the exotic. It was a place that was consciously the most westernised of the Yugoslav regions, Roman Catholic and scorning the cyrillic alphabet. The famous Austrian composer Hugo Wolf was a Slovene.

But back then there was another frisson for those such as me, visitors, people in transit who had no commitment to anything other than curiosity or some inner catalogue of contrasts – a sort of home movie mentality without the cameras or the equipment. There was the still dangerous thought that ‘this is an iron curtain country'. Your passport was evidence: what if you wanted to return to Australia via America? By America, of course I mean the United States, that segment of the American continent. Do not smile, I am lifting you back to a time that was. To the time before. To the Olden Days.

And in a very real sense, travelling to Ljubljana was like travelling into places where the darker fairy tales might well have been located. The clothes people wore: imagine seeing them in Melbourne? Oh yes, some of them would be wondrous in Sydney, at the right party. The Indian decade and the Greek decade had been and gone but there was still room for Central European chic, in fact it was only just beginning. I bought myself, from the Serb vendor, a leather jacket which I wore for several years in Sydney. It was styled with an aim for international consumers who might have broad shoulders and universal poppers. It could have hung in a stall in North Sydney.

When I was in Belgrade, the week before, I was told that city had been razed by invaders twenty-seven times. That was survival. It was also mutilation and revenge and a tenacious collective memory, armed to the teeth forever, unforgiving.

Ljubljana, for all its solidity and the provincial heaviness of its buildings, looked both venerable (to Australian eyes) and like some of those nineteenth century Australian towns planned in two or three storey brick on imperial models and believing they were facing the New Future, not the played-out past.

In the once-upon-a-time I was innocent, that is true. In Ljubljana I was open to everything. I was easy bait.

Andor was one of those people whose faces you forget easily, and then feel guilty. He had been scheduled to meet me when I flew in from Belgrade (on the Slovenian Airlines flight) and I have even forgotten how the connection was initially made. Was it the Embassy? Was it that helpful girl at the Airlines booking office? Was it a phone number someone had passed on to me, saying Andor spoke excellent English and his charming sister had once been to Adelaide with a group that had accompanied the famous (Serbian) poet Desanka Maksimovic to the Festival in, was it 1976? I had phoned him before making my bookings and he offered me everything. He would put himself out for me. He would be honoured. He would be proud to show me his city, his country, his people. I bought myself an extra reel of colour film.

It was the fag end of summer, really autumn but the weather was still and the sun seemed hot, it was as if every­thing – each leaf on each tree – was hanging motionless, stilled by the perfection of the season and the wish to hold on to it forever. It was the prelude to the Fall.

‘My friend. You will see our town tomorrow, but I have taken the advantage of you and your arrival and I have arranged for you a special visit. Now. This very afternoon. Leave your baggage at your hotel, we are off this instant. I have a wonderful plan for you. You have arrived at the very moment. You must have planned it. It could not have happened otherwise. We have the special week of the mushrooms out in the country, it is our best kept secret. These mushrooms are magical. They grow only in one place and for one week only. I will provide for you a feast of our mushrooms, to translate their name you would say they are false toenails but perhaps I do not have the subtleties: fanciful delectables, perhaps, like little toes of young girls, very young girls with tender pale flesh you could take into your mouth and suck gently, each toe separately, till they squirm with delight.' His English was not perfect, but I laughed out loud at his jovial fantasy, and counted myself fortunate to arrive in the Week of the Mushrooms, no matter what they were called and in what language.

He had a small modern car and he drove fast. ‘Slovenia is the industrial centre of Yugoslavia' he called out to me as we left the city outskirts behind. ‘When we have our independence, we will take all the wealth with us. The rest of Yugoslavia is for peasants.'

We drove through green fields, clumps of woodland, and increasingly into the area of rising mountains. The sky was almost cloudless, except for a tablecloth of white over the peaks that we approached.

Suddenly he stopped. We pulled into a dusty patch off the narrow road. ‘Let me show you something' he said. He drew out a knife. It must have been affixed to his belt but I had not noticed anything under his convincing imitation of a Scottish tweed jacket.

‘That looks sharp' I said, for politeness.

‘Yes'.

He pulled out into the road again and we said nothing more about the weapon.

I did not see it again. It was not a portent – why should I think that?

‘I will take you to one of our famous National Parks' he said, after some minutes of silence as we began climbing higher and higher. ‘I will take you to Slap Savica, the waterfall that is the great source of the Sava river. You will have seen the Sava in full flood if you were in Belgrade. Did you see the Sava in Belgrade, where it joins the Danube?'

I nodded. Somehow, once having seen his knife, it had begun for no good reason to intrude itself into my thoughts. I tried to rationalise to myself that in these country areas, where antlers were displayed above portals and on condominium porches, there must be a long tradition of hunters and scoutsmen. I imagined wolves and bears in the overhanging forests we had begun to have shouldering over the little car.

‘Here. In this forest, they have released lynxes back into the wild', Andor said. ‘They have gone back to their wild nature, after three generations, four generations in captivity.'

‘Instinct must be very strong', I agreed, ‘it must carry through generations' I said. ‘And has the experiment been a success?'

‘We wait. And we will see.' he said, ‘But I have no doubts about it myself. These forests have regenerated, after the war. Beech, Linden, Oak. Our wild creatures, also, they will revert to their real natures.'

We had moved, perhaps, into the cloud shadow by now. Despite the bright afternoon, there was a sense of darkness. Perhaps the increasingly steep cliffs that began to overhang the track had the effect of making everything seem more and more closed in. Darkness must be terrible here.

But we came to a clearing, eventually. Beyond was a flat lake, where the source of the Sava flowed in. It was a parkland, with rustic tables and benches. There were a few other cars and a group of white haired men and women were ­clambering down a precipitous track through the off-white rocks. They helped each other down.

‘We will be the last visitors this afternoon. I timed it so. When we leave here we will head for the eating place and the mushrooms. We will arrive there just at dusk, and we will have our rare feast of baby-toe mushrooms.'

‘That name, for an Australian, is pretty funny. I wonder what we would call these mushrooms if we had them growing in Australia?'

‘You do not have these. Nobody has these. These are unique. Thus they are very special. As you will see. As you will taste. I promise you.'

His smile was contagious, even though its very crookedness gave his uneven teeth an extra prominence. But we have been pampered by the cosmetic uniformity of orthodontists and the like. In the context of Andor's well cut jacket and his neat white shirt with woollen tie, the quality of his smile enhanced the almost rustic fervour of his manner. I imagined woodcutters and forest dwellers as his particular ancestors. His Ljubljana sophistication – the excellent English, the very new car – only made this underlying rough-and-readyness more appealing. I was reminded, for an instant, of an uncle who lived at the Glasshouse Mountains. Not my uncle's unfortunate accident with the rifle, but something of his unpretentious grin, which my first wife found threatening but which was really only the fact, which he relished, of his uneven teeth. He called that smile ‘his party trick'.

Andor held me back, until the elderly ones had fully descended and the narrow climb up into the rocks was clear. As we waited I gazed idly at the nearby wooden bench. Two upturned soft drink cans were littered there, and I mentally tut-tutted and thought how Western sins were seeping even into this place. Half a dozen European wasps buzzed in and out of the zip-openings. They seemed to be getting increasingly erratic in their activity, as if they were already drunk – at the aggressive stage. Andor caught my eye. ‘Visitors! My niece, my beautiful niece, picked up one of these American cans and raised it to her face. She was bitten in the throat. Died. She died. She died in agony.'

I gasped and expressed condolences.

‘It is nothing. That is life. But these American cans, they are to blame. They are natural temptations for the wasps and wasps do sting. Like the lynxes, they have their innate natures and nothing will alter that. It is the carelessness of man that I detest. Leaving these American cans like traps and of course the young children do not yet know, how can they know? My niece died in agony. She was very beautiful. I often had her at my place, I bathed her and put her to bed with songs and stories when her mother went off to … to her work engagements.'

‘She must have been devastated.'

He looked at me. ‘You will meet her. What she needs is a mate, someone to sire another child on her. Then she will forget Marissa.'

I understood there were complications. I thought I would welcome the extra company, though I hoped this awful incident would not be raised when we did meet. I was on holiday. Grieving parents were not on my agenda.

‘Come,' And we set off on the hike among great pallid boulders.

It was a track that was more treacherous than I had expected. Seeing those aged people returning, all of them looking enthusiastic and only a little puffed, had tricked me. Perhaps they were all members of a hiking club and practiced their paces three times a week. Perhaps they made this trek to the source of the Sava three times every week. It was something about the place: obsessive, almost, and yet strangely peopled, populated with a sense of endless footsteps that had flattened out the path over the bruising stones, generations of pilgrims making their journey to this great Source, far back into pre-Christian times. It had the feel of a place of earth worship and dark primitive rites.

Andor was way ahead of me. Peremptorily he called me on. I was surprised at how easily I became puffed. I was not all that much out of condition, surely? He waited on a narrow wooden bridge over a small abyss and I could imagine him tapping his bony fingers against the handle of the knife, while he smiled me on.

‘Past here. Around the corner, we come to the waterfall that is the source' he said triumphantly. I could already hear the noise of water belting down, and even caught a first glimpse then of misty spume, half way up the cliff-face. When I held my hand to the rough wooden rail of the bridge I could feel the vibration of it.

‘This is a very old and sacred place. You must understand that. And you must throw into the water something of your own, something that has value for you. A coin perhaps.'

‘But won't that cause litter? There must be generations of litter there, if that is the custom?'

‘That is the custom, and who are we to deny these old rituals?' He said. But I sensed in his irony a greater reverence. I knew I would not dare to disobey his command.

I fumbled in my pocket.

‘No. Wait,' and his hand again barred my own. ‘You must see the waterfall that is the source,' he said, and the rhythms of his voice repeating the phrase again, sounded to me like some ancient invocation, or the start of some ancient invo­cation. I wondered how it sounded in his native tongue?

Holding my shoulder, he guided me along the track and around the last ledge and corner. The sight of the waterfall that was the source took my breath away.

It was much higher, larger, more imperious than I had imagined. When I had envisaged a spring emerging from the cliff, it had been a trickle, an almost mystical and ­precious symbolic flow such as I had once seen, in a remarkably vaginal orifice in the Olgas. This source was prodigious. If this was some ancient European manifestation of the Earth Mother, then it was like a monstrous eternal breaking of the placental waters, not a sexual flow of heightened voluptuousness.

The image that shot through my mind, in fact, was of a savage and primitive male power, the god pissing upon us and laughing; when the floods came, they would be calamitous. And that was the edict. It was a mixture of both male and female images, this place. Both of them bespoke power, not softness. Perhaps it was a merged sexuality I was metamorphosing at that instant: Whatever it was, there was something of ruthlessness in it.

‘Throw your token. Now. Throw it'. It was a command. Some innate reluctance in me made me avoid reaching for the fob pocket where my coins were. Perhaps it was something in Andor, his peremptory tone, that made me instinctively seek out an alternative. I reached into my shirt pocket and tugged out a new ballpoint pen that had been given to me in Belgrade. I threw it as far as I could into the white water. It seemed hardly to reach the edges of the turmoil.