for Doma Journal
What is home?
by Shoba
My grandmother, now 95, lived in six different countries without moving an inch from her home in Sarajevo. She was born in the Austrian Empire, spent her childhood during the Great War, which may have been sparked by a political assassination in her home town but luckily raged elsewhere, and had her peaceful and careless adolescent years and youth in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia which followed the crash of the Hapsburg monarchy. She got married in the eve of World War Two, subsequently living in Axis Croatia following the German and Italian occupation. A few months after her marriage, she lost her husband – my grandfather – as well as three brothers and a sister, all killed combating the Nazis as members of the resistance. She then spent many years in communist Yugoslavia, which inherited the territory of the former Kingdom in 1945. And a while ago she witnessed another war, ending up in the capital of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina. At 95 years of age she’s still not sure which country is coming next.
The turbulent politics of the Balkans have taught residents of the region that they can’t be sure if they’ll end up in the same country where they were born. Unfortunately, frequent wars have destroyed or damaged much cultural heritage beyond recognition, with the last Bosnian war of 1992-95 razing many old structures to the ground. For centuries armies have marched across the Balkans, sometimes not just stripping the people of their goods but occasionally even leaving something good behind. The Ottoman Turks, for example, built many bridges; the Austrians built the first railroad and developed city centers, bringing with them technical knowledge and education. Socialist Yugoslavia rebuilt the entire country after World War Two, and a long period of peace and prosperity started.
Unlike my grandmother I moved out of Balkans. I wanted to taste different countries and had the concept of traveling instead of sitting on one place, waiting for other countries to come to me. After all, I witnessed the fall of Yugoslavia (and fought bitterly in the war for Bosnian independence as a soldier), then got fed up with all that mess and went to Holland for better education and better life. As though that wasn’t enough, I moved to post 9/11 America, and am still trying to survive as artist in New York City.
The very first home which I didn’t have to share with parents, sister and grandmother was a small studio in crooked 14 Century building in downtown Amsterdam. Its walls were porous, and strong marijuana smoke was from the neighbors below constantly tingled my nose and brain. What’s more the building shook at all hours, pounded by discothèque beats from next door. Built on wet sand, the building is still sinking. (The previous flat where I lived with my parents was a solid socialist, albeit weirdly painted, concrete and brick development, designed in a crooked and bent idea of the “Le Corbusier” style. It successfully and proudly withstood a few strong earthquakes and later, multiple 120 millimeter mortar shells during the war.)
Still, even given all that the Amsterdam housing situation was very comfortable. The lack of privacy was interesting. Most apartments in Amsterdam don’t have curtains and you can frequently see your neighbors naked, extinguishing their hand-rolled cigarettes next to the window (and they might see you staring at them). Someone told me the Dutch habit of not using curtains dates back to the Spanish occupation of Holland, when the occupiers forbid curtains because they feared hidden conspiracies and a possible uprising. I was also surprised by Amsterdam’s narrow corridors, its scull-and-bones decorations on black and white facades, not to mention the hooks on top of the buildings, which are used to move furniture through in and out of the house through windows via attached ropes and pulleys. Everything there is designed for maximum economy of space. In the old times people paid property taxes according to the width of the building; a result of that they have very narrow, very long houses all over Amsterdam.
“New Amsterdam,” immediately following my 3 years in the old one, was something different. My first NYC home, which I shared with my beloved wife, had only one dusty airshaft window overlooking the wall of the next building. It was very dark during the brightest days; I couldn’t easily say if it was day or night outside. The good side of that dungeon-like apartment was a total insulation from loud and throbbing noises outside. Just a few steps outside the building, waves of ambulance and fire engine sirens combined with the frequently humid polluted haze used to push me back inside. The closest piece of nature from my home was Central Park, 51streets north, packed with desperate people hungry for leaves, trees, lawns, ponds, ducks and robins. Another surprise in my East Village building was superintendent Suleyman, a Montenegrin-born Muslim. We used to live in the same country before the collapse of Yugoslavia, and still spoke the same language, exchanging knowing jokes about our supposed laziness and inability to integrate wherever we go. (Where do Balkanoids hide money? Under the shovel. Nobody’s ever gonna pick it up...) All the while he was fixing things that were clearly impossible to fix and simultaneously ruining those that didn’t require any fixing. Most of the time I felt like I had at least one pair of eyes on me from the second floor apartment window overlooking the building entrance in which we and Suleyman lived, along his old mother, wife and son. Just a little movement of the curtain told all. Sometimes cigarette butts would land on the street from that open window, shedding their last sparkles in the night air.
My current home, again shared with my beloved wife, is a one bedroom apartment in a fancy brand-new building on the edge of the popular Meatpacking District at the border between the West Village and Chelsea. Never before in my life have I had a concierge, a uniformed doormen, an extremely kitschy decorated hallway with questionable art artifacts and a waterfall, a washer and dryer in the apartment, and a rooftop area complete with a barbecue, sundeck, shower and well positioned half-naked trendy chicks in deckchairs roasting in the afternoon sun. For the first few months there it was embarrassing just to pass the doormen with my “Western Beef” grocery bags, I was afraid that I would be kicked out of this artificial heaven, which we got into thanks to New York City’s low income housing program (and my wife’s hard work to get us inside: thank you, Leslie!). Some weird form of city socialism got us inside a place we actually don’t belong, among the rich and the extremely rich, among the almost famous wannabies and the pets with high expectations, in a building with bronze elevators and a sea of food deliveries to all floors, where huge plasma screens reflect their shifting light in the windows all night. Unlike our “Joy Division” East Village apartment, I finally have huge optimistic windows that open on a genuine street, one packed with offices, shops and food stores. A few times a day sunlight even comes through the forest of air conditioners placed on the rooftop of the neighboring building, discoloring some old photos and newspapers on my desk, its strong light briefly raising hope in the leaves of my sun-thirsty basil plants. The faces of people pretending to work, caught in sun reflecting from our fancy building’s reflective windows, sometimes show up from the other side.
But the biggest, widest and sometimes only window of any home I ever lived in and stared through has to be my computer screen. All possible information, news, identity, images, people, music, nostalgia, friends, family, work, art, visions, ideas, movies, events, goes through it. It’s really hard to imagine life without computers nowadays. Even my parents faces shows up, peeking at the furniture and layout of my apartment through a webcam hooked to Skype. And even my old Grandma recognizes her own image through a webcam on the wall of a brand new New York City building, another reminder of her nowadays virtual adventures, her stubborn traveling without moving.
