Of Whales and Swings, and Distant Travels ( « Où les baleines naissent » )
It was summer, a quarter of a century ago. I was twenty-one and had finished reading all classes at the Philology College of Belgrade. With a few exams remaining to be taken, including the final one in English, I set off to Canada, to visit my relatives. I’d even further polish my already excellent spoken language skills. My English was good. Mother’s grandfather was British. She and I always speak Serbian to each other, but speaking English was important, albeit in the early years of her childhood, after the WW II, not a welcome trait in Communist/swindler Tito’s charade of a pseudo-Westernised reign of terror.
My parents paid for my trip. I had by that time occasionally worked as an interpreter or given classes to high school or even fellow-university students lagging behind, but that was not enough for an intercontinental airfare at the time when such trips were made not a half as frequently as they are today (although there existed much more abundant oil reserves still waiting to be tapped into, then).
In Montréal, where I spent most of the time, few people I met spoke English; seeing that I could not practice it much for the exam, I indulged in discovering the ancient side to what I had previously imagined as a completely card-box architecture/no genuine autochtone culture new continent, and trying to master the Joual with my good, but thoroughly European French.
I was the first visitor from the old country to my mother’s first cousin — the first one from a broader family, that is, not counting his own mother, who is my grandaunt (and godmother), and his stepfather, whom he disliked, but tolerated because the man provided his mother a kind of security for the other half year (usually during the, to our concept of the world abominable — or if you prefer it so: horrendous — Montréal winters) she spent in Serbia. So he tried to show me (and show off) the things he thought justified his dwelling in that faraway corner of the globe, as if he needed a justification, or as if I cared that he had left Serbia. Indeed, it was exactly to the contrary quite convenient for me to have a member of the family to visit for a long trip, and, since I was still a student, I wasn’t expected to contribute to daily living expenses. Not yet ever a long-term resident in a faraway land, little did I know of the embers of patriotism as the sole source of warmth in displacement: homesickness that breeds slightly overdone patriotism).
So I went with my uncle on long drives in the Laurentides, where he pointed old stone cottages, to theatre plays in adapted barns, and on a long weekend trip to the Niagara Falls, where he took me in awe at “our Nikola Tesla”, all the way grudgingly complaining about the inability to communicate in his broken English and the Ontario residents non-existent French. He was surprised by the ease with which I switched between the two, and also Serbian, which, of course, we spoke to each other, and I guess that motivated him to wish to show me more.
He also tried to let me see as much as he knew about the city of Montréal all the way: from the Musée des Beaux-Arts to the monumental Oratoire St-Joseph atop the hill, from the Olympic Stadium where he trained Canadian basketball team (and thus got his residence, and later citizenship) to the porn cinemas off Sainte-Catherine, a thing unknown to me at that age (though as I later learned, there had been one semi-officially recognised as such in Belgrade at the time), Chinese restaurants (his wife took me to the Vietnamese one), the green patina covered wings of angels atop quaint spires of early 18th century churches, the Jardins Botaniques, the underground city branching off from the metro lines, the Terre des Hommes amusement park, workers and immigrants ... er … — OK, I won’t call them “slums”, but what word shall I use… “ghettoes”? — along the far ends of Rue de Saint Laurent and in Laval.
We also travelled to New Hampshire to visit his cousin on his paternal side (not related to me by family, but my grandmother’s goddaughter nevertheless) at her summer estate, who in turn then took me on to her family home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Eventually, my uncle from Montréal even drove down to Boston to take me all the way to Washington D.C. with a stopover in Philadelphia — where I fell in love not with the Liberty Bell or the Independence Hall, but with ironworks on small balconies — and to New York City, seeing which from the New Jersey Turnpike I told him the typical European insouciance: “Well, this is the real America, at last”, for that was the only America most of us in Europe know from TV, and where for the first time in his life, he dared come walking into Harlem with me, because I was from another world, and didn’t understand what his fear was all about, before we headed back to Québec. We skipped Baltimore though, took some tunnel instead; it was late, I was tired, and it seemed to me to be more than 50 miles long.
I am not sure if I would ever feel I had to play such a “continental host” for anyone, and I guess he must have been exhausted with it, as later on, when my cousin and his wife visited him as they came to North America on their honeymoon seven or eight years later, he just got them a half month pre-paid rent a car voucher with limited insurance as a wedding gift, so they went to New York on their own. Of course, he was then seven or eight years older too, and that in the late 40s also means less adventuresome and more frugal.
Eventually, half way through my stay, my uncle’s Québecoise wife — indeed, to be more precise, for many years, and to her devout Roman-Catholic disappointment, his common law spouse, with whom he had two children before they finally got married (at the time this story happens they had just one son) — got her summer holidays and they packed up for a trip up north to Gaspésie, to “where the whales are being born” (“où les baleines naissent”, they actually said, for they spoke French to each other, with her trying to communicate in Serbian only with her mother in law, and just sometimes a few words to their children, when he spoke to them so, and she wanted to say “no” to what he had said “yes”, or vice versa; she did speak both English and French to me, though, whatever language I spoke to her first).
Now I am not particularly interested in the animal birth. I’ve seen small, two or three days old lambs and a week old colt, blind kittens, just-laid pigeon chicks, and — sure: everything small is cute, but for how long? Besides, how small can a whale be to be really cute? And how can you make sure to actually see it happen in the ocean as big as from here to … everywhere on the planet… and back? So I didn’t really want to go along with them, but they insisted. How ungrateful would it be it to refuse them… Finally, I agreed to accompany them only to Québec City for a couple of days and head back by bus when they set off further north.
We passed by Trois Rivières, where my uncle occasionally taught at a college, but didn’t stop there, because — he said — there was nothing to see in it. I didn’t care really. All I wanted was to go back to the big city of Montréal, rather than waste my time in some villages. Which I thought Québec City would likely be. And, boy, was I wrong! After a quarter of a century, in which I have lived in Canada for quite a few years and visited the US many times, I must say I haven’t seen a city more European than Québec. And for me, a European born and grown, Europe is forever “normalcy”, therefore also “beauty” — if a thing we are discussing is beautiful, that is.
Which Québec City, without question, showed us that it is. It was a weird but astonishing experience. The vista from the Château Frontenac opening on a city almost Mediterranean (notwithstanding that it does get freezing cold there, unlike anywhere in the Mediterranean! But then we visit at the height of summer) is breathtaking on a continent where most streets intersecting in a grid have no names but just numbers. In some ways grand (if not outright beautiful) was even the Frontenac itself, however faux — or should I say “a folly”? well, perhaps not after all: unlike cottages at English manor houses, and the fact that it was built years after similar architecture was executed in Europe, the hotel does have a rather obvious kind of purpose — had a look more pleasing to the eye than the usual North American concrete cubes of a height similar to it masquerading as buildings.
But the tiny winding streets, the fortress, the crêperies (and more genuinely, albeit spelled wrong, “ye olde worlde” than the Anglo ones), the guards in white breeches and green and red coats, topped with silly hats!! (Yes, of course we did take photos with them.) The powerful nostalgia of a Nouvelle France-unburied-under-the-acaciæ, dormant until a new président of the “motherland across the ocean” comes along to shout from the balcony of Montréal City Hall “Vive Québec libre!”
And then there was the swing (which by the way is probably my most favourite human-made type of object, but I’ll tell you more some other time), on a promontory on the Fortress Hill, sturdy enough for my then-160 pounds (since, I am sorry to say, rounded to 200, and perhaps a couple more), and the air was crisp, with just an occasional cloud, white as cottonwool, and the wind was warm, the leaves rustled barely audibly with the sounds of the city muffled down below, as I flew up, up … all the way to the sky on that swing, like many years before that on another one, tied to the old cherry tree in Brusnik, in my mother’s ancestral family mansion, amidst a huge orchard and flower garden, surrounded with a tall brick wall, in a tiny town, on the edge where Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian borders meet, where my mother, and this uncle of mine, originated, in the years before Communism, when my great-grandfather was a mayor, before his exile to Britain.
There are such moments. Call it Kairos, call it bliss, call it “at ease with the Universe”, whatever... Those 10-or-so minutes on that swing at the Québec City Fortress were probably the best in the six or so years I have spent in North America (mostly Canada). I took the two moments, and I tied them together, and — lo and behold — years later, with a Canadian passport in hand, I teach in East Asia. The university is third biggest in China, it has ponds, pavilions, regular shuttle buses to the other campus, and something like golf carts for 10 people for within the campus. The library is huge and ultramodern, there is a monumental gate which is actually a building with classrooms atop empty space seven floors high, and another row of administration offices on top of that. And then there are swings. Not too many, but they add up new things all the time.
Occasionally, in late evenings, I go and sit on one of them. I cannot fly as high now, much heavier that I am — and much older, a university teacher, so it does not become me. Even though I have enjoyed my two years in its subtropical south, I do not even plan to tie China into the knot of the two countries I have made my own. But it does bring back memory of both the cherry tree in Brusnik, and the fortress in Québec. And I swing slowly, middle-agedly, to and fro…
And where do the whale calfs get born? I do not know. It’s somewhere off the Gaspé Coast up north. Wait, it’s north-west from this corner of an almost continent-big country, where I’ve lived for the last three years. Or north-east. I guess it depends how you look at it, as it’s 12 hours — which is to say: half a world — away, anyway…
Miodrag Kojadinović, en serbe cyrillique Миодраг Којадиновић (né à Negotin, Serbie), est un poète, linguiste, interprète, traducteur, écrivain et théoricien de la sexualité et du genre serbo-canadien.
