I’d like to say it was the wind that brought me to Pancevo. But maybe it wasn’t so poetic. Maybe I just scrolled airbnb without looking and then stopped, opened my eyes and bought a bus ticket for Serbia.
In the coffee shops and living rooms they tell me there’s a lack of brotherhood here, that it’s every man for himself. They’re plodding along looking straight ahead, blinders in their eyes to the people around them, afraid of getting spooked.
From the way they talk about things here it seems like the real battle is fighting against hopelessness. Fighting against the dark blanket that descends down and stifles the breath. When you let it sink too low it covers your vision and inhibits your will to stand up for yourself or even to move. You get oh so sleepy and then start to think that it’s not even worth fighting for. You’d rather just stay down and rest for a while. Only that little while turns into the rest of your life and you suddenly wake up an old man. You say I’ve been sleeping for so long and try to stand up, just you’ve lost all the energy of youth and now it’s too late. So you plop your ass back down and wait.
We were having coffee and three guys turned to me and said, “So what is it you find so beautiful about Pancevo? Why didn’t you go to Italia for the summer instead?” Truly, I know what it is the travel blogs say. I know they will proclaim the beauty of Trieste and Mykonos and the undying excitement of Antalya. When I walk down the streets of this city, you’re right, I don’t stop and gawk at the glories of the architecture or stroll through in wonder of unspeakable city scapes. I see some industrial buildings that are now empty and unused. I see some churches once tall and elegant, now weather-worn and dusty. The thing about these buildings is yeah, they’re beat up, but they’re still standing. And the way I see Pancevo is there’s a great big cement building trying to come down on all of them, but they’re not hiding under a table with their heads covered, they’re all still standing. They have their arms above heads, pushing back. Sure, maybe that’s a mode of defense, but they don’t have a super hero to save them. I guess at one point they did but he was shot in the heart on the street and that’s not exactly a Marvel storybook ending. Now you’ve got a few folks in one corner arguing there’s one way to stave off the great squash and a few others in a few other places fighting for something else, but at least despite all of that everybody’s still pushing up.
And that pushing up is what draws me to Pancevo. It’s being invited to dinner when someone doesn’t have a lot to offer or maybe doesn’t even speak English and they’re still putting all their food on the table and begging you to eat more, more, more and still finding a way to communicate that transcends language barriers. It’s going out for a drink and trying to pay and having your friends say, “Just leave it, this one’s on us.” It’s a party on the splav where they’re making music and they’re loving each other and loving music and being creative and dancing till they drop. It’s the artists who are painting and photographing and doing all those things artists do and they’re going through the hell of marketing and promotion just to share their work with the world. It’s the quiet nights at Narodna Basta, running circles around the track, trying to do pullups but never quite making it all the way up, slapping at komarci smoking a cigarette. It’s riding my bicycle I bought for 40 euros off Kupujem Prodajem, my friend translated for me, then spent his day off work to navigate the public transportation to Novi Beograd and convinced his dad to drive us the rest of the way so we could go pick it up.
When I was a child, my mother had an old door that had long since broken off its hinges and was so beat up it couldn’t be rehung on any door frame. It was uglier than sin, but she wouldn’t throw it out. My mother kept that door because she’d started a tradition. She had 10 children and every year on every single one of their birthdays, she’d make them stand up against the door, draw a little line right above their heads, and then draw a line that said how tall they were on their birthday that year. Every year I always thought I hadn’t grown at all. I was shorter than my friends, scrawnier than my enemies, and I dreaded the ritual of the marking of the door that was bound to happen on the morning of my birthday.
And yet, each year I stood up to the door, held my breath, spun around and realized I’d grown so much more than I thought I had, it’s just that it happened while I was running or eating or sleeping or playing with my friends. It happened when I wasn’t looking. No one sees the beauty in their own small hometown. Young people get the f*** out as soon as they can, they want to study and work in the big cities and the thriving places where they can get in on all the action. Or in this case, they want to leave to Germany or the United States and earn a livable wage.
Understandably.
But people here in Pancevo ask me, “Why did you come here?” It’s not in a rude way, they’re not saying anything like, get out of here or something unfriendly like that. It’s asked in a curious way, in disbelief. They can’t understand why someone would want to come to this city, but that’s because it’s their hometown. They’re in it day in and day out. They’re sleeping here, eating here, working here, and slowly pushing up at the big concrete building that’s threatening to suffocate. Maybe they don’t see how they actually grow when they’re least expecting it. Maybe they don’t stop to measure once a year and see that they got a little stronger, grew a little taller.
It might not be visible, and maybe it’s not some big change, but with each painful step of resistance comes a new mark on that old, creaky door that your mom just won’t throw away.