Wakefield

by Andrei Codrescu

  “Me? I don’t even know them.”

  Susan laughs. “Well, that’s the weird thing. They have read your articles for years in National Cartographic, the only magazine they get, and they think that you’re some kind of god. When they heard that you were coming for the show, I could tell they wanted to see your performance, but they can’t admit that they both want the same thing. Maybe if you asked them personally …”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  She surprises him with a very old-world kiss on the cheek. Suddenly, the warmth of their exchanges over the past few months becomes apparent to both of them. Oddly enough, they are friends.

  The museum is closed to the public this day, so Wakefield gets a private tour from Susan and the senior curator, Doris, an older African-American woman with a kind face and snow-white hair.

  The introductory essay in the catalogue, written by a rather florid Serbian poet, explains that the ex-Communist Balklands, consisting of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Macedonia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania, are a part of the world where pre-Christian myths are still alive in the memories of the peasants, and that when the people aren’t fighting, life in these countries is sweet, like certain mild goat cheeses. Elements of the art on exhibit can be traced to ancient Greece, but there are also Turkish and Slavic influences. The communist governments attempted to erase this mythical and historical memory, but artists rescued the degraded residue of the past and combined it with contemporary elements in order to protest the authoritarianism of these governments. Most of the work in the show was created at great risk before 1989, but some pieces are more recent: for instance, a sculpture of Pan welded from scraps of the shredded Iron Curtain. The Pan of legend came from Thrace, present-day Albania. Included in the catalogue is a lively statement by an artist who spent fifteen years in a prison camp.

  Our worldview balances precariously on a head of cabbage, like the Native American world on the back of a turtle. Imagine this: a person trying to stand on a rolling cabbage, like a circus clown on a ball, while trying to retrieve a torch burning just out of reach! The Cabbage! This all-important vegetable is essential to any understanding of the Balklands. It is the flower of Eastern Europe the way garlic, as Salvador Dalí said, is “the moonflower of the Mediterranean.” Like the onion, it is perfectly postmodern: it has layers which when peeled off reveal only more layers. Naturally this criterion privileges the onion, which has only layers and no real core, and as St. Sylvester so admirably put it: “God is like an onion because he is good and he makes you cry.” The cabbage is not lachrymogenic and it does have a hard core which I, for one, love to eat raw. Nonetheless, it has enough removable skirts to please the most hardcore relativist. The cabbage is bombastic—one might compare it with a provincial bureaucrat swollen with self-importance. This bureaucrat-cabbage is a familar Balkland type, left over from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, and it has survived through communism to the present day. That such a creature, the Cabbage-Bureaucrat, persists is an homage to the infinite subterfuge and cunning of our world. In the age of the Iron Curtain, the Cabbage was supreme. During communism when only the elites dined on meat and fish, the primacy of cabbage, with its court of turnips, parsnips, and potatoes, was unquestioned by the people. In metaphor and reality, the Cabbage was on the throne, served by a faithful retinue of inmates.

  Susan watches Wakefield read, waiting for his reaction.

  “This guy is a genius,” he murmurs, feeling a little unbalanced himself by the rolling cabbage and swift metaphorical currents of the prose. “Maybe I should look at some art now.”

  Susan directs him to a wall-size painting entitled Pigs. A crowd of superpiggy pigs is gathered at the base of a mountain of cabbages. The painting is accompanied by a lengthy text projected on the opposite wall, and Wakefield wonders if every picture in the show is really worth a thousand words. The artist’s statement reads:

  The slaughter of the Pig was the climax of the year, representing the payoff for the peoples’ toil. At Christmas, even city dwellers would join together with the peasants for the slaughter and feasting. My painting asks: “How are Socialist pigs different from Capitalist pigs?” The correct answer is: “Ourpigs are different because they are SOCIALIST pigs.” Pigs are not cabbage, pigs are meat, and represent progress, therefore socialism, therefore the future utopia. Cabbage was our reality, pigs our dream. A story when I was a child said that during the barbaric days before communism, a capitalist pig ate the testicles of a baby left outside a peasant hut. The baby grew up to be a great worker who married a beautiful and loyal Party commissar who was willing to put the Five-year Plan above the bourgeois pleasure of sex.

  Other works in this room portray pigs in many media. There is a photograph of an aproned housewife displaying the carcass of a pig for inspection by a man in whose face is reflected envy, greed, and disgust, as if the man is thinking that the situation might be reversed: the pig offering for inspection the disemboweled housewife.

  “Give me a nice pork loin from the supermarket anytime,” Doris observes, delicately.

  “I don’t eat meat myself. It drives my folks crazy.” Susan rolls her eyes. “I stopped eating it in junior high, and it was the main thing we fought about until I moved out of the house. Eat, eat, eat, eat pig! It was like an obsession. My dad called me an ungrateful slut one time, he was so angry, and I was like, why is somebody who doesn’t eat meat a slut? He just kept screaming, ‘Slut! Slut!’ so I came to the conclusion that this is just the logic of our people … as you can see from this stupid war now.”

  “Oh, honey, don’t take it that way,” Doris says kindly, “don’t take it to heart. Poor folk work their fingers to the bone their whole lives to put meat on the table, and they can’t see how you can just turn down their food. It’s like turning them down, it hurts their feelings.”

  “I guess I was turning them down,” Susan admits.

  The next exhibition room, themed “Another Traditionalism,” is given over to the works of those Balklanders whose religion forbids the consumption of pork. The focus is on sheep instead, treated with the same hunger and awe, but in a less realistic style. The sheep in these works are quasi-abstract. There is, for instance, a ceramic globe under a sapphire spotlight, its surface decorated with what looks like elaborate script, but the “writing” is, on close inspection, really scores of sheep being sacrificed by figures holding tiny gleaming knives.

  The next room contains a particularly complex sculptural object, a grotesque hybrid of cabbage, pig, and sheep, from which flutters a banner inscribed We Had an Avant Garde! We Are Durably Modern! Between the reality of cabbage and the dream of meat, Surrealism has erected a flag.

  Wakefield wonders how Susan has dealt with all these competing interests; curating this show must have been difficult for her, and he tells her so.

  “I had to do it, but only a little for myself. Until this war, Serbs and Croats and Bosnians all went to different churches but got along fine. Well, we didn’t. I told you my father wasn’t a believer, but none of that mattered. There were a lot of marriages like my parents’. We had the Yugoslav ethnic festival in June, everybody came. Now they are all fighting, people have been knifed, Mommy and Pop don’t speak …” She stops herself and wanders to the next room.

  Wakefield follows at a discreet distance. The exhibition continues with the ubiquitous materials of life under Communism, namely iron (or steel), cement, and cigarettes. There’s a tangle of barbed wire in the middle of the floor. Wakefield steps carefully around it. A panel lettered in black Constructivist script is propped against it, which reads:

  The Iron Curtain was made out of barbed wire, the barbed wire of the border, the prison camp, the factory. Iron, the product of heroic workers, was Stalinist manna. We were taught that in the coming Socialist Eden all one had to do was open one’s mouth and bolts and screws would pour out of it. Barbed wire was our crown of thorns.

  There are mutilated busts of revolutionary “fathers,�
� and a statue of Stalin that’s been smashed into a cube by a car crusher. The air is intentionally dusty, to recall the industrial pollution of Communist cities. Susan reads aloud yet another statement:

  The Iron Curtain was made of cement. Rivers were dammed with cement, mountains were covered with cement, the heroes of revolutionary history were cast in cement. Cement represents the qualities the regime desired to foster: hardness and intransigence, in contrast to the undesirable qualities of flexibility and sensitivity, which were bourgeois. Hardness and Intransigence, together with their little brother, Vigilance, formed a masculine trinity, and the hard, intransigent, vigilant worker was our mascot. In the sexually repressed and conservative communist ethic, this hard worker implied also a proud, erect condition. By giving it all to the ideal, he earned a permanent place in the utopia.

  Wakefield’s head is aching from the cumulative fear that emanates from these twisted remains of a world still packed with evil energy. The Devil pops into his head. He’s smiling ruefully as if to say, “See what I mean?” Wakefield doesn’t know what he means. He can see the shimmering form. His Majesty looks very goaty in his Pan getup. There is none of the weary worldliness he’d affected when they’d first met. He looks rested and fresh. Behind him are the smoldering ruins of a recently bombed medieval town. Very painterly, thinks Wakefield, then turns back to Susan. He touches her arm in sympathy, and her dark eyes fill with gratitude. The Devil evaporates. The presence of the older woman is comforting, too. She seems in her wise way to accept the violence, the humor, the contradictions.

  Wakefield had planned to deliver the same speech he gave in Typical, thinking “Money and Poetry (with a detour in Art)” was universal enough to go anywhere in America, but he knows it won’t work. The relativity of value loses its context here; it doesn’t apply to art that witnesses and testifies, that has challenged the temporal powers, the State, the police, the prison, the mental hospital. The purpose of this art is to scream out a reality that makes no sense in a country where all is now virtual, provisional, free-floating, happy, well fed. How can he connect this art to the disappearance of the material world?

  He looks to Susan for help, realizing that she’s the bridge. His dilemma is inscribed in her psyche. Her body is nouveau American, but her wetware was forged between worlds.

  “Maybe I’ll just talk about you tonight,” he jokes.

  “If you did, it might make it easier to understand … myself?”

  “Well, a shrink I’m not. About your parents? Do you really want me to talk to them?” Wakefield figures that meeting her folks might possibly help him get ideas for a completely new speech.

  Susan grabs his hand, barely containing her excitement. “Let’s do it right now.”

  Wakefield nods, ignoring his crass instant interpretation of the phrase.

  In the car Susan calls her mother and lets her know that they are on the way. To get there Susan drives through a vast Hispanic neighborhood; she points out the big neon crown on top of El Rey Burito, a place she went when she dated Tulio, a minor-league baseball player. “I was still in junior high,” she laughs. “My parents would have died if they’d found out.” Bordering the Hispanic neighborhood is an African-American community, and other landmarks of her high-school years and a relationship with a Black guy. “They would have died twice if they’d known about him.”

  The Black ‘hood ends abruptly at a string of Polish and Ukrainian bakeries, restaurants, and barbershops, some of them with signs in Cyrillic script. The gold dome of a Byzantine church glistens at the end of the avenue.

  Susan’s parents, Slobodan and Aleisha Petrovich, live in a five-story red-brick apartment building. Susan parks in the slushy snow right in front, where her father is bent over the engine of his car, cursing.

  He straightens up when she calls his name. By way of introduction Susan says, “I brought Mr. Wakefield over to meet you.”

  Mr. Petrovich wipes his hands on a greasy rag and mumbles a greeting, sounding not at all like the great fan of his work Susan has led Wakefield to believe he is. To his daughter he says only, “Can you give me a jump? You got cables in that hippie car?”

  “Nice to meet you, Mr. Petrovich. What’s the matter?”

  “Dead battery.”

  It turns out that Susan does not, in fact, have any battery cables in her hippie car.

  “Is Mommy home?”

  Mr. Petrovich looks at her as if she’s from another planet. “Where else do you think she is? She’s always up there with her friends, my enemies.” He turns his head and spits in the dirty snow. “So you’re the guy come to talk about peace and harmony. You can’t wipe out one thousand years of history with some art. It’s all shit.” He waits with his hands on his hips for Wakefield to respond.

  “Here he goes,” Susan says tightly, determined not to be baited.

  “It’s not my intention to change history,” Wakefield answers, “but if art helps people get along, I’m all for it.”

  “Tell you what. We tried ‘getting along,’ we tried to be good Americans … but guess who doesn’t want us to get along now? I suppose you like the American bombs killing women and children in Belgrade?”

  Mr. Petrovich slams the hood shut and lays his calloused palms on it. He looks at Wakefield through the thick lenses of his eyeglasses. “Bombs killing women and children in my homeland!”

  “I don’t like bombs,” Wakefield says, “but it wasn’t just an American decision to bomb Belgrade—”

  “It’s NATO trying to save Mommy’s people,” Susan interjects.

  “Your mommy’s people!” Mr. Petrovich spits again. “That’s who started it. They were happy enough under Tito. Now they want our land, holy Serbian land!” He turns to Wakefield. “I have papers upstairs. I prove it to you!” Mr. Petrovich starts reciting a litany of dates, martyrs, and battles, only half in English.

  “Well, that’s enough for me,” says Susan. “All my life he’s an atheist commie, now he cares about stinking relics. Let’s go upstairs.”

  A burly man with a black mustache even thicker than Mr. Petrovich’s graying one approaches the car and says something in Serbian. He’s got jumper cables. They open the hood and start hooking them up. The man opens the hood of a truck parked in front of Petrovich and winks at Susan.

  “Pervert!” She blushes. “It’s the mustaches,” she explains to Wakefield, “the war of the mustaches. When these guys shave them off, there will be peace.”

  It’s a real revelation, and Wakefield can suddenly see two enormous armies facing each other: the men with mustaches against the ones without. In the sixties when Wakefield’s hair was moderately long, there was war in America over hair. The “Hair Curtain” fell between generations almost as inflexibly as the Iron Curtain between east and west. Back then, it was the longhairs versus the National Guard. Now it’s the mustachioed against the clean shaven.

  Upstairs, Mrs. Petrovich, who has been watching everything from the apartment window, has refreshments waiting for Susan’s guest: cake, tomatoes, liqueur, cheese, and a carafe of ice-cold water. The particularly pungent goat cheese sits in the middle of a wooden board with a knife stuck in it.

  “This is my mommy, Aleisha Petrovich. Mommy, Mr. Wakefield.”

  Mrs. Petrovich doesn’t hold out her hand for Wakefield to shake, but she makes a big welcoming gesture toward the couch. “Sit, sit. A shame that man. You tell me what I do.” She wrings her hands, on the verge of tears.

  “Now, now, Mommy, you know that’s how he is, a rude sonofabitch!”

  “Susan! Don’t talk like that. Maybe even he is sonofabitch, excuse us, Mr. Wakefield. You should have come here before the war. Men were polite and good, working hard, never a bad word, no cursing …”

  “Right,” mocks Susan, “drinking and gambling every night at the club, asleep all day Sunday, screaming at me and Tiffany.… He was only nice when Professor Teleskou was home.”

  “Have something sweet, Mr. Wakefield. I make.”
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br />   Wakefield takes a slice of crumbly poppy-seed cake and stuffs it in his mouth. Mrs. Petrovich pours him a glass of water. He takes a sip.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Petrovich. Susan said that you might like to see the exhibit and hear me talk tonight. I would be delighted if you did.”

  “How can I? You see that beast. If I leave the house, he thinks I’m going to Bosnia Club to make bombs against him.… Maybe I should.”

  “Please forgive me,” says Wakefield, “I’m an ignorant American. What is it all about?”

  “Land. It’s about land. For eight hundred years they take our land. They kill us.”

  “And you kill them,” says Susan. “It’s the same land. For hundreds of years you live together, then you start killing each other. Besides, you don’t live in that land anymore.”

  “It was supposed to be different in America,” sighs Mrs. Petrovich. “It was, many years. This is good place, we have festivals and everybody hate the Communists. Then the Communists go, everyone happy for maybe two months. Then this big war over there starts and everybody here starts. Now, you go out and the Negroes rob you.”

  “Here we go. The Yugoslavs kill each other, so let’s blame Black people. Mother, please.”

  Wakefield is reminded of Maggie’s description of her father’s prejudices. And that reminds him of Maggie. He imagines her lying naked on her back in the hotel room in Typical, talking about the Idiot Guides. He feels a pleasant tremor in his groin, even as he hears Susan bring her mother up short. In fact, Maggie might have said it the same way. It’s the voice of children exasperated by their parents’ prejudices but smart enough to know that it’s hopeless to argue.

  “They’re always looking for somebody else to to blame for their problems!” Susan sighs. “That’s how they think in Europe, which is why I don’t eat meat.”

  More twisted logic. Wakefield has his job cut out for him. What is he going to talk about tonight? Art? Art that was once a code for meat? Art that bemoaned the lack of meat, protested the absence of meat, made imaginary towers of meat? Maybe he should just do some kind of performance art, and speak from inside a pig carcass hanging from the ceiling with only his head sticking out. His head, looking as if it is being born from the belly of the sundered pig, recites dada poetry in an invented language to people who speak many languages but believe only in their own.