I decided to head east for Turkey, stopping in any country that seems cheap and intriguing along the way. At least that's "the plan" as of today.
But first there were a few places in Spain and France that I did want to see before I left. A friend from high school was studying in Madrid for the semester so I spent several days living with her host family, going around the city with her and happily staying longer than I'd meant to because it was great to see her. Madrid, too, is a great city that has won a permanently fond place in my heart if for no other reason than because on a rainy-turned-sunny morning in the sprawling grounds of the Parque del Buen Retiro, I saw an old man sitting on a bench wearing a formal, well-tailored three piece suit and a tri-cornered paper hat he'd folded out of his morning newspaper.
I went south to Granada where I met up with another friend from high school. He was leaving town for the weekend but managed, before he left, to arrange for me to sleep on the couch of a girl on his study abroad program. Then the girl went away for the weekend as well, leaving me with a bed, a kitchen, a laptop and a sunny Andalusian balcony for free. I'm not as dumb as I look, sound and act, so I stayed there as long as possible trying to figure out where to go next and visiting the nearby Alhambra Palace. While not quite as breathtaking, the palace is impressively reminiscent of the Taj Mahal, and the Alhambra does have the distinct advantage that I didn't see a single person taking a shit on it.
Since I had tickets to see FC Barcelona play Levante at Camp Nou I went to Barcelona, though only for one night initially because every hostel was booked for the rest of the week. The game was decent but the atmosphere at Camp Nou (capacity 98,000) was incredible, even if the crowd was somewhat tamer than the one at the River Plate game I went to in Buenos Aires—which is really only to say that no one was shot in the stadium before the match (it occurs to me now that I forgot to mention that before).
Within five minutes of walking around Barcelona I had stumbled across the police breaking up a nasty domestic dispute that had spilled into the street and I had also, only minutes later, had to make a quick about-face on the sidewalk to lose a crazy man who seemed to be following me. I like my cities gritty, so I took these as wholly promising signs for Barcelona, and I decided to come back for a week once the hostels had freed up again.
In the 24 hours I had in Barcelona before I left for Marseille, I managed to meet, by complete chance, Naeha's brother's two childhood friends, with whom I spent a day at Antoni Gaudi's bizarre and wonderful church, La Sagrada Familia, and park, Parc Guell. It was here, alongside the plaza atop the hill where tourists swarm with digital cameras held out at the panoramic view of the city below, that an African guy was selling 5 euro "designer" sunglasses that were spread out across the pavement in front of him.In the past decade the sight of African men on the street selling everything from watches, sunglasses, belts, curio woodcarvings to bootleg music and DVDs has become ubiquitous in Spain, when once it was seen mostly in neighboring France. Almost all of these immigrants are from West Africa, where I was just a month ago, so it was strange seeing them here in Europe, out of the context of the huge but tightly-knit families back home that I know will struggle to eat if the sun does not shine strongly enough on Parc Guell in Barcelona and Western tourists don't buy fake Gucci sunglasses to replace, for just a day, the real ones they left on their hotel nightstands this cloudy morning.
I watched the man for a few minutes, watched the tourists ignoring him, then walked over. "Only 5 euros," he told me. I greeted him in Wolof and he looked surprised, then smiled and responded in Wolof as well. "How did you know I was from Senegal?" Just a guess. We talked about Guédiawaye, the Senegalese food we're both missing, his seven years in Spain and his hope to go home as soon as he can. Seven years ago he arrived in France, but he only stayed a week: "it's horrible there." And here in Spain? "It's hard here too..." (I thought of the bar in Granada where I'd watched one of the Champion's League games, of how every one of the dozen Africans in the bar had watched the game holding their drinks and standing just inside the door or even on the sidewalk, though there was no lack of tables if they'd wanted to sit, or felt welcomed to) "...mais France, France c'est le pire." But France, he told me, echoing what I'd heard so many times in Senegal and Mali, France is the worst.
The next morning, in Marseille, I was beginning to understand what he meant. The hostel I'd booked was not in the city itself (hard, dirty, a place I like quite a bit but that many people would not), but about an hour's walk away in one of those quintessentially French small towns with just one main road, but a dozen boulangeries and at least two chocolatiers, and where no posting signs reference, in elegant cursive, laws dating from 1882. It was a charming town, and also the kind of place where French people who decry the African and Maghreb "takeover" of the big cities have grudgingly decamped to try to reconstruct their social and racial fortresses. It took me about a minute to realize that the owner of my small hostel was decidedly among their ranks.
Where's the best boulangerie in the neighborhood? "Well, you came on the worst day of the year, the Communists have closed everything." (It was May Day.) "Where are you from?" he asked me. "America is a good country, unlike France with all these Socialists who are so bad for business." His only employee spoke up to tell me that they were closing the hostel by the end of this year and moving to the Philippines-- tired, he claimed, of a government that taxes away everything they earn and fed up, too, with French women. Looking at the two of them-- the owner hardly a great catch and his employee a short, round, middle-aged chain smoker who I would soon discover felt about as much inhibition about farting loudly in the company of others as normal people feel breathing--I couldn't help thinking that it was more likely that French women are fed up with them.
They went on to tell me that they were very impatient for the results of that coming weekend's presidential elections between, as the owner put it, "Sarkozy and the fucking girl" (Socialist candidate Segolene Royal). Do you think Sarkozy will win? "I'm not sure..." he told me, adding in a tone of distinct contempt, "all the immigrants are registered to vote." Whether this was true or not, Sarkozy did indeed win, and from the looks of it France will continue to be the worst for Africans like the ones who welcomed me time and again into their homes.
That night I talked for awhile to a Chinese guy, Yang, whom I was sharing the dorm with, then climbed into my bed. Just before I fell asleep he looked over and asked me if I'd been into Marseille yet. I hadn't. "It's..." he thought for a moment, circling in on the English words to approximate the pictographs before him in his mind, "it's ... a kingdom of shit."
I could tell you about Marseille's ancient Roman port, its crumbling buildings, the man who ran down the upwards escalator in the train station yelling unintelligibly and the wedding dress-clad mannequins staring past the passing crowds of dour expressions, long moustaches and hands shoved in pockets, or I could tell you simply that Yang was precisely right.
After several days in Marseille I took the bus back to Barcelona to stay for a week this time around. I arrived at 5 AM but couldn't check into my hostel until noon, so I dropped my bag and walked the streets at random while the sun came up, eventually being given an impromptu city tour by two guys I met at a neighborhood cafe where I was starting my day and they were ending their long, apparently drunken, night.
Barcelona is infused with golden light unlike any I've ever seen. It renders the palm trees stark silhouettes at dawn, gilds the graffiti along the Port and wakens the drunks passed out on the beach next to old women going for Sunday morning swims while their old husbands play dominoes wearing bathing suits and cloaks of cigar smoke.
On long Barcelona afternoons Barcelona light casts long the shadows of people passing on the street, reveals the too-heavy concealer on the too-old faces of the hookers smoking Marlboros on the sidewalks of the red light district and warms the terrace of Gaudi's La Pedrera apartment building (its twirling stucco towers and sentries of still watchmen, its undulating lines that give the impression of flying high above the city on a dragon's back).
And on a Barcelona evening it was Barcelona light that slowly crept away from the square in front of the post office where two men shook hands to jovial exclamations of "qué tal, hermosa!"; from the street nearby where a woman pushed a stroller containing a small child and a bigger red balloon; from the guitar-strapped back of a white guy kneeling in front of the large Ganesh statue in the glass storefront of Kama Indian Restaurant and Lounge, only removing his lips from the window to cross himself; from the white hair of the shrunken woman with the small bag of groceries who stopped to ask me, in a small mumble, something I had to ask her to repeat.
On that last evening in Barcelona I reached into my pocket and gave the single euro I'd been asked for to that woman decades older than me, then walked away quickly (light receding slowly) to collapse on my back for a long time in the park across the street, paralyzed by the feeling that the world is a kingdom of shit-- majestically, overwhelmingly, beautiful, strange and sad.
Having spent a couple days trying to plan the rest of my travels methodically and rationally, having failed spectacularly, I impulsively bought a bus pass good for most of Europe that I then realized I should probably use. I looked at the list of the 40 cities the pass covered, circled six or so that sounded interesting, and connected the dots between them.
Since I was "educated" by the Berkeley public schools (too progressive and alternative to teach such traditional, purportedly obsolete subjects as world geography), I have to admit that my mental map of Europe includes little more than France, Spain, a couple major bodies of water for good measure, and an indistinct blur that eventually becomes Asia at some point or another. Or at least that was my idea of Europe until I took the bus from Barcelona to Krakow and I had some 40 hours and about 1,500 miles to learn the map of Europe as I (slowly) crossed it, and to "appreciate" what perhaps I hadn't sufficiently before: Europe is really big.
No one in their right mind takes the bus from Spain to Poland, but I'm long on time and short on money, so that's what I did. In South America I got used to taking long bus rides, and in Africa I got used to taking shorter bus rides that seemed infinitely longer, so I was confident that I could survive a 40 hour European bus ride, though I didn't expect to enjoy it.
But I did. In praise of taking the bus: the passing waters of the Cote d'Azur, the Seussian whovilles tucked into terraced Italian hillsides, the rain pouring down on Austria during the night, the strobe lights of tunnels that waken you momentarily, the church spires like overturned beets, a cathedral next to a graveyard next to a boat building workshop, a statue of Jesus crucified like a grapevine next to rows of grapevines, the lavender and poppy-dusted fields of Slovakia, the man in blue shirtsleeves riding his bicycle down a two-track dirt road, the train cars rusting in their tracks and the front yards of Poland: vegetable gardens, laundry on the line, a boy trying unsuccessfully to train a puppy.
And if I hadn't taken the bus I wouldn't have realized: that the bus will almost drive away without you when the length of rest stops are announced only in Polish; that when you open your eyes in the morning thinking about breakfast the Slovaks behind you will already be nursing tall cans of beer, or else shuffling to the bus toilet, returning minutes later with bashful grins and the smell of the cigarettes they've just smoked; that in one small village next to the garish life size Jesus statue the garish life size peasant woman statue (white and blue checkered gingham dress, white headscarf, rosy cheeks) is, in fact, very much alive-- she's watering the flowers.
Krakow is an unexpectedly lovely city, though what drew me there originally was my desire to see Auschwitz, about an hour's drive away.
In some ways Auschwitz is what you would expect: barbed wire fences around brick barracks, "hospitals" where human medical experiments were performed, firing walls, public gallows, gas chambers, crematoriums, ponds filled with human ashes and the other trappings of a profoundly depressing afternoon. If you're wondering what the hell I was thinking, I was hoping to remind you that the first Fitzgerald, my father's father, to "summer" in Spain was fighting Franco, and he later considered Communist East Germany the ideal holiday spot. So within a certain context, the fact that I went to Auschwitz on my vacation might have even been construed as familial progress towards normality. But then, by complete coincidence, I went to Auschwitz on Mother's Day.
But in another strange coincidence, the very first paragraph of the book I'm reading (Waterland by Graham Swift, it's fantastic) is the following:
"And don't forget,' my father would say, as if he expected me at any moment to up and leave to seek my fortune in the wide world, 'whatever you learn about people, however bad they turn out, each one of them has a heart, and each one of them was once a tiny baby sucking his mother's milk...'"
In some ways Auschwitz is what you would expect, but in a sense that I have trouble articulating, it was only when I was standing there that I believed that the Holocaust happened-- or that I realized that I hadn't believed, really believed, this before. Because in the end the greatest danger to our collective historical memory will not come from those who, out of ignorance or malice, would deny the Holocaust-- they are easily refuted with facts, their absurdity not to be excused but maybe pitied. What will prove more dangerous in the end is the best of our intentions-- that in our attempts to convey the full horror of the Holocaust, in our desire that it be repeated "never again," we will rarefy that event to such an extent that we will believe groundlessly that it will never happen again simply because it could never happen again.
In popular consciousness the Holocaust (note the big H) looms so dangerously large that it is not until you are standing in Auschwitz that you realize its human scale-- that the grounds of concentration camps could be walked fence to fence in under 15 minutes, that those fences were only as high as normal fences, that those torturous "medical experiments" were performed in buildings that look not unlike Connecticut Hall, and that millions of people were systematically murdered not in the black and white of old newsreels (over six decades back on that time line of human history that we imagine reaches ever forward towards progress), but in the full color of our present world (with its present holocaust in Sudan). For indeed long before the Holocaust there were other holocausts, and after the Holocaust there were holocausts that followed, follow and, it seems, will follow.
In the museum that today occupies the site where the Auschwitz camp once stood are displayed dozens of piles (floor-to-ceiling, many stretching 25 feet wide) of items the Russians found when they liberated the camp: empty canisters of zyklon b pellets, shaved human hair, suitcases marked with family names, eyeglasses, crutches, back braces, artificial limbs, mugs, bowls and shoes.
Outside the museum today, along the 3km road connecting Auschwitz I and the extension camp Auschwitz II - Birkenau (built when the Nazis felt that human beings were not being exterminated quickly enough) there is a pigeon lying decapitated on the sidewalk.In the spring the woods bordering Birkenau are tranquil and beautiful. In Krakow Oskar Schindler's former factory is notable only for its banality (empty offices with views of the adjacent buildings now housing an hp computer factory, the smell of bread baking in the neighborhood). One of the few remaining fragments of the gray walls that once contained Krakow's 60,000 Jews in the Podgorze ghetto (57,000 would not survive the war) is today the backdrop for a quiet children's park.
I sat on a bench one afternoon facing that wall-- facing a small boy talking to his grandmother and his sister rocking on a toy horse nearby. It was a Pole, I remembered, who exhorted us to "praise the mutilated world," but watching that scene it was hard to know whether to feel hopeful or simply dejected. Whether we are able to believe it, really believe it, or not, holocausts happened and will happen, and as much as it should not life goes on-- and on the whole really never so much as pauses even while they are happening (Birkenau trees grew, morning bread was baked).
Life goes on: Polish children will laugh and play in a ghetto-turned-playground, while the barefoot children of about their age in Mali and Senegal could still, truth be told, get a lot of wear out of the concentration camp victims' shoes on display in the Auschwitz museum (it's been cloudy in Barcelona).
Life goes on, and never really stops as it should for holocausts, because holocausts are human events carried out on a human scale. And human beings (we of mother's milk) are so flawed, so unintelligently designed that we cannot even comprehend the evil we are capable of inflicting on each other. We all, at some time, act no better than the majority of the perpetrators of holocausts-- not the Hitlers and Pol Pots, but the soldiers and citizen collaborators who enabled them. It is not really the malice displayed in holocausts that makes them relatively anomalous events in human history, but rather their extraordinary coordination of the disorganized, static, apparently small-scale pettiness and cruelty of which we are all guilty in our lives.
Even when we try to comprehend this evil we have done collectively to ourselves, we are reduced to mourning piles of shoes to suggest (this is all we can bear, suggestion) those who once filled them.
And even after hours wandering the grounds of Auschwitz contemplating the murder of millions of human beings, it was only a decapitated pigeon on the sidewalk that finally made me feel viscerally sick.
And after an hour watching kids playing in front of the remnants of the ghetto walls, I stood up and walked home. Because big drops of rain had started falling from the sky. Because there was no sense in getting sick; I had things to do the next day.
Love,
Fitz
