"You must to understand..." Part 1
"You must to understand, we are serbian." Osman was a 6"5' 240 pound juggler I met at a trumpet festival in Guca, a small town in the middle of Serbia. "We were under the Turks for 450 years." He would take a loaf of bread, tear it apart like it was a small animal in his monstrous paws, and pour a liter of milk on it. "Osman must to eat." We told him that's how he should declare his seemingly insatiable hunger.
It isn't exactly clear to me how I ended up in Serbia. School and Capoeira had been stressing me out, so when I was invited to join a traveling bike circus, the Cyclown Cirkus, I took them up on it. I died my hair blue with a red triangle in the front and red curls down the sides.
I flew into Paris and stayed with an older Jewish woman who showed me some churches and the Salvador Dali museum. She practiced her sparse English. After a day of wandering, I took the train to Venice to meet up with the Cyclowns. I arrived in the evening and decided to sleep on the station steps with other traveler kids. One particularly talkative young man was playing horrible pop music on an acoustic guitar. Some trippy people began playing percussion nearby and spinning fire so I grabbed my juggling torches and asked them if I could use their fuel. They were from Budapest and were headed to Morocco to street perform and buy instruments. They were impressed by my performance and asked me to join them. I told them I would go if my circus didn't find me.
The next morning, the whole troupe of us walked across the bridges over the canals to a little park to waste away a couple hours eating breakfast and practicing circus crap. At about noon, I heard a sour trumpet play and the spindly sound of a melodica. It was the Cyclowns searching me out. I bid my Hungarian friends adieu and hopped on the train to the first station out of Venice. The Cyclowns were camped in a small junkie park waiting for some of the clowns to return from dumpstering and clowning around.
As I was sitting, eating a sandwich in this little park, a very odd thing happened. Three tough guys were sitting on one of the benches, smoking cigarettes and looking like stereotypes. A skinny man on a bicycle rode up, dismounted, picked the bike up and swung it at the largest man sitting in the center of the bench. He rose to the occasion and grappled the bike. It was like watching a velocipede version of American Gladiator as they wrestled with this bike between them. The larger thug-looking man finally shook the smaller man off. The loser backed out of the park, flustered and yelling obscenities as the thug sat on the bench and leaned back with his hand resting on his trophy.
I bought a 100 euro bike at a local shop, using my poor Portuguese in vain with the shop owner who refused to sell to me but finally acquiesced at the urging of one of the shop techs.
The circus, 12 people or so, took to the road close to dusk, heading north toward Trieste. We performed a few times every night in some city or village center and sometimes during the day in an elementary school or social program for kids. We had a bike dedicated to dumpstering and every grocery store we passed, it would stop and look in the trash for edibles. We camped anywhere, ate food cooked over a fire, slept in sleeping bags on the bare ground. We woke up, drank coffee and ate small "chalky biscuits" or cookies and took to the road again.
Our show was a lumbering performance, sometimes an hour and a half long. I juggled and passed fire and knives in the show, sometimes as the finale if the normal finale was absent. All the music was live: accordion, clarinet and percussion.
One night, we camped at an old farmhouse. I woke up in the morning before everyone else and trained Capoeira for a spell on some broken concrete overgrown with queen anne's lace. Something about the farmhouse drew me and I made my way up some rickety outdoor stairs and opened the door into a room in disarray. Rats had built a penthouse out of foam in the middle of the room. The wall was riddled with holes and dappled with red spraypaint, or...ok, it wasn't spraypaint. Two people had been executed in that room, shot multiple times. On the floor where their bodies fell, red paste had clumped into a rust-colored mosaic of dustbunnies, chipped plaster and bug husks.
We crossed the border from Trieste into Slovenija and rode quickly to Rijeka, Croatia. From there we rode south through some fossil-filled, loose rock hills with long descending meadows to perform at a little crust punk festival in a smaller town. One of our crew welded racks onto my bicycle. We spent the night on cold-sweating concrete. The 2000 year-old part of the city was holding a folk festival so they hired us to perform up and down the ancient rock streets. From our dressing room in a little old theatre, we could see thirty 12 year old girls dressed in folk outfits dancing the Macarena in front of their families. We did 6 or 7 short shows that night and retired to have some free pizza, compliments of the city.
At ten at night we settled and started drinking on the steps of a little folk museum. One of us was playing accordion, another trumpet. I had my pandeiro (brazilian tambourine). The little congregation included clowns and crusty punks and a couple locals. I looked up to see a shorter, round man in a large cowboy hat with a waxed moustache, wearing plastic silver guns at his sides and a Sheriff's badge. He walked up to the accordion player and wagged his finger in the rhythm, as if directing the tempo. His eyes moved side to side faster than his head as if he was ultimately in control of this musical situation. Another taller and older man walked up to our trumpet player and asked if he could play the horn. Our accordion player began "when the saints come marching in" and the trumpet picked the tune up. Within two minutes, a 6 piece Dixie-land brass band had showed up and replaced us. The Sheriff was in fact the conductor. Everyone danced and flipped around, wiggled, and drank until the cops showed up. The Sheriff gave a look like "Let me handle this," and talked to the police as the music played on. They left with our promise that we would finish in 10 minutes. Two hours later, they returned and left again with the same promise given. An hour later they returned, and the lead trumpet segued into a minor reprise of "When the saints come marching in." Everyone milled about on the deck of the old museum and I talked at length with the trumpet player. They had been playing dixieland jazz for 40 years, had toured in the US and were delighted to have had this odd opportunity to meet a punk rock bike circus.
From that town we began island hopping off the coast. Water on the mainland was free but on the islands the prices were steep. Our audiences were Austrians and Italians on vacation. Our group decided to take a few days in a particularly charming seaside village and we pitched our tents in a little park with clearly visible "no camping" signs. The clowns lounged and chilled. We ate our chalky biscuits and drank beer, walked on ropes tied between trees and practiced new juggling patterns. The first night we performed on the street to packed in and inebriated crowds.
The next day we sent a clown to find some water. He returned with full jugs and a request from a local restaurant that we attend a free calamari dinner in our honor. The fifteen of us made our way to the restaurant. Our host inquired why some of us weren't eating the spread of fish and calamari in front of us. When the vegetarians gave their explanation, he prepared a second dinner for them. The payment he requested was "A kiss from a beautiful woman," and he pointed at his cheek. Two of the clown girls kissed either of his cheeks simultaneously. His deep brown eyes welled up and he said "I wish I could do what you are doing right now."
Most of us were enamored by this little town, but a couple of us (including me) started feeling stir crazy. The whole group decided to move out one morning. On the way, we gorged ourselves on fresh figs that we thought were wild. When we reached the ferry, most of our group decided to turn around and go back to the little town to vacation for a couple more days. Four of us pushed on. The group that returned to the little town was fined 2000 euros for camping, I think at the prompt of whoever owned those fig trees we plundered.
My friend Moe and I split from everyone to travel to Serbia. We promised we would return after our little stint, although I think Moe had had enough of the unorganized punk rock lifestyle. I was along for the ride. We left our bikes at an infoshop/art space in Rijeka and took the old communist trains, slow and smooth around the jagged rocks and old abandoned 2 man bunkers to Zagreb. We transfered there onto an even older and more beat up train headed to Serbia. It was an all-nighter with big, square-headed border guards barking at us for our passports, wafts of cigarette fog and the eerie sound of station engineers tapping every train wheel with a hammer, listening for any variation from the clean "piyang" of a healthy metal disk.
We arrived in Belgrade at six in the morning, stumbled out of the station. Everything in Serbia seemed to work differently from the EU. Moe had been studying a phrase book and using bits of Croatian. He kept saying "Bok" as hello, a Croatian custom. "Dobar dan" would have been a little more appropriate. We got on a bus for Guca, a village that once a year is descended upon by a hundred thousand Serbians, thirty thousand Romani people and a few thousand foreigners. The bus was a hellride. Every Eastern European bus is. Nobody smiled except the drunk kids who were on their way to the festival. Moe and I were afraid of speaking in English since it hadn't been so long since Nato (under American discretion) had bombed these people. I spoke in bad portuguese and Moe spoke in bad Spanitalian. We found some unhappy medium of functionality in our paranoia and tried to suppress the pukey feeling from fumes leaking into the back of the bus.
It was heavenly exiting the bus in the town outside of Guca. There was a shuttle into the festival, but it was only midday so we decided to eat at a little bar. A man in handmade clothing and an ancient hat, his long beard waving around his belt line, was pulling a bow across a one stringed gourd instrument and singing a microtonal melody in a verse rhythm. His eyes looked far away and he would flash a complete smile bearing large white teeth in his crescendos.
Two children walked toward the gray wood bench where we were sitting and drinking coffee. The girl was no older than 6 and she was grinning cheek to cheek. She said something when she neared us then deftly snatched my little bag from next to me. I bolted after her and she accidentally dropped it, turned around to grab it but I was too close by then. The two children laughed and ran away.
"Fuckin Gypsies," a guy at another table said. The two were Slovenian and had come here for the festival as well. We drank beer with them and rode with them in a taxi into Guca. As we pulled around the bend, we could see plumes of smoke from burning trash and campfires and from whole cows and goats roasting on spits. The fields were filled with winnebagos and tents and 100 different songs were mashed together as the sound rushed up the hill toward our haphazardly driving yugo. The road was barely wider than two of our little car and the driver didn't slow down as he turned around the cliff edges.
"This fucking festival it is fucking great. Everyone is drinking and there will be a lot of bitches. It is great." The Slovenians were getting on our nerves a little bit. They payed the majority of the fare when the taxi unloaded us at a bustling little intersection where meat was frying everywhere around us. We told the Slovenians we would meet up with them in a little bit, that we were going to find someplace to camp. We ditched them.
That night we slept outside of the town on a slope under deciduous saplings. We hadn't figured it was going to be so cold. It was the end of July and we thought that since where we were going was more south than Trieste, where we had slept on the seaside, that this would be warmer. I had a sheet and no sweater. I half-buried myself in leaves trying to stay warm. In the morning a farmer yelled something at us and laughed, shaking his head. Apparently, we hadn't gotten the memo stating that there was a designated camping area.
I dusted myself off. We ate some bread and peanut butter and started walking into town. As we neared the festivities, we switched to our Portutalianish dialogue. We maintained it for a spell.
"Hey, are you guys Americans?!" We were mortified. The voice was an American's and we could only imagine that the whole of Serbia was suddenly aware that they had been infiltrated.
Well, as it turns out, Serbians could really care less if you're American. In fact, they didn't care that our new friend Greg's traveling partner, Zlatko, was Croatian. Wasn't there some war that just happened? Greg had been traveling through Albania, Macedonia and elsewhere, mostly by himself. He had with him a clarinet, though his main instrument was sax in a New York marching band. He was in Guca learning traditional melodies from many of the Romani musicians. He was excited to see us with our juggling equipment.
"Hey, I want to introduce you guys to the only jugglers in Serbia." What an honor!
We came to the real camp and met Marko, Ivan and Osman. They were outside their tent juggling and after a bit of excited conversation, we began juggling together. Marko had a set of Henry clubs, top of the line from a girlfriend of his from Italy. They were beautiful, jade and light green on a silver mylar frame. It seemed like every throw with them was perfect.
I knew I was going to be sick. I prepared by eating a banana and drinking almost a liter of water. I sat against the chain link fence and watched smoke roll through the crowd. Every time one of my new friends asked if I was ok, I reassured them that I knew what I was doing. "Don't let a gypsy steal your shoes." I had this all planned out. The first puke was five feet to the left, next five to the right, three to the left, three to the right. More water, left, right, left right. I slept black that night but never threw up from rakija again.
They shoot an artillery cannon off at 7 in the morning on the final day of the festival. The trumpet competition starts around noon and lasts until midnight. Each band plays three songs and at the end of the competition, some musician is awarded the "Golden Trumpet" award. Boban Markovic (best described by Miles Davis: "I didn't know you could play a trumpet like that") wasn't allowed to compete anymore so the city had constructed a fifteen foot bronze statue of him in the middle of town.
We hitched with some French kids back to Belgrade and moved into the apartment of Marko the pancake clown. Greg and Zlatko accompanied us, as did Osman. Marko lived with his sister in a tiny space in a huge old communist tenement building. He had two dogs who would chase cars during the day. I would watch them from the 9th story window, some of the cars swerving in hopes of hitting them, but the dogs were too good. In the evening, they would come in and eat the pot of rice and tuna that Marko had prepared for them on his stove. I eyed that dog food longingly.
We spent the next few days walking around the city, planning a little circus tour to Sarajevo under our new name "Cirkus Hleb i Sir," (the Bread and Cheese Circus). There are bread stands everywhere in Belgrade and cheese is inexpensive, so we thought the name apropos as that was our diet. Marko and his sister made pants and juggling balls. We walked around the city and Marko told me about how during the bombing, everyone wore shirts with bulls-eyes on them. He had left during part of the war, had skipped a couple borders, had found his way back into Belgrade in time to help firebomb the central police station and watch the slow painful resurrection of Serbia begin. He and most of his generation had a hard time referring to their country as anything but Yugoslavia. Their hearts were broken by the dissolution of that ideal and, at the time, they were in strict denial of a Serbian perpetrated genocide.
They were the most cosmopolitan of the communist countries, the gateway between the West and East. The land of suave spies and new wave music, good white rasta bands and groundbreaking artists...they couldn't fathom what levels of treachery that the horrible acts in Bosnia and Kosovo implied. It seemed like everyone I met was an artist, musician, writer.
Marko's analysis spoke of the conflict between the city and the country in former Yugoslavia. Pockets of militants would clash and with little or no government or outside influences, they waged wars on neighboring villages, or, oftentimes, their own villages. This was complicated by the Mujahadeen entering the Bosnian fray, the military bombardment of Sarajevo, the mismanagement by Nato of the "peacekeeping" missions. It was all a big mess and every sentiment I heard seemed paradoxical and conflicting.
On our walks, more than once a Palacinke (crepe or pancake) stand manager would run out from his shack and shake Marko's hand, beg him to come work at this stand. Marko would decline or say that he was really busy. With his colorful look and pancake-flipping skills, he was a hot commodity on the streets of the capital city.
After a few days we departed. Our initial band of travelers included Moe and I, Zlata and her boyfriend Milosh, Jasna (Zlata's sister and girlfriend to Marko), Marko and Osman . Ivan stayed in Belgrade because Marko considered him to be too much of an alcoholic. Greg and Slatko left for Romania to attempt to satisfy Slatko's desire to find a Romanian gypsy bride.
We bribed the train station doorman and he gave us entrance tokens at a discount. We snuck onto our train, carrying stilts, unicycles, instruments, dressed in our clown outfits. We found an empty car and piled everything in, closed the curtains and waited for the train to start. It rolled for a good 2 hours before a porter came along.
"Tickets?" She knew when she opened the door we had none. In Serbia, one rarely paid legitimately for travelling. Bribes were the order of the day and most workers were inclined to accept them.
Marko chimed in: "We are but poor circus performers travelling to perform in an orphanage. We have little money, will you accept this 500 dinars as payment?" The total cost of our tickets would have been something like 2500 dinars or more.
Zlatas boyfriend was holding an acoustic guitar. Marko juggled 3 balls. The porter took a moment to consider the proposition.
"Ok, but he has to play 'Winds of Change' by the Scorpions."
Without hesitation, Milosh broke into the song:
"I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change..."
The porter sang quietly to herself until the chorus. The whole car broke in:
"Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change..."
...with Zlata singing the second voice backup. The guitarist even played the solo perfectly.
The porter, satisfied, took the money and continued on. We stayed in the car and drank rakija.
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