"You must to understand..." part 2

The train arrived in Valjevo in the early morning and we made our way to an isolated piece of forest. We made camp close to a dammed up stream with a high platform. We spent the day in the water, jumping from the platform into the dam reservoir or jumping into another pool from atop a drizzly waterfall. Marko decided that we should shrink our group down. He broke up with Jasna. Zlata and Milosh stayed in Valjevo with family and the rest of us bribed a bus ride to Sarajevo. I threw up on that bus, into Moe's water bottle. "What the fuck man!" "What, you want me to just throw up on the floor so we can all ride around smelling like vomit?" I thought I had a good argument there, but Moe never let me live that one down. He threw the thing away. Hellride. Crossing the borders within Bosnia was the worst. The sweat hung on the sides of the bus walls and there was clear tension when the border guards ascended the steps. They didn't request, they demanded our passports. Three borders between two countries seemed a little excessive to me, but, I guess I hadn't seen yet what had happened in the region. We arrived late in Sarajevo and found some bushes to sleep under across the street from the American embassy. It was cold and miserable and a dog peed on my legs as I slept. We woke up too early and wandered around the city. Moe had made a connection with a local school so we went there and made a show. The building next door to the school was rubble. In fact, there was not a square meter in Sarajevo that didn't have at least one bullet pockmark in it. Across the street was a burned out bus that had been hit with an RPG two weeks earlier. Though the war was long over and the UN presence was thick in Sarajevo, different neighborhoods still quarreled with each other. The kids in the school were Bosnians. They loved us. Their classroom was covered in crayon drawings of destroyed buildings, of dead family. One drawing showed a happy little girl missing a limb, standing in a lime green field with a smiling sun. Marko walked on stilts. Moe and I passed clubs around three little girls. We taught a little juggling class. In the evening, we performed in the city center. The Sarajevo International Film Festival was at hand, so we were able to generate some relatively decent income with two or three quick rounds of fire and fast-talking. After our short and haphazard shows we began exploring for a place to crash. Some children wanted us to stay at their house, but that quickly turned really really weird. As we were walking, we heard a beautiful button accordion playing. In the shadows there was a woman with her squeezebox standing atop a juggler's shoulders. He was juggling clubs and passing with another guy. It was beautifully executed, but no one on the street stopped to look except us. There was no hat for money. We asked why they weren't busking. They were French and they replied that it would destroy the sanctity of their art. Unlike us, they seemed to have enough money for food and lodging without having to work the street. We drank beer with them and played a juggling game where you step into a passing pattern, take the beer from atop someone's head, sip it and put it on your own head for the next person. That night, we slept on a strange plateau overlooking the city. The wind was rampant and junkies were shooting up within twenty meters of us. We tied all our things to ourselves, but none of us slept very well. Moe had researched a local organization comprised mainly of Italians, Sprofundo. They were funded by the Catholic church but populated by the fun-loving and dance-able Italians we had all grown to love in our travels. The organization facilitated living situations where college students could stay with a family, help them with rent money and work in their neighborhoods, hospitals, etc. Marko decided he was in love with one of the Italians, Osman with another. A thick, dreidel shaped woman decided she was in love with me and began some bizarre courtship ritual within the first few hours of shared company. I dumpstered a little bag from the refuse of an abandoned building. It read "Licni Completa." Marko said it was a gas mask bag. Moe spraypainted "Circus" on one side of it and I tacked studs and spikes into it. Years later I gave it to a girl I thought I was in love with. I just hope she knows where it came from. Some of Moe's friends had arrived in town to meet up with us and do some shows. They had been touring juggling festivals all over Europe and had a great variety of equipment, including giant clown shoes, ribbon poles, animal balloons, etc. Stacy lived in Hawaii and Stan was living on a healthy nestegg. They had made a connection with Club Bok, the owner of which, Dragan, offered us the floor of his bar to sleep on. The indoor concrete was a welcome shift from the gravelly plateau of the night before. The next day we went to an orphanage for children who had suffered head injuries or shell-shock. Whatever medication they were given made them sway when they walked and caused their eyes to cross. They were like siamese cats with socks tied around their stomachs. Jugglers and clowns did little to excite them. The building they lived in looked like some kind of futuristic prison compound out of a Japanese splatter-horror film, with thirty foot walls and short clipped grass. The windows were all plexi with steel bars. We left from there to do a show at a hospital. We performed for a few children with chronic illnesses. Their joy in those moments erased for a time the horror of the orphanage. That evening, Dragan from Club Bok asked us to perform a fire show at a rave party. On the SUV ride up the mountainside, we discovered that it was being held at Tito's (former head of state of Yugoslavija prior to Milosevic) old summer home. The truck turned up a meandering dirt road and we could see the landing lights of the estate down the road. We unloaded and set up our fuel. Osman had decided he was going to be a fire-breather. "I want to be like DRAGON," and he emoted the flames coming out of his mouth with his hands. Moe and I explained the basics of fire-breathing to him and warned him not to make any mistakes. Breathing incorrectly can give you chemical pneumonia that can kill you or last for 6 months to a year. It's like a perpetual asthma attack. As the throng of teenagers and twenty somethings danced to minimal drum and bass on Tito's old deck in their knock-off turkish Tommy Hilfiger gear, we juggled fire, spat fire, twirled fire, fire fire fire. I'm not a big fan of fire, but people seem to really get into it. We took a little break and Osman and Moe walked across the field behind us to pee in the bushes. Dragan began screaming and pulling his hair. "Get back here right now, are you stupid?!" Apparently the whole area was covered in mines. That night, Dragan put us up in an apartment he owned. The place was beautiful with terra cotta everything, crawling vines, delicate flowers and good smells. The floors were blonde wood and the house had a cold fresh feel. "The Rolling Stones stayed here before," he said. He asked Stacy if she wanted to stay with him that night, but she politely declined. She told us later that evening how she was thinking of having a competition at one of the international juggling festivals where the best club juggler would have the opportunity to impregnate her. She was beautiful, getting older and had decided she wasn't going to marry, though she did want children. She was dead set on a juggler sperm donor. We street performed over the next few days and spent all our daytimes with the people from Sprofundo, Osman and Marko wooing their italian crushes, me half-avoiding my pursuer. We practiced our juggling and rope walking in their backyard, ate their food, drank their alcohol. We joked that we would change the sign on their building from Sprofundo to Hleb i Sir. They didn't seem to be averse to the idea. One night, after a little too much rakija, I made out with the dreidel girl. She started crying then walked home alone at 2am. I offered to walk with her but she blew me off, suddenly with a coy smile on her face. I didn't understand, but all the Italians said "She's crazy, but really crazy, not just crazy." Osman's force of presence rolled over the woman he liked, and the morning after their night in the field, he seemed aloof, she seemed a little regretful. Marko asked me at one point what he should do about the girl he liked. I asked him if he wanted love or sex. He only kissed her...she had braces and vicious humor, though the linguistic barrier between them was complete. I wanted to see a movie of their romance but we were leaving the morning after next. That night we performed on the street and two old women in shawls began yelling at us, "They've done enough damage already!" They screamed, crying to the sky. The police said "I'm sorry, we have to ask you to stop performing before someone makes a problem." The film festival was ending anyway, and we had our trip planned for Kosovo. Osman said he would go to Belgrade first and then to Kosovo, but we all assumed by the fears he had expressed, that he was bailing on us. Finally, it was Marko, Moe, Stacy, Stan and I who boarded that morning bus and rode it south, across all the borders again. Nearing Pristina, the bus pulled over because of a paper bag in the road. The driver stepped out and investigated, checking the possibility of a roadside bomb. It was innocent but he still drove around it. No one in the bus smiled. We had two contacts in Kosovo. One was a Sprofundo office in the Serbian enclave of Mitrovica, the other a small community center a train ride south of that city. Our bus arrived at 7 in the morning. The first thing we saw stepping out into the still streets of Mitrovica was a UN urban tank rolling down the street. We had been let out next to a Serbian nationalist store that sold posters of nationalist heroes and offensive postcards. One showed a cartoon Chetnik anally raping a crying Mickey Mouse with his enormous cock. We all felt a little uncomfortable. We found a place for coffee and breakfast, ate a bean dish, then called the Sprofundo office. When we arrived there, it turned out that the administrator for this chapter of the service organization had used the Catholic funds to open a bar. He had a large overgrown and unkempt beard and wore soiled and stained clothing. He didn't like that we were there but he felt compelled to accommodate us. We would be sleeping on the green astroturf of his open air bar in the night chill of Kosovo. The next day the local Serbian radio announced that we would be performing at Sprofundo at noon. We prepared the area, though we didn't expect as many as 150 children to show up. Our show was ridiculous and thrown together, as always, but the kids ate it up. As usual, we taught the kids various circus things after the show. I had a line of children learning back handsprings, Stan was juggling. Moe was rope walking. Marko was talking. The children gradually thinned out and finally there was only a handful. We began talking with them. One of them spoke English very well. It was the same blonde boy who would be a gun runner when I returned 2 years later. The general sentiment among the kids was of animosity against the Albanians. They wanted to grow up to be killers. Stan's camcorder recorded their glassy eyed fantasies of murder and retribution. I never got that footage. Later that day, some middle-aged men came by to meet the clowns. I was practicing melodies on a melodica and one man asked me to blow the air while he played the fingerings. Another man jumped onto his hands and down to his head, in the drying mud of the Mitrovica street. He picked his hands off the ground and and kicked his legs in the air to the beat of the lightning fast melody being played. They smiled and shook our hands with iron grips and walked off laughing. The day we had arrived, I remember no one had smiled. Some people were smiling now...some, not many. For the next two days we partied with locals, performed at a school, ate cevapcici (a type of spicy sausage) and drank homemade liquor. The kids would visit us during the day and learn little bits of things we had to show. Moe called our other contact. They resided in a small village, so we jumped on the free Nato-controlled train and headed south two hours. The train held every type of passenger, Albanian, Serbian, Gypsy (Romani), Clown and Czech drug runner. I don't know how many Czech's asked us if we were looking for weed. After a bit, some Romani passengers began talking with us. They were going to the same village we were going to and they said they knew the place we were looking for, that they would take us there. Their dress was sharp, the vests and white shirts that the bands in Guca had worn as they walked around the city playing for tourists. When the train stopped, we all carried out our gear and began following the Gypsies. We walked perhaps a mile through this odd little grass-overgrown town. Abandoned farm equipment sat lonely in front of gray-wood buildings. There were no trees in visible sight, so wood seemed out of place. "Where are they taking us?" "I think to the community center." They were, in fact, leading us to their encampment on the edge of this sparse village to perform for their kids. The children caught a distant glimpse of us and started grinning and running up to us. We apologized to the parents, saying that we were expected at the community center and that we would try to come back and make a show for these children a little bit later. When we found the place, we were told that they would not be able to accommodate us or allow us to have a show in their space. They hadn't had electricity or water for almost a week. We walked back to the encampment and made the most beautiful show I was ever involved in. We took too long to set up. We had set our blankets, coats and bags down on the ground for the children, most of whom were naked, to sit down on. They immediately sat down, all teeth bare in bright smiles. Twenty-five children holding hands and singing as Marko put on his stilts and we adjusted our dirty costumes... The children loved our little show, sang, laughed and danced when we were done. Marko said that he wished the Serbian children in Mitrovica were this joyous. We spent one more night back at Sprofundo. There was a girl I had flirted with who politely dismissed me after hours of conversation in the cold, and I went to sleep impressed by the grace she employed in rejecting my verbal advances. I'm no real Casanova. I went to sleep in my thin sleeping bag and woke the next morning knowing I was sicker than I'd been in a long time. The first day back in Marko's Belgrade apartment found us surrounded by friends, including Greg and Slatko who had not left for Romania yet, and Ivan who held no hard feelings about not coming with us. I was coughing and sweating and somewhere during that first night's party, as I was shredding my soul with violent throat spasms, Ivan said to me "Old Serbian remedy," and poured rakija on my chest and rubbed it in. I woke up the next morning with no trace of the illness. Shortly after our return, we went to Svetomir's house for a night of debauchery and swimming. He had some flimsy but deep pool sitting in his back yard. After drinks and nudity, songs and techno music, Svetomir jumped off of his back porch into the pool. We all watched in horror as his body punctured the plastic back and 500 gallons of water spilled down the hill directly into the neighbors house. They were on vacation, so we all simply retired into the house and continued our party there. We performed in the street, at birthdays, and around town until one day I opened an email from my cousin saying that my Grandpa had passed. There was no way that I could make it home for the funeral. Marko, Moe and I left for Rijeka within a day and we parted company at the infoshop there. I don't remember where Moe was headed, perhaps back to the states. I gave Marko my bike that I had left in that town and he said to me "I want to give you something, but you have to promise you won't refuse." I agreed, and he handed me his Henry clubs. I immediately started saying no, but he just held up his hands. It was too late for that. I travelled by bus and train back to Paris, where I stayed one night before flying home to Detroit Metro where my love would be picking me up.