Koko & The End Of History

Once, the carriage would have been painted in triumphal red, but what remains of its past vivacity has faded into a diluted postmodern pseudo-red. It must have been around when the twenty-first century was still a futurist’s dream. Windows streaked with dust. Cracked panes. And at the front, an oily coloured heavy metal engine, rusted a little, the colour of autumn leaves. If Trotsky had been destitute, this might have been the type of ragged locomotive he rode to the frontlines of utopia. Its body is overwhelmed by graffiti, a mosaic of symbols that I cannot decipher. A funereal grey face dominates the back end, eye sockets empty and blind, and not so much a mouth to speak of, but two lips painted so as to remain forever closed. I wonder if this is the complete motif of communism that I’ve been searching for all this time.

A shrill whistle escapes into the distance, interrupting the current of my observations. A smoker in the window retreats into the shadow within where the ember of his cigarette glows briefly, like a fleeting miniature sun in the interior darkness, before disappearing. I board the train. There’s an eerie quality to the light in the aisle. Spotlights in the ceiling flicker on and off, adding density to the shadows. Sliding doors separate each compartment from the tired light of the aisle. Inside each compartment, two rows of three large leather-bound burgundy chairs face each other. I step inside the first empty compartment, place my pack on the rack above a window seat, and sit down, letting my head fall back into the wide embrace of the headrest and rest my eyes. Traces of memory appear in the darkness behind my eyelids, fragments of a previous life, reminders, renunciations, regrets, fleeting illuminations that appear like frozen scenes in a black room before they recede into the vault of the past.

I think about my trip and what has brought me to this country, trying to find a way to tie a knot between the past and an undefined point on tomorrow’s horizon. In my own way I’m an exile in flight from a home I know too well, a dead-end job, and a chapter of depression that has left me lachrymose and deeply dubious about the authenticity of anything. I wonder why I’m really doing this, why I’m choosing to spurn the familiar, why I’m revolting against suburbia and betraying the expectations that have been a reliable and definite channel for my energy all these years. I breathe deeply, aware of my diaphragm rising and falling, losing my awareness to the gentle oblivion of metaphors: I’m striking out, throwing off the curtain cast over me in the name of love, a curtain that has grown heavy, like iron, on the continent of my soul, so much so that I can’t tell relative from absolute any more. I’m on a road to nowhere in particular, confronting this spiritual mid-youth crisis head on – existential pang - chasing an inkling that the guiding principle of the cosmos is uncertainty. In the past, I was lost. Now, in the present, reconciliation.

A hand lightly taps my shoulder. I open my eyes and see a pair of kind eyes. They stare into mine, petitioning, shining like a pair of stars that have escaped their constellation. They belong to an old woman, her head wrapped in a headscarf, her wrinkled hands clasped in supplication under her chin. She flicks her eyes in subtle suggestion between her bag and the luggage rail. I smile, reach down, lift. It’s surprisingly heavy. The flap loosens and reveals dozens of potatoes, plastic bags filled with herbs, and a woodblock of a Christian saint replete with a tonsured scalp, golden halo, and admonishing eyes. She sits down, softly murmuring what I can only presume is gratitude in this language I can’t understand.

I take my seat next to the window. Still she watches me with those starlit kind eyes. She sits in the oversized leather seat, woolen clothes wrapped loosely around her diminutive frame, wrinkled hands still clasped together as if in prayer. A saintly sight. I smile and, when she smiles back, her eyes and whole face smile too, folding the loose skin of her years into a field of wrinkles arrayed like furrows left in the wake of a plough.

Three men, broad-shouldered and unshaven, enter the compartment. Each with colossal hands, fingers calloused, hardened by labour, knuckles flat and swollen. I look at my own, delicately folded on top of my book. I am the working man’s bourgeoisie. They take their seats, reciprocate the pious smile of the old woman, and turn to study me. I smile and immediately sense how awkward I must look. If I trigger any sort of reaction in them, it’s indiscernible, and they immediately launch into a raucous conversation without me. Peals of thunderous laughter. Stentorian hands crash down on thighs thick like tree trunks until even the old woman cannot contain herself and her reservation gives way to a tiny melody of high-pitched laughter like sparrow song. I smile awkwardly.

A silhouette appears in the doorway and the chorus of laughter I’m mute to dies down. Relief. I silently thank the interloper. The three men greet the newcomer in coarse voices and he responds in a hoarse one, barely louder than a parched whisper. As he steps from the shadow of the aisle into the compartment, light falls on his face. He looks like an out-of-time Tolstoy: prophetic beard, deep wrinkles, wise countenance, sad knowledgeable eyes that scan the far distance. He takes the one remaining seat out of my line of sight. The train begins to move. The conversation begins again in earnest. I watch out of the window as the platform disappears.

A new world passes across the window - a panorama of discovery flowing backwards in time. Tenement blocks twenty stories tall the colour of lingering jaundice flow into small metal metropolises, factory complexes unmanned, deathly still, doors and windows boarded over. Tools abandoned. Coal piles untended. Urban scenes collapse into a wide emerald valley glistening and bathed in golden light. Starlings dance between the farmhouses. Forests bristle on the skyline. A wall of mountains runs alongside its course and on beyond the frame.

I open my book and leaf through a few pages, but I cannot read. I switch attention to the scenes in the compartment instead. Once ready, I resume my awkward smile. One of the men talks loudly and in a serious tone. The others listen, occasionally intoning their own views. There is an economy of syllables in their responses that insinuates a seriousness in the topic under discussion. The men laugh, but their laughter is starved of the softness of comedy. It is a quiet sardonic laughter, brittle and full of scorn. I watch the old woman. She says nothing, only sits in her saintly way, smiling.

The man sitting opposite me comes to life, tearing his eyes away from the mountains beyond the window, exhausting a monologue as he gesticulates, striking the edge of one hand against the palm of the other with arresting thuds. I don’t speak. I don’t move. I simply stare at the scenes brought to life in the window glass and listen to the conversation’s interplay. I have no idea what they are talking about, but I feel drawn into their meaningless narrative, as if somehow I have heard this conversation numerous times before.

The old man who looks like Tolstoy begins to speak. His voice resonates with age and authority. When he stops speaking, he falls silent and assenting murmurs fill the compartment. A sombre quietude ensues. It is silent for some time.

A scruffy man dressed like a conductor opens the sliding doors and leans his torso into the compartment. Behind him in the aisle, a group of five men stand in a line at an open window and smoke. The other passengers in the compartment show their tickets to the conductor. He turns to me and I retrieve the ticket from the book resting on my knees and I hand it to him. He examines it, his brow furrowed in evident confusion. He looks at me, fixatedly. “This is not a real number.” His tone is matter of fact. Unfriendly. I try to respond, but all I can manage is a pathetic whimper, like an old dog which hasn’t been given its dinner.

I look around the compartment. The three men watch me with stoned eyes and say nothing. The old woman smiles her saintly smile. The silhouette remains hidden. “I’m… erm… sorry. Let me… Receipt. The receipt.” I rummage through my pockets for it. I’ve boarded the wrong fucking train! Why did I all that demon rakya last night? I find the receipt and hand it tentatively toward the conductor. “Kičevo?” He reads the receipt with the rehearsed nonchalance of a newspaper editor and hands it back to me. He doesn’t say a word. The man opposite me leans across, brandishing his ticket. He clears his throat. “This is real number!” I take a look at his ticket. Angst rising and I cannot tell the difference between the two tickets. Both of them are green. Both of them are written in Cyrillic. Both have the texture of blotting paper and bring back strange memories of learning to use a fountain pen in primary school, doing nothing to assuage my own suspicions of my bourgeois appearance. It might say ‘Destination: Kičevo’, but this train could be going anywhere. Sarajevo? Istanbul? Moscow?

“Blagodoram.” I look at the conductor who, I hope, senses the helplessness of this foreigner. He looks at the ticket, fixes a stern gaze on me, back to the ticket. He grunts, returns it to me, turns around, lights a cigarette and joins in the conversation with the men at the window who laugh uproariously. I say blagodoram again to the man with a real number on his ticket. He shrugs with indifference, stands up, and leaves the compartment. The other two men follow, nodding respectfully to the man like Tolstoy in the corner and the old woman whose laughter sounds like birdsong. I turn to both of them and smile. The smiles they return are generous, but secretive, as if they are aware of a universe of rules and numbers that I clearly am not.

The significance of the landscape seems to have changed now that the train could be going just about anywhere. The guiding principle of the universe is uncertainty, I remind myself. I will deal with the lack of a destination with when I arrive. For now, this compartment seems certain enough.

I watch the world beyond the window glass. Tractors move across the fields. Faceless figures kneel in the soil. Dogs wander beside the rail track, lifting their muzzles to the sky searching for scents in the wind. The sun’s rays glint against an alabaster minaret rising at the foot of a mountain. Soon, scenes of devastation press against the window pane. Dilapidated farmhouses riddled with bullet holes. Stone walls scarred and maimed. Pools of water where shells once pummelled the ground. Red tiles scattered around like forgotten jigsaw pieces, pieces of people’s lives broken apart and never pieced back together. Everywhere, homes abandoned, nature reclaiming the crumbling walls and fallen rooves.

The train slows and comes to a halt next to an empty waiting room, walls charred and half-collapsed, its interior full of graffiti and discarded bottles. A graveyard just beyond the platform. I stare reservedly and try to reconcile the civil war I read about before coming here – the abstract war of the academics – with the bullet holes, the graves, the desolation. The train pulls away from the platform and I try to forget the uncomfortable reminder of what war is to those who were consumed by it.

Droplets fall like tears against the glass. I watch the long trails they leave behind. They intersect, lose their origin, break apart in the wind as the train gathers momentum.

I step out of the sliding doors into the aisle and light a Lucky Stike. Beyond the fields that run from the rail to the horizon, the valley lengthens under the great shadow of rainclouds overhead. Like fleeting empires of night. Thin lines – a rainshower - fall from the sky like the faintest strokes of a sketch artist’s pencil. Cold water splashes on my forearm. Huddled forms move on the valley floor under the clouds. What a surreal sight this lone carriage must look to them as they till the soil and endure the rain. What do they make of this colourful blur of contradictions, the travelling contradiction inside, moving back and forth across their lives on its fixed line? And what hidden meaning does the grey mask of tragedy spray painted on its side wordlessly communicate to them?

A memory of what the waiter in the capital told me last night. In Yugoslavia, everyone was brother and sister. No Serb, Bosnian, Croat, Albanian. No Macedonian, Herzegovinian, Montenegrin, Slovenian. No Orthodox Christian or Catholic or Muslim. When communism ended, people only saw differences. Only division. People forget that in Yugoslavia, people were different – yet brought together by a greater idea of ourselves. Life changed after the republic broke down. Whatever its flaws, people were happier under communism. I turn over each word in my mind. The tone of his voice. The knowing look in his eyes.

Darkness envelops the carriage as the train enters a long tunnel. A greater idea of ourselves. The words assume an entity of their own in the acute darkness. I imagine the blind eyes on the exterior of the train, staring into the darkness, searching… but for what? Does this mouthless spectre stare blankly from the past, watching people’s lives in the present? Or is it the present which is blind and without vision, colours washed out, and who does the present belong to anyway - the victors or the dispossessed, those on the side of destiny or those proven to be wrong? Perhaps this ghost and all ghosts like it remind us that, like our journeying between the light and the shadow, our ideas too are bound by mortality.

The old woman is no longer in the compartment when I step back inside. The old man has moved and now sits in the seat opposite mine, tapping his fingers, eyes scanning the distance. I slide the door closed. He turns to me and smiles. I open my book and begin to read. The old man who looks like Tolstoy intently studies the book’s front cover. I try to ignore him and continue reading. I read several sentences, but my brain won’t register any of the words, like light beams travelling unobstructed through empty space. I look up and, as anticipated, the old man still squints at the front cover.

“The End of History.” He says, breaking the silence. He rolls the R. Cntract his vowels. “History is over. I am satisfied this has been brought to my attention. Now I am able to relax” He laughs softly, tapping his fingers on his knees. He falls silent again. I carry on reading.“The ideas that govern us, like every empire in the history of mankind, rise and fall.” The sound of his voice startles me. I close the book. “History does not end, but, like the stops on this journey, history must occasionally slow to a brief pause before it continues in its journey towards its destination. Yet, there is a difference between history and this train: the train of history never actually stops.”

He continues to smile and then gazes longingly out of the window.

“It seems the bear is getting married,” he says, pointing outside the window.

I see torrents of rain falling diagonally beyond his outstretched hand.

“Sorry, I don’t understand your meaning. The bear is getting married?”

“Yes, the bear is getting married. It is a proverb in this country. Outside the window, what do you see? A rainstorm bears down on us when only thirty minutes before now, the sky was the colour of lapis lazuli, bereft of clouds. Outside the window, there is the theatre of Mother Nature in all her glory. The clouds conquer the mountain peaks. Today, the winds are mercurial. The rain falls like a shower of arrows. But tomorrow, who knows?. When the weather is like this, I like to imagine Poseidon thrusting his trident skyward towards Apollo’s celestial domain.” He runs his fingers through his long, wizened beard. “Nature is capricious. Balkan people know that in the spring, the weather changes unpredictably. It is uncertain and this is always certain. In this country, when the weather is like this, changing from one moment to the next, we say ‘the bear is getting married’.”

I think of another proverb – don’t judge a book by its cover. I turn to look at the old man, his long tangled beard touching the hands still clasped in his lap. He looks up at me. His eyes are a striking hue of green, the colour of polished jade.

“What is your name?” he asks me.

“Michael. And what is yours?”

“Koko.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Koko. I’ve never met anybody who speaks the way you speak before.” This is an understatement. I am in awe of this wise elder from the pages of history sitting opposite me. I have so many questions to ask him, so many unfinished trains of thought that he can help to finish.

“You have my gratitude,” Koko replies. He reaches over, takes my book, and examines the cover again. “The end of history. I cannot recall how many times history has ended in my lifetime. When I was a child, the Ottomans were driven from these lands and their history came to an end. When the Second World War ended, everyone forgot about the men who collaborated with the fascists. History was intentionally forgotten and a new leaf was turned. When the six republics of Yugoslavia descended into war in 1991, the history of our peace and prosperity under communism ended and a new world was born. But, Michael, I tell you that in all my years I have never felt the essence of life change with the passing of a political regime. The wheels of history have been in motion for as long as my heart has been pumping blood around this ever more frail body. Men may have decided to write new chapters of history – it allows them to make their truths and their power more concrete, so that they can claim to own the world and the people who inhabit it - but the ink they use never changes.”

The weight of Koko’s words fill the compartment. Time seems to slow to a standstill. I laugh. He smiles to himself, that same smile I saw when it was only me, him, and the old lady with laughter like the arrival of spring in the compartment. “It will please you to know that the next stop is Kičevo”. He chuckles. ‘It is very soon.”

The only certainty is uncertainty. Limbo suddenly settles into perspective and, now, melancholy settles over me, knowing that this conversation was always fated to be so fleeting.

“Can I ask you quickly, before I have to go? I’m on a journey. To seek answers, I guess. To find out if I’m a good person siding with the bad guys. I wonder about the West, this culture which habitually and historically exploits, which seems to have lost track of all of its lies, its clandestine meddling, its misinformation. I was taught that life on my side of the Iron Curtain was better, more freedom-loving and secure. But, I’m not so sure any more. The West can feel a little hollow, as if its populated by ghosts sometimes.” I fear I’ve said too much. “You seem completely authentic, Koko, so can I ask, what was life like under communism?”

Koko smiles and shakes my hand. “Where does life really live, Michael?”

I leave the compartment, navigate the pockets of shadow lingering on a previous century’s walkways, and climb down from the carriage. I sit down on my pack and watch as the living ghost of communism disappears from view, down its fixed line to an ungraspable point beyond the horizon. I close my eyes, the sound of Koko’s voice already echoing through another dark aisle of memory. The evening sky turns pink, swept with faint grey wisps of lingering clouds. The crescent moon hangs above the black silhouette of a mountain. I light a Lucky and smile. Everything is as it is meant to be. The only certainty is uncertainty. Numbers no longer seem real. Living ghosts travel through the present. And the bear is getting married.