English Wall (tz)

srijeda, 17.05.2006.

Disco

(Disko)

The dusk had settled long ago, when Ben looked at me across the table and blurted out - Let’s go to a local disco!

I thought it would be stupid to explain I had not been in a disco since my student days, still, even then – some twenty years ago – it had not been fun. But, guests ought to be entertained, so I nodded my head, pretending I’m thrilled with the idea. In fact, some local guys from Osijek invited Ben and he needed an interpreter. We were standing outside the hotel, in a warm spring night, with hands in pockets and different ideas of entertainment. The rest of our party was pondering the idea, and some girls flatly said ‘no’, when choices between classic and folk disco were presented. How and why choose at all between two equally bad options- I myself was thinking about the same dilemma. Yet, I kept silent.

Osijek is a relatively small town; we nevertheless waited for a car to pick us up. Our host dumped us in front of the Student Center and an experienced guy from the party said:

- If you cannot hear the music out in the street, there’s no fun inside! Let’s go to the Old town!

Ben was standing nearby, unbuttoning his shirt. He loosened the tie, obviously preparing himself for a wild party to follow. For an Englishman, he’s quite unconventional, even though he has a look of a typical London yuppie. We started walking, heading towards the Old town and the disco.

- Why are we walking back from where we drove? - Ben asked innocently.

- Our hosts think we ought to see something better. It’s only a ten-minute walk – I tried to calm him.

The night was warm and the park we walked through smelled of blossomed branches. It looked to me, no confined spaces could provide more fun than walking by the river. Still, I kept my mouth shut and cooperated. The Old town walls were casting long shadows, and our steps echoed on the cobbled stone. Inside the walls, we suddenly found ourselves surrounded with rivers of young people, flowing like a mob on some local folk festival. The narrow streets were jammed with couples and small groups of people moving in different directions and the coffee shops were swelling with customers. I checked the time on my cell phone; it was one after midnight. Numerous lamps on the square and the Plague obelisk in the middle glowed with brilliant lights.
The Moon was helping wholeheartedly.

Our host suddenly eed - We’re here!

Small groups of people were patiently waiting in front of a dark, unlighted entrance to a night bar, from which the vague murmur and noise were coming. Traces of light were casting odd stripes of illumination, across the entrance staircase, yet never crossing the last stair.

A typical, heavyset bouncer, with a clean-shaven head, a tacky, over-sized golden cross and accompanying tattoo on his bull-like neck, was guarding the entrance doors to the nightclub.

– We have to wait – I explained to my confused Englishman, while we were patiently waiting for the bouncer to have mercy and let us in. Obviously, we weren’t attractive enough visitors for immediate pass.

– I think we’re waiting for the empty slots inside to squeeze the new customers in – our experienced host said, lighting up another cigarette. We were headed for a long wait.

– There are some foreigners here, let us in! – A girl from our party told the bouncer, pointing a finger in Ben’s and my direction. The guard changed his mind, moved aside and waved us in.

Behind the double wooden doors a dark corridor awaited, and then suddenly a myriad of senses were triggered by music, murmur and noise from hundreds of people. I stepped back, as a wave of thick tobacco smoke and a mixture of perfumes, shaving lotions and sweaty bodies hit me. There was no time to adjust slowly to the change, as the crowd swallowed us in. Moving bodies engulfed us and pushed into a long, narrow, oval-shaped room, with Salvador Dali -like painted walls. Right next to the entrance, a row of crowded booths with wooden benches stretched. To the opposite, there was a narrow dance floor with two parallel platforms with a silver pole for dancers to wrap their legs around; a long bar, with a line of heads stuck closely together. At least that’s how I saw them, just heads, as their bodies and legs were hidden somewhere in the mass, surrounding them. Our guides were lost in the flowing river of bodies, slowly but steadily circulating in this thickened claustrophobic place. I don’t like crowds, and my years-long experience taught me to make quick judgments and decide instantly. I pulled Ben’s sleeve and dragged him to one of the open booths.

With my back, safely against the wall, I moved my lips close to Ben’s ear and yelled, trying to be louder than the surrounding noise: - Entertaining, huh?

He gave me a puzzled look, not comprehending. How could he? I say this ironically, as the surroundings were completely surreal. A cacophony of voices, decibels of irritating howling sounds of an Arabic origin, a Middle Eastern hit, were ripping through the room, through my mind and thoughts - I could swear – my internal organs. Habibi, habibi, I remembered the song and the singer from Syria, whom I fell in love involuntarily in Tunisia once, intoxicated by hours-long exposure to the local music and totally vulnerable, with a Stockholm syndrome of the captive. But, that’s another story to tell.

–What are you drinking? - Ben yelled at me, but I read the question off his lips.

The sounds and his voice were somehow disappearing halfway from him to me, yet he was sitting only a meter away. The principle of a black hole was at work, and our voices were just a humming of a mosquito next to a hydro - power plant turbines. It was a surreal experience. I got up and headed for a drink, slowly making my way through the crowds towards the bar. There was no chance for Ben to order drinks. After quite some time, skills and pure luck I got to the bar. The bartender was reading my lips to make out and guess what I wanted. With two double whiskeys I was better off than with what the bartender offered me first. At our table, Ben tried to strike a conversation with the girls from an opposite table.

– Ask them their names – he insisted, and I had to explain that this could cause trouble.

– If you still want to take a chance, offer them drinks first. If they accept, the next logical step is to introduce us! - I told him reasonably.

Then it hit me and I bit my tongue – a stupid idea! It would be me again, fighting a passage through the crowd to get us drinks, twice in a short time. I didn’t like the idea digging my way through the mob. The girls ordered some cocktails, combinations that made my head spin. Of course, I had to repeat the names of the cocktails they wanted, afraid of forgetting what they wanted by the time I get to the bar. I cursed Ben and myself for being hasty, for accepting the invitation to come here. I could barely juggle the drinks on my way back, and a glass almost slipped through my sweaty fingers. So I stuck the thumbs and index fingers inside the drinks to secure the glasses, with a perverse feeling of satisfaction. It was not my drink after all, I thought cooling off my fingers inside Ben’ whiskey and a cocktail of screaming colors.

- Martina, glad to meet you! Yes, indeed I’m 18! My friend is Jasenka. She’s 23!

I didn’t believe her. She looked 16 and not a day older. Still, I was never good judge of people. She could be of age after all, but lots of faces here looked young and green.

I sipped my drink without enthusiasm, while Ben drank up his second double drink in a swig. Cruel, as I was up for another battle to reach the bar through the crowds. Ben looked fresh and calm, as if he wasn't loading himself with alcohol the entire evening. I already felt dizzy from three drinks.

I finally felt my nerves relax. The odd, howling music was dissipating through the pores of my body, despite my sober, yet failed attempts to isolate the recognition of music, syncope and lyrics of these songs in my brain. Feverishly I was clinging to the definition in my head: syncope in music is rhythm transition, the loss of sounds. Still, a medical definition would be more suitable here - loss of consciousness from insufficient blood flow to the brain. I think many, if not everyone here, in this folk music infernal disco of howling fugue, lost their consciousness and minds altogether. Perhaps on permanent basis, I felt venomous. I admit I hate folk music, but these are the new heights I never felt before – disco folk staggered towards me in a shape of a monster, finally materialized.

I tried a musical mantra in my head – something easy, soothing, sleepy. Simon and Garfunkel, like a bridge over troubled water, I was silently singing inside my head, until the melody suddenly started to twitch like a serpent, the rhythm speeding up. Soon the poor Garfunkel was squealing like an old 33-record, forced to play at 45, and then – 145 speed. I was shaking off my head, trying to chase away my innocent mantra, which turned into a colorful, coral snake.

- Are you okay? You look like you need another drink! - Ben waved his empty glass.

– You go ahead for a change! – I snapped at him and pointed my finger towards the bar. He was in a good mood. He stood and started inching his way in the crowd. It no longer mattered.

I lost track of time. As if we were turning around on some hellish merry-go-round, with street organ-music going round and round, together with our sweaty bodies and the sky above us. Vertigo, 39 Steps, Frenzy... names of the movies with similar atmosphere started spinning before my eyes. I waved my hand to chase away the fog from my mind and the smoke from my burning eyes.

The girls got off the table long ago. They were dancing to the rhythm of the music, which was so loud it moved the glasses on the table. Their young bodies were twisting and snaking around, in gyroscopic movements that looked odd and illogical. Inertia, precession, tumbling, all sorts of space terminology popped in my mind with perfectly new meanings.

- Dragana Mirković! – The girl pressed her lips against my earlobe and yelled in a friendly way.

I looked puzzled. Finally it dawned on me – that was the reply to Ben’s question, I kept repeating several times and finally quit. Who’s singing there? To Belgrade, to Belgrade… I recalled friendly faces in a surreal Yugoslav movie, a group of passengers in a bus, rushing towards the bombs and the world war. The movie and my association suddenly looked very applicable here.

With lukewarm enthusiasm, I tried to participate in attempts to start a conversation, Ben and the girls were occasionally trying to rekindle. But, how in hell could I translate their question, what the two of us were doing here? I didn’t know the answer myself. It looked to me, as if hundreds of people inside perfectly belonged to this, for them, desirable environment. Indeed, what the hell were we doing here?

I think a couple of hours passed since we had come here, yet I couldn’t be sure. I started recognizing some songs, singers, and lyrics… A trace in time, a worm in stone, my darling, head on my shoulders, save me from loneliness, tell me, my sunshine, it’s a heartache… Those were the lyrics I clung too. My luck turned a blind eye on me, when my stare at somebody’s face for longer than a few seconds, provoked trouble. A guy headed towards me to bust me, as I must have provoked him with my glare; or, perhaps I stared at his girlfriend, or the dancer on the platform, he was secretly in love with; I couldn’t put my finger on it. A bouncer saved me, grabbing the guy by his jacket and pulling him outside. The crowd never paid any attention, and even I myself turned away to listen to some new music blasting from the speakers.

Suddenly, Ben was pulling at my sleeve: –Let’s go!

It felt odd; he wanted to go after such a brief time spent here. And to leave now, when all the good songs were up next. We both were making rhythm movements under the table, our legs following the rhythms. It was just the blissful ignorance of lyrics that saved us from singing out loud, in each other’s arms, listening to the sad tunes. Oh, my land, cry out loud, forget her, my heart… something like that.

On our way out, between the two musical notes and a howling fugue, which was on repeat, circling around like a serpent eating its own tail, the time stopped for a split second. I felt like being under water, in a slow-motion movie, so I could clearly see the grimaces on the faces of beasts, which were surfacing behind the masks of ordinary girls, guys, waiters and bouncers. The belly dancer, with a figure much like Salma Hayek in ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ darted out a split, snake-like tongue in my direction; in horror I felt the hairs on the nape of my neck. Ben didn’t notice anything, looking frozen in a beam of light, just like Spock, before being lifted onto the starship ‘Enterprise’. I turned around. The crowd was pulling down their masks, triumphantly, peeling off the fake human faces from their partners, ripping each other’s guts to let their extraterrestrial offspring to freedom. Well-manicured fingers turned into the claws of some beasts, breathing out the air that was becoming dense and ice-cold vapor. We were locked in this neverending moment. I screamed silently inside my head and tried to pull Ben outside, just a few meters away. My legs were numb and didn’t follow. My shoes of lead and the melting floor were keeping me within the reach of these beasts and their tentacles. Their fierce eyes and the growling faces yelled ‘lynch the human intruders’ and this message spoke loudly in total absence of sound.

With my last bits of strength I pulled Ben through the exit doors and we fell over the stairs. Lifting his bloodied palm, he looked at me, not understanding: - What the fuck?

I was half running, without looking back. The stone gates of the Old town we walked through led us to the promenade alongside the river; it glimmered at dawn with a faint reflection in the water. The horizon smiled gently with a vision of arched bridge and peaking towers of the cathedral in the distance. It finally dawned.

The next day, in the bright sunshine, I got my courage back and walked to the Old town to look for the infernal disco, which turned my hairs gray overnight.

Of course, such nightclub, or entrance doors weren't anywhere to be seen or found.

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