Years ago, when I was living in Central Europe, I got to know a group of men who were the kind a girl would notice. Young and charismatic, they came complete with the fascinating and swoon-worthy job of war photographer.
These men were fun, courageous, and wild. They lived hard – drinking, drugging and bird-dogging every pretty female who would have them. On any given night, you could find them “shrooming” in the great outdoors, or at an underground club watching a live sex show. Maybe just hanging out and telling stories. About war zones, scars and executions.
One of these men – let’s call him Eddie – told me about getting shrapnel imbedded in his scrotum when he was photographing an intense battle in the former Yugoslavia. This was during the civil war there, and it was an ugly, bloody time full of weaponized rape and genocide.
After getting hit, Eddie was taken to a field hospital, where they removed one of his testicles without the benefit of anesthesia. Being smack in the middle of a hot war zone, there simply wasn’t any left. Wounded and dying soldiers lay all around Eddie as the doctor leaned over him, brandishing something that looked like a piece of wood.
“Bite down on this,” he said. “This is really going to hurt.”
Eddie passed out during the operation, as you can imagine any man would. When Eddie woke up, at least according to him, he propositioned a very sultry nurse, having sex with her right there in his hospital bed. Slavic boned, with wide sensual lips, and an ass to die for, she was just what the doctor ordered.
There, fresh out of surgery, Eddie proved to himself that he was still functional, still a man.
Another one of these men – we’ll call him Andy – told me all about a photographer friend of his who had been killed by firing squad somewhere in the Middle East. I was aghast listening to his story. Being only about twenty-four at the time, I’d never met anyone outside of my own war-torn family, who had actually known someone who’d been executed.
This was a person young enough to be my peer, and now, they were dead. No, not just dead, but put up against a wall and shot point-blank by a group of strange men. I wondered if he got a last request – a prayer or cigarette.
“Why did they do it?” I asked Andy.
Andy shrugged, his face a mask of irony. “They didn’t like him.”
Andy was a bit of an anomaly among these guys. He was hugely talented and had spent years globe-trotting from war to war just like the rest of them. And he had a wry and irreverent sense of humor that lurked behind his every word – also like his cohorts. Andy was different from his friends in one crucial way, however: he was married and had two small children.
He’d left the battlefield behind, and was making a nice living snapping portraits of prominent individuals and the like.
This did not go over well with his war photographer friends, let me tell you.
Andy was taunted pretty mercilessly for no longer going off at a moment’s notice and raising hell. For staying home and raising his kids instead, trying to be a faithful husband to his wife. It was hard for Andy, too. I could see it in his eyes and in the way he talked about his past adventures. He missed the excitement, the danger, the freedom – even if he did love his family.
Not long ago, a mutual friend told me she’d heard Andy had left his wife and was now sailing around the world. I guess I wasn’t surprised, but I was sad for him. Andy had a good soul, he just seemed to struggle when it came to claiming it.
Only a few months after I left both my ex-pat life and this motley crew of war photographers behind, I got to know another group of men. I had fallen in love with my husband, and one of his best friends was in the United States Marine Corps. At the time, my husband’s friend – who we’ll call Dave, because it’s his real name – was a colonel and lawyer. In the wake of 9/11, he left his growing law practice in the dust and went back to full-time soldiering. A born leader with the temperment of a philospher, Dave would go on to be commissioned a full-fledged general.
Dave and his Marine buddies were fun, courageous and wild. They told stories about training and camaraderie, with the occassional tale about combat.
I remember Dave confiding to me and my husband about two young men who’d been under his command. They’d been killed during an ambush and Dave was remembering them on one, gloomy Memorial Day a few years ago. He went into some detail about their lives and interests, who they’d loved. And he asked my husband to tell those young men’s stories to our children, so that they wouldn’t be forgotten. Dave told us all of this on the phone, but I could imagine his fierce blue eyes the whole time. Powerful, lived-in eyes that were full of humor, but took everything seriously. The eyes of a man with grave responsibilities.
For his men, for whom he had sacrificed so much, and for his family, who had sacrificed so much for him.
Not long before leaving on one of his tours, Dave and I found ourselves alone in my kitchen. We were drinking beer, casually, after my husband had washed his hands of us and gone to bed.
We talked about how his wife had put her own concerns aside and taken on the full burden of family life, all the while not knowing whether he would return. The way Dave had to leave the people he loved most and enter a world of danger and few comforts. These weren’t voiced as complaints, but observations. He felt a reverence for the faith his loved ones had in him – the fact that they shared his values despite what they had to endure when he was gone.
Dave, with those same blue eyes boring into mine – in person this time, alive with tenderness and emotion, unflinching – revealed to me how much he loved his wife.
“She’s all that matters,” he told me, going so far as to describe the way she looked when she was sleeping.
The way her hair lay against the pillow. The look of soft determination that marked her face, even at rest.
As I’ve been endeavoring to write a truly compelling romantic male character over the past few years – I’ve been thinking back on the war photographers and marines, training my cold writer’s eye on them, a vision sharpened by years of steady surveillance. But I’ve engaged my heart, too – one warmed by half a lifetime of being a wife and mother.
Both teams of men command our attention, making us want to follow their journeys, root for them. I’ve tried to understand what sets them apart and anticipate which man a woman would choose to be her lover and why. How a woman would assess these two groups of alpha males if she found herself having to choose between them.
Manhood, for Dave and his friends, was defined by meaning, and meaning was attained through the exercise of duty and honor. Being husbands, fathers, friends, and in their case, soldiers was a thing of the highest order. They held within them a deeply personal form of power. A competence that stretched far beyond what they were capable of on a battlefield, or any other professional arena. You didn’t dare underestimated them.
Andy and Eddie were charming, intelligent, funny and untamed. They were curious and had an unquenchable appetite for life. The sort of dangerous but captivating men you could find in any number of movies and novels. Full of bravado, fighting wars within themselves while they sought the wars outside. All of this hinted at an inner depth that might make a girl get out her shovel and dig until she found it…or didn’t. Yes, they were riveting in their own right.
I believe they truly cared about the people and events they were capturing with their cameras, despite their sardonic posturing. And I often wondered if they felt a bit lost in the theater of war – like people once removed. Intermediaries who were putting their lives on the line to bring images of conflict to the rest of us sitting at home. Denied the fight, all the while being exposed to the same perils. Dressed in the blood and grime of war, but not the uniform.
“Sometimes I can’t figure out what the hell we’re doing out there,” one of them once remarked.
Maybe that’s why those war photographers lived so hard, playing up their bad boy romanticism. Occupying that middle ground is complex and befuddling. You might have the courage of a soldier, but not the motive. You’re both up close to and at an arms length from humanity at its most base and most noble. And unlike a soldier, you have no articulated directives that bind your heart and mind – Semper Fidelis, First to Fight, Uncommon Valor, The Few, The Proud.
A man like that might be a bundle of ingredients that can’t seem to come together if he wasn’t careful.
It occurred to me, as I thought back on how Dave had described his feelings – employing no irony and embracing, boldly, a deep sentimentality worthy of a Carpenters song – that clarity is an aphrodisiac few women can resist. It’s a Holy Grail for men all over, too, and some spend their entire lives in search of it.
Clarity of purpose. That law dictated from the bowels of the conscience, and adhered to. That’s the difficult part. Most can hear the call, but not every one can figure out how to follow it without getting lost.
But it is that very fidelity to intention that distinguishes men and boys. A husband from a boyfriend. The protagonist in any story from the rest. It is what makes a man whole, and a character transcend the story that’s been written for him.
And for even more on men and male characters, click here and visit me on Patreon!
Hi, Cold readers!
As as bit of a turn this week, Roz Morris (a writer you may recognize from my interview with her last week) is interviewing me! She’s just wonderful and has put together such a thoughtful examination of the new writing life.
As an added bonus – especially for my writer readers, Roz’s blog is one of the 100 best blogs for writers, so do follow. She’s worth it.
Here’s a sample:
Reaching readers if you write in multiple genres – could crowdfunding be the answer? An interview
What do you write? Not so long ago, most authors had to choose a genre and stick to it. But many of us are far more versatile. Our minds and our hearts don’t stand still. Book by book, we push boundaries or leap into genres where we hadn’t previously felt at hom. As life reinvents us, we move on in our work.
No-one worried about that in the Renaissance, but it rarely went down well in traditional publishing, perhaps for sound commercial reasons. But now authors have more tools to reach an audience.
Read the rest of it here, via Reaching readers if you write in multiple genres – could crowdfunding be the answer? An interview
I met Roz Morris where I meet most of my fellow writers…at our virtual watercooler in one of our Facebook writers groups. That may sound strange, but believe me, I’ve met people I consider real friends in the “cloud” world of social media. How else can a homebound worker with her face in a computer screen all day get to know new people?
Roz felt familiar to me from the get-go. Not only do we share “resume” similarities – both of us write personal essays and thrillers, and teach others how to write – but a sensibility. The culture of a close marriage and a struggling family. A desire to watch behaviors and immerse ourselves in the quiet histories that surround us.
In other words, she’s perfect for COLD and I think you’ll really like her. To that end, I wrote up some questions for Roz, so you can get to know her better. And once you do, you’ll want to click on her links below and order her books. Good ones like this don’t come along every day.
This is Roz
ME: You and I talked a bit about the culture of a relationship, which I got a very strong sense of while reading Not Quite Lost (in fact, your culture with your husband felt very similar to my own marriage. We’re both writers, work from home, and love to go on weird little trips. Only difference is the kids part).
ROZ: How lovely that you do that too. Dave and I certainly enjoy our ‘weird little trips’. I think it’s the writer mindset. I was listening to a podcast where Grayson Perry was trying to define what an artist does, and he said ‘artists notice things’. I think that’s true of all artists, not just visual. It’s the details that hold our attention and create verisimilitude as much as the big scale. So if you’re a hard-wired noticer, you’re never far away from being entertained. And it’s brilliant to be married to someone else whose brain works that way.
“Fishing Net”
ME: How have your trips evolved as your marriage has matured? Or haven’t they?
ROZ: I can certainly see an evolution. We started big – we married abroad, in a hotel in Mexico City. For our honeymoon, we spent three weeks touring the Maya ruins of Mexico and Guatemala.
Roz and Dave’s Wedding
ROZ: Since then, we’ve never been anywhere so exotic. We always intended to do more foreign travel, but as our writing careers gained traction we stopped thinking so far in advance, which you need to do for big expeditions. We also couldn’t afford to go far or for a long time – freelance life is great for artistic fulfilment but doesn’t leave you much spare cash. So we went on more last-minute trips, looking for a mop-up booking on line. We get wet a lot because it’s usually raining.
Raining Again
ROZ: As I say in the book, we might go to the quietest corner of the country, but if it’s new to us, we’ll have adventures.
Tea on the Lawn
ROZ: So our trips might have got simpler, but we’re just as entertained by them. Which is just as well because we’ve done most of the cities we could go to for short breaks. We do special expeditions on our birthdays and have become quite inventive. If we pass an interesting signpost on our way to somewhere else, we’ll plan a proper expedition there when we next decide to take a day off.
Recently we were looking for a shortcut through Surrey and we passed the Mullard Space Science Laboratory. It was just a sign on a set of gates in the middle of nowhere. We’re both kids of the space age so it went on our list. On Dave’s birthday we drove there to have a proper look. We knew it wasn’t open to the public, but we just enjoyed mooching around the area, walking the footpaths, poking through the villages and finding a nice place to eat cake.
Science Lab
ME: Where do you and your husband differ in how you approach your travels? What have you learned about your relationship through your “local” trips?
ROZ: With such a long partnership our differences become rather interesting, especially with ruins. Dave likes castles and Roman remains. I try to take an interest in those, but they don’t excite me nearly as much as more modern dereliction – disused airfields, World War II bunkers and ruined stately homes. I love those particularly – because they seem to have fallen so far.
In Not Quite Lost, we had an amusing mishap on a trip to Suffolk. The first half of the week, we stayed in a cosy, stripy cottage – Dave’s choice. The second half was my idea. We moved to a Martello tower – a Napoleonic gun emplacement on the coast that had been converted as a holiday let. Dave was dubious. He was right. It had a seriously leaky roof and I did a lot of apologising.
Martello Tower
ME: One of the things I loved about NQL is that you treat visiting Bath or Shropshire much the way you might approach going to small village in Vietnam. There is the same feeling of wonder and curiosity. Do you feel you learn as much from your own countrymen as you do from distant cultures? Or is this an apples to oranges comparison?
ROZ: Not apples to oranges at all. We all have our own customs, our own peculiar wiring. Keep your eyes open and you’re always rubbing up against them. In NQL, we stayed next door to a retired Prime Minister, and an entire micro-culture had grown up around his security arrangements. There were things you couldn’t do and places you couldn’t go because of it. Different cultures are everywhere, even within your own country.
ME: Compare and contrast traveling abroad with traveling “in-house.”
ROZ: This will probably appal globe-trotters, but I far prefer travelling in-house. I don’t need documents or vaccinations. I can throw everything in the car and take it with me, instead of having to create a capsule kit to fit within a plane’s baggage allowance. I can speak the language and understand the road signs. I can rummage through second-hand bookshops – one of my favourite holiday activities, and quite pointless in a country whose language you don’t speak. Here’s a wonderful bookshop we came across in a disused chapel in Suffolk (you can see more on my Pinterest page).
I love Roz’s Pinterest page
ROZ: But when I have gone abroad, I’ve enjoyed the variations on the everyday. Supermarkets with completely alien sets of staple foods. Flavours that are unobtainable on these shores (the supercharged basil and tomatoes that grow on the Veneto Plain). The curious texture of grass in Singapore; the sidewalks and pavements made of marble and limestone in Verona and Padua. The babble of unfamiliar language, which makes the stuff of routine life sound so vital and uninhibited. Yeah, perhaps I should get out once in a while.
ME: What is the most unusual place you’ve visited within your own country?
ROZ: I have a place that’s on my wish list, but I don’t know how I’ll ever get there. It’s an underwater billiard room in an ornamental lake in Surrey. It was originally built as part of a stately home, Witley Park. The house was destroyed by fire, but the underwater room is still there – like a glass igloo resting in the silt on the bed of the lake. I put it in my novel Lifeform Three, as the last remnant of a grand country house. It’s never been open to the public, but I live in hope that I’ll one day get the chance to visit. Perhaps if Lifeform Three becomes wildly famous…
I wish I could make this picture bigger. It’s amazing.
ME: I feel like you could have written a whole book about visiting the house (now school) that your mother lived in with her childhood sweetheart after your family broke up. You wrote with tremendous reserve about that experience, and what I found particularly powerful about it was how many questions were left unanswered for you. The fact that you weren’t even let inside of the house and had to wander around on the grounds, drawing your own conclusions about your mother’s life there.
ROZ: But isn’t that like life? We get our own story in an uninterrupted stream, but we might only be granted glimpses of somebody else’s. Even your closest relative might have stories that you know little of.
ME: Was that chapter the most difficult to write, or was its very mystery and paucity pretty straightforward, and therefore easier to capture?
ROZ: It was quite easy, exactly for the reasons you say. We weren’t a communicative family and I had very little information about the place or my mother’s time there. I had only those scraps, so I had to fit them together as best I could. indeed I wrote that piece just after the actual event as my way of sorting it out. It was as much for me as it was for the book.
But then, I’ve always been a house detective. I grew up in an Edwardian villa that had hidden fireplaces in the walls and a garden path that went under the bungalow next door. I wrote about that in the book too, when a school friend gave me the news that it had been demolished. I needed to keep its story, as much as I remembered it. Visiting the house my mother then moved to brought the threads together
Sulis Manor
Roz Morris is an award-nominated novelist who writes about people who are haunted by buried pasts (My Memories of a Future Life; Lifeform Three). She is a book doctor to award-winning writers (Roald Dahl Funny Prize 2012), has sold 4 million books as a ghostwriter and teaches writing masterclasses for The Guardian. Not Quite Lost: Travels Without A Sense of Direction is her first collection of essays. Find her at her website https://rozmorris.wordpress.com/ and on her blog https://nailyournovel.wordpress.com/ , contact her on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/RozMorrisWriter/ and tweet her as @Roz_Morris http://www.twitter.com/roz_morris
Roz’s Links:
I cook a meal for my family from scratch almost every night.
I’m not saying this to brag or anything. I realize a lot of people simply can’t or dammit, don’t want to and I not only respect that, I envy it.
I cook for my family for two simple reasons. The first being that as a Czech, it’s somehow a biological imperative for me that my kids associate certain tastes and smells with their upbringing. Ones, specifically, that involve food. Slavs show their love through food. It’s what we do. We’re not big on the “I love yous.” In fact, the very phrase a head-over-heels, ga-ga in love Czech would use to express his affection is actually “Mam te rad.” This means, “I like you.” To say, “Miluju te,” which literally translates to “I love you,” would be overdoing it by Czech standards. People who say “miluju te” are a bit obsessive. The stalker types. If you’re a Czech and you say you like someone, it’s a big deal.
Just to be clear, I do tell my husband and children that I love them. But I also cook. A lot. When I first got married, I imagined that I would be cooking all sorts of Czech meals, even if I reserved my most ethnic dishes – goose, rabbit in cream sauce, pickled beef – for special occasions. Lo and behold, it turned out that my husband is not a fan of Czech cooking. He’s an Irish guy and has kind of a limited palette. Meat and potatoes and such. And my kids really hated Czech cooking pretty much from the get-go.
No biggie. I just cooked other stuff. Anything from Chicken Pot Pie to Kung Pao Tofu.
But what makes me crazy is how – despite having pretty much a gourmet meal put in front their little half-Czech faces every night, my kids would still rather eat plain spaghetti or that processed fare from the frozen foods aisle. They deem foods like grilled salmon and shrimp risotto too flavorful.
That’s when I like to remind them of the sorts of foods I grew up eating. Especially the after school snacks that my surly great-grandmother used to prepare for me. Treats like raw bacon, boiled chicken skin, head cheese and scrambled veal brains on toast. If I had dared turn my nose up at those…well, I don’t know what would have happened exactly, but I can tell you it wouldn’t have been pretty. This was a woman who used to drown kittens in her bathtub whenever her mouser got knocked up. She defended her family so forcefully against a raid from Russian soldiers that they knocked her teeth out with the butts of their guns. Toothless and bleeding, she still managed to cuss them out.
You just didn’t mess with her.
This is not my great-grandmother, but not too far off from her personality either.
And in honor of my great-grandmother and the foods I grew up eating, I thought I’d share one of her recipes with you. Just in case you’re wondering what to serve for your family this holiday season. Or at least what to threaten them with.
ROASTED BEEF TONGUE WITH ANCHOVY BUTTER
1 fresh beef tongue, boiled and skinned (simmer tongue in salted water for 3 to 4 hours)
1/4 pound butter
6 anchovies, mashed
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice
1 cup beef stock
1 cup bread crumbs
Preheat over to 350 degrees.
Cream half the butter with mashed anchovies and spread over cooked tongue. In a large pot, brown onion in the remaining butter, add meat and brown that a little, too. Pour in 1/2 cup beef stock. Roast in oven for about 1 hour or until tongue is good and brown on both sides. Sprinkle with lemon juice and bread crumbs. Add remaining stock and bake until bread crumbs are golden brown. Serves 6.
And have a wonderful Holiday – whatever you celebrate.
The lovely and talented Lynda Filler was kind enough to feature Cold on her blog. Please check out her novel, Lie to Me, on Amazon.
Today I’m thrilled to introduce you to the talented author Victoria Dougherty. The following is a piece written by Victoria called Herein Lies the Truth. You can find more stories in her book linked at the bottom of this blog called COLD, Essays on Love, Faith, Family and Other Dangerous Pursuits
Herein Lies the Truth
By Victoria Dougherty
I have a close family member who tells a lot of big, whopping lies. Lies about the past, about emotions and their impact on her and others, lies about what she had for breakfast, for heaven’s sake.
When I was a kid, this family member – let’s just call her Marta – told me a heartbreaking story about her very painful, difficult childhood.
She had been abandoned by her family, you see. Then tossed out of her grandmother’s house because the woman simply didn’t want another mouth to feed. Somehow, Marta…
View original post 1,181 more words
To commemorate the one hundred year anniversary of a truly morally and intellectually bankrupt system – one that cost the world somewhere in the realm of one hundred million souls through systemized starvation, random executions, gulags, balls-out genocide and other forms of creative murder, I thought we’d take a few minutes this week to sit back and reflect on the twenty-eight years since the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Union.
You know, just to feel good about ourselves in these trying times and all that.
While it’s true that we still have some hold-outs – namely Cuba and North Korea, who are trying to remain “pure,” whatever that means – the fact is that things in the former Eastern bloc are nearly unrecognizable from just a few of decades ago.
The general vibe in the region, even on the heels of a massive global recession, is now more like Vanity Fair’s Oscar night to-do, where attractive up and comers nibble on truffle puffs and drink rose champagne. It’s a far cry from the droll, mid-level office party reminiscent of the way things used to be. You know the one. It actually takes place in an office under fluorescent lighting with that sickly greenish tint. No music, no spouses allowed, and the deli tray comes from the local discount supermarket and would otherwise go untouched if people didn’t need to find something to do with themselves other than talk about needing a new color copier.
In my own Iron Curtain experience, I remember the dismal slop-cafeterias that served – honestly – some of the worst food I’ve ever encountered. Stews with thick layers of grease that floated over gristley meat and old potatoes like the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
The spirit of customer service that inspired insult, indifference and even contempt. A waiter actually once snarled “blow me” after I asked him for a menu, and what’s more…I wasn’t even surprised.
There was a sense of style that can only be described as “failure chic.” Poor quality textiles that not only trapped, but enhanced stale, unpleasant body odors, the casual don of oily, dandruff-speckled hair, and a perfume of alcohol and cheap cigarettes that clung to nearly everyone’s breath and general aura like a silent but deadly fart.
Let’s not forget the architecture that made you want to kill yourself.
All of this was wrapped up in a culture of paranoia and oppression that dissuaded intimacy and even broke family bonds. Impelled people to plaster book covers made of paper bags onto their reading materials – you wouldn’t want anyone to know what types of fiction you liked, God forbid – and pad their doors and walls with cushions, so as not to be overheard by spying neighbors. In a culture where the government openly advocates snitching and cultivates envy, no one is safe.
But much of that is over now in what used to be called the Soviet Union.
The young people are hip, favoring craft beers and barbecue joints. The cafes are a twitter with conversations about popular culture, travel and politics. Nobody makes their own book covers anymore and flagrantly reads whatever the hell they want. I can no longer tell the difference between an Eastern and Western European based on dress, posture and general disposition. Even the waiters seem jolly.
So, despite the uncertainties of our age – the terrorist plots, wacko gunmen, partisan divisions and IQ crushing media culture – we have a lot to be optimistic about. A mere thirty years ago, the dominant belief was that Communism was not only here to stay, but would ultimately prevail, so we’d best get used to it. East Berliners had to reconcile their own grimy and tedious lifestyle with the bright lights and festive bustle that they knew to be bursting like a star from every bar and boutique just steps away in West Berlin. Few of them ever thought their city would be whole again, let alone their nation. We were all sitting around waiting, just waiting, for Russia to finally make her move and put us out of our suspense.
But no bad party goes on forever. The most desperate, diehard revelars – the ones who want to bed the girl everyone’s had a go at, who need to at least be able to say they did something on Saturday night – eventually go home. Sick of the wrong music – too, loud, too weird. Bored of the small talk. Done with the Everclear punch and Coor’s Light. Even they can’t take it anymore.
Let’s remember that as we fret over our problems of the day.
And to celebrate the end of the aforementioned bad party, i.e. the Communist Party, please enjoy my friend Mark Baker’s new travel blog centering on Central Europe. Mark makes his home in Prague and has been in the region a long time, critter-crawling through little-known towns, haunting eccentric-looking cafes, taking gorgeous pictures, and writing for publications like Lonely Planet. He has such an artistic eye and knows a great story – the kind you’ll rarely find in mainstream publications. Click here. I think you’ll love it.
This is one of Mark’s photos
And just for fun, Cold-reader and author Anne Coates is “celebrating” one hundred years of Communism by offering her very anti-communist book, Eagle in the Fridge for .99 cents on Amazon US.
Eagle in the Fridge is the story of the breakup of the Soviet Union, told by someone who lived behind the Iron Curtain. It’s an account narrated by a woman whose breath is taken away when the impossible dream of Baltic independence moves from fairy tale status to one that’s close enough to touch. Eagle in the Fridge is for anyone who wants a behind the scenes look at living behind the Iron Curtain, and an aftermath of independence that brought with it yet more challenges. It’s a testament to the courage of everyday people under extraordinary conditions. It’s a reminder that history isn’t made by generals. It’s made by normal people merely living their lives.
Click here to get Eagle in the Fridge for .99 cents
Click on this before reading my post, please! Won’t take long – swear.
Coming from a family of Czech political refugees, I have to say that my favorite quote from the article I asked you to click on comes from a Russian-speaking commentator who reacted to immigre artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi’s paintings by saying: “Why do all these people nostalgic for the U.S.S.R. move to Berlin and Israel, and not to North Korea?”
That being said, I love these paintings. They are a Slavic DNA splicing of Norman Rockwell and Charles Schultz, representing – pretty accurately in my experience – some of the more charming aspects of Soviet life. And yes, nearly every era has its charms, even if I’d never go so far as to declare that the Soviet regime was charming in and of itself. Let’s just say it for the record – communism sucked.
What enchants me about Nnadi’s work is her nostalgia for the textures of childhood. The colorful incidentals that aren’t so incidental after all, as we often recall them more vividly than the bigger events.
From my own young life, it’s things like feathered hair styles replete with split ends, shiny new Chevy Nova’s, and performing random tasks in Six Million Dollar Man slow-motion. They create a collage as powerful as any individual vignette.
Like when my much older step-sister confided to me about losing her virginity – this was back in 1979. I remember her shimmery, overly-glossed lips far better than her description of how things went down (salacious as it was, I’m sure). The way they cupid-curled and puckered as she applied what looked to me like the most glamorous goop I’d ever seen. I’m not even sure I remember the boy-in-question’s name. Might’ve been Bob. Or Randy. I do recall the lip gloss, however. It was called Kissing Potion for sure, and came in a variety of roll-on flavors – grape, bubble gum, orange and of course…cherry. I later stole one from her make up drawer and hid it inside my worn and seam-split stuffed koala bear.
Nnadi gets this.
Her paintings take us into moments of pithy loneliness punctuated by cringy fashion trends… and then beyond, into a realm that is so stylistically Slavic she makes me ache. Not only for my childhood, but for the very specific children’s storybooks I used to thumb through after school. Ones that chronicled where my mother and brother grew up – in a small, Czech village called Klobuky.
In the pages of my Czech storybooks, I could find scenes that I would never personally experience, though they were captured in the black and white photos framed on my mother’s vanity table.
My mom, pensive-faced, riding her rickety bike down a cobblestone street.
My brother playing naked beside a stream. All curly hair, toddler’s belly pouch and uncircumcised penis.
Slavs have an innate capacity for conjuring home life nostalgia. Of stripping politics and current events from a scene and leaving only the little things that make up our day-to-day lives, and bring essentiality to our existence.
Josef Lada, an early twentieth century Czech artist and children’s storybook illustrator, was a master at this. I can’t imagine Nnadi wasn’t inspired – if not by him, then by Slavic artists like him. His work always celebrated the quieter moments, the minutiae that in hindsight spins a magical longing for the commonplace.
Watching an old man smoke a pipe…
Riding a makeshift wooden sled…
The raucous, smoke-filled excitement of a night at a local pub…
The beauty of Lada was not that he painted a bucolic picture that never truly existed except in our hearts, but that he painted precisely what had existed, but what we may not have appreciated at the time. Tiny glimmers of nothingness present in almost any child’s world.
More so, they remind us that those events continue on in our adult lives – changed perhaps, but nevertheless there. They are happening in our children’s lives and we are cautioned not to take them for granted.
It’s not about the fancy vacation, Lada and Nnadi are telling us. Or the enrichment activities and birthday parties. Or even about who was elected president. It’s about riding around on a hand-me-down skateboard wearing tube socks and piped shorts. Hiding behind the patchwork sofa, making Malibu Barbie and Malibu Ken make out. Eating bread smeared with margarine dyed a cheerful daffodil hue.
And speaking of Cold War nostalgia – The Hungarian, my latest Cold War thriller is free this weekend only on Amazon. Get it while it’s cold…
Click here to download The Hungarian
