The state, too, opens all its doors those three days to all those who want to reconsider their lives, to see where it is best for them, to determine whether they should freely return to their former lives if the wasteland was not meeting their expectations or remain there if they are fed up with that former life. No one goes back to that former life.
*
Last year, on 27 April at 1:00 in the afternoon, my father’s heart stopped beating. This year, on that same date at 1:00, I was lying on the facial bed at the Magic beauty salon in Bristol for a royal sixty-minute acne treatment. When I made the appointment with the cosmetician two months ago, the girl asked me what date I wanted and I answered like a shot: “April 27, if possible.” “The twenty-seventh of April at 1:00, that’s the only time we have available,” she said, and added: “Be on time, on Mondays we only work until 2:00.” I repeated to myself: “27 April at 1:00. 27 April at 1:00 . . .” I knew the date was familiar to me somehow, but, other than the 27th being the day each month I pay my rent and other bills for the apartment, it was connected with something else, but with what, with whom? Now I’m lying in the beauty salon and the cosmetician, a young woman without a single wrinkle on her face, is preparing to treat my acne-pitted skin with various lotions, peelings, creams and other things. In the middle of the session, after she put chamomile-infused cotton balls on my eyelids and turned out the light in the room where ambient music is quietly playing, leaving me alone with my thoughts and the aloe vera mask on my face, I remembered. I remembered and broke out in a sweat of anxiety and shame as before me flashed the date and hour of my father’s death, like a clock with the time and date flashing on the bureau at night when you are staggering to the toilet and the red light blinds your eyes.
I felt the mask penetrating into the acne and the wrinkles that have etched my forehead during the year he has been gone. Exactly one year; I have grown older, but I haven’t shed a single tear. When does the time come for tears? When it’s too late? But you grow old too soon when someone close to you dies and sorrow digs into your temples and furrows your forehead. That is how I grew uglier, as a girl, not as a woman, with acne and wrinkles, but I didn’t shed a single tear for my father, who on this very day at 1:00, one year ago, died on a similar type of bed that raises and lowers, in a different room with a light on, lost, unaware of where he was or with whom, in a pre-death agony. Where, the nurse told Stefan, he remembered the factories he had worked in, the names of some people, some odd words, but why should she have kept a record or written any of it down? The cosmetician placed cotton balls on my eyes; the nurse in the home, Veronica, closed his eyes with her hand.
I lay there and tried not to think about my father, about the last moments of his life. I tried to think about my research into communes. All the time I had gathered materials, documented things, interviewed commune residents to understand the project and find the value-added element that Helen expected. Some communes didn’t have Internet at all, but there were others with email, open to sharing their experiences, but they usually didn’t reply. Some preferred not to give away the secrets of their togetherness, while others who had left a commune had the most to tell. Most of the time, they were pissed off and had simply become fed up with all that expression of love and understanding. Yes, the biggest reason for leaving communes was the human ego—that diminishing of one’s “I” as far as possible to melt into “we”. All around us, our era surges with the power of the ego, whose success tramples corpses; personal freedom is the most important thing, alienation has become a rule of life. Communes are the opposite of everything that the world no longer is.
Caught by the date and the hour of my treatment, by my own consciousness of my unconscious, I thought of my mother as an inhabitant of such a commune. Her presence there was tragicomic. It made me laugh, but suddenly my eyes filled with tears beneath the cotton balls. I told myself the commune would most likely drive her out because, as I had learned, that could happen:: when someone broke the rules, the commune would first tell the person, then warn them, then punish them, but if even that didn’t help, these people would simply be driven out. In every community there is an intruder, a foreign body that the community, as an organism, often expels, because the intruder can’t adapt, doesn’t know how to adapt to the interests of the commune and in differentiating itself from this milieu the intruder brings into question the very philosophy of a community. My mother would have been an intruder in such a commune . . .
Suddenly, I nearly leapt from the bed with the mask on my face and the cotton balls fell from my eyes. I began to shout: “Miss! Miss!”. In the meantime, I had already wiped myself off, rubbed myself with the cloths I had seen on the desk, taken off the mask and, when the beautician rushed into the room and turned on the light, frantic from my scream, asking, “Are you allergic to aloe vera? You should have told me!” I only shouted, “No, no, but brush me off, please, I must go!”
I ran like crazy to the train station. I took the express train to London, which cost as much as an airline ticket to Skopje, calling to tell Helen that I was coming, that it was important, we had to talk. “I’m home anyway,” she said, “call when you get here.” I exited at Victoria Station, and I don’t know how I kept myself together on the bus to East London, which stopped as usual on the side street. I raced along the street, unaware even of when I had reached the front of Helen’s house. I leapt up the stairs and leaned on the bell. When she opened and saw me like that, cheeks red, out of breath, worn out, she tried to make a joke: “I hope you didn’t run all the way from Bristol!” We didn’t go downstairs to the institute, instead she led me to the living room. “My mother and father are at work, Mondays are super-busy downtown,” she said. At that moment it dawned on me. Helen is the same age as me and she’s still living with her parents, but I didn’t have time to think about that. As soon as we sat down, I burst out in one breath: “I’ve finally come up with the value-added part for the project! I will include in my research the dystopia, the anti-commune, as a counterpart to the commune! My father’s wasteland!”
Helen looked at me in surprise, then stood and brought me back a glass of water. “What are you talking about, dear Catherine?” “The opposite of the commune! The anti-commune! That is to say—a wasteland!” I repeated. Helen still looked at me in surprise. Then a flood of words escaped me: “Unlike the commune where people enter to live together, day and night, in good and bad, there are people who want to find a wasteland, to live alone, separated from others, for whom it’s better, or who think it’s better, in silence, alone, uncommunicative, alone with their own egos! In a commune the inhabitants strive for closeness, but in a wasteland they seek refuge in the lack of intimacy! The wasteland is a society in which it is possible to live for oneself, as independent from others as possible, more alone, more antisocial, more taciturn. Or louder, but still alone with themselves. An intentional society of alienated individuals! The complete opposite of the communes! Completely opposite!” I drew from my mind the comparison between a commune and a wasteland as two radical counterparts that had flashed in my mind while I was lying in the beauty salon. Based more on the fact that my father wanted to find a wasteland, not a commune, consciously wanting to alienate himself, not draw closer. But we were already living in a wasteland, how could he not see that?
Helen began to laugh and cut me off with her hand while coughing: “I beg your pardon? But that’s crazy! What sort of idea is this? Have you lost your mind?” She was walking up and down the living room while I stood there and waited to hear what she would say. Finally, she pulled herself together, sat down again, and looked at me. “So, our world is going in that direction, right? Maybe not so much there, in your country, but here, definitely. Still, to have an institutionalized form of such an anti-commune, or as you would say, a wasteland—though the word in English sounds odd for such a thing—to truly have an alternative way of living. An anti-commune rather than a commune! A comparative analysis between the idea of communes that have already existed in the world for more than half a century and the concept of such an anti-commune, a commune of estranged people. Well, this is excellent, it’s unique! To compare something that already exists, that is a utopia, with something that doesn’t yet exist in an institutionalized format, and a dystopia! It resembles Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, I don’t know whether you’ve read them.” When she said that I felt numb; before me I could see the time I had passed with my obsession, or, more exactly, therapy; I had gotten over Branko with these authors, but I simply nodded. “Still, this is something different,” she continued. “In their works, their modus vivendi is dictated by someone else, but as far as I understand, in your anti-commune people go there voluntarily? They can hardly wait to go?” “Yes,” I said, “in my wasteland live people who have dreamt of finding a way to be saved from something, from someone, likely even from themselves. They go there voluntarily.” “Crazy!” she repeated and laughed. “This is crazy, Catherine!” “Is there a slogan for such an anti-commune? “A man needs to find a wasteland!” I told her. It sounded like a joke, but it was the pure truth. “I’m going!” I said and set off out the door as rapidly as I had entered. “I’ll send you the text as soon as possible!”
I spent the afternoons of that whole week in my pyjamas writing about my father’s wasteland. I added a footnote, for clarification, that this is about an anti-commune marked by a specific and symbolic expression, with its own references in the English language—a wasteland. All my thoughts about my father’s wasteland rushed to my mind and I just entered them on the computer without having to think; all those years of self-searching without self-discovery were with me. Every day after work, I ran home and wrote and wrote. The study already contained the first part about communes, but the second part was completed more quickly than the first. It was easier to sum up the philosophy of communes, something that had already been done by many researchers, professors, theoreticians, journalists, sociologists and anthropologists. One of the major questions they all posed was: why did communes collapse? While I, writing about the wasteland, asked myself—would my anti-commune also collapse after a while? I thought of contradictory answers: yes, no, maybe. I thought, in passing, that such an anti-commune would quickly collapse because humans are social beings and would understand very quickly that they can’t live in such estrangement, in an atmosphere of isolation and loneliness, without social relations with others, without sharing, caring relations, whether with relatives, partners, parents, sexual relations or any other kind relatives, partners, parents, sexual relations or any other person. Or is that not the case? Sometimes I was certain that not only would my anti-commune not collapse, but it would develop and improve, to a surprising extent. Hadn’t even Helen said that the world was headed in that direction, towards estrangement and distancing, towards a lack of caring for others and egocentrism? I made comparisons, drew conclusions, deleted what I wrote, and rewrote. I introduced the rules for opening a commune that, in recent years, have even been sold as a set of directions composed by various scholars and others acquainted with the issue; these could be adapted, in an opposite manner, of course, for the fictitious opening of an anti-commune. Some laid out seven rules, some nine, and some even more, but they were all similar: find around ten potential members—ideally close friends with similar interests to yours—who fulfil your expectations relating to the identity of the commune; gain the trust of these members as to the type of commune you wish to open; get them acquainted with one another if they aren’t already; evaluate them according to what they can offer, according to their character, personality, interests, reasons for living in an intentional community, whether they are prepared to share everything with others; allow them to invite a new member whom they trust; give everyone a trial period to see if they really are born to live in such a community. All for one, and one for all. Even more importantly, the person who founded the commune must be aware of what they were getting themselves into and, because the risks are great, a living human being is a risk, everything has to be written down, affirmed, signed, so that it is clear exactly who will be doing what in the commune, from the smallest detail to the greatest ideological understandings, from psychological tests to economic means and collective labour. Noting these down on the computer, I immediately flipped them to their opposite and adapted them for an anti-commune, for my father’s wasteland that I had imagined, invented, justified, and in the end I added all my thoughts about it which were the irrefutable proof that such a wasteland could exist: you go there to find your wasteland, you don’t observe the other members because they are also in the wasteland you look at yourself, you do not become acquainted or establish contact with anyone else, you don’t value anyone for anything, and you don’t share anything with anyone, neither material or psychological, not spiritual or anything else; you don’t invite your acquaintances or people close to you who will make you want to find a wasteland again; since you wanted to find a wasteland, that means that you can’t live any other way, so live inside it. Everyone for themselves no one for anyone.
Helen particularly liked the rules. When, a while later, I sent her the final paper and she read it, she accepted it in a state of euphoria and gave it to her mother before she herself went out with some young guy she had met on chat. Her mother began reading it immediately; she was curious about what I had written now, the study about Cyprus had delighted her. She began laughing and reading out loud. And then she read it to her husband and, in their excitement, they called Helen and asked her to come home, wherever she was. She said to me on the phone: “You know it’s your fault that I didn’t have sex with Paul, but ok, I’ll forgive you!” At home, her mother asked right off whether she was aware what sort of paper I had written, and whether I was aware of what I had done. Her father said that after they read it, all they could do was look at each other and discuss how it was an idea that they had never seen before. That a startup like this would be something unique and shouldn’t just be left on paper.
I was confused. What kind of startup, Helen, what are you talking about? I had never shared my father’s wasteland with anyone. Not a single living person on the planet knew about it, not even Hasan, with all his ideas about saving the world. In fact, the ideal for Hasan would be communes not anti-communes. Not my father’s wasteland. Helen said: “Yes, Catherine, my parents are completely taken by your idea of the wasteland! They think you have come up with an excellent startup project! A project which needs to be realized!”
“I’m grateful to them,” I said, “but I didn’t write a project for a startup, I wrote a research paper.” “That doesn’t matter,” she said. “My father thinks your project needs to be realized in practice. The value added is invaluable to him! Do you understand?” “What do you think?” I asked. Helen began to laugh ecstatically: “Catherine, my father says that the City of London can finance your startup! To start an anti-commune! A wasteland, as you call it! First in the world! My mother can adapt the paper into a concrete proposal for a startup. Financial people don’t have time to read research papers. Crazy, right?! This is all simply unbelievable!” I had to remind her that the anti-commune was a fictional topic of study, that it was only a concept, nothing more. I wouldn’t admit that it was a secure place and refuge for my being, that it had been for years, not only here and now, not because of the aims of the project, let alone the pounds the City of London was offering. The wasteland existed for me like the real world, but only I could see it, no one else. Like Sophie’s piece of cake, my piece of cake had already been eaten by the entire world, and only I saw what others couldn’t see. In some fashion, Sophie and I were the same. Sophie began to speak with me, and I with my research paper. “From fiction to reality, Catherine,” Helen shouted.
I had never seen Helen so excited. “My father and mother are expecting you at a meeting in City,” she said, “tomorrow morning at 9:00!” “I can’t, Helen, I’m at work, the director won’t let me go,” I tried to get myself out of it. “Do you not understand that you are no longer going to have to work in some random bureau for statistics in, wherever, Bristol?! Do you have any idea how much a startup for a project like this is worth?!” she screamed into the phone. Really? The wasteland my father wanted to find?
In the twenty-first century, what seems like an academic project can be conceived as a startup, and it’s easy for misunderstandings to arise. If Helen’s parents hadn’t read the paper, I would have done comparative research on communes and anti-communes as phenomena, as life philosophies, and Helen and I would have laughed at meetings in the institute about the unforeseen possibilities that an analysis like this revealed, the possibilities for jokes, lucid questions, and harebrained answers. It would, in fact, have been very enjoyable to compare the two lifestyles. My father’s wasteland would have turned into a folkloric touchstone, as much a local, Macedonian one, as a possible universal one.
But in my hypothesis of the finding of a wasteland as an escape from a dead-end, Helen’s parents had found a market base. The only question to be determined was where the anti-commune should be opened, what place could be turned into a wasteland. Helen’s father said that the most financial support would be given precisely for a startup in Macedonia.
“It’s not in the European Union, it’s poor, has a high level of emigration, and I’ve received expert advice that outside the capital, other towns and villages in your country are nearly empty. That’s why it would be best to select one of the emptier towns, so there won’t be forced migrations and court battles by those who don’t want to accept this new lifestyle. Still, we’re prepared to discuss all this with your country’s government. The funds have already been approved. The only question remaining is whether there will be any candidates who would like to settle in the anti-commune. This anti-commune will be an experiment for us to learn whether the idea can be expanded to other countries.”
*
Varosha is also a wasteland. It’s ironic, right? Nikos Avram wanted to find a wasteland, and the best he could find would have been right there in Varosha, his hometown, the place he fled from to find a wasteland far from the military invasion or the misunderstanding with his family. He didn’t find the wasteland he longed for, or which he felt he needed, in Skopje with his newly formed family, so he wanted to find a different wasteland, because of the wasteland he was already in. But Varosha is already empty, it couldn’t be emptier. Maybe they could open it again, like in 2003, but this time, permanently, so people could live there, and since it would be difficult to move into all those abandoned and collapsed houses, it would become a wasteland par excellence. A wasteland like this is rather politically incorrect, but also not correctly apolitical. But living there is still not permitted, officially.
*
There are not only candidates who want to find a wasteland in Macedonia, there are too many, I thought, but I cautiously said: “Well, there will certainly be someone who’ll apply.” Helen’s mother was sorry the wasteland would be in Macedonia. “We need a wasteland like this in Great Britain,” she said. “But there will be one soon, I’m sure of it! You’ll be able to sell the licence for an anti-commune everywhere in the world! Giving us a percentage, ok?” And she laughed.
What government wouldn’t accept money from the City of London? The Macedonian government was first in line when foreign funds were distributed, only no one knew where those funds ended up. The investments were an abstraction, but politicians were driving automobiles like the millionaires in the City of London. A short time later, an unknown telephone number rang my Macedonian number in Bristol. I racked my brain, but there was nobody who called my Macedonian number anymore. Who knows whether I even still had credit on it. I didn’t pick up, just wrote a text: “I’m not in Skopje, call my number in England, which is such and such.” It rang immediately.
It was the Prime Minister himself. He wanted to know whether, as a future father of the anti-commune, and he laughed, “I mean, of course, mother,” I had any suggestions where the wasteland should be? Which, if he had understood correctly, should be a place that was as empty as possible, with the worst infrastructure, so it could begin from zero. I said to him, “You yourself know that there are a lot of places like that in Macedonia.” “Yes,” he said. “The former government emptied everything; they destroyed the country! They didn’t invest in anything, they just stole, drove the young people away. But we will put the country in order. With your help; this country needs people like you.” Yes, I said to myself, but only outside it.
Still, I was the “ideal mother” for this. It was like a nightmare from which I couldn’t awake, even though Helen and her parents called it a dream, or, as they called it in English, a Macedonian Dream. It was as if I were playing chess with myself and the pawn was more important than the queen. It was easy for me to give the name of a town to the premier, it was the town where my mother and father had registered their wedding, near my grandmother’s village. The town where my uncle and aunt live, a town that is dying like many others in Macedonia, but the one most important to me personally. And then I thought—what would happen to my uncle and his family? Do they still sell animal feed? To whom? They had to travel around the country selling the bags they put together; there were no longer any farmers living in their town who would work the fields in the nearby villages. Maybe they would finally move with their son to Skopje. And what would happen to my aunt, left alone in that big house? I remember how, when she was building it with my uncle, my grandmother would walk from the village to the town to bring them a huge pan of her excellent spinach pie. “That’s interesting, in the Cabinet we had been thinking of several other towns, but we will respect your wish,” the Prime Minister said to me. “But, you know, if you want to return as mayor of the anti-commune, or whatever it will be called, join our party, the local elections are next year, just in time for the project. And, lest I forget, we will be paying you an honorarium from the funds we receive for the project, which is no small amount. Just leave your information with my secretary: date of birth, number on your identification card, bank account, personal identification number.”
I listened to the Prime Minister and thought of my father. And about how my mother, Stefan and Sophie were at the cemetery for All Souls’ Day, and how my mother didn’t get a priest so she wouldn’t have to pay him, and how she made the same pita as the one that nearly choked my father before we took him to the home. I thought about what Stefan told me—that while they walked to the car, Sophie asked him whether her mother was also dead. He was so shocked by the question he didn’t answer that her mother wasn’t dead, but said he would tell her later, when they got home. Also, that it was a good thing her grandmother had already gotten into the car and hadn’t heard. In the car, his phone rang; it was the geriatric department, telling him that there was a free bed for my father. A year and two months after his death.
I thought of Sophie and the inevitable path she would travel to reach her mother, seeking her in real life in the convent, or just within herself, standing in front of a wall of silence. And the fact that my father didn’t find his wasteland, with its two different faces, while he was alive. But he found it in dying. Now it had grown into something completely different, a startup of an anti-commune for estranged people; the competition had already been announced and the new inhabitants would be signing up. I thought about how my academic projects, which were so personal, ended up so completely different from what I had anticipated: I didn’t find an answer to my father’s Cypriot question, even though I had been seeking it my whole life, even though I had been at the meeting organized by Cypriot Answer even though I had found three photographs in the pizza box which Hasan had brought to Bristol, even though I had fallen in love with Hasan and gone to Varosha, and even met my grandmother, but hadn't told her to come with me to Skopje to see her son. And I hadn’t given my father a single drop of the babutsa for him to taste.
My project about communes turned my obsession with my father’s wasteland from something that could have been a perfectly competent study—about why these intentional societies where people live, both with and for others, develop and even more importantly, why after a time, they collapse—into a startup. the City of London will richly finance it and, paradoxically, with the loneliness and alienation of the residents, it will revive, that is, deaden, as it were—the small town in which my mother and father registered their marriage at the end of July that distant year of 1974. I thought of myself, and my place in all of this, and I thought of Hasan, and whether or not I needed to return to Cyprus, then realized I was passing by the City Museum and I stopped to stare at the sign which said: “Free Entry.” There was a reproduction on the sign of Banksy’s Naked Man Hanging. Just like my father’s wasteland, I said to myself, there’s free entry for everyone who dreams of finding it. Like the naked man hanging.
A man needs to find a wasteland!
