On Death, Beauty, and Magnolias
I’m getting older. My father stopped getting older a long while ago. Soon I will reach his age.
My father used to draw. Looking at his drawings, the memory of his drawings, from a forty years distance, I think he drew quite well.
His large hand holding a pencil, the pencil is of warm yellow colour, most often yellow, sometimes striped red and golden, the tip for a moment hesitating over the paper, moving back and forth, not leaving a mark, and then the faint lines would appear, an outline of horse’s head, the muzzle, the lines getting stronger, he’d then draw the ears, the head-gear, and mane, he’d draw, and tell us about his horses. I still remember the strange words for the head-gear, улар, узде, and I remember them in Cyrillic because that’s the first alphabet we learn, and I was very young. Although Serbian has not been my language home for decades now, I’ve never looked up those words in Norwegian or English: When you put more languages in your head, it gets crowded, the words start to stir and shuffle and push each other, and I want улар and узде to be left alone, to remain at their place, right by the memories of my father’s drawings.
I don’t remember him ever drawing for us after we moved, and my younger brother was born, so at the time he stopped, I was still little. I never questioned his drawing, his ability to draw, I just concluded, in the infinite wisdom of a seven-eight years old, that it was something all grown ups could do, that it came with age, like their height, and knowing their way around the city. The idea that there was something artistic about him, it didn’t fit my picture of him at all, it was unthinkable.
When I think of his drawing as an adult now, the thought that his parents, his teachers, someone, anyone, ever teaching him how to, or encouraging him to draw, is equally unthinkable. He was born a few years before The Second World War, and even after the war ended, the life didn’t get that much easier. The new communist government did bring one important change though: All children had to go to school, even peasant children whose labour was indispensable, an integral part of the way of life and economy, even peasant children had to go to school. But the necessity of them still needing to help around the house and in the fields was recognised, so the school days were short and efficient, they went to school to learn to read and write, arithmetic, and history, and geography, not much time, no space, no need, for frivolities like art.
The primary education was obligatory, but the secondary wasn’t, and his parents decided that the primary school was just about enough for him. But he was bright and a good student, and the times were changing, the centuries old, ossified, social strata suddenly fluid, suddenly moving, he felt the tug of the tide, and wanted to move with it. So he read and studied, alone, in secret, while still doing whole day’s work at the farm, and he took the entrance exam to the university, without ever attending secondary school, and he got accepted, got a scholarship, and he left for the big city.
When my sister was born, he bought some land outside the city, and planted his orchard. I have no memories of us not having an orchard full of large trees, they were probably not that big when I was little, I’m only three years younger than she, but when you’re that small, everything looks large. So I have no memory of the trees not being many and tall, and I have no memories of me not being a competent tree-climber. The largest part of the orchard was dedicated to cherries, sweet cherries, we had twenty tall, well branched out trees, but we also had sour cherries, apples, pears, several plum trees, we had a couple of quinces and apricots, walnuts and hazelnuts, and many types of berries. He tried to plant all the fruits that could grow in our climate, even those that were at the edge of what could be grown that far from the sea: We had a couple of peaches and an almond, and even a fig, that had time to ripen only every third or fourth year. He also tried planting a kiwi, it was completely unknown in Serbia in the 1980's and was called actinidia back then, but it couldn’t withstand our harsh winters.
He’d always take us to the garden when the cherries were in bloom, and that was the only occasion we wouldn’t go there to do some work, so we didn’t have working clothes on, and it felt a bit solemn, a bit awkward. We’d drive out there, half an hour’s drive from the city borders, just to look at the flowering branches, and I’d be like, yeah, yeah, very nice, but when are the cherries coming? For me, the cherry bloom was just a promise of cherries, and the cherries were a fireworks start of a six months of fruit and berries bonanza, and had you ever tasted the fruits of our orchard, you would have forgiven me my impatience.
But lately I’ve been thinking, the last years, thinking is all I seem to do, I’ve been thinking that he did not plant that orchard for the fruit, but for the cherry blossoms. He couldn’t allow himself an idle hobby, not after he worked that hard to escape his peasant destiny, not after he left against his parents will. He left, and they died, a short time after, one following the other, within two months. So he never got the chance to really get to known them as a grownup, just like I didn’t get to know him. He didn’t have a chance to meet them on equal terms, as adults, and perhaps gain some common ground, and perhaps even forgiveness. I think the guilt of a good son, disobeying his parents’ wishes on such a central point, almost unthinkable in his time, and his culture, the guilt untold and unaired, it became petrified, and an unchangeable part of him. So he was never really free, never free to do something as frivolous as drawing (apart for for his children) or enjoying visual art, so what I came to think now, I think he planted that orchard, and invested hundreds of working hours every year, just for that brief moment of the cherry bloom. I mean, the fruit and the berries and the vegetables and the cut flowers, they came in handy too, but the more i think of it, the more I believe it was the beauty of that short time of sakura he did it all for.
Now I never got to really know him as an adult, we didn’t get that time, so I may be projecting, or, like other who delve into past, archaeologists and palaeontologists, sometimes do, I may be building theories on loose sand, too. Maybe my siblings would disagree with me, especially my eldest one, who lived longest with him and got to know him best, I don’t know. But I built this hypothesis on the only source I really can study, and that’s me. I have, you see, I have this unquenchable thirst for beauty. I haven't always felt it, or rather I wasn’t aware of it, until it burst out one day, a decade ago, at The Metropolitan Gallery in New York. An afternoon of wandering through the European painting section, just looking, letting my hyper rational mind rest for a moment, so not reading about pictures, not looking at their names, or the names of the artists, just looking, just absorbing, and five hours later, something shifted within me, the tears started running, something silently clicked, and I came out changed, and whole.
Since then, I've had an almost physical need for beauty. Now, I live in Norway, and it’s a tiny country, and I do try, I go to exhibitions, and museums, but Oslo just doesn’t do, the art I get to see here is just a far-away echo of the avalanche of feelings I experienced during the first visit to The Met: I ache to return there, but it’s too far away, for the time being unreachable. But then, I’m in Europe, and I’m often in Brussels, with its Art Noveau, and close to the museums of Amsterdam. One of those places, the van Gogh museum, it is special to me, and I can’t put my finger on why, my mind, ever asking, ever analysing, is for once silent. When I go there, it feels like a pilgrimage: I go in with trepidation, alone, always alone, and afterwards I can’t be around people for a while, my skin feel scrubbed and raw, painful to the touch, I need to wander the streets of Amsterdam, until the unrest settles and I feel my skin becoming unbroken and protective again. But then I can raise my head, and I can breath in, and breath out, and feel the silent click, and feel whole again.
But in my Oslo everyday, between job, and cooking, and kids, taekwondo, orchestra practice, mom have you seen my note holder?, what, you’ve lost it again?!?, laundry, and ignoring the windows that need washing, also on these days, I need those drops of beauty, too. The cherry blossom still just makes me think of how late the springs arrives this high up North, and of the orchard that has gotten too old, the last tree cut down just days ago, of my father and the cherries, and I can’t look at it without getting a bit sad.
But I’ve got magnolias! And there are mine! No sad memories connected to them, just many years of slowly discovering them, and the joy of realising they really existed!
I had this friend, long time ago, she was an artist, she used to paint them all the time, she was in the magnolia phase for years, but I had never seen one, I had never seen a magnolia tree in real life, so I always thought they were a product of her imagination, because on her paintings they looked nothing like the trees I was used to, they were too beautiful, too aethereal to be real.
And then one day, ten or more years after they entered my life, and my mind, through Natalija’s paintings, suddenly it was before me, a single tree at the centre of the village square, in Handschuhsheim in Heidelberg: A large, opulent, pink magnolia, in full bloom, defying reality. A whole tree, real, with unreal blooms. In Germany, of all places.
Since then, I’m always on a lookout for them, there’s one in Botanical Garden, she’s early and white. On my way to work, the tram passes through the part of Oslo with rich men’s villas, and embassies, not my favourite part of town, but in two of the gardens, there are magnolia trees, one small and pink, one white, and in the few days of their blooming, I look intently to the right, and I know when they're to appear, first the pink one, and then, two stations later, the larger, white one, the silent click inside me, the feeling of being whole.
Magnolias, they bloom for such a short time, much shorter than other trees, I think. And when it’s over, there isn’t a shower of light pink or white petals drifting downwards, the large petals of magnolia get ugly and brown, and fall slowly and heavily, thick petals lying one by one on the ground, no melancholic beauty of fallen sakura covering the ground like late spring snow.
I’m getting older. My father stopped getting older a long while ago. Soon I will reach his age.
My father didn’t get much time, nor, in a way, much space. Still, he had slowly carved out this little place, a tiny little burrow, where he could enjoy sakura and draw for his little daughters.
I may yet live for a long time, but also somewhere, at the back of my head, I am prepared to perhaps have to depart earlier, as he did. And that is why I do the pilgrimage to The van Gogh Museum, and that is why I press my nose at the window every time the tram passes magnolias, and that is why I take every morsel of beauty I can, and give every morsel of love I have, to my family given, and my family chosen, to my children, to him, the petals get brownish and ugly, and fall off, and all that is left are the memories of beauty and love, for what else do we have?
