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A Child and a Country at the End of History
by Lea Ypi
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Some of the goods in the valuta shop resembled those that lorry drivers or sailors brought back from their journeys abroad as souvenirs for their wives and children or for the wives and children of relatives and neighbours: Bic pens, Lux soap, and nylon stockings. In rarer cases, they brought more expensive goods: T-shirts, shorts, and swimwear, paraded on the beach in the summer, making the human models who wore them stand out because of the name of the brand they carried: "the green Speedo man" or "the red Dolphin girl." "You look like a tourist," people would say to their friends. Mostly, it was meant as a compliment. Sometimes, it came as a warning. Very rarely, it might be a threat.
A tourist did not look like one of us. A tourist could not be one of us. A tourist appeared rarely but was easy to spot. A tourist dressed differently. A tourist had their hair styled in an unusual way: cut in strange shapes, or not cut at all, or recently cut at the border on behalf of our state—a modest price paid by world travellers to visit a country whose own citizens travelled the world only in thought.
Tourists visited in the summer months. They roamed the streets during the siesta hour, accompanied by the chirping sound of crickets and the hazy look of locals rushing home to catch the last of their afternoon nap. They carried multicoloured rucksacks filled with small plastic water bottles which turned out to be too small once they discovered the extreme heat, a heat that suffocated all lingering associations with the Soviet Union and reminded them of the Middle East. They were interested in everything: the Roman amphitheatre, the Venetian tower, the harbour, the old city walls, the tobacco factory, the rubber-making factory, the schools, the Party headquarters, the dry-cleaning shops, the piles of rubbish awaiting collection, the queues, the street rats, the weddings, the funerals, the things that happened, the things that did not happen, the things that may or may not have happened. Tourists held Nikon cameras, intent on capturing our past greatness and our present misery, or our present greatness and the misery of our past, depending on their point of view. Tourists knew that the success of their cameras in capturing anything at all depended mostly on the benevolence of the local guides, who, unbeknownst to them, were often secret service recruits. Tourists did not know just how entirely it was in the guides' hands.
A tourist never came alone; instead, they always appeared as part of a group. Years later, I discovered that the groups were of two kinds: the realists and the dreamers. The dreamers belonged to fringe Marxist-Leninist groups. They mostly came from Scandinavia and were furious with the social wreckage that was called social democracy. They brought sweets to offer locals, who rarely accepted. They worshipped our country as the only one in the world that had managed to build a principled, uncompromising Socialist society. They admired everything about us: the clarity of our slogans, the order in our factories, the purity of our children, the discipline of the horses who pulled our carriages, and the conviction of the peasants who travelled in them. Even our mosquitoes had something unique and heroic—the ways of their bloodsucking, which spared no one, including the tourists themselves. These tourist groups were our international comrades. They wondered how our model could be exported. They always waved and smiled, even from a distance. They believed in world revolution.
Then there was the second group, the restless Westerners, bored of the beaches on Lake Balaton and in Bali, moaning about how Mexico and Moscow had been invaded by tourists. They had joined niche clubs, and exclusive tour operators now sold them the ultimate exotic adventure: a place in the heart of Europe, just over one hour by plane from Rome and two hours from Paris. A place nevertheless so remote, with its hostile mountains, its dreamy beaches, its inaccessible people, its confusing history, and its complicated politics, that only the most spirited traveller would dare to make the trip. They came to crack the code, to discover the truth. But it was a truth they had already agreed upon. They had talked about it while sipping cocktails in Bali and downing shots of vodka in Moscow. The truth was political. They had no political views but one: socialism was contrary to human nature, anywhere and in any form. They had always suspected it. Now they knew it. They waved, too, sometimes. They did not smile so often. They also carried sweets and wanted to talk. Sometimes they managed it. The next time they tried, nobody returned the wave, nobody was interested in sweets. They would never be able to guess if the locals who shared their views with them were random passers-by or secret service agents. It could have been either. They knew it would be hard to tell. But they always tried.
Excerpted from Free by Lea Ypi. Copyright © 2022 by Lea Ypi. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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