Culture Shock by Noemi LoPinto

I spent this New Years' Eve in a universe unto itself known as Cafe Sarajevo. I had been there before, in younger days when I was acquainted with this crazy Romanian gypsy named Robert. He was a musician and jewelery freak who loved me for my then-insouciance about sex. I met my first real-life gypsies there, a small group of men who drank hard and gambled harder, selling their jewelry and betraying their wives well into the night. I haven't gone back, though, mostly out of laziness. But I returned because of an article idea. I grumbled a bit about working on New Year's Eve to the bar staff, who were too busy working on New Year's Eve to offer much sympathy.

The Cafe phenomenon is contained within about 2000 sq feet of basement, a dark and warm space full of spongy furniture and red lighting. Everything about the cafe, from it's warmth, to the conversations one overhears, to the blaring music is a reflection of the Koulenovitch family. They consist of Osman , 66, his son Hugo, 26, and his nephew Emir, 27. All handsome, highly sexed, charismatic romeos, they own the bar as surely as a dog owns the place he sleeps in. Osman, a self-proclaimed philosopher and artist, created the bar in 1993, during the war in the former Yugoslavia. It was a a place where Montreal's Eastern Europeans could come and talk. This included Bosnians, Serbians, Russians, Ukranians, and Romanians. The men, the darlings of the Cafe, have the same dark looks, and imperious attitude. Osman has short cropped grey hair, a long face and a slightly bulbous nose. As the bar patriarch and alpha wolf, he gets first dibs talking to the beautiful women. He is naturally inquisitive, and possessive of new arrivals.

There is something about these Eastern Europeans--they're a smart bunch. I can hardly darken the Cafe doors before I am engaged in a discussion on love, literature, music or war. I met a beautiful girl there named Nella, she has shrapnel scars on her leg from the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We talked of love. Another man, a soldier turned musician with the band, has one distorted blue pupil from when a bullet passed through his face. I talked to a middle-aged man and his son, (whom I would have eaten alive with a runcible spoon, if only he wasn't so young). They knew about Spinoza, Russian literaure, Borges, and Shulamis Yelin.

The musicians at the Cafe are invariably gypsy, and the songs, while beautiful, are always the same. There appears to be a slavic "top ten" that can always get the crowd moving, but it must be a drag for the staff. "Ederlezi", a classic Emir Kusturizi song, is a long gypsy lament that the band may play up to four times a night. The lead singer howls it out, and two identical twins with narrow faces follow with vocals and saxophone.

The trait of most barflies is loyalty to the favoured drinking hole, but the devotion demonstrated by the cafe's long-time patrons approaches idolatry. Perhaps because Osman is constantly hugging them. The rest of the Koulenovitch family--his son Hugo, his nephew Emir-- and even cafe manager Helene and the other two waitresses are often found kissing and hugging each other and their customers. When the music is particularly good, the hugs seem to fan out across the bar--it looks like a hug wave. It can be a shock, for those of us raised with the notion of hugs and kisses as something intimate, an expression of personal affection. Osman would say that's what it still is. It's unusual for me to be intimidated by other people's breaching of social protocol--usually that's my job. But either I have been hug-less for too long now and have forgotten what it feels like, or I am intimidated by how charming these men are. All that hugging can't be healthy. How can men that handsome care about any single individual? The world is their oyster. But then again, lately I have seen men giving me the same look as I've been giving out. Maybe they find me unapproachable too. I forget: men are human too. Osman's nephew, Emir, is older than Hugo by a year. He is slim, boyish and sincere, as light as his cousin is dark. He has less of a hard, practiced smoothness than his cousin, which made
me like him. He shoved his narrow face between two shelves, sideways, to offer me a kiss. I put my nose to his--and then his cousin tapped his shoulder, and I retreated into the darkest corner of the bar.

His uncle almost peeled the outside cover off my battered heart that night. He handed me three pieces of paper, and asked me to write a wish on each. "If God were to descend from the heavens," he said, "tell me what you would wish for." I was embarassed, because the first wish to pop into my mind was Love. I refused to name the first one, and wrote "success" for number two, and "world peace" for number three. Osman probably knew what number one was; he pushed me to write it down anyway, and I refused, cheeks flaming. Two feet away was Hugo, listening intently, and I would be goddamned if I was going to write anything so pink and girly as "Love" with him as a witness. Osman looked at my choices, and dissected them one by one. "These are not good choices, " he said. "You did not ask for clarity of mind. You did not ask for vision into yourself. You asked for success, which is unattainable anyways. Success in your profession is a myth, a carrot before the horse. If you want to be happy, then it would be best to ask for wisdom. As for world peace, that is a waste of time. The world turns as it is supposed to. Would you want to stop all progress, and stop the planet from its evolution, just so you can have peace? Don't you know that the earth will eventually be absorbed by the sun anyways? World peace is a dream. So these aren't really good choices, are they?" I was burning the little pieces of paper while he talked, and had no answer for him. I do not expect clarity of vision any more than he expects world peace. I just want to make my living, and raise my kid in security. To be human, it seems to me, is to be blinded half the time--by pride, by selfishness or insecurity--so why waste time asking God for clarity? It's hard to maintain perspective about oneself. The humdrum aspects of my life--the household drudgery, artist's poverty and struggle are not written on my face, just engraved on my heart. I forget that, especially when the outside part of me, composed of various shades of colors that essentially fit together into the portrait of an attractive woman, betray nothing of it.

So despite Osman's critique, my New Year's wish remains the same: Give me some love, some money to live on, and let me forget about cruise missiles when I look at the stars.

later,

N

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