SHIT HITS FAN: KOSOVO DECLARES INDEPENDENCE

Categories: uncategorized

Tags: love, community, faith, death, life

Date: 17 February 2008 22:31:24

albanian flag There's a side to my wife that I don't get to see very often. It's like living with two different people. One is a busy happy bouncy woman, full of childcare and hormones and hassles and all the usual stuff. I live with this person most of the time. She and I get on, usually. The other person is odd and secretive. She doesn't talk very much and she's seen things I don't really understand when she tries to describe them to me. I think this is why this person doesn't come to the surface very much. When we first got serious about one another we tried to talk about my wife's lives abroad (because it does come across as a number of quite separate but intertwined lives), but though I did my damnedest, none of my usual tricks worked. I couldn't get inside her head when she talked about it. I knew something was up because the television went off sharply as I entered the room this morning. She was distracted, and made no eye contact, but I couldn't get it out of her and we were busy. I wasn't really thinking about it properly. I didn't really start to put things together till well after 4pm when I'd deposited my daughter back home, and took my son out to a cafe. As soon as I'd stuffed a cookie in his mouth and picked up the Sunday Herald I recognised what had triggered the return of my Other Wife. It only needed something as subtle as the Albanian flag emblazoned across the front cover. And the headline "SHIT HITS FAN: KOSOVO DECLARES INDEPENDENCE". " (Actually it was "Tensions mount as...", but my mind did some subediting). The Kosovans have a state. It has been a long and very complicated road for them, and I'm damned if I can understand it, but there was a great deal of blood. I am frustrated. I want to talk to her about it so I read up on it and she doesn't connect to me. Her experience was not that of the western media, who readily set up one side and then another as good guys and bad guys. I can only see the situation through news stories, but they are inevitably still stories: to her, crucially, it is NOT A STORY, and I am unable to make it real to myself. I can't make it real enough. Many of the facts and figures of the situation are lost on her, and talking to her about them just feels like screaming uselessly into a storm. Like explaining theodicy to a hanged child. I'm left looking at this person I don't know. It is this person, in fact, who I fell in love with years ago. It's this woman who will suddenly, fiercely lose it with suburban fuckwits who bitch and whine about local produce costs or not being able to park their 4x4s outside the Tesco Metro. She understands something about the value of human life that I simply don't get. I don't get to see her very often and I have missed her. She is unanswerable and I wish she'd talk to me more. But she stays hidden. The reason the Albanian flag is on the cover of the Sunday Herald is that Kosovo is using it, temporarily, until they work out one of their own. The story for the moment (this story which is not a story) is one of guarded hope. But Russia and Serbia are growling, and there have already been explosions in the ethnic Serbian area of Mitrovica. I don't know what's going to happen. My wife is quiet and troubled and makes lots of tea. She keeps making tea. My daughter recognises this side of her too, now. She isn't worried by it, I suppose it's just part of mummy. Nor am I, really. It makes me remember falling in love. And it intensifies and slowly makes real my own pretentious frustration with modern bourgeois bollocks. I don't doubt that there have already been hundreds of thousands of words blogged about what began in Kosovo today, but I can't imagine much more telling than the sudden silence of a happy woman, the endless cups of tea uselessly made and poured away, and the worrying of her hands at her rosary beads as she quietly begs God not to let it all start again.