Architecture of Dreams
On my way home, I usually walk past a mansion built in 1905 by the Spahić family. Its shape and style suggest one of those creepy Victorian houses where you might find a body in the cellar. I was even told that there was a small library in the tower.
People dubbed the house Firefighter’s Tower, though it had nothing to do with it. The dilapitated state of its facade adds to the mystery and timeless beauty of it. There was a curated French garden with a palm tree in the middle, until they decided to tear it down to make place for a cafe bar that no longer works and the rest of the space around is used as a parking lot. I call it the Brigitte Bardot house: ravaged by time yet refusing to succumb to it.
Unlike Bardot, there’s no smoke coming out of the chimneys here. There is one other house next to it, with two vintage Renaults. One is used for spare parts, the other in use. They say a drug dealer lives at the house. But I actually think a former classmate lives there, way too busy for something as time-consuming as a commercial drug habit.
When I pass by, sometimes I get overcome by the urge to clean the mess and let the garden once again reclaim its original space. For whatever reason, there were quite a few palm trees around these old houses. Maybe they thought it’s appropriate with the climate. It also provided for a yet another cultural clash: the Orient, Mitteleuropa and the Mediterranean all in one package. It reflected our food, a fusion before food fusion even became a name. From the clash of the refined and the raw arose a city dotted with places like these, little stories in plain sight yet still retaining a certain puzzle to them.
A house like this must be a miracle if you are a child. It sticks out from others, a sad showpiece of the past pointing to the skies. But there are houses that have no turrets, lattices or plasterwork. My pre-war home used to be like that. A house hidden behind a wooden gate in the Old Town. Two floors facing a plastered patio with a terrace overlooking a wild, small river and the bridge above it.
Almost like you were living in a theater box, with tourists passing by and it all felt so spacious, so wide. There were neighbors next door, a garden smelling like dog poo and mulberries. We didn’t like them. The old lady was a little demented and smelled like adult diapers.
Her middle-aged daughter seemed to be on her way to that same place too and her husband was a doctor while their kid was a whining brat that I would steal toys from. That was the only time in my life I ever behaved like a bully. But no joy in taking toys from kids. It’s not a challenge. No joy in stirring hatred and violence either but that doesn’t mean our elders weren’t good at it. It was a question of time when the fuse will catch fire and ring the start to something that was no longer a game.
Our house had an outside stairway to the first floor with a fountain underneath. When you went inside, there was a dining table with four chairs. On the wall was a clock that my aunt had brought as a present from her trip to Russia. There was a glazed cabinet filled teapots, cups, saucers, serving trays, candle holders, vases and pitchers.
Now it sits once again in my dining room in a different place. Its contents start dancing everytime an earthquake comes to visit. Yet so far none of the figurines have dropped to their premature death after surviving a war where more than 100 thousand people lost their lives. There were crystal decanters and wine glasses. Everything a good hostess might need to keep her covered for ocassions like visiting guests, birthday parties, holidays, weddings.
Some of the pieces she most probably got as wedding presents in the first place. It was a time where people frequented each other’s homes much more often than nowadays where everyone wants to avoid cleaning up so they prefer eating out. The social etiquette seemed a bit strict, when I look at my childhood photos, wearing patent leather shoes, velvet bow ties, there was even a bathrobe with matching slippers.
You can tell the mood of a society by the looks of wallpaper in the average person’s house. We had a pattern with little flower garlands, as if you were wrapped in a gigantic vintage bedsheet. Upstairs in the hallway was a different, geometric one in moss green. The living room in the back of the ground floor was filled 1980s green sofas covered in large pieces of white crocheting.
On the coffee table, it was a crystal vase filled with roses or carnations and the tv was in the corner. And books, books everywhere. All kinds of books, encyclopedias, dictionaries, art history, classical literature and more Dostoevsky or Tolstoy than you could handle. I don’t remember the floor but I know we didn’t recover a single book. There were things of bigger priority.
Things like furniture, kitchen utensils, clothes, even the radio which we still have. It’s all there. Fortunately the photo albums managed to escape and our memories endured. Otherwise I would be a man without history and a story to tell. Which is wrong because we all have a story to tell. Some of us are robbed of the opportunity. And when that happens we are also robbed of our voice.
The tv was one of those before the remote control era. You had to pull out a little drawer which was full of little buttons and wheels that operated the channels. If the pale flowers on our walls were anything to go by, our world was soon to bid us all goodbye in the most brutal way of all. I can remember the shock and disbelief at the sight of that big pile of rubble within a hallow burnt shell that was once my home. The neighborhood as well. Everywhere was similar and the street was a patient waking up from the trauma, tubes sticking out of his nostrils and veins.
There used to be turrets there. Slender tall stone minarets of little mosques, decorated with frescoes and kilims. Unfortunately those too evaporated into thin air until years later everything was rebuilt. Now there’s a frenzy of tourists, my home has been sold in the meantime and turned into a hostel. The nature of its present is in direct contrast with its original intention.
But life always finds a way back into the story. It’s a soothing awareness. Houses are more than windows, doors and walls. They have a certain similarity to sponges, sucking up the air and preserving it. Like that fabled magic lamp, hiding a ghost that can rub itself out and reveal its secrets.
There are old Parisian villas locked up for more than a century and when unlocked, it’s a vision of an opulent baroque bazar. Each of those objects has its own story too. A reason to be there. Just when you thought you can’t run into something like this outside the Egyptian Valley of the Kings. They are architectural sleepwalkers. Wonders looking for their own Howard Carter.
How funny that it’s exactly how I feel whenever I see a house shared by many generations and their memories, the energy that turns a roof into a pair of wings because just like a bird its young, a house takes its tennants under its wing until they learn to fly. And when they do, the house once again becomes a nest. A place for love and a pillow for rest.
