A Balkan Man in the Americas

Living between Europe and America the last three years I was thinking that you can’t really understand America without recognizing the centrality of the car in the lives of Americans – in a country where a driver’s license serves as an identity card. On the other hand you can’t understand Europe without remembering the centrality of railways and trains in its modern history: the industrial revolution; urbanization; a continent ‘united’ in its linguistic fragmentation through railways; WWI; WWII; the Holocaust; the post-war European economic miracle; the Cold War and a divided continent (old railways ended at the borders of Communist countries as a dead end); the European Union and a borderless continent again – just as it was before 1914. Trains and railways symbolize Europe’s booms and dooms, its most shining as well as its most gloomy moments. In the last few weeks, children, families, refugees from the Middle East are embarking in a painful and hazardous journey through Europ

March brought us some good news. The temperature started rising and some warm and timid sunny rays crept into our freezing winter. The snow started thinning away. It also started turning black, like the countenance of a humiliated warrior who can’t do anything about the incumbent defeat.   No more snow-slopes on the sidewalks. We got into the habit of contemplating them every day for the past two months. Snow-banks and snow-slopes have now turned into narrow black-and-white strips. It’s a sign that spring is around the corner (or so we hope). There are even days when I can hear spring’s quiet whisper. But the next moment I am brought back again into the wintry reality I was dreaming of leaving behind. Suddenly, the temperature begins to drop and a chilly wind cuts straight to the bones, like a chainsaw. The snow never surrenders till it melts away, until it totally disappears. The snow is stubborn. Winters in these parts of the world are stubborn, springs and summers are fragile a