Tatiana Zamirovskaya returned from the USA to Europe for the first time in 11 years. Many manners, habits, and even birds that we don't notice, evoked a storm of memories in her
The writer visited Berlin and the Netherlands, was overwhelmed by the friendliness and activity of Belarusian communities, and looked closely at the changes in the appearance and behavior of her old friends. She wrote about what she saw, heard, and felt on her Facebook page .
Writer Tatiana Zamirovskaya returned to New York from her first trip to Europe in 11 years – to Frankfurt, Utrecht, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In her post, she describes this journey as a once-in-a-lifetime event that completely "reconfigures" a person: flying across the ocean for the first time, leaving New York, which had become home, – and happily returning.
"It feels like I've been reassembled – but I have been reassembled; I broke free from limbo. Ahead, perhaps, are all sorts of other limbos – let's not deny it – but I did something, in my opinion, that one wouldn't even think of, and I succeeded in everything – and it couldn't have been otherwise."
Most of all on the trip, she was struck by her own corporeality – the feeling that everything she experienced was a physical, material experience. She hugs her friends, touches their shoulders, notices changes in others' bodies – including new breast prostheses – throws herself around the necks of old friends, holds her father's pinky finger – as in childhood, inhales others' perfumes and creams, walks on unexpectedly different European dust – "dust with little glasses," which, surprisingly, doesn't exist in America.
"I hug my friends, grab their thin shoulders, feel their freshly inserted, brand-new breast prostheses ('they're so cool!', 'I still don't feel anything'), run my piano fingers over their lean athletic forms, marvel that Vera's butt has disappeared somewhere (but she used to have a butt!)".
A separate topic is farewells and how unpredictably light promises of "see you soon" can turn out. Saying goodbye to her friend Sasha many years ago, Tatiana heard an anxious warning from her that literally came true:
"I won't say goodbye, last time you also casually said 'see you soon,' and we only saw each other again after eleven years."
The writer was strongly impressed by the sounds and birds not heard in America – spectacled geese in Frankfurt, familiar Canadian geese-"hooligans", and at Utrecht train station – jackdaws, whose calls took her breath away.
"Jackdaws! I haven't heard jackdaws in 11 years! Do you hear them cawing?"
One of the culminating moments of the trip was a concert by the Belgian band dEUS near a medieval castle in Zeist, Netherlands – a band whose albums, Tatiana admits, once practically saved her life. She writes that she felt as if the concert had been organized specifically for her.
"Girls and guys, you will never know that in this crowd of tall Dutch balding nostalgic men, there is a person from Belarus who flew to your tiny Zeist from across the ocean, from New York."
Amsterdam became an unexpected love of the trip – a city that Zamirovskaya, in her own words, "instantly recognized" and where she was impressed by the number of active Belarusians: a book club, a shelf of Belarusian books in a Utrecht bookstore, a cafe with khaladnik in the center of Amsterdam, where readers recognized her from her books.
Zamirovskaya met old friends after 11 years of separation, and instead of the usual "you haven't changed," she looked for and rejoiced in the changes in them, noting that everyone had changed "in the right, good direction," although the psyche by inertia still loads old, already irrelevant patterns of relationships.
European prices became a sharp contrast to American reality – predictable, without hidden tips and surcharges.
Separately, the writer formulates the contrast between the atmospheres of the two continents with one short phrase:
"Europe is not haunted. America is." (In Europe there are no ghosts of the past. In America – there are / In Europe, phantoms do not haunt. In America – they do).
The verb haunt is indeed difficult to convey in other languages.
According to Tatiana Zamirovskaya, emigrants who left Belarus after 2020 find life in Europe less difficult than in the USA: people have more time for reflection, books, and cultural life.
"For us, it's survival, I swear. Life in Europe is easier. To live!"
The culmination of the trip was a book presentation at the Berlin bookstore Babel Books – however, an hour before it, news arrived of the death of Belarusian writer Svetlana Kurs, and the hall, where more than 50 people had gathered, received this news with collective sorrow.
Zamirovskaya was overwhelmed that the hall was full not of friends, but of readers – people from Minsk, Mogilev, Crimea, Kharkiv, Moscow – who had carefully reread her novel "Eurydice" more than once.
"You know, I say, when I was finishing it, all those lonely nights in the residency in the forest, I had a strange feeling that I wasn't alone... And then I suddenly understood: these are the readers. These are the future readers of this book. They are reading it right now in their own time, in the future – and they are looking at me in the present, at me at the very moment I am writing it. That's why I am not alone."
It was there, among readers with worn, marked copies of her books, that she first felt like a true writer – with her own readership, separate from her friends and acquaintances.
The trip also included meetings with her parents in Berlin, recognizing in Amsterdam the features of New York and Bushwick, which had already become dear to her, and a constant internal question – had everything she loved disappeared over these 11 years? The answer turned out to be the opposite of what she expected: nothing had disappeared, everything was nearby, all she had to do was touch it.
"No one told me I had changed; no one told me I had stayed the same. Emotionally, this journey was one of the most profound experiences of my life. And only when they stamped my funny little green passport in New York, saying 'welcome home!', did I suddenly realize: I did it; I did the impossible, and it was so easy and simple, and no one knows and will never, ever know what it cost me."
The writer concludes her post with a promise to someday write in detail about everything she experienced – "because I am no longer afraid" – and heads off to a Tori Amos concert in New York, so that someone would greet her home "solemnly and with a song."
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