Stories of Friendship: Let’s Talk Politics, Cherry-Pie
Can a lifelong friendship stem from seemingly irreconcilable political differences? In my life, I have never seen a condition more refreshing and ridiculous at the same time. Embrace your rigid worldviews, I say; when it comes to falling in love with someone, they work wonders. The shell of one’s political integrity crashes, cracks and crumbles to release all that gooey goodness of humanity.
If you’re lucky, that is.
Every time I hug and kiss my former class enemy Yvonne, who is a particularly sweet and caring kind of enemy to have, even for a leftie, I realise how grateful I am for all the times she has chained herself to a tree, waved her bra at Barack Obama or resisted the authority of a couple of confused police officers.
“Did you really take off your bra in front of the president of the United States?” I asked Yvonne on her first day in the office of a small but influential PR agency located in Prague, Czech Republic. I worked there as a consultant for a variety of businesses, some of which I remember fondly when I feel like having a self-deprecating laugh. We were twenty-five then; it was a great age to make new friends, cherish one’s disappointment in romantic matters and argue over things completely irrelevant to one’s actual life situation.
We both came from neighbourhoods very different from the urban, well-to-do sort, mine being stripped of hope by almost every decade of 20th century. The Nazis, the Communists, the Morons, you name it. The place I was born, a small town close to the Polish borders, holds a curious national renown, and it has been thriving on a mild version of despair for quite a while now. We are unemployed, we gamble, we go bankrupt in the most unusual ways, but our low expectations and sense of sarcasm make up for some of it. And as far as policies and their “left” or “right” charge is concerned, everyone’s tried pretty much everything, and none of it worked. So why bother.
Yvonne’s background was, in a sense, very similar to mine, so it was rather surprising it yielded quite different results. She comes from a small town located in southern Moravia, which is taken for a Roman Catholic stronghold (mine is more of a pagan playground). It is known for its winemaking tradition, a dialect you can barely ignore, and locals who seem to have a thing for sleeping in their starch-stiffened folk costumes. The situation in the region is, of course, hardly that simple; at this point I would aspire to make one particular observation: living in such environment hardly motivates you to a) stand out in any way, b) have a perm, if you’re a girl, pack your bags and head out to help Indian orphans.
Which is exactly what Yvonne did before we met.
The agency we worked was a place for no political activist with a true heart — I knew that, she did, too, and it was all somewhat conspicuous. Was she really going to perform the necessary truth bending, word juggling and ruthless moneymaking as everyone else?
“I can show you what happened with Obama,” Yvonne smiled and produced a picture of a row of twelve topless women of various shapes, heights and ages, whose chests carried a different letter each. Her rather bony ribcage with small, round breasts paraded a colourful “S” which opened a neat request for global nuclear disarmament, unfulfilled to-date: Stop Star Wars, it read, and it was all breastly-wobbly.
I blinked. I was seriously impressed. At that time, I never really considered taking off my bra even when I was home alone. What if my bosom… Showed? Even more so: showed politically? Would it be pretty enough to become a medium?
In the picture, Yvonne beamed with joy and resolution. She held her hands high in the air as if surrendering to the idea of freezing to death on a mid-winter day was the most natural thing to do. Obama’s silhouette, his graciously shaped skull (I love it, it’s aristocratic, borderline artsy) and the panorama of the Prague Castle provided a contrast I always recall when I begin to suspect that there are worlds beyond my means, my imagination, that there are places only special people are entitled to visit.
Now I know there is nowhere you cannot party crash if you are a dedicated activist with the features of a porcelain doll.
“I don’t think Obama got the chance to see us from that distance, though,” she tells me on a similarly cold evening in early spring of 2017, laughing at the memory of her semi-naked revolution. It’s seven years later. Prague’s still somewhat bleak that night but the faces of tourists pouring into the city in larger and larger crowds bring a glimpse of hope that a change for the better is inevitable. I don’t laugh along because as I see it, it would be only reasonable if boys were capable of lowering their guns at the sight of female bosoms.
“Poor Obama, he missed your titties! Mankind could have evolved by now,” I tell her, frustrated that the enchanting, highly personalised message was never delivered.
“I think so. But he was the enemy then,” she says. Recently she’s been almost inclined to admit she considers him a charmer, too. But I don’t push it. One likes to go gentle about their favourite socialists and their more superficial favours.
“Of course,” I say, suppressing a smile. I enjoy her attitude even more now she’s been to New York (she knows it’s not America as much as Prague is not the Czech Republic, but still) and loves the city with the enthusiasm of a fifteen-year old. I know I will, too, when we go together.
“He’s not exactly a friend even now,” she adds, reminding me that there are requirements of character hardly compatible with the role of any world leader.
With Yvonne, I always wondered: can you be truly political, achieve something, and still be taken for a good person? I tend to think it might be a tough job even for Jesus. I am curious whether we could agree on a name of a living person, a real politician other than, say, Bernie Sanders, who’d match the criteria. Could Sanders be that kind of guy, an admirable achiever?
Recent history shows he wasn’t, not entirely. Perhaps he was all too real, and we didn’t want that kind of thing. Perhaps we do need powerful images and big words such as Vladimir or Donald (never before I noticed the courtship of the V’s and D’s), words creating worlds vibrating with the same violent energy where crude structures grow and fall on the heads of people eager to start building them all over again once their hurt has been hushed away. We need images of the hunter and the hunted, just like the cave people we still are.
I am not suggesting Bernie (and that is not a very awe-inspiring word, is it — it sounds more like an amuse-bouche) was a rejected saviour. But you get my point.
“In Obama’s case, one was forced to reconsider, given the circumstances,” Yvonne points out the obvious. “Although there still is a lot to digest.” She goes on to tell me the story of a former Guantanamo prisoner she’s interviewed for her TV project. As a British citizen of “local appearances” he was picked one day in the streets of Kabul on an unfounded suspicion of posing a terrorist threat. He was shoved into a shithole for two years; only then the British government succeeded in releasing him.
“The guy seems very happy now,” Yvonne tells me, struck by the memory. “Meeting him was so intense my heart burned. Can you believe he and his wife have had a second baby recently? She was pregnant with the first one at the time he was arrested.”
“It sounds like a sheer miracle to me.”
It certainly does now we both have children. Yvonne has three; I have a three-year old son. Wait, what? Really, when? Only yesterday we drank tanks of terrible white wine at a lovely uptown café and swore that those two unpredictable, inconsiderate males — who eventually fathered our beautiful children — were not worth our pain.
“Hope you don’t mind it’s a little messy in here,” she changes the topic from the global to the superlocal as she tries to organise the dinner table to serve its original purpose, while her daughter, Nadia, comes to ask about the food, which is not coming quite as yet. Yvonne keeps sweeping bread crumbles off the desk with the composure of a mother who’s asked to provide something twelve thousand times a day.
“No. I’d think there was something seriously wrong with you if this place was tidy,” I say and I mean it.
Then we hear the desperate screaming of a baby, Yvonne’s two-year old son Oleg, who’s being dragged through the corridor; his elder sister, Nadia, thought she’d give him a ride by his hoodie. My systems align and finally cease wasting time on thin air, which is, at that particular moment, the pain of love and love’s absence, which made me run to Yvonne in the first place. She sees me and she understands. She knows when to ask and what. Her inquiries are usually accompanied by an amused smile (so what did you do this time), rendering all answers quite acceptable. Whenever I feel that pull in the muscle, whenever the expansion — or sudden shrinking — of my universe threatens to rip my heart apart, I go to her, and we talk some politics. At that moment, however, a different sort of intervention is necessary.
At our yelling, Nadia drops Oleg’s hoodie. He stops weeping, swiftly recovers and comes to me to cuddle. I am flattered. It’s the ultimate kind of flattery — you can’t manipulate a baby into liking you. You just have to be yourself and hope for the best. Yvonne’s eldest son, Boris, also comes to cuddle, although in his own way; he’s almost six, after all, so there’s no room for being overly sentimental. He climbs onto my lap, it’s more of an accident, really, and then I receive a series of violent smacks on the lips. My teeth hurt. I feel stuffed with violent, pure love, with the sense of a family I can never disappoint because I fuck up.
“I never told you,” I turn to Yvonne after I work my mouth a bit to start feeling it again, “you were the first political person I ever met. With my background being what it is, I could have been a working intelligentsia case, too — a natural leftie candidate. Your comrade, even!”
“Well, and what happened to you?” she asks mildly. Her mildness is a feature so prominent it almost contradicts the meaning of the word.
“Early on, I was told it was only arts, self-cultivating effort of the individual and his critical thinking which shape the society. Never mind the fact that in my hometown it was mostly dole,” I tell her and remember that arts, talent and legacy were the keywords invisibly ruining years of my life. Under their influence I figured that if I never became an artist, a genius even, my life would be utterly worthless.
“And how did it work out for you?” she inquires.
“Quite well until we met, and you started dragging me around rallies, commemorations of the Hiroshima bombing and all the natural birth stuff.”
What I don’t mention is that Yvonne’s friendly introductions led me to writing my very first opinion pieces for an online newspaper, which I enjoyed greatly, and it earned me the reputation of an outspoken socialist. You see the irony; you’re not blind, are you.
“Natural birth stuff, ha?” she laughs. She knows all too well she helped me deliver my own son, in a way. Few weeks before he was born she told me giving birth would be beautiful, and I believed her. She works that magic by placing all of her trust in you, and by doing so she makes you braver than you actually are. Once Yvonne thinks that deep down in your soul you don’t suck, you try your best not to, and that applies to all life situations including the expulsion of a brand new human being from your female parts.
Also, there’s the experience. One day I rang to check on her ever-bigger belly to learn that “she accidentally delivered Boris in their living room, and would maybe take a nap, if I didn’t mind, so she’d call me back.”
I did not mind. I almost fainted.
“You’re my Das Kapital,” I tell her, watching her and her kids eat fresh homemade bread with pumpkin oil and Japanese seaweed. There are elements of her lifestyle, which are thoroughly sustainable, and then there are some entirely glittery. Or pearly. And those are, allegedly, my fault. With years I’ve come to accept that while some people change the world by building orphanages, others inspire individuals to accessorize more, the latter being my case. One time I also attempted to infect her with my love for a fine lipstick, however, she’s the kind of girl you “beautify” using a range of cosmetic products, and in the end she doesn’t appear “made up” but rather “covered in colour”.
Today, Yvonne is wearing a light pink top with fine silver threading, looking fragile as a teenager. In the early days of our acquaintance when my concept of political engagement for greater good was rather narrow, I’d ask myself: Why would anyone like the idea of trade unions, for example? Because when you’re a leftie, you have to be willing to strike on any given night or day (she was, she did, and she adores public speaking), you should have a thing for shapeless frocks and trade unions. Those “bands of grey-faced, middle-aged men with greasy chins, enormous abdomens and slippery characters demanding the victory of the average and clueless.”
Ok. My elitism used to be rather unbearable but you go and file your complaints with my father. Stop smirking.
Now I come to think of it, we have never discussed the trade unions, Yvonne and I. It’s a shame. Without it I can barely claim I know a thing about her leftist tendencies. And it’s also convenient as we both hold freelance jobs, which guarantee that if we run into trouble, we will wither and die and nobody will give a fuck.
“You’re my Wealth of Nations,” she replies as if she read my mind, holding baby Oleg in her arms, kissing me on the forehead. I finish my tea and head home. And from there, having talked politics again, everything starts getting better.
