The Annihilators

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              “Wait, you mean they left it like that on purpose?"

              "Well, yes… as a memorial."

              "It just seems so weird. In America, we would fix it."

              We all stood gazing into the church’s dark interior, the traffic rumbling at our backs. Our tour guide, Lavinia, was staring through the glass wall too, the wall which filled a gaping hole created by aerial bombardment, and to which Jessica, in her slightly condescending but well-meaning way, had just objected to.

              "We have also fixed many churches and buildings," Lavinia answered coolly. "This was not the only one hit by bombs. They chose to leave it like this to be remembered. I believe that at your Pearl Harbor you can look down through a glass floor at the sunken ships."

              I glanced back at Jessica’s freckled, smiling face, wondering whether the comparison would take hold or not. Whatever the case, I had already sworn a solemn, internal oath never to take an organized tour ever again and to avoid collegiate backpackers like the plague.

              "But this isn’t underwater," Jessica responded. "You could still use this church."

              For the first time our tour guide’s composure showed signs of slipping.

              "No, you are right… uh, Jessica… we’re not under the water."

              The idea was to go east of the obvious. We were content to leave Budapest and Prague to all the Hemingway-wannabes, to the impressionable and aimless with their dog-eared copies of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, to those who look forward to correcting their nervous grandmothers with a firm but gentle, ‘No, it’s not Yugoslavia. It’s Czechoslovakia, and there’s no war going on here.’

              This had nothing to do with reckless daring on our parts. We likewise had no interest in making our way to war-torn Sarajevo or Azerbaijan and braving whatever chaos there was to brave there. Nor were we aiming to navigate our way through the crime and corruption of post-Soviet Russia. Our ideal destination was a middle ground, uncharted territory, a place where the roles of two Americans stepping off a train wouldn’t be established the moment our feet touched the ground.

              So we ended up here, in a provincial city we had never heard of, whose name consisted almost entirely of consonants. We were off the beaten path. That was our primary objective.

              After we arrived, I'd left Aaron in our shabby room by the train station and went out to do some reconnaissance. A few blocks away, past a row of grimy starless hotels and one-room casinos, I began looking for the city’s historical center. I didn’t have a map so I was hoping to guide myself by spotting church spires or stone towers but had yet to see any set off against the smoke-filled backdrop that passed here as the sky.

              I gazed down street after street looking for cobblestones but saw only asphalt and potholes and an absence of the kind of souvenir shops that are the surest harbinger of the quaint old world.

              After an endless search, I realized that there was no historical center here and was about to head back when I spotted a flyer taped up on a lamppost that had a few words written in English, German, and French. It was an ad for daily historical tours. What a surprise that even here in the middle of nowhere it was possible to get a guided tour.

              Lavinia had so far brought us to the bits and pieces of history her hometown had left on display. A sculpture or an architectural wonder here, the house of a writer or artist there, all surviving and hidden among a rebuilt, indifferent city like Samizdat documents tucked away from the prying eyes of the secret police.

              But, for Aaron and I, the most compelling part of the tour didn't come from history or architecture at all. It was our tour guide. And it wasn't only her beauty, which was substantial. There was just something about her focus and determination. Now she was telling us about a 17th-century stone fountain of an archer surrounded by a kind of grotto with such passion that we stopped seeing the broken glass all over the ground, the  streetlamps stripped of wiring, and an abandoned, overturned baby carriage with a wheel missing that I was hoping didn't have a story behind it. We were entranced.

              She showed us an Art Deco movie palace that looked like the deck of a sci-fi spaceship, a  World War II bunker that now housed a music club, and a metallic, minimalist mini-golf course from the communist era that had rusted from disuse and wouldn't have been out of place in a contemporary art museum back home. She brought each of these places back to life, even the ones that had their doors and windows boarded up, even places that had never had much life to start with.

              Not that her passionate explanations always came across to the full contingent of backpackers.

              "But if the damage isn’t visible… well, isn’t that, you know… a good thing?"

              Lavinia didn’t roll her eyes this time. They wandered upward, half imploringly, but more out of frustration that she couldn’t express what she wanted to say. This time it wasn't in reference to a bombed-out church but a renovated villa we had just passed.

              "Look, I don’t want to sound a little condescending to you or anything like this, but I have the feeling very often when I talk to Americans or western tourists generally that for you history is a place you visit on trips with your school… you know, where tour guides wear the powdered wigs and there are cannons and some other historical decoration.  

              It’s like your history has nothing to do with you personally. You need to learn it for exams, as you learn math. I know it’s not true for all of you. Maybe it isn’t true at all. It is just my impression. I’m sure many of you know so much more than me, but you talk about it like something that just happens, in a good way or bad way, maybe like the weather."

              I didn’t need any more reasons to fall in love with her, but the guilty look she had when she finished speaking, as if one of us might be offended being told that history isn’t a vital aspect of our lives, made my knees tremble.

              "Here, it is different," she continued. "Here, the consequences are always present… sometimes too much. Everyone has a theory, an interpretation… and not only the old people who lived through so many great and terrible events, also young people, children. I mean, you can go… oh, I don’t know… you can go to a horrible, dirty pub and find a young man drinking like a Swedish foot soldier… or no, in English you say…"

              "Like a fish."

              "Yes, that’s it. You see, even your expressions have no history. A fish! It doesn’t even make sense. Oh, anyway, you can find such an alcoholic who blames his own mess on the world history. Really! And he truly believes this is the reason."

              Suddenly, all thoughts of history, fish, and Swedish foot soldiers vanished from all of our minds as a truly incongruous and unexpected sight appeared from around the corner. It was a group of three backpackers, but not "travelers" as Aaron and I fancied ourselves, or even the budget-variety tourists like the rest of our group. These were the kind who sported upscale guidebooks indicating where to eat at restaurants with Michelin stars, restaurants which didn't exist in this country, let alone this provincial city. In fact, their guidebook couldn't possibly include this city at all except mentioning it in passing in the historical introduction.

              There were three of them, all wearing baseball caps and toting shiny new backpacks. They were each holding bottles of water in their hands and passed us by without a word. Clearly, they weren't interested in joining the tour.

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The rest of this story is available in Volume 4, Issue 3 of Night Picnic.