
”A journey, years long, has brought each of you through thick and thin to this moment in time as mine has also brought me. Think back on that journey. Listen back to the sounds and sweet Air of your journey that give delight and hurt not and to those too that give no delight and hurt like Hell. ‘Be not affeard’. The music of your life is subtle and elusive and like no other—not a song with words but a song without words, a singing, clattering music to gladden the heart or turn the heart to stone, to haunt you perhaps with echoes of a vaster, farther music of which it is part.
‘We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. ‘Be not afraid,’ says another, ‘for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”’
— Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey
This is a story from my boyhood — the story of the most exotic, mysterious place in the village…at least for me, at that time. This is also the story of the woman who was painted on the entrance wall of that place. But I am getting ahead of myself here…
Now come with me, if you will, to that long-forgotten place. Let us go back to the place where I grew up, and visit the village again…
This time I want to tell you about The Hole.
Imagine…
A late weekend night. A small Balkan village with a cold, cruel, broken past, and a murky, hopeless, bitter future…
Poverty. Desolation. Broken, cracked concrete. Scarred, damaged souls…
Normal life and normal people, if such things exists anywhere at all. Good people. Hard-working people, most of them, and deep down, sad — all of them. Faces with names, nicknames and ‘labels’ one never forgets.
A handful of young men, some with their girlfriends, most of them not, wearing blue denim jeans, white trainers, and hair too long and too strange to be taken seriously…
Old men with smelly clothes, smelly lives, and sour, twisted faces…
The old and the new; the hope for glory and the despair of the broken heart; the flight up to Heaven and the descent into Hell…
It is what it is. We are what we are and we will never be what we once were. Make hay while the sun shines. Eat, drink and be merry…
Loud music; red light; the smell of cigarettes and the sense of impending drunken chaos — this is what you feel as you dive down under the thick concrete slab that separates day and night, exciting and mundane, sacred and profane. And then you see her — The Woman My Uncle Painted…
After you see her, you can enter. Or not.
But you must see her first…

Yes, the first bar I ever walked into, was down there, under the old Communist building that was the village restaurant, which in my time, also turned into a nightclub every weekend night…
But there was a time when ‘my time’ had not yet come. There was a time before time; there was a time before my loss of innocence, and before the beast of time had leapt upon me from the darkness, sweeping me in its merciless deadly race…
In that time, there was The Hole — the first bar of the village.
That bar looked like one of saloons I had seen in the old Westerns. Apart from nighttime, it was also open during the day, offering soft drinks, coffee and hamburgers to the children from the school which was just opposite, across the main road. The atmosphere of The Hole was not really suitable for children, and I think this was what made the place so mysterious and so alluring to me at the time.
The red velvet on the tables; the modern music; the smell of coffee, alcohol and cigarettes; the colours of the lights; the stag antlers on the wall behind the bar; the exotic-looking large foreign banknotes and the even more exotic-looking photographs and pictures of naked women, pinned to the walls…it all made such an impression of me that I remember it to this day…
There, men who had only popped in for a quick after-work drink on their way home, drank, and would not leave until their wives sent their children to ‘remind them’ to get back home…
There, on weekend nights, those young people came in to drink, court, and dance clumsily to the music that, not long ago, had been forbidden to them.
There, those old, bitter men drank, cursed and laughed; but bitter was their laughter, for there was no hope in that village. No hope and no longing…
Unless you were a young boy, like I once was.
In those days, I yearned much and I longed much; and when I grew up a bit more, I still longed for the things I once felt close to me…the thing that even now I cannot name.
When I grew up old enough to think and reason, old enough to kill my dreams, I was still young, and dreams still existed. In those days, I looked around me, and saw an empty, voiceless world. I saw nobody who dreamed like I did; I saw only young, free, empty minds, and I saw my own emptiness.
The cynics of my age, barely twelve or thirteen, were around me in the classroom. They were happy, as most children are. I looked at them and thought myself insane for dreaming. I was not normal, I knew that. And I was not happy.
How quickly they had grown; how soon they had become who they would one day be. And how quickly, still in the spring of life, I was growing bitter with myself and life.
Despite all the wonder and joy of my younger years, I knew then that Hope did not live there, in that school. Hope did not live there, in that village.
My days grew dark, and my soul began to fade.
And yet, only metres away across the road, hidden under the old concrete building, locked behind iron bars, surrounded by piles of waste, broken glass and stench, was The Woman My Uncle Painted.
It was as if she had been waiting, for years, for decades…
Like Blanche DuBois, getting ready for her Caribbean cruise; like Miss Havisham, still wearing her wedding dress, while everything around her fell to ruin and decay; like the Bride of Christ, torn, bruised and bloody, waiting to be rescued and claimed at last by her Lover…
She was waiting, and is waiting still.
I knew she was there, under the ruined, eroded surface of my adult life, and I even glimpsed her a few times. Once, me and my friend Victor — a wild boy with a soft but darkened heart and fists that was ever clenched ready for revenge — were relieving ourselves right outside the locked entrance of what was once The Hole. Above, the loud bass rocked the old building and amidst the shouts of joy of the young people, the promise for goodness, for a destiny, for a future, could be felt so clearly…
‘Do you remember her?’, said Victor, pointing at the darkness through the metal bars. He was holding his beer bottle in his hand, even though we weren’t allowed to take glass bottles out of the ‘nightclub’.
I laughed. The night air was soft and was pleasant, the drink had softened that terrible tension inside me. The night was good, we were young and we were kings. Nobody bothered us in the village anymore and I liked it.
‘One of a kind, your uncle is’, laughed Victor. My uncle was still very much alive at that time, and, thanks to his wit and drunken antics, was something of a legend in the village. ‘There’s nobody like the good old Coco!’
But I did not want to look at the woman on the wall…for some reason, my eyes did not want to meet the past. As if I was afraid that, by looking at the old picture in the darkness behind the locked gates, I would see something else that was also imprisoned there, behind the gates of time and pain.
Perhaps I was afraid that I would see myself there — my younger, more innocent self — locked behind the bars.
And so I laughed, and we went back to continue the party.
And I did that every time when I was faced with some relic of the past.
But I have since decided to stop running. And in the summer of the turbulent 2020, I went down behind the old restaurant and found the gates wide open…
The Woman My Uncle Painted was there to greet me.



Maybe we can all learn from her.