Sidewalk of hope

Zvonko Davidovic

“Rekord”, once a legendary spot where we used to meet when we were young, a place in Skopje from which our night-out began. Sometimes we eagerly watched the buses that stopped here to see if the friends that we were waiting for were on them. It was always packed like a basket full of young smiling people filled with dreams and hope. “Rekord” smelled of happiness, love, smiles, friendship and Zuko.

Thirty years later, “Rekord” no longer exists except in our hearts, it is dark and enclosed with studs and police metal fences. It is decorated with baroque facades and the people’s office of the man who serves as a laughing stock. On the sidewalk, several dogs that meet me every morning when I go to work. And behind them, between the passage for the “Beko” (now who knows what, like many other objects in the city) and Rekord is a man with two tables. Placed on those tables are colorful hair scrunchies and a few plastic souvenirs. The man is inconspicuous with an average look, for many ordinary passers-by almost invisible. They pass him by, only noticing the few dogs around him. Some of the passers-by fearfully pass them by, while some are angry and comment through their teeth about the dogs. But the dogs are friendly and with constantly staring at the man with the scrunchies.

I’ve stopped many times and bought scrunchies for my daughter. The man always stood by the table, unobtrusively, and proudly refused to receive a denar more for the scrunchies. He always had change, he proudly returned each denar of change and almost angrily explained that the price is right and that he did not want anything more.
Last Saturday, I was shopping with my daughter and she asked me to stop at “Rekord”, she had something to do. I stopped at the pedestrian crossing, and she ran out of the carsaying that she will not take long. Through the windshield, I saw her buying scrunchies from the man surrounded by dogs, who was waving his hands, and wrote on a piece of paper and the showed it to her. She returned quickly with a pile of scrunchies in her hands, got back in the car, and waved to the man goodbye. The man stood proudly staring at the distance with the dogs lined up around him.

I mentioned that we could buy scrunchies elsewhere. “No, we cannot”, she answered, looking at me with wide-open eyes as children do when they advise the parent and want to convey their feelings and experience to the world and the environment. That man takes care of the dogs and feeds them every day, and he is on welfare, he barely has food for himself. He is suffering from throat cancer and is operated, so he cannot speak and write on a piece of paper, my daughter continued, but this does not prevent him from taking care of the dogs. He doesn’t like when people leave him money, he gets angry, so I have to buy scrunchies, that way I can at least help him, my daughter finished her story. I was shocked and I started shedding tears of anger, fury, embarrassment, mixed feelings overwhelmed me, demanding answers to many questions.

I do not have the answers, I do not know why someone has a soul, and someone does not, why is someone invisible to people, while he is a bigger man than all of them put together, why the so-called ladies with painted faces from the nearby ministry and the surrounding institutions are full of themselves and blind to everything around them, why people simply pass and skip over someone else’s trouble, pain, or virtue without stopping, noticing, or trying to help.
The man with the dogs stayed there, around “Rekord”, and the traffic mess and the pedestrian crowds continued to flow, unaware, indifferent, and insensitive. But, subconsciously or not, I brought him with me in my thoughts and soul, thinking about many things. Suddenly, the ugly pavement at the now impersonal people’s office of an international professor and grotesque baroque facades became a sidewalk of hope. As long as there are such people in the true sense of the word, there is hope for us with a soul greater than the present, and the petty interests and deceits that passers bring into the soul blinded by themselves and their quasi-greatness. The most expensive thing is the one that has no price, what is gained by heart and soul, and everything else that can be bought or paid is so cheap.

We are all born the same and equally powerless, we study in the same schools, we play in the same streets, we suffer from the same diseases. We grow up alongside each other, we have the same and similar dreams, we read the same books and everyone makes a step towards fate unaware that somewhere at the junction of life they have already chosen their path. But I do not understand where and when some of us have lost their souls and their feelings that makes them human. Unaware and insensitive, they walk through life by skipping the people around them, losing forever the human within.
The next day I went and bought a big bag of dog food, ready to buy more scrunchies. I hope that the man with the dogs will receive the food and will not get angry … I hope that I will never lose, or forget the human in me.