Circling through the hills one blistering afternoon
in a closed bus, throats parched, our tongues afire,
billeted with strangers, 1 didn't take to this
salt-and-pepper city of minaret and spire.
A building loomed over us, its lateral fissures
scarring each floor. The whole block was askew.
We must live with this for the day, we thought,
taking in placidly a menacing view.
We spent the afternoon chasing a waiter
instead of girls; took him the best part of a year
to arrive at last with a steak lunch,
cold mineral water and not-so-cold beer.
The museum is where the epicentre was,
said the man behind the counter. The chap
gave us a brochure splashed in kodachrome
and dotted with ikons-but it had no map.
We crossed the Turkish bridge which had stood the quake,
got lost in Turk-town, in the kebab smells
and taped tambour music, till we came across
a skinned goat that stank to Struga-ah well!
We didn't find the museum or the galleries,
cursed the Agencia Turistica
and spent the evening drinking Cuckoo beer,
chasing it with the fiery mastica.
I trudged four miles next day, misdirected
by well-meaning Slavs, and it came about
that I reached the museum and homed in
to the point from where the earthquake had set out.
A wall had been turned into an exhibit,
beanis jutting out of plaster, now a frieze.
I stepped in. They switched on the lights
for this solitary entrant; Gestures such as these
never fail to touch me. The blow-ups stare at you,
the black-and-whites of Skopje in the thirties. Then the stills
of 1941, the coming of the Nazis,
the partisans in the Macedonian hills,
Tito behind a field gun. The shades vary
from chlaroscuro to the war's sepia tints.
The earthquake next and the coloured splashes
of today. They bludgeon you, there's no subtle hint
of imperceptible growth, historic spiral
of cause and event. There arejust contrasts,
the lush placed alongside the stark, each era
caught in a monotone-the colour holds fast.
And a clock that stopped at 0157;
people find something quite profound
in frozen clock hands, such an easy metaphor
for time and the seasons, things that circle and go round.
Technology need not circle in, it strides.
The TV office, a monstrosity in brown,
is played up here. Walls bristle with photographs:
a chimney belches soot, a power station frowns.
Having carved history into disaster eras
the museum saw to it that the present spoke
through tunnels and TV towers. Meet the future
gentlemen; plate-glass and factory smoke.