This story has a beginning in the rain. One of my friends recently told me that rain has a special meaning for our senses. Because in the rain, we listen. We don't want to feel neither smell and we rather close our eyes. There is just a calm coming down to our eyelids and the tone in a background, the sound of the rain. This is the moment when time stops, and the radio begins.
This exact moment all of a sudden broke the reality on one usual day on a usual gas station somewhere in between nowhere and East Berlin. I was sitting in a car with Pattie, and she had just released her seatbelts to go out.
- I'll be back in a minute- said she, hastily jumping out of a car. I remained alone, in a cozy box of sedan. The rain was falling above my head, stopping and rumbling on my metal protection of a roof. Then I noticed the radio. It was there waiting for me to allow my mind to sink in muffled tones once I get a chance to stop the time. There were some adverts recommending various medicines for cough and fever, as usually in winter and supplements of a diet for those who continously endure in their personal improvement. Sometimes the adverts were stopping to take a breath and get replaced for a moment by cheesy songs from eighties, so-called 'greates hits'. I was always wondering who is responsible for this choice and who the heck gets paid for composing a 'greatest hits' playlist for a radio. In the age of persistent unemployment, that person is certainly born on Sunday. But then the adverts came back, and back again, and I thought about Mia Farrow, recording a radio advert in Woody Allen's movie. In 'Radio Days' the radio is not really a window to the world. It's a companion. It's a witness of a general activity called life, with all its' upside-downs, all what changes and all what remains, still there, waiting for a moment. You can laugh but there, in the car, I thought that there used to be a time when adverts about cough medicines meant something. Such a thought can change a perspective of miles, and how about a simple reality of a locked car?
In 'Some Like It Hot' Tony Curtis tells Marylin Monroe that radio is like taking a deaf man to a concert. It took me years to understand what he means, coming back to this scene on and on, even though it was just a cinical line without any deeper conclusions. Today I would say that listening to the radio is like watching only one side of your hand. And so on, watching only one side while forgetting about the second one can be much more exciting.
Pattie came back to the car and pulled me away from my radio imagination.
- God, what a queue- she was holding a paper cup.- I got a coffee too, I had some points to be spent so was better to no longer wait.
She started the car and in a minute we were rushing along a busy street.
- I'll leave you here, is that ok? There is no way I can turn back later on- she didn't finish her thought as I interrupted her agreeing for anything. To be honest I don't like spending a long time inside a car unless I have a really good reason to that. I said goodbye to my friend but my mind was already somewhere else. If I lived here, would I drive? Would I listen to the radio?
It happened several years ago but all of a sudden came back to me that time, while coming back home through the snow after leaving Pattie's car. It happened one night at home, when I went ti my dad's workshop to find him sitting near the desk, in a darkening light, listening to the sounds coming from the computer. Once I got closer the sounds turned to be a mysterious language, which I wouldn't even try to understand.
- It's Radio Iceland- my dad smiled, slightly increasing the volume of his speakers. - I just can't stop listening. There is something hypnotizing about it.
I still cannot explain it but there was something about this moment, and about these sounds, that stopped the reality for several hours. I will never forget that night and my dad increasing the volume of a music we couldn't know and couldn't understand. I knew he was doing in every evening, when he thought I was already asleep, imagining a far land he would never even try to go and explore.
- I wonder what time is now in Iceland- said he, after minutes, or maybe hours, of silence.
- I don't know- I smiled back. The time didn't matter.
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