Three of my friends were evicted this year. It was almost four, but cruelty and her accomplice the market seemed to agree that three was enough. The evictions were the quiet kind. Legal and common. The rent went up. Arguments were had and lost. Suitcases rolled across pavement. Furniture was vivisected and distributed in backseat trips. Cash was handed off under the table to whoever would rent at four years ago's prices.
Cut to me and two of my friends in a little white sedan, borrowed, heading West from Ptuj after Easter, pulling into Ljubljana, evading the exit-sign trickery of the ring road. The main boulevard of Šiška, Celovška cesta, is a clever bit of socialist-era propaganda concealing a deeper truth of tightly-packed houses on nonsensical streets. After three left turns, only my friend who lived there knew where we were. We pulled up to two houses. One was brightly painted yellow, with new windows.
"The yellow one?" asked my other friend, who was driving.
"No, the other one," my friend replied, deadpan. The other house could be described as brown and careworn. A woman stood outside keeping watch with the true mien of a busybody.
"The landlady," my friend noted, half into his jacket. "She lives downstairs." He left us then. From my view in the passenger seat, he stood up and became only his trench coat.
A few weeks prior, he moved there. He used to live in one of the Yugoslav-era apartment buildings in the city center, a square, concrete tower, nicely articulated with orange accents under the balconies. It shared a courtyard with Sigmund Freud University, a psychology school whose bona fides always remained unclear to us despite the grandiose name, and therefore became the butt of a long-running joke. That his rent held out as long as it did is in itself a miracle. The building is visible from the market squares and main riverside corridors rendered insufferably postcard-like by the tourist board. The nearby anarchist squat in the old Rog Bicycle Factory was illegally evicted by police during the pandemic so the complex could be turned into a product-oriented makerspace with an expensive tapas bar on the far end. Leftist friends from out of town asked me to meet them there once, none the wiser. The transformation was that complete. Even the International Whisper Network of Problematic and Cancelled Places had faltered. The spatial juxtapositions of the New Ljubljana are often violent and jarring in this way, not unlike listening to news on the radio, where traffic updates and advertisements for lipstick are rattled off after a sober five-minute report on the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and now here's Evenflow by Pearl Jam...
I identified the building with my friend. His bike, once made in that same bicycle factory, used to be parked outside by the stairs, chained to the railing. Once he told me the bathroom sink had come detached from the wall and a new one had to be installed, was sealed with a horrifically pungent and perhaps dangerous sealant. I remember a picture of him and his roommate with a suspiciously sourced washing machine on a dolly sent via WhatsApp at three in the morning. I remember the IKEA table in the galley kitchen in front of the huge window that overlooked the sycamores or whatever they call them over there. Plane trees, parched from the now-annual summer drought. I remember the cobwebs and the little switches that didn't work right. How it got hot as shit in there during the summer. The shoes piled in the entryway. It was impossible to think that he could be detached from that building. The building had become every bit a part of him as his glasses or the trendy shoes I had shipped from America, or his conspiratorial, knowing smile, his fabulous timing in conversation, his sometimes irritating penchant for being very, very mysterious.
Right before he moved, we stood at one in the morning in the courtyard, damp from one of Ljubljana's famous yet increasingly rare fogs. I was crying thinking about this very situation. He said to me, with the dispassion of someone bereft of a choice: Everything ends. This too. That night was the last moment of the city as I knew it, the city I'd first experienced all those years ago and made a home out of. Everything that came after that moment took place in a city just like every other in the world in which everyone is tired of fighting against the inevitability of their disappearance or the disappearance of their friends, a city in which one feels the hostility of neoliberalism in the listless stares of their own reflections as seen from the curtain walls of the new and expensive, where the bars and venues dry up and the protests get sanitized. Where design launders displacement and tourism strangles every street to the point where, from the months of May through September one cannot even ride a bike in Prešeren Square.
My friends think of moving away so as to abstain from all this, their apartments finally leased to higher value tenants. They hang on the seductive notion that, somewhere off in the distance, one can spend less than the 51% of their income that on average goes towards rent in Ljubljana. My friends talk about moving to Gorizia, to Maribor, to Berlin which is even worse than Ljubljana, even to America, which to my trained eye is somehow milder when it comes to housing crises. But life keeps us tethered where we are regardless if whether we are convenient for our landlords, and so, fantasies aside, my friends instead move outward into the vague periphery, adrift on a strong tide. Rudnik, deep non-boulevard Šiška, the inter-zone between Moste and Fužine.
My other friend who got evicted moved into the same building as his parents. The landlord from his childhood, now a senior citizen, makes him pays four times as much as them. The third friend who got evicted, from a tower not that far from that of my first friend, went to go live in Kranj with his girlfriend. He commutes by train now, leaves every party by nine. He and his girlfriend didn't want to live together so soon but he needed to be out of his old flat by the end of the month. His landlady was renovating it into an AirBnB. He thinks so little of his new situation that he hasn't committed to fully unpacking his boxes. Two of the three apartments my friends were evicted from remain empty. The third is, of course, under construction. My friends' buildings are less architecture than they are ghosts, haunting the landscape, form without a soul. When I walk around corners, there they are, absent of an old comfort, reminding me.
Me and my friend, the first one I mentioned, went to McDonald's shortly after he moved. I'd bought him a housewarming gift, a woodcut of Ljubljana houses in an expressionist style, which I found at an antique shop and framed courtesy of IKEA. On the back I wrote, may both of us never have to move again. He took it from me, read the inscription, only to then inform me that his landlady was already trying to raise his rent and that he planned to move again as soon as possible. In the apartment, there was poor heat, no internet (or even the infrastructure for internet), no oven, and no room for his desk by the window in the cramped, awkwardly shaped room. He looked down at the picture, his eyes scanning the houses depicted, solid and stark on the page. I probably should have gotten him a different gift.
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