H is for Horse

In 1989 and 1990, I visited 17 countries in 12 months, a whirlwind of international work that took me right ’round the globe. There are so many memorable people and places from all those trips–Thailand and Korea and Japan and South Africa and Australia and New Zealand and far beyond–and yet one stands out, a short visit to what was then Yugoslavia. Zagreb. We were invited by the human resources association there, a small but committed group standing in the face of ethnic divisiveness, trying to make their workplaces more professional.

I had visited Yugoslavia before, a trip on a ship that slowly motored into Split, one of the most magical entries into a place–and one of the most magical places–that I have ever visited.

Zagreb showed a different side of this beautiful land, and I took the opportunity to wander a street fair with our host. We talked for hours about what the country was facing–and his very real fears. I felt in many ways as if I were saying goodbye to him even while talking to him–I’m not sure why. As if I were listening to a man who knew the world would pass him by, that he would be lost in a backwards spiral of a country splintering into a million tiny pieces, borders moved and moving, naming renamed.

At the end of our hours of wandering beautiful old streets, he stooped to buy me a small wooden horse. "I want you to have this," he said, "to remember me by. Please don’t forget us." He paused in the falling sunlight to write his first name, "Milienko," on the bottom of the horse. A gift from a man for whom time would soon stand still while I kept moving.

Rituals are born of some great meaning that sometimes we cannot even express. Perhaps they come from an intuitive self that we feel but can’t name. And so, over these many years since then, little Milienko has become part of a ritual for me–the meaning of which I have only come to in writing these very words this morning.

Each time I have moved since 1990, little Milienko accompanies me in my handbag, not in a box, and Mr Brilliant and I make sure that he is always placed in our new house first, before anything else, that he too is moved, moving forward, becoming. He always lives in our kitchen, little Milienko, our horse to remember, even though his human counterpart has been sadly lost in the unravelling and reconfiguring of a nation.