The Day Tito Died

It would be a lie to say that every May 4 I remember it. There are some dates in each month which are etched permanently into the folds of my brain and they resurface automatically, without reminders, Facebooks, or other aids. In May, it is the 10th -- the birthday of my cousin Sanja, three years my senior, as well as her oldest daughter Tamara, an eagerly expected newcomer by all the family members, relatives, and even neighbours, who was born at 7:10 pm that day 14 years after Tito's death, while I was at the Philharmonic Orchestra concert in Belgrade. Some years, however, a vague whiff of something familiar gets into my nostrils on the fourth day of May, and then I remember.


A child of the 70s (the last decade of Tito's life), my "Tito-memories" are mostly located in the years after his death, and there aren't many such memories. In the early grades of primary school, the girls had two versions of a favourite recess yard-game. We'd hop around the big square blocks in front of the main entrance to the school (in whose cracks a few scraggly leaves of grass always tried to rebel against the concrete, and children's ruthless feet), the main goal of the game being to avoid stepping on the lines between the squares. Depending on the mood of the day, the accompanying song was either "The one who steps on the line has a boyfriend!" (an unimaginable profanity none of us wanted to have attached to her name), or "The one who steps on the line doesn't love Tito!" (taken much more seriously, and immediately raising the stakes). And then there are series of memories, each one for each year of primary school, from competitions entitled, invariably, "Following Tito's Revolutionary Paths", which were held annually on school, municipal, regional and federal levels. They gave a chance to Tito's "pioneers" (which we all were) to show their knowledge of the People's Liberation Struggle in the Second World War, the most crucial event that had defined our socialist, non-aligned, free homeland Yugoslavia, as we often heard. A typical question in this competition: when did the Fourth Enemy Offensive, also known as the Battle of Neretva, take place? Before each competition, we received booklets issued to help us prepare (they were printed on the same type of cheap paper as daily newspapers, with smudgy lead and the sharp smell of printing presses). To my surprise, I never got far in these competitions, although I was a diligent student. For a while, I continued to cut out Tito's pictures and paste them on the first page of some school notebooks, as suggested or required by certain teachers -- this trend, however, died out around the same time as the obligatory long navy-blue school uniforms, which looked like workers' overalls. And finally there are flashbacks of a less personal but massive event "Tito's Relay of Youth", in which the relay baton was carried (a bit like an Olympic torch) across the country and delivered to Tito (even a few years after his death) on May 25, officially designated as Tito's birthday, popularly known as "The Youth Day."


The memories from before Tito's death are rather foggy, and belong to that half-dreaming half-waking reality of early childhood, which is later hard to disentangle into neat categories of adulthood. One involves a hand, waving from an open window of a stately car, slowly gliding down the street lined with excited people. I strongly suspect this particular "memory" to be some sort of montage concocted by my brain from various bits and pieces of information or other people's memories, as it has no tone attached to it, and it's in slow motion. The other memory is, technically, right around Tito's death. If I remember well, on May 4 1980 my parents, brother and I were in Belgrade, most probably visiting relatives for the 1st of May holiday. Tito, a few days short of 88 at the time, had been in hospital in Ljubljana for a while, where one of his legs had to be amputated, and anyone with enough common sense must have known that the end was near. And yet it was such a shock. An explosive, collective, gasping shock, that spread like a flame spewed out by a flame-thrower from the mount Triglav in Slovenia to the Djerdap dam on the Danube in Serbia, and, like some evil fireworks, burst into particles of grief, panic, and fear raining down on our heads. The afternoon TV program was interrupted on the state channel, and the devastating news was delivered to the citizens. My grandmother, with whom we were staying, was truly shaken up, the adults were serious and there was talk of possibly bringing grandma to Bosnia with us for some time in case there was any "trouble" in Serbia in view of this shattering event (how ironic -- if anybody could have "read" the future, they would be saving us from Bosnia and urging us to move back to Serbia...). My cousin Sanja, then approaching her early teens, and I sensed rather than realized the gravity of the situation, mostly from the behaviour of the adults, but as it happens with children, couldn't keep up with the heightened, larger-than-life tone of the whole thing, so we hid in the hall and played a couple of hand-clapping games, giggling hysterically.


Tito's funeral took place in Belgrade on May 8, after he was transported from Ljubljana, across the country, in his famous "Blue Train". By then, we were back in Banjaluka, and I was watching the funeral ceremony on TV; my parents must have been with visitors in the kitchen, as I was alone in the living room. My first-grade-pupil intellect didn't seize on the truly grand dimensions of this occasion, with hundreds of thousands of bereaved people present, and hundreds of topnotch world dignitaries from left, right and centre, paying their last respects; instead, I convinced myself that if I concentrated enough and willed into being a special elixir, materializing inside our thick-glass ashtray on the table, which I would then telepathically send to Tito, carried around in that coffin -- he'd come back to life. It didn't work (or, well, I hope not, as he was duly buried that day, 21 salvo salutes announcing the fact).



And then, for years afterwards -- perhaps until the 1990s? -- each May 4 at 15:04 sharp, the hour of Tito's death, the public sirens throughout Yugoslav cities (whose primary task was to announce natural disasters or air-raids in case of war) wailed in their thick, metallic voice for a minute, in sign of memory and respect. Everything would literally stop and hold the breath for that minute: people in their workplaces, homes or schools would silently stand up, those caught in the street would pause, even drivers would stop, get out of their cars and stand next to them until the sirens suddenly fell silent, releasing echoes in the eardrums and inflating the silence through contrast. It was a moment of total, collective concentration of inactivity, and there was something profoundly moving in that, regardless of the historically-induced jadedness that came later.

I don't care if you, with the hindsight of the last 30 years, find this sentimental, naive, blind, stupid, or even sick; I don't care, because those are just labels that bloom and wilt like seasonal flowers, and that ultimately don't mean much. They certainly don't mean as much as what masses of people genuinely felt on or around the day Tito died. Erroneous or not, they sensed this was the end of something big, which opened the door above a void that will lead to something even bigger.