Walking with Grandmother: Three Days

~ To remember. Never to forget ~

We arranged it even weeks before I came for a visit in July. While we were planning on the phone what we'd do when I got there, I suggested I'd take her for a "spin" in town, and she said she'd show me where her elementary school used to be in the 1930s.




I have an insatiate need to find out, to record, to save from oblivion. With a worried eye I watch my links to the past slowly disappear one by one, and am holding on in a spasm of concealed panic to those that remain. Grandmother doesn't mind, she likes when I walk into the past with her. It is now the only time when she lives.



The day starts kindly: not too hot, not too bright, perfect for a walk. I help her sit into Grandfather's wheelchair, and arrange her swollen, hardened, aching legs on the foot rest. We are ready and roll out onto the street through the maroon metal gates, next to the small wooden shed where a long time ago my grandparents had a couple of goats and a few chickens. For several years now it has been the storage place for the wood. I realize this is the first time I'm pushing someone in a wheelchair and soon find out it's not easy, especially downhill. A clumsy procession of two, we are widely different from the absurd scene taking place on this very street some 20 years before, which my cousin Martina and I watched breathlessly from the attic: a pig which was destined for our feast table and was about to be killed and prepared by a butcher in the yard, had managed to slip away in the adrenalin rush of a creature which knows it's about to die, jumped the concrete fence, landed on the street below, and ran for it downhill and across the bridge. Like in a cartoon, a procession with the butcher at the head, my uncle, and my father behind, followed the errant short-legged pig, until they caught it a few blocks away.




Grandmother and I are on the bridge over the shallow Timok, full of frogs in the evenings. Here, on the left was once a wooden mill which was already abandoned and dysfunctional at the dawn of my memory, and which was eventually replaced by a red-brick apartment building. From the corner of my eye, I keep track of the lampposts, knowing I'll see Grandfather on some of them. The day before was 40 days since he died, and the usual notices, carrying a picture of the deceased and inviting family, friends and other citizens to attend the small ceremony in the cemetery, were posted throughout the neighbourhood and in some key points in town. We pass by a few notices from where the mustachioed Grandfather from his best days smiles at us. "Milosevic Sreten, the accordion-player," says the notice, and I have an urge to smile back.




A little further down the street we reach a washed-out yellow apartment building, which Grandmother says was built after the old school was demolished. We park on the sidewalk for a few minutes, and contemplate the site. She tells me she used to walk here from her native village of Sastavak, about 10 kilometers away. She only attended school for 6 years since her father wanted her to help out in the fields and with the cattle. At 17 she eloped with a young accordion--player with a tilted hat from the neighbouring village. There is one brownish-yellow picture of her from the school days: as part of a school performance, the young, soft-faced Grandmother stands in a row of children, with long hair and paper wings attached to her back.





We decide to make a semi-circle, and pass through the town centre before we go back home. Not having been in town for who knows how long, Grandmother perks up a little, and looks around with interest. With her subtle sense of humour, which my mother inherited from her, and which I like to think I inherited from my mother, she beep-beeps at passers-by in our way and then smiles apologetically. "Well, our town is not so bad, is it?" she says absorbing the summer day. We take a short break in the park, and sit on a bench right across from a row of stores where my mother's pharmacy used to be for about one year in the 90s, when she and my father decided that she should leave her job in war-infested Bosnia (where he had no choice but to stay), and try to open a pharmacy in her home town of Knjazevac in Serbia. It was the worst possible moment for small businesses, and within one year they lost all the borrowed money they had invested in it (which then took them almost 10 years to pay back), they closed it down, and my mother went back to Bosnia. I remember that there was a tall wall mirror in her pharmacy, where all the clients liked to stop for a second and check their reflection.



We go the rest of the way home in silence. We have planned to go to Grandfather's village Oresac the next day, and we need to rest.



************************************************************************************

The next day, we employ a more serious means of transport: my father's 1990 car - the domestic make, Zastava - which replaced the yellow Beatle we all adored almost as a family member and which took us to all the fun places around the country in the summer. (Symbolically or not, the beloved "Folcika" -- short for Volkswagen in Serbian -- collapsed right around the same time as the mentioned country).

Grandmother combs her hair, packs her ID card, her vial of nytroglicerin, and a couple of bags of candies, for anyone she might find there. Another agony of trying to fold Grandmother's stiff legs into the car, and then we're on our way. On the outskirts of the town and before the village of Oresac, we drive by fields, meadows, and wooded patches; a couple of them belonged to my grandparents, and she points to places where they worked the land when they weren't playing music in the local restaurants and hotels. We cross the railway tracks, where once the horse in the wagon she drove was startled by the train and almost killed her. I'm filming. The lens frames everything into a distant story, which so clearly isn't mine, even though I'd like to be part of it.

Oresac is Grandfather's native village, where he brought Grandmother after they eloped, where my mother and my uncle were born, and from where they all moved to Knjazevac a few years later, when the War was over. The house where they lived with my great-grandparents was partly demolished and new parts built by other family members -- it's now inhabited by my grandfather's nephew Dragoslav and his wife Gordana; their children left the village for the town a while ago. Gordana, who is doing some chores in the yard where a tiny puppy is crying, sees us coming and welcomes us in. Inside, they offer us juice, coffee, apples and sympathy for Grandfather's death in their simple kitchen. In Dragoslav's face I see a version of my grandfather. I'm still filming and he takes me around to show me what remains of "the old house," built by my great-grandfather Janko: all the doors in the house, part of the shed outside, and the low wall protecting the house from the street. After a short silence, he tells me that many years ago my mother took pictures of the same wall. I have a sudden feeling of walking into an unknown room and unexpectedly seeing myself in a mirror.

After a time appropriate for a visit, Grandmother says she'd like to see briefly the first-door neighbour Danica, who used to be her friend, and a female "ally" when they both lived there, young wives and mothers in the 1940s. When we go out of the house, Danica is outside, and the two old women embrace, crying, and trying to talk. I'm walking behind them, I don't know why I'm still filming, but I am. Danica says through sobs what has evidently been sitting heavy on her soul for some time: a month and a half ago she was ill in hospital, and she was in the same room where the paramedics, accompanied by my uncle, brought in my grandfather after he collapsed at home. She was there when he died the same night. She would have liked to take his hand at least for a second, but they took him away before she could do that. Grandmother asks her some questions, wiping the tears. Both women seem to know that this short walk between the two houses is the only time they'll get to themselves, before children and grandchildren take over, in an attempt to distract them from the painful subjects. Just before we enter the house, they ask each other about their ailments -- the legs, the heart, the head, nothing is good any more.

Danica's daughter, her husband and their youngest grandson welcome us with more coffee. Her daughter Cana is my mother's age. She's talkative and tells us that she remembers how, when they were 3 or 4 years old, she and my mother were taking their bath together in a big wooden tub underneath a linden tree just ouside their house, playing with daisies. Later, when we leave, I look for the tree, but Dragoslav tells me it was cut down some time ago.

It's time to go. Everybody says goodbye, and nobody knows if we'll meet again. In the car, I find out that Gordana stacked some vegetables, fruits, and home-made brandy on the back seat while we were at the neighbours'.

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On the third day we get ready to go to Grandmother's village of Sastavak. I don't feel like filming and take only the digital camera to make some pictures. We spend the entire afternoon among ghosts and shadows of places and people who once faced the skies with a tanned face and looked the future straight in the eye. And who are now long gone, a few sporadic remnants testifying to their extinct existence.

We first visit the small village cemetery, filled with various relatives some of whose tombstones have faded into illegible slabs of sandstone. Grandmother's parents are there, as well as her sister Zivka, who died at the age of 7 from a dysentery-like disease, and her brother Branko, who died about 10 years ago. Grandmother can never think of them without tears, but she never fails to observe the old ritual of offering some food to the dead. This time it's a few squares of the jellatinous ratluk, and a few waffles which she leaves on paper napkins at the side of the grave.

We drive into the village from where Grandmother eloped almost 70 years ago, running away from a heavy-handed father and an arranged marriage. Immediately afterwards, her father (my great-grandfather) Zarko sent her a note saying simply "You died on March 15" (the day of her elopement) and renounced and disinherited her publicly in the local paper. Several years later, after my mother and uncle were born, he loosened up a little, but the relations remained somewhat strained. I remember him as a short, sinewy old man with a curving mustache, who sang beautifully and always had delicious watermelons to offer. In his last years, he had an unusually loyal white chicken for a companion, which followed him everywhere until it became the prey of a local cat.

Sastavak is now a string of empty houses, Great-grandfather Zarko's being one of them. Abandoned by their former inhabitants -- the older ones taken by death, the younger ones lured away by towns -- the houses have a surprised, almost offended look about them. In some cases, they look as if daily activities had been momentarily suspended, in mid-step, and might continue as soon as someone shakes them back into life.

The crumbling stairs to Great-grandfather Zarko's house, and a hose trailing in front of them:



The one-time hub of the household activities: the well in the back yard, with a forgotten blue pot:

The unused hay, waiting for the horses that aren't there:









Old death notices posted to the front wall of the house, with grapes ripening for no one:

The dead walnut tree in my grandparents' piece of land. It used to bear kilos of walnuts, which would be placed on the floor in the attic to dry. When I was little, they'd put me in the middle of these drying walnuts and I'd roll around happily:

At the end of the trip we're tired. In the evening, I ask Grandmother to teach me how to make kravajcici -- bread rolls with cheese inside, which she invariably made early in the morning before each of our trips back to Bosnia in the older days. The one-time Queen of Pastry, she now can't stand long enough to make the dough, so she gives me instructions from a chair. I carry them out carefully, then write them down in a notebook. When they're baked, the steaming kravajcici are perfect: crispy on the outside, puffy on the inside. Unforgettable all over.

One for the Russians

I don't have any particular feeling about Russians, or Russia. I grew up after that period of time in Yugoslavia when Russian was an obligatory foreign language in schools or when Russians were automatically seen as "brothers." My tenuous personal links to the culture comprise one failed attempt to learn the basics of Russian at University when we had to choose a second foreign language; the class was taking place in the remote subterranean chambers of the Faculty of Philology, all dusty and murky, and was taught by an old Russian lady with long curving fingernails and a dishevelled bun on top of her head. That, and the dark deep-throat guttural sounds I was asked to produce in pronunciation exercises were a bit too much for me and I escaped to the sunnier, first-floor French section, but the ghost of the Russian language still haunts me occasionally, like when someone asks me where I am from, I tell them I am Serbian, and the person concludes happily, "So you speak Russian!" A couple of films by Nikita Mihalkov, Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, and the name of the legendary Belgrade band Ekatarina Velika (Catherine the Great) pretty much exhaust this list.




So it's not from sentimental reasons that I'm dedicating this one to Russians. And it wasn't the atrocious socialist-realist monument on Mount Avala near Belgrade I saw this summer that inspired me. (In sign of a protest against this particular artistic style, I didn't take a picture of it). It was, I think, the simple statement on the white marble plaque that seemed to speak from a time long long ago, when people still remembered their tragedies, when they cared about such disasters as the Second World War, when a certain simpler, more straightforward friendship existed. Above all, it was the sad irony enveloping a handful of Russian names etched into the marble slab, the kind which leaves you silent and empty-headed for a while.



A crash-course in history (which I myself had to take): after three years of German occupation, Belgrade was finally beginning to see the light of day in October 1944, and was liberated on October 20, by the joint efforts of the People's Liberation Army of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Red Army. (My grandfather was there with his 9th Serbian Brigade -- which later earned him a somewhat humorous title of "my liberator of Belgrade!" from me -- and right around that time, my grandmother was getting ready to walk 300 kilometers from eastern Serbia to Belgrade, to find out if he was alive). The war in Europe ended the following spring, and the world woke up from what must have felt like a bad combination of sci-fi and horror nightmares. Exactly twenty years later, in October 1964, Belgrade was all set to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of freedom, and welcome the Soviet military delegation containing 6 participants of the operations carried out two decades before, led by Marshal Biriuzov and Colonel General Zdanov. In the morning of October 19, the plane carrying the delegation crashed into Mount Avala, just 16 kilometers away from Belgrade and the very spot where in 1944 they helped win somebody else's battle, survivors of man-made madness and chaos.

Grandfather Sreten's Liberator of Belgrade Testimonial

There wasn't much Belgrade could give them: gratitude, the monument to commemorate the tragedy, the title of the Yugoslav National Hero to Biriuzov, a street name for Zdanov... The story itself is receding from the living memory, disappearing under the fine patina of passing time, joining the lost ranks of thousands of other gradually forgotten battles that must have taken place in the history of this planet.



So this one is for them, while it is still possible to remember them. I too don't have much to offer except a small salute from across forty years, and this unlikely but real dandelion which against all odds found a way to push through the marble around the monument. A sure sign that the mountain remembers, perhaps.

A Map of Absences

I want to write about Belgrade, but the first things that come to mind are those that didn't happen. This, then, is my postcard from the Belgrade I never knew.



* * * * 1

We're driving down Karadjordjeva street. The summer is one long, dusty, scorchingly hot day that never ends and promises everything. In front of the Central Train Station, which is right next to the Central Bus Station, the street is a mess of pedestrians, cars, buses, and streetcars clanging, screeching, and swaying dangerously on the rails. I keep my gaze glued to the right: I'm waiting to see the cake shop which has always been there, or at least looks like it has always been there. In a row of old, faded Belgrade stores, it has a narrow but tall display window, and never fails to impress with its pyramids of all sorts of yummy-looking, mouth-watering cakes: tulumbe, sampite, krempite, tahan alva... Particularly attractive are the tall, elegant, foam-white sampite, with a delicate crust on top. I looked at them yearningly as a student 15 years ago whenever errands brought me to this corner of the city, and I look at them with the same yearning now. I don't know why, but I never went in, never even stopped in front of the window, just looked to see it with anticipation, imagining what all those sweets might taste like. If anybody ever wants to offer me a little present one summer day in Belgrade, perhaps take me to the small cake shop on Karadjordjeva street, across from the side entrance to the Train Station...


* * * * 2


A little further down the street, towards the Kalemegdan Fortress, is the Insitute for Geology, where my grandmother Angelina, my father's mother, worked as a secretary in the 1950s and the 1960s. The Institute is in a beautiful early-20th-century grey building, somewhat worse for wear on the outside, but famous for its rich interior with intricate staircases, used as sets in various domestic films. My grandmother retired before I was born, and I never saw it from the inside, but I heard about it from her. My favourite story: this building is the very place where she started to smoke in her forties, after she divorced my grandfather Dragi. She'd always explain half-sarcastically how she thought at the time that she should look distressed and crushed by the divorce and the easiest way to build that image of herself in the public eye was to smoke at work. She'd often light up while telling the story. Sometimes, when we visit her grave in the cemetery on top of the Lesce Hill above the Danube slowly disappearing towards the east, we light a cigarette and leave it there.


* * * * 3

Still further down Karadjordjeva street, at the foot of the Fortress, is a small tangle of railway tracks where a few streetcar lines turn around and go back into the city. This is where my grandfather Dragi drove the red streetcars of Belgrade his entire working life. I was four when he died so I must have met him, but I don't remember him. I know him only from a few black-and-white pictures, as a man wearing a spotless suit and a timid smile. The Belgrade of the 50s offered at least two prime entertainments to young lads such as my father and my uncle Bata: one was the raising of pigeons on the roofs of buildings which also involved training them to fly and come back, and a street amusment for the daring which involved streetcars, and which had its own special name, kesanje (most probably a portmanteau of "kacenje" - hooking, and "vesanje" - hanging). The point, as explained once by Uncle Bata, my father's older brother, was to run up behind a streetcar, and hang on to its back as long as possible before being detected by the ticket collector or the driver (which, theoretically, may have been his own father). The 50s were also the time when my grandfather left, and went to another woman. Grandmother divorced him and started smoking; my father and uncle grew up without their father but remained on good terms with him. The last few years of his life he spent in a psychiatric hospital, for an unidentified ailment. Not knowing much about grandfather Dragi, I always linked it to an unfortunate accident which happened to him one day at work: a woman suddenly threw herself in front of the streetcar and he ran over her. I never asked where exactly this happened, but perhaps it was just here, where the Fortress runs down to meet the River Sava, rolling by steadily towards the Danube around the corner.

* * * * 4

Turning right at the end of Karadjordjeva street, we move away from the river and drive along the south edge of the Fortress, passing through the hub of pedestrian activities at the tail end of the posh Knez Mihailova street. We leave behind us the cackle and chaos of the City Zoo placed inside one corner of the Fortress, and turn into Cara Dusana street. Here at the lower end of the street is the oldest standing house in Belgrade, number 10 , built in 1727 by an Austrian engineer and colonel. The real highlight of the street for me, however, is further up: Bajloni's Marketplace, one of many such open markets in the city. This one is at a pleasant walking-distance from the place where I worked briefly -- the Kolarac Foreign Language Institute: an old-fashioned, chalky language school, occupying part of a dignified old edifice not far from the Fortress, which is also the home of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra. I remember the Market well because I used to go there every payday to get deliciously fresh honey from a health-food store there. Having money in your pocket after the meagre student years made even more meagre by the war, gave a bounce to your step and benevolence to your manner. I would walk leisurely from the Institute through the bustle of downtown to Skadarska street casting generous looks all around, and go down the stone pavement until I reached the Market; I'd wander between the stands for the sheer pleasure of feeling my "buying power" which I could exert at any moment; then I'd go to the health-food store and get the honey. One time, however, my small ritual was spoilt. In the store, I asked for two jars of honey, and before I could tell the shop assistant that I'd put them in my backpack, she'd already placed the jars in a plastic bag. I paid, walked out, and about three meters later, the cheap plastic tore, slipped out of my hand, and with an ominous deep thud the jars hit the concrete. The thick, transparent honey was invading the remains of the bag and then the concrete with a teasing finality. I watched, bent over this mini-disaster, for a few seconds, calculating quickly and realizing that my tight monthly budget wouldn't allow me to go back in and buy another two jars. I straightened up slowly, and left it all behind, not turning once. Sometimes you just have to walk away, a friend said once. I did, and soon forgot all about it in the casual lightness of a Belgrade afternoon.

* * * *

The band was Idoli, the year was 1985, and I wasn't there, but this is exactly what Belgrade feels like in the summer: stubbornly sunny, butterfly-light, and permanently in love.