Unphotographable

 

Every summer towards the end of my visit, I get ready for my annual raid. I declutter my father’s kitchen table, pull out one or all the boxes from underneath the L-shaped canapé – where, many years ago when my mother was still alive, my brother slept when I was visiting – and open the dusty lids. It’s a moment of instantaneous magic. As if someone had suddenly turned on the light after eons of darkness within the box, a whole new world – black and white, and sometimes in color – blinks awake and looks up at me, looking down at it. Photographs. Dozens and hundreds of photographs. A myriad of lives crammed into little, flat pieces of paper. Some – many – touching mine in various and weird ways. After only a second of sizing it all up where everyone is holding their breath including me, I just jump into it and know I’ll be in there for hours or decades of real time depending on what “real time” really means. Or whose it is.

Everything in the boxes is fascinating with its momentarily vivid pastness, almost on the brink of saying something, and I’m not sure what I’m looking for. An instant of mystery teasing from the other side, a spontaneous configuration of known or unknown people captured in a telling tableau, a nostalgia-invoking gem of the past… Some summers I try to sort and organize the photos according to the side of the family or the decade or how familiar the faces are. But most of the time I just leaf through the piles and travel through time. There are toddlers – often my brother and me – naked or half-naked on the pebbly beaches of the Adriatic Sea; there are unidentified children at various early birthday parties (which, at the time, meant eating/drinking gatherings of the young parents with their small children in tow); there are people in their late teens and early twenties, known as omladinci in the happier times of Tito’s Yugoslavia in the late 1950s, picnicking on meadows with badminton rackets and accordions (the latter giving away my mother) or walking through a summer forest-clearing with their work shirts and pants rolled up on a field trip for a university course (my father); there are families radiating genuine happiness gathered around dinner tables – always covered with white table cloths –  at home or in restaurants, pressed close together for the picture, arms on shoulders (my grandparents and their extended family or friends).

One photo arrests my attention in a puzzling way although I recognize two out of the three people in it – my maternal grandparents. But there’s something a little odd in the placement of the three subjects and the composition of the scene: my grandfather and a man I don’t recognize stand in front of a house with tall windows lightly turned towards each other but facing the camera. My grandfather, a peasant who worked the land but also a musician with his own family band not shying from a PR opportunity, seems at ease flashing a bright smiling face, a white shirt underneath an unbuttoned good-quality dandy-looking jacket, and a cigarette between the fingers of his left hand. The unknown man is wearing a sweater, has both hands in his trouser pockets and with a slightly leaning head seems to be eying the photographer suspiciously. Between and behind them, like a third point of a triangle, is my grandmother, who is inside the house, her elbows resting on the windowsill of the open window with a white lacey curtain behind her. She is looking at the camera with a gentle (slightly vulnerable?) smile and there is something that looks like a cat’s head with triangular ears cradled in the nook of her left arm. She is wearing a necklace but even with a magnifier I can’t tell if it’s the one she gave me, having nothing else to give me, the last time I saw her some forty years later. Where were they, who was this man, what were they doing here? There is no one who can tell me that anymore, and the puzzle remains, suspended in the empty air of the photograph forever.

The photograph which I decide is my top-prize loot this summer is one of many capturing celebrations around white-table-clothed tables and it also contains three people. I know who all of them are, although I’ve never met one of them. This was the wedding day of one of my father’s best friends from university, Pera (to me, who saw the light of day a few years after this photo was taken, he was Uncle Pera), and this was at the very end of the 1960s. The other two men in the photo are Cvrle and my father. Cvrle, whose real name was Jordan (my father couldn’t recall why they nicknamed him Cvrle), was another good university friend, and the closeness of their friendship is clear in the photo: they are a tightly-knit unit of three, with Pera and my dad on each side of Cvrle. Cvrle’s right arm is squeezing Pera’s neck as if he’s headlocking him, and my father’s right arm is extended and thrown around both of his friends’ backs. They are holding various drinking accessories: a tall glass, a small jug, a shot glass. The table bears witness to the amount of drinking that was going on: there are five bottles in front of them, a soda siphon and a fat jug, one bottle showing its label in half-profile with the big letters DA (“ah, yes, we were drinking DAVID,” my father said as soon as he looked at the photo – apparently an expensive drink at the time which was normally above their alcohol budget but was there for the occasion; a good student as always, I googled it but found nothing). A heavy crystal ash tray – the kind that continued to be fashionable into the 1970s and the 1980s and that even I remember from the time when my parents still smoked – with the cigarette butts in it confirms they were living fast and with gusto.

Why did this photo pull at my sleeve, why did it demand my full attention….? There are plenty of similar photos in this box and this one is not in any sense better or special. But perhaps it epitomizes, I don’t quite know what, a thirst for life? The power and invincibility and nonchalance of youth? The highs of a thick friendship and the intensity of being there with and for the others “right here right now”? Or did my nostalgia-hunting eye detect what I see as a certain old-world quality of knowing how to be fully festive, inhabiting the width and the breadth of one’s life unquestioningly?

Although all of the above is relevant, I know I’ve been dancing around the truest reason: fragility. The power and force of life but also the inescapable frailty of any one life and its ramifications, staring you in the face, beautiful and terrifying.

The three men in the photo are in their late twenties; they are coming into their own, finally earning proper salaries in their first jobs, and beginning to make big life decisions. Their bright smiling faces are radiating a certain ease and confidence, Cvrle and my father looking straight into the camera, Pera – the incorrigible and mischievous joker of the gang – casting a salacious? mocking? flippant? side-glance somewhere out of the frame. The world is theirs at this moment. And yet… Looking at them from across almost sixty years, my admiration of their vivaciousness captured in the photo is somewhat obscured by what my vantage point imposes: an insight into the accumulation of glitches, detritus, blockages, weights and burdens brought on after this moment by the free-flowing, elusive, always dynamic and unphotographable current of time which never stands still. An insight into the unfolding of their paths – their fate, perhaps? And knowing someone’s fate is somehow never pleasant, even when we can stop and appreciate the value of certain singular moments.

I never met Cvrle. In the photo, he commands the most attention with his middle position, the whiteness of his shirt unfettered by a jacket, and a tanned healthy face radiating with overflowing happiness. He is also the one whose path stopped abruptly just a couple of years after this photo was taken and before I was born. Unlike Pera, who got his first job in Macedonia and my father who started his career as an engineer of geology in Bosnia, Cvrle was lucky to land a job in Belgrade after graduating. Yugoslavia was a fast-developing country in the 1960s, rebuilding and building the post-war infrastructure everywhere, so they often found themselves travelling to different locations as part of the pre-construction terrain work. The summer Cvrle died, he and my father had terrain assignments in Montenegro, and they made a plan to meet up. My father’s work was in Kotor, while Cvrle’s was in Budva, where they agreed to meet one evening. When my father arrived, Cvrle was not there and at the bar they told him that Cvrle decided to leave as it was getting late, to make it to Cetinje where he had booked a hotel room. In the era of no cell phones and no reliable landlines if one was not at home, it took a few days for my father to find out that Cvrle was killed in a car accident that night as he was making his way up to Cetinje.

Geographically speaking, Montenegro is a landmass bunched up into spikey hills and mountains hugging the Adriatic coast, with vertiginously curvy roads often skirting the edge of precipices, with the sea or steep cliffs in the distance below. That night, probably after having had a few drinks, Cvrle didn’t make a sharp left turn and drove off the road, falling dozens of meters into a rocky abyss. He managed to get himself out of the car and started crawling up towards the road but didn’t make it. In the morning, shepherds taking their flocks out to graze found him. Weeks later while still on the job in Montenegro, my father followed in his tracks and says he was chilled to the bone when he saw the sharp turn instantly realizing that’s where the accident happened, stopped and peered down into the precipice: the remains of Cvrle’s red mini-Fiat were still scattered below.

I did get to meet Pera – Uncle Pera to me – mostly when I was a child but also later a few times. Although my father and he remained very good friends, they ended up settling down in different parts of the country: my father in Bosnia, and Pera in Belgrade after his initial working stint in Skopje. My childhood memory of him is quite hazy; perhaps the sharpest fragment is the excitement I felt as he was about to enter our apartment during one visit, and my mother whispering to me, “And look, now he’ll tell me ‘How are you doing, sister?’” And then he did it, exactly as she said, and to me it seemed like magic, filling me with admiration for the cool lives of adults. He was loud and festive in an old-fashioned way. During another visit much later, I remember him telling us how thrilled he was when his daughter Jelena, a year or two older than me, explained to him she couldn’t go to her swimming practice because of “women’s reasons,” and he then went and treated friends to drinks because his daughter “had become a woman.” Jelena later went to school in New York and stayed there; he visited once and went to Las Vegas too from where he brought my father a pack of “original” casino playing cards – which are still in my father’s kitchen; we take them out every now and then and play a little poker. Life then got more turbulent – Pera got divorced from his first wife, Milena, whose presence is invisible but implicit in the photo I’m looking at; he went to work in Libya for several years, earning good money which he frantically tried to preserve during the hyperinflation in the 1990s; his son, Milanče, went to the U.S. where he fell in with the wrong crowd, got hooked on drugs, and had to flee for his life to Canada, where Pera went to get him and bring him back to Belgrade; he remarried and spent most of his time on a piece of land he acquired an hour away from Belgrade, where he had an orchard (and I remember a wonderful apricot tree most of all).

The last time I saw him was at my mother’s funeral. She died suddenly and I had to come at a moment’s notice; still jet-lagged and completely out of it, I sleep-walked through those first few days, lost in a strange kind of unreality. But towards the end of the funeral as the June rain was beginning to come down and wet the soil, I looked at Pera who seemed small and hunched over, and something happened. I still don’t understand it. Out of the blue, I felt a certain lightness, a relief, a brightening from inside, like you might feel upon finally coming across an answer to a long-standing troubling question. I even smiled a little, inexplicably. “Uncle Pero,” I called. He looked at me without really seeing me. “Come, let’s throw a handful of earth there together,” I said. And we did, both of us smiling and tearing up at the same time. At the end of that summer, he was gone too; my brother called me to tell me he just didn’t wake up one morning. I did not attend his funeral but visited his grave with my father a year or two later.

And then there is my father. The only still living one of the three, inching into his mid-80s now. His path isn’t completed, and I don’t want him to belong to this story quite yet. But he’s been my dad for almost two thirds of his life now, so I have a fairly good insight into how things unfolded for him after this photographed moment of festive elation and camaraderie. As one can expect, there was a lot of good stuff: getting married, having kids, settling into a more comfortable phase of his life after the post-war deprivation and penury, enjoying the stability and jovialness of the good, solid mature years. But there was also the less good stuff, still nowhere visible on the horizon of the young man in the photo, flanked by his best friends and bolstered by the uncomplicated handsomeness of youth (including his older brother’s ring – borrowed for the occasion – on his left hand). It’s hard to rank tragedies but chronologically the first one, which was both a private and a public one, was the cataclysm of the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s, into which my father was conscripted in the last months of it. Almost forty years older than the majority of the rounded-up soldiers (one of whom would have been my brother if my parents hadn’t sent him off to Serbia to my grandparents while the borders were still open), he preserved his sanity by planting vegetables wherever they were stationed for more than a couple of weeks and by cooking for the scared and traumatized boys in uniforms. He doesn’t talk about it much and I don’t ask. I do remember that he had lost twenty kilograms by the time the peace treaty was signed, and I barely recognized him when I saw him. Then followed a few years of continued financial and political chaos when my parents got cripplingly indebted (to Uncle Pera, who was in Serbia and who had earned foreign money in Libya) in the attempt to stay afloat, and then took a few more years to repay the borrowed funds. Then he lost his older brother, my Uncle Bata. And then my mother died suddenly just half a year after they both stopped working and were getting ready to return to Serbia (by that point a different country after the breakup of Yugoslavia) and enjoy retired life. My father had always been an epitome of strength to me, but this really knocked the air out of his lungs. Overnight, he’d become a solitary man, a widower whose children had left home and who now had to go through the final reckoning with the forty years of his Bosnian life on his own, pack what was worth keeping, and move back to Serbia, where he didn’t entirely belong any more. It must have been disorienting – having to rethink and reinvent oneself at the beginning of one of the latter chapters in one’s book. But, highly adaptable and realistic, he did find his footing again and I’m always impressed by how he manages to find daily meaning despite a sizeable reduction of his life field, which is fast-funneling into the distance.

These days he walks with an uncertain step, uses a cane and has difficulties walking uphill; he might tell you the same story a couple of times; he can doze off within seconds. But he is still there, and trying to make it all meaningful, somehow. Looking at this photo, he doesn’t have any particular emotional reaction – he simply tells me about his friends. There isn’t even any nostalgia in his story, only facts, and perhaps that is by far the best way of going about it: choosing to feel a sustained continuity about oneself and others regardless of disruptions, blows and losses along the way.

I look at the three young men again, looking at me with all of their past and all of their future condensed in this forever-toast. How lovely, how beautiful, how memorable. This is why these flat little pieces of paper have so much more depth and power than one’s literal mind can muster. And so, I gather my selection of photos – this year’s loot – and take with me these known and unknown, dead and alive people with their moments and continuities to keep me company, to play on my team, to remind me to walk the walk without always looking for the path. To empirically remind me of the unphotographable stuff of life throbbing inside everyone, everywhere, regardless of time.