Song of Kosovo, page 5
“This dance is your dance, Vida,” he said. “This dance is our dance; I pass it on to you, as it has been passed for generations, from father to son to son. Listen, Vida, to the music of the wind, to the Song of Kosovo, and dance with me.”
A loose book tumbled from the pile and rolled to Obilić’s feet, and in that instant, he disappeared. Gone, the smell of apples and lemons. It was all smoke and petrol now, and I watched Father bend over the partially ignited book and pick it up. His fingers carefully avoided the flame. Father stood and contemplated the book for a moment, his eyes intent on the little flame. Then he shut his eyes tightly and inched the book toward his head. His lips moved although no words seemed to be coming forth. Was he praying? Was he reciting some alchemic incantation? Was he talking himself into it? I always only have questions.
I do know that within the next instant, another gust came up, at once blowing the flames away from Father and extinguishing the one book he held in his hand. In that second, Miodrag Petković leapt forward and brought my father to the ground. It was a surprisingly efficient takedown for a man of his age (leading me to decide that the rumours of my doughy former schoolteacher’s athletic prowess and his near-selection to the 1964 Yugoslavia Olympic wrestling team were true), and in the moments that followed several more townsmen joined the heap. Soon there was a goose pile of wriggling, grunting men almost as high as the burning book pyre, with Father at the bottom screaming now in a panicked voice: “Let me up! Let me up! I can’t breathe!”
When they finally pulled Father from the bottom of the heap, it was his turn to cry. He wailed like a baby. Four men carried him back home, each holding an appendage, and as they carried him away, he cried and called for me to come to him, comfort him, I suppose. For me, this was the saddest part of all, to see my father reduced to a sobbing girl in front of this, the entire town.
By this time, my gentle abductor had set me down, and I turned my ears away from Father’s pleas. Where was Beba?
Beba! Beba!
And there he lay in his own corner of the square. In the excitement and stress, he had succumbed to one of his seizures. I ran to him and saw his face pale, his eyes wide and sightless, but pain-free, his fist clenched so tight that the knuckles were red and seemed ready to burst through his skin. I knelt down and gently turned him from his back to his side. I cradled his head to protect it from the hard ground.
Several men stood by, discussing what to do.
“We must put a pencil in his mouth, so he doesn’t swallow his tongue.”
“I haven’t a pencil. Will a ballpoint pen do?”
“I’m not sure. I suppose it could shatter in his mouth.”
“Is an inky mouth worse than a swallowed tongue?”
I thought to correct the well-meaning dolts. It’s an old wives’ tale. Epileptics do not swallow their tongues. I mean, just try that; just try to swallow your tongue! It’s attached, you see; it’s attached right there to the bottom of your mouth. It’s simple physics, you pillocks, you horses’ cocks. What kind of imbecile could think that a boy could swallow his tongue?
I know what you’re thinking, Nexhmije Gjinushi: what was the name of the book, the one that fell from the fire?
I’ve wondered that myself. Many times I’ve kicked myself for not going to look. In reality, even if I’d thought to do it, it would have probably been too late. Most likely, the book was tossed onto the flames almost at the same moment my father was being carried home to be bound, splayed, to the bed until the dark mood passed. The fire, you see, burned for days. The people of Crnilo, never ones to waste a good fire, all converged on the village square, bringing garbage and unwanted clutter — books, mostly, and broken toys and automobile tires and corrupted Socialist plastic furniture. Everything was tossed on the heap. Our town had not been that clean in a long, long time.
But now my fingers are burning, good Counsellor. It’s already late into the evening, and even I, son of my father, need some rest.
8
THE SONG OF KOSOVO has never been transcribed. It cannot be captured on paper. The issues are both technical — no notational system yet devised can capture its complexity — and pragmatic: the song is still unfolding. At any given moment, it is complete yet incomplete. Like time, it reaches forwards and backwards; it has depth and breadth and width and loft. Like heaven, it is perfect in its way and therefore without true beginning or end.
Likewise, the words to the song cannot be recorded. They include every word ever uttered in any language, and converge only in that space between, say, your lips and mine. One of the peculiarities about the Song of Kosovo, Nexhmije Gjinushi, is that while each performance is unique in itself, every performance is essentially the same. Regardless of how the melodies shift, the instrumentation changes, or the lyrics are incanted, the tempo or pitch or scale is modified — each iteration of the song is, at most, a minuscule variation on the original.
I am contemplating the music now, as I wait for you to come, although you must excuse my Albanian. I think “contemplating” is the wrong word. I am concentrating, Counsellor, trying to block the song from my mind. It is too distracting, Nexhmije Gjinushi, and would drive a man to drink (have you never wondered why alcoholism is so prevalent in our neck of the woods? It’s that damn song! Everyone is trying to get it out of their heads. Personally, I would rather get on with some good smoke, but despite that we are in the midst of a major drug corridor, weed is hard to come by here).
You’ll be happy to know, though, that I am not merely wasting my time. Time has not taken a vacation, Counsellor, and with just four days left until the Big Day I continue to record this affidavit. I have even put some thought to our legal strategy. I realize that we have never specifically discussed one, and I am hoping that it will involve more than a simple re-telling of the facts, then throwing me to the mercy of the Court. I’m inclined to believe that this institution’s stockpile of mercy may be in short supply. However, I appreciate that our options are limited, so let me suggest we claim some kind of diplomatic immunity or, better, a non-diplomatic unmunity; you see, regardless of my alleged political, religious, or cultural affiliations, the fact of the matter is that I belong to no one, and despite my nominal Serbism (and Mark of the Martyr), I am a deeply irreligious man who holds no affiliation to Islam, Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, or any of the world’s other 4,268 organized faiths. Of course, this doesn’t necessarily exclude me from taking a position in the ongoing troubles between our peoples, Nexhmije Gjinushi, or from having a vested interest in the outcome. You know as well as I do that the issues at stake are purely political and have little to do with ancient religious divisions and more with the curious psychological needs of a handful of embittered, aging men (with, albeit, fantastic hair — you never see a bald Balkanoid do you, Nexhmije Gjinushi?), struggling to make their mark on history.
If pressed, my dear, I would categorize myself as a former lapsed Buddhist, having found myself in principle attracted to the general indifference of the religion — is it a religion, Nexhmije Gjinushi? One can never be sure with those Buddhists. They are hard to pin down, which, of course, is the major selling point. In this and many other regards, Counsellor, I am not my father’s son. Still, any religious leader whose entire doctrine can be summarized on a matchbook is all right by me. The Buddha once said that he taught one thing and one only: suffering and the end of suffering (technically, of course, that’s two things? In any case, it’s marvellously concise and rather germane, don’t you think, and leads me to wonder, as I am a closet Buddhist, if the Buddha himself was perhaps a closet Serb?).
If unmunity doesn’t fly, Counsellor, we could try another tack. We can claim that by virtue of my Buddhism (lapsed Buddhism, to be sure, but that is the sort of technicality regularly overlooked in Kosovo), I am a neutral and sovereign entity. Admittedly, Nexhmije Gjinushi, this is the weaker of two weak arguments. So let me add a third, Counsellor, one both compelling (on a purely emotional level) and genuine.
The simple fact is that my descent into this geographic purgatory was undertaken with only the purest of intentions. It was for Love, you see, my sweet Counsellor. Love! Surely you can appreciate that, and understand that every step I marched away from my Red-Haired Angel of the Salivating Dogs was, as I truly believed at the time, one more step towards her. My blessing, my beatitude, come and gone so quickly!
But I don’t want to get ahead of myself, Nexhmije Gjinushi. In good time I will tell you how we became lovers, Tristina and I, but that was years after my family had moved to Beograd, chased like stray dogs out of Crnilo. There is much more I could tell about my time in this town, Nexhmije Gjinushi, but I don’t want to mire you in the effluence of my life. For the record, I have provided you with the most pertinent facts and am left, out of a sense of filial duty, to clarify the details pertaining to what has come to be termed in the popular press as the Crnilo Mining Disaster.
In truth, Father has been unfairly savaged because of the whole incident, with little thought given to personal costs he paid as a result of the explosion. But that is the nature of the song, I suppose; eventually, everything is sucked into it, reshaped by it, and, finally subsumed by it.
You are correct in thinking, Nexhmije Gjinushi, that it had been a major news story that was widely followed around the world. Across Serbia, the press kept vigil. In the days directly following the blast, the TV offered around-the-clock updates, with the story of hope and potential survival capturing the hearts of a people sinking further into an economic depression and the quagmire of ethnic tension. As the days passed, and the prospect of finding survivors faded, the focus of the press reports changed. Hope gave way to defeat, a theme more familiar to the reporters and their audience, and the story transformed into a kind of proto-Serbic epic, pitting the heroic miners against incompetent and arrogant owners, usurpers of the natural order, who may have been (if reports in the ultra-nationalist press were to be believed) agents of Albanian Turks. In the aftermath of Crnilo, Father was vilified, a modern-day Vuk Branković.
For my part, I cannot separate the incident at the mine from the larger context of my life. In my teenaged rememberings, it all streams together so that the mining story itself is not a separate paragraph in the larger story of my life, but part of the unstoppable march of events that would lead me to the conclusion, if I were a religious man, that there was a God in heaven and He was a total, total bastard.
It started small. Father received a strange package in the mail. About the size of a deck of cards, it was wrapped in royal blue paper with gold trim. FROM THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, SOCIALIST FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF YUGOSLAVIA, BEOGRAD.
“What’s this . . . ?” Father turned the package over in his hands, shook it gently, held it to his ear. When it comes to the mails, Serbs are by nature a suspicious people. And packages from the government are given special scrutiny.
Somewhat satisfied, Father handed it to Beba Dobra, who tore it open eagerly. Inside was a blue velveteen box, the kind that one might expect to hold some cufflinks or a costume brooch. Beba tried to open the box and in his frustration put it between his teeth and tried to pry it apart; animal force was Beba’s solution for almost everything. Father was by now very curious and rescued the box from my brother’s sloppy mouth. He undid a small clasp and opened the lid. A sheet of thin paper, folded an impossible number of times to fit into the tiny container, fell out. Father unfolded it.
“‘To My Honoured Comrade, Dobroslav Zanković,’” Father read. “‘In recognition of your contribution to the economic development of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, in the specific area of Mining, Metallurgy, and Steel Production, I am pleased to present you with the Medal of Merit in Economy, Third Class. In your capacity as Senior Operations Manager . . .’”
Here Father’s voice trailed off. I caught the odd phrase — “allocative efficiency,” “production quotas,” “central planning committee” — before Father picked up the thread again.
“We have spilled an ocean of blood to create a society dedicated to the harmony of peoples and fraternity of workers, and we shall not allow anyone to touch or to destroy it from without or within. Yours in brotherhood and unity: Borisav Jović; president, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”
Father set the letter aside and looked in the box. Carefully, he extracted a small blue ribbon, intersected by three thin gold strips.
He picked the ribbon up and examined it for a moment. “What horseshit!”
He pinned the ribbon to his face with his finger, just under his nose, then scrunched his upper lip to hold it in place. “Look,” he said, pointing to his blue moustache. “I’m Commander Tito! No.”
He paused and thought for a moment.
“No. I’m Comrade Hitler!” He did a funny German salute, and then began goose-stepping comically around the living room. He grabbed an umbrella from the stand and started to waddle back and forth between the kitchen and hallway. Mother came out now, laughing so hard there were tears in her eyes. “He’s Charlie Chaplin!” she explained, and while we were only dimly familiar with the name, and knew nothing of the Little Tramp, we laughed along with her until our stomachs hurt.
Over the next few days, Nexhmije Gjinushi, something curious took hold: Father grew less dismissive. He read the letter from Comrade Jović over and over again, and began to drop his name indiscreetly into his conversations. We might be talking about anything — school work, for example — and Father would suddenly crow: “President Jović thinks the estimates for milk production are uncommonly conservative this year . . .”
He appeared one day in a tattered military uniform, having assigned himself the rank of field commander, his Medal of Merit in Economy now augmented by several other colourful ribbons and a string of authentic-looking medals that Father must have pried off of some old veteran in exchange for Lord knows what. He talked of Jović in the familiar and hinted broadly that they had served together during the early days of the People’s Liberation Army. He began littering his conversation with military jargon, and gave far-reaching economic advice to anyone who would listen. At kitchen tables around our neighbourhood he became a scathing critic of Russian imperialism, advocating the “normalizationing” — he’d become quite adept at Socialist triplespeak — of our relationship with NATO and the West, while savaging the United States, which he called The Great Provocateur. He dismissed America’s brand of “slave capitalism,” its “culture of appropriation”, and its “vengeance-based imperialism” while mocking its inability to win through fixed elections and police terror what for Yugoslavia had come so easily: true democracy, brotherhood, and unity.
“Yes,” Jovo groused. “The Democracy of One, elected by the Brotherhood of the Terrified, united by Ignorance of the Hateful.”
Along the way, the importance of the Medal of Economic Merit increased exponentially in Father’s mind. It was no longer, as he originally intimated, a pro forma citation, issued out of bureaucratic compulsion, but a personal communiqué from Jović himself, who’d somehow gotten wind of Father’s experiments and immediately recognized their significance. So Father’s new avocations — military tactician, economist, social critic — augmented his alchemic studies, and Yugoslavian Workers Mining Collective (Crnilo) be damned, he spent hours upon hours in his newly restored workshop surrounded by beakers, chemicals, test tubes, and compounds. We could hear him out there till the darkest hours of the night, his medals rattling as he hummed patriotic songs or carried on imaginary conversations with President Jović, discussing politics, science, and the atheistic theology to which they both subscribed.
One morning he emerged just as we were sitting down to our cornbread and jam. He was walking with one hand outstretched, palm-side up, paying careful attention to something in the middle of his hand. He entered the back door. Dark circles shadowed his eyes, yet his face glowed.
“There. I have done it, Comrades.”
“Done what, Nana?”
He held his hand out toward us and we circled around. I bent even closer. In the middle of his palm was a small speck. Yellowish.
“Look, my loves: gold. I have done it! I have unlocked the secret of transmutation.”
Brati leaned as close as he could. “It’s nothing, Father. It’s a sliver of dust.”
“It could be anything,” Jovo piped in. “A chip from a tea cup, an edge shaved from one of your borrowed medals.” Jovo eyed Father’s decorations with suspicion.
Father would have none of it. He leered more manically, glowed more fervently.
“Gold.” His voice was almost a whisper. “Bice, contact the President immediately. I will alert the newspaper and Radio Yugoslavia.”
“Tell them to make sure they bring their magnifying glasses.”
Only Beba Dobra caught the spirit of the moment. “Are we rich, Father?”
“We are, my son. We are wealthy beyond imagination.”
Beba shivered with delight. “Will we buy a television, Father?”
“We will, my son, buy a thousand televisions.”
9
THE AUDACIOUS JOY PERSISTED. It seemed Father never slept or even rested. He stayed awake for four straight days, counting stars by night (he was determined to prove they were a finite number), and lecturing Beba and I by day on the intricacies of transmutation.
“The ancients believed that the process of turning base metal into gold, bringing insufficiency to perfection, consisted of four stages. The first, nigredo, the blackening or putrefaction that worked as surely on metal as it did on a decomposing body or soul. It is the state of where we are in the world, so far removed from that pre-chaotic golden spark.”
Father produced an ornately detailed ink drawing of what I presumed was the beginning of the universe, although it looked rather more like the face of a bearded owl.
“The second stage is albedo, the process of burning off the impurities in a metal, a lightening or whitening of the essence, although it could be more correctly thought of as a process that restores the metal’s capacity to reflect pure light.”
