Song of Kosovo, page 6
By now, Dobra had lost interest and was adding his own flourishes in red crayon to father’s drawing of the dawn of time.
“The third stage, citrinitas, sees that reflective capacity completely restored, with the moon the defining metaphor, a wondrous object in its own right, but a reflective glory only, with the capacity to illuminate but not enlighten. For the alchemist to achieve citrinitas, a tempering or seasoning that can be best imagined as the yellowing (this is the literal origin of the word) of the pages of a book, was rare indeed, and suggested as much his own spiritual progression as any achieved alchemic artistry. Finally, rubedo. Yellow and now red merging into gold, the perfect, restorative union of the elements, of One with God. Purity re-attained.”
“Will I make gold from nothing one day, Father?”
“Don’t be stupid, son. Only a great man can contain the power of purity.”
And then, the next day, the spell was broken. Father crawled deep inside that black cavern. It took six weeks for him to emerge again, and only after a course of electroshock therapy and a nutritional routine, overseen by my mother, that included regular cups of liquorice tea and colonic, applied twice daily, distilled from Holy Basil, rose petals, and sage.
And so, he ebbed and flowed. There were to be other suicide attempts, to be sure. A plate of poison mushrooms (which turned out to be merely rancid and slightly hallucinogenic); an overdose of laxative; an attempted hanging that almost, inexplicably, succeeded.
And the highs. Comrade Jović was not his only friend, it seemed. Tito too — he had a citation, somewhere, and Professor Einstein, we learned, was an early advocate of Father’s genius. To hear Father tell it, it was Dobroslav Zanković and not his (previously) more celebrated uncle who gave the cyanide to Nedeljko Čabrinović; and then St. Slava himself had made contact and the Apostles, who spoke to Father through the scriptures and became quite friendly, ultimately convincing him that he had a new mission in life. He was to become the alchemist of the soul, transforming the base Christians of our town into pure, enlightened atheists.
Can you follow the line of reason? I can’t, and I dare say I have become something of an expert on things metaphysic. The chemical logic by which Father ordinarily lived was replaced by a logic of accidental associations and presumptive magnanimity, which culminated in the disaster that shook our community during our final fall in Crnilo.
It was the eve of the Feast of St. Andrej, the third most important day in our parish’s calendar. Winter had already announced itself and settled in for a long visit; a layer of thin snow had come to coat the black dust that permeated our town.
It was a Friday evening, as I recall, and my mother had taken me out of my literature class and sent me to go track down Beba Dobra. He’d disappeared, as was his habit. It was just as the winds were picking up and the deep cold was tightening its grip on us. Mother was concerned: Beba wasn’t dressed for this weather, and with his various sensitivities, he was always susceptible to illness. “He’ll catch his death,” Mother said, as she pushed me out the school door and off toward the mines.
Why did he favour these dark places? I cannot say, Nexhmije Gjinushi. But certainly, this is where Beba Dobra spent much of his free time, wandering the endless kilometres of mine shafts wormed into the earth beneath our town. Maybe it was the dirty warmth that attracted him, the permanent dampness that smelled vaguely of decaying wood. Without question, the labyrinth of dark shafts stank of adventure and mystery. There we were: explorers, cavemen, astronauts, mermen, the Mole People. Perhaps, though, it was simply that here was a world that Beba could manage with ease. He seemed to have internalized the entire underground landscape, and could navigate the black passageways as easily as the rest of us could find our way to church. They called him The Canary, the men who worked in these pits, and in his oversized yellow jacket that covered his hands and hooded his head, Beba did appear in the dusty light of the mines to be, if not a giant bird, at least some kind of otherworldly un-mammal.
As usual, I did not find Beba. He found me. Whenever my mother sent me to retrieve my brother, I knew that all I needed to do was enter any random shaft, get myself thoroughly lost, and wait for Beba to show up.
On this particular Friday I did not wait long. I was deep in a seam and had only just sat down on a rock, with a handful of smaller rocks to pitch at the rats. One whiskered fellow, the size of a small bureaucrat, peeked its head around the corner. I took aim.
“Boo!” Beba screamed, leaping out from a shadow. It was part of our ritual. He would sneak up, and I would pretend to be frightened, and then I would tell him he had to come home, and he would say “no” even as he began to lead me to the surface. Sometimes, still, he might take my hand, even though I was in my final year of high school and he well past his sixteenth birthday.
We arrived back in town just as the pageant was starting. At the head of the procession, a gang of serious-looking adolescent boys in white podrizniks were carrying a large wooden saltire. Bound to the cross at the wrists and ankles with elegant velvet cords was the beautiful Dušan Mićić, a porcelain man-boy in his early twenties, with flowing yellow hair, like a Latin Christ, and bold green eyes, one of which was lazy and always seemed to veer off into the distance. Dušan, a fixture in the role of St. Andrej for as long as I could remember, had captured the hearts of many of the young women of Crnilo, although, it was darkly whispered, he was disinclined to return their affections. Still, he made a grand martyr: fragile, gracious, fragrant, and only somewhat narcissistic.
The Holy Martyr was followed directly by a small line of petty officials: the mayor and council (who, as Communist Party members, were there as “observers only” and not, the newspaper regularly assured us, as “designated celebrants”); the mine manager, a sombre, mouseish man with the curious Gaelic name of O’Dowd, although he appeared to me more Croat than Celt; a limping, one-armed veteran whom we all just called Ujak — Uncle — and who always seemed to be given a prominent position at ceremonies of this type; and our own Father Grygor and his wife (a smiling, red-faced baba with a bubbling fountain of bosom and a massive red birthmark that scalded the entire side of her head). The good father himself carried the censer, penduluming frankinscented smoke that immediately made me think of Christmas and all that glorious food.
Several paces behind Father Grygor, Pavel. Plodding with porky little steps, half-wheezing, half-snorting as he moved, an asthmatic pig, Vicar Bishop Pavel, the ninth most senior member of the Serbian Orthodox Church, looked neither right nor left but straight ahead, beyond the church of the Holy Martyr and the hillock it stood on, beyond the modern municipal centre rising in the background, beyond the ancient mosque at the edge of our town, beyond the low mountains in the distance, no doubt beyond Aleksinac, seat of his own diocese, to someplace bigger, better, beyond. My guess: Beograd, centre of the Orthodox universe.
Vicar Bishop Pavel leaned heavily on his crozier, holding the staff so tightly that the tips of his fatted and much-jewelled fingers had turned white, his graceful nails seeming ready to pop off. His Holiness stopped suddenly, directly in front of me and Beba Dobra, so close we could have spit on him. He held his hand to his chest. He staggered for a moment, his great gut seeming to drag toward the earth. His faced turned bright red as he struggled to catch his breath.
The procession moved on, without hesitating, oblivious to the vicar bishop’s distress. Only Dušan Mićić, from his high vantage, noticed anything was amiss. The young martyr appeared quite flustered at the sight of the stumbling prelate and made as if to step down from his cross, only to remember those velvet cords and his pre-eminent position.
“Pavel!” Mićić cried, which appeared rather informal, given the circumstances. The puffing, red-faced bishop looked up and nodded at the beautiful martyr and, with a single, familiar glance, seemed to assure the young man that he was well enough. Vicar Bishop Pavel took a tentative step or two, scrunched his eyes tightly, then wheezed forward again.
Beba looked very serious for a moment, pointing at Pavel.
“Poo,” he declared, almost wistfully.
“Poo indeed,” I replied, so softly only he could hear. “Poo indeed.”
Our family, you see, had a history with Vicar Bishop Pavel and history, for Serbs, was never a good thing. He’d appear, this stuffed cassock, at Christmas and Easter and significant Saints’ Days, each time somewhat fatter than the last, to impose himself on our dinner and dispense rambling sermons, uncommonly grand and, to my ears, utterly unintelligible. Even Mother was caught napping when Vicar Bishop Pavel spoke.
Of course, the distinguished prelate was much less inclined to indulge Father and his occasional ecclesiastical forays. Several times he’d had sharp words when Father tried to interrupt his service, and once he’d even called for the guards to haul Father away, leaving good Father Grygor tugging nervously on his beard.
“Perhaps you have need for guards in a parish the size of Aleksinac, Holy Father,” Grygor finally offered. “But in this modest church, we cannot afford such a courtesy.”
But that was neither here nor there. The reason for our family’s general disdain for the vicar bishop was his dismissal of Beba Dobra from the Christmas pageant two years previous. Having secured by acclamation the role of third shepherd to the left, Beba had practised every day for a month to perfect his single line (“A star! It’s as bright as a thousand diamonds!”), only to have Vicar Bishop Pavel arrive at dress rehearsal and decide that it would be disrespectful for “a boy like Dobroslav” (he got that wrong; there were no boys like Beba Dobra) to speak at a festival honouring the birth of our Lord and Saviour. Father Grygor protested, citing numerous scripture and growing so angry that at one point he dropped the pretence of respect and began calling the distinguished vicar bishop by the diminutive of his given name: Peta. But, perhaps still angered by the unseemly behaviour of the doll assigned to play the Baby Jesus (who had allowed his plastic head to fall off at a critical point in the rehearsal), the vicar bishop would not relent. Only at the last minute was a compromise reached. Beba Dobra was recast as a lamb and assigned one, small line: “Baaaa.” He delivered it with gusto and a small sigh.
Father, who was deep in his bed and deeper into his cups by the time we got home that night, did not rouse when told what the vicar bishop had done; he managed only to extend his grimace a little further. Mother, for her part, was so angry that she prayed in silence well into the night. We found her the next morning, Nexhmije Gjinushi, asleep on her knees by the couch, a wad of dried tissues stuck to her fingers, her forehead resting on a fading picture of the Blessed Virgin.
But that was two years ago, and out of my mind as I watched Vicar Bishop Pavel, wheezing heavily but undaunted as he stood before us in the pulpit. He had begun the second hour of his sermon by elaborating on his earlier exegesiological point that the Bible, especially in the eyes of Serbian Orthodox commentators, was both a historical and meta-historical document, when Father appeared in the narthex. He was, of course, completely naked, save for a small text wedged under his arm.
I say “of course” because in the context of the time, it had become accepted in Crnilo that Dobroslav Zanković did not wear clothes. Again, while I cannot explain my father’s choice specifically, I can say that it was related to his studies of both the Doukhobor sect of Western Canada, whose most radical members practised mass nudity and arson as a protest against materialism, and the Jainist Digambara monks, who, in an effort to attain full spiritual enlightenment, reject all forms of materialism, including bodily attachment. It is their practice to go naked.
Nudity for Father was both a spiritual statement and the logical conclusion to the imaginary political conversation he’d been having with Comrade Tito. In Father’s mind, being an atheist did not mean being aspiritual, while being a socialist did mean rising above Judeo–Christian morals and Western capitalistic values. The simple act of shedding one’s clothes, Father believed, was the ultimate expression of brotherhood, unity, and Socialist democracy.
Needless to say, the practice had not caught on.
Still, few people stirred when Father entered the church. And while many of the congregation, expecting a good show, no doubt, roused themselves and strained forward in their pews as Father began to make his way forward to the chancel, Vicar Bishop Pavel took no heed. His nose was deep in his sermon notes.
“In my own personal study . . . study of moral hermeneutics” — Pavel read with little inflection, puffing and pausing as he went, as if life itself was a vast obstacle — “many of which . . . were taken, I might add, under the direct supervision of Patriarch German, Archbishop of Peć, Metropolitan of . . . of Beograd and Karlovci, and Patriarch of all . . . Serbs, himself a noted Biblical scholar . . .”
By this point, Father Grygor had spotted Father. The good priest tugged on his beard furiously. He looked around, perhaps searching for a way to divert the imminent collision. Suddenly inspired, Father Grygor stood up, drawing his hands upward to his hips, silently instructing the rest of the congregation to stand as well.
The strategy seemed to work. Father’s naked body disappeared in a sea of faithful as the vicar bishop panted on, never lifting his eyes from his prepared text. Perhaps the ruse would have succeeded if someone could have managed to grab Father, by the arm say, and steer him off in another direction. But Father simply rolled on and finally emerged from the cover of crowd mere metres from the pulpit. Still, Vicar Bishop Pavel did not notice him, and may never have looked up from his notes if Dušan Mićić, still bound to his saltire and propped in the ambry, hadn’t cried out in alarm. Not words exactly, but an elongated, distressed gurgle and just enough of a noise that Vicar Bishop Pavel lifted his eyes, looking first at the delicate saint and then to the naked Dobroslav Zanković.
The prelate smiled politely, then turned his head slightly, not quite able to take in all this new information at once. Perhaps he thought this was all part of the pageant.
Father took the prelate’s confused silence for acquiescence, and strode to the lectern. With Mother beside me now offering a new and almost silent prayer to the Blessed Virgin, Father closed the vast Bible that lay before him and cleared his throat.
“I will be reading today,” he announced with the fullest authority, retrieving the small book from under his arm, “from the Akaranga Sutra, the most sacred Jainist text. The world,” he began, “is afflicted, miserable, difficult to instruct, and without discrimination. In this world full of pain, suffering by their different acts, see the benighted ones cause great pain . . .”
Father did, truly, have a wonderful speaking voice. It was deep and whole, like that of an American jazz singer, and his tongue rolled over rich consonants in a way that both calmed the listener and underscored that this was a man of culture and learning.
And so the two men, Vicar Bishop Pavel and my own father, stood not three metres apart, the former at the pulpit, his head turned and brow drawn as he gathered his thoughts, the latter at the lectern gesturing emphatically. With every thump of his fist, his middle extremities shook their approbation. To the naive observer — a stranger who had just wandered in from the street, for example — the scene had a rowdy calm, a debate between learned adversaries, hateful at the core, but each honouring the rules of decorum. But most of us understood that Pavel’s silence was merely momentary; he was gathering himself, like a great wind. Father Grygor had already made his way to Father’s side and, using his mitre, gallantly tried to restore a level of physical decorum. But we could not expect Vicar Bishop Pavel to stay silent for long.
All at once, the fat prelate exploded, throwing both hands in the air and shouting at Father in a coarse and guttural northern dialect. Leaning heavily on his crozier, the vicar bishop began to limp toward Father.
“As I have heard it, I shall tell how the Venerable Ascetic, exerting himself and meditating, after having entered the order in that winter, wandered about, I shall not cover myself with that robe, only in that winter . . .”
Caught in the middle, Father Grygor was not sure what to do. His strategic use of the mitre had allayed the concerns of some of the more faint-hearted members of the congregation, but as the Holy Father shuffled his way across the chancel, wheezing and spitting rough invectives, Father Grygor must have begun to fear for my father’s safety. He dropped the headpiece and took a step toward the vicar bishop, who simply lifted his crozier and knocked his subordinate out of the way.
“. . . for a year and a month he did not leave off his robe. Since that time the Venerable One, giving up his robe, was naked, world-relinquishing, and wise . . .”
By now the cream-skinned martyr was calling from his cross, pleading with his servant, the good vicar bishop, to calm himself, as some members of the congregation stood and shouted as well, torn between the desire to restore order and the lure of the looming confrontation.
Father continued — “. . . then he meditated with his eye fixed on a square space before him of the length of a man, as the many people assembled, shocked at the sight; they struck him and cried . . .” — as the Vicar Bishop raised his holy crook and brought it crashing down on the head of this lowly, maniacal lamb, with such force that I was surprised it did not break.
Mother elbowed me in the ribs. “Do something!”
Why me? I cannot say. Perhaps I was just in the wrong place at the right time.
I stood and looked around stupidly.
I saw Father, who had struggled to remain on his feet. He had a small cut on his forehead, and he wiped the blood away as he strove to find his place.
“Knowing . . .” His voice remained strong, and he hesitated only a little. “Knowing the female sex in mixed gathering places, he meditated . . .”
Again the crozier came thundering down, this time cracking in half with such force that the gilded handle flew into the nave, knocking the postmaster, Dositej Obradović, who’d risen to offer his assistance, flat out. This time Father fell to his knees, and I could see blood flowing from a cut just above his right eye. Vicar Bishop Pavel remained hunched over, from the follow-through, and appeared to be holding his chest, again struggling for breath, and as voices rose from all corners of the church — and none louder than Dušan Mićić, demanding to be unbound and released from historic martyrdom — I pushed my way toward the lectern, torn, in my adolescent angst, between wanting to defend whatever may have been left of my family’s honour and sincerely desiring to evaporate from the face of the Earth.
