Being a native of Zemun outside of Zemun means a kind of funny stigma. Wherever you are, not very inventive jokes follow you - what is Ljuba Zemunac to you? The criminal Ljubomir Magaš was, admittedly, born in Zemun but grew up in Zvezdara and was killed in Frankfurt. Sometimes, with a mischievous smile, they ask me - why did you kill Đinđić? Although Dušan Spasojević Šiptar was born in Retkocer, and Mile Luković Kum was born in Donji Gajtan near Medveđa, they were known under the name of the company Zemunski Klan. Their partner who shot the prime minister, Zvezdan Jovanović Zmija, was born in Peć. However, the headquarters of the criminal clan was located in the famous Zemun villa in Šilerova, where luminaries of former and current politics, as well as the stars of Belgrade's entertainment and artistic make-up, attended cocaine parties. If we add to all of that the jokes about the people of Zemun - sister, brother, you're sorry - then the picture of stereotypes is complete.
Memory of birth
Some writers resort to a simple trick. Their heroes describe - their own birth. Of course, we cannot remember that moment. Some psychologists say that the protective mechanism erases our mother's screams and our own suffering of suffocation in the straits of her body. Birth is a bloody trauma that people have turned into a ritual joy - life is renewed. But art works miracles. An interesting question is what I could see that spring many years ago, apart from the light bulb and the ceiling of the Zemun Hospital.
It is certain that I saw this world in its Zemun version in that very place, in the town on the edge of Srem - opposite the socialist metropolis.
It would be tiresome to list all Serbian, Croatian, German, Hungarian or Jewish Zemun citizens who left a strong mark on the development of the town, as well as their national cultures. It is more than clear to me that I have reason to return to my birthplace with cautious pride.
I remember a walk to the Zemun cemetery with the poet Nenad Milošević, a native of Zemun by choice. They stopped burying at the cemetery, there is no place for a pin to fall. But in 2007, they found a burial place for the Serbian poet Raša Livada, who, together with David Albahari, from Zemun, brought world literature closer to Yugoslavia at the time.
Don't take offense at Zemun
Albahari's novel Leeches begins with a scene on the Zemun quay - an unknown man slaps a girl. Afterwards, the text takes us into the historical catacombs of the vanished Jewish community. The book was published in German under the title Šamar. Zemun is significant for Jews - Yehuda Alkalaj, a forerunner of the Zionist movement, spent fifty years of his rabbinic life there. Born in Sarajevo, from a family that was expelled from Seville, from the Alcala district, he wrote in the middle of the XNUMXth century: "What are we Jews doing? We wander from city to city in the countries of the world and seek existence, but we do not go to Eretz Yisrael, even if there we eat dry bread and drink water unwillingly". They say that he said that it is better to stand at the plow on the Dead Sea than to catch fish in Zemun.
At the root of the expression is the Slavic word zjalo, hole, gap, opening or throat. Therefore, to catch zale means to bite, to be deaf or to bleat. But I have to disagree with the esteemed rabbi. Every time I come to Zemun, I - I like to catch zalje. On the Quay, on the deck of the Old barge, in one of the cafes under the plane trees, in the Saran or Reka restaurant. But about that later. In addition - and zemunica, a word related to Zemun, is a kind of hole in the ground.
Alkalaj's thought must have made a deep impression on Theodor Herzl's grandfather, whose name was Simon. He held the first copies of Alkalaj's famous writings with his own hands in Zemun. How else would his grandson become the founder of the Zionist movement? Alkalaj's contemporary, Dimitrije Davidović, writer of the Constitution of Sretenj, was also born in Zemun. Zoran Modli, a native of Zemun, was generationally closer to me, a disc jockey and professional pilot, whose radio shows in the seventies and eighties were part of the mandatory education of future rockers. When I was born, he was probably roaming around Zemun as a fifteen-year-old.
The history of an evil place
Zemun and Belgrade were officially united in 1934. But some of the historical memory remained on both sides of the Sava. Before the arrival of the Slavs, this Celtic, then ancient Roman town was called Taurunum. In the XNUMXst century AD, Pliny calls it the second most important city of Srem. The Roman settlement is destroyed by the Huns, conquered by the Avars and the Franks, the Slavs call it Zemlin. I'm not saying that every citizen of Belgrade knows that the Hungarian king Stefan II Arpadović destroyed Belgrade to the ground in the war with Byzantium, and used the stones from it to fortify Zemun. The Constantinople warriors would do the same when they conquered Zemun again - the stones traveled in the opposite direction - from Zemun to Belgrade - across the Sava.
It was not only Byzantium and the Hungarians who fought over him. Albert Achenski describes the first crusade and records a previously unknown name for Zemun: Malevilla - evil place. Some say that the crusaders, after getting drunk and fighting with the local population, set it on fire and called it that. Others say that the surrounding swamps were a breeding ground for mosquitoes and malaria, so the place was marked as bad. Still others believe that it is a Frankish toponym.
In the following centuries, Serbian and Hungarian crowns were stolen around Zemun. The Turks rule for two centuries, followed by two more Austro-Hungarian centuries. In Austria and Bavaria, a song is remembered from the period of the capture of Belgrade from the Turks - Prince Eugene of Savoy wanted to conquer the city and the fortress of Belgrade again. The song mentions the Zemlin camp of the Austrian army. Austro-Hungarian troops sang the same song when they started bombarding Belgrade from Zemun - these were the first salvos of the Great War. It's just that they replaced the word Turks with the word - Serbs. In Zemun there is also the oldest house in Belgrade - the former Beli Medved tavern - from 1635. When looking from Kalemegdan towards this town of Srem, built on loess hills, something in us feels that Zemun is the most beautiful mirror of all Belgrade's victories and defeats.
My Zemun
In the XNUMXs, Zemun became a refuge for refugees from Croatia and Bosnia. Vojislav Šešelj turns the city into a radical fortress. The place is still recovering from that. In the first and second decades of the new millennium, I was happy to come to Liberation Quay. I was once visited by Uve, a Bavarian writer who has been coming to Guča since the sixties. In a small restaurant near the bus stop, we drank cloudy Kay beer and ate good goulash. Uve didn't buy Zemun souvenirs, he bought a huge garlic wreath at the Zemun Market, one of the best in the Belgrade area. He later informed me that he managed to smuggle his narcotic across several borders.
I welcomed a new year in the Salaš restaurant in Sinđelićeva. The ice froze on the steep street. Moonlight over Zemun, frost, Danube. And inside tambourines and Srem deaconies.
Sometimes, if necessary, I went to the Magistrate and waited for the clerks, surrounded by dusty books, to make me a birth certificate. One May in Zemun, I met a girl I used to hang out with when I was young and stupid enough to let her go. I was smarter this time. We never parted again. Since then, I have not stopped thinking about a poem by Borges in which a coin thrown into the ocean symbolizes the unrepeatability of the moment - the paths of the owner and the coin will never cross again. I am, in fact, Borges' sailor from Zemun, to whom a lost ducat miraculously rolled into the palm of his hand in the shade of a plane tree, next to the Danube. Since then, I see myself as lucky. Sometimes we go together to Gardoš, the tower that marked the southernmost point reached by the Hungarians - when they celebrated their thousand-year presence in Pannonia. Now the tower bears witness to their absence.
Through the huge window of the Gardoš Pub cafe, behind the roofs of Zemun, behind the tower of the Orthodox Nikolaev Church, the oldest preserved church in Belgrade, and a little further, the belfry of the Catholic church - both in the Baroque style - you can see the Danube. Fed by the Sava, it stretched like a fjord, and at its end, on the bluish hill of Šumadija leaning towards the river, the beast called Belgrade sleeps.
A tiny comma in an endless text
About ten years ago, I wrote about Zemun:
Melancholy of invisible borders, and across the street the weekly metropolis; the smell of fish stew and half-empty trains. Whoever is born on a crack feels like a crack. You caress the hot belly of the world with a cold gaze: there something of yours collapses, something of someone else is born.
Murderers from your street are walking in trainers by the river, family people with small children in good-natured conversation. Souvenirs are sold by Bosnian exiles; their half-wits and children who are ashamed of them. Two hundred years. Armies camped here, churches were burned here, street gangs were sent across the Drina from here, people came here on tractors.
And it's like it's nobody's business.
The Danube flows, the old Rome whore, upstream is the West, downstream is the East, and on the shore pensioners tell anecdotes from the war. A chessboard on a bench by the quay, a worn-out Balkan battlefield. Gathered around her, small human reasons that will not end in any beauty.
Small sighs from the suburbs, worn faces, crowned monuments, withered eyes. And this eye has seen too many faces, too many cities, so it coldly caresses the hot belly of the world. Towns are acquired and dispersed. But only here since you were born is a sign: A tiny comma in an endless text.
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