Joking. I visited the capital of Kosovo, unfortunately, without him. After all, you know that one person cannot be in two geographically distant places at the same time. Not even the almighty AV. He could not be with me in Pristina and with Porfirio in the temple of Saint Sava. While the President of Serbia prayed for strength and wisdom to defend his country against the invaders from the UN, I once again, at the closing evening of the Polyp Festival, experienced the death of Yugoslavia! In "Urotniki", a great project by Belgrade authors and actors. Directed by the famous Budva native, the greatest after Stefan Mitrov - Boris Liješević.
And if, instead of Patriarch, Vučić had gone with me to Jeton (Neziraj), the creator of Polip, he could have listened to and watched unusual ethnic music, solo singing, poetry, recitals, and dramatic texts during the three days of the festival. And that in Albanian, English, but also in Serbian. Among other things, parts of "The Mad King" were read, in Albanian; it sounded much better to me than in my native language, probably because I didn't understand anything. With poetry, especially top-quality, it was already easier. When the actors of the Kosovo National Theater recited Jevrem Brković's verses, what AV would have said to the grandfather of the Novi Sad banji, Brian, I understood everything. Logically, because I knew the song "Hold the Heart" by heart:
Around my legs, hands, head, / Silent suspicions and webs weave. / Some stalk me, others terrify me, / They snarl at me from all sides...
To remain both pure and nobody's!/ It's hard, and who can?/ Endure the heart in the sicija,/ Beneath this dirty skin.
Why Jevrem did not, even after 1976, when he wrote these terrible verses, stay on what was best and the only thing he knew how to do in life, is an equally redundant question as this: why did I, after returning from Pristina, regret what happened to me in Aleksandar Vučić was not in the company.
Let me say right away - the benefit is not in the difference between prayer and poetry, the inspiration that takes you when you listen to Svetozar Cvetković and not Porfiri Perić, nor is the benefit in the fact that you are accompanied by Jeton Neziraj and Arben Bajraktaraj (from "Bese"), and not some Mile Dodik and Milan Knežević.
But if President Vučić had known that in the Kosovo capital he would also "meet" Bogdan Bogdanović, Krleža, Borka Pavićević, Kiš, Mirko Kovač, a total of 10 of them branded and the wisest, he might have left with me sooner. To hear how Bogdan in Paris in 1934, as a twelve-year-old boy and alchemist, saw Hitler, the twilight of Europe, 50 million dead, 6 million murdered Jews and his first monument at the Old Fairground in Belgrade. Before the most important one in Jasenovac:Yes Yes. At the Jewish cemetery in Belgrade, the cemetery that will one day become my final resting place, I made a monument, twenty meters high, which looks like a narrow passage between two mountain gorges. Through it they passed... into the sky. Or, barely, into life. So I bowed down to their shadows, so that there would be a memorial on earth for all those Demai, Davič, Alkaluj, Bararon, Bihalija, Albaharija, Mevorah, who had disappeared forever... So that in death the Jews would accept me as one of their own! I guess because my fate was exile, exile, just like theirs. I thank them for that niche where my ashes were placed, where I hid to watch forever from that mouse watchtower the city of which, believe it or not, I was once the mayor.
Would President Vučić cry like I did, at these words uttered by Svetozar Cvetković. If not, I wonder, can even a radical believe with tears? And to accept that the fan hordes are not right either then or today when they persecute, beat or harass their smartest people as anti-Serbs, even though they are just themselves, brave and dedicated to universal values.
If he had been with me that evening in the Oda Theater in Pristina, AV would not have had to listen to the binary Dodik in the Temple explaining to him that long before Srebrenica, he had lost faith in his brothers from Montenegro, "when they allowed the Pride Parade". Or even worse, that Milan Knežević screams in his ear, calling for the competent authorities of Serbia, Republika Srpska and SPC to ban entry to their territory to anyone who does not wear a melon on their shoulders instead of their heads! Or, in Montenegrin, pipun.
In truth, there would be unpleasant moments for the president in that confrontation with the "conspirators". Let's say, a reminder of the scene when Seselj's underling shot Mirko (Kovač) in the head with a camera and broke his arcade. Or when anonymous mercenaries brutally beat Svetlana Slapšak somewhere in Revolucije Boulevard, where she grew up and where, like Mirko, she had to emigrate.
On the sidelines of the Festival, the Chargé d'affaires of Montenegro in Pristina, Bernard Čobaj, showed me the exhibition of Đeljoš Đokaj, a great European painter, born and buried in Milješ, in Malaysia, near Podgorica. Then, after seeing the impressive works of the great master, we went to Zaka Preljvukaj's studio. And she is a European name in painting. He exhibits from Britain and Sweden, through the Netherlands and Switzerland, Italy and the Balkans, all the way to North America. "My parents are from Montenegro and they taught us that Montenegro is our homeland." Zake built a summer house on the edge of Lake Plav. All of them, Bernard and Zake, and the paintings of Đeljoševa tell, for the Balkans, an unreal and wonderful story about the relationship of minority peoples with their country. Mostly sometimes disliked, but, as it turned out, warm and broad enough to carry her in their hearts for the rest of their lives.
I am especially sorry that President Vučić was not with me to see and feel it. Because he would surely ask himself: why Serbia could not be so wise and broad, to protect its minorities. And Albanians too. Weren't Bekim Fehmiu, Faruk Begoli and Abdurahman Šalja, the biggest partisans of our childhood, the giants of Serbian theater, and not only of Kosovo?! And why couldn't the big billboard with their characters, which hangs on the wall of a residential building in the main street of Pristina, stand, with pride, somewhere in Slavija?!
I entered Kosovo via Kula, and exited via Prizren and Albania. So I saw a good part of the incredibly beautiful country. Peć, Pristina, Prizren, cranes, glass and concrete towers, green meadows and hills, planted corn, potatoes and other plants, between all that highways. In ten years, when I did not pass that route, Kosovo developed more than in the previous thousand summers. This is what it means when a community takes its destiny into its own hands. I imagine President Vučić with me in the car, asking me not to tell anyone, let alone to write what we saw, how much Kosovo has gone to heaven, because if his Serbs found out, he would no longer be able to intoxicate them with the story of a fake state and a dark vilayet. If he had been with me, I would have consoled the president by saying that it was not his fault and that the Serbs made the wrong choice long ago, long before him - when, at the beginning of the 20th century, they listened to Nikola Pašić and Vasa Čubrilović, and not to Dimitrije Tucović.
I turn on the radio, when the drama "Conspirators" is on it once again. The same one with 10 branded and banished. Only then was I sorry that Vučić was not with me. To hear the conversation between Bogdanović, Krleža and Kiš:
Danilo: Still, I wonder who we are and what we are to such and such a Europe?
Bogdan: So what are we?!
Danilo: I will tell you, loud and clear, sir: we are exoticism, we are a political scandal!
Miroslav: True.
Danilo: We are, in addition, beautiful sunsets on the Adriatic coast, mild tourist memories... memories filled with plum wine. And that is all. We are hardly part of European culture... Politics, yes! Tourism, too! Slivovitz, and certainly! But who the hell is going to look for literature in that country! And who would be able to distinguish between their nationalistic bullshit and in all those languages and dialects so close yet so different, in all those religions and regions!
Miroslav: Well, I say nicely that Serbs and Croats are one and the same piece of cow dung that was accidentally cut in half by the cart wheel of history!
Danilo: That's right, that's right. And there are us thrown in, neither guilty nor responsible, so mixed up in those two pieces of shit, sorry sir, over which more wheels of history, unfortunately, will pass to tear us apart... into even smaller pieces of shit...
Miroslav: Wait, wait, you're a writer I hear. Like me anyway…
That's right, that's right, and I say. And now I hope it is clear to you why I claimed that it would be very important for Serbia and the region if Mr. Vučić traveled around Kosovo and Pristina together with me. In that case, there would be no morbid slogan on the Belgrade Tower, We are not a genocidal people. Because there would be no need for a UN session and a Resolution on Genocide, since the Srebrenica genocide would really have been, as Porfirije claims, the so-called because neither the war in Bosnia, nor the one in Croatia, nor the first in Slovenia, nor the last in Kosovo, would have happened, nor would there have been a song who can take Kosovo from my soul, because it would be an autonomous region with a special status within Serbia, like Trentino with the Germans in the north of Italy, Serbia would then be the leading country of the former communist bloc within the EU, and instead of the radical pelzer, Aleksandar Vučić would be raised on the ideology of anti-fascism and the Christian Democrats of Konrad Adenauer, so instead of the President of Serbia, he would reach the President of the Council of the European Union. Before a certain Donald Tusk.
But nothing of all. I was alone in Kosovo, as was Vučić in New York. I will never see the Second Serbia in power in Belgrade, and President Vučić will never see Pristina. That's why they will never understand why everything turned out so badly for the Serbs, and then for all of us. A big and a little smaller piece of shit, to excuse the expression... Over which, as the great Krleža wrote, the wheel of the most powerful, the biggest, the most arrogant, the most reckless passed long ago, who, like Lazar in Kosovo in 1389, my unsuspecting companion, AV, recently beat in New York. United with Bahrain, Uganda, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, honorable Togo and proud Kiribati.
Bonus video:
