I am walking through the cemetery in Ćuprija. It's a nice day. The cemetery is bigger than I thought. I came here with the intention of putting together, at least on a mental map, the fragments of the family picture that in the last century fell into pieces under the heel of the occupying boots as if it had been painted on glass.
Bunici without a grave
Somewhere in this cemetery, maternal grandparents are buried. His name was Rodoljub Bunić. And she is Ana. She often signed herself as Aneta. With a double 't'. She was born in 1902 in Zagreb, near Uspinjača, in the family of Aleksandar de Ilej, a Croatized Italian from Senj, and Gertrude Kostanjšek, a Slovenian from Carinthia. She grew up in prosperity - the girl from Tomićeva had access to good schools of the dying Habsburg era.
The Great War ended with the establishment of the South Slavic kingdom. Rodoljub, son of Petar Bunić, a wealthy forester, native of Žagubica, arrives in Zagreb to study veterinary medicine. Petar served in Donji Milanovac, where Rodoljub was born, and then in Loznica. The war caused Rodoljub to finish high school in Šabac.
I don't know if his love for animals led him to veterinary medicine or if he saw his chance in the young country's need for trained military personnel - as an army scholarship holder. He completed veterinary studies in Zagreb in the second half of the twenties.
He immediately gets a job at the royal stud.
He must have met Ana at some event organized for young officers and unmarried ladies from better houses - say in Sokolski dom.
Daughter Mara was born in the Bunić family apartment in Ilica in May 1932, a few hundred meters from the place where her mother was born. She was baptized in the Zagreb Orthodox Church on Cvjetni trg. Her brother Dusan was born a year later. My mother told me that she barely remembers her pre-war life in the Bunić house - as if everything was just a dream. From Zagreb, Rodoljub Bunić was reassigned to Maribor and then to Ćuprija. His daughter Mara goes to school there.
The world from a tin box
Mara kept her father's and mother's photos in a tin box. When she left for work, I would take out the box and line up the black and white photos on the couch.
As soon as I was old enough to ask my mother relentless questions, I would do so with photographs in hand. Images with jagged, yellowed edges had a magical appeal to me. They were windows into a world that no longer existed. The world of my mother's childhood. Among the multitude of characters, the faces of Ana and Rodoljub were repeated as a leitmotif. A bone-headed, nosed officer, sometimes in a white parade uniform, more often in a darker, working one. A black mustache and a look in which I recognized incurable sadness. Or I loaded her into those eyes.
Rodoljub was a character from his time - photos of Branislav Nušić or Aleksandar Karađorđević come to mind. His wife Ana, a black woman with gray-blue eyes, self-conscious demeanor, white complexion. Mother remembered, or thought she remembered, that for a while - she washed herself with mare's milk.
That's how I would revive the dead world of my mother's home. Epaulettes, expensive jewelry, faces of unknown people who look into the lens with the casualness of the privileged class as if the future is a spa promenade, and not a beast that devours countries and peoples.
Uncle and grandfather
I only saw my uncle once, exactly in Ćuprija. And that picture from childhood remains important for the entire memory. Thin mustache with thick glasses. He looked like Rodoljub's grandfather. Dušan also had his grandfather's weaknesses - a penchant for drinking and poetry. He was a vet too.
I read Rodoljub's manuscript of love poems as a high school student. Beautiful Cyrillic, polished by practice at the Sabac gymnasium. His son also wrote. During his lifetime, the uncle published four books of poems. I found them and read them when he was gone.
"Why doesn't time stop / to bring back the years thrown down the cliffs / to break the parental curse...", wrote the uncle. And in the second song: "It's not my fault that I was created outside of the series". Dušan Bunić remained a wounded boy for the rest of his life, from whom both his mother and father were taken away. "Marveni doktor" who writes lyrics: "Look at the tortured faces of the people around you / you are part of their suffering". As a pensioner, he was crushed by the transition, he was in debt for taxes, electricity, and water. They threatened to take away his apartment. After my mother's death, I found a receipt - she sent him a substantial sum, saved from her pension, to pay off debts.
She also wrote down the verses in a kind of diary. She too remained a wounded girl who passed the long days of her old age in Bosnian solitude by writing.
It's as if the dead Bunićs are now talking to me with more beautiful verses than they did in their lifetime.
Even my father wrote down verses on his perch above Lim. It seems I had no choice - I'm a third-generation penchant for writing.
These thoughts take their course, get tangled up and skip centuries, as I walk through the cemetery again. I force myself to read the names on the older stone tombstones in the senseless hope that I will read: Rodoljub and Ana Bunić, whom the war took to the regions of eternal love.
And then I realize that this record is the only epitaph given to them.
Donkey's tail
Mother remembered the main square in Ćuprija, the elementary school. Once, on the way home from school, she stopped next to an interesting animal on the trail, She pulled it by the tail, At that moment, her father came and slapped her without hesitation. She was stunned. Father didn't usually beat them. But the vet in uniform was scared to death, because his daughter was pulling the donkey's tail. I thought - if the donkey from Čupri had kicked, I wouldn't be here either.
Before I came to the cemetery, I walked around Ćupria. From the same square where my mother pulled the donkey's tail as a little girl, you can see a department store, a beautiful elementary school building, a park next to Ravanica, which flows into the Morava not far away.
I crossed the Bridge near the Museum, at the place where the northeastern tower of the fortified Roman castrum Horeum Margi was. Family history does not allow me to devote myself to the ancient Roman layer of Ćuprije. At the mouth, Jovana Kursula Street turns across Ravanica and parallel to the Morava coast becomes Danilo Dimitrijevića Street. What was her name 84 years ago? The Bunić family lived there, in a long house with five rooms.
Opposite the restaurant on the Morava river which no longer works, near the disintegrating barracks, I can't tell which house it is. There are no written clues. The memory of living descendants is unreliable. But I can imagine Rodoljub getting dressed, clean-shaven, with a stubbled moustache, tight in his uniform. Coffee is being smoked on the table. It is drunk from cups made of Chinese porcelain, the last specimens of which perished in a Bosnian war, half a century later. Ana has eyes that I will recognize in her daughter - my mother. From my grandmother, I will inherit the migraine that tormented me in my childhood. From Rodoljub, a penchant for taverns and melancholy.
Of the four inhabitants of this street, three were buried in the cemetery in Ćuprija: Rodoljub, Ana and their son Dušan. His sister Mara - my mother - was buried in Tuzla.
How did gravediggers do it?
There is no known grave for the patriot, who as a king's officer returned from German slavery to die at home, and Anna, who died a year after him, right after the war.
Before she left herself, the mother described the death of her parents. Post-war transition from a five-room apartment to a small room with a wood stove. Mother's illness, lack of medicine, sale of expensive things, severe poverty of a family that before the war knew only prosperity. The day when her tears mixed with her mother's tears – Anna could no longer speak, and her daughter was kissing her. The day when she whispered to her dead mother to wake up, while her brother sobbed inconsolably. Columns of silent people going through Ćuprija towards the meat cemetery, and the children, Mara and Dušan, behind the car with the suitcase, holding hands, at the head of the column, alternately consoling each other, because the adults told them they had to be brave.
The mother wrote that a certain apothecary with the Polish-Croatian-Italian surname Usmiani helped the most to bury Bunić as human beings. The Internet tells me that a certain Josip Usmiani, a pharmacist from Čuprije, was a member of the Pomeranian Rotarians between the two world wars. I think, if his descendants are alive, I have to say thank you.
Rodoljub and Ana were buried in this cemetery, at the end of which the highway roars like a river. But Bunici grew up - brother Dragoljub, later a military pilot, sister Dara, a Skojevka sentenced to prison after the war because she allegedly betrayed some comrades during torture, sister Bojana who supported her mother and herself by sewing silk socks for the remains of Belgrade gentlemen, Rodoljub's mother Mileva, Petrova a widow, who barely survived the occupation and liberation in Belgrade's Đermo - they could not even take care of the living orphans, the children left behind by Rodoljub and Aneta, let alone their graves.
I wonder how the gravedigger's assistants did it in Tito's state. They pull out the cross, dig up the grave. Make room for someone, whose descendants and family will have the money and time to deal with the graves of the people they came from. But what do they do with the bones? Where did the skulls of grandparents end up? Wasn't some manual worker Hamlet-like holding Rodoljub's skull in his hand dirty with fungus, from whose empty eye sockets the fullness of a life that had passed forever looked at him?
I came to Ćuprija, to the cemetery, knowing that there would be no answer for me there.
I'm sitting on a bench near the entrance. I've been walking for almost two hours trying to find my uncle's grave. He bequeathed that his parents' names should be written on his tombstone, in addition to his name. I couldn't even find that tombstone.
I was never closer to my mother's family, but we passed each other.
Let the woman pass by with a slow step, probably to one of her deceased. Is her comfort greater because she knows where her graves are? Or are they just two types of inconsolable?
People's hero
Before leaving the town, I stand in front of the barracks building. Better said - in front of what was left of her. In April 1999, NATO fired 11 missiles at the vacated "Miodrag Novaković Džudža" barracks. The building that grandfather Rodoljub certainly entered, because it was built between two wars, has a decrepit face with many half-open eyes.
In 1837, Miloš Obrenović built the first barracks in this place. As Serbia grew, so did the barracks. Only in the renamed states did it get other names.
I remember that in the cemetery I found the place where the national hero was buried, after whom the barracks were named. One of the few who survived the war and died in the socialist state they fought for.
And the circle closes.
When grandfather Rodoljub was walking in Ćupria in the early forties in a parade uniform, Ana, dressed in the latest fashion of the interwar bourgeoisie, held him under his arm, and next to them, an eight-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy - my mother and uncle - it is entirely possible that his eyes met at least once met with the eyes of the graphic apprentice whom everyone called Džuža. Neither Rodoljub nor Džudža could have anticipated the historic collapse and epic reversal: the barracks of the king's army, whose uniform and epaulettes Rodoljub wears, will be named after an almost invisible apprentice in a few years.
And Rodoljub will put on his uniform for the last time, getting up from his deathbed in the officer's house in Ćuprija at the end of the Second World War. Inflamed feverish eyes, hands shaking with fever. Just to fasten the button on the top pocket. And to put on boots. If he stays on his feet - death may not reach him. The veterinarian of the royal stable Dobrichevo seems to hear a gallop. The irony could not be greater, because his disease is called galloping tuberculosis. They put him back in bed. He died the next day.
Speaking of Dobrichevo, a large agricultural and livestock estate, the former pride of the state stud farm from which Haile Selassie received a horse as a gift, it has taken on a special dimension in the family chronicle. Ana and her children retreated there from Ćuprije during the Second World War, to avoid the bombing. Mother remembered that they would run away from the plane at night and from the farm buildings into the woods, spending the night under the treetops. Half a century later, in Tuzla, they will flee to the basement. And Dobrichevo was bombed six times by the planes of the North Atlantic Treaty a quarter of a century ago.
After walking through the cemetery, I give up my intention to visit Dobrichevo. Everything is even deader there than here. And I won't be able to make a connection with my family's past. She is no longer at home in Ćuprija. She is still alive only in fragments of the family story, in the memory of the descendants of Mara and Dušan.
And this is worth noting
The walk along the Morava coast to the bridge, through a beautifully landscaped park, ends at a place where the entire side wall of a building is decorated with a mural with the image of Dragoslav Mihailović. It is the biggest literary brand that Ćuprija had. This writer experienced all the horrors and beauties of the twentieth century and turned them into books that undoubtedly belong to the Serbian literary canon. A novel immediately comes to mind When the pumpkins were blooming which the socialist regime at the time frowned upon, especially the cult figure of Ljuba Šampion.
Ili Bootleggers - a novel that will easily connect me with its famous namesake, because it is actually a novel about soldiers. The main character, Žika Kurjak, is my grandfather's companion, an officer of the same defeated army. I am glad that Ćuprija was able to embrace her great writer with a mural by an artist from Paračin four years ago.
I should also mention that in Ćuprija I sat down in the "Ćaka" tavern. It is undoubtedly an excellent address for anyone who loves authentic Serbian cuisine.
I also took a walk in Karađorđeva, which in the former garrison pearl among the towns preserves an urban touch, the promise of a happier city.
I also saw wedding trumpeters in front of the municipal building. I have also seen carefree high school students who think that the world belongs only to them, and that the world I am talking about is as boring as a museum. In half a century, they too will begin to look back, and the traces, in a country that likes to forget, will be fewer and fewer.
In an alley, a street dog came up to me, sniffed me and wag its tail. Others followed him. My surroundings wonder why all kinds of animals approach me. Perhaps that is also the legacy of Bunić.
On the eve of leaving the town, while drinking coffee in the cafe "Gavra" with a metropolitan atmosphere, Gavrilo Princip watches me from the wall. The man who, with his shots in Sarajevo, set in motion the already prepared grindstone of the Twentieth century. In it, the lives of the Bunić family were mixed up several times. And with that, ultimately, my life too.
Bonus video:
