It was November. The snow was falling under Komov at the end of October. In Grudice, he stayed on the meadows and slopes, which ended abruptly above Lim, like white slides. There are few people in the villages. The uncle is still alive, he talks about his brother with respect and admiration. His sons, my brothers, gathered in the kitchen, pour me brandy.
I ask how he died. Marko tells me that he went to bed early in his house, which was built ten years ago by his relatives, next to his grandfather's collapsed house, with Red Cross material in a mob. Kućerak was alone, on the highest plateau in the village. In the morning, the brothers shoveled the snow, which attacked during the night, bringing him scones and cheese for breakfast. He was lying motionless on his side, facing the wall. They couldn't call him.
The brothers are telling me all this while the yellowish light bulb above us flickers here and there, as if turning the story into Morse signals. Clear brandy made from mountain fruits pours down my throat questions that I almost mouthed, but I swallow them because they seem inappropriate.
Was he sick, what did he say last? What did he look like? Is the end in sight?
I remembered that a long time ago, one of my relatives said that Žućo took a lot of notes. "That will be inherited by Dragoslav, when I am gone." This indirect, unreliable bequest prompted me to ask what happened to his books and writings.
Marko looked at me sadly and said to Isokola: "You know, it was a bitter winter when we buried him. And then no one went there to the house. There was so much snow that the roof did not hold up in one place. That's how it got on the papers".
I asked if there was anything left. They shrugged.
I got up. "Let's go there".
A Podkomski blouse
They looked at me in disbelief. Outside, the darkness, mixed with snow, was dark blue.
When they saw that I was serious, Marko and Milić went with me into the night. The puddles formed in the morning because the snow started to melt at noon. They haven't frozen yet. Soon my German shoes, made for metropolitan autumn, were drenched with ice water inside. Uphill to the pass, then downhill. Twice my soles slipped, but my brothers would welcome me holding my hand. I felt their mountain toughness. I felt ashamed because I don't know how to walk on my own.
Below, in the meadow, the black shadow of the little house. The door was ajar. They were difficult to open. Marko turns on the flashlight. A beam of light falls on the tripod. Furuna was still there. In the second, larger room, it smelled of moisture and tobacco. Light slid down the wire bed frame, robbing the darkness of rust. There is a pile of waste in the corner. I get closer and realize that they are papers and books. Notebooks. Some of it has already turned into putrid matter. I start digging with my bare hands. Where I feel the paper, I pull it out of the dark mass. I move it all from the damp corner to a dry place in the middle of the room. Marko pulled out two plastic bags with English inscriptions from under his coat. We placed everything that still had a shape in them.
I examined those two bags the next day. A chaotic pile of books, notebooks, sheets, letters typed on a typewriter. Beautiful Cyrillic handwriting, sometimes hurried, sometimes ornate. In the hotel in Beran, I dried papers on the floor. I did not open the glued piles and letters, so as not to damage them. When the heat mummifies them, I will carefully separate them.
Everything I saved from the mountain humidity I put back in a small suitcase suitable for cabin luggage. I took it with me to Cologne. He waited there for almost a year standing next to the writing desk.
Then he moved with me. Three years in Belgrade at the same table. Berlin for a year, by the radiator. I opened it there for the only time in these 19 years. I inhaled the familiar scent. I unwrapped one package. Father's tobacco.
Although I quit smoking I was tempted to roll one. I held the tobacco stick between my fingers, brought it to my nostrils. Then I rolled the tobacco again in paper and put it in the suitcase. I closed it.
Eight years in Cologne, three different apartments, and always keeping an eye on the suitcase. Like a silent indictment. Finally, a Belgrade apartment on Banovo Brdo. In the study - the first time I had it all to myself - I lifted the suitcase onto the cupboard.
On one trip to Sarajevo, at the beginning of the last decade, Damir gave me a booklet that had just been published by his publishing house. We shared a penchant for Orhan Pamuk's books, the present made me happy: "My father's suitcase". In fact, between the covers was the writer's speech at the awarding of the Nobel Prize.
The title made me want to look into my father's suitcase.
Another 14 years have passed since then. One August evening this year, I asked myself why my father's legacy is blocking the suitcase I need for short trips. I opened it and started to take out the contents. What I had apparently shied away from for nearly two decades now surprised me with ease. I felt nothing but curiosity. Through the cloud of tobacco smell, the father finally spoke dead.
The same Cyrillic handwriting. Notebooks, some blackened from moisture, and some well preserved. Minutes between 1997 and 2001 from the meeting of the local socialist committee. At the beginning, Momir and Milo. So for Momir and against Milo. So for Predrag against Momir. I laughed. The old communist as recorder of Montenegrin neo-communists confirmed Đilas's prophetic sentence - the last way out of communism will be nationalism.
Much more important than the function of recorder, were the unofficial merits of that man for the ethnography of his native region. I am reading a letter in which a gentleman from Belgrade thanks several pages because Žućo explained to him the origin of his last name from Vasojević. Then my attention was drawn to a dedication on a picture of a fiddler.
Most of the books are dedicated to the poet Ratko Deletić, with whom he was apparently friends.
When Žućo becomes speechless
It is said that once academic gentlemen from Belgrade set up Žuć for a conversation in a tavern near the bridge. Later, the academics complained that the locals had disguised a top historian in peasant clothing, so he outwitted all three of them. I don't know if it's one of the local legends woven around the memory. It is certain that Žućo was good with words like few others. That he had an elephant's memory, a mathematical brain.
However, in one case he became speechless.
I separate the glued papers on the couch. Tobacco rot and decayed paper spill onto the bedspread. And that's my father's dust, I think.
The handwriting is different on one sheet. I recognize him too. Mother's handwriting. She reminds her ex-husband that despite the divorce, he is the father of two children. That he has obligations to help with schooling. He lists the costs. He demands to be human. A photograph fell out of that paper, like a kangaroo's bag. It was as if I saw a ghost. Sister and me from the black and white era. The year is 1974. I am 11 and she is 15.
On the back, the sister writes: "My brother and I decided to remind you that we exist, even though you deny it with your behavior." Look at the picture and you will see that we are not little children, but adults and that we need everything that other children have. This is your last reminder that we are your children".
I notice that in my sister's Ekavica - mother used to say so - Bosnia has already infiltrated a lot of Iekavian words. Soon both of us will be completely adopted by that melody. And the reflexes of the native Ekavian will emerge unannounced in the middle of a word that has been repeated a thousand times.
Žuco never answered. Master of rhetoric, entertainer of the crowd, undisputed speaker at funerals, he also knew how to be speechless.
Red chants
Now, almost two decades after his death, I am trying to decipher the messages he left behind. Countless papers. A good part is a read. These verses were written in March 1979:
"The dry beechwood rumbles in the furnace, and crackles like the shots of a revolver
And when I'm awake, I dream of Red July and riots, and I talk to a group of dead proletarians".
The eighties are upon us. Žućo gore, near Komovi, dives into his Skoje and wartime past, talks to the dead.
He dedicated the second song to comrade Vlajko Mijović, a partisan who was shot by Italian fascists in August 1941. Those dead proletarians had living faces for Žuća. When he was passing by the deserted house of Branko Deletić, a folk hero from Gračanica, he wrote the poem "July Longing". The dilapidated birthplace of a comrade who died in 1942 brought unrest into the poet's day. A little later, Žućo wrote: "The graves are ours - a den of the winds. / They are border people, as long as there is a border".
In September of the same year, he left verses that could refer to him as well: "He loved music - I mean above all, he loved jokes - ticklish incidents/ He loved madly - his Communist Party. He had a heart - like a figure of freedom".
The heroes of his songs were not only local heroes, but also Aljenda, Che Guevara, Neruda, Veljko Vlahović, Veselin Masleša. He also mentions Tito once or twice. In the song "Legends of the Immortals" he wrote in October 1974: "I feel sorry for the children from Vietnam/ from Cambodia or Palestine/ while murderers live among us/ until then the innocent and the weak die". Half a century later, children continue to suffer.
I think, looking through these writings, that Žućo had a pure red core in him. He was expelled from the royal Beran high school because of communist propaganda. Later, as a young warrior, camp inmate and post-war left-wing enthusiast, he must have been on the line. At the latest in the sixties, he came into conflict with the force he affectionately called Compartia.
I know nothing about the reasons. It will be that his vision of a just society collided with the Yugoslav reality. Or the peculiarity, the inflexibility of a man who saw too much evil too early spoke out from him. I can see from these writings that his love for the great idea of equality and justice for all people - despite the fact that he no longer wanted to join the party, nor to request a partisan monument - was never questioned.
Camp memories
From other poems, Žućo se palja like a longing man. A flock of cranes evokes sadness: "From somewhere behind the Komski mountains / a wedge-shaped flock of vapors".
I imagine him on a stone, at the end of the property, above the slope above Lima. He is trying to understand his own thoughts. To catch her in words. It's April 1975. Cyrillic script says:
"I see an old birch - which is gone.
I hear an echo of a song - which does not exist.
Machinally, the hand writes on the handle
Because those were also my hot days".
He often escapes from sadness into war anecdotes - he writes down memories of village quarrels between close relatives, supporters of Partisans and Chetniks, or accidents of peasants with cattle and the authorities. Sometimes the comments in the margins would reveal some information about the man taking notes. Below the poem written on January 1975, 1945, it was written: "Memory of January XNUMX, XNUMX. In retreat, prisoners during the evacuation of the Rhine region, chased and tortured - hungry and thirsty, we endured."
In the photo that came up with these papers, I didn't recognize him. I don't have a single photo of him from his younger days. But my older sister, who remembers him better, because he left when I was five, identified the young skunk unequivocally.
I did not know that Žućo, together with the others, from Mauthausen near Linz, was forced to do forced labor in the Rhine region. The period he describes is four months before the end of the war. The Allies cover Hitler's Germany with carpet bombs. And the merciless guards force Žuća and his companions through the cold January. They move workers. The song next to which the note was left has poignant lyrics: "A column of slaves, angry and sluggish/ beats the ground with a wooden clog./ And asks himself: When will we get home?/ Hold on, comrade, the day is not far away".
How did these people survive the torture?
"The vision - Tomorrow - feeds the soul. / Our "Bear" of the Hooked Eagle square. / Silesia is sung by the dawn Kaćuša / And its echo is stronger than pain".
Legacy
His father's only testament is "Testament", a poem that, judging by the date, he wrote in August 1973. He was then fifty-one years old. Today, I am ten years older than my father, who is composing a poetic last will. He wished to be buried by his comrades, the old comrades, as he called them, of course, "if they were still alive then": "Without wreaths and without orator/ and without weeping - and with a clear conscience/ sing from the choir of old men/ the old song of death communists".
I heard from the mouth of the late Ljubo Vukanić how much his comrades appreciated him after his ordeal in the concentration camp. He said that they would never be able to find their way to post-war Yugoslavia on their own. Yellow was bright, he learned German in the camp, he quickly established contact. He brought home a group of camp inmates from Polimlje through the post-war chaos.
Recently, my brothers told me an anecdote that one of the old camp inmates told during his lifetime. Detainees sometimes had to work on the farm. It was summer. The German owner had dozed off, and the cows had just been milked. Camp inmates worked in the fields. One of them crept up and reached for the pots to scoop up the milk. The pot rattled telltalely against the edge of the bucket. The owner went out to the open window, restless from sleep. Žučo called out to the owner from the field, waving his hand: "Katze. Cats". The German word for cat calmed the owner down, he returned to the house. The language skills of one camp inmate saved another from mortal danger. He would have been shot for a pot of milk.
The only thing my father really cared about were his records. "I don't leave wealth or treasure/ because I can't be Kir-Janja/ and I left a letter dear/ maybe someone will publish it".
And then: Let him tell this about me/ the other-haired heavy hermit".
This "hermit" and "hermit" sounds like a pleonasm to me. But I like it because it's true.
I take another look at the stack of papers. I suspect that this is just the beginning of mining for papers that smell of another era, of tobacco and the solitude of the man from whom I came.
Bonus video:
