There is no better witness to the transience of worldly fame than a few articles of clothing of the famous deceased. Suit without Branko. Cloaked in language, Miljković is better equipped for the uncertain journey into eternity
I went to Niš that morning by bus from Leskovac. Exactly half an hour's drive. The dry mountain and the fields below it are covered with snow. In the city itself, precipitation fluctuates between sleet and rain. December is trying to kill any will of people to go out into the street. It is a short way from the Niš bus station, past the market and Stambol Gate, across the bridge over Nišava and to the left to the City Hall. I have work to do in it today, but more on that later.
I was only able to come to Nis that way. To some pub. From the famous "Mrak", through "Ploughman", "Pirate", "Small Cellar", "Roštiljka", "Izvor". I liked classic taverns more than fancy places like "Pleasure", "Meze" or "Stambolijski". So, I entered the gastronomic map long before, due to circumstances, my name will be entered into the cultural map of the city.
I went to Nis in all weather conditions. In the summer, go to a concert by Vlatko Stefanovski or go to a pub on the shores of Nišava for a beer. In winter, mostly in Kazandžija sokače or in some warm, smoky room with boiled brandy. So I can no longer consider the city an exciting, foreign territory. He is close to me, yet not mine.
This time the occasion is special.
ON COFFEE WITH GORAN
The poet Goran Stanković, along with two literary critics, was on the jury that awarded me the "Branko Miljković" literary award in May of this year. Goran is my host today. We agreed to meet in front of the City Hall. We get to know each other and head to a nearby coffee shop for an extended milkshake. There is still almost an hour until the awarding, at noon. Goran is a quiet, moderate man. He received the same award back in 1999. We are agreeing on the technical details. Then he tells me about Niš Jupiter, which emerged from the bottom of Nišava in 1938.
The city chronicles recorded that the excavator of soda maker Vladimir Domazet removed a lump of sand from the bottom of Nišava from which limbs were sticking out. Cleaned of sand, the figure of Jupiter on the throne flashed with a dark glow on the boss's palms. The landlady's wife did not accept the black ancient Roman figure in the house, so it spent the night in the shed of the Domazets. Sodažija's neighbor and lawyer advised him the next day not to put the supreme Roman deity next to his icon - if he is a good Christian - and to donate it to the museum. So the soda maker got rid of Jupiter, and the Niš Museum got one of its most valuable exhibits. The story is already a common good, an anecdotal pillar of local identity. It was recorded by the Niš writer Vidosav Petrović, along with other "Niš anecdotes of the 19th and 20th centuries".
In fact, that man probably connected Jupiter from Niš and the poet Branko Miljković in some way, because Vidosav left records of "Memories of Branko Miljković", a book that was published back in 1988 - exactly half a century from the moment when the excavator freed Jupiter from his dark sandy sleep.
In recent months, Niš has been dealing with post-election labors that seem to have been temporarily resolved by the formation of a city government with the help of only one majority vote. In a city where Roma are the most present minority, and according to the last census there are a total of 121 living Russians, that golden councilor vote was provided by the Russian Party. This is another one of the Serbian political phantasmagorias, according to which our reality resembles the most bizarre pages of magical realism. After temporarily solving the question of who is the boss in the City Hall, the city government can finally deal with such trifles as the presentation of the first-class prize for poetry.
IN THE TOWN HALL
Anyone who walks through the city sooner or later has to come across the Town Hall. It, like almost everything that is representative in Niš, was created during the royal Yugoslavia. They say that it was built on the site of the Prince's Palace, the summer residence of Prince and King Milan Obrenović. When they decided to build a branch of the National Bank there, the previous building was removed. It is interesting that the foundation stone was laid on the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, on July 28, 1924. And in the summer of 1914, the dispatch about the declaration of war found the state leadership precisely in Niš. The neoclassical building in artificial stone is certainly one of the most beautiful public buildings in Serbia. I'm entering it for the first time. Not much time for sightseeing. The deputy mayor tells me that my absent namesake, the current mayor, is greeting me. I meet people from culture, journalists have some questions.
When it was my turn, I spoke about the time four decades ago when we read Miljković intensively. I mentioned that today we anticipate the answer to the poet's question: "Will freedom be able to sing, as the slaves sang about it?" No. Because the dissonances of the explosions became entangled in reality. Analog and digital revolutions. The disappearance and emergence of states. Although I had prepared a speech, actually an essay, I didn't want to bother people, so I spoke spontaneously. My written response to the award will be read, by those who wish, in the magazine "Gradina". In the end, I read the ancient poem "Freedom". I publicly dedicated it to all young people who would like to expand the space of freedom.
While Goran was reading the explanation of the jury for awarding the "Branko Miljković" award, it made me feel a little uneasy. It's always been like that, when someone publicly praises me. I remember my late mother. She was the kind of person who would give you your last penny. And she didn't know how to accept the gift. "Why did you spend money"? "I don't need anything"! "You know I don't like you to give me anything." It's possible I inherited a mental pattern. I don't know how to enjoy to the end when someone else gives me something, so it's the same with the praise that each of us, when dealing with writing, certainly desires. And the words read by Goran are arranged in a kind of professional eulogy. It is fortunate that I have entered the seventh decade of existence, so I have learned to accept the discomfort, which still occurs in such situations, with sincere gratitude.
This was followed by the presentation of the charter and the statue of Jupiter on the throne. The replica was created as a relatively free interpretation of the original. The soda maker Domazet, his lawyer neighbor, as well as all those rich Romans who decorated their villas in the area with objects like this go through my mind. I would like to know where Nishava took the ivory scepter from the left, and the lightning from the right hand of Jupiter. I held up Jupiter and struck – not without self-irony – an Oscar winner's pose. And that was it.
SUIT WITHOUT A BRANK
After the award, Goran took me to the Stevan Sremac and Branko Miljković Literary Memorial. Curator of the literary legacy Jelena Bogdanović first took us through the part of the exhibition that reminds us of Stevan Sremac's twelve years in Niš. He did not publish then, but from 1879 to 1893 he filled notebooks with notes on future characters. One of the notebooks is open so that visitors can recognize the recorded name - Zona Zamfirova. Šotra's film "Ivkova slava" would not exist without the short story of the same name by Stevan Sremac, which was written more than a century before the film. And Ivko really existed - it was the quilter Živko who lost only the first letter of his name in literature.
Moving on, I'm still here for what the setting has to offer about Branko Miljković. I immediately go to the corner where I recognize four addresses that the poet changed during his lifetime. One in Niš, two in Belgrade and the last one in Zagreb.
In the 1961s, the poet's charisma was still vividly reaching us, students and apprentices of poetry at that time. Although he ended his life back in 27, when most of us were not even born yet, in a way, he subsequently became an associate member of the "27 Club" which included our musical saints - Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison. They died a decade later, all at the bloody age of XNUMX. Miljković's meteoric rise as a poet and his mysterious death remained a transgenerational theme. This is how the most widely read writer from Nis, Dejan Stojiljković, published this year on the poet's ninetieth birthday the novel "Star over the Void", in which it is said that the poet was killed by order of the Udba.
I hover over the showcases in which I recognize songs that I knew only in printed form. Personal documents that give a hint of the time before my birth: pre-military training booklet, membership cards of the Union of Yugoslav Students, the citizenship certificate from which I learn that his father's name was Gligorije. In the death certificate I see that his mother's name was Marija and that she had an unusual maiden name Brajilo.
Then I came to the suit and hat in the display case. A spooky exhibit.
Goran tells me that Miljković went to receptions where Tito was also present, that he received invitations to places where members of the diplomatic and cultural elite gathered in Belgrade. I imagine him in this suit checking in front of the mirror whether everything is in its place.
There is no better witness to the transience of worldly glory than these few articles of clothing. Suit without Branko. Wrapped in versed language, he is better equipped for the uncertain journey into eternity.
I saw a lot and realized that before entering this memorial room, I had reduced the man Branko Miljković to his poetry. He probably wanted that too. Certainly, the verses provided him with a posthumous life, a kind of duration in the language.
NISLIJA MACHINERY
The entire presentation was moderated by Velibor Velja Petković - a nice journalist and assistant professor of journalism. He is also known as a moderator at the Nišville festival. I'm sitting next to him in the Niš tavern "Nišlijska mehana". Everyone left, but the people from the Niš Cultural Center - Goran Stamenković and the literary program editor Milena Mišić - as good hosts, did not let me go hungry.
With a great barbecue, they talked about anything and everything. I found out an unusual thing about Velibor Petković. Velja was born in Tuzla. His father worked at the military airfield in Dubrava near Tuzla, where he grew up with Muslim friends from that village, some fifteen kilometers from where I spent my childhood. And we are the same age. I look at him in disbelief when at the table he slips from Ekavian from Niš, which charmingly avoids length as if on command, into the microdialect from Dubrava, one of the extremely archaic Prekodrina varieties, sometimes incomprehensible even to Bosnians. In addition to professional works, Velja also publishes beautiful literature. In fact - the kind of lyrics that make you laugh. He promised me his book of stories "Međeđedovina". The title promises.
WE SEE A BEAUTIFUL LAND
I rarely feel good in the company of people I have just met - but this time in Nis it was nice. Of course, I had a laureate discount, so I can't tell if it's a mutual impression. The guest is always pleased. But I think that the people who were at the table in Nišlijska mehana belong to a community of sensibilities that still allows a shortcut to other people - if they are on similar wavelengths.
It's a pity that a person can't experience days like this more often when they praise him for a handful of words that he arranged according to some inner necessity and presented to the public. That's what the boy in me thinks. And the old skeptic reminds of a verse read long ago, that one should live "far from fame and its gallows".
Niš sends me off with sleet. I part with Goran again at the Town Hall, leaving the way I came that morning to the bus station. Wet streets and reflections of street lights on them. I carry my charter and Jupiter in my bag.
I get on the Niš Express, which will continue to Skopje after Leskovac. I am reading Goran Stanković's booklet "Litanie". I stop at the verse: "I am my own letter, addressed to nothing, to the world that will live after me, in which I will no longer breathe. I am someone who leaves".
Perfect lyrics for the melancholy of driving on the highway between Niš and Leskovac, while Suva Planina, this time on the left, is engulfed in darkness.
A young Macedonian woman behind me, in a language that I like, talks on her cell phone non-stop. She will say more words in this half hour than Branko Miljković has published in his lifetime. But her words will disappear in time like tears in the rain, as Roy from the movie "Blade Runner" would say.
Here, as a consolation, I introduce Goran's verse - I can't make a better point: "When we look from the road that leads us / somewhere, we see a beautiful country. / We are grateful for that".
Bonus video:
