One of the greatest Yugoslav actresses, Živana Žanka Stokić, was accused of aiding the enemy by performing in the theater during the war, so a few days after the liberation of Belgrade by the liberators, she was arrested and sentenced to eight years of loss of civic honor. The sentence was community service, cleaning the streets. Two years after her conviction, her request for clemency was granted. Three days after Bojan Stupica's invitation to re-engage with the new Yugoslav Drama Theater, Žanka died.
But Žanka is neither the only nor the main heroine of this story. The monument to the famous actress at the Topčider cemetery was erected by her maid, to whom she left a modest inheritance, and it was adorned with the inscription: “To my noble mistress Žanka I erect this monument, grateful Magda”. Many years after her death, in the rehabilitation process, the District Court makes a decision in which it states that Žanka was not politically active and that she was convicted for political and ideological reasons. I will not deal with the political aspect of the story, but with this unusual tombstone epitaph.
I wonder if there could be at least one landlady in our time to whom her Magda could address these words.
Today's path to becoming a mistress in Montenegro is not difficult. More or less everyone has the same beginnings, which is that regardless of their level of education or lack of education, they came from modest, not to say poor, families and spent most of their youth envying everyone who had, even if it was just a little more. And of course, the fastest and easiest way to get to the point where you are envied, and not you by others, is to get married. Usually, this marriage involves a businessman or a politician. It is more useful to choose a politician, because with him you get the cream of the social class in the phone book, "friends" that you show on TV and in newspaper articles. Of course, you also have the opportunity to defiantly show your former girlfriends that you are some kind of authority, albeit with a deadline, but while it lasts, it lasts. Thanks to a socially influential husband, you can take over part of his power, so you can decide on employment and promotion, that is, on human destinies, from home with a phone. Gaining power by marrying a businessman means that you will be surrounded by people who have money, but as soon as they drink a little more, they usually show that they had the same beginnings as you, that is, that they were destined to be irrelevant. In a word, regardless of being a businessman or a politician, respectable ladies become nobles very quickly. And what kind of mistress would you be if in your luxurious home you didn't copy frames from movies that describe life at court, which is that you issue orders and that someone humbly listens to you.
Just as in Montenegro a large number of women play nobles, and certainly not a small number of women, due to poor financial conditions, are forced to be at their mercy and disfavor. Scenes in which a housemaid walks away from the table after a set lunch, while the owners dine, can be heard and seen more and more often in our seemingly beautiful cities. A wonderful, quiet and dedicated woman, due to a series of life's hardships, was forced to work full-time from 08 a.m. to 16 p.m. for a pittance, for many years as a housemaid with responsibilities that exceeded even those of a real mother, for a landlady who persistently tried to smuggle bags from luxury stores through the house. However, on one occasion, despite all the care, the price tag of the bag ended up in the hands of the housemaid and the humiliation was immeasurable - she was paid the value of her two monthly salaries.
That cruelty is in a way a talent, given the need to find different variations to satisfy one's own ego, was also demonstrated by a young mother who took her housekeeper for a walk along the Nikšić promenade, to push her stroller with her baby, while she tried to show curious glances with her graceful walk that life is a mother after all, not a stepmother.
With the change of one government and the arrival of another, the ordinary world expects a morning in which it wakes up and sees Montenegro without injustice and humiliation, but... there is no such morning, just as there is no such thing as our much-vaunted "humanity", because if there were such abundance of it, Marko Miljanov's "Examples of Humanity and Heroism" would not be just "examples".
The way we live our own lives and how we treat others usually says something about us, whether we are small or big. Unfortunately, the small think of themselves as big, and the big, in their modesty, see themselves as small.
The author is a B.Sc. lawyer
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