Mag

Dijana introduced me to Mugdin, aka Mag. In the garden of the Theatre, on warm autumn evenings, the buzz of conversation could be heard on the other bank of the Miljacka River. Under the thick trees, tables were lined up with checkered tablecloths and tin ashtrays that the grumpy waiters were reluctant to empty. At one such table, Dijana told me about her dream.

- I was waiting for you at Two Fishermen. You were approaching me along the shore, smiling. When I wanted to hug you, you walked past me, hugged Azra and started kissing her.

Lightning sparkled in her gray-blue eyes.

- Hey, man, my boyfriend is with my sister!

- Well, your sister is cute too, at least it all stays in the family!

She didn't like the joke. Her eyes sparkled.

- How can you?

- Wait a minute, that's you dreaming, not me.

At that moment, a bearded, balding figure with smiling blue eyes loomed over us.

- Hi Dijana, he said and offered me his hand.

- I am Magus.

Diana met him while she was going to meetings of an amateur acting troupe. He was an authentic worker, so he helped a director friend write dialogue for a play called Self-Government Drama. The actors then memorized Mago's speeches on the topic of the factory to the workers. Soon I was talking to Mago about Stanescu, Diana was bored, so she left, hissing goodbye.

- Say hello to your sister, said Mag.

She turned and addressed me:

- You're so mean!

She waved to Mago, who looked at me questioningly.

- I cheated on her with her sister, she saw it with her own eyes. In a dream.

MAGICIAN'S WORLD

I continued to hang out with Mago, but not with Dijana. He lived in Mejtaš, at Mahmut Bušatlije's. When I was hanging out at Titova, I used to drop by his place without any notice. He would always be happy.

He lived in a dimly lit apartment with his mother, a silent woman with thick eyebrows, and his immobile grandmother, who wailed in a chorus from the room at the end of the hall, which I never entered. His father had died a long time ago. Mag was a metalworker on sick leave. He had an accident at work that he never talked about. When we got to know each other better, he confided in me that he had problems with his potency. Incompetent doctors claimed that there was no physical cause, that Mag's occasional impotence came from his head. At check-ups, he gave passionate speeches about threatened workers' rights, including the right to healthy sex.

Once they detained him in the hospital in Koševo.

He stayed for about ten days. I came several times, bringing grandchild or a small beer. When I took the offerings out of the inside pocket of my jacket, Mago's bearded face would light up.

On the tenth day, the head of the clinic signed his discharge certificate and said that he would personally send him to Jagomir if he ever came back to screw the doctors while healthy.

Mago's little room was crammed with books, cassettes, papers. There I met his company. Adil, a curly-haired handsome man, a philosophy student, Ema, his girlfriend who looked as dazzling as that Swedish girl from Aba. Nino, the brother of the guitarist from a Sarajevo band known for celebrating petty criminals and the underworld. The long-haired twins Marko and Mirko, who were studying painting.

We would all crowd into Mago's little room, listen to psychedelic music, sometimes hard rock, sip and talk about how we would move the world with art. And we knew little about art or the world.

Sometimes we would indulge in a game of associations. Mag would play a long song, and one of us would close our eyes and describe aloud the images the music evoked in him. Once Mag put Vangelis' film music on the tape recorder, and I was well into the vodka.

I write from memory: Plato's cave, shadows on the rocks. Blood drips from above and coagulates into coral-red stalactites. From afar, through the mouth of the cave, the reflection of fire reaches. Stalactites, transparent as rubies, whisper - it's time, it's time... A city in the valley is burning. Residents on the streets, under Munch's masks. They shout zig hajl, jumping into the swollen river, before the dirty water completely swallows them, waving at us as if they were leaving on a train. When the tone do i ton si They touch the vault of the cave, it splits like flesh cut lengthwise with a knife, and in the gap a starry vault appears. The stars are multi-colored, they blink irritably. The eye searches for the star Wormwood, but cannot find it.

The blood is cold, it's not time yet.

The Magus spoke first: You're crazy! But this is really good!

Emma looked at me with teary blue eyes: What did you take, give it to me too!

I handed her the vodka.

Adil just gives a thumbs up.

The ruddy Mirko emerged with his face from under his long straw-colored hair and said: Sweet bad trip.

And the one-eyed Marko just sighed loudly.

They never let me speak with music and vodka again.

DEAD STONE

There, at the top of the street that climbed from Titova, and could be seen like a carved ravine even from Čobanija, began the area that in Turkish was called the Dead Man's Stone. When I climbed the slope towards Magova's building in the summer, heavy from the previous night, I would imagine that dead man, always wearing a turban, pale and silent. His stone, a cube of expensive granite, revealed that he was a local merchant who, knowing that the last shirt had no pockets, had invested his fortune in the hardest marker while he was still alive, counting on the stone to convey his message through time: Here lies one who created a marker during his lifetime. And each of you will lie on that stone.

I wondered, am I not like him?

I seek words that are as hard as stone. So that I could lie down under them once, protected from oblivion by their order, more solid than any granite. Then I would wave my hand as if defending myself from my own pathos. They placed every dead person on such a stone before burying him.

I like to believe in my version: The dead man bequeathed a stone during his lifetime, which people took away anyway, because it was not an ordinary tombstone, but as good as a threshold. But his wish that word about it reach me, a hungover student slowly moving up the slope, inventing a story about its name, remained inscribed in the name of the city neighborhood.

Mag's apartment was on the fourth floor, his window looked through the canopy of a large birch tree down the street I was coming down. Sometimes Mag was alone, staring at the ceiling in silence and moving his mouth. Once I asked him what he was whispering.

- A poem. I hear its melody, I know it exists. It would be like a prayer and a hymn. I know it is ripe, if only I could pick it. You see, it exists, perfect, holy and crazy, but I can't guess the words. I've been close a few times. But as soon as I whisper a few words, they clank hollowly like a tin can when you kick it down the Mejtaš. But I feel its existence within me. I know it is there. I don't know if I will find the words. You see?

I understood. But I was too young to understand that everyone only hears their own life song. I wanted to help Mago at all costs, to finally squeeze out of himself, like out of used toothpaste, those verses that would then shine, eternal like the Dead Man's Stone.

Sometimes the Magus would recite his verses in taverns. His voice had a prophetic pathos. Bearded like an Old Testament, he spoke in such a way that everyone listened to him, even those who had never touched a book of verses. Images collided. Treasuries of the night, dragons of despair, a blue boy searching for a cup with an elixir...

One boring, hot afternoon, he left the jazz café Zvono on Zrinjskog Street and began to recite a Morrison-esque text that I had never heard before. A dozen or so people who were killing time in the café followed him, each with their own drink. He took us to the Zrinjski Bridge. Even passersby began to stop to hear the Sarajevo sermon on the water. There on the bridge – with a view of the other bridge and the place where Princip shot Ferdinand – he finished his apocalyptic monologue. We applauded and patted him on the shoulder.

But Mag never published a single line anywhere.

I decided to be his manager.

I brought my Universal typewriter into his little room. I made him collect everything he had ever written down. There were miniatures on an upturned turkey box, notes on tavern bills, verses microscopically written on a matchbox. I spoke them out loud and if Mag didn't object, I would type them on the typewriter for which I had bought a blue ribbon.

The manuscript grew.

On the third night I tried to suggest changes. I had rarely seen him so angry.

- These words are mine. I fought for them. Either write them as they are, or you'll be a complete fool! Don't mess with someone else's, but write your own book!

We were silent until morning. Visotsky hummed from the cassette player. The sound of metal letters hammering into paper became less and less frequent. Mag looked at the ceiling, the morning blush rising to his high forehead.

"Done," I said and yawned.

I pulled the title page of the manuscript out of the machine: IN FUTURE.

We went down to the shore. At the entrance to the publishing house Veselin Masleša Mag took all three copies and went upstairs. He returned a few minutes later. He said that he would know the result by late autumn, it would be on the notice board. We sat in the garden of Dva ribara, drank a pot-bellied Sarajevo beer and then parted ways.

SHIP OF THE MADMAN

That summer, I found guys in his little room that I would never have met otherwise. A machinist who composes a symphony for a table and a hammer. A painter who paints only one motif – a woman's mouth. A physics professor who was expelled from school for telling children that gravity was a hoax. There was also Ljubomir, a former captain and current patient in an open psychiatric ward. He would laugh the loudest when others were on the verge of crying. Once, one of the students told the sad story of his family, whose father had long since abandoned them.

We all surrendered to the prescribed blues, and Ljubomir chuckled.

The student asked what was funny. Ljubomir looked at him like a snake at a frog:

- Your father is an idiot. And you're a fool for saying that!

The student straightened up, and so did Ljubomir, who was a head taller. The magician stood between them and explained something for a long time, and finally everyone sat down again and made a toast.

I met so many crazy people at Mago's that I ended up wondering if he wasn't a clinical case too. And maybe I was one too.

I never found any of them in the little room more than once or twice. Only Nino came often, he would stop by to tell an anecdote from the Sarajevo rock scene, smoke two cigarettes, or rather, smoke them in one gulp, and leave. He stayed once. He took Mag's out-of-tune guitar, immediately tightened the strings, and without a word began to play Zeppelin, Stepenice ka nebu. The only people in the room were Azra, Dijana's sister, whom Mag was helping with her graduation paper in Serbo-Croatian, Mag and me.

She was a bit plumper than her sister, she radiated sensual femininity. I took her hand... We stood up and hugged, spinning in a circle in a dance that was actually a rotational embrace.

She snuggled up to me with all the fragrance of her eighteen years.

Nino played like an angel. Mag lay on the bed, moving his lips. From the depths of the apartment, Mag's grandmother was moaning, dying slowly, slowly. Her moans mixed into the musical phrase, adding to it a real pain. The two of us spun around, forgetting for a moment who we were. She looked up at me and licked her lips. I just buried my nose in her hair.

Nino stopped playing. All that remained was moaning.

She whispered to me, do you know I dated Nina?

I pulled her away from me and gently pushed her back onto the worn-out armchair, which sighed sadly under her firm ass. I thought I caught a glimpse of despair in the look Nino gave her.

Azra jumped up to leave, and Nino immediately followed her.

- Say hello to your sister, said Mag.

Azra turned to me and blurted out: You're so mean.

Mago's company was important to me. He was my connection to the city as it really is, not as it appears to newcomers. Seen from Mago's window, it was a shabby, fragmented city, full of alleys reminiscent of the most distant province. People lived and died in that city who would never, except perhaps in an obituary, make it into the daily newspapers. Some arrived here in search of a living. Some had their fathers, grandfathers, great-grandfathers move here. For at least three generations back, they were people from Foča, Zvornik, Krajišnica, Herzegovina, Šapč, Split, Prague engineers and Istrian sailors. They were landless people from Trnovo, poor people from Visoko, merchants from Sandžak, peasants from Romanija. And they all listened to their children softening their consonants and rustling, becoming part of the city that was eyeing newcomers.

They brought women from areas where they had relatives, because they weren't as demanding as those from the asphalt, and they also knew how to make pie. Cooking a pie, as they say here.

The magician is from that story. A Sarajevo native whose roots reach back to Montenegro.

AND AN ANGEL

One November afternoon, Mag led me into a room that was unusually tidy. I had just begun to praise his sudden diligence when a girl with a narrow Sephardic face and swarthy hair came out of the kitchen. Her large eyes glowed like dark crystals. She set down the tray with the teapot and cups on the coffee table in front of the sofa, wiped her hand on her skirt, and held it out: I am Munevera.

It seems I clumsily suppressed my surprise. Mag patted me on the shoulder and told me to sit down, I had just arrived for coffee. Then he told me how they met. He went to the post office to pay the electricity bill. The old post office clerk had retired. And the new one was Munevera.

I asked him how he addressed her. Munevera sipped her coffee the whole time, leaving the explanation to Mago.

- First I paid for the electricity. But when I saw her I bought envelopes. Then in line again. Then postcards. Then in line again. Then stamps. Then she asked me what I really wanted, and I said - let's go out for a drink.

- And then?

- She turned me down. Her people are from Prijepolje. Only easy women there say yes right away. I came in the afternoon. And again in a row, letters, stamps, money orders. And the next day. But when I got in line she appeared behind me and said, let's go for that drink.

I was delighted by his sudden happiness. I stopped dropping by unannounced. They no longer needed a companion, but time alone.

And that summer passes.

We stood together in Masleša in front of the bulletin board.

There were only a few names on the paper above the line. Magovo's was not among them.

I didn't know what to say. I remembered that before dawn that day when I was typing the manuscript, a doubt had come over me. What if the Magus speaks the verses prophetically, imitating the melody he hears, but as soon as the text is separated from the voice it becomes a meaningless pile of genitive metaphors? Isn't the spoken melody alone close to that perfect poem, and the text is just a morsel from God, as much a poem as a fish skeleton is a fish?

I do not know.

- I wish I wasn't the first one under the line!, Mag said.

His last name started with A, the last names were arranged alphabetically.

Outside, the October sun left an inimitable mark on the artificial river waterfall, beneath which plastic bottles, trapped in a whirlpool, danced in circles.

GOD'S PARAMECIA

I didn't go to Mejtaš anymore. Mag didn't go down to the taverns. Winter was over, spring was emerging through the fog and soot. Sometimes I would meet people I had met at Mag's at Vasa Miskina.

Ljubomir once sat down next to a beggar at the market and held out his hand. When she protested, he took what she had begged from her. And when the police arrived, he took out some kind of ID, and they took the beggar away. He saw me and winked at me. I hurried on.

I recognized the twins once after midnight, near Drvenija.

They were fighting against four of them. With their bright hair up to their waists, they knew exactly what they were doing. Two of the attackers, petty criminals who like to torment "hashishshars" as they called long-haired guys here, were lying on the asphalt, two of them ran away. I remember the twins laughing loudly, shaking hands.

Nino once explained to me in passing that he was going to study painting. He asked me if I was seeing Azra. I said I wasn't.

I heard that an antigravity physicist killed himself. By jumping off a skyscraper.

I only met Dijana once more, at Skenderija's. She's studying economics. She would like to separate from her parents. And live alone, without men. Adil and Ema have separated. He published a book, he was declared the hope of Bosnian poetry. I didn't even know he wrote.

The city relaxes in the summer. Taxi drivers tell customers how they stayed in the city real pussies because the female students went home.

The meeting place for art-loving night owls – Zvono – was moved from the Cathedral to Dobrovoljačka, where Štok used to be. One evening I entered the basement room, from which Armstrong's voice could be heard. Several guests, mostly students of the Academy of Fine Arts, were hanging around without saying a word.

On the walls hung canvases with thousands of tiny figures and specks, as if someone had spilled a bucket of multi-colored paramecium onto a flat surface.

Dark tones prevailed.

It was as if the canvas wanted to say something important in an unknown language. But it couldn't.

In the lower right corner I read the signature: Mag.