he was a hero and the talk of the town. When Dušan came out of German headquarters he was bathed in sweat.
Stanica remembers the sounds of shelling and machine-guns. And running to hide and her ‘heels hitting her in the bum’. Her brother Branko was a wealthy merchant. He lived in Dubrovnik but had at least one flat in Belgrade, at least one in Zagreb and who knows where else. He loved life and lavishly disbursed his wealth together with others, filling the time with joy and failing to notice the repressed images of evil. Luka learnt Italian from the occupation forces. That was a term the grown-ups used, and the children just took it on. But straight after exiting house and garden they rushed down to the guys at the cantina always hungry – that’s how they felt at the time – lured by the smell of fried eggs and pasta sauce. They were even given some to take home. ‘Shame on you for accepting food from the enemy!’ Stanica said. Dušan was silent and ruminated for as long as the war lasted. Everyone ate pasta.
Branko called Stanica to tell her that she and the family urgently needed to flee from Bar and offered them his flat in Belgrade, in prestigious Višnjić Street. Stanica hysterically demanded that they leave immediately. She kept telling everyone her nightmares and painting the blackest scenarios. Dušan continued his silence and ruminated so much that he felt his head would explode even more loudly than all the shells he had heard in the war. As a ‘man of confidence’ he was able to, and later required to, tap telephone conversations. The post office and telephone exchange were in his hands. He had close relatives who were with the Partisans, too. No one knows how many times grandfather Dušan saved their lives by warning them that an ambush had been laid in this place and that. Before telling them, he’d try to think up a subterfuge for the town commander. After the war, his relatives forgot him and he became a common collaborator, but that was much later. Now, when he heard the children making faces and saying ‘ma bene!’, he came up with the idea of getting himself a doctor’s certificate which would state that he urgently required a varicose vein operation. That was the only way of escaping the town, considering his deadly importance there, and moving his family to Belgrade. Who knows what went through his head when they took him out to be shot – three times! Later he’d blather on about it so much that we all took to our heels whenever we heard him say, ‘and when they came to get me...’ There were actually several versions of the story. The only thing they all had in common was that he went grey after surviving the first execution.
Luka remembers several episodes from their month on the run. For example, when a Messerschmitt strafed the train, and he was stunned to see a bullet from one of its machine-guns bore through the rail. Thuck! He marvelled at that metallic puncture sound. After the war he was one of the founders – actually builders – of the Lisičji Jarak airport; he became the best glider pilot there and soon a flying instructor. But all that was nothing, he said, compared with the mighty Messerschmitt. That powerful image of a rail bored through by a bullet led him on to several world records. He couldn’t stand still, he had to race ahead, be it in a glider, in thoughts or in dreams, at the same speed with which he fled from the scalded Jerry. He remembers a trip by train, a truck ride, and long stretches on foot. Once they arrived in a town where the aroma of freshly baked bread wafted over from a bakery. The whole family was hungry, but no one more so than Luka’s youngest brother, that eternal starveling. ‘Bred, gimme bred!’ he shouted when he smelt it. Dušan bought everyone a small loaf of bread. ‘Daddy, daddy!’ the little gobbler yelled with his mouth full, ‘D’zis mean we’re not “depraved” any more?’
He remembers the Russian liberators, weary after years of war, in ragged pants and each with a bottle in hand; and the stories of them swigging flasks of eau de Cologne, desperate for the alcohol, and smashing aeroplanes’ gyroscopes to drink all four corners of the world; and the German machine-gun nest on top of what is today the Faculty of Mathematics; and the Russians cut down by the dozen as they yelled ‘Chaaarge!’ and kept on attacking until one of them broke through and silenced the last sounds of the enemy with a hand grenade. Now Belgrade was liberated not just officially, but in practice as well.
Books and books could be written about all our memories. There are some who devotedly do that. I’d only add, although I don’t know why it’s important, that Luka not only remembered the smell of the sea, and of oranges and lemons, but also took it with him throughout his life in his stately nose, even in the years when he was up to all sorts of fun and tricks with the cool gang from the Dorćol neighbourhood, and despite the fact that he suffered from chronic sinusitis. His life’s journeys coloured in the map of the world, and that Mediterranean smell followed him wherever he went. It came from the blending of all the variations of blue and citrus, just that one smell. It outlasted the gunpowder and the odour of caviar at the reception with the Yugoslav president, Marshal Tito, who had decided to treat the ensemble as guests on equal terms with the other invited notables. Like the whole country and half the world, my father sang for Tito. The difference being that his choir performed professionally, while the others mainly sang and staged rustic circle dances without any great preparation, at least those who survived the smell of gunpowder and left Tito’s dungeons alive. And even when he went diving in the River Sava and the Danube, travelled the world, fell in love again and again, suffered or rejoiced, was lavishly paid or had to sell his clothes at the flea market to survive, all the time he was really sailing on the air and smelling that one smell – that scent of childhood, of orange and lemon groves near the sea.
So Bad to See You
(Starting a new life)
Here the Carpathians begin: a boundless place, for it spreads as far as the far-flung vineyards. They existed and will continue to exist long before and after all wars. Their form is elusive – every vineyard ends, or begins, at the point where the eyes weary and the sky takes over the last of the vines. Old folk are able to recognise that nuance of blue in the grapes which commingle with each other during the harvest. Only they can recognise the subtle differences in what they once called ‘the grapes from the end of the world’, while the landowners watch over every harvest hand, basket and grape. Although today, when farmers show others their properties, they have to admit: ‘Sure, it is great land, but just look at the sky!’ Gazing up at it, the poet Vasko Popa once wrote: ‘He had to die, they say. The stars were closer to him than people.’
The next stage of grandfather Stipe’s career was here, in Vršac, near the Romanian border. The area had a living a mixture of languages, and after leaving Thessaloniki and the odyssey that ensued Ekaterini thought for a moment she had miraculously returned home. But the miracle ended as soon as she began learning Serbian. There was nothing for it, she had to get a grasp of the new language, if only because of the cooking. Pata’s Cookbook was her primer. Stipe carted home food just like he used to do in Thessaloniki, and thanks to his habit of buying wholesale, several Thessaloniki families – grandmother’s closest relatives – survived the four years of that war. During another turning point of history, they in turn would save Lucija and her family. Deeds like that are never forgotten. Yet generous people, those who give gladly, don’t do it so that their kindness will be reciprocated. At least those who give from the heart; that’s simply how they are – incorrigible. Other people are born of weak character; evildoers, petty thieves and great usurpers, and that’s normal for them, that’s just how they are. Once people used to call a spade a spade, but times change; now we have pop psychology shot through with detective-story elements. Food hasn’t changed so much. Housewives still consult the old cookbooks, and there’s no generation which hasn’t had to queue for food. A heavily laden dinner table is part of tradition; hunger is individual destiny.
After his barren, stony childhood, Stipe bought food by the sackful from the start of his career till the end of his life. That godsend of a man hated no one and nothing – except hunger.
‘What this now, dear God? You crazy, husband? How I now make so much food?’ Ekaterini stumbled in her newly acquired language of the Serbs.
‘Oh, come on Kata.’
Stipe
