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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780847698202 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 09/29/1999 |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
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Only the Nails Remain
Scenes from the Balkan WarsBy Christopher Merrill
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Copyright © 2001 Christopher MerrillAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0742516865
Chapter One
Journey
"Can you imagine?" she said. "The phone rang in the middle of the war: it was a Serbian writer calling to ask if we had read his new novel yet. 'Look,' I told him. 'We haven't time. We're stuck in our basement, dodging your bombs.' 'Well,' he said, 'that's a good place to read my book.'"
She shook her head in disbelief. Metka Krasovec was a slender, middle-aged woman with a bob of dark, curly hair and a melodious voice. Dressed casually in a floral print skirt and a white blouse, she looked as if she had just come from her studio, where she was at work on a series of portraits of women. Two paintings in particular would haunt a viewer, offering contrasting visions of the same troubled model. In the first the young woman's head, lined with shadows, jutted out of a turbulent sea; embedded in the second, unfinished work titled "Ana Happy" were shards of broken mirrors. Metka wrapped a black cape around her shoulders.
"It's freezing," she said. "I wish we could build a fire."
We were drinking coffee in the living room of her house in Bled, a resort near the Austrian border. Autumn was in the air. A cold front had moved in overnight, the sky was overcast, and rain had fallen, on and off, since early morning. And it was almost as chilly inside as out. This three-story log house--a replica of a dacha--was built by a White Russian who had fled the October Revolution. Metka's father, a Yugoslav diplomat, used his connections to acquire it, and now the house was her summer residence--the rest of the year she lived in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts. The change of weather had caught her by surprise.
"The problem is," she said, "we don't know how to work the chimney. Whenever we light a fire, the house fills with smoke."
The mention of the word smoke made her husband, the poet Tomaz Šalamun, wince. A soft-spoken man, more studied in appearance than Metka, Tomaz was wearing a sea green Italian shirt, white pants, and leather sandals. His hair was greying around his ears; the lenses in his wire-rimmed glasses were thick. He was very nervous. Jailed briefly in the 1960s as a dissident, he had emerged as a cultural hero; by the late 1980s he had become Slovenia's most renowned literary figure, the author of more than twenty books of poetry. But he had not written a word since before his country's Ten-Day War of secession from Yugoslavia, the so-called Weekend or Television War waged one year earlier. "Poetry may ruin you for anything else," he liked to say, explaining his silence; though if Metka overheard him, he would quickly correct himself: "Maybe I'm just lazy."
During Slovenia's first year of independence in more than twelve centuries, Tomaz had turned his attention to making money, spending one day a week in Trieste--a two-hour drive away--trading stocks. He had discovered a measure of truth in Wallace Stevens's maxim: "Money is a kind of poetry." Yet after an initial grace period in which his gains had been substantial enough to earn him the respect of some Italian brokers, the poet had seen his luck change. His mounting losses were a source of constant anxiety. Worse, four days earlier, as a gift to Metka (and also to improve his luck), he had given up smoking. More than once this afternoon he had said how much he missed his habit. He studied the fireplace, as if willing to risk catastrophe to inhale a little wood smoke.
"There is no purer joy than smoking," he murmured, a beatific smile spreading across his face.
I reminded him of an entry in Cesare Pavese's journal: "Life without smoking is like the smoke without the barbecue."
"And that was four days before he committed suicide!" Tomaz laughed. He rose to his feet. "Time to go."
"Will you be able to drive?" Metka teased.
He considered her question seriously. "I don't trust myself these days," he told me.
I was traveling with Ales Debeljak, who had remained quiet during our visit, suffering from what Metka said was a common ailment in this country of poets: melancholy. If there are three Slovenians in a room, odds are all three are poets, was the national joke, melancholy the national disease. Ales's sadness grew out of his ambition to make a name for himself in literary circles; he sometimes talked as if he had not achieved anything, though at thirty he was regarded as Slovenia's preeminent young writer, having already published several books of poems and essays. He taught the social history of literature at the university; worked as an editor for an Austrian publisher; compiled anthologies; wrote articles and reviews; gave poetry readings around the world. He had even appeared on television with Slovenia's president to discuss the nature of friendship. Impelled by the war, during which he had worked as a translator for CNN, now he took advantage of the attention focused on the Balkan crisis to promote his country's literature.
"We need to strike while the iron's hot," he was fond of telling editors.
Clean-shaven, Ales had a narrow, innocent regard, which accentuated his deep blue eyes; when he let his beard grow for more than a day, he took on a hungry look. Like many Slovenians, he was both frugal and shrewd. Once he had walked the streets of Paris in search of a prostitute who would give him a student discount for her services--and he had found one. He was by turns romantic and rakish, a libertine determined to marry. Similar contradictions marked his literary work. His poetry was lyrical and vaguely surreal, his prose logical, incisive. He held a doctorate from Syracuse, yet he criticized his peers for seeking inspiration in American poetry. Slovenian poets must rediscover their Central European roots, he argued, even as he lined up American publishers for his books. Rilke, Trakl, Celan--these were his masters, not the poets of the New York School.
He was, in fact, the first writer of his generation not to imitate Tomaz Šalamun, which did not prevent him from becoming the older poet's closest friend. He was as sure of his ideas as Tomaz was tentative, and as we drove out of Bled--"A place dipped in green," was how Metka described the resort--to a party in southern Austria, Ales started speaking in the authoritative manner he adopted whenever the war came up in conversation. It was Metka's story of the Serbian writer's telephone call that riled him. The man is a brilliant novelist, said Ales, but his politics are appalling.
"The Serbs want to be the Russians of the Balkans, imposing their language and culture on us. What arrogance! In Belgrade I can pass as a Serb living outside their borders, because I speak their language fluently. But if you think they'll speak our language when they come here you're gravely mistaken. And," he added, leaning forward into the space between the front seats to drape his arms over Tomaz's and Metka's headrests, "what do they know about our literature? I know theirs intimately. I know their poems by heart. We all do."
He gazed out the rain-streaked window at a roadside chapel commemorating plague victims. "It was only when the war began that I discovered who my real friends were," he said. "In our basement, with war planes flying overhead, only two Serbs called to see how I was. Croats, Bosnians called, but only two Serbs, who happened to be translators of Slovenian writers. The man who wrote a heartfelt introduction to the Serbo-Croatian translation of my Dictionary of Silence didn't even call. How many of your Serbian friends did you hear from?" he asked Tomaz and Metka.
"Two, maybe three people," said Metka, who had spent part of her childhood in Belgrade and had often exhibited her work there.
Tomaz mentioned a prominent American poet of Serbian descent.
"He doesn't count," Metka giggled. "Name someone from Belgrade."
Tomaz shrugged.
"I thought this community of writers in Yugoslavia was proof we could live together," Ales sighed, settling back into his seat. "I was wrong. The Serbs have a streak of irrationality they suckle in their mothers' blood."
We sped by a baroque church with a pale-yellow stucco facade and a black tower, an onion-shaped dome tapering into a spire ("There's a Catholic church on every hill," Ales said), then past cornfields, woodlots, and a tidy village. In a softer voice he said to me, "Remind you of Vermont?"
Everywhere I looked was green: thick grass and gardens surrounded two-story alpine houses; hayfields covered the Sava River basin; the road up the steep Karavanke range separating Slovenia from the Austrian province of Carinthia was lined with trees. Half of this mountainous country is forested--"Balkan comes from the Turkish word for a chain of wooded mountains," historian Barbara Jelavich writes--and in some regions, as in parts of New England, the woods are reclaiming farmland. Slovenia is indeed scarcely bigger than Vermont in total square miles; not for the last time was I reminded of the lush landscape around Lake Champlain, where I had spent my college years.
The UN had accepted Slovenia's application for permanent membership in May (along with those of Bosnia and Croatia), and a giddiness lingered in the air, as if the whole country was caught up in freshman orientation week at college. After a kind of prolonged adolescence, Slovenia had revolted and joined the international community. Here was a country testing its wings: anything seemed possible to many of its new citizens, who until recently had perhaps never imagined feeling that way.
Slovenia has a population of two million, half a million less than that of the American Colonies during the Revolutionary War. Slovenians proudly told me that in drafting the American Constitution Thomas Jefferson was inspired by what one writer calls a "colorful Slovene ceremony": namely, the installation of dukes. In the Slovene Principality, centered in Austrian Carinthia, the ancient Slovenians, the western Slavs then settling the Balkans, were liberated in 623 A.D. from the Avars to establish an independent realm stretching from the Elbe River to the Adriatic Sea. For almost a hundred years they maintained a democracy of sorts--their only brush with freedom. In the eighth century the Slovenians came under Frankish rule, yet they continued convening a general assembly to elect their leader. He was then installed--with special rites--by a peasant, "the embodiment of the people," according to a Communist-era guidebook. And the ceremony persisted until 1414, early in the Habsburg reign. Thomas Jefferson underlined a reference to it in his copy of Jean Bodin's Six Livres de la Republique, a small gesture destined to assume new meaning in the Slovenian imagination.
Here was proof, the guidebook concluded, "that democracy flourished [in the Slovenian lands] centuries before the adoption of the Magna Carta in 1215"--a questionable assertion that Slovenians accepted as historical truth. This was a central Slovenian myth, vital to a people making the transition from what an exile returning from America labeled "a sort of dictatorship"--the self-managed, nonaligned or nationalistic form of socialism created by Marshal [Josip Broz] Tito--to "a sort of democracy." Like all South Slavs, the Slovenians were accustomed to living under the yoke of one power or another. (The word slave has roots in both Slav and Slovene.) It had taken them more than a millennium to reenter the turbulent waters of independence. Their ship was a rickety version of nation-building, the blueprints of which had been drawn up in the glory days of 1848 when, as Czeslaw Milosz points out, a certain manifesto beginning with the words, "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of Communism," might have read, "A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of nationalism."
In progressive Slovenian circles that specter took the shape of a Program for a United Slovenia, which at the end of the "springtime of nations" was pushed aside. But the demand for a unified country, with its own parliament and its own language, kept growing, spurred by the writings (in German) of France Preseren (1800-1849), the national poet. Preseren dreamed, in true Romantic fashion, of greater freedom for Slovenians and declared "God's blessings on all nations who long and work for that bright day"--a theme amplified by Slovenia's finest prose writer, Ivan Cankar (1876-1918), who articulated the need for this "people of serfs" to be transformed into "a people who will write their own judgment." Cankar also spoke for the "Yugoslav idea," the plan to forge a union with Serbs and Croats, which had arisen during the revolution in Vienna two weeks after the publication of The Communist Manifesto. In the wake of the Balkan Wars (1912 and 1913) that idea again fueled public debate; and the demise of the Ottoman Empire, coupled with the downfall of the Dual Monarchy at the conclusion of World War One, set the stage for the creation, in 1918, of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes--Yugoslavia's first incarnation, which owed its charter to Woodrow Wilson's enunciation of the Fourteen Points and his leadership at Versailles.
The Slovenians' hopes for more freedom in a union of South Slavs were soon dashed. At the start of Serbian King Alexander's reign they founded their university in Ljubljana, built two national theaters, and set up Radio Slovenia. But Alexander's experiment in democracy ended in dictatorship; in 1929, when he rechristened his country Yugoslavia (literally, Land of the South Slavs), Slovenia was abolished in name and made into a province. (Which may explain why Slovenia receives scant mention in Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, her celebrated book about Yugoslavia. Her travels, inspired in part by Alexander's assassination in 1934, took her first to Zagreb, her train passing through the Drava province at night, and thus Slovenians do not figure in her narrative. Her longest description of them--"a sensible and unexcitable people who had better opportunities than their compatriots to live at peace"--may seem, in a book of 1,158 pages, parsimonious.)
Not until the final days of World War Two did Slovenians restore their national government. And although they prospered in Yugoslavia's second attempt to enter the community of nations, under Tito they did not "write their own judgment," partly because the rapid industrialization of the post-war years did not allow their mainly peasant population to exchange its servile habits for the liberal spirit found in the growing urban classes; partly because the single-party government's abridgement of individual rights accentuated the symptoms of what some observers call the "Slovene Syndrome": a people subjected for too long to the whims of a foreign power, like a criminal imprisoned beyond a reasonable length of time, loses its ability to function without shackles; and partly because the Serbs, Slovenians kept telling me, doomed any union of South Slavs.
"The Slovenians in Carinthia knew what the Serbs were all about," Ales muttered as we approached the border. "That's why these mountains divide us from our historic lands north of the Drava River. In 1920 they held a plebiscite in Carinthia, and the Slovenians voted to remain in Austria. They could see what was coming. The butchery in Bosnia is nothing new for the Serbs."
Tomaz shuffled my passport in with the Slovenian passports (the same shade of blue as mine) and, bluffing like a cardsharp, flashed them at the guard manning the checkpoint. The guard waved us through. What might once have seemed impossible--Slovenian passports and a border guard with no interest in examining their contents--was now commonplace. I considered the practical difficulties of creating a new country, the enormous scale of the Slovenian undertaking. They needed a constitution, legislative and legal reforms, security forces, diplomats, embassies, a foreign policy. They had to design a new flag, military uniforms, and their own currency; rename streets and businesses, schools and political parties; reroute communications systems; rethink their whole world. Ezra Pound's injunction to his fellow poets--"Make it new"--applied to a broad spectrum of Slovenian life. Little was free from the pressure to reinvent itself: a daunting prospect. It was one thing to secede from Yugoslavia, quite another to build a nation.
On 25 June 1991, six months after a plebiscite in which nearly 90 percent of Slovenian voters had favored the right to secede, Slovenia--Yugoslavia's only ethnically homogeneous republic--joined neighboring Croatia in declaring independence, ignoring diplomatic signals from the United States and the European Community (EC) to remain in Yugoslavia. The next day, at checkpoints along Slovenia's 420-mile frontier, guards raised their country's new flag, even as the Yugoslav National Army (JNA) moved in to retake control of the border posts. War erupted; and while the JNA--one of Europe's largest standing armies--far outnumbered and outgunned Slovenia's forces, it was not prepared for the resistance it encountered. Slovenian units of the Territorial Defense, the paramilitary organization Tito had established after the Soviet Union's suppression of the 1968 "Prague Spring," defended their homeland guerrilla-style; their casualties were light (a dozen killed, less than 150 wounded), their victories impressive: more than 3,200 Yugoslav conscripts surrendered to the Slovenians, who in only ten days of fighting had won their freedom. The JNA Chief of Staff accused the seceding republic of waging "a dirty and underhanded war." Indeed Slovenian Minister of Defense Janez Jansa, whose criticism of the JNA had once landed him in prison on a treason charge, had over the previous year secretly marshaled his forces to fight such a war. Now at the age of thirty-three Jansa was his country's first military hero. This summer his memoirs were a best-seller.
A nation's development, de Tocqueville suggested, is conditioned by the circumstances of its birth. "The entire man is, so to speak, to be seen in the cradle of the child," he wrote, though only America could be studied this way, since no other nation possessed a beginning as clearly marked as ours. Slovenia's origin is as murky as that of any European country, but the circumstances of its birth as a nation-state may reveal "the primal cause of the prejudices, the habits, the ruling passions, and, in short, all that constitutes what is called the national character," as de Tocqueville proposed to do for America. If so, then the salient feature of Slovenia's birth was that after a long incubation its all but bloodless entry into the community of nations precipitated the Third Balkan War. A troubling legacy for the people who made up only 8 percent of Yugoslavia's population? Hard to say.
What was clear was that their signing of the Brioni Accord in July 1991 (an EC-mediated agreement requiring the JNA to withdraw its forces from Slovenia, and Slovenia and Croatia to suspend their independence efforts for three months), was the prelude to barbarism on a scale not seen in Europe since World War Two. The journalist Misha Glenny observes that with this accord "the European Community embarked on a policy of localized solutions in the Balkans which have neither stopped the violence nor resolved the underlying causes of that violence"--a point borne out that August, when the JNA attacked Croatia, vowing to defend the more than half-million Serbs living there.
The fighting in Croatia was unimaginably vicious: 10,000 killed, tens of thousands wounded, hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes, countless atrocities; the uneasy truce negotiated late in the fall had given Serbian authorities time to concentrate on Bosnia, where since April of this year war had raged. The shelling of cities like Vukovar, Dubrovnik, and Sarajevo, Ales insisted, demonstrated the primitive nature of Serbian warcraft. And as we drove down the winding road into Austria, passing religious shrines and alpine houses indistinguishable from those on the Slovenian side of the mountains, he resumed his diatribe against his former countrymen.
"What military significance does Dubrovnik have?" he cried. "It's a cultural monument."
"If they can't have it, they'll destroy it," said Metka. "They're just like little boys."
"What I'm afraid of is that they're setting an example to the tyrants of the world," said Ales. "And they're getting away with it. If no one stops them, ten years from now another demagogue will come along and do the same thing somewhere else."
Tomaz studied the invitation to the party, balancing it on the steering wheel for a moment before proclaiming its engraving of an apple tree "beautiful, but useless." The address and directions mystified him, and when he turned onto a road that ended at a fence propped on a hill, he threw up his hands. He squinted at the farmhouse beyond the fence, worrying aloud that we had forgotten our manners by neglecting to bring food and wine. A hayfield stretched across the valley below us--a peaceful scene that on another day might have made him thankful to have put another border between us and the fighting in Bosnia. But the talk of war had rattled Tomaz, and Metka's assurances that there would be plenty to eat and drink at the party hardly calmed him. He was superstitious enough to imagine his confusion was an omen: we would be lucky if nothing worse befell us than that we showed up late. Metka examined the invitation and, pronouncing it hopeless, gently steered her husband toward the village of Cahorce, where the party had already begun.
To distract Tomaz, Metka and Ales took turns telling a story about his brief career as a door-to-door salesman. In the early 1970s, forbidden for political reasons to find employment as either a teacher or a curator (his own conceptual works had been exhibited around Yugoslavia), he tried peddling how-to books--the worst possible occupation for someone as unassuming as Tomaz. He rarely managed even to show potential customers the books he despised. One day, though, he summoned the courage to ask a woman impatient with his pitch to tell him which writers she read.
"Kafka, Proust, and Šalamun," she replied.
"I am Šalamun," he said, amazed.
Presently we arrived at the party hosted by the owner of Wieser Verlag, a small Austrian publishing house specializing in writers from Eastern and Central Europe. The clouds were so low that by five o'clock dusk was falling; rain was imminent. But the backyard of the publisher's spacious country home was flush with poets, fiction writers, journalists, and a television crew. Two large canopies draped with colored lights and a gazebo surrounded by apple trees completed a square, its fourth side the stucco wall of the house. Framed and lighted illustrations of Wieser's book covers hung beneath the windows, like flags; new titles were displayed on a table tucked under a staircase near the cellar entrance, where bartenders served beer, white wine, and schnapps.
Writers from all over the former Yugoslavia had gathered here, and when Metka and I were separated from Tomaz and Ales the first person we met was the Serbian novelist who had telephoned her during the war. Though he immediately recognized her, he could not remember her name. She gave him no hints. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, embarrassed, unable to place her until, finally, another writer hailed her. The novelist's face turned bright red. Of course he knew who she was. Hadn't he and his family stayed at her house in Bled? He hurried to the cellar to get a drink.
"What did we tell you?" said Metka.
Near the food tent a radio journalist was interviewing Ales about Slovenia's independence; before the night was over Ales would offer opinions on his favorite subjects--the writer's role in these changing times, the inability of current political and poetic language to address the "new world order," the moral and cultural abyss opening in Europe as a result of the war in Bosnia--to newspapermen and television journalists, too. He was Wieser's Slovenian editor, and literary business dominated his conversations. I said this must be a good place for him to make connections.
"It's not what you think," he shot back. "This isn't literary politics, like you have in America."
Tomaz, meanwhile, was trapped in the food line with Wieser's Austrian editor. Ludwig was a bald, affable man with a round belly and bright blue eyes. He loved Tomaz's work, he said, and recited--in Slovenian--an early poem, declaring it had prophesied the atrocities in Bosnia. Tomaz was unnerved. His was a mystical view: a single verse might unleash terrific forces. "Every true poet is a monster," he wrote. "He destroys people and their speech." He had seen (or foreseen?) enough: one reason he gave for not writing anymore. On his plate he piled thick slices of ham, potato salad, and rolls; he ladled rich meat stew into a bowl. He sighed with relief when Ludwig wandered away.
"Eat," he said to me. "Look at how much food there is!"
One writer conspicuously absent was Peter Handke, the Austrian novelist and playwright who had collaborated with Wim Wenders on the screenplay for Wings of Desire. Handke was a fixture at international literary events, and Carinthia was his homeland, in fact and fiction. What was more, Wieser was about to publish a collection of interviews with him. But Handke knew better than to attend this party, said my Slovenian friends. The author of Offending the Audience had alienated his favorite readers by insisting that Slovenia should have stayed in Yugoslavia.
"I lost my homeland when Slovenia seceded," Handke said in an interview. "I would never wish each republic to be separate. Perhaps as a child you want your village to be a kingdom, but not when you're an adult."
He did not agree with the widespread Slovenian belief that their language and traditions had been threatened by the Serbs; it pained him to know that diversity, which in his mind had been Yugoslavia's cardinal virtue, was the first casualty of the war.
"The Slovenian nation was a fact, not an illusion," he declared. "One could say dream instead of illusion."
Handke's idyllic dream of a workers' paradise no longer interested Slovenians. Nor did they heed his warning about the ways in which nationalism diminishes a people. On one level his work investigated borders and languages, German and Slovenian (his books were sprinkled with Slovenian words), and he liked to give his protagonists some of his Slovenian mother's characteristics. He identified profoundly with her people. In his novel Repetition he writes of the Slovenians: "Like them, I was gaunt, bony, awkward, with rough-hewn features and arms that dangled inelegantly, and my nature like theirs was compliant, willing, undemanding, the nature of a people who had been kingless and stateless down through the centuries, a people of journeymen and hired hands (not a noble, not a master among them)--and yet we children of darkness were radiant with beauty, self-reliant, bold, rebellious, independent, each man of us the next man's hero."
Sentimental claptrap, Slovenian writers believed.
In the middle of the lawn, on uneven ground, a card table tilted; on it a stack of books was arranged next to a microphone. Journalists crowded around the table and guests drifted closer. To celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Ali Podrimja, an Albanian poet from Kosovo, Wieser had printed a special edition of his work--fifty copies of fifty poems, in Albanian and German. Ludwig gave an impassioned speech supporting Albanian independence. Kosovars, he argued, made up an old Balkan country that deserved to be free of Serbian dominance. His evidence? Podrimja himself--the youngest grandfather in Albanian poetry, he chuckled. And a prolific writer, too. Podrimja went on to read a selection of the poems that had made him a hero in Kosovo. No one at the party understood him. He was slouched at the table, a short dark-haired man in a grey windbreaker, reading softly, as if to himself. Ludwig's more forceful reading of the German version of these poems may also have meant nothing to some guests, but the symbolism of the occasion was not lost on anyone.
Yugoslavia's poorest province, Kosovo was rich in minerals and history--the site of a famous battle between the Serbs and Ottoman Turks. On Saint Vitus Day in 1389, the Serbian kingdom, which over the previous two centuries had become the strongest power in the Balkans, suffered its worst defeat. Legend has it that Blackbird's Field, as the killing ground came to be known, was where Prince Lazar, the nobleman leading the Serbian armies, sacrificed his earthly crown for a heavenly kingdom. He led "his men into battle knowing what the tragic outcome was to be," writes poet-scholar John Matthias, "as one might lead a host of martyrs consciously into a conflagration."
The result was five hundred years of Turkish occupation, during which the Battle of Kosovo was commemorated in heroic ballads and folk poems. "Serbs are possibly unique among peoples in that in their national epic poetry they celebrate defeat," poet Charles Simic notes. "Other people sing of the triumphs of their conquering heroes while the Serbs sing of the tragic sense of life." Their belief in "a great nation strangled at birth" is rooted in this oral tradition. And that loss remains a primary subject for Serbian poets. The late Vasko Popa devoted a cycle of poems to Blackbird's Field, where the white peonies are supposedly stained red with the blood of fallen Serbs: "A field like none other/Heaven above it/Heaven below," he wrote in Earth Erect. And the closing stanzas of Miodrag Pavlovic's "A Bard from an Ancient War" give a sense of the collective Serbian grief:
Now the open graves have no need of words and the pines turn away their heads from man, only in the homes of the hanged do they ask me to speak of the rope.
Who now in the fields will await the morning summons of the sun's arising, who will find a new beginning for the song and a better ending?
Recently, a Communist apparatchik, Slobodan Milosevic, had discovered "a new beginning" in Kosovo, and a bloody song it was. Tito's death in 1980 left a power vacuum in Yugoslav politics, and, in 1987, on a trip to the Kosovo capital of Pristine, Milosevic recognized a potent political force in Serbian fury at their diminished standing in the autonomous province. The 1974 Yugoslav Constitution had granted Kosovo a status equivalent in most ways to that of the republics--a bitter blow to Serbs who could not reconcile themselves to the idea that in this Albanian-dominated land they were no longer "lords of the blue fields/ And the ore-rich mountains with no foothills," as Popa called them: the Serbian Jerusalem, which contained their most important religious shrines and monasteries. That the new constitution ratified changing demographics--Kosovo was now 90 percent Albanian, thousands of Serbs having emigrated in search of better economic opportunities--only aggravated the wound. No one should dare to beat you, Milosevic told Serbs in Pristine. And on 28 June 1989--Saint Virus Day--he gave a stirring speech to several hundred thousand Serbs gathered at Blackbird's Field. "After six centuries, we are engaged in battles and quarrels," he said. "They are not armed battles, but this cannot be excluded yet." What was once a poetic subject became his call to arms.
The imposition of martial law in the province enabled the Serbian minority to take control of the media, schools, hospitals, businesses, and security forces; the federal decision to revoke Kosovo's autonomy (a campaign spearheaded by Milosevic) fueled an Albanian separatist movement, which brought from the authorities so many reprisals that Peter Handke, among others, believed that Albanians, not Slovenians or Croats, faced the biggest threat of all. Once the war ended in Bosnia, conventional wisdom ran, Milosevic would set his sights on Kosovo, and no one would stop him. Hence the bitterness of the poem Ali Podrimja read about the Berlin Wall coming down: "When I wanted to go through the Albanian wall/ my feet my head were soaked in blood."
The audience was hushed.
When Podrimja closed his book, a quartet consisting of Ludwig, the publisher, and two elderly women sang Slovenian folk songs a cappella, their voices high and clear: a celebration of a culture vanishing on this side of the border. Up the road was Klagenfurt, the ancient Slovenian capital; home of the first large Slovenian publishing house and newspapers, the city was Germanized over the centuries. Since the fall of the Habsburgs and the fateful 1920 plebiscite, the Slovenian population in Carinthia had shrunk from 80,000 to less than 18,000, thanks to assimilation, a subject Handke explores in Repetition. "[W]e had been a family of hirelings, of itinerant workers, homeless and condemned to remain so," Filip Kobal, the narrator, explains. Exiled from Slovenia, his family lives in Carinthia, where "[t]he only right we retained, in which we could find brief moments of peace, was the right to gamble. And when my father gambled, even as an old man, he hadn't his equal in the village. As he saw it, another aspect of the sentence of banishment was that in his home he was obliged not only to give another language precedence over Slovenian, which had after all been the language of his ancestors, but to ban the use of Slovenian altogether. As he regularly showed when talking to himself, often very loudly, in his workshop, he himself spoke it in his innermost consciousness, but he felt forbidden to let it out or pass it on to his children." But the familial attachment to the idea of Slovenia does not die: Filip Kobal is drawn to the land south of the mountains, where "invention and freedom were one." There he passes himself off as a Slovenian, "playing with conviction the role of a man who had returned to his home country after a long absence." Telling stories in Slovenian, he discovers, is one way to create an imaginary homeland: his only refuge. What sanctuary Handke had found in writing about his mother's people--"With my play of words I can create an ideal picture of the landscape," he said of his Slovenian settings--had perhaps disappeared with Yugoslavia's dissolution, a death not unlike his mother's suicide.
He said of the alpine republic, "it's so disappointing that all of this is only Slovenia."
A Slovenian folksinger stepped up to the microphone and tuned his guitar. He usually performed with a band of old men, none under the age of eighty. When they went on tour, he had to put them to bed after each concert and feed them their medicine before he could go out. But this night he was singing alone. His music was hauntings--mournful ballads in a minor key, an exercise in nostalgia. This polyglot, pluralistic party was a vintage Austro-Hungarian affair. It took a publisher to unite Franz Joseph's disparate peoples, I was thinking, when the Slovenian journalist who had interviewed Ales plucked an apple from the tree I was leaning against and gave me a smile.
"This is the same tree on the invitation," said Nina Zagoricnik, a striking woman with shoulder-length auburn hair and sharp features. I remembered Tomaz's description of the engraving on the invitation--"beautiful, but useless"--when Nina offered me the apple. "Like Eve," she said in a thick accent. "Everything will happen under the apple tree."
"And what, exactly, is everything, Eve?" I asked.
She changed the subject. "When I saw Ales in Ljubljana during the war, I decided not to leave. I had a ticket to Munich to go to the film festival. But I thought, if Ales can stay, so can I."
I started laughing when the singer covered Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side."
"What's funny," said Nina.
"The music," I said. "What a strange juxtaposition: these beautiful folk songs and Lou Reed."
"Why?" she said. "We love Lou Reed."
So it seemed, for the next song was his "Satellite of Love."
"Slovenia, Nina confided, "is possible only as long as one thinks constantly of Italy. I got this," she added, pronouncing the last word so that it rhymed with lease and smoothing her hands down the front of her body, "in Trieste. You like?"
"Very nice," I murmured--and then she was gone.
The singer packed up his guitar. The rain had held off, and the air felt warmer even before Ales brought me a glass of schnapps. He had just met a Serbian actor from Croatia, a poet-singer whose work had encouraged the romantic entanglements of an entire generation in Yugoslavia. One of Ales's prized possessions was a record album of the actor's love songs, which he had played for many women. "My whole erotic history passed before my eyes," he grinned. But the actor was now a man without a country: in Belgrade he was denounced as a Croat, in Zagreb as a Serb. He had applied for asylum in Slovenia. Ales was pleased to think that soon they might be countrymen.
"Drink up," he said. "By the way, Nina loves poets. She named her daughter after one."
"Cheers," I said, raising my glass.
"Na zdravje!" he corrected me. "Your health. And look in my eyes when we clink glasses, or you'll have bad luck. You don't need that in the Balkans."
Metka and Tomaz waited in the car while Ales made a last sweep of the party. After saying goodbye to Ludwig, he turned to me and said, "Can you imagine? The man loves Slovenia so much he's learning our language, even though he was arrested once in Ljubljana for helping a drunken Slovenian poet. Ludwig was also drunk, of course. And while he was in custody the police beat him so badly he was deaf for six months. That kind of thing was one of Communism's dirty little secrets."
Continues...
Excerpted from Only the Nails Remain by Christopher Merrill Copyright © 2001 by Christopher Merrill. Excerpted by permission.
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