(about Janez) and the Montenegrin and Dalmatian and Macedonian ones. We imitated the way Kosovo Albanians speak “our language” (“When I love I kiss, and when I don’t I kill”) and all kinds of regional accents. No one could finish a sentence without someone else jumping in. It was one long rat-tat-tat of quotations from life in Yugoslavia. I kept worrying that our plastic bag—the one with the red, white, and blue stripes—would burst and with it the newly established foundation for our imaginary museum of Yugoslav daily life.
Nor did they steer clear of the war.
“There’s something fundamentally fucking wrong with a language that instead of saying ‘The child is sleeping soundly’ or ‘sleeping deeply’ says ‘sleeping the sleep of the butchered.’”
“That’s what brought the war on.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you think your kid’s about to be butchered, you pack a gun and fire at the drop of a hat.”
My kids didn’t know that I’d heard the same thing from any number of Yugoslav émigrés. They even cited it as their main reason for having left the country. (“Why did I go? Because in otherlanguages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.”)
At that moment I felt a wave of compassion come over me; at that moment I felt sorry for them and loved everything about them—the way they looked, the things they said, the way they said them…. They were my kids. As my eyes traveled over them, I snapped Polaroid shots of their salient features: Selim’s unusually long, fine fingers and the nervous way he had of flapping his arms like wings; Meliha’s face when a smile spread across it like oil; the deep incisions between Ana’s eyebrows, a brand almost; Uroš’s restless, half-shut eyelids and whitish eyelashes; the ticlike twist Nevena gave to her head before she raised her eyes. I was the only one without a Polaroid: the place at the table set aside for me was empty, a void.
The group temperature rose like beer froth. We must have been temporarily insane, the lot of us. We had no idea where we were. A Pioneer meeting? A Party rally? A school field trip? All of a sudden—from too much to drink or overexcitement or fatigue or some kind of group dynamics—Meliha burst into tears. Others followed suit or felt a lump in their throats. Something told me that we’d drunk the cup to the dregs and that from one second to the next the positive group dynamics could turn into something else.
Which is what happened.
Uroš, who had clearly had more to drink than the others, stood and called out, “Quiet, everybody. Quiet down. I’ve got something to say.”
His face was pale, and trying to take a deep breath, he swayed slightly.
In a land of peasants
In the mountainous Balkans
In a single day
A martyr’s death came
To a band of children.
All had been born
In the selfsame year.
All had gone to the same school,
All attended
The same celebrations;
All received
The same vaccinations.
And they died on the selfsame day.
We listened without a word. Ante was playing the partisan song “Mount Konjuh.”
And fifty-five minutes
Before that fatal one
The band of children
Were at their desks
Hard at work on a hard-to-solve problem:
How far can a traveler go
If he walks at a speed of…
And so forth.
It was a painful scene. Desanka Maksimovi’s “A Bloody Tale” was known by heart to generations of schoolchildren in the former Yugoslavia. It figured in all textbooks and anthologies and was recited at “official events,” celebrations and school assemblies. The incident it treats actually occurred: the Germans did in fact execute an entire class in Kragujevac in 1941. But overexposure had cost the poem its potency, and in time it turned into a parody of itself. People had simply grown sick and tired of it. While Uroš droned on, I recalled some TV footage of the ninety-year-old poetess in a hat with a brim three times larger
Nor did they steer clear of the war.
“There’s something fundamentally fucking wrong with a language that instead of saying ‘The child is sleeping soundly’ or ‘sleeping deeply’ says ‘sleeping the sleep of the butchered.’”
“That’s what brought the war on.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you think your kid’s about to be butchered, you pack a gun and fire at the drop of a hat.”
My kids didn’t know that I’d heard the same thing from any number of Yugoslav émigrés. They even cited it as their main reason for having left the country. (“Why did I go? Because in otherlanguages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.”)
At that moment I felt a wave of compassion come over me; at that moment I felt sorry for them and loved everything about them—the way they looked, the things they said, the way they said them…. They were my kids. As my eyes traveled over them, I snapped Polaroid shots of their salient features: Selim’s unusually long, fine fingers and the nervous way he had of flapping his arms like wings; Meliha’s face when a smile spread across it like oil; the deep incisions between Ana’s eyebrows, a brand almost; Uroš’s restless, half-shut eyelids and whitish eyelashes; the ticlike twist Nevena gave to her head before she raised her eyes. I was the only one without a Polaroid: the place at the table set aside for me was empty, a void.
The group temperature rose like beer froth. We must have been temporarily insane, the lot of us. We had no idea where we were. A Pioneer meeting? A Party rally? A school field trip? All of a sudden—from too much to drink or overexcitement or fatigue or some kind of group dynamics—Meliha burst into tears. Others followed suit or felt a lump in their throats. Something told me that we’d drunk the cup to the dregs and that from one second to the next the positive group dynamics could turn into something else.
Which is what happened.
Uroš, who had clearly had more to drink than the others, stood and called out, “Quiet, everybody. Quiet down. I’ve got something to say.”
His face was pale, and trying to take a deep breath, he swayed slightly.
In a land of peasants
In the mountainous Balkans
In a single day
A martyr’s death came
To a band of children.
All had been born
In the selfsame year.
All had gone to the same school,
All attended
The same celebrations;
All received
The same vaccinations.
And they died on the selfsame day.
We listened without a word. Ante was playing the partisan song “Mount Konjuh.”
And fifty-five minutes
Before that fatal one
The band of children
Were at their desks
Hard at work on a hard-to-solve problem:
How far can a traveler go
If he walks at a speed of…
And so forth.
It was a painful scene. Desanka Maksimovi’s “A Bloody Tale” was known by heart to generations of schoolchildren in the former Yugoslavia. It figured in all textbooks and anthologies and was recited at “official events,” celebrations and school assemblies. The incident it treats actually occurred: the Germans did in fact execute an entire class in Kragujevac in 1941. But overexposure had cost the poem its potency, and in time it turned into a parody of itself. People had simply grown sick and tired of it. While Uroš droned on, I recalled some TV footage of the ninety-year-old poetess in a hat with a brim three times larger
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