Belgrade
Dragan Velikic
Belgrade
1.
Latitude: 44% 49′ 14" north
Longitude: 20% 27′ 44" east
Area: 3,221.85 km2
Metropolitan Belgrade: 358.77 km2
Altitude above sea-level: min. 66.6 m.
max. 512 m.
Climate: moderately continental
Average temperature: 11.6C
January: 0.2C
July: 22.0C
Time zone: Central European
Population: 1,628,000
2.
Everything is, in fact, missing: figures for the number of rainy days in the past year, decade, century, millennium; how many rainy days were there in 1054? Figures for the number of sunny days, for the winds, storms, thick blankets of snow. Figures are missing for assassinations, nocturnal assaults, murders, burglaries, wars, revolutions.
A city cannot have a biography without having a record of the movie theaters that existed or still exist on its territory, without a long list of the movies that played in the darkness of the theaters, the grimaces of the audience and the roads taken after the movies were over, without a list of the scenes in which they became the heroes and heroines, in leading or supporting roles, and continued to live the life of the protagonists off screen.
Missing are the records of birth and death, the cadasters for entire neighborhoods, maps of the water supply and sewage systems, the position of artesian wells, double digit telephone numbers, travel orders, police files, medical records, the routes taken by horsemen, carriages, omnibuses, buses, trams, trolleys, automobiles.
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3.
Imagine a gigantic ear the size of the biggest telescope which day and night absorbs the billions of words spoken within the city limits, meticulously recording and storing them. Settling in the abyss of this hearing aid are not only the words of many languages, but also sighs, cries, laughter. Imagine a gigantic eye the size of the biggest glacial lake and imprinted on its crystal surface are the faces, movements, gestures, tics, views and scenes espied through the key-hole. Imagine the enormous depot holding this gigantic ear’s and this gigantic eye’s work, a depot from which endless material begins to run along the curves and bends laid by sentences, stopping for a moment at barriers, and then, its tracks switched by fired-up brains, travelling to the waiting platforms of stories and novels. And deeper still into the night of History.
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4.
The last time a caravan of camels passed through Belgrade was in 1854, bringing bales of tobacco from Serez for the merchant Anastas Hristodul.
The first telegram to arrive in Belgrade was from Aleksinac on April 12, 1855.
The first soup spoons were brought to Belgrade in 1827. That same year the first parasol came to the city.
And two years later, in 1829, the first overcoat appeared in Belgrade.
Beer came from Zemun in 1834 and was served in Manojlo’s garden near the Zeleni venac market.
Meteorological observations started being recorded in 1847 by Dragutin Karlovanski, the owner of the "First Serbian Swimming Pool and Bath" at the foot of Kalemegdan. Three years later, Dragutin Karlovanski opened a general store selling insect powder, all kinds of paints, Swiss cheese and herring. Mr. Karlovanski also treated haemorrhoids.
In 1844 the first dressmaker, Pavle Temeljkic, came to Belgrade. That same year the first circus appeared in town. Two years later the first music teacher, Aleksandar Skrodilis, a native of Trieste, arrived in Belgrade.
The first dentist, Moric Lefner, who "plugs hollow teeth with some sort of matter," settled in Belgrade in 1847.
The first piano tuner appeared in Belgrade in 1850. He was Imro Ipenovic, who, having gone blind, had learned the piano tuner’s trade in Pest.
The first steam bath opened in Belgrade in 1850.
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5.
The number 2 tram on the circle line stops at the terminal above the docks. The driver steps down from the tram, walks, his gait slow, to the shack, and shuts the door behind him. There are twenty-two passengers on the tram, seven from the city proper, twelve from the wider city area and three who had arrived in Belgrade that morning. The door to the shack opens. The driver comes out and walks toward a single-storey building, the city’s transport control center. Five minutes later he reappears at the door of the building, a sheet of paper in his hand. The driver’s name is Marko Nikolic. He does not know that at that very moment two other Marko Nikolices, unknown to each other, are sitting on the tram. No one knows how many people named Marko Nikolic live in Belgrade. Or how many Marko Nikolices have found their resting place in the cemeteries of Belgrade.
The tram sets off, leaning slightly into the curve, past the gas station, crossing the asphalt stretch of road, picking up speed as it hugs the slope of Kalemegdan on its way to the City Library. Passengers sitting on the right side of the tram see the Austrian embassy, the French embassy, the gallery of the Museum of Modern art. We cannot know what is in these people’s minds. The view of passengers sitting on the left side of the tram is submerged in the greenery of Kalemegdan’s park. In the absence of panoramic vistas, their thoughts are probably entirely unconnected to what their eyes behold. Half a minute later, the tram stops at the City Library. And there ends one possible tale. For this a wide-flung story which, if the tram were to drive on for several hours, would certainly develop. These twenty-two passengers will never be together on the same tram again. One of the three Marko Nikolices, a customs officer at Belgrade’s port authority, steps off the tram for a stroll through Kalemegdan’s park. The other Marko Nikolic will get off at the next stop, in Dusanova Street, and walk to the nearby herbalist’s to buy bearberry tea. Left standing on the stage of this possible story is Marko Nikolic, the tram-driver. He is patiently waiting for Nikola Markovic, owner of the glazier shop in Djordje Jovanovic Street number 13, near the Bajloni market, who is running to catch the tram before its doors close. By now there are thirty-five passengers on the tram. Their names will remain forever unknown, as will the reasons why they were heading for their destinations on that sweltering August morning.
For Marko Nikolic, the tram driver, who had been working the number 2 circle line for years, the familiar urban landscape had long since ceased holding any surprise. He knew where every tobacco shop stood on either side of the street, he recognized cars parked on the sidewalk, the shop windows by the tram stops, trees, houses, even the physiognomy of some of the passengers. His thoughts retreated into hidden recesses, opening the secret compartments of imaginary drawers. This is how he would amuse himself during the tedium of driving. He would imagine scenes behind the windows of the houses he drove by. Sometimes, of an early morning, he would ring the bell going down Dusanova Street, and, revelling in his mischief, would imagine the sleeping inhabitants of the surrounding houses, being roused from who knows what kind of dreams by the strident ring of the tram’s bell. Sometimes he would entertain himself by imagining how much money passengers on the tram were carrying, how many years of life they had left to live, how old the oldest was, and how young the youngest, and whether for some of them this might not be their last tram ride. The city in which he had been driving his tram for so many years reminded him of a huge never-to-be-completed crossword puzzle.
Engrossed in adding up the sum total of money he imagined to be in the possession of his passengers, at 10:45 on that morning of August 18, 1998 Marko Nikolic, the tram-driver, ran a red light at the corner of Dusanova and Zmaj Jovina streets, crashing into a car that was cutting across the road. Braking too late, he was thrown from his seat, his head shattering the glass, and instantaneously killed, having counted only one third of the money in the pockets of his passengers.
Watching the accident from the balcony of her apartment, where she was stripping the dead leaves off her potted flowers, was Mrs. Danica Stojkovic, nee Nikolic. Half an hour later she related everything she had seen that morning to Nikola Markovic, the glazier, at his shop where she had gone to pick up a framed map with photographs of her ancestors and descendants. Of course, tt did not for a moment occur to Nikola Markovic, the glazier, that Nikola Markovic, the tram driver, whose sorry fate Mrs. Stojkovic had just described to him, would have encountered quite a different set of traffic lights had he not waited that morning for his glazier name-sake to run across Dusanova Street. Nikola Markovic, the glazier, did not even remember having run across the street that morning, nor did he remember the kind gesture of the tram driver.
After Mrs. Stojkovic departed, Nikola Markovic, the glazier, lapsed into his daily routine: he leafed through the newspaper and then carefully began reading his favorite column Leafing through "Politika".
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6.
With each passing day, our capital is adopting more and more western ways, and unfortunately they are almost only the bad ones. We have still not managed to replace Turkish cobblestones with something better and are stepping in mud worse than in Turkey, but an underground gang selling cocaine for good money has already been caught in Belgrade (November 21, 1923).
At approximately eight o’clock on the night before last, at the Cold Water Cafe, which always has a variety of brandies on offer, an argument which subsequently turned into a brawl broke out between policemen from the nearby police station. The police, or some other higher voice of authority, decreed that news of this fight among the guardians of public order should be kept secret and the common people, born to obey, must do so. (December 6, 1923)
Yesterday morning, Nikola Mackic, the National Theater’s stoker, fell into the red hot oven and burned to death. (January 19, 1924)
The season has been peaking in Vrnjacka banja. As soon as they received their July salaries, office workers headed for the railway station to check in their luggage because this is not a spa where you go without taking your own bed linen and other items. Except for two primitive springs and two small baths, it has no other facilities. So, we have a spa which the world would envy us, yet we sit idle. And such a spa is particularly necessary in the homeland of peppers, savory foods and brandy, for a people who suffer in large number from tuberculosis and syphilis, for people ruined by so many wars. (July 22, 1924)
Imitations of Bayer aspirin are all around. So always ask for the original packaging. (September 8, 1924)
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7.
Early one August evening, when Nikola Markovic, the glazier, closed his shop and started walking home past the Bajloni market, several people were washing down the market with huge hoses. Carried by the water, drifts of refuse and varieties of garbage piled up in the drainage grates. The city’s underground circulation system transported the day’s refuse onwards, in the same way that invisible telephone traffic collected the words of thousands of conversations that had been inaugurated and finished in the heat of that August evening. The huge depot filled by the gigantic eye and gigantic ear, a depot of stories and novels begun, temporarily finished and framed, like the ancestors and descendants of Danica Stojkovic on the family map framed at Nikola Markovic’s glazier shop, hovered in the air above the city. Millions of movements and gestures, words and murmurs, formed an invisible architecture on the stage of the city. And what about dreams? A whole duty-free life unfolded in the motionless heads of the sleeping, a second city determined by the reflexes of consciousness, by the memory of the body which gains its freedom only in sleep, spilled into unconfined spaces. Out there in the conscious world, meteorological stations, using precise instruments, recorded details about yet another day which statisticians would process, perhaps making minor adjustments on the tables of future guides to the city. But in the unhemmed space of dreams, another town was being built to the rhythm of the sleeper, one where sailboats and steamboats glided along the Danube and Sava, while caravans of horses and camels, and columns of cars and trucks travelled along the Constantinople road. The trumpets of war and sirens of fire trucks wailed, the hoofbeat of horses mingled with the roar of car engines, churches and towers alternated with parks and squares. Appearing in this confusion of appended towns, as if rising from the bottom of the deepest waters, was the only existing town, a town which disappeared every day and every night, changing its statistics, falsifying its own face in millions of dark chambers. It disappeared across the rims of picture frames, under the wheels of trams, in the stains of old mirrors. Marble tiles pressed the dead still deeper down, among the props of bygone ages, into the darkness of future museums. Bandits and adventurers, clad in the robes of heroes, laughed in the safe havens of verses. Chains of sentences spoken in forgotten accents surfaced from the keyboards of typewriters, on the blue screens of computers, in the hearing of those sleeping. The remains of yet another day spilled through the drainage grates.
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8.
The beam of a flashlight cuts across the lock of a jewellery store, a bar breaks the lock, the alarm is sedated, the accountant at the Mediterranean travel agency is correcting the bills, at the zoo the lion is dreaming of an antelope, a tired traveller is dozing on the wooden bench in the waiting room of the station, the waiter at the Madera restaurant garden is taking orders from seven customers, the traffic lights are not working and are flashing yellow at intersections on the outskirts of town, a moth, its folded wings making it look like a razor blade, completes the pattern on the tie at the Jugoexport store at Republic Square, a broken-down ice-cream cart is leaking water onto a path in Kalemegdan’s park, in an attic in Dositejeva Street a fifteen-year-old boy is rolling on a condom for the first time, a little Gypsy girl gratefully accepts money for the rose she has sold at the Ima Dana café, the plane from Athens lands at Surcin airport, in Zarkovo a car crashes into a truck, orderlies on duty at the VMA Military Hospital are in the elevator taking a deceased patient from the ninth floor to the morgue, a young man is pressing the doorbell of the duty pharmacy at "London", a broken down bus stops at Terazije, the night watchmen at Jugobanka in Kralja Petra St. are playing chess, a drug addict at the rehab center in Drajzerova St. falls into a coma, a pack of stray dogs trots across the intersection at Topciderska zvezda, Danica Stojkovic is watering the flowers on her balcony in Dusanova Street, a police patrol stops a car on the Avala road, Nikola Markovic, the glazier, chews his pencil as he gazes thoughtfully at the five empty squares under 3 across and 2 down, and he writes in the name of the medicinal herb: bearberry, on the first floor of a building in Brace Nedica Street, above the David boutique, a young man is writing in his diary, the melon vendor at the Kalenic market covers a pile of watermelons and melons with canvas, the cleaning woman at the Prolece café is putting the clean dishes away in the cupboard, a girl in Cvijiceva Street is holding hands with a young man and crying, the draftsman at the civil engineering bureau in Majka Jevrosima Street is logging figures into the computer, water is gushing from a broken pipe in Rifata Burdzevica Street, Marko Nikolic, the tram driver, is entering the thirteenth hour of a better life.
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Dragan Velikic was born in 1953 in Belgrade. He is the author of the novels: Via Pula (1988, 1989, 1990; Milos Crnjanski Prize), Astrakhan (1991, 1992, 1996), Hamsin 51 (1993, 1995), The North Wall (1995, 1996; Borislav Pekic Fund grant) and Dante’s Square (1997, 1998); the short stories: Wrong Move (1983) and The Greenhouse (1985); books of essays: YU-tlanta (1993), The Depot (1994) The State of Affairs (1998).
Dragan Velikic’s novels, stories and essays have been translated into German, French, Italian, English, Slovenian, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Polish and Dutch.
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