BELGRADE (17 page)

Laza Lazarević (1851–91) was an advocate for the progressive United Youth, but later in life adopted a more conservative political position. He studied medicine in Berlin before returning home to practise as a doctor, eventually becoming personal physician to the king. He was also a writer, although his main profession took up much of his time and he only completed some nine stories, but each is a small masterpiece of its genre, style and theme. Critics have often drawn attention to his sentimental attitude toward the past and the disappearing traditions of the countryside. Lazarević saw the world in which he grew up dissolving under the demands of modern society, his work hovering between nostalgia and a harsh picture of inevitable transformation.

Lazarević includes Belgrade in one of his short stories, “The First Morning Service with Father” (“Prvi put s ocem na jutrenje”), set in a small Serbian town and narrated as a childhood recollection. The narrator tells us about his family, dominated by his father, a silent man occasionally very generous and sometimes inexplicably absent. It turns out that he has a passion for gambling. One night, he returns home with his cronies and they begin to play cards. The atmosphere in the house becomes more and more oppressive as the night progresses, and the child, unsure of what is happening, feels a rising sense of fear and panic. The family loses everything through the gambling and the father is prepared to commit suicide for the disgrace he has brought on them. He is stopped by the boy’s mother who points out that they began their married life with nothing and can begin again. The father, as an act of repentance, takes his son to church that morning.

What is not clear from the story is why the narrator remembers these events from so long ago. Then, in a final sentence, he tells us that he has seen again the man whom he blames for leading his father too far in his gambling obsession, a character called Zelembać. “When I went to Belgrade last year to buy some goods I saw Pera Zelembać in Topčider, in convicts’ clothes: he was breaking stones!” It is significant that the narrator travels from his village to Belgrade, which has negative moral associations opposed to traditional rural values. Lazarević shows us a modern interpretation of the city in a society, which in the space of one hundred years, from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century, moved a distance of some four centuries in terms of its cultural trajectory.

In her collection of stories
Dorćol
Svetlana Velmar-Janković offers images of figures taken from Serbian history, characters involved in creating a sense of cultural identity: Vasa Čarapić, Uzun Mirko, Dositej Obradović, Vuk Karadžić, Captain Miša, Jovan Jovanović–Zmaj and others. The name of each character is also the name of a street in the district of Dorćol. The stories are organized around a rough geographical pattern, so that as the reader reads each one he is taken on a journey.

The first story, “Francuska ulica”, is named after France Street, which borders the district. The next few tales refer to streets at the top and bottom of the slope as it faces the Danube, while the remainder cut across them in an east-west direction. Their order in the text gradually leads deeper into the district until the last story, “Stara čaršija”, a name for the central part of the district and the crossroads of King Peter I and Tsar Dušan Streets. The name of the whole quarter is taken from this crossroads, or in Turkish
dort jol
.

Each story begins by introducing the eponymous historical figure after whom the street is named. They are spectral images who invisibly tread their eternal paths down their street, every day the same, observing the life of the city, reflecting on their historical roles and looking out for the ghosts of others who used to live on their streets. Their individual reflections coincide and conflict, building up a complex picture of Serbian culture. There is a fundamental distinction between the figures of Karađorđe and Knez Miloš Obrenović. The former is a heroic figure finally defeated by the greater numbers of the Ottoman forces, forced into exile, betrayed by Miloš and then murdered by him. Miloš Obrenović uses cunning and stealth to achieve his political ambitions, even turning against Serbs when he suspects them of not supporting his tyrannical rule. This is the source of cycles of success, deceit and failure typifying the representation of Serbian history in her fiction.

There are numerous other details in Velmar-Janković’s work that draw attention to the constant return of destructive forces. In the story about the brawl around the water fountain leading to the Ottoman withdrawal from Belgrade, there is a description of the 1862 Turkish cannonade on the city, immediately followed by reference to later bombardments in the First and Second World Wars: “The bombs exploded, truly at intervals, yet nevertheless one after the other (it is still not 1915, nor 1941, nor 1944, but it is a beginning).” The narrator remarks on such coincidences by simply commenting “that some dates are repeated”. History is not governed by relationships of cause and effect, but by coincidence and accident, the result of the contiguity of events.

Isolation is another dominant theme in Velmar-Janković’s work. The characters seek out other historical figures where their streets intersect or yet others whose lives are associated with their streets. Gospodar Jevrem, brother to Miloš Obrenović, waits in vain each day for Vuk Karadžić and Dositej Obradović on their respective corners but he never meets them. They try to speak to each other but their voices do not carry from one to another. Individuals and historical eras appear as so many unconnected moments, with each character trapped in the age in which he lived. The statue of Vasa Čarapić watches from his vantage point people crossing the road in front of the National Theatre to Republic Square. He notes a connection between the alternating green, red and yellow traffic lights and the movement of the pedestrians from which he concludes that the people are somehow dependent on the lights. All that remains is a series of haphazard links based on inexplicable parallels.

Velmar-Janković’s image of Belgrade is one of a sinister ambiguity. The last story focuses on the crossroads from which Dorćol derives its name. We are told that executions used to be carried out on this spot in a most peculiar manner. The condemned man would be led out to the centre of the place and then decapitated while still standing. His head, the narrator observes, flies from his shoulders and his body “already dead, still alive staggers toward oblivion”. The transformation from life to death is the passing of a frontier in which, for a brief moment, opposites co-exist.

The city is never permitted to develop and emerge fully whole before its evolution is arrested again by another war or other dramatic event. Belgrade’s history is a narrative of different identities which co-exist in a confusing pattern expressing the simultaneous existence of opposites.

In one of her later novels,
The Abyss
(Bezdno, 1995), Velmar-Janković offers a fictional account of the last years of Knez Mihailo. It is written in the form of personal diaries and letters left behind by him, his wife Kneginja Julija and the manager of the court’s affairs, the artist and photographer Anastas Jovanović. It is a historical novel in the best sense of the word. The image and atmosphere of the age in which the action is set is captured and expressed.

The first part of the work is a diary written by Mihailo during his exile abroad in 1858. He is happy living with his wife on their estates in Hungary and mixing in fashionable circles in Vienna, Paris and London. The following year, turbulent times return to Serbia, and his father, Miloš, is invited back to Belgrade to rule again. Mihailo’s peaceful existence is about to change when he becomes knez on his father’s death. His diary is now accompanied by notes written without dates by his friend, Jovanović, in whom he entrusts the running of his court. These two voices tell in tandem the pressures on the new state, relations with the foreign consuls who are constantly implicated in plots and intrigues, and the activities of the pasha in Kalemegdan. We are now in a position to be told not only what the knez is thinking and feeling in the confessional tones of his diary, but also the changes in the man as observed by someone who knew him well.

The transformation in Mihailo’s new life as knez is most vividly seen in the relationship between him and his Hungarian wife, Julija. By 1862 the prince’s voice is rarely heard in the book. Instead, Jovanović’s notes and comments are joined by letters from Julija to her family. In her loneliness and incomprehension at the transformation of her husband into someone she barely recognizes she has begun an affair with a foreign aristocrat. Her family admonish her for the scandal she is causing, while she defends herself by blaming circumstances: Mihailo is abandoning her for affairs of state, the court treats her as a potential enemy, the city to which she has been brought is alien and in complete contrast to the sophistication to which she has been accustomed. Mihailo’s return from exile becomes for her a form of banishment.

Julija describes the troubles of 1862, which began around the water fountain with a trivial incident:

On that Sunday afternoon in June, while I was reading and sipping my tea, and Belgrade’s good families were out taking a stroll in the countryside, a few young Serbs, boys really, servants in nearby houses, came to the Čukur fountain to fetch water. At the same time and with the same intention, several officers from the Turkish police arrived. As the Turkish authorities had become arrogant recently, so the officers began to behave in an overbearing manner. They would not wait their turn for water but shoved the Serbian boys aside. In the ensuing mêlée an earthenware jug, which one of the soldiers was carrying, broke. He struck the nearest boy about the head with the shattered remains. Covered in blood he began to wail, his friends began to call for help, Serbs and Turks flew from the surrounding houses, a Serbian constable turned up with some gendarmes, and a fight broke out. The Turkish soldiers who provoked it tried to flee but were prevented by the Serbian gendarmes.

Her depiction of events introduces a note of incredulity to the unfolding drama in the city. After Turkish soldiers shoot and kill the interpreter sent to help with negotiations and another Serbian representative, a mob attacks the gates leading into the Turkish part of town and the pasha orders his cannon to fire on the city. She comments: “I had already learnt that, here, one death invokes revenge, and that revenge is followed by another killing. In the Orient, that tragic sequence can be a very protracted affair, multiplied hundredfold or even thousandfold. And Serbia is still the Orient, although Mihailo will not allow himself to say so.”

The meaning of this “Orient” in Velmar-Janković’s fictional world of 1860s Belgrade is evident on multiple levels. The city’s oldest quarter, Dorćol, is exotic with its colourful gardens, mosques and meandering streets that lead nowhere but can lure an unsuspecting foreigner into danger. It presents a mixed face to the outsider, both demure and gaudy. It is a spectacle offering fascination and fear, the promise of hope and the betrayal of expectations. Belgrade, in Velmar-Janković’s fictional universe, represents both a bridge between different cultures and, in her words, an abyss into which its inhabitants may fall.

After the assassination of King Alexander Obrenović, Peter Karađorđević was invited to take the throne. He was modest, unassuming and diplomatic, a man with a completely different nature to his predecessor. Trained as a soldier, he appreciated the need for an
esprit de corps
and held a high sense of duty.

But what kind of a country was Serbia? The established view of the decade leading to the First World War is of a Serbian Golden Age. Belgrade was emerging as the capital city of a modern state with institutions that could support a functioning, democratic, parliamentary monarchy. Great changes had taken place in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Belgrade was now a beacon for all Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians and Macedonians who sought freedom from Vienna or Istanbul.

Yet this view has been called into question, both at home and abroad, with the hindsight of the 1990s when the country disintegrated through a series of bloody wars. Some historians now question the idealized myth of Yugoslav solidarity. Serbia, in the first decade of the twentieth century, was still caught between a European future and the lingering legacy of its Ottoman past.

When Peter was crowned in 1904, Serbia had a population of about three million, a land area of 18,725 square miles and a border stretching for 825 miles, of which 580 miles was shared with the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. The population was expanding at the rate of 190,000 per year as a result of increased birth rate and immigration. The size of the country increased dramatically after the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 when Turkey was driven out of the region by an alliance of Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. Serbia now included the southern provinces of Macedonia and Kosovo, the number of inhabitants grew by another 1.5 million and the land area by 12,355 square miles. About 87 per cent of the population was comprised of peasant farmers with a small plot of land producing barely enough food to feed the family who worked it. Most people made their own clothes, shoes and tools when possible. Consequently, the vast majority of the population played no role in the money economy of the state and paid no taxes.