In this story and in “Listening to the Shells,” the various confused and contradictory later accounts by strangers of the couple and their deaths (including “No, no; he was the Muslim and she was the Serbkina,” and “Actually, that’s just an urban legend”) are all verbatim as I heard them in 2007 and 2011. In 2011 a young Sarajevan woman summed up “that story on Vrbanja Most” for me: “He was Orthodox and she was Muslim. Today they are as famous as Romeo and Juliet. Just among the older generation they are popular, not the kids.”
My one visit to Sarajevo during the siege (described in a chapter of my long essay Rising Up and Rising Down) took place in 1992, roughly half a year before the two young people were killed. Descriptions of the city in “Escape” and “Listening to the Shells” are based in part on my notes from that time and in part on my Sarajevo trip notes from 2007 and 2011.
Given names of characters in these three ex-Yugoslavian stories— People in this region would know which names are typically Serbian, Bosnian or Croatian. Some commonly occur in more than one group, such as Marija, which can be associated with both Serbian and Croatian women. I am informed (although I take it with a grain of salt) that a few names are still more specific; thus Indira might be a Bosnian girl from a mixed marriage or an atheist family.
Meaning of the name “Vrbanja Most”— My friend and translator Tatiana Jovanovic writes, first noting that there is no considerable amount of information on this edifice, since “it is not beautiful or historically interesting compared to some other bridges in Sarajevo”: “A name of the bridge ‘Vrbanja’ probably meant a willow grove… but some of researchers of the central medieval settlement (in Bosnia and Herzegovina) think that the name refers to [the] undiscovered key of ‘Vrhbosne’ (literally, the top of Bosnia). It was known also as ‘Ćirišinska cuprija’ or ‘Ćirišana’—i.e., ‘Chirishan Bridge’ [which] was a name of a small company that produced glue (“Ćiriša”… sounds [like] a Turkish word)… Probably, long time ago, in the ancient time, a wooden bridge was in this place, about which we can know because of discovery of some Roman bricks… in some fields in Kovacici, Velesici, etcetera. Bašeskija (an author, probably a historian) mentioned it [in] 1793 as a wooden bridge that was erected or renovated by a Jewish merchant. The previous one was destroyed by flood [in] 1791, and because it was needed to have a bridge in the same spot (especially for the Jewish people to go to their cemetery), the Jewish merchant paid for its renovation. It was restored again in [the] 19th c., but today, on the same spot, there is a new bridge made of reinforced concrete which was built after the Second World War.”
The Serbian officers with stockings over their faces on the Vrbanja Most (just before the beginning of the siege)— Mentioned in Kerim Lucarevic Doctor, The Battle for Sarajevo: Sentenced to Victory, trans. Saba Risaluddin and Hasan Roncevic (Sarajevo: TCU, 2000), p. 35.
LISTENING TO THE SHELLS
Occurrence in the Orthodox graveyard overlooking Bucá-Potok— Related in Lucarevic Doctor, pp. 29–31.
Comparison to my reporting from 1992 in Rising Up and Rising Down will show that my protagonist had it better than I did. Although my sojourn on the frontline was terrifyingly educational, if I had it all to do over again, perhaps I would rather spend my evenings at Vesna’s, flirting with her and meeting her friends. Too bad there were no such people.
THE LEADER
Epigraph: “There is no life on the earth without the dead in the earth.”— Branko Mikasinovich, Dragan Milivojevic and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Introduction to Yugoslav Literature: An Anthology of Fiction and Poetry (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 176 (Veljko Petrovic, “The Earth,” n.d.).
THE TREASURE OF JOVO CIRTOVICH
Epigraph: “I could have been unvanquished…”— Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ivan Supicic, chief ed., Croatia in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance (vol. 2 of Croatia and Europe) (London and Zagreb: Philip Wilson Publishers and Školska Knjiga, 2008), p. 122 (part of grave inscription).
Most descriptions of Trieste in this cluster of stories are based on visits in 1981, 2010 and 2012. Some descriptions of the old city are indebted to illustrations in Trieste Dall’Emporio al Futuro/vom Emporium in die Zukunft, Dalla Collezione di Stelio e Tity Davia alle foto del nuovo millenio per la rappresentazione della città in un viaggio ideale (Trieste: La Mongolfiera Libri, 2009).
Names of Serbian settlers in Trieste, events relating to the two Churches of San Spiridione, descriptions of those churches, the Triestine doings of Casanova (which actually occurred in 1772–74), the Triestine Serbs under the Napoleonic occupations, etcetera— After text and illustrations in Giorgio Milossevich, Trieste: The Church of/Die Kirche des San Spiridione (Trieste: Bruno Fachin Editore, 1999). I have altered history rather freely. The real Jovo Cirtovich (or Curtovich) did not arrive in Trieste in 1718 but was born then, in Trebinje, Herzegovina. He first visited Trieste in 1737. According to Milossevich, p. 34, he “was certainly not a refined person. He was a practical man aiming at essential things and full of new ideas and initiatives.” Apparently he began his career as a porter. This historical Curtovich would have lived in his warehouse (built in 1777), not on the hill. The Orthodox Church, or, more accurately, the first Church of San Spiridione, was built for both Greeks and Serbs in 1753 (thirty-five years after my Cirtovich’s arrival), visited by the Tsar in 1772, left in 1781, by the Greeks, who wished to worship in their own language, decked out with a pair of Muscovite bell towers in 1782, demolished in 1861 to forestall a potential cave-in, and rebuilt somewhat later in the form which I describe here. My invented Cirtovich married in 1754. Tanya, whom like all his children I have invented, would have been born in about 1764, so her father’s last voyage took place when she was fifteen. The names of Cirtovich’s brothers are all genuine. About his father’s death I know nothing. In 1806 Napoleon took ten rich traders hostage until Trieste paid him a vast tax; among them were the historical Jovo Cirtovich and Matteo Lazovich. Those two were incarcerated again in the third French occupation (1809). Cirtovich died that year, aged ninety-one, having outlived his children even though he had married three times. His brother Massimo closed down the family business in 1810.
Some details of Serbian dress and Orthodox tradition are indebted to Prince Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, with the collaboration of Princess Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich (Eleanor Calhoun), The Servian People: Their Past Glory and Their Destiny, 2 vols., ill. (New York: Scribner’s, 1910). A few incidents of life (for nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Montenegrins) under the Turkish occupation (for instance, a man’s execution by flogging in the market square) are indebted to Milovan Djilas, Land Without Justice, anon. trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958).
Serbian attitudes toward the Ottomans, and toward the Battle of Kosovo— Here is a typical (pre-1991) assessment: “During the Turkish occupation, the Serbian Orthodox Church was the only force that kept alive the national spirit and the hope for a better future.”— Mikasinovich, Milivojevic and Mihailovich, p. 2. Djilas relates some horrible stories of opportunistic murders of their Muslim neighbors by Orthodox Montenegrins, while also relating a few Turkish atrocities. A dark view (and widely subscribed to nowadays) of Serbian historiography is summarized in Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 1999).