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 than her head. She was sitting in a first-row seat listening to a warmongering speech by Slobodan Miloševi, beaming and nodding like a grotesque mascot or mechanical dog.
A handful of the selfsame dreams
And selfsame secrets—
Secrets of love and love of country—
Rested deep in their pockets,
And all of them thought they had
All the time in the world
To run beneath the firmament
And solve the world’s problems…
The path taken by the innocent poem had begun with a historical event: the death of a group of children during a war. Once the event was embedded in the poem, the poem was embedded in the school program. By the time fifty years had passed, what was meant to be an antiwar poem had turned into its opposite: the smile the poetess gave the nation’s leader represented symbolic support of the war he was waging and everything it implied. Here in the Amsterdam pub the lines trickled from the mouth of the young refugee like a repulsive drool. It couldn’t have been more painful, more wrong. Uroš had missed the mark. Fatally. If we listened without a peep, it was not because we were shocked by the poem or Uroš’s performance; it was because we were shocked by Uroš’s himself. Uroš had pricked the balloon that was holding us together, and our collective nostalgia whooshed out and disappeared. The magic of the moment had turned to alarm.
Row after row of children
Joined hands and left the classroom,
Going from their last lesson
To the firing squad meekly,
As if death had no meaning.
Having recited the final line, he collapsed into his chair. No one said a word. The only sound in the room was Ante’s soft accompaniment. Uroš pulled a twenty-five-guilder banknote out of his pocket, spat on it, and slapped it onto Ante’s forehead. The accordion fell silent. Uroš brought his hand down hard on the cup in front of him, breaking it to pieces. Then he slammed his head against the table.
As he raised it, I saw thin jets of blood trickling down his face. I heard a shriek coming from Nevena or Ana or Meliha. I saw Mario and Igor lifting him from the table and dragging him to the men’s room. I was numb. I felt completely cut off. I could hear what people were saying, but their voices sounded infinitely distant.
“That was like in the Petrovi movie I Even Met Happy Gypsies.”
“With Uroš in the role of Bekim Fehmiu.”
“Fehmi.”
“Since when are you an expert on Shiptar names?”
“Since when do you call Albanians Shiptars?”
“Why do ‘our people’ always end up like this? Why do we make a bloody mess out of everything?”
After a while the guys came back. Uroš looked fairly together. Igor and Mario had done a good job: they had washed the blood from his face, bandaged it up with some help from the owner, and wound somebody’s scarf round his hand.
“Sorry if I…,” Uroš mumbled on the way out.
By now the voices sounded normal again, but I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what to say.
“Hey there, Comrade. You okay? You’re as pale as a ghost.” It was Igor.
I nodded and asked for a glass of water. The waiter appeared. We paid. I put the presents into my bag. We left the pub in silence.
We came out into a thick fog. You could barely see your hand before your face.
“Christ! A pea-souper!”
My only response was a few deep breaths.
The students looked at me, bouncing up and down to keep warm, then began to disperse.
“I have the feeling I’m in one of those Carpenter movies,” Mario cried out through the fog.
“Look, don’t get all upset over Uroš,” said Meliha by way of consolation. “Balkan bashes have Balkan endings.”
“I’m okay,” I muttered. “See you in two weeks.”
“Going to Zagreb for the holidays?” Nevena asked.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Have a good trip!” she said, kissing me on the cheek. “Bring back some of that good Zagreb chocolate.”
One by one they disappeared into the fog. Before long only Igor and I were left. I was grateful when Igor offered to see me home. He took the bag with the gifts, and I took his arm and leaned against him. I still felt weak.
The fog was as thick as cotton candy. The pain I had felt during the Uroš incident was giving way to the pleasure of Amsterdam and its childlike charm.
“Fog becomes Amsterdam, don’t you think?” Igor whispered.
“How come you’re whispering?”
“It’s the fog,” he said, flustered.
I looked at him. I found it touching he was flustered. The fog was exciting. Like a child’s fantasy about vanishing into thin air. Now you see me, now you don’t. It was tempting and scary at the same time. Like the invisibility hat in the Russian fairy tale.