Out of nowhere really the name came back. Not the figure of the old man, there had never been any blockage there; that was always on hand for ready reference.
Remarkably, it was over forty years ago that the single, brief meeting had taken place. Making the simple calculation produced the usual slight startling and adjustment. We were ourselves well advanced along the path now, yep.
Old Andrija was looked after in the Vala, the Valley, around the hill a short walk from Uncle Peter’s house, by a distant relative, some kind of niece a few branches removed on the genealogical tree.
Her name likewise came back a minute or two after Andrija’s own was recalled. Anka with her iron grey hair, her apron and black skirts. Not young herself; pan-faced just like her namesake, Aunt Anka.
This was the first woman encountered who bore that name again after terribly tragic Aunt.
Strina Anka’s tragedy would not properly emerge for another decade and more after the namesake’s appearance. The fullness of it had been well buried like all tragedies over time—borne and carried singly, spoken of more and more rarely, and in that way slowly slipping even from the victims. Slowly and surely slipping; but never entirely. That was impossible.
Old Andrija had some miserable Partizan communist pension, and his great niece Anka may have had her own even more miserable. Throwing their lot in together they survived somehow.
The Vala held a church that in those years functioned on the marker days of the calendar, where again with Petar a service was attended not long after the visit to our clansman Andrija. The nearer Church of St. Petar above Uncle’s house had been boarded up for decades.
Petar was in his early 80s at the time of the visit, wobbly on his own pins after being hit by a car some years before on the magistrala en route to his vineyard, sitting astride his donkey. For the visit to see old Andrija he had needed the donkey too, likely a replacement of the other.
Old Andrija was in much poorer shape. Somehow he had been helped out of his room by Anka to receive his guests, hulking across to take a seat at table. A desultory conversation ensued between he and Petar, who was not given much to conversation in latter years.
Like the gait of the old men, the talk staggered along fitfully, Petar here being forced to lead the way. Andrija spoke hoarsely from a dry throat. There must have been coffees made from some precious store. In those years of the early ‘80s green coffee beans of a number of kilograms were brought in the luggage as precious gifts and doled out among the extended family.
The men continued churning out one thing and another, with little to claim the attention of the listener on the side. Anka didn’t sit at table. There might not have been a fourth chair, but usually women of her age, when they sat at all, assumed a place on a stool beside the stove.
The particular words spoken by Andrija that did immediately draw attention, even at that time when so little of family and larger history too was known, failed to strike in any special way at the time. That young self was incapable of receiving such information properly, with the gravitas it deserved. And yet the words were heard with some alertness and never slipped from mind.
The precise words themselves were not recalled. It was the essential core that was collected, as if old Andrija had passed it like a precious keepsake across the table.
It is no doubt a false and dramatised memory imagining that piece of family, or at least clan history, spoken by this old man, seemed channeled directly not to Petar, but to the young clansman newly arrived from Amerika. That was very unlikely.
Petar himself seeming indifferent to what we had heard perhaps aided the impression. Possibly the matter was no news to him; of no consequence at that late stage of his life.
Every other part of that morning, the circling around the hill, entering the house, the emanation of the old man as if behind a curtain, his niece and the halting conversation, stands on firm foundations.
A man of that age, at the end of his life, with his last breath more or less, speaking like an oracle.
Shabbily dressed in an old suit jacket, croaking like a disembodied voice coming from the walls or underground, and closed-eyed mostly.
Most of the time Andrija had been turned in Petar’s direction; not exactly looking at his chief interlocutor, but more or less pointed toward him. What vision he may have retained behind his glasses at that age when he did open his eyes was a question. A blind Oracle close enough.
It was unclear whether he and Petar had ever met previously. It didn’t look like.
The year was 1981. Petar would live to ’85 or ’86. In the middle of the night the day before the plane was to take the young nephew back to Amerika after another subsequent visit, the third in the communist era, while the federation still remained, Uncle Petar’s coma ended in a relatively easy death. A vigil had been kept up about two weeks.
Andrija may in fact have passed away a month or two after the meeting at the Vala; there is vague memory of the news. Andrija’s revelatory words to come shortly...
A funeral oration for Petar was delivered by the closest male heir, the nephew from Downunder, confused by so many of the elders in Boka with the States. “Fortunate Petar,” Uncle was called because of that circumstance. Even on the earlier first and second visits men Petar’s own age had expressed the view—startling at the time of hearing—that wouldn’t Petar be blessed if he happened to pass away during his nephew’s stay, the son of one of his two younger brothers; being lowered into the grave by him.
This was voiced by at least two or three older members of the circle. At least one woman too had independently joined that chorus.
A challenge hearing that. And hearing again and again. For his part, Petar mostly gave a ready, perfunctory agreement.
The text of the funeral speech had been written by the Slovene husband of Petar’s eldest granddaughter, the daughter of cousin Mare, who after the death as we began carting her father’s coffin out from the upstairs sala, explained she would not be attending the internment. Women did not do so, apparently; not closest kin. At least not the older generation. Petar’s younger two daughters, Ljube and Danica, were in the party.
Daughters, sons-in-law, maternal nephews, young adult grandsons—none of these were properly fitting for the oration over the grave once Petar had been lowered.
After the text had been parsed, the longer, unfamiliar words broken into syllables on the slip of paper, the matter was delivered with such effect that audible cries were heard part through the funeral speech and continuing to the end.
It was not only Petar’s two youngest brought to tears at their father’s grave. Fellow villagers up at the heights, neighbours down at Bijela and Zelalici, others from wider a field, found themselves overcome listening.
The example of the far distant young scion, sole male heir of four brothers, proficient in the language, handsome and cutting a fine figure in his borrowed suit, returned to dutifully perform such function, stirred a great many hearts. Such a pleasure, one could call it, being able to satisfy requirements.
It was a surprisingly large turnout, possibly made larger by the kind of occasion prepared.
Who had lowered Andrija into the ground thereabouts and spoken some words over his grave was unclear; almost certainly it had taken place after his young American clansman had left the country. Another elder of the tribe had been buried in a grave that a clansman had prepared in advance for himself, when finances made it difficult for the former to find a plot. (When the time came the other would follow on a higher tier.) Possibly a similar arrangement had been needed for old Andrija without direct heirs, without close kin, or outliving both possibly.
Born sometime around the turn of the century, Andrija, three or four years Petar’s senior. Speaking at his table in the Vala information that had been imparted from generations past. Centuries indeed past. The last discreet function in Andrija’s long life, safe to say.
Five centuries ago the decisive upheaval had occurred that had uprooted Andrija’s forebears and those of countless others. Andrija voiced that knowledge to his clansmen gathered at his little table.
Some few years after Andrija and Uncle Petar’s demise the six hundred year commemoration of the disaster at Kosovo Field would draw Milosevic’s famous speech. Weeks prior the political firebrand had stirred such numbers of Serb hearts when he pronounced down in the Autonomous Region that no “Turk”, no Shiptar, had the right to beat a Serb. There had been inflammatory reports. B&W footage existed in the archives of a brief media grab, in passing, it seemed. Nevermore allowed. The Defender had arrived on the scene.
Milosevic who had had a grandparent killed during the war, from memory, by local quislings doing the dirty work of the Occupiers. There had been some poisonous political element in both parents separately suiciding. Montenegrin heritage himself, from the Vasojevic clan. A kind of Netanyahu analogue; one who would answer for his crimes.
From Kosovo it had been that the clan had fled centuries before, Andrija had declared to his clansmen over coffee at his table in the Vala.
The holy ground where so much Serbian blood had brought up poppies. Where Tzar Lazar and his nine sons perished. Where the Kosovan Maiden would search for her youngest brother, or fiancé.
That part of old Andrija’s utterance had been clearly heard.
If Petar found the revelation unremarkable, still, delivering it, old Andrija seemed to be offering new, private information. It was possible Uncle Petar had asked about our host’s roots.
Even in the early ‘80s some of the scattered houses in Village Uble were still covered with thatch. The space within that had been shared with the small herds even in mother’s time continued in one or two cases the same. One old spinster of our Radonic clan had sheep blundering indoors during a visit.
Situated just over the Herzegovinian border within Venetian and later Austro-Hungarian authority: Village Uble, echoing the old Beatles’ song.
It fitted requirements for a refuge settlement from ages past.
The other hills roundabout held precisely the same. Grandma Ruza, Rose had fled the Herzegovinian interior with her family in order to settle at Krivosije, close by the Montenegrin border.
The living, the endurance and survival in the stony heights, was a heroic feat in itself.
Uble was a local term for spring. A source of water on a mountain plateau a few hundred kilometres west of Ottoman authority was salvation.
In the Muslim Malay lands on the SE Asian Equator the prostrations with the forehead to the ground seemed fitting for prayers of thanksgiving. Fitting for pleas of intercession and commemoration of generations past. Upright Christian crossing seemed less wholehearted by comparison. Even more so again the full length outstretching, with forehead to the ground, that one saw occasionally within the gates of Hindu temples.
Those worshippers too had bound up in their observance the ones who had come before. Rituals of inheritance.
