Hard to recall now whether the first photo had in fact ever been sighted previously, a prize studio portrait of a radiant Bab in her mid/late thirties, strongly reminiscent of the silent screen stars of the earlier era.
Zdravko had suddenly dealt the pic on Viber like a cardsharp one evening; morning his time it must have been. After coming to ask the year of birth of his great aunt, Zdravko was surprised at her mladolik, her youthful appearance.
The beauty shone clearly without need of comment.
His own mother opposite, leaning on the other side of the stand where the photographer had placed the pair, showed a broad face, closely spaced eyes and nose like a blade. Dear good Jovanka, the obedient, dependable niece in her mid-teens.
It was surprising to come upon the aunt and niece featuring in a studio photograph of their own in that early Tito era. Decades later on the visits to Boka that bond and feeling between the pair would pass down at the meeting with cousin Joke.
It was strange the pride that could be taken in the beauty of parents or partners long after their deaths, even when survivors had aged themselves. It was not an uncommon occurrence.
Only once one Saturday night after witnessing too much preening at the mirror had Bab made mention of her former beauty. Coming from an elderly woman and without any previous hint of the matter from any quarter, the declaration had been especially strange. There was only the wedding portrait in the house, long an object of mystification; the young woman there presented had been more or less discounted as mother.
Memorably, in the Analects Confucius came to lament the common prizing of beauty above virtue. (1)
Z. rebutted the idea that the fine clothing displayed in his pic had been provided by the photographer. His branch of the Pavolvici had national costumes even in the previous century, he maintained. Prior to the assault of Mussolini’s troops the cache had been taken to a neighbouring village further inland for safe-keeping. There had been a locally famous Pavlovic ancestor a couple of generations back; outside chance it may have been possible.
Here in this photograph it was not a case of national costume, but impressively neat townswomen garb, unlike what might be expected of villagers, even in the case of well-to-do villagers in that corner of old Montenegro.
The second photograph was of Z’s grandfather Luka’s monument up by Our Lady in the village, an expensive looking structure that Z himself had raised, he said. For the photograph colourful bouquets had been placed either side of the central inscription.
As the eldest grandson all the love from the old man had flowed to young Zdravko. The reports had come down. In younger days and now in later years that immoderate cherishing was apparent in the man, a boisterous, strong-willed and eruptive sort of fellow—characteristics of Number One Brothers, as the Chinese designation had it. A pair of Number Ones locking horns could be guaranteed to produce a spectacle in Montenegro, even in contemporary times.
After the initial meeting up at the JNA Sailors’ barracks in Pula, Istria, followed not long after by another at the University in Belgrade, there had been a twenty-five year gap in our communication. In the noughts Zdravko had compiled a dictionary of our village usage, after which some jesting had raised offence and led to another decade’s gap. Once we picked up again there came a flood of messages to-and-fro, calls and these particular photographs.
In her early seventies dear Jovanka had thrown herself into a well. The devastation continued to haunt us all and was unspeakable. Zdravko’s younger brother Nedjo, who was perhaps most closely attached to his mother, once said a determined suicide could not be prevented. It was Nedjo who had found the photo of his young teen mother with her aunt somewhere and presented a copy to Zdravko, who years later passed it on. Each of us could only ponder the image alone. Even wedding photographs were uncommon pre-war up in the Montenegrin hills.
The other two photos Zdravko sent were taken up in Village Uble, both featuring himself and both curious stagings. Uble sat 1,000m above the coast, back in the day only accessible by a rough, winding bridle path on the Morinj side and a longer, smoother climb on the other toward Herceg Novi.
Zdravko had returned to Boka after fifteen years in Switzerland, where his younger brother had long been established. Bijela had been chosen for his re-settling, a hundred metres below his maternal grandfather’s house, where his mother had spent extended periods in her youth with her beautiful aunt. Before his father died early, in their particular case there had not been a settling down on the coast. Younger paternal cousins of Zdravko’s were established a short distance above on the hill at Bijela.
Perhaps the first of the village photos was a spontaneous shot taken by the new Russian girlfriend, as the broad grin suggested. Zdravko was seated on a ridge in his work clobber holding a hand scythe in one hand and the grass or herbs he had just cropped in the other. A cigarette dangled from the lips.
In younger years, for Zdravko like for the whole of that generation who had forged a place for themselves in one of the cities, within Yugoslavia or out, the pedigree of the selo, the village was nothing but a source of shame. The flight from Village Uble had begun in earnest post-war. After the first war some of our villagers had taken up King Aleksandar’s offer of land in Kosovo. The herding out of the Germans and Magyars after WWII led to greater opportunities again up in the flatlands of the Vojvodina. With the living so meagre on Uble, many fled at the first opportunity. For all the better living in other parts, some eventually returned to Boka, if not to the village, just as others returned from America and elsewhere.
The last photo was almost as remarkable as the one of our two mothers caught together in the late ‘40s in the photographer’s studio, in Herceg Novi it must have been.
Here in this the forest dweller was pictured, the horseman and hunter returned to camp. A merry drunk perhaps caught in a moment of high-jinks. Spirited alpha male showing his biceps in the strongman pose in front of the burning logs of his fire on the ground, flames leaping high.
The staging had been arranged in the cleft between a pair of dark hills, the evening early descended. Given the angle it seemed to have been a selfie.
Some few years before a villager at the upper end of the settlement had famously had his rifle wrestled from him by a leaping wolf. On the barrel there were teeth marks to prove it. Through the year there were now only a dozen permanent occupants of Village Uble; through the last few winters only a couple of households.
Zdravko would not be camping outdoors by his fire. In recent years the old house his father had begun to build in the early ‘60s with his brothers Zdravko had renovated. A road had been brought to the very doorstep now, he proudly informed.
Other cousins hunted wild swine in the higher hills and with the change of weather there had been bears sighted recently.
The heroics of the ancestors’ daily lives on Uble continued to captivate those of us who had been touched by them. It was an inheritance that was highly prized, for all that the ways of that life could never be recaptured and hardly even imagined, even by those like Zdravko who had spent their childhood there through the early phase of abandonment.
Zdravko swam now down on the beache below the house he had bought at Bijela. In earlier time none of our folk had ever entered the water. The struggling fisherfolk on the coast had always been keen to trade for the potato, cheese and meat from the hills. In his old age Baba’s father, grandad Rade, had thrown himself off the pier at Kumbor.
There was a popular corso now under the lamps along the shore, numerous migrants from all over, Russians in strong numbers. Cafes and fine dining places had opened. Essentially it had become a suburban life along the three large bays of Boka Kotorska now, with views across the water and the dark hills ringing round.
Up on Bashtik above the lower end of the village, where the folk from that quarter had gone for the summer pastures, the sight was thrown across huge chasms of space, where the small units of time below had no relevance. On the pastures and in the fields they had all gone barefoot, there had been hunger and great privation for many, all of it in the midst of a remarkable natural setting.
Three seasons of occupation, from early spring to late autumn, had been the long-held dream, renting one of the houses that were used as weekenders now. It might still be possible.
(1) Confucius’ Analects, Chapter 12
The Master said, "It is all over! I have not seen one who loves virtue as he loves beauty."
