The first few days the prospect again made you stop and stare mornings and afternoons both. You threw your eyes onto the hills in particular; it was not possible to fall upon them like the Muslims on their prayer mats. Some crude exclamations were actually voiced aloud; they had erupted spontaneously. The whole of the life in the flatland of Melbourne switching suddenly again to these forms, these assemblies of rock, lush greenery, wide skies and water.
A heavy white cloud stretching across a green hill a few hundred metres from the crumbling old Ottoman fort, with some angled sun illuminating in patchwork. The water there had been a combination of uncanny turquoise like in the travel brochures and dark ink splotches; on the horizontal plane the expanse was as distant as the sky above.
At a sudden inspiration that afternoon at the little resto on the water’s edge, where Ljubo the Niksicanin waited on tables, a woman took her campari over to the wall at the edge of the patio and raised it high for a shot on her phone.
The sight was captivating alright, needing a stop by the railing to drink in the scene. Ten metres away a young Russian in athletic wear that revealed the contours of her vulva had mounted her phone at the base of a pillar for her own attempt.
At the various cafe tables the talk was the usual, loaded somewhat more here with construction and labour costs, this one or that one’s success or slide; the local vulgarities always intermixed. Oddly, Dostojevsky hardbacks were common, two Devils being sighted within days of each other, one read by a designer lad in branded gear and fashionable sunnies.
Numerous gelaterias, sun-baking lounges, yachts, a jet ski & diving operation at Igalo, among churches & monasteries for other tastes. All of the riviera form was included in the offering. The changes were substantial from sixteen years ago and revolutionary from the first visits in the early & mid-80s, during the Communist era.
No quibbling could be spoken; there was always an assumption of a great advance, a kind of Great Leap Forward, that numbers of others within the trading block had shared. The losers in that race could be dispensed with. A good number of contemporary Montenegrins wanted a firmer break from Serbia, and EU entry.
Numerous visits were required, starting first of all with Cousin Danica in Tivat, Sister-from-paternal-uncle, in the Montenegrin parlance. Dane was now in her mid-80s, her husband Branislav pitched into the decade beyond.
Odd how Dane had turned into a close approximation of Cousin Peko from Kraljevo, via Kosovo. Back in the day Peko had done time after being unable to accept the break from Stalin. Now Dane was the sole remaining first cousin on the paternal side, from what had been an extended family. Bab and Lazar had been separated twelve years by the war, children coming to them much later than to those on the other branches.
On the second visit Dane produced a significantly embroidered tale on the arrest of our menfolk by Mussolini’s soldiers. In place of the earlier reported private arrangement between Uncle Jovo and the Italian officers to get out of the territory, here was a story of imminent execution before prepared graves somewhere up in the heights. All that was needed was the testimony of a pair of widows, whose men had been betrayed to the Partizans. The soldiers were ready with their loaded rifles, the widows arrived to finger the culprits, before summary justice would be delivered.
Instead of which, Oh lord no! These men did not give away our husbands. On the contrary, their house has supported us during the worst days with food and credit. No, no.
So, escaped by the skin of their teeth, before the transport to the labour camp at Lanciano, opposite Split followed.
Sternly Dane held to the tale delivered by her father directly; no third party hearsay.
Was Uncle Petar a wee fabulist, entertaining his youngest? The other, simpler version related by both Bab and Aunt Andje was rather less dramatic, though still something.
(Jovo the former gendarme commander in Lika, who had himself in fact luckily escaped the Ustashi slaughter, had been fluent in Italian and used in that function by the Occupier. Plenty of grounds for annoying the Royalists & Commies both. Best get away by prior, secret arrangement.)
It was not worth arguing with Dane; she was adamant.
In Melbourne there were a number of men like Dostoyevsky taken to the execution ground, before a last minute reprieve. No doubt less of mercifulness involved in these cases and more useful terror in the strategy.
The old rhythms of speech were retained by Dane. She was a perfectly wonderful talker. Almost invariably when the former villagers were encountered, often at Cousin Zdravko’s front porch, tales were unreeled such as were never found in books. The spirit and form of the old hearth-fire evenings blazed behind these raconteurs; blazed high.
There had been numerous losses, of young and old alike. Covid had taken a slightly older clansman, Tomo Mirkov, and the younger husband of another Second Cousin, Dane’s elder daughter.
Cousin Leka's widow Vida told of Sarajevo well in advance of the horror, mid-'89 to be precise, the June 29 600th year commemoration of the battle of Kosovo. The year before Milosevic had given his riveting speech down there: Niko vas nesmije tuc. None shall beat you. None have the right...
How many Serb hearts around us in Melbourne had swelled at that. Among many in the then country there had been shrinking premonition, unimaginable as the full horror of what followed must have been.
Young Vida was a Pedagoski student at Sarajevo U at the time and instantly broke out in a rash on that marker day of commemoration. Her face had swelled up and become bloated. Doctors diagnosed an allergy to feathers, of all things. It was true Vida was a bird lover, an animal lover generally; this oncer of a reaction however was something else.
The bombing of Split. Dubrovnik. The young JNA man plucked from the top of a tank and torn limb from limb by the Croats.
The death of Aunt Rake years later, a few days before Vida delivered her first daughter. When husband Leka arrived at the hospital Vida immediately knew. Aunt had died in her husband’s arms. Radoslava was the second of grandad Rade’s daughters to succumb to breast cancer.
When the march to the grave was orderly it could be endured, the Serbs said. Leka had passed short of sixty.
On his porch at Bijela Zdravko had given old, blind and bedridden Grandma Stane's flinging of her faeces into the hearth. Stane was the boy’s great-grandmother. When his mother Jovanka brought her son to her grandmother the boy would refuse to go to the old, ailing woman.
No, I wont’t, the lad told the hag without mincing.
Certainly there would have been a better end for Grandma Stana if the family unit had held.
Aneta Velova's tale of her mother-in-law Ljube's final days was perhaps worse again. Diabetes had led to the removal of the better part of one leg, half way up the femur. The toes of the other leg too had become gangrenous. Bowel cancer was added. Finally Ljube had reached something like 130kg, for the last transport to the hospital the fire brigade needing to be called.
Telling it seven or eight years later Aneta brought tears to her own eyes. Little wonder the bond with her husband, who had been absent at the time of both his father and mother’s passing. This was precisely the same as maternal first cousin Vasilije; sailors both. For his younger brother, Vasilije had been on hand. When condolences were transmitted to him by telephone from Singapore Vajo had only been able to reply, Velika ti hvala; Many thanks, before choking off and ending the conversation.
Catholic Zeljko the restauranteur at Zelenika, where we lunched a couple times with Neki, who had come down from Switzerland, produced a novelistic tale and one half of a grandmother / servant who fell pregnant, was severely beaten in order to miscarry, and later reunited with her bastard child by her indulgent husband. Highest drama that; Bab had delivered similar stories; but being so remote from the family line the reaction was something lesser. The woman concerned was in fact a half-sister to our faeces-flinging grandma Stane. Still, a remove from the heart’s core.
Evening walks along the water reaching for the dim hills reminded that earlier generations had never seen dusk on the waterside. Dozens of generations very likely, returning to their mountain retreats while the light held; while they could.
In ‘60s & ‘70s Melbourne neighbours from the old country procured various pine seedlings and shared them round. Bab received her Norfolk Pine from Bosnian Slavko in Kernot Street, who planted his front yard with a mixture of these and some palms. Our pair of pines in the front yard grew to giant size and eventually undermined the foundations of the house Lazar & Jovan built. Later Bab also procured from somewhere the strange and delightful spears of the deep purple spiderwort, with their quiet lavender blossoms. In more recent decades in Melbourne they had become common, but when Bab first planted them there were none to be seen anywhere around. Another strong reminder from home. On each visit right back to the early ‘80s they were found in all the tubs & boxes of the smart houses at Novi, and found again on this visit.
One could gather small stones & pebbles in a tall, glass jar for the bathroom perhaps, as our tenant in Stara Baba Hazel had seashells and various coloured stones. A Welshwoman, Haze also kept sections of brittle coal on a bookshelf at the downstairs entry door in memory of a miner grandad. What a misnomer was Crna Gora, Montenegro. From the Venetian galleys the greenery on the sides was dark alright; throughout the interior of course the karst was often blazingly white.
Revisions of village history were offered in a couple places. The Vukovic brothers suggested another version of their clansman, Savo Bekan’s notorious killing of a Catholic priest from the point at Sveta Nedelja, in Kamenare. True enough, the Divine had been led at gunpoint from behind his altar mid-way through a service by Partizan Savo. Taken up into the hills somewhere and summarily shot too, but now not by Savo himself; others unknown had performed the shocking deed that was ordered as a warning to the local Croats to watch themselves. (The Ustashi slaughter had got out.) Later too Savo had saved lives under bombardment, telling villagers to lie low in the bomb craters, which would not be struck a second time.
Established in the early ‘40s, Café Beograd on its menu carried an old B/W of the establishment, with the rear of a large donkey foreground. Every likelihood the original beast had been one of ours from up in the village, tethered there by a seller at the market around the corner (or at least up by the current bus stop, where the old piazza may have been sited back in the day).
At the Savina Monastery a painted ring in the low wall of the crowded graveyard had provided tethering for the great festival of Our Lady. On the windows of the church the grills could only have been to protect the glass from Muslim youth during the Ottoman rule. (Two hundred years from the late fifteenth century; never above in those hills however.) The stillness of the pines and the much taller oak one imagined would make the signs for quiet redundant; the strongest burra off the mountain peaks might be incapable of stirring those branches. Birds flitting and chirruping during the hour stop.
The poet’s head was again mounted here and a sizeable headstone and grave encircled by wrought iron for a soldier who couldn’t be recalled from the annals. Like the hills, the colours of the water and wide-stretched sky, the church of St. Sava stood incongruously in the midst of poor villagers who shared their domiciles with their donkeys and herds. (The poorer the village, the grander the church, Gabby the former Metho Minister back in Singapore held.) Persimmon, orange and at the end a banana tree by the monks quarters. On earlier visits to the coast the latter had not been identifiable.
Ivo Andric’s old place no longer had the resto attached, which lessened the possibility of encounters with bookish types. Recently posters had appeared along the road of a drama of Andric’s due to be staged, a monologue possibly, titled, Moram Da Progovorim; The Need to Utter.
Despite social media, the traditional black-bordered death notices on the roadside continued to draw attention. Asked recently after his health, Cousin Velo, who had endured some health alarm the year before, answered that he continued checking the noticeboards, without yet finding himself listed.
Witticisms abounded on the street. An old guy standing before a couple young pretties at Café Beograd, where he was hailed by men his own age in a passing car, abruptly challenged them, Are you jealous?
Passing along the waterside the little settlements across the hills stood like the sites of children’s stories from the old schoolrooms, toy-lands of the imagination that held untold dramas and lives. On first acquaintance with the alpine village over forty years before the tiny thatched houses had seemed incapable of holding any life at all.
As in Athens along Sofokleos & Evripidou, in Belgrade on Gavrilo Princip & Njegoseva, here too in the great poet’s own stamping ground the rock and stone gave surety. The closer acquaintance with the Balkans had been too long in coming.
Thus far three weeks in.
Herceg Novi, Montenegro
NB. Four favourite autobiographies include Thomas Bernhard’s Gathering Evidence; the others being Camus’ First Man, Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest & Nabokov’s Speak Memory.
An Australian 5th warrants mention: Barry Dickins’ Unparalleled Sorrow, found in a thrift shop in Melbourne few years ago and likely very difficult to obtain now.
