Getting off the bus from Belgrade—two and a half hours express—the chap manning the luggage counter immediately guessed from the description.
Deda Slaviša. Grandad Slavisha.
Most of the gypsies around the place knew him too and had a smile and a crack for Slavo when we went round the piazza later.
Seventy seemed inapplicable for a man like Slavo. Much of the vehemence and restlessness was retained. The local notoriety was first gotten for his football skills back in the early 60's, when Slavo was a star in one of Niš’s big teams. Played with heart, the old guys reported. Knew how to roll it.
The local Komren team had evidently done their region proud, providing a number of players to the national league.
Both Slavo and his side-kick Uroš got to the land of Oz through their football. Čika Danilo the Serb butcher in Acland St brought the pair out.
Čika Danilo had been one of the chief sponsors of Footscray JUST. The club President back then was the Dalmatian Čika Ante, who ran The Vineyard steakhouse behind Luna Park.
Slaviša's mate Uroš, a fellow primary schooler, was half gypsy. Truth be told, many in the region of Niš had something of the gypsy quality. The gypsy population in those parts was among the highest in Europe. Macedonia further to the south was even larger. (Isabel Fonseca in her book, Bury Me Standing, uses a verse from one of their songs for her epigraph: the gypsies call for vertical burial because they have been on their knees all their lives.)
Uroš lasted in Australia about a dozen years. Unlike Slavo, he couldn’t hold down a job. Through the early ‘80's you could have seen Uroš nights in the tram stop on the corner of Brunswick & Gertrude Streets, drinking with the blakfellas.
On the park Uroš was known as the Assassin, not for his football skills, but because when he got mowed down on his runs he would memorably curse his opponent and threaten various forms of imminent death. Laughable for a scarecrow like U.
A bit player on the field, Uroš’s talent was as a musician, mostly self-taught piano-accordionist.
Uroš played and sang his heart out on the second night in Niš. In Melbourne he had played weddings, christenings and the Yugo bars—the Rob Roy had been a regular venue, restaurants Macedonia and Yugoslavia down the road.
That warm June night Uroš quickly took up his instrument, with partner Žiža adding her voice when she knew the words. Occasionally Slavo entered third harmony.
Žiža was a little restrained in the circumstances. A couple of times she asked for lowered volume. Some years before, after his return from Australia, Uroš had enticed Žiža from her first husband over the back fence. An hour into the playing this neighbour began to return fire from his side with other old folk songs on his cassette recorder. The clacketing tape ran off the reel at one point and Uroš had no difficulty out-gunning the wheezy old box.
From the side of the case Uroš’s long thin fingers danced over the buttons. Getting muddled once or twice, he peered around the front of the instrument to straighten himself out. Despite the early June heat, before starting Uroš had asked Žiža to fetch a vest from indoors to lighten the load on his shoulders. Uroš’s lashes were long like his fingers; lips & nose conforming. In certain aspects, in particular movements, there was something of the assassin in Uroš, something of the blade.
When he took a smoke and there was no room for pause, Uroš placed the cigarette in the crook of his thumb and forefinger, playing on.
Uroš could not have weighed more than 45 kg. Giving Žiža the lead and encouraging her, Uroš threw out the accordion in her direction and brought it back from the rise. His own voice was thin and tuneless, but when Žiža retreated or didn’t know the words, Uros filled the breach, relying on the lyrics for effect.
Through the little concert on the patio outside the back door a screeching came up from the dark on the other side of the house that was put down to kokoške, chooks. A couple days later Uroš showed his vineyard behind the house and an orchard beyond. On one side of the house there was a vegetable garden and the other a sty and large chicken coop.
In the light of day the fowl was revealed as ducks, turkeys, chickens and pesky pheasants that were said to be deadly for snakes and rats. It was the pheasants that had let up those tearing cries through the concert.
The locals seemed acclimatised to the odour of the chicken poo. A large cage of turkey chicks hung a couple metres from our table, the light within the cage throwing shadows on the house wall when the chicks stirred. Regular unruliness in the cage needed Žiža’s intervention.
Underfoot a pair of dogs, one of whom died the day after, had nuzzled our legs and a number of kittens made movement precarious. Uroš played on from his store of songs, the old themes returning again and again: love & heartbreak, sons & mothers, fate & nevermore, the café and drink.
A mother reported the unfaithfulness of her beautiful daughter-in-law to her son, who let it pass, so besotted was he by the beauty. Startling turnarounds came one after the other. The recourse to the café and bottle, grief and its term, the domain granted love & beauty, all found uncommon reconciliations one after another. The verses stabbed and stabbed again, far too rapidly to be retained.
Uroš, Žiža and Slavo sang the well-known songs together, in a discordant, moving unison. There was time only for a brief gloss and clarification, before Uroš moved on, his long, thin fingers reaching further again.
Uroš kept fit and nimble. Younger, cleaner-living, non-drinking friends had peeled off. Slavo and Uroš often joked about their drinking. After a heavy night they mock-berated one another.
We’re not going to drink any more. // Nor any less.
One day near the end of the stay there were three separate deaths to mark. In the morning the first anniversary of Slavo’s brother Petar’s passing needed marking. Slavo wasn’t going to the wake at his nephew’s after the visit to the grave, as he had unaccountably been left off the list of mourners on the notice.
We followed the neighbours and relatives slowly in the car while they trudged up to the graveyard. Everyone brought an offering to share, the men a bottle of rakija and the women food. After the priest rattled through his verses each man and woman came around, taking care not to miss anyone in the circle.
During the course Uroš sidled over with perfect deadpan.
Majku mu jebem, Mother be fucked. Why was I born 30 years too soon.
Earlier, prior to departure for the cemetery, the news had come that another pal had passed. On the eve Vlasta Pečeni, Baked Vlasta—not to be confused with Vlasta Gumeni, Vlasta Rubberman—died in his bed.
Slavo had mentioned this Vlasta in the days prior. A telecommunication company had been attempting to erect a transmission tower adjacent Slavo’s land, in the midst of dense housing. This had roused neighbourhood protest, with Baked Vlasta the most effective and formidable.
Like a number of other relatives, neighbours and acquaintances, Baked Vlasta had served time. Mostly it was theft and larceny, sometimes serious violence. In protesting the tower, Baked Vlasta had threatened council officers and police too, reminding them of his form. All their addresses could be easily discovered, he warned.
Early in his prison term years before Baked Vlasta had managed a remarkable escape. That day the judge who had sat at his trial was paid a surprise visit. The trembling fellow was taken in hand and shown a long knife. No need alarm; the judge wouldn’t be harmed. Vlasta simply made the man swear the next time he sat in judgement, he would give the accused a fair chance to explain himself and tell his side of the story. Baked Vlasta had seemed perfectly well the day before.
Slavo and Uroš took the bottle of rakija to the widow for condolences, only to learn there of another death that same day. This acquaintance fetched back to the footballing days.
In the evening we drove to Upper Komren to pay our respects. As the lads were soaked by then, a driver was needed. Being further out from town, en route there were barns, orchards, green cornfields and browning haystacks. At the house the deceased was laid on a table in what must have been the living room, body covered by a blanket, with added towels on top, because of the odour, Slavo said. The days were hot, though nights cooled quickly. An air-cooler rattled at the head of the casket, to which the bereaved son regularly added water. Old women in widow’s weeds made up the circle. After a decent interval we went to stand under a large fig where some men had gathered.
Among the group was the star of the old team. Slavo, always considered and honest in judgement, acknowledged this Johnny as champion. Johnny had been a play-maker, highly skilled dribbler, tough and hard. The men in the group continued to hold their former star in highest regard.
It seemed Johnny reigned in Upper Komren for other than sporting talent too. The man quietly, unabashed, received the tributes from his former teammates. The deceased had been an occasional player in the team. Johnny recalled a game when the man’s father had come looking for his son to help with the work back home. Before the father could sight him the lad had run from the field and hid in the corn.
Uroš asked the precise age of their friend. It turned out he was two years younger than U.—born in Slavo’s year. Uroš had been drinking the entire day. He wanted company into the night, which led to words with Slavo. The pair had no reserve when they cussed each other. Even the most offensive fucking of mothers was included. There was I fuck you in the mouth, your sister/father/brain/elbow/all. A deft comic duet.
Two other outings at Niš included historical monuments. A short drive out of town was the place of the last stand of the great Stevan Sindjelić. Sindjelić led the local uprising against the Ottomans early in the nineteenth century that finally, after five hundred years (six hundred for Greece), liberated the Balkans. 2009 was the bicentenary of the battle. King Alexander had built a modest monument to commemorate Cega, where Stevan Sindjelić, surrounded and greatly out-numbered (betrayed by the Russian Tzar with a separate peace), fired into his gun-powder to take with the remnant of his own men a large number of besieging Turks.
An old pal of the boys was the monument’s custodian, a man named Miroselac (Village-Peace-Maker), who liked a drop and gave the history more smoothly when lubricated. The monument was in the form of a simple tower, from whose height the lie of the battlefield could be seen. The area remained unsettled; with the help of some maps the folds of land gave some hint of the old battle.
A couple days later we went out along the road to Sofia to see Čele Kula—the House of Skulls. After the battle at Čega the enraged Turks had severed the heads of the Serbs and mounted them on crude stands. Originally there were some nine hundred in the cube of lime and mortar about four metres square, the guide informed.
It was a simple structure initially. Again it had been Alexander who had sanctified the fallen, having the original monstrosity housed in a Victorian-style crypt.
Slavo recollected a visit in his youth when he maintained the skulls had stood at that time in the open, outside any roofing. The guide replied many made the remark on returns in adulthood, only the skulls sitting in the rows being retained in memory. At our visit there were a dozen or so skulls remaining, including what was reputed to be Sindjelić’s own, now encased in glass. Relatives had taken heads away for burial; others too mementoes.
