Mirko Kovac (born December 26, 1938 in Petrovici village near Bileca, Drina Banovina, Kingdom of Yugoslavia, now in Montenegro) is a Montenegrin and Croatian (formerly Serbian) writer. His works are mainly novels like Vrata od utrobe (which won him the NIN Prize in 1978), Gubilište and Kristalne rešetke. He lived in Belgrade but moved to Rovinj, Croatia, his wife's hometown, after Milošević came to power.
Memorial Service
I once ran into Leonid Šejka at the New Cemetery, it was May 1959, he was carrying a candle, while I was returning from someone’s parastos. I was writing a piece for Mladost, and had promised that I was going to mock feasting at cemeteries as a backward, pagan custom, but nevertheless I could not resist the traditional sweet corn dish, the pies and vanilla buns that I was offered by complete strangers at the service, and I even took a paper bag stuffed full of goodies from the festive table that they gave me at the end. I had intended to catch a tram to the Law Faculty, but changed my mind and joined Šejka, keeping him company as he walked round the part of the New Cemetery that he himself called the Russian Quarter. We talked about how easy it is to lose one’s way and how hard it is to get one’s bearings in large cemeteries, particularly when you are looking for the individual grave of a relative or friend.
“I sometimes light a candle on a grave, without knowing whose it is, but whoever you light a candle for, on whatever grave, it is a Christian act,” he said.
Šejka was looking for the grave of the architect Valery Vladimirovich Stoshevsky, a Russian emigre and close friend of his father Trofim Vasilyevich, one of the few emigres to be employed by the High Command of the Royal Army, as topographer. This was an exception, because Russian emigres could not normally get employment in the army or the police, “Only if you marry a Tsintsar, as my father did,” Šejka would joke. Whichever direction we set off in, we kept coming out at the grave of Boris Chistogradov. It had an open book carved from marble with the nameof Ana Smirovna Vasilyevna on it, and in the end we decided to take a rest there and try to work out how we would continue to search for the eternal resting place of Valery Stoshevsky. It was a mild May day, with occasional rain, and increasingly rapid successions of cloud and sun; the shadow of a rain cloud would bring a few drops or a light shower, then the sun would come out and disperse the shadows, and that took place in short intervals, making a “heavenly installation”, as we both concluded, glancing at the golden shafts breaking through the clouds.
We stopped for a while on Boris Chistogradov’s grave, and, before we sat down, Šejka leaned his ear against the marble surface, he thought that I was going to ask him what he could hear and whether the deceased was going to allow us to laze about on his property, but I was cautious and reticent, so Šejka himself said that there were people who could hear the speech of the dead. “But there’s no need to lay your ear on the gravestone,” I said, although there were many ways in which some fragment of the past could be summoned, it all depended how large a morsel you could bite. We had settled in so comfortably, that we could have stayed until nightfall.
“What do you think, can a man exist without God?” asked Šejka out of the blue, so that I was caught off guard, and did not have any reply in mind, so I began coughing and stammering, but he replied instead of me. “I don’t believe he can,” he said. “If he has no God, he starts to invent false gods,” he said. “Hitler, Stalin, Tito. They flew in to fill the empty Godless space,” he said.
Šejka did not captivate one only with his knowledge and sense of humour, but also his charm, he was particularly good at so-called idle chatter, so I really tried not to miss a single word, sometimes I would move right up to him, to a dangerous limit, just to hear better, because he altered his tones, raised and lowered his voice, often whispering. He would begin softly, and then exaltedly, for example about the “portrait as mirror”, about “painting as a form of prayer”, and then he would lower his voice, as though he was afraid of something, as though someone were eavesdropping, then he would stop, and, after a pause, he would explain his silence with chosen words: “We have to take a rest when we talk about the great masters of the portrait, and we rinse out our mouths with their names without any pain or compassion, often without piety.”
“We’re in a cemetery,” I said, “not in some profane place. Everything here is talked about with piety. But you sometimes speak so softly that I can hardly hear you.”
Šejka suggested that we embark on another expedition and comb the Russian quarter of the cemetery in search of Valery Stoshevsky’s grave, so we set off between the graves, many of them were neglected, their wooden crosses rotten, crooked, but there were also tidy graves, on some of them there were still legible quotations from Russian literature, so we kept stopping and reading aloud verses by Pushkin, or the occasional thought of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and other famous Russians, while on one gravestone there was a stanza of lines by Mikhail Lermontov translated into Serbian. Here we separated and parted for a short time, roaming round the graves and it seems that we were moving ever further from the one that we were looking for, and then a short shower drove us to the chapel, which was locked, and we stood in front of the door until rays of sun broke through cracks in the clouds. There were raindrops on our hands and faces, which now glistened like pearls. Then I read for the first time that this chapel was built in 1931, modelled on the Iberian Chapel in Moscow, and the designer was Valery Stoshevsky, whom Šejka remembered from his childhood, he had brought him models and paper for drawing on; his first pair of compasses, protractor and ruler were given to him by the architect, who had left many buildings in Belgrade, The Civil Servants’ Settlement in Voždovac, the building of the industrialist Milan Dimić, the owner of several brickworks in Serbia, the Orthodox church of the Holy Trinity on Tašmajdan, while the jewel in this series of monumental buildings was the Iberian Chapel in the New Cemetery. Had it been open, we would certainly have gone inside, bowed before the icon of the Holy Mother of Iberia and asked her to lead us to the eternal home of the architect who built her house. Šejka said that it was easy to recognise Valery’s hand, not only as monumental, but also fine, soothing, weaving details, incorporating decorations, but without any kitsch, always discreet, in controlled quantities, developing his own heraldry.
Šejka knew all about the Iberian Icon, about its history, how it came to Russia and all the miracles that had surrounded it, it was all quite new to me and I drank in every word as I listened to the gentle, agreeable voice talking exactly has he had himself once written: “I am a weaver, an expert, a weaver-sorcerer, the one who weaves to unweave and reweave, so as to interweave.” But nevertheless I don’t think that he believed in the miraculous powers of the icon he was describing, despite the fact that he was religious, and in a superior way, “with his head in the lap of the Russian mystics’, as he put it. He was drawn to Kierkegaard’s conception of religion; in one issue of what was then the avant-garde journal Vidici, he published extracts from his Diary, quoting the Danish philosopher as saying that “religiosity begins with despair.” As I was listening attentively, without asking questions, he continued to talk about the Iberian Chapel, which stood at one of the gates to the Kremlin until Stalin came to the throne. The easiest way to enter history is though crime, while the second step is the destruction of sacred objects, said Šejka, so Stalin, who had attended a seminary and was a fine singer of Akatist hymns, immediately ordered that the chapel be destroyed. Once it had been impossible to be received by the ruler in the Kremlin, however celebrated the guest, if he had not first prayed before the miraculous Iberian Icon and stayed at least long enough for the priests and singers to pronounce the words of the litany: “Rejoice, gentle gate-keeper, who opens the gate of heaven to the faithful”.
“The tsars placed God above them, while the Kremlin godless are themselves Gods,” said Šejka.
We leaned our backs against the door of the Iberian Chapel, with its crosses on either side of the double door; these were the double crosses that are common in Russian shrines. A painted iron rod with a padlock at the end additionally secured the locked door. And as we stood there, Šejka lit a cigarette, calmly raised his head and gazed at the treetops as he exhaled smoke, as in some ritual of perfect relaxation. We breathed in the ozone and that aroma that comes after rain, the aroma of earth on graves, the intensive scent of those flowers which had budded early, so as to come into flower in May, and, when the sun broke through the clouds, it brought such good cheer that the two of us greeted it like a dear guest and pronounced something literary every time, some little ode to the sun, at least a word or two; in fact we wished that in that its contest with the clouds it would capture as much clear, blue space as possible. And so it was, some clouds divided with dizzying speed. We no longer talked about the grave of Valery Stoshevsky, fourteen years had passed since his death, remembrance of the dead does not last long, and that was a small sign that we could not find the grave; we must have got caught up in something mystical. Šejka said that there were days when Kafka himself had not been able to orient himself for several hours at a time, and there were periods when he wrote the wrong dates. He knew perfectly well that a particular day was, for instance, 26th March, but in the evening, before he began to write his diary, he would write 15th March, which he would not notice until the following day, when he came to check what he had written the previous evening. He had written about it in a letter to his friend Max Brod, complaining that he was unable to explain that business with the dates.
“There are things that should not be figured out,” said Šejka.
We roamed around the cemetery for a little while longer, we even trod inadvertently into a fresh mound, dragging our feet out of it with difficulty as it was waterlogged and the runny clay stuck to our shoes. A short distance from that grave we heard a high, shrill, vehement woman’s voice, as though it was quarrelling with someone; arguments between women sometimes broke out in graveyards, usually about something trivial, but as we drew closer, we saw just one middle-aged lady, a strikingly beautiful woman, in an elegant light-grey suit, with a black hat and black silk stockings, with rings on nearly every finger of each hand and an amazing antique brooch that glinted in a prominent place, where her left breast formed a small hump. The lady was smoking a long, thin cigarette of the kind that could only be bought abroad, in a diplomatic outlet or duty-free shop. So, she was not quarrelling with a neighbour who had dropped litter on the grave or something like that, rather she was shouting angrily at the deceased, furious that he had gone too soon, leaving her with nothing, so that she had to marry a cad, a womaniser and maniac drawn to young girls. We stood and listened to the angry conversation with someone from beyond the grave, but that did not bother the lady, perhaps she thought that we did not understand Russian, and she became increasingly vehement, quietening down only when Šejka interrupted, also in Russian.
“Madam, you are venting your anger on your dead husband, instead of throwing your rebukes in the face of your living, unfaithful one,” he said.
She did not snap at us, angry that we too had been standing beside the grave; she even smiled beguilingly, and since the sun suddenly blazed, she took her dark glasses out of her handbag, blew the dust from them and put them on. Šejka offered her his candle to light for the soul of the deceased, she accepted it and squatted beside the grave, pushed it into the earth, and, with an elegant gold lighter already in her hand, she sparked it, lit the candle and straightened up, watching the little flame flickering, the wax slipping down the candle, and when it crackled, that little tongue of flame lengthened and twisted.
“He didn’t deserve any kind of memorial,” she said. “Nothing other
than contempt.”
“Do you think that we have any influence on our own death?” asked
Šejka.
“He was only forty-five,” she said. “That’s no age to die,” and then again, in front of us, she let fly the deceased, “did you have to end up so humiliated and pathetic?”
We did not involve ourselves in her story, nor did we wish to know what was really tormenting her; we were just drawn to this elegant, beautiful woman who was castigating a grave, and we were not interested in the deceased, what he had died of and how, what he had been, that was no business of ours and who knows where such curiosity might have led us. We had chanced to be there and approached the lady, perhaps it was impolite, but we were not aware of any impatience in her; on the contrary, she had been pleased, it even seemed to us that she was addressing us at the same time as the dead man. It was a unique event, and we had participated in it discreetly. I then gallantly took a paper package, already greasy in several places, out of my shopping bag, opened it and offered them the food that I had been given at the memorial service. That startled Šejka, he looked me up and down in surprise and said, “I’ve been smelling food in your bag the whole time,” and then he took a little piece of cheese pie and bit into it. I talked cheerfully and wittily about how I had happened to walk into someone’s memorial service, saying that I was writing something about wakes and feasts in memory of the dead. They had accepted me as one of them, and first I had drunk brandy for the soul of the deceased, for the fortieth day. The beautiful lady immediately tried those delicacies, taking them in her cared-for fingers, with their prominent claws of bright-red polish. Šejka ate with pleasure, praising the pie, while I tried only the little cakes, I was full and had eaten too much at the service, then I had been handed a large piece of roast suckling pig with crisp skin and as I left I had downed another plum brandy. I managed to talk about the customs and various memorial services. “Whatever is made of wheat for the dead, is called “soul-food”,” a stout lady in black had said. I had immediately written that word in my notebook, I made myself look important, as though I was carrying out a mission and not concerned only with this handful of grieving relatives at the graveside, but also with their customs, the whole Serbian tradition, and I asked again whether food for the dead was really called “soul-food”. “Yes, yes,” they all cawed helpfully, almost in unison, and the stout lady added that in southern Serbia a layer of dried fruit would be laid out.
And so, it turned into a kind of “soul-feast” on a Russian grave, although I knew little about these customs, but I would arm myself with knowledge before I wrote my pilot-text after which I would be taken on as a permanent writer for the Mladost journal. I said that I was going to mock the autumn and winter memorial services, but Šejka good-naturedly warned me that in the mythology of all the Slavs mockery was devil’s work; whoever mocked another was possessed by the devil, even when he was mocking someone’s faults and malice. The lady took her leave of the grave with a scornful glance, and in order to emphasise it as something convincing and obvious, she lowered her sunglasses onto her nose. That was her last look at the grave, perhaps her final farewell to her husband who had died too young, who knows?
We set off at the same time, first the lady, then Šejka, while I stayed behind for a moment to throw the greasy paper and string bag into the rubbish bin. I could get to the overflowing bin if I took several swift and agile leaps round small rain puddles and at least three or four graves. And that is when it happened that I came across the grave of the architect Valery Stoshevsky, it had been within easy reach of where we were, we had passed it several times, you could see the prints of our feet on the sodden path. How had we missed it? What kind of subterfuge was at work? I caught up with the two of them on the broad gravel path between an avenue of trees, but I did not tell Šejka that I had found Valery’s grave; I don’t know why I kept it from him. On our right, near the grave of Petar Petrović Pecija, actor and writer, four children, each up to the shoulder of the next, were kneeling on the ground, beside a fresh mound, sobbing and kissing the yellow tin letters on a new wooden cross. “What a sad quartet,” said Šejka. We were passed by two thin little women in black, their arms round each other, as though they had grown together, as though they were Siamese twins. When we came out on the broad asphalted avenue, one of its branches led uphill to the Memorial and Mausoleum of the Defenders of Belgrade, 1914-1918, and the other to the cemetery’s secondary chapel in St. Nikola Street. The lady wanted us to escort her to the exit. On either side of the narrow gateway, in the street, right beside the cemetery fence, there were two small flowershops, and in front of them, all over the pavement, were pots and vases of flowers, glass candle-holders and other graveyard requisites, while candles of all sizes could be bought only in a kiosk. On the other side of the road were stone-masons’ workshops; machines for cutting stone and marble whirred while white dust spread all around, even over the tops of the trees; only a heavy, lengthy rainfall would be able to wash it away. At the edge of the street stood a black limousine with diplomatic plates, clean and waxed to a high shine, almost unreal in that dusty environment, its sheen reflecting, as in a mirror our caricature figures, shortened and flattened; that is how the cemetery chapel, the kiosk and the flower-shops looked as well, as did everything that was reflected in the polished, gleaming mirror of that diplomat’s vehicle. The chauffeur was standing leaning against the front wing of the car, looking towards us and at that moment threw away his cigarette, crushing the stub under his shoe. Our lady offered us each a hand at the same time, I got the left one. “We’ll say goodbye here,” she said, thanking us for the feast, and then, looking along both sides of the street, made her way lightly and elegantly to the limousine; the driver held the door open and as soon as the lady had sat down he closed it and leapt swiftly into his seat. She waved to us as she left, or rather she just leant her hand against the window, as we watched the limousine moving away towards Roosevelt St.
I did not manage to write the text about graveside feasts, I even told the editor “why should we stamp out old customs and who are we to determine what aspects of a nation’s traditions are backward,” and instead of mocking “soul-food”, instead of jeering at the people who had treated me, I wrote for the column which I titled “Encounters with Young Artists”, a panegyric to Šejka, stressing that the brilliant painter was tormented not only by artistic but also philosophical doubts and insights, “those who believe in God, are God,” he had said. That was my third trial text in order to get a permanent journalist’s job; two or three days later the editors summoned me to tell me that I had not been accepted, one of them said that there was no “literature” in journalism “and you can tie those poetic images of yours to a cat’s tail,” that’s what he said. Three years later, the journal Mladost made my life misery with a scandal over my first novel The Execution Site (Gubilište), a crazy campaign against me that dragged on for a year through other papers as well, and the Belgrade weekly Svet carried that dispute on its poor quality paper, proclaiming my work shocking, “books by the mentally ill should not be published”, while one provincial newspaper carried a picture of a brain, with the caption “the author of The Execution Site in a mad-house”. I do not wish to dwell now on former traumas, I would not want to try to portray myself as the victim of ideological torture, everyone is that nowadays, especially those who did the oppressing, they say that it was harder for them than for the oppressed; I shall probably have something to say about that later, in the chapter about Oskar Davičo, the famous communistwriter who helped me to get my own back on my persecutors in Svet, “I have not read your book, but that is no reason for me not to defend a young writer,” he said. He read my reply, neatly typed on a typewriter, carefully, took a pencil and licked it with the tip of his tongue, then he crossed out some of my words and made corrections in his own hand, inserting new sentences between the lines or down the side of the text, in the margins. I still have that newspaper cutting and the original text with Davičo’s handwriting.
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