Song of Kosovo Read online

  Song of Kosovo

  Also by Chris Gudgeon

  Fiction

  Greetings from the Vodka Sea

  Non-Fiction

  Ghost Trackers: The Unreal World of Ghosts, Ghost-Hunting and the Paranormal

  Stan Rogers: Northwest Passage

  The Naked Truth: The Untold Story of Sex in Canada

  Luck of the Draw: True Tales of Lottery Winners and Losers

  Consider the Fish: Fishing for Canada from Campbell River to Petty Harbour

  Out of This World: The Natural History of Milton Acorn

  Beyond the Mask: The Ian Young Goaltending Method, Book II (with Ian Young)

  An Unfinished Conversation: The Life and Music of Stan Rogers

  Behind the Mask: The Ian Young Goaltending Method (with Ian Young)

  Humour

  You’re Not as Good as You Think You Are: A Demotivational Guide (with “Sugar” Ray Carboyle)

  Copyright © 2012 by Chris Gudgeon.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Bethany Gibson.

  Jacket and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Gudgeon, Chris, 1959-

  Song of Kosovo / Chris Gudgeon.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-748-4

  1. Kosovo War, 1998-1999 — Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8613.U44S66 2012 C813.54 C2012-902937-8

  Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Culture, Tourism, and Healthy Living.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  In loving memory

  Paul

  Barb

  Jess

  Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

  — Robert Penn Warren

  Prelude

  IT WAS THE SUMMER of 2001, and through an odd set of circumstances I found myself in a barren office building in the ancient and melancholy city of Priština, capital of what is now recognized (by most people outside the Serbian sphere) as the Republic of Kosovo. The office building was literally in the shadow of the Sahat Kullan, the rococo clock tower that dated back to the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, and I spent many collective hours watching French soldiers from KFOR beetling over the tower — they had taken it upon themselves to replace the clock’s rusted mechanical works with a state-of-the art electrical system — when I should have been collating and archiving a mountain of mildewed files. I had come to Priština, a youngish man seeking some kind of calculated adventure, and was swept up instead in the chalky underworld of the office functionary.

  Our job was simple. Working with a small team of translators and admin staff, we were to organize tens of thousands of documents that had been collected by the advancing Kosovo Force — KFOR for short — the NATO peacekeepers charged with restoring order within Kosovo while making sure that the integrity of the proto-country’s borders remained intact.

  x

  It could have been mind-numbingly dull work, but given my training as a social historian, and my natural inclination toward task-centred solitude, I dissolved into a minor dreamlike joy. My days took on a tidal rhythm: mornings and afternoons quietly huddled in my work cubicle, surrounded by a Berlin Wall of files; domestic solitude in the evenings, alone in a Spartan flat a few hundred metres from the office. I came, in time, to see myself as a kind of detective approaching every piece of paper as a potential clue to helping me understand the endless mystery that was, and remains, the Balkans.

  Still, it was a tough slog. There were endless lists of names, haphazardly collected so that any sense of context was lost (was it a list of prisoners or dinner guests? Were they the names of schoolchildren who’d received their immunizations or members of one of those sports clubs that seem to permeate every level of Balkan society?). There were minutes of this meeting and that (one day, I came upon a treasure trove of documents from the Priština Horticultural Society, seventy-eight years of motions, bylaws, amendments, citations minutely detailed). There were invoices (“thirty-six hundred kilos of ground beef”; “twenty-seven hundred knitted hats”) and memos (“Notice to staff: the rolling electrical blackouts will continue until the end of February. In the meantime, please avoid use of kerosene heaters within the premises.”) There were seas of affidavits and legal briefs, great rolling rivers of draft manifestos and legislative amendments. There were fragments of sentences, which could have been the beginnings of great literary works or the remnants of shopping lists — one could never be sure.

  It was amidst this cultural exuviae that I found the Song of Kosovo, although the real credit for the discovery should go to Octavian Rădescu, the Romanian polyglot who headed our translation team. I don’t know exactly where or when he found the document, I just know that at some point rather later in my tenure I would sometimes be drawn out of my blinkered reverie by the sound of Rădescu, bivouacked in the cubicle next to mine, laughing discreetly or muttering a mild Romanian oath — “O Doamne!” — over and over again. Eventually, I took the bait and asked him what he was reading.

  “Pjesma o Kosovu,” he said, in flawless Serbian. “Song of Kosovo.”

  It wasn’t exactly the title of the document, I came to understand: Rădescu had christened it in the manner of the Serbian epic song-poems he personally revered and considered literature of the highest order.

  Thereafter, whenever we were bored or slap-happy from inhaling a toxic mixture of dust mites and Serbic conjugates, Rădescu would read passages of the document, impossibly translating from Serbian to Romanian to English as he went. Ostensibly, it was some kind of affidavit or brief, addressed to a certain Nexhmije Gjinushi (who had for a short time worked, I eventually verified, for the UÇK — the Kosovar Albanian nationalist liberation organization — which had begun compiling evidence of war crimes before the final shots in the conflict were fired). But in terms of its content and tone, the Song of Kosovo was like no legal brief I had ever encountered. Even by the standards of jurisprudence, it was long and somewhat rambling, and told a story almost too unbelievable to be true. Then again, as Rădescu never hesitated to remind me, Serbia was a country where the unbelievable was a matter of course, where mere months previously, for example, a wheelbarrow full of dinars could not buy a loaf of bread.

  So, Pjesma o Kosovu joined my narrow list of obsessions for the duration of that Serbian summer. I spent hours in my flat with the manuscript laid out on the plywood box that served as both my kitchen table and desk, methodically (and poorly) translating the document from Serbian Cyrillic into something akin to English. It seemed a never-ending pursuit. My output rarely exceeded half a page a day, the progress impeded not only by a morass of idiom and syntax, but by my near-pathological attraction to the trivia, which led me to verify, or at least attempt to verify, even the smallest of details.

  Near the end of my term, I found myself in an unpleasant circumstance for any reader. I had not finished translating Song of Kosovo and, given that I was barely a quarter of the way th
rough, was unlikely to ever make my way to the end. I must confess that for a time I considered stealing the document (concealing it under my cloak and escaping under the cover of night, perhaps, although I did not then, nor have I ever, owned such a garment), a pointless strategy given that everyone in the office regularly took files home, with no formal process for tracking the comings and goings of documents. Still, the drama intrigued me; I plotted out the caper but, in the end, abandoned it. It would have been such a small crime in a universe of state-sanctioned pathology and random atrocities, but I could not bring myself to do it. So I went instead to Ilmari Kunnis, the perpetually agitated Finn who headed our unit, and asked him directly. Kunnis was hungry looking, insectile, and not given to pleasant conversation. In particular, he was short-tempered, a general disposition worsened by the fact that, thanks to KFOR regulations, our office was the only designated non-smoking building in all of Eastern Europe. Frankly, I was terrified of this impatient cricket. Still, I held the file up for him to see and asked directly if I could take it with me.

  He paused a long time, then finally asked, “Why?”

  I could only shrug, and offer meekly, “A going-away present?”

  Kunnis took the file from my hand and flipped through it tersely. After a few minutes, he shook his head. “Take it. Fuck. I don’t care. Then he added with uncharacteristic softness: “You are a strange man, my friend.”

  I turned to go, my prize in hand, but he grabbed my elbow. “While you’re at it, Chris, take some of these with you, too.” He pointed his thumb at the stack of files beside his desk, a pile that rose, literally, from the floor to almost the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. “Do us a favour, Canada: take them all. I’ll carry them to your flat myself!”

  And that was that.

  For several years I carried the document in the bottom of my briefcase wherever my travels took me — Turkey, Greece, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Sudan — always intending to finish my rough translation but never quite finding the time to do so.

  Until now. Finding myself rather more domesticated than I have been in a decade, I decided turn my attention once again to Песма о Косову. With a more focused approach, I endeavoured to translate the document and render it something rather more readable than my previous half-efforts — with no intention beyond the personal desire to bring a protracted and at times hypnotic read to a final conclusion. That other people started to show interest in the document is not an unpleasant surprise; every serious reader takes some pleasure in uncovering a hidden gem, regardless of its lustre. That my translation found its way to a publisher in a remote corner of the country I hadn’t called home for several decades, however, is nothing short of miraculous. A wonder, to my mind, only exceeded by Goose Lane’s offer to publish Song of Kosovo. After wading through a minor morass of moral and legal concerns, we were finally able to reach an acceptable agreement. The result is the volume you now hold in your hands.

  A few caveats up front. First, the backdrop of the story — the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the resulting death throes — can be difficult to follow. It was one compact country, roughly the size of Michigan, held together by Tito’s velvet fist. But when it fell, it did not shatter like glass but spattered more like liquid mercury into a group of formless, ever-changing globs.

  At issue were not so much concerns of statehood but rather a kind of religio-ethnic sovereignty. In almost every region of the Balkans you will find enclaves of Catholic Croats, Orthodox Serbs, and Muslim Albanians, along with various other groups. So as one state tried to slip away from the Yugoslavian sphere, the localized tensions within the state intensified. As Croatia tried to wean itself, for example, the minority Serbs feared that their personal identities and connections to the larger Serbian community would be taken away. In Serbia itself, the Albanian majority in Kosovo worried about its future in a larger Serbian state. The result was a series of wars that raged in pockets across Tito’s former country for much of the second half of the 1990s. From these pangs emerged Croatia, Slovenia, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, Macedonia, Republika Srpska, the Autonomous Province of Western Bosnia, the Republic of Serbian Krajina, the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Republic of Kosovo . . .

  As of this writing, some of these states still exist.

  For my part, and despite my more obsessive inclinations, I tended to ignore this shifting political backdrop as I worked my way through the document, other than to recognize that it was a region accustomed to ongoing and eternal flux.

  Then there is the matter of the folk hero Miloš Obilić, and again, some context may be useful. While I don’t claim at all to be an expert on Serbian culture, this much I know: Serbian history — and by that I mean the place where memory and myth converge — begins and ends with Obilić. His mother, it is said, was a fairy queen, his father, a dragon. As a child, he was heralded for his prodigious feats of strength and daring, a born warrior who drew his physical power, so the story goes, from being weaned on mare’s milk. As an adult, he joined the knightly Order of the Dragon, boonsman and blood brother to such legendary Serbian heroes as Milan Toplica and Ivan Kosančić, battling Turks and rescuing maidens, never forswearing the Serbian virtues of village, tradition, chivalry, and the selective chastity of courtly love.

  Obilić is best known for his role in the Battle of Kosovo, the pivotal, albeit highly mythologized, moment of Serbian history. In the spring of 1389, Sultan Murad I, ruler of the Ottoman Empire, marched forty thousand troops across the Nišava Valley, deep into Serbian territory. The army was only nominally Muslim, with some five thousand Janissaries, the sultan’s own personal guard made up of new recruits, twenty-five hundred mounted cavalry, hordes of Akıncıs — the advance terrorist squad — and several thousand peasants, press-ganged mostly, sustaining themselves, no doubt, with visions of plunder, one eye constantly on the lookout for a means of escape.

  It was a formidable force, augmented by a core of turncoat Serbs that included arch-nobles like Zavida Kraljević, Konstantin Dejanović, and perhaps even John VII Palaeologus — the ambitious but ill-fated Greek who headed the Byzantine Empire for a tumultuous five months — all of whom threw their substantial resources into Murad’s camp in hopes of advancing their own political aims.

  Prince Lazar was leader of the Serbian troops, and his force was somewhat more homogeneous, made up of some five thousand of his own troops, at least as many Bosnian Serbs under the lead of Lazar’s son-in-law, the shifty Vuk Branković, along with mercenaries and sympathizers from Poland, Hungary, and Croatia.

  Lazar’s somewhat Serbian army confronted Murad’s slightly Muslim forces on the Field of Blackbirds, a low plain and critical crossroads for the Balkans. There was some skulduggery at the start of the battle, as Obilić found his loyalty questioned by Branković (a man of dubious integrity himself, who would ultimately pull his forces from the field when it became clear that the day was lost). Furious, Obilić swore an oath on his father’s grave: he would personally kill Sultan Murad, or die trying.

  Obilić led the charge and fought valiantly despite the intervention of a witch, who cursed Ždral, Obilić’s mythic horse, leaving it vulnerable to the Turks’ arrows, and who revealed to the enemy Obilić’s most cherished secret: that he hid the keys to his armour in his vast moustache.

  In the end, Obilić would fulfil his rash promise. Lying amidst the dead and dying in the aftermath of the battle, he waited patiently for the arrival of the sultan. Medieval warfare was a brutal craft; swords and short knives were designed to penetrate, gouge, and shred. Men rarely died quickly. The life leaked out of them, slowly, amid the stench of shit and entrails. The dying wept like babies and cursed like men.

  It was far from a decisive battle. The casualties were heavy on each side, and as Murad sat on his horse, offering a prayer or considering his next move, a corpse rose from the purgatorial heap and lunged forward. Obilić’s light sword stru
ck the sultan directly in the heart, and he buried it to the cross before Murad’s Janissaries could react. An instant later, Obilić was dead, decapitated with a single stroke. They didn’t stop with the head, the sultan’s men. They cut Obilić’s body to ribbons, fed most of him to the dogs, and paraded his head and massive genitals on top of spiked standards. But no matter. The deed was done. Murad had fallen and Serbia’s promise had been fulfilled.

  Of course, as Obilić’s story underscores, any discussion of the political or historic context of Song of Kosovo also begs a larger (in artistic terms) question: how “true” is this story? That is, what elements of this story embrace a verifiable, measurable, and shared reality, and what elements are fabrications, the work of a semi-deranged mind, a prankster, or a literary poseur? In the end, I am afraid, it is impossible to say. The Albanian warlord Korbi Artë, for example, who holds Zavida’s life in the balance: did he exist? My research tells me that it is possible he did. In various documents there are indirect references to a man (or men; it’s possible that the Korbi Artë of history is a composite figure) with a similar name and sharing his penchant for brutality. He had a reputation for cold-hearted calculation and slaughter, this Korbi Artë — he was directly responsible for the murder of, perhaps, as many as thirty-seven hundred men, women, and children — and had seemed to come from nowhere to take effective control of the hills and backcountry of south central Kosovo. The fact that any definitive trace of him has disappeared from public record since the end of the Kosovo war is meaningless. Hundreds, if not thousands, of others rendered themselves invisible in the aftermath of the conflict. Korbi Artë’s case is not exceptional.

  More intriguing is the case of Zavida Zanković himself. I have established with a fairly high level of certainty that a man of this name lived and worked in Belgrade during a period that roughly corresponds with that described in the manuscript. And while I cannot find any direct documentation that suggests that a Serb named Zavida Zanković was being held for trial by Albanian authorities near the end of the war, I have found nothing that refutes it. In the end, though, both the Christian and surnames are fairly common throughout Serbic Europe, and the most likely candidates appear to have disappeared in the general Balkan Diaspora, which reached a peak in the late 1990s (but has been ongoing since, at least, the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). In any case, we cannot rule out the possibility that, while the circumstances occurred as described, the names were changed to protect the safety of everyone involved.