Song of Kosovo Read online

  For my part, I take my cue from Rădescu’s arbitrary title of the work. Like the epic songs of Serbia’s remarkable literary prehistory, it is less a rendering of events as they occurred in some kind of historic context. More, a representation of those kinds of events that only take place outside of time and history. This is not a story of Serbia or Kosovo or about Serbia or Kosovo or from Serbia or Kosovo, but can only be understood as something that exists above and slightly to the left of these temporal states. Of course, it almost goes without saying that history is ever nothing but fiction of the highest order.

  Finally, I must apologize for the roughness of this translation. It is a difficult task, translation — Umberto Eco calls it “the art of failure” — and I am not studied in it. Still, I do find myself indebted to a vast team of academics who assisted me along the way. Particular thanks are due to Dr. Georges Bogolmov of the Department of Slavic Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Sandra Urschel of the New York’s Pratt Institute, and of course, the entire staff from the Department of Philology, Univerzitet u Beogradu.

  Puno Hvala!

  I would be remiss as well if I did not acknowledge the generous support of the National Council of the Arts and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Without the generous efforts of all of the aforementioned, this work would have never seen the light of day.

  CG

  Aix-en-Provence

  1

  THE SONG BEGINS SIMPLY. First with silence. Then with a soft melody, played on a guzal or kaval, rising like smoke in the distance. Soon, a dajre will join, setting a deliberate beat, only slightly slower than the pulse of a human heart.

  Over time, more instruments will join in, and then voices, as sweet as air.

  Eventually, Nexhmije Gjinushi, melodies will intertwine and overlap, rhythms emerge and collapse, and the song will thicken, impenetrable like a fortress or the mind of a lover. It is the song of distance, the song of separation, defined more by the spaces between the notes than the notes themselves. It is the song of death and life. It is the song of separation and completion. The song is specific to this time, this place, these instruments, these players. The song is timeless and sweet and putrific, a song as prehistoric as grass, as ancient as the gods. The song is insistent, a temperamental white noise that drifts in and out like a distant radio signal that you can turn neither on nor off.

  In these vacant hours, alone in my comfortable cell (waiting for you, Nexhmije Gjinushi, to bring me your cheerful, hollow help), the song snakes in and out of the shadows, rises and falls like a spring breeze, weaves itself, like history, around you and inside you. Cover your ears, my dear, run, hide. There is no escaping it.

  2

  YOU'VE ASKED ME TO write down my thoughts, Nexhmije Gjinushi, to provide a full accounting of how I came to be in this place. Leave nothing to the imagination! — that was your decree. You believe it will help me in my impending trial. But we know better, don’t we, dear? It’s an exercise for us, a ritual: you playing the dutiful counsel and I, the earnest defendant. I will peck my story and you will consult your law books and we will sit in rooms waiting for Korbi Artë’s great black boot to come down and squash us both.

  Still, we play, biding our time.

  “Mother’s occupation?”

  “Apprentice harpy.”

  “Father’s occupation?”

  “Future war criminal.”

  I’m afraid irony is lost on you, my dear.

  “Nationality?” (You have a way of pursing your upper lip whenever you ask me a question that you know I will not answer directly. I find this trait endearing, Counsellor.)

  “Hmmm. I don’t like labels. I think we should just accept people for who they are, and not for where they come from.”

  “You’re not making this any easier, Mr. Zanković.”

  “I am not trying to be difficult. Imagine no direction. Wasn’t it the Buddha who said that?”

  “I am quite certain that it was John Lennon, Mr. Zanković, and I am even more positive that a military tribunal will not find the song relevant to this case.”

  I must say, Nexhmije Gjinushi, you have my deepest sympathies. Your earnestness and dedication will never earn you any friends. More to the point, you are in a tough spot. Although you wear the uniform of the UÇK, I can only assume that, since you are in Korbi Artë’s house, he is your master. I will never understand it all completely, the cross-pollination of tribal factions, paramilitaries, police, international advisors, and regular soldiers that make up your army — it’s almost as confusing as the Serb ragtag. So, I respect your desire to do a good job, but forces, I fear, are conspiring against you.

  Admittedly, the complexity of my case would tax a dozen Valtazar Bogišićs, so I can only imagine what it’s doing to the mind of my unexpected lawyer. The charges alone are dizzying: fomenting treason, conspiracy to conspire, impersonating a prisoner of war, impersonating an officer of the Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës, consorting with history, providing material support for a terrorist organization, murder in the first degree, genocide, crimes against humanity, et cetera. And even those that should have been the most basic of questions, Nexhmije Gjinushi, are proving difficult to untangle. My citizenship, for example. Was I Kosovar or Serb? I appear to have been wearing an Albanian tunic, typical of this region, at the time of my arrest, and can speak a passable if not overly cultured Gheg. I am, however, factually Serbian, as Korbi Artë himself could easily attest, should he choose to do so.

  And in any case, I am the least of Korbi Artë’s worries. Why he should find time to bother with me, I do not know. Something to do with history.

  And so it goes, back and forth, I and you — my counsel —huddled together in my cosy cell as little Adelina maas and nibbles on the horsehair chair. I cannot help but notice the softness of your cheek, my Kosovo Muse, the slight, deferential slope to your shoulders. When you leave my cell, my dear, the scent of your sweet candy perfume — some designer knock-off no doubt — lingers for hours. I have come to realize — with the utmost respect to my Sweet Angel Tristina — that I am falling into a kind of infatuation with you, Nexhmije Gjinushi, something lyrical and insistent, almost akin to love.

  3

  BTW: MUCH APPRECIATION to you and NATO for the use of the iBook, Nexhmije Gjinushi. Who could have imagined a computer that fits into a suitcase! The refugees of the world will thank Steve Jobs; he’s making diasporas so much more convenient.

  You’ve asked me to write down my story, Counsellor, and I have dutifully begun. It brings me a certain peace or, at the very least, a distraction from the song descending from the hills. Your intent is to develop a body of evidence, and this I understand, my dear. I understand the urgent nature of your request too, Counsellor. Five days is hardly time to prepare for a trial of this complexity. The iBook will help immensely. I will endeavour to put things into some kind of context, but I fear that the shape of events will elude me, and in the process, my genuine bewilderment will be taken for obfuscation (which I can’t imagine will please the Court). But I will try.

  Exhibit A

  My name is Zavida Zanković. While technically a lowly Razvodnik in the Provisional Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Greater Serbia, I have no personal commitment to this or any other cause. Not that I require your sympathy or absolution, Nexhmije Gjinushi; as a lapsed pretend-Buddhist, I do long for any sort of material afterlife.

  Exhibit B

  I am a Serbian by birth, having been forged in that future former country, Yugoslavia, and in my twenty-odd years have accumulated almost nothing. The sum total of my possessions to date include a name (and even that I am not longer certain belongs to me), some borrowed clothes, an envelope with documents of dubious value, and a small herd of sheep, which at last count ran somewhat less than two.

  I suspect that the fact that I was dressed in a rather Albanic fashion at the time of my arrest has created some confusion. It is not, as it has come to be logically assumed, a deliberate a
ttempt at subterfuge or espionage. It was simply a matter of practicality and — yes — survival. I was found in the dress of a Kosovo farmer because I had been salvaged and supplied by a Kosovo ranchman and heroin runner, the imperial Fisnik Valboni. He, quite literally, gave me the shirt off his back, and through him, I acquired little Adelina, setting me on my current career trajectory.

  Exhibit C

  This place I think you’ve heard of, Nexhmije Gjinushi. They call it Kosovo, but it has been called many things over time: Dardania and the Principality of Dukagjini, the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, and Socialist Autonomous Province of Kosovo. For a time it was reduced to constituent parts: the Banate of Zeta, the Banate of Morava, the Banate of Vardar Republic of Kosova; and throughout its history it’s been malleable, a splutter of clay or, better, a scrap of meat, pulled and torn by varieties of scavengers until it has no permanent form. It’s only an idea, this Kosovo, an abstraction. Look on any map, and you’ll see, very clearly, in that amorphous space that plugs the hole in the earth where Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, and Macedonia almost meet, a hand-painted sign: UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

  Exhibit D

  More specifically, I am the reluctant “guest” of Korbi Artë, having arrived at his compound seated on the back of an ancient Russian motor scooter, clinging with one hand to the thin shoulders of Vasile Lupu, Korbi Artë’s aide-de-camp, while holding little Adelina (half-stuffed into the front of my jacket, her wet nose nuzzling my Adam’s apple) with the other.

  The compound sits deep in the Šar Mountains on the very edges of what appears, from my limited vista, to be a more urban settlement. You have a better idea I’m sure, my dear, with your comings and goings. I sometimes imagine where you go at night: to a little condo, no doubt, or a cottage overlooking one of the tiny lakes that pock these mountains.

  The compound itself is nondescript. Fortified, yes, but that is not unusual in these parts. You may not know, Nexhmije Gjinushi, that, when I first arrived, Adelina and I were placed in a dark room on the third floor of the smaller of the two houses (both with the vaguely Spanish lines and windows and doorways framed by ornate Moorish arches). It was comfortable enough, I can assure you: a small bed with an overstuffed mattress, a horsehair armchair (which Adelina commandeered), a small desk with an old fashioned ink blotter and a sheaf of green notepaper — and every four hours I was allowed fifteen minutes of “relaxation time” in the slate-floored terrace. And so I waited in my velveteen boredom, sleeping on my dimpled mattress, labouring through days-old editions of Koha Ditore (which assured its readers that Slobo had already all but capitulated, even as Serbian shells rumbled in the hills around me), pacing the orange carpet of my room and the black stone floor of the terrace, and playing Pesë Katësh with the elderly Imbrahim Kaceli, who, Vasile Lupu repeatedly assured me, was in fact my bodyguard and not my jailer (although I could not help but notice that the old man moved his hand to his pistol whenever my pacing brought me too close to a doorway).

  “Am I a prisoner here, Vasile Lupu?” I would ask with regularity. Vasile Lupu answered all my queries with an earnest patience — Albanians are nothing if not gracious hosts — and the careful diction and the relentlessly trilled “r” that identified him as native Tosk speaker and, therefore, not of this place. A military adviser from Tirana, no doubt, sent, like you, to advance the cause of Greater Albania.

  In any case, Vasile Lupu would insist that I was a guest in Korbi Artë’s house and was free to go any time I wanted. “Of course,” he would add, with a forceful sincerity that made it clear I had no choice in the matter, “For your own safety, it’s best you stay put. Besides, I’m betting you’ll want to meet Korbi Artë first.”

  Exhibit E

  At 6:30 in the morning on the third day of my stay, Vasile Lupu entered my room accompanied by four paramilitary policemen. After rousing me with a firm shake, he opened a grey envelope and took out a thick paper, which he unfolded methodically.

  “I have here, Zavida Zanković, a warrant for your arrest. You shall be removed from this place immediately and taken to a secure facility to be held until such time that your case can be heard by the proper judicial authorities.”

  I must admit that I laughed at first, all the time realizing that a joke of this magnitude would have been beyond Vasile Lupu’s limited capacity for mirth.

  “And the charges?”

  “Fomenting Treason, Conspiracy to Conspire, Impersonating a Prisoner of War, Impersonating an Officer of the Ushtria Çlirimtare e Kosovës . . .”

  I felt the anger boiling in me; I quickly composed myself. “What is the meaning of this?” I rose from my bed quickly to underscore my indignation. “Am I not a guest of Korbi Artë? Hasn’t he himself invited me — welcomed me — into his home? He’ll have your heads.”

  There was a long quiet pause, and even the police — men, no doubt, almost beyond all shame — looked away. Vasile Lupu stood silently, his shoulders slightly slumped, folding and refolding the document in his hand.

  “Korbi Artë” — he began —“signed the order himself.”

  So there it is, Nexhmije Gjinushi, the evidence pertaining to my arrival at my present circumstances, to the best of my recollection.

  I suspect, though, you’ll be wanting more — the details inside the details. A full accounting of how I came to be in this place, just as you’ve requested, Nexhmije Gjinushi. And so I will take you now to the exact moment where my journey began.

  4

  ONE MINUTE I WAS biding my time — a teenager, true — but still clinging to the edges of childhood, not exactly innocent, but rather unaware and unconcerned about the greater world around me. The next I was thrown, violently and quite literally, into the world of adults.

  The force lifted me off the toilet seat and drove me head first into the lavatory wall, no difficult feat. Even at thirteen, I was slight and scrawny, a nest of bones; the lavatory was as dark and cramped as every other room in our small house.

  I think I stayed there for a moment, my face pressed up to the wall, one foot in the WC reflexively struggling for a toehold in the turded porcelain. Father was at it again, experimenting. We were used to the occasional bursts and pops, to small colourful fires that appeared and disappeared spontaneously, to clouds of wretched black smoke that smelled of rotted chicken wandered through our house like displaced ghosts. I believed Dobroslav Zanković to be some kind of wizard or itinerant magician, a man of great power and mystery who spent hours wrapped in the corrugated aluminium shed he’d constructed on the patch of mud and small stones that was our yard, conducting experiments that would, one day, uncover the secrets of existence.

  As my senses recovered, I became aware of a metallic tang in the back of my throat. I lifted my hand to my mouth and felt the warm sap, and still slightly confused I looked at my fingers and found them black with oxidizing blood. Few things terrify a young boy more than the sight of his own blood, and yet I could not gain my feet. Every time I extended my leg, Nexhmije Gjinushi, my small foot slipped again in the filth and it was soon wedged in the drain opening.

  “Beba! Beba!” I called frantically to my younger brother, Dobra. My shadow in childhood, he was never far off. “Get Mati, quickly. I’m being eaten by the toilet!”

  But no response and I imagined that he too was laid out somewhere, bleeding, his head half-embedded in a wall, unconscious or worse.

  And now I was certain I would get sucked into the pipes — I’d heard of such things happening — and carried away by the murky Morava River. I could see it, my corpse, washing ashore in the woods between Aleksinac and Beograd, to be torn apart by packs of feral dogs and ravenous, yellow-tusked boars.

  “Beba! Beba!” Only nine months my junior, he was what my aunts generously called “simple.” Perhaps he could hear me, but in his . . . simplicity . . . thought it only a game. Just as likely he was off exploring the mines.

  Eventually, I was able to pry my free leg under the washbasin cabinet and, placing b
oth hands on the towel rack, freed my other foot. But now a new horror revealed itself. As I drew the back of my hand across my face to clear the blood away, I felt — what? I want to say nothing, but it seems impossible to feel nothing. I guess it is more accurate to say what I did not feel: my nose. Somewhere between the explosion and the wall, my nose had gone missing.

  I raced through the small house in a panic, crying for my mother, leaving a trail of blood drops and little shit prints behind me. I found her in the kitchen, sitting at the folding charcoal-coloured linoleum table (her most prized possession, purchased from Robna Kuca, Beograd’s finest department store).

  Mother was a Kosovo Maiden through and through. Do you know the term, Nexhmije Gjinushi? It describes, not an ethnic Albanian as one might think, but the perfect Serbian woman, full of piety, charity, compassion, bitterness, and melancholy. The original Kosovo Maiden is part of the mythology of my peoples, Counsellor, famous for wandering the battlefields of Kosovo in search of her betrothed, the warrior knight Milan Toplica, blood brother to legendary hero Miloš Obilić himself (it is telling, Counsellor, that we remember the name of her fiancée Toplica but not the name of the maiden herself, isn’t it?). She lives on today, this Kosovo Maiden, in the hearts and minds of every baba and majka, in the romantic films on the state-run television channels, through images forged in Serbian epic poems and Uroš Predić’s maudlin painting (a fixture in the popular imagination, Counsellor, rivalled only perhaps by the velvet Christ and those poker-playing dogs).