By Andrej Nikolaidis, CdM columnist
Until last night, until 9 pm last night, Marko Vesovic was the greatest living Montenegrin poet. Then he died. Now he is one of the greatest poets of the Montenegrin language. Along with Njegos, whom he said was his “superior” and Zogovic, about whom he taught more passionately than Romeo whispered to Juliet and wrote more precisely than Princip shot Ferdinand and his pregnant wife.
He died in Sarajevo, far from Montenegro. In a distance greater than anything that space allows. Greater than time allows. He died in a distance that exists only in indifference.
Montenegro killed his father, who preferred to give up his life rather than Stalin. Montenegro did everything it could to kill him too: when Vesovic stayed in Sarajevo, the city whose siege his first homeland supported and served with all its big and pure heart. Grenades and sniper shots killed 1,601 Sarajevo children. But not Vesovic, who wrote after the war:
When the Serbian sniper
shot my friend’s child in a bundle –
I stopped believing in God. You’re gone, God,
I said, you are crossed out for all time
and period. Because God letting children in their mothers’ arms
get killed like that, for nothing,
just for fun, I don’t need such a god
And as for others – whatever they want
(…)
Everything goes on as before
It even seems easier for me this way,
This way, without God. I’m afraid I can’t explain that to you.
You know, walking is easier
with nothing in your hands but when you’re pulling luggage
Yes, I said it right. Without God, somehow
it is easier to walk through this busy life.
The only thing is that every moment I feel
that my hands are empty.
Empty, and therefore heavy
As a poet, Vesovic was admired. As a polemicist, he was feared. He was Dante’s child; he was a child of the only God. I don’t know when he wrote more beautifully: when he was sad or when he was angry. He was as melancholy as a suicide on the roof of a solitaire; he was angry like God against Sodom and Gomorrah.
His father was killed before he could remember him. He did not know God the Father. Now they finally met. He did not forget his mother: about Darinka, he wrote the most beautiful lines that a Montenegrin uttered about his/her mother. He wrote equally movingly about the dead Gordana, his wife who took care of him like a mother. Every day, whether it was snow, rain or heat, he went to her grave and spent hours talking to the stone that covered the ground in which she was laid.
He was angry with the Father. Then, in his old age, he translated Auden. And his poem “Herman Melville”.
For now he was awake and knew
No one is ever spared except in dreams;
But there was something else the nightmare had distorted–
Even the punishment was human and a form of love:
The howling storm had been his father’s presence
And all the time he had been carried on his father’s breast.
Who now had set him gently down and left him.
He created two masterpieces. First is his literature.
Then… He beat those who beat the city that received him in its arms. When it was necessary to beat Montenegro, he beat it as it deserved. When Montenegro had to be defended, he beat the hyenas for attacking it. Just as Zogovic sang in Ali Binak’s songs on behalf of those for whom the song was forbidden, Vesovic struck on behalf of those who did not have the strength or courage to do so.
If Montenegrins believed in their own myths, if there are Montenegrins at all, as many as green horses, the foundation of unwritten Montenegrin ethics would be – Admiral Barovic and Marko Vesovic, along with “Examples of Manhood and Heroism” by Marko Miljanov. One who killed himself because he did not want to shoot his innocent brothers and the other who chose to stand among the innocents who were shot by “his people”. In the modern Montenegrin history, namely, there are no two more convincing examples of heroism. Montenegro’s attitude towards Barovic and Vesovic speaks volumes about how much of the Montenegrin spirit is left in Montenegro.
However… Vesovic left without being in disgrace. Few succeed in this.
What Montenegro considers treason is another of his masterpieces.
In Montenegro, nothing will be named after him. It won’t, because Vesovic despised and destroyed Montenegrin false morality whenever he could. Kafka wrote how order in the world is built from lies. Like in the world, like in Montenegro.
There are no books written by him in Montenegrin bookstores. Vesovic will not be compulsory reading for Montenegrin students. And yet, scoundrels have no reason to rejoice. Even dead, Vesovic will haunt them. He is no more. What he wrote will always be.
I understand. Beauty is hard. It is bitter, like mountain wormwood syrup that heals what even a knife cannot save. Disgust, on the other hand, is sweet. Like the syrup they give to children who cough up all night. Like Coca-Cola, which, whenever you feel sorry for them, you invite them to a bar and ask: what are you going to drink, by schizophrenics who walk along the waterfront day and night make their ordered. Because the south wind blows.
But the history of literature is not written by mediocrities, cowardly compromisers, sycophants and hybrids of intestinal flora and insects. It is not written by authors of commissioned eulogies, cowardly academics who hand out business cards at weddings with their miserable title printed on them. It is not written by the jury that presents the awards, nor by the commissions that decide which selected texts that serve the pigs of the nation will poison the youth.
No. Fifty, one hundred or three hundred years from now, some student of Slavic studies at a European university will open a book, after she had an abortion and attempted suicide, because one night – innocently looking like any other – she was raped by cheerful, drunken young men. She will open the book and read. And before her eyes, an endless space will open, into which she will bravely step and write her own story. Only then, only she – will decide what was really big.
…
Marko Vesovic, the man who defended Bosnia from Montenegro, and defended Montenegro by defending Bosnia from it, and presented both of them with his poetry, died alone, isolated, as if both his homelands were ashamed of him. He spent his last days in a nursing home in Nedzarici, a suburb of Sarajevo. Until the war, I lived in Dobrinja, a settlement that leans on Nedzarici like a drunkard on a bar. I was a child – men grow up late. Thousands of times, riding my bicycle aimlessly, I passed by that nursing home. And I never noticed him. For youth, old age and death do not exist. And actually, I barely existed. I was just a little dick on a bicycle indifferently passing by the only certainty in life: that everything will crash and die in the end, the way the souls of those put in nursing homes die.
Those are – a barely existing little dick on a bicycle – and all those who spoke or will speak about Vesovic as a traitor of what – in the name of humanity and the little honor that is given to us as human beings – must be betrayed. Who is, like death, an undeniable fact.
Marko Vesovic
A cat
Just as the sails go down suddenly when the mast is broken
Dante
*
I kneeled down on the stairs to feed and caress no one’s cat.
Eyes older than the world –
they look at me, long-past. I had a sudden thought:
if you had even a drop of luck, you wouldn’t have survived the war
But Devil forbade it, God forbade it. I still haven’t
crushed you as much as upstairs, in my office,
I planned. I haven’t made enough fun with your raptures yet.
Although every evil
is for some good: now I am having a rest
in other people’s indifference from too tiring
love that my people, ever since,
has cherished for me.
*
I look deep into the eyes of the cat as if watching
far out at sea: everything is empty from here
to childhood. The soul is a ruined church
St. Fracis from Matavulj’s novel.
And living is nasty like dandruff on the shoulders
Of old bachelors.
My nights are empty, spent
over paper as over a seriously ill patient.
Wherever I went, there would always be futility,
half an hour before me.
Life is a nightmare with a stone under its head.
My ravings were as ridiculous as the gait of men
in silent films. Everything in the world moves
into steel hammers that beat on the sole
jewel in my soul.
*
It’s too late for everything.
For joy and for despair. For meaningfulness and meaninglessness.
My time is faster than the fastest
smuggler’s speedboat that cannot be reached by
a single patrol boat. The only thing left for me is to feed
nobody’s cats in Sarajevo, and to talk to people
like when trying to start a fire from wet wood,
while the century is dying in which Evil, like altars
for Easter, has opened wide its door.
*
When you look closely into the cat’s eyes it seems as if you
could see far to your first cry. Even farther.
To the candlestick on your own coffin. Even farther.
To an earthen mound no bigger than a camel hump.
And living is as sad as a song of a blind
goldfinch in a cage. And the soul is colder
than the monk’s cell. There are truths in it,
nobody’s, just like street cats.
My dreams were
Njegos faces on ashtrays. They are my passions
justly mocked. Those were the passions of the
opera singer who, in Buchenwald,
was forced to sing his great arias
while beating the inmates.
