The Afternoon on the Sava: Second Draft

The Afternoon on the Sava

 

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

Invisible Cities Italo Calvino

 

Every country has its rivers, he told me. That long afternoon it was the Sava River in Serbia, just a few hundred yards—several kilometers?—from where the river, more vast than any river in the American West that was his home, flowed into the Danube, a storied confluence under the once-stern gaze of Belgrade’s Kalemegdan Fortress.

A houseboat on the Sava served as gathering place, a rustic restaurant with no sign to announce its presence. If people found their way to the houseboat, as had Ljiljane and her husband writer and painter Momo Kapor (may he rest in peace), they generally did so by boat.

His own invitation had come in response to questions about a translation, Scott said. The Author had written: “On April 8^th I shall be in Belgrade / Serbia. Zarko will come too, also Zlatko. And you??” On the back flap of the envelope, below F-92370 Chaville, was an Arabic word neither he nor I could decipher.

Setting out from the Kapor house in Belgrade, the friends, fellow travelers, distant neighbors, and two journalists—Serbians, French speakers, an Austrian, and one American—soon formed a column. Mladen Materic’s little Puegot, Ljiljane Kapor’s big Jeep Cherokee, and a taxi wound off the backbone of the white city onto the Gazela Bridge, the third from the mouth of the Sava.

The bridge closest to the Danube was once called the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity. More recently it has traded its Communist optimism for a name with perhaps tragically tinged literary pretensions: Branko’s Bridge. It is not clear, however, which Branko is meant. It may be Branko Radicevic, the Romantic poet who died in 1853 in Vienna. Or the name may refer to the writer Branko Copic, who committed suicide by jumping off the bridge in 1984 at the age of 69.

Between Branko’s Bridge and the second bridge upriver from the Danube, the Old Sava Bridge, stands what is now called the Old Fairground, a complex built in 1938 to host international trade fairs. After the German occupation in 1941, the site was transformed into the Sajmiste Concentration Camp, housing Jews from Belgrade and the surrounding area. The inmates were systematically starved, beaten, and shot. To increase efficiency, 100 at a time were gassed in the five-ton Saurer truck operated by SS officers. In his novel Götz and Meyer, David Albahari’s narrator thinks his way into the minds and lives of the truck drivers (“Is that what I want to do: to bring Götz and Meyer back to the shadows in the former Fairgrounds camp, to give them life so that, quickly, quickly, I make them die?”).

This narrator, however, has another story to tell, one in which the Jeep bumped up over the curb at the end of the streetcar line in New Belgrade and ascended a short, steep dirt path to the top of a dike. The little Peugeot, skillfully driven, eased tentatively over the curb and up the dike. The taxi followed a more circuitous route, but found the top of the dike as well. A few hundred yards (five hundred meters?) along the dike, the cars parked and the passengers disembarked. The Author tugged a dark-brown stocking cap over his grey hair. He wore a knee-length black coat, light-blue scarf, black pants that had been twice lengthened by hand, and high-top black shoes. Dark-haired actress Sophie Semin Handke, hobbled by a bad back, wore a long black coat with sleeves colorfully embroidered to the elbows by the Author. Hostess Ljiljane Kapor was youthful in tight brown pants and a matching jacket. Her bright and capable young assistant Marija had neon red hair. Maja Kusturica was elegant in a white coat and a bright blue scarf. The wry and thin-lipped Poet Matija Beckovic had a Sherlock Holmes hat. The Theater Director Mladen Materic was loose jointed under a brown stocking cap and in blue jeans baggy at the ass. The Writer Zarko Radakovic, short-haired, wore no hat but was snug in a brown wool coat. A dark-haired middle-aged journalist and her younger protégé were dressed more formally than the rest. And my old friend, a university professor who would like, someday, to call himself a writer, was dressed in black, from his shoes and levis to his wool coat. His long grey hair was pulled back tightly in a ponytail.

Although the spring had been unusually cold, the first week of April still saw the river at its spring-flood stage. Permanent wooden steps led down the grassy dike to a long walking bridge made of white pipes bound together by clamps and floored with wooden planks. The bridge carried the party out over the flooded bank between tall and still leafless trees whose trunks seemed surprised to be rising out of the floodwater. Where the bridge ended, ten steps turned at a right angle down into the shallow water. Two broad, weathered planks reached from the last step above water to a little platform where three bright new planks overlay their ends and continued the makeshift bridge. Two more of the new planks led to a juncture where older planks turned to the left at a right angle, taking the guests to a small platform of 5 planks set sideways on a pallet across the path. Two narrow planks connected the platform to a gravel bank just above water level. From the gravel bank, more planks led back to the left to two steps which brought them up onto a platform supported by four red 55-gallon drums (or do they call them 208-liter drums? he asked me). Plywood fixed on thick planks offered a wide path from that floating platform onto a long bridge perched on alternating red and blue drums. The bridge, now over the river proper, ended at the door of a black wooden structure that served as a restaurant for boaters on the Sava River—and on this day, for the eleven guests who had approached over the labyrinthine wood path for their afternoon on the flooded river.

The Moravian Night / Moravska Noc

Zarko Radakovic’s translation of Peter Handke’s Die moravische Nacht.

Dear Scott,
We flow again and again into Peter’s Moravia,
and again and again we flow out of it,
and no one knows
in what direction this powerful meandering watermass moves.
The two of us, my dearest friend,
will always be there . . .
your, Zarko
Cologne 29/4/2013

David Albahari’s SNOW MAN

Snow Man, a novel by David Albahari, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac

. . . fearing . . . that I would end up stuck here forever, constrained, among people who believe that knowledge, rather than being the mastery of ignorance, is confirmation of the desire that things be the way a person believes they are. . . . I hated the willingness of young people to believe, to shrug off the individuality that grows out of the challenge of learning, and to embrace the dead abstractions that professors foisted upon them, and that were nothing more than banality cloaked in the guise of profound wisdom. . . .

I had been living on the edge of an incomplete historical vortex, on the edge of a historical sewer that sucked in all spiritual and physical secretions and then spewed them forth in even more horrible forms, disguised by the illusion of historical balances that dissolved at the most unexpected moments. Nothing was permanent in that place, nothing reliable, except a permanent faith in the power of illusion, and if that day, I was thinking, that had long since eroded into twilight and now held evening in its firmly clenched jaws, differed in any way from all other days, then the distinction lay in my feeling of incredulity at the willingness of people to embrace illusion, at the quickness, in fact of illusion’s embrace, I was thinking at the quickness of this willingness to seize on the veracity of illusion.

“I came because language no longer meant anything, it was being squandered like flour in a mill, because, in fact, it no longer existed.”

“I came here,” I said, “because I had stopped being, because I believed that life could be an existence again, and not merely a series of interrupted sequences, always a new beginning, never an end, and I found myself in a web of new beginnings, in a constant repetition, in the impossibility of being anything other than what had, once, been.” I couldn’t remember when I had last uttered such a long sentence. “I came,” I tried again, though I was no longer addressing only my toes, “because I believed that when I looked back from another place that I would see that first place in a way that I had never been able to see it while I was there, and then, freed of the subjectivity and passion for possession, I would see that everything might have unfolded in a different way, that reality, actually is contained in the act of choice, in opposing any sort of imperative.”

The narrator of David Albahari’s novel, published in English in 2005, is a writer who takes refuge from his disintegrating country at a Canadian university. A country that falls apart leaves people who fall apart. What had seemed to have meaning loses its meaning. Language squandered no longer exists. And without language, a writer becomes a snow man.

Without paragraph breaks, this novel puts a reader inside the head of a troubled man, troubled for good reason, impossibly situated, suffering — “Elend,” as the Germans say, eli-lenti, outside of one’s country — exiled, foreign not as foreign in a new country but foreign in regards to his own. Books and maps and sentences and words have proven useless, worse than useless, have proven to be lies, all of them.

The country is never named. The violence is never described. The dead are never counted. The history of this war plays out entirely in the personal crisis of the narrator in exile. His disappearing voice is devastating.

Standing as Metaphor: H. Bosch

In April I spent a long morning in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, almost the entire time in the large room that displays eight or ten of Breugel’s best paintings (The Peasant Wedding, Saul on the Road to Damascus, Hunters in the Snow, Peasant Dance, and so on). I took lots of notes about the metaphor of standing in several of the paintings and am a little closer to an essay on the subject.

At one point, however, restless and wary of the crowd that had just arrived with a guide, I slipped into a row of interconnected smaller rooms, where I came upon a board standing in a glass case with paintings on either side. They were both works by Hieronymus Bosch, a naked boy walking with the aid of a little stand on the one side and Christ carrying the cross on the other side.

I thought of that magic moment when we take our first steps, of the awkwardness of the early move from four legs to two, from crawling to standing and walking erect. The painting, with its little three-legged device gets at that stage wonderfully.

The other painting, I thought, is of a human being (still like a man even if it is Christ) being brought low. Not only is he heavily weighed down by the cross, his feet are being destroyed by wooden pads with nails protruding through them.

As if to make a viewer think twice about the feet and their role in keeping us upright, one of the thieves is portrayed near the bottom with only one shoe.

These men are going to be killed. Christ’s feet will be nailed to the cross (Gruenewald’s depiction of the ruined feet in his Isenheim Altar is the most graphic). He will be brought low (Holbein’s Dead Christ is the most graphically horizontal and final of this stage).

I have never, however, seen the wood “sandals” with nails before. Does anyone know of other such depictions.

So, in the end, the two paintings that share the same board depict the moments of rising to ones feet and of losing one’s feet. Short of birth and death, these are defining moments for us.

Epiphany

If I were James Joyce, and if I were collecting local “epiphanies” like he did in Dublin, I’d write a story centered on a phrase overheard this evening at the Woodland Hills mailboxes, a strong statement coming from a heavy woman of maybe 40, sunburned after a day outside, standing outside a small car packed with two large adults and several children:

GET IN THE CAR LENA! GRANDMA’S FREAKIN’ THE FUCK OUT!

 

Joy

Listening to Nicolas Simion’s jazz in Cologne, I felt an unexpectedly rush of joy.

Yesterday, walking with Blue through meadows thick with the yellow flowers of arrowleaf balsamroot, I plucked a couple of juicy three-toothed leaves of sage, pressed them between my fingers and brought them to my nose. The scent was a sharp as the yellow of the flowers. Standing there in the morning quiet, I heard the liquid call of a black-headed grosbeak, and then the sound of water burbling up out of a pipe or spring. As I listened, the sound came again, and then again. I looked up and found two black birds above me on a branch. One of them gurgled, just like water, and I was filled with joy again.

Coming to Know a Little Square of Home

Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little square of Venice where he gamboled as a child.

At this point Kublai Khan interrupted him or imagined interrupting him, or Marko Polo imagined himself interrupted, with a question such as: “You advance always with your head turned back? or “Is what you see always behind you?” or rather, “Does your journey take place only in the past?”

All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. . . .

“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

Invisible Cities Italo Calvino

[thanks to Travis Low]

Jazz in Cologne: Nicolas Simion and Martin Lubenov

On the evening of April 18th (with Lyn enjoying the morning of her 51st birthday in Woodland Hills, Utah), I joined Zarko and Anne for their first wedding anniversary celebration (they have been together for twenty-some years). Anne was to meet us in a Greek restaurant on Alteburger Strasse after returning from Solingen, where she works as a psychologist. It was the first mild evening of a very cold European spring. As Zarko and I strolled from their apartment, likewise on the Alteburger Strasse, to the restaurant, we passed the “Litho,” a club where Zarko had introduced me to Balkan Jazz in 1999.

In the Greek restaurant we ordered grappa and a plate of appetizers and settled in to wait for Anne. We talked about our new book, about Peter Handke, about the depth of Zarko’s love for and commitment to Anne, about my fortunate partnership with Lyn, about John Smith — a graduate student friend of mine who had met Zarko at the University of Tuebingen, which had led, a year later, to my meeting Zarko there as well.

Over the conversation I heard snatches of jazz saxophone. I looked out the open window and saw a dark figure bent over a tenor sax at the Oxin Persian/Mediterranean Restaurant. That’s Nicolas Simion, Zarko said.

While Zarko stayed at our table writing in his notebook, I leapt across the street and stood on the sidewalk outside the wide open doors of the restaurant. Simion and an accordion player were in the middle of a set of jazz standards, a long medley of tunes introduced only to establish chord changes that the two musicians then improvised on at length and with obvious relish.

Relish is a good word for Simion. Slowly approaching 60, he still has the enthusiasm of a young man, the broad smile of a man happy to be alive, the charismatic presence of a born performer. I stood transfixed, witnessed a joyful musician utterly serious about his music.

I caught the accordionist’s eye in the middle of a discursive solo and nodded my pleasure. He nodded back. I applauded at the end of one of Simion’s solos and he turned to nod his thanks. A couple walking by stopped to join me as audience, as did a young man walking alone. The musicians played the first bars of the bouncy “my favorite things” and just as I thought I knew what to expect they accelerated  the tempo and shifted to a dissonance that required further acceleration which led to a wild balkan rush that reminded me of the gypsy music in Emir Kusturica’s films. While I looked around to see if any flocks of Kusturican geese might be coming my way, the set ended with an exuberant flourish.

I bought two CD’s from the musicians: the first by Martin Lubenov’s Orkestar, led by the accordionist — “dui droma/two roads” and the other recorded by The Nicolas Simion Group — “Transylvanian Jazz.” I crossed the street with my treasures and found that Anne had arrived. Sorry, I said, I couldn’t tear myself away. I don’t think either of them held it against me.

We finished our dinner and crossed the street to have dessert. The last set ended just as we sat down. Simion came over to say hello to his friend Zarko and Zarko introduced me as the person who had written a piece about him for the Salt Lake Observer. Yes, Simion said, I have a translation on my website:

http://www.nicolassimion.com/press.php?lg=en&are=Various

Please accept this CD as a kind of thank you, he said, handing me “Nicolas Simion / Florian Weber Duo: Classic Meets Jazz Vol. 1.”

After a tasty dessert with coffee, Anne and Zarko and I walked home. Almost 15 years after first hearing Simion on this very street, I thought, here I was again, filled with the playful complexities of his music. Filled with joy.

. . . . . . . . . . excerpt from the Salt Lake Observer piece:

But now the bombing has stopped, and Cologne’s “Balkan Forum,” headed by Dužan Milosević (a formerly innocuous name), is sponsoring a jazz night in the Litho Restaurant. It’s a noisy, smoke-filled place, seating a hundred people at most. Black-and-white photos decorate the walls, and a short-haired dog begs for scraps. Featured tonight is the Nicolas Simion Quintet, with Simion, a broad-chested, black-bearded Romanian, on tenor sax, a young and talented flugelhorn player whose name I didn’t catch, and a rhythm section of stubble-faced, slack-jawed Mihal Farcas (Romanian) on drums, Macedonian Martin Gjakonovski (who appears with Dusko Goykovich on “A Night in Skopje”) on bass, and the quick-fingered German Norbert Scholly on guitar.

I sit with Dušan and Anne and Žarko at a tiny table tucked into the armpit of the bandstand. By the time the evening is over the table is buried under a dozen beer and wine glasses, two bags of tobacco, three packs of cigarette paper, a pack of cigarettes, two overflowing ashtrays, a tape recorder, a pack of batteries, a sketch pad for the snakey haired house artist, assorted pens and pencils, Simion’s soprano case, a candle, a dozen CD’s for sale, and loose cash for the CD’s that have sold.

[sketch by Benno Alfred Maria Turke]

            The crowd of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, and at least one American warm quickly to the quintet. In his freely ranging solos Simion leaves no doubt about his debt to Ornette Coleman. Simion’s tunes also hint at the oriental scales and rhythms of Balkan folk music, songs like “Geamparale,” based on a Romanian wedding dance in 9/8  time (reminiscent of Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo a la Turk” – or better said, Brubeck’s tune, as its title suggests, is reminiscent of music from the Balkans).

The Author Approaches the Houseboat on the Sava

[both photos, as also the one of boards across the water in a previous post, courtesy of the Momo Kapor Foundation]

The Afternoon on the Sava

Every country has its rivers, he told me. That long afternoon it was the Sava River in Serbia, just a few hundred yards—several kilometers?—from where the river, more vast than any river in the American West that was his home, flowed into the Danube, a storied confluence under the gaze of Belgrade’s Kalemegdan Fortress.

A houseboat on the Sava served as gathering place, a rustic restaurant with no sign to announce its presence. If some actually found their way to the houseboat, as had Ljiljane and her husband writer and painter Momo Kapor (may he rest in peace), they generally did so by boat.

His own call had come in response to questions about a translation, Scott said. The Author had written: “On April 8^th I shall be in Belgrade / Serbia. Zarko will come too, also Zlatko. And you??” On the back flap of the envelope, below F-92370 Chaville, was an Arabic word neither he nor I could decipher.

Setting out from the Kapor house in Belgrade, the friends, fellow travelers, distant neighbors, and two journalists—Serbian, French, Austrian, and American—soon formed a column. Mladen Materic’s little Puegot, Ljiljane Kapor’s big Jeep Cherokee, and a taxi wound off the backbone of the white city onto the Gazela Bridge, the third from the mouth of the Sava.

The bridge closest to the Danube was once called the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity. More recently it has traded its Communist optimism for a name with literary pretensions: Branko’s Bridge. It is not clear, however, which Branko is meant. It may be Branko Radicevic, the Romantic poet who died in 1853 in Vienna. Or the name may refer to the writer Branko Copic, who committed suicide by jumping off the bridge in 1984 at the age of 69.

Between Branko’s Bridge and the Old Sava Bridge, the second bridge upriver from the Danube, stands what is now called the Old Fairground, a complex built in 1938 to host international trade fairs. After the German occupation in 1941, the site was transformed into the Sajmiste Concentration Camp, housing Jews from Belgrade and the surrounding area. The inmates were systematically starved, beaten, and shot. For efficiency, 100 at a time were gassed in the five-ton Saurer truck operated by SS officers. In his novel Götz and Meyer, David Albahari’s narrator thinks his way into the minds and lives of the truck drivers (“Is that what I want to do: to bring Götz and Meyer back to the shadows in the former Fairgrounds camp, to give them life so that, quickly, quickly, I make them die?”).

This narrator, however, has another story to tell, one in which the Jeep bumped up over the curb at the end of the streetcar line in New Belgrade and ascended a short, steep dirt path to the top of a dike. The little Peugeot, skillfully driven, eased tentatively over the curb and up the dike. The taxi followed a more circuitous route, but found the top of the dike as well.