BELGRADE (28 page)

Belgrade filmmakers began to take a more independent stance in the 1960s, which evolved into a trend known as the Black Wave (Crni talas). This radical group of directors had at its centre Aleksandar Petrović, Živojin Pavlović and Dušan Makavejev. They risked government displeasure by offering individual perspectives on social themes, the meaning of suffering in the war of national liberation and personal visions of uncertainty about the future. Their work is often pessimistic, filled with the realities of urban squalor, exposing the gulf between official aspirations and the lack of direction and drive of a new generation. Their world was one of ambiguity, filled with primitive and unknown appetites that can swallow beauty, innocence and intelligence.

One of the first films in this wave was Pavlović’s
When I’m Pale and Dead
(Kad budem bled i mrtav, 1960). The story is set in the post-war period concerning a young man who is a drifter with no purpose in life. He tries his hand at singing, and finds that his poor voice is acceptable in small kafanas or army camps where the audience is not too discriminating. He goes to Belgrade to try his luck but faces two problems: his lack of real talent is recognized, and his choice of material—old-fashioned ballads—is at odds with the city’s demand for western pop music. He returns to the provinces and the corruption of communist officials who use their influence to satisfy their desires for money and women. Confronting one of these men, the disillusioned popular singer is shot and killed. He dies in a most undignified position, in an outdoor lavatory with his trousers round his ankles.

In the end, the authorities decided that these directors’ work overstepped the political boundaries on which the party insisted. In their hands, contemporary life was a struggle for survival set against the backdrop of the new slums created by massive post-war movements of population. They focused attention on themes of social dislocation and individual alienation, which was seen as too critical of contemporary Yugoslav reality. So the Black Wave came to an end.

The turning point for literary production after 1948 came in 1951 with the publication of Dobrica Ćosić’s novel
Far Away Is the Sun
(Daleko je sunce). The story follows a fairly standard Partisan narrative but with the additional themes of doubt and possible ideological miscalculation, which were not typical at the time. More generally, there are few examples from this period of the kind of Belgrade literature that had flourished before the Second World War. The authorities did not forbid such expression, but neither was it part of their agenda for cultural policy. The city was not a centre of Partisan activity during the war; it was occupied and then liberated only in the latter stages of the war. It was also a place with many physical reminders of the previous regime. The communist authorities were anxious to promote their arrival as year zero, and to suppress memory of what existed before them.

Literary life in the 1950s was dominated by the polemics between the Modernists grouped around the journal
Delo
and the Realists around
Savremenik
. The differences between the two groups were founded in their attitudes to the role of the literary work. The Modernists emphasized the autonomy of the text and its potential meanings from direct social and political engagement. The Realists regarded literature as an expression of social forces that could not and should not be separated from that world as its raw material. In some senses, the latter were closer to official views on the responsibility of the artist to practise his or her art with an eye to the possible influence the text might have on the public imagination. Yet it would be too simplistic to see their differences just along these lines. By the end of the decade their polemical relationship was over, as literature followed the same kind of cosmopolitan and varied styles to be found in other creative spheres.

The city became a literary topic during this period in the work of two authors who came from very different poetic backgrounds, Dragoslav Mihailović and Borislav Pekić. After the debates between the Modernists and Realists most writers wanted to take literature out of the public sphere and tended to produce work with little connection to contemporary life, especially with its more squalid aspects. Literary prose became more contemplative. Then, at the end of the 1960s, a new wave of authors, most probably under the influence of the Black Wave in film, saw literature and particularly the novel as a source for depicting the new urban reality. Mihailović was one of their number. He published his novel
When Pumpkins Blossomed
(Kad su cvetale tikve) in 1968. The narrator is a Yugoslav worker living in Sweden and recalling the events that forced him to leave Belgrade some twenty years earlier. He reveals how he lived in one of Belgrade’s poorer districts, and in the aimless poverty of the immediate post-war years took up boxing. While undergoing his compulsory army service he hears that his sister has died. She was raped and, as a result, committed suicide. Learning that the rapist was a member of a rival gang from another district, he resolves to take his revenge. Eventually catching up with his quarry, he beats him to death and, when he feels that he may be arrested for murder, flees the country.

The novel was one of the first to make use of post-war Belgrade not just as a setting for action, but also as part of the structure of the novel and its fictional world. The places where events happen are real, and the grinding difficulties of the urban environment in this period are relevant to understanding motivation. Characters speak the authentic language of the Belgrade streets, and their mental and emotional horizons are bounded by that same geography. The action of the novel even includes an obvious allusion to the arrest and transportation of people from Belgrade to Goli Otok in the purges following 1948.

Borislav Pekić published his novel
The Houses of Belgrade
(Hodačašće Arsenije Njegovana, 1970) two years later. The narrator and hero of the story is Arsenije Njegovan, who has not left his apartment since 1941. He was a landlord in Belgrade before the Second World War, the owner of numerous houses which he rented to tenants. The novel is set in 1968 when Arsenije decides to leave his flat for the first time in over 25 years. He resolves on a pilgrimage round his former properties, thinking that he is still their owner, unaware that the war and the subsequent arrival of a communist government have changed his city.

Pekić’s urban landscape takes on a much greater symbolic presence than is the case in Mihailović’s novel. As he goes around recalling his Belgrade of 1941, Arsenije remembers the event that frightened him into his seclusion. Caught up in the demonstrations at the end of March against the pact that Prince Paul signed with Hitler, he was badly injured and has been unable to face the world since. Now, once more, he witnesses another demonstration on the streets of Belgrade, this time the student protests of 1968. He sees these events as symptoms of the collapse of order, the actions of the crowd contrasting with his houses, which represent examples of symmetry and beauty.

Arsenije is obsessed by the houses which he once owned, giving them names and personalities. In his vision of the world, all problems are eventually seen as issues of architectural or urban design. When watching the demonstrating students in early June 1968 he gets into conversation with some fellow-bystanders. They discuss the events unfolding in front of them, the behaviour of the mob and its destruction of property. They are aghast at the display of lawlessness, while Arsenije feels more for the hurt caused to dwellings than to people. The bystanders comment on the police response, while one of them calls the situation “a political error”. Arsenije offers an alternative explanation:

It is difficult to imagine such sentiments finding their way into a published novel elsewhere in Eastern Europe at the time.

At the end of Tito’s final decade in Belgrade the city was again represented in fictional works, but this time with a potentially broader meaning in a short story by Danilo Kiš and a film by Slobodan Šijan. The film,
Who’s That Singing over There
(Ko to tamo peva), made in 1980, has been voted the most popular piece of cinema made in Serbia. It tells the story of a ramshackle bus with its strange conductor and driver, taking a group of passengers from a village somewhere in the Serbian countryside to Belgrade. The journey takes place in 1941, on the very eve of Germany’s attack on the city. The passengers represent people from all walks of life and all ages, as if a microcosm of the country itself. They include two gypsies, itinerant musicians, who introduce the film with a song. The journey extends into the night when the passengers come across the army making preparations for something, although the danger is not named. The atmosphere is generally light-hearted but as the bus approaches its destination the mood begins to change. One of the passengers is sure that his wallet has been stolen, and all eyes turn inevitably to the gypsies. Daylight is breaking, the bus is entering the outskirts of the city, and unwarranted violence is about to be inflicted on two innocent men. Then, without warning, the bus is hit by a bomb dropped by the Luftwaffe. It explodes and the bus is blown over, the sudden silence indicating that everyone is dead. But the two gypsies emerge as the only survivors, and the film closes as it opened with their song. It is a symbolic journey of a country heading toward a catastrophe of which it is completely unaware. Looking back on the film from a vantage point after the year 2000, it seems to suggest a much wider resonance than that of Belgrade facing the Second World War. It was made in the same year that Tito died, when another unseen hand began work at the long process of unravelling Yugoslavia.

From
Who’s That Singing over There

The short story by Danilo Kiš, “Encyclopaedia of the Dead” (Enciklopedija mrtvih), was published in 1981 and contains another kind of symbolic reference. The narrator is visiting Sweden when one night she is taken to a strange library comprising a dimly lit series of rooms, each chamber full of volumes chained to the shelves. Each room contains books beginning with the same letter in alphabetical order. She quickly realizes that the library is the Encyclopaedia of the Dead, with a reference to each departed soul. She races to the volumes beginning with M to look for the entry on her father who died just two months earlier. She finds the entry, which is both a document of his life and at the same time an account of his country in the twentieth century as it affected him. A Serb, born in Croatia, he moves to Belgrade where he studies surveying and eventually is one of the men given the task of making maps of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Staying in Belgrade during the Second World War, he witnesses events under the occupation, then the liberation of the city by the Partisans amidst scenes of violence. After the war he returns to his profession in order to produce maps for the new order:

The post my father held after the war in the land office, which undertook to re-measure and re-record the land, as is usual after major historic upheavals, is accorded the detailed treatment it demands: quality of terrain, title deeds, new names for former German villages and new names for freshly colonized settlements.

At the end, however, after all this careful elaboration it turns out that the whole episode has been a dream, and the narrator did not read the Encyclopaedia of the Dead. There is here a similarity with Pekić’s
The Houses of Belgrade
in that the city provides a solid framework around which the story is embellished. The presence of Belgrade is stronger than the fragility of fiction and stronger than the changes and transformations that have shaped its development during the twentieth century.