Zeljko Prodanovic
The Tale of a Singer
One day I sat in front of the temple of god’s tear in Baalbek, listening
to the crickets singing joyfully in the crown of the cypress tree, when
a young man came along riding on a two-humped Bactrian camel, a
balalaika slung over his shoulder. as he came closer he smiled at me
innocently, then got off the camel and sat down beside me. and as if
we had known each other for years, I would even say for centuries, the
young man sadly sighed and began to talk.
“Dear friend,” he said, “after all that has happened to me I can’t tell
you for certain whether what I am going to tell you has really happened.
More precisely, whether it happened to me or to some other man who
lived instead of me. In other words, I don’t even know whether I have
lived at all.
“So, if I have existed or if I still exist, then my name is ashug-Kerrib
and I come from Samarkand. and my sufferings began the day I met
alma.
“alma (Baal-ma or the crying tear) was – and you can take my word
for it – the most beautiful girl under the sun and I was the best poet
in Samarkand. as you may guess, love flamed my heart and warmed
my soul.
“But then shocking news came to me – alma got married!
“She went to Cordoba,” they told me, “and there she became the
sixth wife of caliph al-gizah.” at that moment it seemed as if I saw
death itself, but I quickly pulled myself together and made a salutary
decision: I left Samarkand and, firmly decided, set out to Cordoba. I
had no foreboding, however, how long and troubled this journey
would be.
“first, I arrived in Shiraz where I met the famous poet and astron-
omer Khayyam and told him about the misfortune that had befallen
me. He listened to me attentively, and when I finished, here is what he
told me.
“as far as I know,” Khayyam said, “the distance between two stars is
smaller than the distance between two hearts. So, your sufferings are
in vain. But since alma, as you say, is so beautiful, then you, ashug-
Kerrib, can with good reason be proud of the beauty of your sufferings,
worthy of the best poet from Samarkand.”
“I took Khayyam’s words as comfort, and then left Shiraz. I went
to Palestine with the intention to embark a ship that would take me
to Cordoba, but soon a new misfortune befell me. apparently, the
Christians and Saracens were fighting over their holy land, but I
didn’t know that.
“As soon as I arrived in gaza some brigands intercepted me and,
with no explanation, clapped me into a dungeon. I tried to explain to
them that I belonged to Zarathustra’s faith and that I had nothing to
do with their war, but they told me that it would be much wiser to keep
my mouth shut.
“among the prisoners, who, with no exception, were cruel and biza-
rre, I would single out one man, whose fate in a strange way interlaced
with mine.
“ I am from the Sahara,” said al-Korta, as the man was called, “from
the proud tribe of Tuareg. When I realized that the arabian bedouins
had forced my ancestors to accept their faith, I raided the mosque in
fes and went abroad.
“on the shores of the red Sea I came across the Carmatians, who
claimed that the Prophet was a liar and that the world was not created
by allah – but by Satan. I joined them and when the caliph from Bagh-
dad captured our chief and put him to death, we ravaged Mecca and
took the Black Stone with us. We threw it into the heart of the desert
and the soldiers of Baghdad’s caliph found it only twenty years later.
“Soon, however, I realized that I was neither a robber nor a murde-
rer and that I am strongest when I fight alone. I went to Persia where I
fought imam al-Sabah, because he was a tyrant, but I also fought the
robbers who robbed his caravans.
“and when these bedouins arrived, carrying the cross in one hand
and the sabre in the other, I came to Palestine. They captured me in the
battle by a purple river and that is how I got to the dungeon.
“That’s my story,” al-Korta said. “and you are going to Cordoba,” he
added, “and you will cover such a long way because of a woman. I’m
not going to persuade you that this is folly, although I know perfectly
well that love doesn’t exist. But I have to tell you this.
“It was in this very dungeon that Samson, the great hero from Phoe-
nicia, also spent his life. after leaving Baalbek, where he had spent a
year as alleluia, the one who carries the sun, he left his mistress astar-
ta and went out into the world. He wandered from town to town, flying
from one woman to another, and then he arrived in gaza and met
Delilah.
“and do you know what this bitch did to him? While he was asleep
in her arms, she cut his hair – the source of his strength. The Philisti-
nes then blinded him and threw him into the dungeon, where he spun
the mill wheel and ground Philistine corn. and so he who felt no fear
when faced by sixty bedouins and six lions at the same time, was over-
come by a woman! and now you go to Cordoba!”
“I spent three years in the dungeon in gaza. at the end of the third
year we received news that the Christians had suffered a crushing de-
feat and that, in retaliation, they would put us to death.
“The following morning they took us out and I watched with my
own eyes as they cut off heads, one after another. When it came to al-
Korta’s turn, he looked at me and smiled. “Death is a secret,” he whis-
pered, “just like love,” – and then his black head rolled into the dust.
Ranko Pavlovic
Emptiness
Two shadows in the empty room formed a right angle. one of them
stretched across the rotten floor with tiles spaced out just enough to
insert one of those thinner books in them, recognizable by the layer of
dust underneath it, so much darker it looked wet as if it was splashed
with water. another one was what remained of a skinny girl right befo-
re herexistence poured into a shadow. She stood with her back towards
the opening that once served as a window. Behind the girl one could see
a small square of lightened up sky bruised by redness of a burning sun
vanishing in the mouth of the nearby hill. Her eyes reflected disappe-
aring shades of flames of her former life that one might think she squ-
andered away.
a moment earlier, in a narrow alley, full of gaps and scattered gar-
bage, she paused for a moment beside him, piercing him with a look,
through which she wriggled to the icy lumps of anxiety hidden deep
within his pupils. She signaled with a slight movement of her eyes to
follow her through the opening where the door once used to be. They
found themselves in a ruined room with beams of spring afternoon
light sifting through the wracked roof and sporadically broken ceiling.
He remained near the entrance, while she approached the hole on the
opposite side.
– I know you. You are Ivan Chabrilo – an empty voice interwoven
with nicotine clanged through the gaps of a damp room.
He had nothing to answer on that, he knew he was Ivan Chabrilo.
He pulled the cigarettes out of his pocket and started approaching her
to offer some, when she stopped him with a stretched out hand. Ivan
returned the pack into his pocket.
– I am nadine.
That was news to him, but he did not feel the need to comment on it,
just as he didn’t a moment ago when she said his name.
nadine could have been seventeen, twenty, or thirty-five years old.
It wasn’t just the darkness in the room with walls long blistered with
mortar where nothing but contours of her face were looming up by
sunset behind her back that made him doubt her age. It was her dried
lifeless body, worn out shabby clothes and rough voice more suited for
someone whose bones witnessed many decades.
He noticed something behind her heels, right where the two sha-
dows (shadow of her body and its reflection on the floor) formed an
angle – there were three or four plantlets peaking an inch from the dust
and striving towards the hole that served as a window. It must have
been the birds who carried the seeds in their beaks or feces, he thought.
Perhaps the wind brought a few drops of rain through the opening
so the seeds started growing and rushing to escape their prison of
tight membrane that was suffocating them the same way tight walls
suffocate the man trapped inside.
If a plant – he was surprised how he even thought of this – has a pa-
rent, is it a seed or is it a plant that creates the seed? Perhaps, in this
case, the parent is everything around – it is the rottenness from which
plantlets draw food, or the morning dew that moistens the dry rot.
Maybe it is the light itself, as well as moisture and nourishing juices
from the rot that are keeping the plants alive.
all beings have a parent, and even though we often do not know
who that might be, it is a question of more philosophical rather than
genealogical nature, he concluded.
– You do not know or you do not want to answer?
The question slammed into the silence, onto the fragile plantlets –
startling him thinking it will break them.
– or maybe you weren’t listening to me?
– I wasn’t, he admitted without hesitation.
– I asked why you were standing in the middle of the street? Were
you deciding to take a little walk or immediately enter the building
opposite from here?
– Some … something like that – he stuttered.
– I have been following you for months now – she said quietly, and
when he wanted to express his surprise, or perhaps indignation, she
silenced him by placing her twig-like finger on his lips.
– I know that you go to the one-bedroom apartment on the second
floor every evening, I even know the woman’s name written on the
nameplate on that door that stands there as a lonely pine on the cliff.
and I know that you leave the building before midnight, slowly dra-
wing the front door behind yourself so that the creaking won’t wake
up the neighbours.
The sun is now long gone, devoured by the hill at last. In the black
corners of the room the cobwebs of darkness started taking their toll.
– That really doesn’t…
The thin dry twig-like finger on her even thinner ash-violet lips
stopped his sentence before it even entered his thoughts.
Penetrating creak ruffled the damp darkness in the corners. a mo-
ment later there was another one, and another one…
a tiny mouse ran by the girls heels. faster than a blink of an eye. Su-
ddenly a bigger shadow rushed after it. Must be a mother, Ivan gues-
sed. Mother always feels when something is wrong, when her children
might be in danger f and she is ready to rush after to protect them.
– I saw you going to liberators Street, I had followed you for months.
His thoughts left the couple of rodents and plunged back into the
void to return to the face of an ambiguous figure similar to gaps in gray
darkness. Her face.
– You went there in the evenings but this time you didn’t go upstairs
because it’s a one-story building with no nameplate on the door. I
couldn’t find out the name of that woman with weather-beaten face