Skin Colour Cloud Nebojša Lujanović; translation by Ivana Ostojčić 1. He found himself on a road, a wide and vast one, and this fact struck him like a bolt of lightning, here on a Čazmatrans coach, seat 32, that he felt he had to grip the seat as tightly as they do on aeroplanes which plunge into what we call meripe [1] and know nothing of, just as he didn’t know where or to whom he was going. Nervously jerking his head, he tried to grab hold of any familiar object within his sight. The seat next to him was empty, the brown tattered upholstery evaporating a stench and shaping by his side an ethereal creature of disgust and nausea, so close that he would fraternise with it if only he knew the language and skills two people employ to develop fondness and affection. On the sticky floor by his feet, in the gap between the seat and the opened overhead compartment there was no luggage or grocery bag, nothing. Only later he noticed on himself some dry leaves of grass poking out his lightweight jacket. Finally a connection to the night he spent in the bushes behind the Bus Station, sweltering and fatigued like a hunted animal. One way or another, that night belonged to a past life and only a short spell of sleep on the coach stood between him and the previous night, like a small meripe with this chaotic resurrection. Are these 90 kilometres per hour on the Zagreb – Banja Luka motorway fast enough to escape this life, he felt like asking the driver. Otherwise, this journey is utterly senseless both to him and the coach, him being the only passenger.
He was flooded by the heavy air oozing with the smell of worn out rubber on the gaping front doors. The thought of a terrible defeat was another incubus on his burdened chest. The weight of centuries of lost battles, right here on this seat, in a seemingly peaceful body with only slightly sweaty palms. Asphalt, road, macadam; so many attempts at sticking around, of grabbing a firm hold of the ground, of avoiding all those paths that promise a lot but deliver almost nothing. So much effort to hinder from inside that damned wheel from the blue-green background, grinding destinies in the senseless wear of distant stretches. So many retreats in this predetermined failure of being forever a foreigner and an intruder, with only one strategy at hand: to humbly persevere, to suffer, but to stay, always to stay in the hope that in time he would blend in. And here he is, on the road, without a single belonging save for two fears: of enraged persecutors on one side and of heartless foster home providers on the other side of the road. The flag wheel is turning again and the national anthem is performed by the hiss of air coming from the cranky doors. A wire fence is stretching by the road, dotted and pierced with slender plant stems like prisoners’ hands sticking out of concentration camps. He shivered as though he traced another landmine inscribed in his genetic code. The undergrowth neglecting the clear borderlines and piercing to the other side was punished with a thick layer of dust, the solid cover that eternally embalmed it in a crazy attempt to escape. In the distance, windowless houses like faceless spectres. He takes a closer look, but the houses drift away too fast. He patiently waits for the next one, although the visual strain 3
intensifies his nausea. He realises the house windows are barred. Has he come this far already? A flash of yellow appears by the roadside, a phantom he once saw but failed to secure it everlastingly in his memory, overcome by disbelief. A yellow spot, a yellow square, a sign, letter‌ Yes, it says Zagreb. The sign is crossed out with a black line. Doviđenja. Goodbye. Aufwiedersehen. Dikhamen. [2] After sixteen years of walking with his head down, of speaking in a low tone, of looking aside and of a dumb smile of approval, it all came to an end this morning with one brief look over his shoulder as he stepped aboard the coach. Fugitives cannot afford the luxury of long goodbyes. For the first time he felt for his persecutors something more than indifference. They denied him the time for a long ominous contempt while he was at the station, watching dozens of buses vomiting out all those people in ragged coats bedecked with grocery bags. Beneath the sugar-coating of brightly lit facades and geometrically planted flowers, this is a place that mirrored the soul of the city. Subdued differences, marginalised newcomers, unprocessed raw mass arriving too quickly and too suddenly, clogging the blood stream and threatening to burst from overcrowded byways and isolated neighbourhoods, to inundate the well-kept insides of the heart of the city. Jek Rom majcra [3], he fidgeted in his seat so that he may delve more comfortably into this pleasant idea. And a hoard of new intruders. The worst kind. Their own. A couple hundred people, just this morning, and only him in the opposite direction. In this natural exchange of genetic material, the city he was leaving behind nevertheless came to a stickier end. 4
(…) 2. (…) He put his trampy hands in his pockets and his backpack on; the road to Bročice is ahead, the first step on his descend to the dark core. For fifteen years, ever since he moved from Bosnia to Zagreb, Enis never stepped foot out of the city. Only now, on this godforsaken road, on his way to where nobody can guarantee anything, did he feel what bibi Seniha’s djili sang of, Djelem, djelem, araklem vi e bahtalen Romen [4], so now, as any selfrespecting movie-type Gypsy, he should feel a romantic zeal, happy to be alone and starving in this damned middle-of-nowhere, on his way to where everybody returns from. However, this is not going to happen. He would love to enjoy a life as dull as a most trifling habit: a familiar arrangement in the room, a steady couch moulded to the contours of his body, a domestic smell of upholstery, a table and a lamp, like a glowing sun his own private galaxy revolves around. Before him a lowland, short grass as far as the eye can see, with an odd woody island here and there. Cracks in the road like tree rings betray the age of the concrete and the time passed since life had drained out of this place. The road slithers imperceptibly, only the concrete more and more often gives way to gravel or mud whose softness heralds the closeness of the Sava river. Overflown streams followed, puddles of spring rain engulfing parts of the road, and although no river was yet in sight, he gradually became one with water. He didn’t even notice his wet feet in soaking shoes. 5
When he left behind the last of the last houses on the far left, and the soil became sticky and drenched, he felt a mild quake. With every step it grew stronger. First he suspected of a fit of hunger, fatigue or fear. Then he made sure his step was firm. He looked into the lake consuming a part of the road. The perfectly still surface was reflecting the blue spring sky sprinkled with tiny dense clouds. Not even a ripple, nothing. Silence everywhere, only he trembled from the smothered within. He stopped walking; it seemed that the trembling had its own undoubted rhythm, that the intervals were regular. And every third or fourth blast was joined by a new sound squired by sparkly shudders, like a pick-axe or a shovel coming across a rock by accident. Perhaps it was that rhythm, the regular strikes of a pick-axe on the ground, thousands of pick-axes in harmony shaking the earth. The sounds grow deeper and deeper, it is the pick-axes over the gaping pits, hovered by sinister threats. He speeded up his pace into a funny stroll of bend knees, fixing his gaze upon the two wooden buildings in the distance as a saving grace destined to take him out of the deepening mud, bulging and quivering from underneath. This stickiness now seemed like evil djinns’ attempt to frame him pod rom đi ko čačipe [5]. These magnificent puddles reflecting the blue sky and soaking the surrounding ground, waiting like fly traps for a random wanderer. He started to avoid them, introducing meandering trajectories into his already funny pace. The wooden house was a disappointment, derelict boards with no windows or doors, but nevertheless it gave Enes shelter. He sat in front of it, in a 6
leeway protecting him from the trembling sound following him since BroÄ?ice. Finally he managed to escape it. He wearily sat on the thick wooden floorboards, scattered and overgrown by grass. His head fell to his hands resting on the knees, but then he was suddenly roused by a whistle of a train engine. He looked up and down, dead sure he fell asleep for a second, and then again he heard the whistle and the tracks screeching. On his back he felt the density of the air pushing a hundred tons of surging mass. He looks around, there is no one to be seen, only distant horizons overgrown by uniform tall grass, and yet he is aware of the thickness of the moment and place, of the atoms of a terrible crash trying to engulf thirty carriages of intertwined bodies. Grinding heavy doors, an awkward jump onto the sand, legs torpid from standing, downfalls, shouts instead of answers, a sound of lost steps colliding until they are finally tamed and directed southward of the train station, where Enes also repaired to escape these shadowy spectres, unaware that his trajectory now coincides with the colony of nameless and shapeless bodies, that he was walking along with a troop of enslaved ghosts. The ghost colony in the parallel world marched along predetermined routes; only anger and sorrow burdened their weightless bodies and prevented them from floating off. Some came from the railway station, dropped out of trains, pale and frightened, others came by foot across the fields, armed with horse carts and baskets. Further ahead, at the brick mill, hands stick out of the railing, dozens of similar and yet different dialects. Behind it, two or three forges, orders trying to outcry the sound of striking the hot iron. 7
Narrow blades discernible in the heated mass, the old ones already blunted from use. Down at the end of the village another party of ghosts separated towards the river bank. Overburdened cart wheels screech but still cannot subdue the voices: “Male, soke male…” “Gava hi o feri. Parne, a men sam parne Roma, amaro del hi o Alahi…” “Devla, čhavorale! Munre čhavorale!” “Beš mirno, phenav beš mirno!” [6] The routes intersect right by the sign in the middle of the junction, but the translucent bodies are unaware of each other, just like Enes is not fully aware of their presence. Only splintered voices, which he refuses to acknowledge and connect, can reach him, all those atavisms thrown out on the banks like driftwood by this flooding waves. He is letting the mounds of these voices strand on his weary conscience without the will or power to understand, all until he sees a clear name on a sign – Jasenovac. And a secret encrypted code he read from it made him run for the Sava. Perhaps he thought the river would help. Rivers always help the Roma, it was a relic of an embryonic instinct that switched on inside him. The water would wash away melalipe [7]. He didn’t realise he was standing where the dregs were so thick that all the waters that have flown through the banks of the Sava since forever could not rinse him clean. Nor he realised he was running south, to where the bloodshed was even bloodier. He stepped on the Sava bridge, elevated and firm over the menacing silence of the rising force, the commanding water fed by melting snows and spring 8
rains. He can see it clearly from above: a string stretched between the two shores is tense and cuts through the breeze spilling over the waters like a razor. Then he detects a scene, which outlines only after a careful stare, like those hidden drawings in a packed bunch of seemingly random dots. A ferry raft is hanging from a cable. It leaves behind a wake of cries, shouts, threats and shots, and on the other shore it is welcomed by dead silence. Two guards and three workers squeezing on the raft, dragging the cable and wearing hats to hide their eyes from the sun and their faces from shame or terror, immersed to the knees in intertwining bodies. Not a soft mass of limp flesh, but an ossified cobweb of interwoven limbs gnawed by hunger. One of these limbs broke in the joint over the edge of the raft and remained immersed in the serene river surface. As it moved, the raft left behind a few yards of rippled rays, until they ironed out and vanished. Just like alav sewn once onto one of these skeletons would also vanish. Just the carriage number (4-F), capacity (300), date (May 1942) and status (approved). This was the only alav that documented them. Enis speeds up his pace trying to leave the raft behind, what else was he supposed to do with a bunch of nameless bodies. They have nothing in common except for the colour of morchi, not even time or place, no matter how much these phantoms wished to bridge the gap between them. Their fate is sealed, it treads along the firm line of the cable whose end is tied to the final point, on the other side, it cannot be prolonged or tied to some other shore. These ghosts’ unrest is pointless if their awakening can serve only as a painful and dull acknowledgment of the same inescapable đestino. [8] 9
As soon as he stepped foot on the other bank, he realised what a mistake he had made. The dregs were even thicker, the nervous steps he made in the attempt to leave the river behind only dragged him deeper into the sticky mass. He tried to fix his gaze forward, but he couldn’t avoid the spectres in the far corners of his sight, forged of visibly denser darker air. Blinking and waving his head would banish their outlines only for a short spell. His unstoppable send-off had begun and it made no sense to try and steal away from it, right by the road sign announcing the houses of Nova Gradina and the village of Uštice. He kept to the narrow asphalt road no people or machines have long stridden on. The road was corroded by undergrowth, but his gaze kept wandering more and more away from it, as though he decided to listen. The spectres sat on small hillocks of dirt piled up by the roadside, holding hands so as to make a ring around the bent knees (men) or crooked against the hillock with a shoulder mildly dislocated under the weight (women). “I was born a Petrović, I’m a blacksmith and me vam mol sunakaj.[9] That is what my masters used to say, that is how gadjos graced me, that is what my Duka called me because our two children never knew of hunger. Keep those hands! Dig them out! Take them with you! My Duka no longer needs them, there she is, in that pit with the children, buried. See, everything is rotten apart from my sunakune vastengo.[10] Take them, it’s a pity, a pity of del…” “I am the oldest and yet the only one left of the Nikolićs, the only dej not lying with her children. And the enemies buried them right under my nose, so I can smell but can’t reach them. They are deep in the pit, they simply 10
piled them up. Their necks are cracked open, not a sound they make. But I don’t need to hear them, I know their smell. There they are, all shuffled up, but there. Someone needs to dig us out and couple us. Bone by bone. Someone needs to rearrange our underground world. No dej has ever been denied to lie next to her children. Bango hi![11] Whoever turns their head away from my tears bango hi, may they never see their children’s face again…” “Know you, remember, write down that I, Antun Šaju, am a white Gypsy and that they killed me, bludgeoned me to death, to the injustice of our dear Allah, whom I failed to remember on time and to whom I didn’t give a single alav as they were beating the air out of my lungs with their shoulder stocks, until they hammered the life out of me and threw my by the road like a cigarette butt. I have nothing to do with the fate that befell me and I know of the list, letter by letter, proclaiming so and so, but there is no rhyme or reason here… I travelled half the world and traded with just as much, but while they were passing a judgment on me I couldn’t utter a single word. That is why I now speak endlessly and won’t stop until it is cleared out, until it is written down and verified that it was by injustice and mistake that I lie here among the dead, where I don’t belong. Did you hear me, can someone explain?...” As he was approaching the great ravine just outside Uštica, a sharp pit whose steep slopes were covered in green slime which directed the rains down to the hole, the voices grew in numbers and transformed into an undistinguishable cacophony tearing him apart. He kept running away from 11
the unrelenting voices that wanted to be remembered or accounted for, even though they were nothing to him. He ran all until he came out to a clearing where all the voices converged into one single voice, the voice of Sanda. Another accusing voice… [1] Death (Romany). [2] Goodbye (Romany). [3] One Roma less (Romany). [4] I have travelled and travelled long roads, and even met some happy Gypsies (Romany). [5] On the path of truth (Romany). [6] “Mother, why, mother…” / “This is a mistake… White, we are white Gypsies… our Allah…” / “Oh God, children! My children!” / “Calm down, I say, calm down!” (Romany) [7] Impurity (Romany). [8] Destiny (Romany). [9] My hands are golden (Romany). [10] Golden hands (Romany). [11] He is guilty! (Romany)
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