Marko Vešović: The polish cavalry

ARS No.4 year 2003 DEATHLESS MOMENT A sniper is shooting on a street crossing. Two girls, breathless from running. They exude heat, perfumed/scented, like silk underwear being ironed. One of them doesn't have a hairdo, but bristling wheat sprouts on her head. She's fuming, thundering, and cursing at the sniper: I seem to be watching, like out of a window, a glorious storm! The other's words are pleasant like the flapping of an umbrella, in the morning, at the Budva beach. She tosses her head from time to time. For our sake! For she knows: with each toss, her long hair will smell sweetly. A beauty. But one of those who never fail to smile at you. Both lavishly and stingily. Lavishly enough to make you happy. Stingily enough that it costs them nothing. Their smile let's you know that for them you are not a thing among things. They wish perhaps to break the spell put on you by an icy female look that has turned you into a thing. The air smelled sweetly of my youth of long ago when every tree-lined lane led to the end of the world. When life was not yet worn thin like a proverb. They left, leaving in me the tendernes that comes over you when you look long at the skies swarming with snowflakes. They went, chattering-not two girls, but two breezes, blowing suddenly through scorching heat of the siege. Through the dogs days of existence. DAYBREAK I'm doing sentry duty. At dawn. Nearby is a house. Actually, a yellowish hovel. Beside it-a poplar above a well. The poplar is as tall, it somehow seems to me, as the well is deep. Above the house white smoke is unfolding Like a baby's diapers. In the house a child is crying. Long. For years already. It seems: The shack would come down if the child fell silent. Anything can come to mind when one is Doing sentry duty. All of a sudden, a goldenheaded girl comes out of the house, She's about ten years old-twelve, at the most. Missing a leg. A gorgeous invalid. An angel on crutches. With a ruddy face, as if from the daybreak. And I started crying. From that ruddiness on her face. From that daybreak on crutches! All kinds of things can cross your mind when you are doing sentry duty. And the child's weeping seems never to stop. As if it had its own electric motor. The weeping which, it seems, will not cease, as long as this world exists. As long as there is a soul alive under these skies. A weeping that will resound through all eternities. For time, when you are a sentry, moves slowly like a glacier. When you are a sentry, your soul sometimes hears galloping messengers bringing the news that for a long time, under these skies, there's nothing. Not even you. On sentry duty. SIGNATURE I'm running home with my little daughter ? Again, shells have surprised us on the street. Shells have, for centuries, been falling every day, And every day they surprise us. I'm hurrying her on with angry words: Transferring my rage from the Serb gunners To a child awaited for ten years. Let me write my name, she tells me, as we were passing A patch of virgin snow in the park. Instead of scolding her, I-God knows why-let her forefinger Break the delicate whiteness And then, around the Cyrillic IVANA VEŠOVIĆ My forefinger described a circle Impenetrable Like in fairy-tales. THIS SHOOTING This shooting has gotten into our blood. Without shooting (just like without your morning coffee) you can't get your day going. And do you remember how, at the start of the war, after a shell burst a hush would fall, like the deadly silence when someone in a bar blabbed something against Tito or the Party? Shells have now gotten into our bones. When there is a silence, you're as taut as a string. You keep thinking: My God, what are they fixing for us now? With that silence they only instill more fear into our bones. But as soon as a heavy machine gun makes itself heard, I loosen up right away, my wife begins making a pie, the kids start chattering around the house. They are shooting again- everything's all right, then. Yesterday, back home from work, I asked: was there any shooting while I was gone? My youngest daughter told me: You should have seen, Dad, how nicely two of them whizzed by! THE LIGHTERS A mixed marriage. Without children. And wonderful people, both. No doubt the handsomest old people in our high-rise. The loveliest and the purest. As if minted from silver. Look at them, fit for an exhibition, Neven would often say. The old man used to say: I'm not afraid of hunger or thirst, Or cold, or shells, more than other people. When my father saw me off to that other war? Fifty-odd years ago This is what he told me: I'm not asking you, son, To be a hero. Heroes' graves are what dogs Piss on. But it wouldn't be good, either, for you to be a coward. It would be a shame for you to fear for your life, More than other people fear for theirs. First the old man died. Of heart failure. In his sleep. One simple Envies him. Two weeks later, he was followed by the old woman. And she'd been fit as a fiddle. That is what often happens: old spouses are like wartime lighters: one lacks flint, the other gas-and only as a pair can they operate! GIRL'S BLOUSE It's getting dark, and in the west someone's foot Has knocked over a jug of wine, pouring it all over the horizon. The new moon looks like horns on a helmet in which, in films, Moses is shown. Pines smell of lemons and incense A soldier, long and brittle like a rye stalk, is doing sentry duty. He's brittle with youth and love. Carefully he pulls out of his breast pocket a girl's white blouse. And he plunges his face in it. He drinks its scent for a long time. Those five or six grams of fabric he could pull through a wedding ring A sight divinely unutterable. Saying it in words would be like measuring the weight of a sun's ray on a scale. Suddenly, from all this-from the wine-colored west from the new moon with horns, from the girl's blouse, whose scent can, like a thread, lead you out of hell - suddenly, from all this, I feel relieved in my soul. And in the world You know that war still exists on earth like a black ball of yarn. But the soul could play with it like a kitten. Death still shows through everything. Yet not like a skull showing through the skin of the face But like a seed through a grape: making it more magical THE "LAV" CEMETERY a fog transparent like tissue paper that separates pictures in albums and a gravedigger is digging her grave eagerly as if he were digging the foundations of his best man's house IN THE EVENING YOU LIE DOWN IN BED and you know you are lying down in vain: tomorrow you will get up still more enervated than when you lay down. In the morning you get up from bed and you know that you are getting up in vain: yesterday's day is awaiting you, with yesterday's stress. With the humiliations of the day before yesterday. With the despair of the day before that. This siege has been going on not for two years but for a single day that has no end. From this I could find rest, it seems to me, Only by the sea. And who knows if we will ever see it again? Will I ever again be able to stand on those cliffs Where the air currents are so strong they Return the cap you threw?! But I do not long, this time, for the sea with the fleshy Leaves of agaves in which the names Of love are carved. For the olive trees feverishly Twisted like green laocoons. For the hats of jellyfish That look like silken tents from Oriental Tales. I do not long for the monotony of waves which the poet compares to Homer's metrics. I do not long for that ink With which one could write billions and billions of Iliads and Odysseys. I long for that sadness that Comes over you when, looking at the eternal blueness You listen to the murmur of that eternity. For the sadness that tells you that you have a soul again. Maybe not even for that sadness, but I long for that Magnificent and balmy emptiness. To plunge the soul into the emptiness that relaxes. That heals and rejuvenates. To stare for hours not even at the open seas, nor above the open seas, but-just so! The Bosnian way. Until you forget both what you are and where You are and where you're from and what your name is. The only thing you know is that within you are-miles And miles of emptiness. And that the sea's vastness has sucked Out of you all the centuries, all the way to Adam. The blue emptiness stretches to the end of the world and, backwards, To its beginning. And you grasp-actually, you don't grasp, you feel It on your palate: the sweetness that will take over after Judgment Day! Everything will be obliterated, like a child's scribble on a blackboard And only pure rapture will remain! So you taste ahead of time, albeit with a teaspoon only, The bliss the world will explode in! I, TOO, LIKE PRINCE ANDREY From a green meadow, wounded, was staring at the skies. There was nothing for a million miles around. Yes, miles, as if the immense void that Roared around me was in fact the open seas. Empty and boundless. From everything, under the sky, Only an unseeing emptiness remained that roared inhumanly. At first, to be sure, Serb frogs could be heard In Dobrinja's ponds.?? But they soon fell silent. Oh, wonder of wonders: a chorus of frogs is seeing me off To the other world (I thought, if that could be Called thinking. For it was my skin that was thinking). I, too, like Prince Andrey, before death, suddenly felt that there was nothing In the world but that immeasurable distance Above me, and the still more immeasurable distance, Inside.As if the soul was looking upon itself From an immensity powerfully healing. Or as if it were looking on its pain after a million summers. Pain turned into a white waterfall roaring like the spring of the Bosna. I, too, like Prince Andrey, realized that nothing matters more than those distances that multiplied with lightning speed. Seventy-seven immensities, the soul drinking from each like from the seventy-seven fountains of home, The world was, all around, ground to powder, and looked like that Ruddy column of dust that surges upward When a shell smashes into someone's house in Sarajevo. And I understood that those many distances Can only come to the good. And you are happy because, in those distances,? you are a tiny wisp, But a wisp containing all those distances. And I felt they, those distances, were Suddenly pouring into me, like Krka Falls near Knin, But a million times bigger. With a million rainbows Created in watery dust. And I listened to those distances rushing to Cleanse me from the inside, to wash the blood stains in which The whole world had been dissolved. Translated by: Omer Selimović  ARS No.4 year 2003