BELGRADE (36 page)

For De Windt, boorish behaviour is equated with provincial and rustic settings, while civilization and modernity are exemplified by an urban environment. In Belgrade he found the citizens were usually as he would want them to be, probably on account of the fact that the new elite sent their children to Paris for an education and they all spoke at least three foreign languages, adding to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the place. In other words, he did not recognize the city as a part of Serbia. The real Serbia, however, was never far away. On a visit to a Belgrade musichall he commented on the restrained public and their sobriety, which he explained by observing that the average Serb “is a temperate being, who dislikes alcohol in any shape or form—and generally prefers water to any other beverage. This, however, does not apply to the provinces, where drunkenness appeared to be almost as prevalent amongst the peasantry as it is in parts of the Russian Empire.”

De Windt could not resist qualifying his own experience, assuming that there lurks somewhere the real Serbia to which Belgrade does not belong. He generally expressed an ambiguous relationship toward the city, which had only recently lost its oriental appearance and was still regarded, whether deservedly or not, as if on the crossroads between East and West, the Orient and the Occident. De Windt’s image of Belgrade is of a place surviving on the very edge of civilization.

Other writers have relied on imagery similar to De Windt’s. The American journalist John Reed (1887–1920) provides another example of this striking sense of ambiguity. Reed is more famous as a witness of the Russian Revolution, which he captured in his book
Ten Days That Shook the World
(1919), but prior to this he reported from Serbia during the First World War as one of a group of foreign newspapermen assigned to visit the Serbian army in 1915. They were put in the care of a representative from the military press bureau whom the western journalists called Johnson—this being a literal translation of his name, which was probably Jovanović. Johnson was a lecturer at the University of Belgrade in peace time, teaching comparative literature. Reed describes him in the following terms:

Johnson was saturated with European culture, European smartness, cynicism, modernism; yet scratch the surface and you found the Serb; the strong, virile stock of a young race not far removed from the half-savagery of a mountain peasantry, intensely patriotic and intensely independent.

His choice of expression is in itself telling. The representative from the press bureau is given a false Anglicized name, making him appear more like a citizen of the West, which on the surface he resembles. But underneath this urbane veneer, he hides a true self closer to his rustic origins. Whereas De Windt finds this true self repellent, Reed transforms the vices of the peasant into virtues, not least because he is fighting alongside the Allies during the war.

Some foreign visitors preferred the image of the village Serbs to that of citizens of Belgrade. Rebecca West (1892–1983) recorded her lengthy stay in Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second World War in her book
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
(1941), probably the most famous travelogue from this part of the world. She is generally considered to have been very favourably impressed by the country, and particularly by her experiences in Serbia. Yet it is again in her attitude towards Belgrade that we find an element of ambiguity. Spying a group of businessmen at a hotel bar in the centre of town, she does not like the way in which they try to emulate their counterparts from the West in dress and manners. Nor does she care for the hotel itself, which she considers to be akin to any other Savoy or Plaza anywhere in the world. Both have lost their authenticity in her eyes. She continues:

Belgrade, I thought, had made the same error. It had till recently been a Balkan village. That has its character of resistance, of determined survival, or martyred penury. This was a very sacred Balkan village; the promontory on which it stood had been sanctified by the blood of men who had died making the simple demand that, since their kind had been created, it might have leave to live. Modern Belgrade has striped that promontory with streets that had already been built elsewhere much better. I felt a sudden abatement of my infatuation for Yugoslavia.

West’s romantic view is charged with a highly emotive account of a historical struggle for survival. She conjures up a world of heroes and deeds of great sacrifice in her mythic Belgrade, her sacred place. Her faith is restored when the scene in the bar is interrupted by the arrival of a stranger, a peasant, dressed in village clothes, and clutching a black lamb in his arms. She transforms him into a tableau portrait of her ideal: “He stood still as a Byzantine king in a fresco, while the black lamb twisted and writhed in the firm cradle of his arms, its eyes sometimes catching the light as it turned like small luminous plates.”

This dual image of the city has been redrawn by visitors in more recent times. The destruction of Yugoslavia and the following Wars of Yugoslav Succession attracted many journalists to the country and more than a few wandered through Belgrade. Mark Thompson presents his impressions in his book
A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia
(1992). Visiting all the main towns of the country, he arrives at Belgrade’s railway station, which he describes thus: “Belgrade at last. The train station makes no distinction between goods and passenger trains. Some travellers have to make their way between pens of sheep on the platform; others are left where there’s no platform at all.”

The station, a stop on the old Orient Express, is a large and busy junction with both international and local trains. It was built in an imposing architectural design, appropriate to its function. Whatever was happening on the day when Thompson arrived, he chose to follow an interpretive framework used by writers and visitors to the city for the last one hundred years. He concludes his description of the city in similar vein: “Those sheep-pens at the station are no anomaly. Belgrade hasn’t moved far from its origins: the garrison and the village. Its focus remains the Ottoman fortress of Kalemegdan.” His Balkan village is not the stronghold of Rebecca West, defended by heroes straight out of the Serbian folk epics. Rather, he paints a picture of a muddy dung-heap, governed by a medieval militant order and commanded from the heights of a fortress. Official Belgrade was then stoking the nationalism and violence that accompanied the end of Yugoslavia, and Thompson finds the image that corresponds to expectations.

Such views are part of a tradition of ambiguity that leaves the reader waiting for the author to discover something positively romantic in the city. Thompson finds his antidote in the old frame of Milovan Đilas, the first Yugoslav political dissident who denounced the Communist Party for losing its revolutionary aims in the early 1950s. Thompson interviews him in his flat and is clearly impressed by his clarity and energy, so much so that, while listening to his words, he remarks, “I gazed back, fascinated by the transformation of man into Dinaric legend, re-enacted before my sceptical English eyes.” Thompson, like Reed before him, finally finds his intensely independent hero, whom he places on a pedestal like West’s Byzantine king in a fresco painting.

This issue of ambiguity is not lost on Belgrade’s own internal commentators. Many of the novels that have been introduced on earlier pages reveal an uncertainty about Belgrade and its history, although in recent times this has reflected a new freedom to articulate that past without the dogmatic constraints imposed by the League of Communists. This revised tension in relation to the past has often revolved around Belgrade’s oriental heritage, as identified by Elizabeth Medaković in Slobodan Selenić’s novel
Fathers and Forefathers
, and by the Hungarian wife of Knez Mihailo in Svetlana Velmar-Janković’s
The Abyss
. Such expression is also elaborated in non-fiction works, particularly those written from the curious position of someone in-between, with a foot both in the Serbian and the foreign camp.

Lena Jovičić was one such figure, the daughter of a Serbian father and a Scottish mother. She divided her time between her two countries and was in a unique position to know them both. In 1928 she published her book
Yugoslavia
in a series aimed at younger readers called “Peeps at Many Lands”. She writes about the life of children and how it differs from life in England, telling her readers, for example, “You may find it difficult to believe that, except in Belgrade, there are no real toy-shops in Serbia,” and later, “You will never find people still asleep at half-past seven or eight o’clock in Serbia!”

Jovičić includes some observations that go much deeper, and one wonders if a child would fully see the point. The following paragraph is worth quoting in full:

Extremes and contrasts are the most striking feature of Belgrade. You see opposing forces everywhere: in the streets, in the houses, in the lives of the people even. Side by side with the peasant in homespun clothes and sandalled feet, walk the smartly dressed people of the wealthier classes. The creaking ox-cart has the right of way alongside the luxurious limousine car, and tall modern structures tower above dilapidated little houses in the strangest fashion. Thus East meets West in a curious jumble, and in view of such extremes and contrasts you cannot but feel that there is a gap somewhere. The connecting link between the one and the other is missing, and so you constantly find that you suddenly drop into the gap.

The passage has an incongruous tone, especially given that it was written at a time when class division was certainly not unknown to the British public for whom she was writing, and where motorized traffic had not entirely usurped the horse and cart. It is almost as if the Anglicized self of Lena Jovičić has picked up and absorbed the model that foreigners apply when looking at life in Belgrade. Stressing a division between East and West, her description goes beyond economic and social class and enters the realm of historical experience, drawn from a marked discontinuity in cultural expectations. The gap that she evokes is that ambiguous space that many writers see in Belgrade, a place from which one may be metaphorically exiled—and a hole into which it is possible to fall.

From the platform at the base of the Victor in Kalemegdan, the tower on the top of the hill overlooking Zemun is visible down the Danube. It is not far away and Zemun now forms part of the administrative district of Belgrade, but it is a settlement with its own history, closely tied to the fortunes of the larger city but not entirely part of it. In Roman times it was called Taurunum, and to the Austrians it was known as Semlin. The first record of the Slavonic form, given as Zemljan, is to be found in the ninth century. A fortress in medieval times dominated the hill at Zemun, which was used at different periods by Byzantine, Hungarian and Serbian forces. The town fell, like Belgrade, to the Ottoman army in its offensive of 1521 as it made its push further into Europe. For two centuries Zemun was a small provincial town in the Ottoman Empire, subordinate to its larger and more important neighbour whose significance was geographical and political as the residence of the pasha. Yet historical circumstances were to have a huge influence on developments across the river from Kalemegdan. When the Austrians attacked and took Belgrade in 1717 they also captured a large swathe of Ottoman territory including Zemun. When they returned their conquests to Ottoman rule in 1739, they did not give back all they had taken, and the border between the two empires now followed the Danube and Sava. Kalemegdan remained as a Turkish watchtower, while the land on the other side of the rivers, to the north and west, was Habsburg territory. Zemun was transformed in status into the last Austrian outpost on the border with the enemy.

This change in Zemun’s geopolitical position was crucial for the development of the district over the Sava from Belgrade. There was a Serbian community already established in Vojvodina to which Zemun now gravitated. Most of its population was comprised of Serbs, with some Greek, German, Jewish and a sprinkling of Turkish inhabitants, drawn here mainly by business. It rapidly became a wealthy staging post for land and water traffic between Austria and Turkey. It contained a small garrison and administrators representing Habsburg authority in order to regulate commercial and political relations on this crucial border crossing. Talks would often take place between representatives of the Belgrade and Zemun sides in order to resolve any local disputes. The town was given some autonomous functions, increasing its identity as a local municipality and its inhabitants’ sense of belonging to a specific community. Zemun was a visible symbol to the Serbs in Belgrade of a successful westernized community of their co-nationals. This complicated relationship between the Serbs in the Ottoman Empire and those in the Habsburg Empire who left in earlier decades is one of the themes in Miloš Crnjanski’s 1929 novel
Migrations
(Seobe).