by Reif Larsen
Though he was three years Miroslav’s junior, Mihajlo Danilo Danilovic—known to everyone simply as Miša or sometimes Miš Miš, or even beba džin, “the baby giant”—was already four centimeters taller than his older brother by the time he turned six. Whereas Miša spent all his time outdoors, shadowing their father in the fields, killing sparrows with his slingshot, playing football with boys twice his age, there were many days when Miroslav would not even leave his bedroom.
“Children are meant to move,” said Stoja, wise as always.
“His mind is moving,” Danilo replied, unconvincingly. Indeed, Miroslav was exceptionally bright—this much had been clear from the beginning, and more than one of his teachers had called him the most naturally gifted child they had ever seen—but he was also prone to bouts of melancholy, stubbornness, and obsessive behavior.
Instead of performing his farm chores, he would draw great maps of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) fighting off various invading hordes on the walls of his bedroom. At first, this practice was forbidden, but you could steer a horse away from water only so many times. Tired of rapping his knuckles, Danilo and Stoja eventually relented, and Miroslav began covering his bedroom with endless battlefield minutiae as he listened to old Partisan fight songs on his transistor. Every man, every gun, every trigger needed to be sketched, or else they wouldn’t exist and that side might lose the war because they were one soldier short. But just as soon as one soldier was added, the tides shifted, and another soldier had to be added to the other side. It was a never-ending task. A perpetual fractal of warfare. The hens would go hungry as Miroslav spent hours rendering the thousands of tiny soldiers, each with gun, trigger, backpack—stars on the hats of the JNA, squares on the hats of the invading foreigners.
No manner of beating could sway the child from his task, and there came a point at which Danilo found it was hopeless. He would be what he would be.
“Feed the chickens, would you, Miša?” Danilo sighed. “I don’t know what to do with your brother.” And Miša ran off without complaint, eager as ever to please the man he would one day become.
Soon the walls of Miroslav’s bedroom could no longer contain the war. He began to build armies of soldiers from screws and paper clips and bottle caps and bits of clay—thousands of them lining his desk and then his floor, arranged into elaborate formations, poised to attack and counterattack. Yet somehow, their static nature bothered him much more than the two-dimensional figures on the walls. Now that his men were rendered in three dimensions, he became all the more aware of their lifelessness. Simply moving them with his hands was both unsatisfying and inefficient: he was always conscious of his intervention, and he could move only a handful of men at a time. He stood at an impasse: how to control his men without implicating himself as the control?
His first tactic employed an old electric football game. When switched on, the vibrating metal pitch would cause his army of wary soldiers to tremble as if possessed by an evil spirit. They would chatter across the board, occasionally colliding with one another in a meager display of hand-to-hand combat. More often than not, however, the random shudderings from the electric game would result in the soldiers spinning in circles before collapsing and spasming in place, seemingly felled by their own volition. Miroslav could not stand such incoherence. He needed to be able to control his men, not watch them suffer the random consequences of electrical pulses. He shelved the game and searched for another way to gain complete command over his domain.
A solution came to him after watching a television program about a Volkswagen assembly plant in Sarajevo, in which cars were swung from station to station suspended on tracks. Inside his bedroom, Miroslav hung a series of coat hangers on four long rods that could slide back and forth using a system of pulleys. He then attached a tiny thread to each soldier and tied these threads to the rods above. In this way, he could manipulate the pulleys to draw the two armies into battle, and while he could move the soldiers only one company at a time, and while their battling was still limited to awkward, imprecise collisions, he could use his imagination to soften the clumsiness of his system and fill in the gaps of real warfare. When a tank blasted an artillery shell into the enemy ranks, he would release a string and a whole swath of soldiers would collapse to the ground, bloodied and wailing. Later, he would tug on the strings, and their souls, as one, would gently float to heaven. This was how he started to give life and death to the lifeless things around him. It was also where he came up against the essential dilemma of the puppeteer: that is, the governance of objects that have no minds to be governed.
From the moment Miša entered the world, he had idolized his brother, despite the vast chasm between their proclivities, outlooks, manners, bodies, and minds. In his eyes, his brother could do no wrong. “Miša would drink Miroslav’s bathwater,” as Danilo once put it. But such adoration was hardly mutual. Miroslav showed little patience for his brother’s clumsiness and lack of imagination. When Miša tried to join in one of his elaborate battlefield maneuvers, Miroslav would quickly become furious at how his brother was breaking the strict rules of engagement or letting the strings get tangled or moving too many men or too few. His hands were much too big for such delicate matters, and there was little room for error with a system as delicate as mass warfare.
“Get out of here, shithead!” Miroslav yelled after another entanglement had halted the battle. Miša, banished and inconsolable, would retreat to the safe space of the chicken coop.
A temporary truce was usually called between the brothers each Christmas. On Christmas Eve, it was custom for the eldest son to go with the father into the woods and cut down the badnjak, the oak tree branch that would serve as the Yule log. But Miroslav showed little interest in this tradition, and so it was Miša who eagerly climbed the tree, bow saw in hand, and felled the branch onto the snowy ground. He would wrap the branch in a blanket like a child and show it to his brother upon his return.
“It’s a good one, Miša,” Miroslav would say, knowing how much each and every word meant to his younger brother. “You can name him Otik.”
“Otik?” repeated Miša in wonder.
“If you wish hard enough, he’ll come alive,” said Miroslav.
“Okay,” said Miša, and off he would go to stare at the branch for hours.
Christmas Eve was also the time to bring out the vertep, the traditional puppet theater, which the boys of the town would use to tell the story of the nativity. Children would don paper crowns and fashion wooden swords for themselves, pretending they were the Persian kings on their way to see the Christ child. Predictably, most household vertep performances were rudimentary at best, with a few hand puppets utilized in haphazard fashion. Many kids simply used the occasion as an excuse to go around town and sword-fight with one another.
In contrast to those of his peers, Miroslav’s vertep was a fully automated electromechanical puppet theater with multiple hidden compartments, elaborate lighting and synthesized sound effects, and a loudspeaker from which he could perform the voice of God. His nativity productions soon became legendary in Višegrad, where he would perform several shows to a packed audience in the town square. Miša was his loyal if clumsy stagehand, though this relationship ended one Christmas Eve when Miša tripped and knocked over the entire stage during a matinee.
Afterwards, Danilo found his younger son on the kapija of the Turkish Bridge, tears streaming down his face, staring at those oxen hands.
Danilo sat down beside Miša. He was silent, listening to the quiet hush of the river, and then he said, “Your brother is a Danilovic, but he is not a Danilo Danilovic.”
This might have seemed like an odd thing to say had it not been for the convolutions of their family’s history: Danilo Danilovic’s father had also been named Danilo Danilovic, as had his father, as had his father, as had his father, Rabbi Danilo, who at one time had been one of only two rabbis living in all of Montenegro. This his
tory was the source of much contention in the Danilovic family, particularly for Darinka, Danilo’s now deceased mother, who staunchly denied the presence of Jews anywhere in their lineage.
Rabbi Danilo’s ancestors were Sephardic Jews who had been living in Dubrovnik for more than three hundred years before Austrian annexation in 1814 withdrew the few rights granted by Napoleon to the territory’s Jewish citizenry. A subsequent confrontation with a Habsburg minister led to Rabbi Danilo’s public denouncement, forcing him to flee the city under a cloud of scrutiny. He moved his congregation east, to Perast, on the Bay of Kotor, a calm strip of sea flanked by mountains on all sides, leading some to label it (incorrectly) Europe’s southernmost fjord. In the middle of this bay, there was a small island shaped like a waxing moon. Legend has it that the island was completely man-made, created by superstitious fishermen over many hundreds of years, who had thrown a stone into the water every time they left and returned from their journeys. Those who did not add to the pile did so at their own peril and would die terrible deaths, devoured by sea monsters with poisonous horns, it was said. And so an island took shape, and it was on this island that Rabbi Danilo built a limestone synagogue among the linden trees.
Fig. 2.1. “Karta Oticic´a Abrahama” (1853)
From Mladinov, T. S. (1962), Židovstvo u južnoj Dalmaciji 3: 23
“Only God can reach us here,” Rabbi Danilo famously said after those gathered had consecrated the temple by circumnavigating it seven times and then throwing a stone into the waters just beyond. Thereafter, every Friday evening, they would hire a local fisherman to row the small congregation (only ten of them had followed the rabbi to Montenegro, the very minimum necessary for a minyan) out to the island, now named Oticica Abrahama, to hold Shabbat. Afterwards, they would throw a stone into the bay, and then the fisherman would row them back to town before sunset, two candled lanterns flickering at their helm.
When the Montenegrin state required all of its citizens to take a surname for the 1855 census—to essentially create a history out of nothing—Rabbi Danilo, after some deliberation, assumed the Russian-style patronymic of Danilo Danilovic.
“Because I am my own father now,” he liked to joke to those assembled on the dock of their little island as they sipped lozovaca on Sunday afternoons.
The rabbi, to no one’s surprise, named his own son Danilo Danilovic. And so a tradition was born: Danilo Danilovic (the second), a clockmaker, also named his son Danilo Danilovic. Danilo Danilovic (the third) was a stiff-headed bastard who fought for the First Serbian Army in the Toplica Uprising of 1917. Following the war, he discarded his grandfather’s Jewish faith as if it were an ill-fitting jacket, moved to Višegrad, and embraced Christian Orthodoxy. But he did fulfill his duty in one respect: he named his only son Danilo Danilovic. Danilo Danilovic (the fourth) had slimmer shoulders than his father and spoke in soft tones, like a man delivering bad news. He married a beauty named Darinka, a devoutly religious woman who would not let Danilo touch her during their long forest walks before they were properly wedded. When Germany invaded Yugoslavia and another war began, Danilo joined the nascent anti-fascist Partisan movement recently formed near Mount Ozren. Darinka became pregnant during one of his visits home, and he instructed her, by letter, on what she must name their child in the event that he did not return from the war.
“And what if it is a girl?” she wrote in reply, though her husband would never receive the letter, for he was killed by a sniper in Operation Rösselsprung, in May of 1944.
Danilo Danilovic (the fifth), born in September during the middle of an Allied air raid, would suffer from a fear of loud noises for the rest of his life but would also be blessed with the knowledge that all things must end. Darinka raised her son by herself; she taught him, above all else, to be thankful for God’s mercy. Her religion had been hardened by her husband’s death, and so in the years after the war, when the church was all but banned by the Communist Party, she nurtured her son’s faith behind closed doors.
“Tito is confused,” she would say to him. “He’ll come to find God soon enough. God is the one thing that cannot be forgotten.” As living proof of this, she proudly wore her husband’s red handkerchief every day. Others assumed that this was to signal her membership in the party, but Darinka knew better—through the presence of a small, nearly invisible cross that she had stitched into one of its corners, the handkerchief represented for her God’s almighty omnipotence, even in the depths of a misguided ideology.
Fig. 2.2. Miroslav of Hum’s Gospels (1168)
From Beardsman, T. (1956), A History of Illumination, p. 144
Once, on a trip to Belgrade, Darinka took Danilo to see an old illuminated manuscript inside a large museum. It was a book of the Gospels created for Miroslav of Hum, a twelfth-century prince from Herzegovina. At first reluctant and bored by the echoing halls of the museum, Danilo was startled by the book’s beauty beneath its glass case—he stared at the images of saints grouped in curious orbit around the thick Gothic strokes of the text. The museum guard, perhaps drawn in by Darinka’s beauty, offered to unlatch the case and turn the pages of the ancient book. So captured was he by the shimmering images that bent and swayed across the paper, Danilo did not notice the guard leering at his mother as he showed them each page, nor did he notice the man’s hand creeping up her thigh or how she let the hand linger for just a moment before discreetly brushing it away. Danilo was too transfixed by the miracle before him: Hum’s manuscript made him realize for the first time that if such beauty could exist in the world, then God must exist as well.
They moved to a two-story farmhouse in the hills above Višegrad. Even without a father to guide him, Danilo Danilovic sensed the way the earth breathed. He implicitly understood the angle of the sun, how a season always began during the season before, how water did not always run downhill. Holding his mother’s hand, he would kneel at the threshold of his bedroom and pray every morning and every night. Before the sun rose on Sundays, they would walk the four kilometers through the pines to attend the small, secret services at the village church, those assembled whispering their prayers to the dusty icons above, which were normally closed and shuttered to keep the party administrators at bay.
During the summer of 1972, Danilo attended an unsanctioned screening of Dušan Makavejev’s W.R. - Misterije organizma (W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism) at the Dom Kulture in Višegrad. He was not even supposed to be there, but someone had told him that they were showing a movie banned by Tito himself and that this movie would most likely change his life. Afterwards, he stood bewildered in a corner, trembling, awash in the utter innocence of his upbringing. He did not understand all of what he had just seen, but what he did understand made him fearful, and what he did not understand filled him with a great loneliness, as if the world had suddenly left him behind. It was then that a beautiful woman approached him. She was smoking a long, thin cigarette and wearing a JNA army cap. For a moment he was afraid that this was the woman from the movie who had been decapitated, that she had found some way to reattach her head and walk out of the screen and into the Dom Kulture.
“You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said to him.
Her name was Stojanka Stevovic. She was from Trebinje. Her mother was a Catholic Croat, her father was a Communist Serb, and she spoke like a Montenegrin, but she called herself a Yugoslav. Danilo was smitten by the strength of her eyes. Every time she opened her mouth, a little vacuum of space opened up inside his chest.
“Don’t go with her,” his mother warned when it was clear he was going with her.
“Why?”
“She’s not a believer.”
“That’s not a good reason.”
“That’s the only reason. If you go with her, I will never speak to you again.”
He called his mother’s bluff and went with her. He had no choice. She had seen him see the ghost. And she went with him
, despite her ideological resistance to becoming a farmer’s wife. Stoja had always maintained a vague dream of moving to Belgrade and becoming a movie star, smoking her long, thin cigarettes in the Danube clubs as men hung on her every word. She would later say she never made it to the city because she was scared, because she did not trust herself enough to be on-screen, but this was not true, for she trusted herself completely.
Danilo asked for her hand in marriage on the banks of the Drina. It was early evening—the time of day when light moved slowly, laterally, striking the earth with such acuity of angle that everything was forced to step back and glow in wonder. They had just been for a swim, and they lay on the rocks soaking up the last of the day’s heat, watching the bugs spiral across the surface of the water, their paths now and again igniting into silver pinpricks of luminescence. Nervous at the absence of words in his head, Danilo wiped some moisture from his lip and tried to say what he meant to say in the right way, but in doing so said it all wrong, which turned out to be the right way after all. Technically, she did not give an answer, but it was clear from her smile and the heat of her silence that she would be bound to him until her last breath.
There was just one problem with their union: when the priest at the local Orthodox church heard of Stoja’s questionable lineage, he refused to marry them. Danilo suspected Darinka’s influence in the matter, so to spite her, he married Stoja in a civil service, where the Lord’s name was mentioned only once, and then only because there was a clerical error in the document read by the flighty municipal clerk.
After a period of time just long enough to make them both nervous that such a thing might never be possible, Stoja became pregnant. When a baby boy emerged into the world—small, thin-boned, but otherwise healthy—Danilo Danilovic made a decision that startled even himself: the child would not be named Danilo. They would call him Miroslav, though Danilo insisted that this was not after Miroslav of Hum, creator of the illuminated book that had so transfixed him as a child, nor even—as everyone would later assume—for Miroslav Stevovic, Stoja’s father. The child was simply named Miroslav, for himself.