by Daša Drndic
A military-religious structure, a military-religious ideology wrapped in military-religious terminology, writes Andreas Ban to the amorphous mass, in universities, including their own, often serves as a cover for the legal practice of unfounded, outdated or worn-out authoritarian power, preserving power through fear from a position acquired long before, paired with an offensive, slimily paternalistic attitude toward those who occupy positions lower in the hierarchy. Why are dissertations not presented or expounded before some kind of commission, but defended, as though someone was attacking them? asks Andreas Ban. How is it that for the most part there are no first-rate artists at universities, nor first-rate writers, nor first-rate architects, nor first-rate musicians, nor first-rate philosophers? asks Andreas Ban. There are none, he writes, because such people need varied and unbounded spaces of freedom, and since with time a military-religious structure leads to serious psychic frustrations, it happens that this lethargic university cadre reach for cathartic activities such as amateur, by and large worthless, artistic creation, to mask its creative impotence. There is no freedom within an institution, concludes Andreas Ban. An institution offers security, freedom destroys it.
Andreas Ban is not revealing anything new to his colleagues. As early as 1907, as a delegate to the Second Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, Emma Goldman says, The school, more than any other institution, is a veritable barracks, where the human mind is drilled and manipulated into submission to various social and moral spooks, and thus fitted to continue our system of exploitation and oppression.
You behave like private intellectuals, Andreas Ban writes to them, and a private intellectual does not exist. You are not responsible intellectuals either, for responsible intellectuals cannot be passive observers, which is what you are. This is a message from Edward Said, Andreas Ban tells them, not from me.
Your morality is questionable, because you passively observe injustices and social and political anomalies, you incur moral omissions, Andreas Ban writes, and then, unable to resist, seasons his text with Jaspers, and moral omissions create the basis for political wrongs and crimes. Innumerable tiny omissions, conformist accommodation, cheap justification and imperceptible acceleration of injustice, contributions to a public atmosphere that renders clear vision impossible and makes evil possible, all this has consequences.
In the meantime Radomir Konstantinović dies. Andreas Ban is not sure how many people at the School of Social Sciences, let’s say in Rijeka, let’s say in the English, German, and Croatian Departments, in the Departments of Psychology, History and Art History, how many people have heard of that writer, poet and philosopher, let alone read him. Maybe a few, not many, but in the Pedagogy and Polytechnic Departments — Andreas Ban is certain — none.
Andreas Ban now plays his ace. He uses Filozofija palanke, The Philosophy of the Province written by that courageous and wise visionary, cruelly isolated and eliminated from public life even in Serbia in these gloomy times. And he ends his pitiful and irrelevant tirade with a nod at the idea of the provincial, endeavoring in the most straightforward possible way to explain to the ignoramuses he is addressing what makes them as parochial as they are. The provincial does not imply settlements pushed out of the center — small towns, villages — but a state of mind, writes Andreas Ban, quoting Konstantinović. The size of an inhabited locality is not proportionally commensurate with its openness and cosmopolitanism, he writes. Consequently, a whole country, that is to say its inhabitants, may be imbued with that provincial spirit, the spirit of the “kingdom of darkness.” The provincial world is neither a village nor a town. Its spirit, however, is a spirit between the tribal, as ideally unique, and the international, as ideally open. The spirit of the province preaches the religion of closure. Opposes action with passivity, because action, activity, is capable of transforming the provincial spirit, of betraying it. A provincial person is not an individual on a personal journey, he is the summum of experience, he is an attitude, a style. The provincial person has an exceptionally strong sense of style, for he has a strong sense of the collective, frozen or embodied in that style.
The provincial spirit is the spirit of homogeneity, of the ready-made solution. In the provincial world, it is more important to maintain established customs than to be a personality. Anything predominantly individual is undesirable, because it is the embodiment of versatility, the pure personification of sound, which for the provincial spirit is the music of sheer hell. Having renounced his own will, stylized according to the model of collective will, the provincial takes refuge in the security of the general. The provincial spirit as the spirit of super-I, the spirit of collective will, takes us under its wing, protects us from everything (especially ourselves), from the provocation and temptation called “I,” personal responsibility and personal action. The provincial spirit does not like the unfamiliar. That is one of its fundamental attributes, defining its history, its culture, its mental world. Provincial life is a life of routine. The provincial spirit is a tribal spirit with no awareness of the individual.
The impulse to exclude, by mocking, by negating what is outside the norm, is strong in the provincial spirit. The provincial spirit registers everything, every difference, linguistic, ethical, physical, cultural, it remembers everything and does not acknowledge any variation. The provincial world is transformed into a great theater of life. The provincial spirit makes tragedy impossible, sentimentalism becomes a substitute for sensibility. The provincial possesses the consciousness of the collective, becomes the collective hero which in tragedies explains the destiny of the protagonists while remaining outside the tragedy.
The philosophy of the province is a philosophy of a closed circle that does not allow an apostasy, without which there is no creativity. The philosophy of the province is a normative and normalizing, suprapersonal and impersonal philosophy, it shuts out all aspects of life, education, sport, nutrition, nature, love, work, language, religion and death (which is far from being the death of an individual) replacing life with rigid forms of the normative which apply to all.
The province is fanatically afraid of the world because it is afraid of chaos. The province is incapable of absolute rebellion. Its world is ruled by the spirit of order and self-discipline. The province takes its banality for granted, an archaic condition in permanent retreat from the Other, whom it sees as the enemy and whom, because of its own restrictive spirit, it frequently promotes to renegade, intruder, and often also “jester.” The spirit of the province is the creator of the vision of the “small man” and his small life, a semilife of semiwill.
So Andreas Ban leaves that invalid horde of former colleagues comfortably settled in the Abgrund hotel, in Hotel Abyss, to quasi-philosophize from time to time in a melancholy fashion. Poor Andreas Ban. His letter addressed to his former colleagues will be read only by few, by that aggrieved critical minority, already weary and sickened. Most will wonder, What is this drivel? What does he want? Maybe he’s deranged?
Twenty years have passed since he came here. It might seem that he has fitted in.
He has not
At least he has someone to write to.
He does not.
When it gets tough, when it gets bad internally, when his insides clot, when they contract, Andreas Ban sings “Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in — Belgrad,” although that’s a lie. If it turns out that twenty years later an abandoned suitcase, a small piece of cardboard baggage still languishes there, not much will be left inside: two cracked urns, Elvira’s and Marisa’s, a few reliable addresses with altered names, some physical contacts which are pulling away, aromas mingling, and misty glances. Marlene Dietrich did not return, she just flew over Berlin. When he sings that song “Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in — Belgrad,” Andreas Ban calms down for a while, he doesn’t need his asthma pump.
I, like a river,
Have been turned aside by this harsh age.
I am a substitute. My life has fl
owed
Into another channel
And I do not recognize its shores.
O, how many fine sights I have missed,
How many curtains have risen without me
And fallen too. How many of my friends
I have not met even once in my life,
How many city skylines
Could have drawn tears from my eyes,
I who know only the one city
And, by touch, in my sleep I could find it . . .
Yours, Akhmatova
In Andreas Ban and around him, nothing flows any longer, it is a time of stasis. Like Joyce’s Dubliners, he is stretched out under a snowy coverlet on the verge of sleep. They, the Dubliners, paralyzed as they are, constantly remember, they don’t live, they remember the living monks who lie in their coffins, who rest in life, they remember the dead who shiver under snow. With those memories they pump up their brittle blood vessels. Andreas Ban does not even want that anymore. He has packed his past as one dumps old clothes into plastic bags. Sometimes, though, feeble flashes appear before his eyes, sparks, but as his sight is steadily weakening, with time they too fade, one by one, silently. What was it Pessoa said? “Now nothing inside me can cut off — the nothing.”
Ich hab’ noch einen Koffer in –
The last time Andreas Ban goes to Belgrade is on October 27, 2011. After twenty years he has been invited, officially and in a friendly way.
I’m going to get my life back, he writes to Leo. I’m coming to get my life, he writes to his friends.
May 14, 1992, eight a.m.. In the apartment there’s nothing left. Just nailed-up wooden crates and taped-up cardboard boxes in which, squeezed and crumpled, airless, lie once vigorous years. On the walls only dark gray outlines where pictures once hung. Two plastic coat hangers on the floor. Built-in bookshelves, empty. Lowered blinds. Darkness.
The ginger cat, Ivo (Is your cat Croatian? the six-year-old twin girls ask Leo), has been given as a gift to the Lebovićes, Zlata and Djordje, who move to Israel shortly thereafter. Without Ivo.
Andreas Ban runs across the highway to the police station, registers his departure. Why are you going to Reka? asks the woman at the desk. Rijeka, he says.
The neighbors come and cry. Why are you crying? says Andreas Ban, as Leo picks up the neighbors’ garbage left outside their door the night before. Here, take our flowers, Andreas Ban tells the neighbors. They did not buy potted plants again, Andreas and Leo. For twenty years there were no potted plants in the apartment.
Leo in the third year of primary school. Your father writes for the newspapers, stand in front of the class and read this article of his, the teacher, Nada Milošević, says to Leo. Leo reads, Leo is little, he is eight. You see, children, Leo’s daddy is an enemy of the state, says Nada Milošević, Leo’s daddy is a state enemy.
He brings a chocolate cake to the clinic as a “farewell.” The director of the clinic says, It’s good that you’re leaving, you like the sea. A female colleague says, It’s good you’re going, one can see in your face you’re not a Serb. A male colleague sheds a tear, Have I contributed to your leaving? Prior to that, some people said, that Ustasha Ban. He takes the cake to his patients.
He said, I’ll come to Belgrade when Milošević falls. He stays in a hotel then. It’s all quite sick. He meets people who want to hug, but there’s no chance of that. He meets friends, they fall into each other’s arms. As though I’d never been away, says Andreas Ban. He goes to the cemetery. He takes mimosas to Elvira and his mother. Then the aperture closes.
It gets dark again. He returns to nervous Croatia.
Some people from Belgrade come to Croatia, so his relationships seem unaffected. As if nothing much has changed. He sees actors, writers, directors, doctors, painters, colleagues, among them some close to him, he shops with them for sandals and clothes for their wives. Some people he misses. There were many in his former life. He used to correspond with a few, no longer. He still sees some of them, in the summer, they grill mackerel. They swim. Healing little visits, though pointless — they nourish the illusion of time standing still. Here there are not many he is close to, not many at all.
Two or three times Andreas Ban goes to Belgrade — always for a short time, in haste. That doesn’t count. One October, irrationally summery, he goes to the Čubura restaurant in Pejton with some good, weary people and there in the garden sits Brana Crnčević.* Relaxed and carefree. Andreas Ban wants to leave immediately, This is too much, he says. Pretend you haven’t seen him, his friends try to distract him. Miša brings him some new books about Rovinj, the following summer Miša dies.
He cannot remember which is ulica Kolarčeva. That disturbs him, but at the same time it is liberating.
Leo “returns” to Belgrade after sixteen years. He calls Andreas and says, All the time I feel like crying. Then he shoots a documentary entitled “My Belgrade.” A sad but acerbic film. A tough little film, not at all sentimental.
When they first arrive in Croatia, Leo’s schoolmates say, Ban is a Serbian surname. Of course it’s not. Leo asks him, Is Ban a Serbian surname? but Andreas is silent, he does not say anything.
Recently, they brought Leo’s children’s books down from the attic. Leo opens his Greek Myths and says, Look, Nebojša gave me this in Belgrade, for my birthday. Look, I covered up the dedication with big stickers, says Leo. The dedication was written in Cyrillic, he says, laughing. Andreas Ban does not find it amusing. His stomach contracts. It’s the first time he sees Leo’s fear of twenty years past.
Andreas Ban goes to Belgrade in May 2010 as well. For less than two days. He has no time for anything. On the way to a meeting, he walks from Kalemegdan Park to Marx and Engels Square (which is no longer called Marx and Engels Square, he knows) and is surprised to see trees growing there. He runs into Goran Marković and they say ciao, as though they often meet. At the beginning of December 2008 Andreas Ban sees Goran’s film “The Tour” in Pula. Then Goran gives him his book Small Secrets, he hasn’t seen him since, Andreas wants to say something about that touching chronicle, with its dedication: For Andreas, after so long, for the years ahead. That mess with time turned out to be a serious complication. That ebbing away of punctured, hole-ridden time.
He walks along some streets and remembers the numbers of buildings in which his friends lived, 51, ulica 7. Juli, only, that street no longer exists. 16, ulica Tadeuš Košćuški. Zagorka no longer lives there, she died.
In the former Toplice Hotel, he has a meeting with Ognjen. Ognjen orders lamb soup, Andreas pours Coke into himself because he’s had a stomachache the whole time he’s been in Belgrade. Both of them are graying. They don’t talk much.
There are some terribly dilapidated facades. On the ground floor of the crumbling, pockmarked buildings are elegant shops selling imported goods. The statue of “The Boy from the Čukur Fountain” is no longer in ulica Dobračina, it disappeared. There is only a vacant plinth. The statue is the work of the uncle of Andreas’s grandmother, Paško Paskoje Vučetić, from Split (1871–1925), who goes from Split to Trieste, to the art and craft school Nordio, from there to Venice to the Accademia, then to Munich Akademie der Bildenden Künste, then back to Trieste, where he works with Rendić and finally ends up in Belgrade in the arms of a certain Marija with whom he now lies embraced in the New Cemetery, where they also placed Andreas’s mother. Elvira is somewhere else. For Croats, Paško Vučetić is an important Croatian painter; for Serbs, Paško Vučetić is an invaluable Serbian artist. So, four years after he won first prize at a competition, Paško Vučetić’s monument to Karadjordje is erected in Kalemegdan Park in 1913. But the monument is destroyed as early as 1916, during the Austrian occupation of Belgrade, with the excuse that it had been damaged in the course of the fighting. Today that spot is occupied by Meštrović’s “Monument of Gratitude” to France.
On the grave in which Andreas’s mother Marisa also lies there is another of Paško’s p
ieces, “The Boy with a Jug.” Cvijeta writes that it is damaged, that someone had tried to take this one down too and sell it for a “fee” of fifty euros. Paintings by Paško Vučetić hang in the National Museum of Belgrade, some are in galleries, some sold at auction. They ought to be on display in Split.
Those facades have completely shattered him, Andreas Ban. Belgrade is like an old man. A treacherous old man. As he taps his way along its streets, Andreas Ban feels like Arsenije Njegovan, like “a man who eats death,” who is eaten by death. In Croatia, Andreas Ban has almost no one to talk with about Belgrade, five or six people maybe. Not enough for healing. With others, a lot of misunderstandings, their Belgrades differ in image, in time, in completeness. Even now, when he is not in Rijeka and wants to say that he has left something there, in Rijeka, Andreas Ban says, I forgot it — in Belgrade. Presumably in that suitcase in which what is there is not there at all. The deceit played by his tongue and mind irritates him, but pleases him as well. The fact that this tattoo is hard to erase.