Journalist, editor, and founder of several dailies, Manojlo Manjo Vukotić, still passionately edits after decades of work, only this time it is – books. It was him who published and edited the first of four books by Žarko Laušević - Godina Prođe, Dan Nikad (A Year Goes By, But Never The Day.)
The book saw an astronomically big circulation of 350,000 copies, and the TV series Pad (The Fall) was made based on it. The two men are both from Cetinje, which is where they knew each other from.
In his Kurir exclusive op-ed, Manjo Vukotić bids his farewell as a friend, fellow countryman, and editor to Žarko Laušević, who is to be laid to rest tomorrow:
“It’s been 12 years, Žarko, since we published your first literary piece of penmanship, giving it a home in 330,000 copies. Years have gone by, and thousands of long days. Perhaps faster than our being. It all passes, Brother. Even life itself. I was as happy as you when you returned to your house. Your home. Your roots. Yourself. With your wishes, hopes, loves, seductive games. To some of your illusions too.
“You’ve become a ŠMEKER (THE COOL GUY) again. You were no longer among THE FORGOTTEN. You visited THE GREY HOME once more. Saw all the MATERNAL BROTHERS. I suspect that even the solitary was sometimes BETTER THAN ESCAPE into the unseen land. Even A STINKING FAIRY TALE may have sounded to you as a lullaby at times. You saw that everything is but THE ORIGINAL OF THE FORGERY. Your WOUNDED COUNTRY hadn’t changed much, nor had MONTENEGRO. The are still UNDER THE RUBBLE. You no more have a reason to ask all of them, all of us – SAY WHY YOU HAVE LEFT ME?
A watchful sentry
“Through your book, you took AN OATH OF ENLISTMENT and stopped wasting away in pavilions or the glass giants of New York, your hat no longer threw a shadow over your bright cheeks, and your greying hair no longer hid the Lovćen forehead…. Books such as yours cannot be written by an actor, even if Shakespeare himself cued you.
“Nor can a playwright with experience. Or a good lawyer, because he doesn’t have that many facts. Or a prisoner, because he doesn’t have such a torn heart, such a tortured soul, and such purity of regret. Such a book could only have been authored by Žarko Laušević. The owner of a universal gift. The master and gentleman of the theatrical scene. The lover of the film play. An unexpected servant of evil. The bearer of ‘orders of merit’ from the criminal laws of two countries. A watchful sentry in the solitary of his own suffering and dream visions. A penman who wrote about his sin and sacrifice in blood. The waves of the prison’s reality downfall roll, catch up, sigh, foam, and moan from the pages of your book.
“Cosmically intelligent, a polymath, a curious person, a hard-worker, a sensitive string on a violin, pained at every touch, with clear eyes even through your prescription glasses, in love with Anita, boyishly obedient before his family, charging at injustice - Laušević made an great wreath full of human thorns and barbed wire, but at the same time wove into it the golden braids of human goodness.
Brothers by Cetinje
“He peeled off the skin from his face. He exposed, unclothed the stocky and fat body of the state judiciary and justice. He took off all the numbers and striped pajamas from the primitive and stinking Montenegrin and Serbian pens. Nothing better and more documented, more convincing, has been written here about this cadaver that has been reeking of rottenness for a long time now.
“You, my Brother, would say, ‘Is it enough now?’. Well, it’s not. You owe me a couple of answers to some riddles. Do answer me. So, we were both born in Cetinje, and you seem to be kinda sorta running away from it? ‘What’s important in life is this: Be born in Cetinje and leave in time.’
“You didn’t find a reason to stay there?
‘If we put aside sentimentality, I can’t see others. We were brought up to believe that saving our honour was one of the most sacred principles. Because we haven’t allowed others to trample upon us and possibly kill us, that two of us are where we are. But, wherever you are, you carry within you a great restlessness…
‘To set off, but never arrive. All my life I walked in the same circle. A life made up of small circles of brief living and great circles of long regrets over these joys. Who can humour me? Who will drive away the feeling of guilt? Who will want me, looking so cancelled and wounded?’ “Do you know which way you will go? ‘I want everything, and don’t need anything. I’d like to set off, but not to arrive. Once I do, I realize I didn’t want to set off in the first place, that where I came from was better.’
“You are convincing some heartless supervisor who calls you a thief that you are a murderer. Then you write letters to your sister Branka, a teacher of our difficult language, asking her to check if there is another word for killing?
‘Is there a more horrific verb than to kill, a more difficult realization than the 1st person of the Present Perfect – I have killed? Is there a more terrible noun than murderer? Or killing? Who can stop, strip of its meaning, de-verb this lasting, abstract, verbal noun from my dreams? What force, what grammar, what people, what justice, whose courts? But what should they be called in this language, what names are we to give them, sonless? Would I save myself if I were to find a name for them, a noun? And how do you save yourself from yourself? To be quartered, to hang myself on the belt of my own rifle before their threshold, to roll in salt with my skin removed and my eyes gouged out… Not even that would help.
‘Or them, or any justice protectors, the blood-thirsty keepers of the national morals, or the sinless curers of my disease, the infallible magistrates, disappointed believers, betrayed viewers… Or the political know-it-all’s, or well-informed journalists… I’m alone here, and I will be till my last breath.’
Who is right?
“You seem to think, often, that even a life in prison would be simple if you knew nothing about freedom, and you know a lot… ‘Well, I want to forget freedom, I want to think that I was born in a cage, and that I will end my days there. That my unmarked grave will be decided upon in the courtyard of the Seventh Pavilion. I have a sick enjoyment of that pain of unfreedom. I know there is no cure, it hasn’t been made yet, and a truce must be made with the pain.’
“Looking for freedom, you also wanted not to align yourself with anything, to stay your own person? ‘I’ve always felt the need to be sticking out. At any price. Not too much, but enough to let myself and others know that I refuse uniformity in thinking, acting, dressing, and that that’s nothing more than the need to not ever belong to anyone. To stay separated from the hosts that want so much that to belong to someone. I wasn’t going to align myself with anything.’
“Well, do you know who you are, Laušević?
‘Who am I? A Serb? A Montenegrin? A foreigner? A Yugoslavian eyesore? Who is right in this lawlessness and lack of order in this “courtless country”? What has it done to deserve to be lifted up to the skies by the illiterate? This country looks like Wakefield and vice versa.’ “So, do you subsume all your life – all these refusals of yours, this puffing up of your chest – under non-acceptance? ‘An impolite non-acceptance of the single state. I cannot come to terms with just one profession, one woman, I don’t accept the fact that I’ve had only one father, I don’t take on board a single consciousness, a single book, a single country, a singe party, or a single life.’
“And you want to keep all of that to yourself? ‘My justice, injustice, sin – each that I have committed – has to be closed within my skin, hemmed in by my life only.’ “I’d like it if you could respect and accept the decision that you took one day, and you needlessly call it mad. You say:
‘Life goes on. Incarceration is life too. A way for someone to live. A lifestyle. And I will live with it, just like people without legs, eyes, or their close ones, live. A matter of adjustment. To learn to LIVE. That EVERYTHING that is happening to you – you call life. And in this way – last. This life also has to have its meaning. And I won’t let it pass by me anymore; instead, grown into each other, we will weather the world – my disability and me.’
“My dear Laušević, you were incredibly strong. Much stronger than the others expected. Stronger even than yourself. Years have gone by. Life has gone by too. Safe travels, Brother.”
Priredio Ljubomir Radanov
(Kurir.rs)
Bonus video:
