HE WHO PHOTOGRAPHED 130 DEAD IN A SINGLE DAY CANNOT RETURN FROM WAR The most famous war reporter in the Balkans speaks to Kurir: ‘The Third World War began long
The most famous war reporter in the Balkans. Both praised and contested for it. Even those who dislike him because of his former reporting from all the wars in this region do not diminish his literary quality. They say: the Serbian Hemingway. And he says: “He who photographed one hundred and thirty dead in a single day, who, moving with fighters from Slavonia, Krajina, Republika Srpska and Kosovo, spent the best years of his life, who lost his health and ruined the lives of his parents and his beloved wife, cannot return from war.” Thus, in his view, a war reporter remains a war reporter even in peacetime. And in peacetime he writes books…
You are the winner of the Grand Prize “Ivo Andrić”, awarded by the Andrić Institute in Višegrad, for the short story collection Dead Smoke. You must be satisfied?
“This year awards are clanking on me like chains on a watchdog. I’m afraid it’s not a good omen. This is the fourth award I’ve received for Dead Smoke. For years I was on the deep margins. So as not to upset the neighbours, they hid the fact that I even existed. My books were published privately. You will search libraries in vain for my titles. But stories about my stories spread. ‘And imagine, he’s still writing,’ one lady exclaimed in horror in front of television cameras. I received the ‘Branko Ćopić’ Award from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, because it is very difficult to frighten people such as Matija Bećković, Dušan Kovačević and Jovan Delić. And then, as the crown of it all, the greatest literary award in the Balkans, that of the Andrić Institute in Višegrad. Kusturica says I remind him of Kieślowski and that ten short films should be made based on my stories.
On my side there has always been the Brotherhood of Serbian Spiritual Komitadjis. Painters who brought one hundred stones from Prebilovci and made their works on them. Poets for whom I am no competition, members of Rimovani’s regiment ‘Sava Savanović’. Dr Aleksandra Žeželj wrote about me in Politika that, like Cioran, I dream of words that would break jaws like fists.”
There is a (war) story about you that you reported from the battlefields in Yugoslavia wearing Ivo Andrić’s woollen coat. What is the truth about that coat?
“One long-ago day in the winter of 1977, while I was wandering around Terazije in worn-out shoes without a coat, Miodrag Bulatović came across me and took me out to lunch. All I had on me were the stories from The Black Suitcase. He took me to lunch and said: ‘Eat, who knows when you’ll next eat when you want to be a writer.’ Afterwards we went to his flat, and there I received my first and hardest award. The president and sole member of the jury was Miodrag Bulatović. I received Andrić’s coat. The one that Ivo Andrić had given him one such winter. When he tried to thank him, the old sage reproached him: ‘Don’t thank me, young man, nor repay a debt. Help someone who needs help more than I do. Good should go in a circle.’ I felt the weight of Andrić’s coat throughout the war. When the Dayton Agreement was signed, I gave it away, choosing carefully, to the then still young Željko Pržulj from Nedžarići, who was just beginning to write. His father and brother were both killed by a brother’s hand. Now the decision lies with Željko. And I know it wasn’t easy for him, but that the coat kept him warm. Winters under Igman are long and terrible. But he told me he had found a candidate who had been a boy in that dreadful column which, carrying the bodies of the dead, was leaving Sarajevo.”
Is there room today, and a livelihood, for writers in Serbia?
“I spent my life smuggling stories into newspapers disguised as reportage. Readers liked it, and editors pretended not to notice. That’s the only way. What gets read are weekend romance novels by starlets, fictionalised lives of saints, pulp crime magazines. In the 21st century, the short story is the only literary form that has survived. One that can be published on social networks and read on a phone on the bus. I was the first to realise this. That’s why I wrote hundreds of short stories, which can be found on my profile if you follow it. I’m satisfied with readership. I have thousands of followers, and I don’t even need books. They have all become my loyal friends.”
As a writer, do you expect anything from the Ministry of Culture?
“I expect nothing from anyone. I neither lobbied nor applied for the awards I received. They crucified the Minister of Culture because he refuses to purchase books printed in the Latin script. They impaled him because he gives money to monasteries, to soldiers’ cemeteries that no one has funded for a hundred years, and to folklore – the only thing that reminds children in the diaspora, who don’t know Serbian, that they are of Serbian origin. No ministry of culture anywhere in the world can force people to read. Little Zejtinlik in Sokolac, where my dead friends lie, Sarajevo warriors, is the cemetery where I want to be buried one day. This state belongs also to those who gave their lives for it. Leave soldiers’ cemeteries alone. And attack the minister, if he deserves it, over other things. It pays off. What is not yours is not yours. I need nothing.
I need oxygen and water, which the Aleksinac municipal services won’t give me even though the water mains pass two metres from my wife’s legalised weekend house in Rujevica, where I intend to see out the end. Nor does it occur to them to asphalt the kilometre of road to the cemetery. I have oxygen, and in the war I learned to quench thirst with dew from leaves.”
You were best man with the late Bora Đorđević. How do you remember him today?
“The Drina is not a border, but the backbone of the Serbian people. When sanctions were imposed on Serbs across the Drina, the first to break them was Bora. At midnight, in the middle of the bridge in the Drina canyon, while thousands of people stood on the bridge, he sang ‘Anđela’. I don’t know how to cry, but that night pus welled up in my eyes.”
You have been a journalist for decades, best known as a war reporter. Why did you decide to be a war correspondent – aren’t there other challenges in journalism?
“Only in borderline situations is it possible to discover God. I am a writer, and writers are advocates of the most unfortunate before God. Should I write a market weather report while children across the river are dying?”
How does a war reporter live today when there is no war?
“It is impossible to return from war. He who photographed one hundred and thirty dead in a single day, who, moving with fighters from Slavonia, Krajina, Republika Srpska and Kosovo, spent the best years of his life, who lost his health and ruined the lives of his parents and his beloved wife, cannot return from war.”
In one of your earlier interviews you said you knew the war in Bosnia would begin. What do you say today – will another major war begin in the world, will the Third World War start?
“The heart of war is money. No war begins before it is known exactly how much each party will earn from it. The Third World War began long ago. Ask Xi, Putin and Trump. I will not report on a war of Serbs against Serbs.”
Who will win tomorrow, artificial intelligence or man, the writer…
“Artificial intelligence writes well, but it has no imagination. And without imagination it is impossible to reach the heights of literature. It is incapable of creating great characters. And the history of literature is the history of great characters. A writer is as great as the great characters he has created. From Odysseus to Don Quixote, Prince Myshkin, Raskolnikov. Artificial intelligence will never be able to do that. It is a good postmodernist.”