Stevan Raickovic

TORSO

On Orthodox Good Friday, 1999, Belgrade

Through night and their own darkness they take aim

From every corner of heaven, out to maim

Not legs or left hand but the right I wield

My pen with ... as if I would quit the field.

Translated by Richard Burns and Jasna Levinger-Goy

Belgrade Is Alive
(Greetings from Hiroshima)

The black (half dead) telephone began ringing in my apartment the day after the bombardment of Yugoslavia and Belgrade began. A couple of moments passed before I succeeded in figuring out who had called me, and especially what kind of message I was being given.
"Stevan, good?" - was as much as I could make out... and I sensed in the accented, un-Serbian pronunciation that the speaker was obviously upset... it was a Japanese variant of our language... which is not entirely unknown to me.
"Good!" - I replied.
We repeated the same question and answer several times...
It was a woman's voice from Hiroshima, on the other side of the world, a woman whose last name is Nakajima... the sole surviving grandmother of my grandchildren, Adam and Ana. They are the children of her daughter, Miwako, and my son, Milos... who live in Brooklyn...
Mrs. Nakajima learned this single Serbian word, dobro (good), from her daughter, Miwako... This word had a variety of meanings for her... and it did not literally have reference to only disposition or health... but also to life, raw life...
And the next day, exactly at noon, my black telephone rang again.
It was the same voice from far away Hiroshima.
"Stevan, good?"
"Good!"
This time Mrs. Nakajima's voice was even more upset, and she kept repeating herself... but added a new expression:
"Belgrade, good? Belgrade, good?"
"Good! Good!" - I repeated several times. I was deeply touched.
On the third day I was on my way to the Serbian writer's house... located at (the former!) Francuska (French St.) 7... when the air raid sirens started screaming, which now meant a dangerous period of renewed NATO bombardment of Belgrade.
There was a protest taking place at the writer's house called Five Minutes to Twelve.
At a dramatic moment like this, I had intended to read in this illustrious hall of ours a pathetic old sonnet of mine called Stone Lullaby... but I refrained from verse...
I instead shared with my fellow authors this newest experience of mine... It seems to me that I ended my story with these words:
"Now it is exactly noon... in my empty apartment on St. Sava Street, the black telephone is ringing in vain, with two urgent questions from distant Hiroshima: is Stevan well?... and is Belgrade alive?...
As I am writing all this down... I recall the one Japanese word that I do know, which my son, Milos, drilled into my head a couple of years ago:
Arigato... (thank you)...

27 March, 1999

Translated by Milo Yelesiyevich