Boško’s Clouds

Boško’s Clouds

The wrinkled old Serb gulped a mouthful of spirit from a battered silver hipflask that he had taken from the pocket of his equally battered jacket. ‘It’s all I can do to stop the coughing’ he said, almost apologetically, before drawing hard on his cigarette. Nicotine stained the fingers of his right hand, a couple of centimetres of the otherwise grey moustache that concealed the whole of his mouth, and the drably painted walls that surrounded the dark wooden desk at which he sat. On his left hand I noticed he had one finger missing and another badly misshapen.

As I examined the dozens of campaign medals tossed into a plastic ice cream tub on the glass-topped counter, he started telling me the story of his own military career. I hadn’t asked but he was eager to share. He admitted that in hindsight he wasn’t proud of some of the things he had done and neither, it seemed, were they who had been decorated with those now discarded pieces of brass and ribbon, each with an asking price of 200 Dinars (approximately £1.40). Considering that people must have died in the lead up to them being pinned on the chests of glorious recipients sent shivers through my body. Thoughts of them later being discarded, for whatever reason, depressed me.   

Standing close to him I sensed that I too was turning brown from the cloud of exhaled smoke as he recounted gruesome details of his time fighting against the Bosnians in the 1990s and explaining why it had been necessary to do so. Although I couldn’t agree with the ideology that had guided him, particularly his attempts to justify the four-year-long Siege of Sarajevo and the Srebrenica genocide, it was interesting to hear of the first hand experiences of someone who had been a combatant in that complex and horrific war. I felt I was listening to the words of an intrinsically good man poisoned by propaganda and in search of personal revenge.    

Suggesting I take a seat, he introduced himself as Boško, and offered me rolling tobacco and a glass of his homemade slivovitz, claiming that both contained only natural ingredients. ‘If I didn’t smoke and drink, how else would I get nature’s goodness into my veins?’ he asked.

Out of politeness I accepted the plum distillate and a little coffee from the small copper djezve that simmered on a cast iron stove in the corner of his dusty antique shop. Laughing as he poured, he boasted ‘All natural ingredients!’ I tried to convince myself that heat from the burning logs might have seen off any deadly bacteria or cigarette ash that had got caught up in the cooking process.

He went on to say that those terrible things he had spoken of had all taken place many years ago, wishing that they had never happened at all and expressing grave concern that the ethnic tension in the Western Balkans had still not gone away. ‘The situation in Kosovo is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off,’ he said before raising his arms in the air and shouting ‘BOOM!’ at the top of his voice. There was an awkward silence then as he drew again on his wispy roll-up and stared hard at the worn bare boards of the wooden floor.

Not really knowing how to react, I hesitated a couple of minutes before asking him what effect the upheaval had had on his family. After a heavy sigh he replied, ‘While I was at the army training camp in Croatia, Bosniaks beat my father to death in our yard. My dear mother and young brother were taken away with some of our neighbours in the back of a truck. No one ever saw them again. No one knows what happened to them. I have no family. Most of our village was burned. I have no photographs. I have only memories and a desire to forget, but not to forgive.’

Looking around I saw shelves laden with simple but interesting artefacts from a Serbia of fifty or even a hundred years before. Coins, porcelain vases, books of poetry printed in Cyrillic script, alabaster busts of long-dead pompous dukes and generals with feathers in their hats, ornate cigarette lighters, socialist groups’ lapel badges, monogrammed and inlaid jewellery boxes, and such like.  Every item was a treasure from a time when Belgrade had been the capital of the whole of Yugoslavia.

A significant proportion of the wares bore pictures or engravings of Marshall Tito, Yugoslavia’s former president. He had been a leader cautiously respected by western and eastern powers alike and worshipped by many in his own country. The old man described him as a ‘snake in the grass’ who, despite his strong allegiance to socialism, had refused to take his people into the Soviet Bloc and who had played a cunning game with powerful statesmen from both sides of the Iron Curtain to secure what he considered best for the Yugoslav Federation. Everything had been fine, it seemed, until Tito died in 1980 without there being a successor capable of continuing to hold together the six individual republics as one nation. From that point onwards all hell really was let loose in a series of wars of independence.

In light of what he had been through, Boško considered himself fortunate to be alive and fortunate too that, due to spending long periods of time away from his home on active service and then having a body and mind both scarred by war, he had never been able to marry and have children. ‘The work of God is such that when the next conflict comes I will have no need to worry myself about my sons and my grandsons. I am very lucky!’ he said with a forced smile on his face.

It didn’t seem right to buy something from him. Taking home a polished trinket would have just sullied this unique experience. I couldn’t have wished for a better souvenir than the conversation we had just shared. ‘Great thanks to you for taking an interest in my country’ he said, firmly shaking my hand. ‘It is rare for a foreign visitor to do this.’ But he understood that as a resident of neighbouring Bulgaria, a country that had experienced great troubles of its own, I would always yearn for a greater understanding of the intricacies of Balkan history.  

An old-fashioned bell jangling on the back of the shop door as it closed behind me was the only sound when I eventually stepped out into the empty streets of the city’s Dorćol district. Boško’s words already repeating themselves in my mind had me thinking to myself that sometimes even the darkest cloud might have a silver lining, albeit one that is virtually impossible to find and which may have been riddled with bullets.

Image:

My own photo of a statue of Josip Broz Tito, former President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It stands close to his mausoleum in the garden of the Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade.