Ivan Dobnik - Vilenica

220 · Edo Popović
the street your ears were picking up various languages and dialects from
the courtyards, it was like switching stations on the radio; my folks, too,
came rolling in from Bosnia when I was a kid. Beyond those borders was
only the obscure, unfriendly space where it wasn’t smart to venture. And so
it went until I was approximately nine, when – in my best pants and shirt
(the pants were chequered, the shirt glaringly green with a huge, pointed
collar) and with a real fortune in my pocket – I sat on the No. 11.
I’d never been to town before. My parents took me nowhere. It was even
hard for them to go with me to the Nama department store in the Main
Street to buy me this or that; they didn’t try to hide it, and this was fair.
They let me know right away I couldn’t count on them. The stories my
peers told, of the world outside, of panthers, tigers and lions in the ZOO,
of city theatres with plush seats and parks with fountains, were just as
exciting as Bonanza episodes and cartoons about Tarzan, Ray Carson or
Steel Claw. So, I was sitting on the uncomfortable wooden bench, watching
through the tram window and clutching 50 Para coins in my pocket.
The tin coins in my pockets were heavy as gold, and they tinkled like gold
florins. And while the tram rattled past the Dinamo stadium and Partizan
cinema, my first orientation points, it dawned on me. I realised that the
asphalt streets in my quarter weren’t arteries leading to the heart of the
world, the Main Street, but in fact only capillaries leading to an insignificant
vein, whence the asphalt blood circulation went on along Maksimirska
and Vlaška Streets to the Republic Square, and from there... From
there all the way to the Austrian and Italian borders and beyond, into the
world of which I knew nothing then, but other people did, like my father,
who left and never came back, so he couldn’t tell me about it, but it was
logical he knew things about which not much was known in our quarter
at that time. And, more importantly, I realised I didn’t need anybody to
get somewhere.
Did I learn anything from my father? Well, I must have, but not because it
was his intention. He didn’t think much of others. He was wise enough to
take care only of himself. He didn’t bother me with advice and instructive
stories about the better past, the material so abundant in the warehouses of
many moms and dads. He generally spoke to me very rarely, nothing more
than everyday conversation like, How was school or Who hit you on the
eye? He didn’t squander words, and this is why you had to read his face –
to get out of his way when he was in a sour mood. It was a tricky business:
on the face of a bronze statue of some national hero in the school lobby
you could discern more emotion than on the face of my father.
What I want to say is this – just seeing doesn’t mean you recognize what
you’re looking at. To see above all means to know how to read the expression
on the face, to decipher the body language, and I learnt it quite
early on, thanks to my father, I must say. I’m not claiming he was violent.