Sul Campo Del Mare - Vilenica

V2-2010.PM51136/13/100, 12:13 PMEnes Karićwho claimed that the West Indies was a lie; the New World is the truth!),in Mostar I hear the ringing of the Koran in an incomprehensible language,Semitic and Arabic, clusters of sounds from different worlds, fromfar away never-never lands. In those words my Mostar childhood is a shortdreameddream, or two dreams, walks on child legs in the middle of rosegardens, in which I knew not the name of any flower! Ramadans descendedfrom sky-blue abysses, kissing the faces of young boys and girls, sometimesalong a ladder of moonlight.I go by bezistan and I know one thing for sure: If Mevlija’s son had notleft Mostar to study, maybe he never would have discovered God as a threat,as a duty, as an ambush. In Tepa his faith was poured from the sky, clearand blue, accompanied word for word by Hodža Alun’s voice, transformedinto spring water, quenching the thirst of a dry throat.In Dubrovnik, at the seventh stroke of half-sleep, I separated myselffrom Tepa, from mother Mevlija, with the cries of seagulls as witnessesand the shimmering of waves on the shore. She stayed until the boat sailedaway, taking in the grim reality of the joy that she was sending me to theEmperor’s city, to great madrasas at the end of a long trip, through severalseas. The boat moved away, the dear blue blade of grass grew smaller andsmaller, all the more unknown as the foamy breaking of the water grewmore expansive.Mevlija was like the fragile plants that we tried to raise long ago in ourMostar garden: march, sorghum, wormwood, malt, St. John’s wort…thenames I have remembered by the special beauty my mother created withher caring hands as she cared for them. On the boat I recited the names ofgrasses; I had learned them from her, carefully, just as I had memorizedKoranic passages under Alun’s tutelage. From the boat I called out something,like: Goodbye, Mevlija! Or: We’ll see each other in Mostar! Or: We’llmeet in the shade of the garden in a year or two…The blue blade of grass, the blue dot, no longer heard me. She wipedher tears away with the corner of her blue headscarf.Qadi Halid saw that I was sobbing.“Listen, boy, you’re crying! And you want to go to Constantinople! Comeon, why are you shaming yourself, and now even me! Look, there, sevenbeautiful Dubrovnik girls are looking at you, laughing at you, saying: aboy, and bathing himself in tears!”Qadi Halid said only that, found our places, surreptitiously took twoswigs from his brandy bottle and fell asleep.2.I went through the streets towards bezistan and Baščaršija; I would soonbe in front of Begova Mosque, warmly welcomed by the smell of boiledcorn, a new plant, still a shy guest in our land.Forty years have passed since merchants brought it from the West Indiesto Italian and infidel lands (In 1535, in Stolačko Polje, its seed was plantedby Orhan Dubravić, descendant of Dabiživ and great-grandfather of Šakir113