Read Online Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergovic - Free Book Online Page A

proletarian labor camps were being set up, it became clear that something was in fact wrong with the boy. He picked up some things more easily than other children of the same age, but other things he failed to understand. To begin with, he would cry inconsolably for a long time, or withdraw into his shell for days and just stare at the corner of his room. As he always came around in the end, his parents were able to convince themselves that his tantrum had just been a passing phase, one of many peculiar childhood illnesses whose real cause is unknown but which sooner or later vanish without any trace.
    On the first day at school Slobodan had a nervous breakdown. He sat on his desk and howled, gripping the top of his chair until his fingers broke. “Sleep heals everything,” his mother observed, but the infant woke up in a similar mood the next day and the day after that. He responded warmly to any kindness but fiercely resisted his parents’attempts to send him back to school. The very idea provoked a series of long monotonous wails that only died down when poor exhausted Slobodan fell into a sweaty sleep. The rest of the time he would only talk about subjects that interested him at that moment. Anything else he reacted to with a look of bewilderment or silence. For days, whenever Bogdan tried to teach his son how to do up his shoelaces, Slobodan fumbled clumsily with his fingers or tied false knots. He just couldn’t master the three simple moves. And yet he was able to remember any conversation that had taken place in the family, and often took great pride in recalling, word for word, everything that had been said over the Sunday lunch table the previous weekend. Also, he could tell you whose godfather had stepped on a sea urchin in Promajna last year, and which of the neighbors had been discovered with stockpiles of flour in 1946. As he grew up, the boy served as a kind of aide-mémoire to his parents, utterly incapable as he was of doing anything but repeat conversations with unnerving accuracy in a slightly raised and monotonous voice.
    In the mid-1950s, Bogdan died of heartbreak and the unforgiving memory of that night in the autumn of 1944 when he agreed to let Mira resolve all the uncertainties of life by having an abortion. His widow continued to bring up Slobodan on her own, and the boy soon grew to be over six feet tall, though he never became any more independent and was still unable to look after himself. To this day, many inhabitants of Sarajevo remember Mira as a smart old lady, alwaysimmaculately groomed, with an intelligent and attractive face. But wherever she went she was followed at a distance of three paces by her gigantic son, whose appearance was no less immaculate and polished than his mother’s. In other words, he was fine as long as he didn’t open his mouth. But the minute he started talking it became apparent that Slobodan was very strange. For instance, he had already sprouted a few grey hairs when he came to the attention of Meho the Shoemaker, who looked over the rim of his spectacles and commented, “That young man comes with his own sell-by date. I bet he won’t outlive his mother.”
    During the Sarajevo Olympics in 1984, Mira quietly and gracefully departed this world. Soon afterwards her poor distraught son began to stop passersby in the street in order to ask irrelevant questions about their family trees. As a rule, people were happy to cooperate with this idiotic stranger and tried to answer his questions patiently. They would tell Slobodan everything, and he would commit the information to memory, filing away personal details inside his head only to regurgitate the miscellaneous data at the next encounter. Slobodan had total recall when it came to other people’s faces. For instance, he would never mix up a family from the region of Lika, say, with its counterpart in Podrinje. Nobody understood better than Slobodan the frustrations suffered by the