Singer in the Night. Olja Savicevic
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when the goodwill of a beginning briefly reigns, toss at least a bone to those genuinely hungry for the meat of hope.
Yours faithfully,
A Wistful Dog
If I had to describe Nightingale in two words, I’d say he is a street poet.
Although since he was twenty-something when he published a samizdat edition of just ten poems, he hasn’t written any poems but everything he has done could be called poetry. His collection was even called Poetry, which is neither good nor bad, but simply accurate. They were interesting poems, authentic, but he felt that he needed a new means of expression, for him paper was slow, dull and uncommunicative, while the Internet is garrulous, polluted and cacophonous, those are places that don’t offer space for development, that’s what he thought. He wrote poems with a felt-tip on walls, by night, on peeling façades, in lifts, toilets, on rubbish skips, in subways. He drew. He discovered spray paint. An excellent concept, always fashionable, he liked spray.
He said that when the poets left the streets, it was a bad day for poetry.
Because the first poets were guttersnipes;
noble Homeroid beggars,
the occasional Villon beyond the law,
Byrons who typically limp on the other side of the law,
and beatniks,
their distant relatives Cendrarses,
whole brigades of Bukowskys,
a few Bolans,
Rimbauds, Wildes, Verlaines, Dalmatian reporters,
rappers …
gentle decadents, anonymous painters and grafitti writers, Banksy
et al,
and too few women, poets,
(maybe, if we stretch the term, Tracy Emin? Nin, Anaïs?)
because for too long over the centuries their wanderings
have been hampered by the skirts and children round their legs.
The threshold of the house
and men’s shoes
women’s too, pointed.
On the other side of the street music wafts
from rhapsodes, troubadours, cantators, street singers:
young backpackers with a guitar.
They were all his gambling fathers and prostituted brothers,
although, although,
he used to say
you never know whose dad is whose.
Gale said that the poets were ruined when they focused on each other and their medium, language, and stopped thinking about the people they were addressing. They perfected their tools, they precisely tuned their instruments, but they sang into emptiness, with empty words, and empty space responded.
But bollocks to the poets and pseudo-poets, they will always have poetry, the blessed idiots.
Nevertheless, the first thing I heard about Nightingale was not that he was a poet or a grafitti artist, comic-strip maker or art student, and he was all of that, but that he was visited by women, all sorts of women and girls, when they fancied sex, unpaid of course, for he was not a tart. Approachable and affable, he would say: benign.
It was all strange to me, because at the time I kept seeing him with a girl, whom we called Helanka, she was a refugee from Bosnia, better known as a girl without a single hair (about which she gave various explanations). At that time I didn’t know there could be male/female friendships, because we had been taught they didn’t exist. And I didn’t know that Gale, Helanka and I would become inseparable for that brief phase of youth when your friends are more important than anything and anyone, but that passes as though it had never been, hello-goodbye, each to his own path forever and no matter.
A village, a melancholy village. Why is a village more alarming than a town? The smallest village is more alarming than the biggest town, isn’t it? No one locks their door for fear of burglars, but before long here comes your next-door neighbour tapping on the door with an axe. I’m not a fan of villages.
But what can you do, the heart does not ask, after I had left the village of Mitrovići behind me, on my search for Gale, I set out towards the village of Tulumbe in pursuit of my Helanka, because wherever she was he could have been too.
Tulumbe is a village of ghosts, on a mountain between clumps of hazel and meadows full of blueberries. The old Red School in the middle of the fields is concealed by wild corn, and the long burned-out houses have been taken over by plants. Here and there the occasional light in the darkness, a lantern, a generator humming, electricity never reached here, nor asphalt, nor mains water, but there is that delicious water from the forest well, and if the well dries up, there are springs in the villages down the hill. I heard all that, all that and more, my dear, some time ago, and soon I would see for myself. That was two weeks ago, a little less, at the start of my search, at the sweet start, and it was sweet, I can see that now…
I drove tirelessly across and beyond the border, deep into the deserted land of Bosnia, through glistening red and black forests and through canyons full of wild beasts’ eyes, through gigantic greens, a moist tearful landscape of magnanimous beauty and past the peeling façades of towns.
Every minaret and every gilded church bell-tower, and they were as numerous as house chimneys, reminded me of an evil phallus. Evil phalluses are always ready to thrust. ‘Oh God, wherever you may be!’ my grandmother used to say as she watched devastation on television or when she spilled coffee on the tablecloth. If he exists and if he’s worth his salt, of one thing I am certain: from the outset he avoids places of worship.
I drove, without a break, from dawn to dusk, along little by-ways that don’t exist on Sat-Nav, I got lost and then found myself, evening caught me on a road with not one single lit window and the blood in my veins had frozen repeatedly.
And then I became accustomed to the east, studded with tiny stars. The night was not yet impenetrable – soon a small town in a hollow would be revealed by the headlights and beyond it was the village I was looking for. I did not stop until I reached my goal. Such a journey ought perhaps, no, certainly, to be planned, more things and warmer clothes brought along, a different car, not to attract attention, but I had not had time for plans. Freed from plans, from responsibility, from obligations. (I am alone and therefore free, says the optimist. My dear. I am free and therefore alone, says the pessimist.)
If anyone saw me at the one traffic light or at the queue at the border, he would look round questioningly, one person even shouted: ‘Hey, there’s Clementine, the blond, the soap girl!’
I have silicon lips and perfectly whitened teeth, I have a Brazilian hairstyle, soft and expensive, if crumpled, clothes, I drive a gold Mazda convertible, but I am a black orange, inside. Full of hell.
I’m going to a melancholy village. The road devours me sullenly, but the night – the night is glad of me.
LETTER FROM AN INDIFFERENT GOD
Who’s this waking me?
I’m an old, tired God and I have to sleep, because I have to calculate, I have to arrange things, I have to do book-keeping, I have to write down everything that has come in and out of my mouth, I have to digest it all, I have to empty all those inboxes of prayers. Day and night, I sit bowed over the Earth, sorting: a prayer for health, a prayer for forgiveness, a prayer for success, a prayer for a life, but sometimes also a prayer for death. I do my work in a professional manner, the profession of God, I don’t delve into the meaning.
Well, hey, what else could I do; you’re so pathetic, so feeble: blind puppies looking for their mummy, little children for whom their father assumes responsibility. You don’t need a God, just a prosperous parent! An illusionist! A fortune-teller and lottery-drum, that’s the ideal God for