Then, from the top of the bridge, one catches sight of a massive, stepped semicircle, carved into the facing hillside like an ancient Greek theatre, and below that, a grove of trees and a grove of stones. The trees are poplars: tall, slender, their branches finger the sky in constant, quiet motion. It was a sunny day in early September, and against the foot of one tree, a young couple leaned, arm in arm in the shade: a picture out of any park in the world. Only the stones stand inanimate and fixed, carved into the shapes of waist-high truncated pillars, bleak whitened monoliths proffering their silent, brooding commentary on the movement all around. They represent felled trees: individual lives brutally cut down.

A grove of trees and a grove of stones. No combination of physical forms could more simply and fittingly symbolise what occurred here. This is a place of which there are too many in Yugoslavia, where life and death meet and merge. If Kraljevo is to mean anything to the world for the atrocity that took place here in October 1941, our human responsibility is surely to try, as best us we can, to understand the significance of this meeting point. It is one thing to respond with strong feelings here. That is not hard. Understanding, though, is more difficult, perhaps even impossible. Yet if the Kraljevos of the world are really to be prevented from ever happening again, this challenge has to be met. Understanding is necessary, crucial. Civilisation depends on it.

It is in the nature of memory to dig and forage in the past: that is its operational zone, its field of exploration. Its passage is always downwards and back, as far as consciousness can carry us, even to our individual births. Here what is normally called consciousness comes to a full stop. Yet memory itself knows no barriers here, but is willing to take us still further back, through history, through the stages of evolution, even deeper down - through the realms of the dead - and then, patiently to escort us back up to the healing surface of the present.

This being so, memory tends to attach itself to the irrevocable and irrecoverable. So memory all too easily undergoes a kind of transference in our thinking, until we see it as a property belonging only to the dead, with as little bearing on our present lives as a fossil. And so, memory, to some people, simply conjures up the image of a monument, a still and lifeless block, an impassive sculpted slab - a finality.

Yet memory belongs to the living, the sentient. It is a function of life, continuously in movement - and if it is attributed to the dead this can only be so because the dead live on, in us.

We, who are living, all have our own dead: our loved ones, our friends, our family, tribe, people - a whole series of concentric human circles, expanding in us with years like the rings inside a tree. And though our dead often seem distant from us, and although their deaths have inevitably made them strangers, still they belong to us so intimately, and still they seem to regard us with such gentle familiarity, that it might almost be said: we belong to them. Even if there is an almost impermeable membrane between us and them - or perhaps a one-way screen, which on our side, at least, is opaque - we know all too well that, one day, we shall join them, and to those we leave behind us, as well as to the unborn, we shall become what our own dead are to us now.

Whenever the dead speak to us, it is always as a private voice heard inside us, from the depths of our own selves. The dead know nothing of statistics. Their voices are always warm, human, loaded with multilayered meanings: alive - whether they seem passionate or detached, close or distant, fleshed or disembodied - and even if we cannot always decipher the codes of their messages, they are carried to us through the underground mazes of memory. We know that certain objects can act as powerful receivers and transmitters for them: things, for example, that belonged to our dead in their lifetimes, which have since passed down to us: a ring, a locket, a photograph; an armchair, a room, a whole house. And the entrance to those labyrinthine channels and tunnels can open anywhere, any time, often taking us by surprise, because it is located precisely in objects and occurrences we hardly even notice any longer, for the simple reason that they are so familiar: a mirror, a cup, a stone; a melody, a perfume, a word. Constantly the dead remind us that whatever is around us is also inside us that the mysterious stuff we are made of is shared with all other things and beings - wind, flowers, butterflies -and that this intimate connectedness threaded through creation really is the common miracle.

This community among things makes the dead belong to all of us. The dead have no property and know no possessive pronouns. They observe none of the silly frontiers that obsess the living. Your dead and my dead are one kin. Their peaceful, quiet, impossibly simple language is universal, and its name is: Memory. So, full possession of the faculty of memory is a necessary condition for claiming the title: human being. Memory of the dead, as a constant presence among the living, and memory of the living, unafraid to listen to the voices of the dead, are interconnected links in the chain of being. Not for nothing did the Greeks call Mnemosyne, their goddess of memory, ‘Mother of the Muses’ - of the poet’s inspiration. If for poet we read ‘human’, and for inspiration ‘life’ and ‘liberty’, this ancient myth makes all too poignant sense in our own century: Memory as mother of human life and liberty, insisting on honouring her dead, relentlessly opposing all artificial attempts to reduce her children to ciphers.

Perhaps this helps us towards understanding the mentality of those who perpetrated the atrocities at Kraljevo, and so many other places. Such a mentality not only directs its total attention and energy to separating one living human person from another - whether according to race, religion, nationality, or whatever criterion - but also to denying access between the living and the dead. The denial of these natural connections, based on a limited and therefore distorted view of the universe, results in a carefully planned attempt to ‘reprogramme’ it according to some apparently more convenient, but always reductive theory. Beneath the superficially efficient and cool military exterior, which is meant to operate is a totally effective armour, such a mentality is frightened, spineless group-dominated, and easily organisable to utterly ruthless behaviour; and it finds the silent voices of the dead either irrelevant or intolerably threatening and disturbing. They must be shut out at all costs. And shutting out the dead means the abolition of memory. An African proverb says, ‘When a human being dies, a whole great library goes up in flames.’ So it is no accident that two of the most common expressions of this mentality, which frequently occur together, are the reduction of human beings to numbers, records, statistics, all meticulously tabulated to mask the underlying reality - tattoos on forearms, gassings in trucks and death factories, mass round-ups and executions - and the burning of books, of libraries. But it says something for humanity that even in our bloody century, all the mechanistic and reductionist social experiments conducted by such mentalities eventually collapse. The dead cannot be wiped out of us, the living. They refuse to be silenced. They go on speaking in and through us. They insist on it. Even so, the mentality of those who committed the atrocities at Kraljevo can creep up unawares on any one of us, like an “emotional plague”. There are still plenty of people who are afraid or have forgotten how to listen to the dead. Remembering the dead is a necessary guardianship of our freedoms, of all we most cherish. Another name for memory is: History.

In Yugoslavia, ordinary people still look each other directly in the eyes when they talk to each other. This frank, clear look occurs ritually, for example, whenever two people toast one another, raising their glasses not just with a wish for ‘Good Health’, as in my country, but for life itself (‘Živeli!’). Foreigners do not always notice this, but when they do, this simple, courteous acknowledgement of the full humanity of other people is seen as a radiant grace, a great treasure, a complete recognition of connectedness. But in these eyes, a blacker light also shines. For in Yugoslavia, the dead are not only buried all around beneath us, but they seem very close to the surface. The land still brims so unbearably with these recent dead, and the memories of the living are still so, paradoxically, alive with images of them, that I cannot help almost physically seeing and hearing their gone presences. George Seferis, twentieth century Greek, Balkan and universal poet, wrote: ‘I have to ask the dead / in order to go farther. / There’s no other way. . . / The dead must guide me.’ The dead should guide us, everywhere.

A grove of stones and a grove of trees. Memory is not just a monument: cold, detached, immortal. Memory is also a living tree: it has its roots, sap, bark and its inner ring of years, its knotty boughs and sturdy hardwood trunk, and its greenwood shoots that bend and sway in the wind. Like a tree, memory withers only to live again, it hibernates to bloom. And from this tree of memory, when it is cut down, we can make woodwind instruments for music, tables for bread and wine, furniture to stock our homes with, and gates and doors and windows.

As the workers of this small town go home across the railway bridge, Kraljevo reminds us that we the living, are the gatekeepers of memory, fully formed and informed by the voices of the dead. In remembering them we are the forest keepers, guardians of the tree of life which gives oxygen to the born and the unborn, protectors of the future. At the foot of this tree, a pair of young lovers embrace. Theirs is the common miracle.

This essay relates to the book The Blue Butterfly.

It was first published in Serbian in Oktobar, Kraljevo, 1989, tr. Bogdana G. Bobić

and then in The Tel Aviv Review 2, 1989-90

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