My life Pero Zubac, author and poet I have been in my “later years” for a long time and my memories are still not awakened. Some things have been erased, mostly the injustices I’ve experienced in my life, or - to put it another way – repressed in the corners of memory. I remember and most often recall moments of happiness, serenity, gentleness, joy, calmness. My album of the unforgotten is large. Glistening winters and the snows of childhood, sledge rides down the Grebak, the first films in the Nevesinje cinema, St. George’s Day holidays in Batkovići, the warm care of my sisters, my first crushes, Olga and Lola, the town library and librarian Vinko Milas, so committed and dedicated to books and recommendations for children to read, football matches and little pictures of footballers that I collected from the wrappers of chocolates, carefully and with devotion, blue flowers in the Nevesinje field, buttercup grass, the smell of elderberry and linden trees in the gardens, the first scout detachment, a carefree existence, collecting medicinal herbs (rupturewort, linden, elder, orchid) and my first earnings from submitting the plants to be sent to Belgrade, where my uncle Mile Soldo, aka Forta, was the director of company Jugobilje. And the table football that we invented and played with buttons as footballers, and my uncle was a tailor and I had the best button team, and that beautiful button with a wind jacket that sometimes came to us as Unra’s assistance, along with Truman’s eggs and plant-based cheese from America. And the snowballs were dry and soft. It didn’t hurt when they hit you. The Zubac family also had a house in the village of Batkovići, where your youngest uncle, Bogdan, lived, and aunt Stana with her children. It was at their place that you celebrated your family patron saint’s day of St. George and the feast of St. Elijah. The church and the faithful were frowned upon during that post-war period and people mostly celebrated “in secret”? Vaso and Obren weren’t party members, so they were allowed to celebrate, but Obren did that at Bogdan’s place in Batkovići because he had been the director of socially-owned companies until his retirement (hotels, agricultural cooperatives, trade companies). Some ‘first fighters’ [WWII Yugoslav Partisan combatants] also came to the celebrations, and the priest came to Vaso’s, so whether we wanted it or not he would burn incense in our rooms and on the veranda. I loved the smell of
56
March
ANTIĆ AND ZUBAC WITH STUDENTS ON THE TRAIN TO SPLIT
JOVANKA, TITO, VLADIMIR AND PERO ZUBAC - VILLA RAVNE
slightly impoverished from today’s perspective of the celebrating of major holidays.
I have been in my “later years” for a long time and my memories are still not awakened. Some things have been erased, mostly the injustices I’ve experienced in my life, or - to put it another way – repressed in the corners of memory incense and myrrh, and still do. That’s something you don’t forget. And every Easter, which was my favourite holiday during my childhood, I went to the church tower with my friends to ring the bell, and looked forward to coloured eggs and competing to see which has the strongest shell, then the town was full of people who were filled with some universal happiness. Did you recall the Christmas and Yuletide traditions of your childhood? I remember some holy serenity from Christmas evenings and mornings, and some blessedness on the faces of all of us who were celebrating: česnica loaf, roast meat, cakes, the scent of Christmas bread,
It is inevitable for certain “pictures” to be erased from our memory, but there are also those that remain forever. You mention with joy Nevesinje’s winters, snows... In my memory, the snows of Nevesinje were a brighter fascination than the rains of Mostar, and their whiteness is described in many of my poems, especially those intended for children. There were days when buses couldn’t traverse the road from Mostar to our town. There were no sledges, except for larger sleighs that villagers used to come to the town with the help of horses, on Thursdays, on market day. The snows of childhood are my everlasting joy. You lost your mother, Joka, at the age of just five. That is an irreparable loss, even though the widow Božana, whom your father married, worked hard to take your mother’s place for you and the other children? I remember her only for good things. And the relatives multiplied: her brothers, the Živkovićs, Milan and Đoko in Belgrade and Ljubo in Straševina near Nikšić, sister Jela married to Vuk Nikčević, in Belgrade, their numerous children, were the new wealth of my upbringing. You learned to read both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts early on, and the most interesting
