: Alma Lazarevska
: Death in the Museum of Modern Art
: Istros Books
: 9781908236463
: 1
: CHF 3.00
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 124
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Very different from the rougher, blunter prose of her male contemporaries, Alma Lazarevska's stories can perhaps be described as the tender heart of Bosnian war. Writing from the domestic perspective, her prose is nevertheless deceptively simple; allowing the horror of the war to impinge with devastating effect on the most banal, everyday scene. Apart from the protagonist of the first story, the characters remain nameless. In five of the six stories we can assume that we are following the same unnamed female narrator, who refers to her husband simply as 'He' and her son as simply 'The Boy.' In a conflict where ethnic identity is at the heart, it seems a sobering decision to dispense with names. The family in these stories are at the same time everyone and no-one. They might become bigger than themselves, standing for every group that has ever been the victim of violence due to their ethnicity; or they might represent the de-humanization that has to occur in order for such persecutions to be carried out, reduced to pronouns rather than individuals with names. 'Him' and 'her' seem perilously close to 'it.' This collection brings home the acute unfairness of forcing that contemplation of death upon another person, of depriving them of that human freedom to dream and delude themselves. And it is a beautiful acknowledgement of the small humanities that we cling to when we are at the mercy of so much inhumanity.

GREETINGS FROM THE BESIEGED CITY

Thirteen for ten!

If twenty years had passed since that evening, rather than two, I would still have been certain that this was the offer he had chanted in his sing-song voice. He had a face that would have inspired titles such asBoy in Blue, Boy with a Tear in his Eye,Boy with Rose ... It was hard not to be sentimental about a face like that.

But we both recoil from such emotions. We know all too well how awkward one feels when they subside. Even on summer beaches we read serious books. When the sun’s star paints the sky orange, purple, violet, red, one of the two of us says drily (we seem to take turns from one evening to the next, like conscientious watchmen):

‘Well, have we had enough Greetings from the Adriatic?’

We mean the picture postcards of sunsets inscribedGreetings from the Adriatic. In the evenings tourists buy them at street stalls and send them inland, to cities where the asphalt is melted by the heat of summer and women’s thin heels sink helplessly into it.

We don’t buy postcards like that, even if, in the absence of any others, it means not writing to our friends and family at all. We did not succumb until that evening when we caught sight of those awful postcards in the hands of a boy standing at the beginning of the main street in Dubrovnik, near the Onofrio Fountain. He had arranged the thirteen cards, all identical, in two unequal fans. Cooling his flushed face with the larger one, he held out the other with the full length of his thin arm, like an outdated traffic signal. He was theBoy with Postcards, Boy by the Onofrio Fountain. Boy at the Entrance to Dubrovnik. Boy Leading one into the First Temptation!

In fact, there had already been similar temptations. Like the one to which I had ingloriously succumbed several months before. At that time, our little boy was already very good at distinguishing letters but he steadfastly refused to read. He would press up against me, thrust a favourite book into my hands and mutter:

‘Read it!’

He maintained a dedicated silence. While I read aloud and my mouth grew dry, he would gaze calmly at a fixed point, without turning his head towards the book.

That spring before Dubrovnik (it was an unhealthy, sickly spring which instead of luring the buds out of the old trees, turned sensible people sentimental!), I had been reading him a little book by Paul-Jacques Bonzon,The Seville Fan, a remnant of my own childhood reading. The original title wasL’Eventail de Seville. Those were the first foreign words I had memorised, never having managed before that to reproduce the little Czech songs my father used to sing as he shaved. That was how he daily revived the language of his four-year bachelorhood in the country with the prettiest sound for the letterc. I remembered the French title of Bonzon’s book because my romantic younger aunt, who had been born an old maid, used to come up to me while I was reading it, and ask, expressing her agreeable surprise each time by a movement of her eyebrows:

‘Oh, so is my little fair-haired girl readingL’Eventail de Seville? Little fair-haired girls ought to readL’Eventail de Seville. L’Eventail de Seville ...’

She would lean ov