Teofilo's imaginary homeland

We will send each other off with a story. There used to be a messy and dusty tavern in Sarajevo, above Kino Romani, called Galerija. During the war, China was given back its old name, "Imperial".

So the tavern became Imperial. Nothing in the fall of 1996, the first post-war, was imperial. It was cold and stifling. It smelled like a toilet and tobacco smoke, there was no water. The guests were Giacometti's thin. There, at a small table by the window that looked out on the battered Titova Street, on the facades riddled with shrapnel and on the windows with nylon panes, the two of us met. There, at the same table, we sat for hours, drank too many coffees and talked about what we would talk about for the next short, almost thirty years.

We already knew everything there was to know about each other. Although the borders between the two countries where we lived were hermetically sealed, he had already read my books and followed my newspaper articles quite regularly. "Vreme" would first come to me through some Western diplomats and German journalists who moved between Zagreb and Belgrade, and then a very young journalist of the then Radio 101, who decades later would become a journalistic military expert, began to smuggle fifty issues of "Vreme" every week from Slovenia, from Brežice, for his subscribers. I told him, at that time in "Imperial", that for a long time I thought that Teofil Pančić was a pseudonym. This morning, the first dawn without Teofilo, it seems to me that it would actually be better if it were possible to live without the body, only in books and in theater performances, in films and comics, with Olja and among friends, in newspaper articles, because only some gloomy and sad problems were encountered with the body. The body was suffering from what was happening around it.

Once, in an antiquarian store in Zagreb, I came across a book that belonged to him. It ended up there because it was resold by those who fraudulently obtained the apartment in Viktora Bubnja Alley, where he lived until deep in December 1991. The story about that apartment and the model of Teofilo's exile is good and powerful, but he did not write it as a whole as it really happened. This is where the two of us differ: while for me there is nothing greater than a story, nothing for which any story should not be told, for Teofilo there is style. That style that makes his human dignity. First of all, he says now at the dawn of his absence, I am not in any kind of exile! And he won't even say the other, because it goes without saying: he loves Zagreb too much and in some perfectly preserved part of himself he feels like a Zagreb resident to ever be able to tell the story of how he lost his city. Or how his body was left without an apartment. And how, which is the most terrible thing, he ran out of some books. He was terribly shaken when I returned his book.

Once, at the last hour, I drove him to the bus station. He went with full bags, checkers and piles of books, and he was nervous. The lady at the counter was not the nicest. Maybe because she recognized Teofilo's gorgeous ecavila in that wrong place, which seemed to be emerging from all the Vinaverian Serbian Babylons? That was not the reason. The lady is simply a counter worker, and it is in her nature to be unhelpful and unkind. However, it made him so angry that he started shouting. And he shouted at her, until she turned into her own opposite, into a sweet lady with teary eyes, in some of the most preserved, perfectly flawless Zagreb Kajkavian language, in the state in which that language was at the end of the eighties. All those words, accents and intonation, places where the speaker takes a breath or rolls his eyes, everything was equally perfect, linguistically lavish, Babylonian comprehensive and unattainable to us poor people who are not from Zagreb, although we are in Zagreb.

This morning, when it becomes clear that we will no longer part ways, but that from today Teofil will go everywhere with me, because it is up to me to be his home and I have nowhere to run from that, and I have no intention of doing so, this morning, therefore, when I set up a map of our paths and encounters in those too short thirty years, I notice something unusual on that map. We saw each other everywhere, were in between our reading and writing, but never outside the former Yugoslavia. After we met for the first time in Sarajevo, by some miracle we were together at least once in every capital of the former Yugoslav republics and provinces. Only in Pristina we never met. And that can only mean one thing: our spirits will meet there the following night. Probably somewhere around the National and University Library of Kosovo, designed for our dreams by Zagreb architect Andrija Mutnjaković. (And there is no vain, Yugoslavian or Yugoslav nostalgic connotation in all of this. We simply met in places where we understood each other and where we had something of our own. We met where Teofil repaired something that others had broken.)

And finally Novi Sad. View from the heights, on the river and the bridge. The view from the place where the body is in a foreign country. Because the body is in subtenancy. And it is hard, hard sick. But the view is magnificent and unique. There, from that balcony, Teofilo's imaginary homeland could be seen. We will never see her again.