Belgrade is Alive (Greetings from Hiroshima)

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Belgrade is Alive (Greetings from Hiroshima)

Open letter from Stevan Raičković

The black (half dead) telephone began ringing in my apartment the day after the bombardment of Yugoslavia and Belgrade began. A couple of moments passed before I succeeded in figuring out who had called me, and especially what kind of message I was being given.

"Stevan, good?" - was as much as I could make out... and I sensed in the accented, un-Serbian pronunciation that the speaker was obviously upset... it was a Japanese variant of our language... which is not entirely unknown to me.

"Good!" - I replied.

We repeated the same question and answer several times...

It was a woman's voice from Hiroshima, on the other side of the world, a woman whose last name is Nakajima... the sole surviving grandmother of my grandchildren, Adam and Ana. They are the children of her daughter, Miwako, and my son, Milos... who live in Brooklyn...

Mrs. Nakajima learned this single Serbian word, dobro (good), from her daughter, Miwako... This word had a variety of meanings for her... and it did not literally have reference to only disposition or health... but also to life, raw life...

And the next day, exactly at noon, my black telephone rang again.

It was the same voice from far away Hiroshima.

"Stevan, good?"

"Good!"

This time Mrs. Nakajima's voice was even more upset, and she kept repeating herself... but added a new expression:

"Belgrade, good? Belgrade, good?"

"Good! Good!" - I repeated several times. I was deeply touched.

On the third day I was on my way to the Serbian writer's house... located at (the former!) Francuska (French St.) 7... when the air raid sirens started screaming, which now meant a dangerous period of renewed NATO bombardment of Belgrade.

There was a protest taking place at the writer's house called Five Minutes to Twelve.

At a dramatic moment like this, I had intended to read in this illustrious hall of ours a pathetic old sonnet of mine calledStone Lullaby... but I refrained from verse...

I instead shared with my fellow authors this newest experience of mine... It seems to me that I ended my story with these words:

"Now it is exactly noon... in my empty apartment on St. Sava Street, the black telephone is ringing in vain, with two urgent questions from distant Hiroshima: is Stevan well?... and is Belgrade alive?...

As I am writing all this down... I recall the one Japanese word that I do know, which my son, Milos, drilled into my head a couple of years ago:

Arigato... (thank you)...

27 March, 1999

(Translator's note: This open letter appeared in Japan's largest daily newspaper, Tokyo's Asahi Shimbun, on 4/5/99. Radiation levels from the use of depleted uranium warheads in the bombardement of Serbia equal ten atomic blasts in Hiroshima (see www.iacenter.org). Mr. Stevan Raičković (b. 1928) is Serbia's greatest living poet. He gave his last reading in New York in 1997 at the Serbian Orthodox Church of St. Sava. A brief biography and selection of Stevan Raičković's poems in translation can be found in Serbian Poetry from the Beginnings to the Present, by Milne Holne and Vasa D. Mihailovich, Yale Russia and East European Publications, No. 11, New Haven, 1988, pgs. 310-317. ) 

Translated by Milo Yelesiyevich © 1999.