About twenty miles south west of Belgrade there is a small town called Obrenovac. The bus stops opposite the post office. There is a decorative flower bed with grass growing in it instead of flowers. Four men sit on the edge of it, leaning forward with their elbows on their knees, talking. Behind them is a small but well-stocked supermarket. Other shops in the main street are less like those of a consumer society. There is an ironmonger’s with home-made stovepipes in the window. There are four or five tailor’s shops with lengths of material for men’s suits and hand-made sajkace – the Serbian dented cap for men – in their windows. A hairdresser. A baker with several different kinds of bread, including ring-shaped, seed-covered djevreki, and various sorts of Strudels. Then a butcher with no meat in the window, but with carcasses hanging at the back of the shop.
In Russian cities the food displayed in shop windows often consists of painted wooden models, wooden chops, chickens, eggs. From a distance they sometimes look more convincing than real food because their colours are unusually vivid and distinct. The wooden meat is either lean (red) or fat (cream-coloured). There was a painter from Georgia towards the end of the last century called Pirosmanishvili who spent most of his life going from one tavern in Tiflis to another, painting inn signs. Many of them were of food. I have never seen paintings more expressive of hunger – or rather, of the dreams provoked by hunger. Tabletops like the earth and on them cheeses and joints of meat like huge buildings. Even the women he painted look edible, like Easter cakes. In Pirosmanishvili’s work the Russian tradition of painting wooden models of food for shop windows found its only genius and master. Why is it that the real lamb hanging at the back of the butcher’s in Obrenovac unexpectedly, without premeditation, reminds me of his painting?
Further along the street is a bookshop in which most of the books have the appearance of school textbooks. I know already that when the children come out of school for lunch they will be wearing black overalls trimmed with white stitching.
But even if I ignored the shop windows and the children, and if I walked, as I often do, head down looking at my feet, I would still know which part of Europe I was in. The surface of the road is poor and where it is metalled the edges are rough and unfinished. This much, however, might be true of parts of France. Is it the strength with which the grass grows, pushing up lean and stalky wherever there is a gap or crack, that makes it so Slav? Is there something quintessential in the yellowy grass stalks and that dusty grey tar which may at any moment break into cobbles or fade away into earth? (It is necessary to insist that there is nothing exotic in such questions: their answers are literally part of the substratum of real, in no way romantic, events: for example, that dusty, tarry grey is the colour at the bottom of the tram-lines in Prague when it is dry and the sun catches in a muted acetylene blue on the uppermost surface of the rails.)
Or is the characteristic quality of the road more to do with the relative thinness of its surface? Is it that it has never been embedded in the earth but only laid on its surface? Is it that the road wears like a cloth rather than a solid structure?
Either side of the main street the houses are low. You can almost touch their roofs. They have double windows with a space the width of their walls between the panes. In this space in one window there is a pot of geraniums and, behind them, coarse lace curtains. The other window is slightly dusty. To look through the glass, with its transparent nap of dust, at the deep red flowers in the shade and then through the lace, the colour of string tied round parcels, into the brownish darkness of the room beyond is to rediscover something of one’s childhood. Is this the result of stories read, or does its ‘childishness’ derive from the scale of the window and house?
Occasionally along the street pass buses, cars, open lorries and horses hauling four-wheeled wooden carts like open-ended, very elongated cradles. Their drivers, reins in hand, sit rounded and hunched up: as dogmatically immobile against the movement of the cart as stone piers against the movement of a river. There are also cyclists on tall black bicycles with their wheels far apart – so that the cyclist gives the impression of hurriedly following the front wheel instead of bearing down upon it.
At right angles to the main street are a number of rough roads which lead for half a mile or more towards the fields and woods and wasteland which surround the town. These are access roads to the houses on either side of them. Some of these houses are like suburban bungalows; others are old, very small cottages which contain no more than one room. A fair number have television aerials on their roofs – and, at the same time, wells in their gardens or courtyards, for water. It is these gardens and yards which fascinate me and which constitute the most striking visual element.
In some there are flowerbeds of roses and on the grass between them chickens and ducks. There are also cherry trees and pigs. On the outside of the fence, along the borders of the road, there is a goat chained to a stake and two white kids who butt each other, standing on their hind legs like beasts rampant in a heraldry that never existed here. In these gardens and yards (the distinction between the two terms is that a garden is private whereas a yard is the space on to which two or three houses give), there are also tables, jugs or pails of water, benches, chairs, creepers to give shade, tall grass, bare earth to be dampened in the summer so that it does not become too dusty, vegetables, acacia trees, and ritual space. These gardens and yards are like bodies accepted for what they are without pretence. They are neither neglected nor, in the strict sense, cultivated. Yet such a description imputes a moral awareness that is irrelevant. A strange undemonstrative equality has been established here between nature and tenant. They are neither impressive nor sordid. They suggest neither ambition nor despair. They are simply and consistently inhabited, like rooms built on the earth. You measure them according to a human time-scale. They are not immediate like herbaceous borders, nor are they timeless like forests. Everything in them is a little overgrown and everything is intentional. And this is evident without a person being in sight or a story being told – merely through the disposition of what is visible within them.
The town is not far from the banks of the Sava. The Sava rises in the Julian Alps and joins the Danube at Belgrade, where the confluence of the two large rivers, with its considerable expanse of shining water, affects the light above the city so that sometimes you have the impression, looking up a street, that over the brow of its hill there will be the sea. Here the river is strong, wide, muddy-grey coloured and opaque, though bright like the sky because it is fast-flowing. If one must use the misleading metaphor of a river to describe the nature of time, this is the kind of river one should visualize. It has weight, and this weight is a reminder of the scale of the land mass to which everything on its bank belongs. It is a river that ultimately celebrates not water, but land. At the end of the road which leads to it from the outskirts of Obrenovac there is a café where they grill the river fish and serve them with cabbage salad.
For some way the road back to Belgrade runs beside the Sava. The bus stops at each village, usually outside the café if there is one – if not, where a few men are sitting on cases and boxes talking, with a bottle of beer between their feet. The bus radio is on loud. Songs not unlike certain Greek ones. As the bus bowls along, the seats squeak and the windows rattle (if there is a pothole they clatter) and all these sounds are somehow accommodated by the music. People quite far away from the road look up at the approach of the bus because they hear the notes and the voice it is bringing nearer and then carrying away into the distance.
Why am I so conscious of the progress of these sounds through the landscape, along the road, down the river? It isn’t that everything else is quiet. It isn’t because everyone looks up as we pass. It is, I think, because everything I can see out of the window suggests an expanse, a continuity which forces me to be aware of, to trace, the length of our short noisy ride over it. But what is it that suggests this almost endless continuity? The light in the sky? The air? The specific changes of colour caused by distance here? Perhaps these play a part. But principally, I think, it is because no event in the landscape (no hill, no tree, no building) is so striking that it creates a natural focal centre to which everything else becomes subservient. Each event passes your eye on to another and then that one to another and another and another, so that there is no reason to suppose that the sequence need ever stop.
In Western European terms, the opposite of romantic is classic. This landscape, however, is the true antithesis of the romantic landscape. The romantic is always at the edge, at the end, of the possible. It proposes the ultimate – either sublimely or terribly. It is based on hierarchy, whereas here between the events of the landscape there is a restrained egalitarianism similar to that which was evident in the gardens between the human and the natural. It is the normalcy of this landscape which makes it seem boundless.
In the National Gallery at Belgrade there is not a single painting which bears witness to any of these quintessential qualities. Nor can I think of many paintings elsewhere that do so. It is not a landscape which lends itself to representational painting – but, rather, to film because it moves, or to embroidery and decoration because they ignore the difference between near and far. It is the landscape, however, evident behind the experience expressed in a great deal of Slav poetry. But one must be clear about what one is looking for. There is nothing arcadian or innocent or eternal or reassuring about its qualities. Such landscape encourages a passionate (not quietist) recognition of transcience.
1972