Today, Sima Nesic would be called an interpreter; in his time they called him Sima the targuman. But it is not such a big difference, since targuman means translator. Sima could translate from seven different languages and speak just as many. As a boy, he would roam for hours through the city’s main trading district, called the Dubrovnik Bazaar (today a section of Seventh of July Street between Prince Mihailo Street and Jugovic Street). He walked past cramped little wooden shops listening to what Jews, Tzintzars, and Greeks shouted out loud or muttered to themselves as they traded—words and sentences that have been continually repeated by all the world’s merchants from time immemorial. Sima listened to those strange and unfamiliar sounds; his ears adapted to them and gradually domesticated them. He realized that each language has its own melody, which—when you grasp its meaning—reveals not only the secrets of that particular language, but at least one of the secrets of communication in general. The laws that govern words began to interest him more than the laws that govern people, and the more he learned about the ways of words, the more he seemed to know about the ways of men. As he grew, he spent more and more time playing the game of translating sentences from one language into another, and then into a third and fourth. He began to believe that much evil stemmed from the fact that people were unaccustomed to listening to or understanding each other—they simply did not pay enough attention to words. In the young man’s opinion, people should have been taught to handle words instead of guns. The first to hear this was his father, the hide merchant Pavle Nesic, who was shocked. And when his son declared that he would like to go abroad in order to study languages, he became deathly afraid. Being a practical and well-to-do man, Pavle Nesic sent his son to the School of Commerce in Vienna.
Every morning around ten o’clock, Sima the targuman stands again at the corner of Sima Street and Captain Misa Street, approximately at the place where, during his lifetime, an alley separated the Turkish and the Serbian police headquarters. Here Sima Street is empty and its noises are muffled by half-darkness. Passersby are rare; when they squeeze between the parked cars, they seem to be splashed with shadows. The place is now dark because the sunlight is completely blocked out by the new building of the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Underneath that large edifice, erected where both the Turkish and the Serbian police headquarters (and, later, the Glavnjaca prison) once stood, there is a covered passageway with columns that leads to Students’ Square. Sima the targuman now considers this another example of the misunderstanding of words: why should a building in which natural sciences and mathematics are taught block the sunlight and a view of the sky? But on that day, the third of June, 1862, the place looked much different.
It was early Sunday afternoon. Sima, the interpreter for the Serbian police, was standing next to an open window. The enormous sky over Kalemegdan radiated summer light, the smell of the Danube, and a protracted subtle feeling of tranquility. He listened to the meandering drawl of Sunday voices, which reached him from the central marketplace (Students’ Square is now located where the central marketplace used to be). That soft whirlpool of noises forced itself on him and goaded him into selecting individual sounds and trying to discover their origins. He had come into his own (as one would have said then)—he had children; in five days he would turn thirty-two. But he still liked to play. With words, of course. Never before—it seemed to him—had he felt so keenly how similar that urchin of yesterday was to this dignified targuman. Just like that boy, Sima the targuman believed in the power of words; just like that boy, he knew the power of inner harmony, once it was attained. He felt that life would offer him an opportunity to do something that would reveal to others how essential words are in the process of communication. As an interpreter, he accomplished a few things: he prevented misunderstandings. But that was not enough. He hoped that he might be offered a position as an envoy to a foreign land or be invited to teach at the lycée. Everything was possible that afternoon, and the world lay wide open before him. With the glittering June, he felt his youthful elation rise in his blood again. Glowing inwardly, Sima surveyed green gardens on the sloping banks of the Danube; he saw the upper stories of Turkish houses peeping from the greenery, and, close up, the roof of Dositej’s School of Higher Learning rising above that crossroads of light. In the distance, out of reach, the mists of the Danube drifted above the slopes. Everything looked so clean in the mild June air, so free of any foreboding. But then, suddenly a cry soared up from the bottom of the green expanse. The voices grew stronger, reached him, and became distinct: they were a bad omen. The distorted sounds contained threats and expressions of fear, and Sima felt that the mildness of the day was suddenly shattered.
Soon the news reached him: over there, on the slope, at the Cukur fountain, a Turkish soldier had wounded, or maybe even killed, a Serbian boy.
So Sima the targuman hurried toward the fountain. If there had been a misunderstanding, who could straighten it out better than he? If some misfortune had occurred, who could find the right word as quickly as he? The targuman walked hurriedly; right behind him was Djordje of Nis, a jokester who spoke an impossible dialect, and two gendarmes. They leapt over the contorted shadows of rose bushes and the drooping shadows of mulberry trees (so suitable for dreaming of love). But Sima was not thinking about love: he was thinking about the well-known Viennese banker, Tzintzar Sinna, for whom he had worked as a very young man. That banker, who had the face of an intelligent rat, would inspect his employees every morning as if sizing them up for the day’s work (long experience seemed to urge him to anticipate changes in their biorhythms), and he would say: “When you are in the utmost hurry, slow down. If you don’t, making a mistake is unavoidable.” Sima was in a hurry now, and his strides grew longer and longer, madder and madder. The banker was warning him in vain. Sima did not slow down.
He got there at the right moment. The crowd around the fountain grew more silent as it grew larger; a mute ring tightened around the Turkish soldiers. The boy was lying on the ground, wounded in the head and perhaps still alive. At his feet was a broken water jug. Water flowed from the fountain into the silence. Sima knew what he had to do. Politely making his way through the ring, he gave a sign to the gendarmes, and they quickly tied up the soldiers. Sima bent over the boy, sadness on his face. Then he raised his head. The sorrow was gone; now was the time for resolute action. He looked at no one in particular, although everyone in the ring felt as if Sima were looking straight at him (he had also learned that trick from the ratlike banker). He said that the boy should be taken away immediately; he might still be saved. As for the Turkish soldiers, they would go with him to the Serbian police headquarters; they would be tried before a Serbian court. Serbian citizens should keep their dignity. At the same time, speaking in Turkish, he told the soldiers not to resist.
This was not the first time that Sima the targuman saw words— his words—accomplish something: they reached people, calmed them down, and remained in their ears. And people obeyed him: the crowd, the soldiers, the gendarmes. The boy was carried away, the handcuffed soldiers walked ahead of Sima, between the gendarmes, dozens of reflections flickered like eyes from the garden greenery, the townspeople followed Sima at a distance, and the sky was translucent, spacious, and bright.
In his imagined watchtower at the corner of Captain Misa and Sima Streets, Sima the targuman now always shakes his head as he watches that silly targuman, who—many decades before—walked with the handcuffed Turkish soldiers and a group of peaceful townspeople, suddenly strengthened by his confidence in the power of words. Sima knows what that young fool will tell him in passing; it is easy for Sima to shake his head now. Since the day he died, he has had an entire century plus a few decades more to think over everything that happened. But as a young targuman, he didn’t have it so easy then and there, he didn’t have a single moment for reflection. He had to be prepared for anything.
All eyes and ears, he walked behind the Turkish soldiers and thought about nothing. He felt numb inside. But he nevertheless saw light in the spacious sky, dimmer in the vanishing June evening. The dust was drowsy, and fragrances of linden trees, mulberry trees, wild mint, and sage blended together. Only the mildness was gone, extinguished. Although Sima walked through well-known alleys, he felt that he had entered a region where he had never been before. And again he was in a hurry (there was no reason for it), and, hurrying, he erroneously took a shortcut, the wrong one, the one that led by the Turkish police headquarters. (The problem is that bankers are usually right.) At the windows of the Turkish building (which also served as a barracks), he suddenly noticed soldiers aiming their rifles at him; he realized their evil intention and shouted a warning. As he shouted, the arrested Turkish soldiers broke away and ran toward their barracks. Djordje of Nis rushed after them, the crack of rifle fire could be heard, and the townspeople started to draw back. Sima walked toward the soldiers who were shooting at him. He saw black smiles on their faces, and—in impeccable Turkish—he began calling to them, telling them to hold their fire, to stop, that what they were doing could lead to a disaster. His words collided with the swirling air, with the shattered light, with the shots. The soldiers fended off his words furiously, as if they were some kind of accursed disease. Sima the targuman shouted louder and louder; rifle fire answered him more and more rapidly. Then he could no longer feel his legs and body—he became bodiless. Only his head, which had suddenly become wobbly, sank to the bottom of the shallow darkness.
Sima the targuman now stands again at the corner of the street named after him, uncertain which turn to take: the one to the left, the shorter one, toward Visnjic Street, or the one to the right, the longer one, toward Francuska Street. That house that Milan Bogdanovic frequented is on the left; the house in which Slobodan Jovanovic lived is on the right. The two men thought differently in politics, but they were both perfect stylists and shared a sense of historical paradox; they might help him express what has been bothering him for more than a century: how is it that his genuine desire for harmony caused so many deaths? (For the first time in his life, Sima the targuman is having difficulties with words.)
Immediately after Sima was killed, Djordje of Nis was seriously wounded; he died a few hours later. On the slopes above the Save and the Danube, old hatreds flared up. The Serbs quickly seized their arms and attacked the city gates, which were manned by the Turks. The Turks began to retreat into the Kalemegdan Fortress, and the battle (in the words of the British envoy Gregory, who supported the Serbian cause at the famous session of the House of Commons, on May 17, 1863, in London), lasted the entire night.
The next day, just before noon, in the opaque June glow, foreign consuls met with Ashir, the pasha of Belgrade, and Ilija Garasanin, president of the Ministerial Council, and they reached a mutual agreement and put together the Armistice Convention, effective immediately. So one could again walk the hushed streets of Belgrade with a feeling of relative security.
This historical comedy was thus postponed until the following day. The following day was Tuesday, the fifth of June, a dazzling, magic day, full of deep light. From the direction of the Stamboul Gate (located between the present Monument of Prince Mihailo and the National Theater), a procession moved toward Palilula Cemetery, in Tasmajdan. The entire Serbian population of Belgrade, anyone who could move and was not bedridden, was in that procession. They were attending the funeral of Sima Nesic, the targuman with excellent prospects, braver than a hero of legend, his parents’ only son, the handsome interpreter who spoke seven languages. They were attending the funeral of Sima Nesic, who was riddled with bullets, and of Djordje of Nis, who was also riddled with bullets. Sobs and liturgical chants blended with the thick heat of the morning, the water from the moat at the Stamboul Gate stank, no one lamented aloud, and sweat trickled from beneath the top hats of the officials. Flocks of large storks and wild ducks circled swiftly over Terazije and the Venice pond. There was not the slightest breath of wind under the sky. They walked toward the outskirts of the city, toward Terazije, on the hard, hot dirt road (it is Kolarac Street today). They reached a small tailor’s shop and stopped at the place where today, in Kolarac Street, is a branch of the Belgrade Bank and the entrance to the underground walkway in front of the “Albania” building. With his head bowed, the tailor waited to join them. Forbidden portents hid in the dust. And then, with a whistling sound, a bomb fell right from the sunny sky. The cannonball was perfectly round, not very big, and it exploded right under Sima’s coffin. The Turkish guns started to thunder from the direction of Kalemegdan. The bombardment of Belgrade had begun. It lasted for four hours and turned into a hotly disputed international issue.
Foreign correspondents later tried to maintain that the bombardment was not particularly heavy, because the poorly armed Turks were poor marksmen. Bombs exploded one after another (admittedly, in intervals, not as they did in 1915, or 1941, or 1944; however, this was also a sort of beginning). The coffin containing Sima the dead targuman was dropped on the hard ground, and the lid slipped a bit, although no one noticed it. The whole crowd scattered, storks and wild ducks included. Through the crack in his coffin, only the peaceful targuman Sima Nesic, whom they would not allow to rest, stared with his right eye at the sun, which had reached its zenith.
At his corner, Sima now shakes his head again. But he is not inclined to reproach himself anymore; he reproaches Mr. Longworth, the British consul in Belgrade. This gentleman’s reports to his government almost obliterated Sima’s role in history. Being a Turkophile, he was convinced that the Turks were “good-natured people” who were “rightly annoyed by the rebellious attitude of the Christian population.” Accordingly, he notified his government that the riots of the third of June were incited by the Serbs, not the Turks. Fortunately, both at that time and later, some British gentlemen and others thought differently, so that the truth about his death, slightly distorted, has become historical fact. But even that is unimportant now. His name has been preserved, admittedly not as a proper noun but rather as a modifier of another noun, written in white letters on a dark blue street sign: Sima Street. The targuman reads this inscription on the sign several times; he listens attentively to its sound, already somewhat unfamiliar; its meaning evades him and fades away, sharing the inevitable fate of repetition. Suddenly, he is confused: does Sima Street have anything to do with Sima the targuman?
Translated by Bogdan Rakic
* The title refers to a Belgrade street named for Sima Nesic, a minor Serbian police official who was killed in a well-known incident at a Belgrade public fountain in 1862.