ONE OF THE WAYS the Nation expressed gratitude for its freedom, and furthered the allegiance to the foundations of the country, was by having each generation of children take the Pioneer Oath. Thus, everyone was wedded to the country, its soil, its heart. The Pioneer Oath was taken at the Partisan Necropolis. Ruben remembered Mona taking her oath here. A sea of red neckerchiefs knotted at the gullet. Small blue envelope caps each bearing a red five-point glass star. The envelope cap like an origami piece, needing to be puffed out before being affixed to a child’s head. Ruben thought of the factories where they produced the caps and the neckerchiefs, rivers of blue and red bleeding from the stabbing needles of the sewing machines.
Parents and siblings watched with pride. If a family had a camera—and most did not—they took photos for themselves, and for those who did not. Children stood lined up in long rows, silent and almost breathless; words boomed from the loudspeakers:
Today, when I become a pioneer,
I give my pioneer’s word of honor:
That I will work and study diligently,
that I will respect my parents and elders,
and be a loyal and honest friend,
who keeps his word.
That I will love our country,
cherish the brotherhood and unity
of all her peoples,
and appreciate all the people of the world
who want freedom and peace.
Each child was given a red carnation. Ruben watched Mona inhaling its powdery clove smell. A carnation is a common flower, Ruben thought, but it is a beautiful one. Its soft head feels like silk against your lips, its smell unobtrusive and warm. A carnation was thought to be the flower of incarnation, and coronation. In the case of the new Pioneers both were true, Ruben felt, they were becoming something else on this day, crowned in glory, incarnated into the next generation of the country’s guardians.
The Partisan Necropolis was also the place where Ruben took Rosa on their first date. They walked toward the enormous monument etched into the pine-covered hill in the southern part of town. Ruben took Rosa’s hand as they strolled through the collection of terraces that spilled down the slope, just stone and water and green. There were twisting pathways, fountains that became waterways, all ending in a large, still pool in the shape of a tear, right at the bottom. There was frogspawn in the tear; in springtime children submerged their hands to feel for the slimy texture. Flowers and celestial formations were carved in the stone around them.
Ruben and Rosa were passionate about the monument. It was built by a famed architect and celebrated everything that the country stood for: the Partisan struggle, the deaths of many for the freedom of many, the new life that came from that sacrifice. Ruben and Rosa, who had both forged much of their souls in the war, felt that the monument spoke to them personally.
And Ruben told Rosa the story of the monument, which he had been told by the architect himself. Ruben had internalized Bogdan Bogdanovic’s words, and he narrated them in the way he had once heard the architect deliver them. He waved his hands as he told the story, a glimmer in his eye: “The stone was worked by stonemasons from an island that was nothing but stone. There, the stonemasons’ tradition was centuries’ old, and required great skill and strength and discipline, both of the body and the mind. But what it required most of all was working in unison with others. The masons came in a group, led by a so-called Uncle, a kind of maestro, a great conductor. He was the man who would report to the parents and fiancées what the men did and how well they worked. This was very important. The honor and the image of the island and the community and the family depended on the decent behavior of the stonemasons.”
Ruben wagged his finger at this point, just like Bogdan had when he told the same story to a young Ruben. “The spot from which the Uncle led the work was in front of the group, and the men lined up in order to face him. The summer heat meant that they could only work from dawn to just after breakfast, and from sunset to midnight. The architect was anxious about whether what he had envisaged would work, would at all be possible. He went to the ancient bridge that was the pride and joy of the town. It was several hundred years old, and made of stone, and he touched it as if trying to get answers to his own questions from the old bridge maker. And so, in his fingertips, through his skin, the architect carried the wisdom from one stone to the other. Sharing the memory stored in the mineral. And how sad that we use stone to name all the things that don’t have feelings, that don’t have a soul. If you touch and caress a pebble, a piece of rock, a boulder, its textures will tell you things that the world cannot hear. And this is what the stonemasons knew.”
Ruben got close to Rosa, as if revealing a secret, and whispered, “They understood stone, and its character, and they could hear the voice of all the different types of stone. And Bogdan Bogdanović heard it too. This is how he described it—he said that every piece of stone reverberated like a musical instrument. He knew, of course, that different types make different sounds, and the softer the stone, the deeper its tone. It’s paradoxical, and slightly comical, that the hardest granite had a piercing pitch, marble sings with a slight mezzo soprano, and limestone, the most musical of stones, has a beautiful, velvety alto. Practiced stonemasons can hear even more. ‘Each one sings its own song,’ said one of them, convinced that each piece was a being in its own right.”
Ruben breathed out, enchanted by the invisible work going on around him.
“The work of the stonemasons was akin to some alchemy, an invocation of the spirits. The architect told of how he saw acetylene lamps, or carbon lamps from the past century, a dim light and even dimmer shadows. And in the light, something mysterious was happening. The gray Uncle, his hair static and pointing to all four sides of the world, is spellbinding, like a wizard, like a genie who had emerged from the stone. Out of the blue, he lifts the hammer and chisel. The masons lift their hammers in a holy hush. A silence comes up that reveals all the sounds of the night: crickets, nightingales, the murmur of the river in the distance. One of the masons starts up the wordless melody, nasal and mystical, a ritual of stone worshippers. The Uncle’s hammer strikes the rhythm. He hits the piece that is in front of him, and immediately they are chiseling together in harmony. When the melody starts to rise, everyone is singing, the sound of the chisel becomes deafening. When it lowers, the sounds become softer. This is how the pieces manage to have the same form engraved into them, how the lines have consistency between each piece.” Ruben pointed around them, at the walls. “When the chiseling started, the rhythm developed on every stone instrument, and, every arm movement, every posture, so that the entire orchestra functioned as its own metronome. And when the pounding started to scatter—a sign that concentration was dropping—the Uncle lifted his hammer sternly. This meant that the work had to pause for a minute, and that the beat must be synchronized all over again. They then waited for the warble of the man who produces the melody, and the Uncle’s first strike.
“This monument was built with love,” Ruben said to Rosa on that first date. “And devotion. And knowledge, not just of the work and the skill of hitting stone, but the knowledge of things beyond the eye. The masons sang a wordless song, one that maybe went back to a time that preceded language.”
The architect believed, along with many alchemist-builders, that limestone was the child of the Sun and the Moon, and that it was meant for making celestial forms. The Necropolis held flowers, suns, moons, planets, stars. The monument sang toward the town, and to the heavens, and the town sang back at it. And it was where Ruben went to honor his important moments, among these unseen worlds, among the mineral constellations.