Teasing (Of) Salko Pirija

By Sead Mahmutefendic

The theme of the novel represents the climax and the eve of the fall of the communist system in Yugoslaviathat is, in its central part of Bosnia and Herzegovinaas a totalitarian ideological pattern and practice that psychologically incarnated the soul and tissue of characters in a provincial Bosnian town. It is set in a time ranging from the late forties to the late eighties of this century. Between the passage of trains alongside his switch house, Salko Pirija plays one childrens game, cowboys and Indians. This is set in the time of the conflict between Tito and Stalin, and therefore, the local authorities accuse him of propagating America with that game, that is, rotting the West and rotting capitalism.

A professor from Sarajevo University, Dr. Senadin Lavic wrote this novel. He and South Slavic literature have their Don Quixote in Salka Pirija, and in Sead Mahmutefendic, they have their own Cervantes. This is confirmed by three novels translated into English and published in Xlibris.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jul 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543490510

Sead Mahmutefendic

Sead MAHMUTEFENDIC (Sarajevo 1949). He graduated literature and languages from University of Belgrade. His books have been translated into 10 languages. He is the author of more than 30 books. Scientific symposium, organized in honor of his literary, essayistic and publicist work, entitled Modern Heretic Apocryphal Manuscript on Pre-apocalypse, emphasized that he is the writer whose creativity according to style and linguistic references could be contextualize in the South Slav and European literary space. His literary work tries to answer the question why there is so much violence, evil and lies among people in a wide range from empathy via irony to a sarcastic satire. Sead Mahmutefendic was nominated for IMPAC Dublin award in 2016.

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Copyright © 2018 by Sead Mahmutefendic.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2018906173

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-5434-9053-4

                            Softcover                           978-1-5434-9052-7

                            eBook                                978-1-5434-9051-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 07/12/2018

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To Mahmut Mahmutafendić, my father,

whose life, before he left it, had been one of

the best I know

The internal history of unhinged images of forbidden and discarded memories of a tragic event, given here in a comical, perhaps even a somewhat grotesque form, or as a double-content image as if it were made in glass. If you put it on a dark surface -it has a drawing painted in muted chemical tones. Looking at it toward the light, you will get quite something else, almost opposite by content.

This story is entirely fictional, and any resemblance to possible real prototypes and possible real events is completely irrelevant. If it be not similar to reality, my story will at least be similar to my own personal recollection of reality, which is, infact, the same.

Does surrealism cease to be surrealism if it becomes reality?

Stanisław Jerzy Lec,

Unkempt Thoughts

Need I say my name is Salko Pirija. If so, I have already completed my obligation.

I do not know whether my life was useless, a mere misunderstanding, or whether it had some meaning. If it had, then it probably would have been in the fact that there once lived a man who very clearly and very painfully realized and experienced how big a chasm in our life is between the soul and the body, between what one wants and what one can, between what is allowed and what one secretly wants within oneself; in other words, how a man knows little of himself, because - one must admit - to talk to oneself is true art, while talking to others is - an ordinary amusement or still something completely different.

If we try to reconstruct the life of Salko Pirija, and at the same time try to interpret it, as a person who records these events, I am deeply sorry that parts of that life lack any reliable information; I was encouraged for my endeavor by the very circumstance that those parts of his life became a legend. I accept that legend and agree with it, regardless of whether it has the power of magic and deception, the ability to lead down the wrong path, or whether it is just a devotional poetry in the sense of the lament over a man of unfortunate fate. I have no excuse, however, to assume that the emergence of this legend was entirely accidental. The fact is that, in view of my presentiment of his drama, I gladly incline to the legend and faithfully accept it, and I do so because of the finer things such as, say, the best shoe soles for the purpose of preventing the moisture to cause leg rheumatism and bladder cold, or because of, say, the question he asked himself a thousand times: what is the secret of human stupidity and human evil?

Even the fact that his fate over time transformed into a legend seemed reasonable to me, accurate and solely possible. I embrace the miracle of that fact and rejoice in that miracle, this time trying to interpret it, but to the point at which his teasing surpassed the usual limits and ultimately transposed into a legend, such as the one handed over to me in my research.

Salko may have been twenty-three or twenty-four years old at that time…

Furthermore, to Salko, whose life history we know, whose countenance we know from two or three photographs in the family album, but whose figure we more often imagine independently of what we have as a fact on his life and his words recorded in the files of court investigators, we inadvertently add his posthumous fate as well: in our imagination, somehow, he is already aware of that fate during his lifetime, and he smiles at how the future will interpret his teasing. For a long time, it will be immersed in the vortex of misunderstanding, gossip, wrong quotes, at times for the purpose of defence, at others for the purpose of attack, the barbaric twisting of facts, and so on.

I have never found an easier way to one of my characters than to the hero of this novel, with whom I knew how to strike the right balance of laughter and the right balance of grief.

It seemed to me then that everything was magical and altered. Only then did I understand the act of my calling, the act a Christian calls the sacrament. Then I would see the smiling Indian, Restless Bull, who was no longer for this world, because he was already in the dream, in the distance, inthepast, inthefuture.

The legend has long since become a reality, regardless of what has created it.

In the yellowed photograph taken in Kaštel Sućurac in July of nineteen forty-seven, on one of the piers, striking a cowboy pose, his left eye half-closed à la John Wayne, appears the railway switchman Salko Pirija. Smiling mischievously. On the left side, his distorted shorter leg is visible, causing him to stand lopsided, so that his waistline is tilted downward from the right to the left hip, on which a fairly large plastic toy gunisslung. Although a non-smoker, he was pressing a cigar between his teeth, and his open palm right next to his hip - as if he would draw the gun at any moment and shoot at the photographer.

Thirty-two years later, the then stationmaster, and now a pensioner, told me – a journalist of the metro-politan boulevard newspaper – thatSalko really drew, and out of his throat loudly fired that plastic toy gun hanging from his hip at the same time as the photographer under the black cloth exclaimed: Say cheese!

25 February 1951

I vividly remember our conversation. I welcomed him into a wide room. I was hyper-observant of how poorly he governed himself.

It was Sunday evening. A few days earlier, I think it was Thursday, I heard some things about him on the phone. I wanted to start with the questions, but I refrained from doing so, and simply promised that I would act according to his wishes. I was already seriously wondering how to proceed in the direction I was previously told to run the things further. It did not seem convenient to me to leave this opportunity to chance.

It was necessary to help get it arranged, some initiative was required, and - there it was.

Salko eventually confessed to everything. After all, he himself had to realize that his denial did not confer any benefits and, therefore, regardless of having pinned his hopes on the jury, now he could finally breathe, feeling at the same time that an enormous weight was off his shoulders. But he was still upset by the thought that they all, well, belonged to a certain era, and everyone could take pride in being part of the exceptional events that history would regard as remarkable and rarely thus dramatic.

The creases between his eyebrows disappeared, and his smile from a short while ago disappeared as well, the one by which every single person knew him from his happier times when he was Restless Bull the Indian.

I began thinking to myself like this: Even though life did not remain true to me, I will certainly remain true to life. I have to, I will and I must. I don’t know how to explain it. I only know that I will and I must. Why would I confuse faintheartedness with what inevitably awaits me, as it does any mortal? Life is one and the most powerful, while there were, are and will be as many Salkos as there are stars in the sky.

25 February 1951– afternoon

At this point, he allowed himself to pass his tongue over the dry corners of his lips, where tiny bubbles of saliva appeared, which was unusual, and shortly afterwards surprised himself as well, because in that move he probably recognized his own self from the Indian period when he was amused with his own ability of mocking, which was probably deeply rooted in the wistfulness of his inner self.

I noticed that he expressed his feelings only through parody. His tongue half hanging out reminded me of that. In such ambiguity, he was content just enough to smile, actually, to snort, loudly forcing air from his nose.

That trifle was not to remain unnoticed by the jury and, a few months later, they will have it whole heartedly dug out and brought to daylight, and fully used to curb the ever-increasing Salko’s teasing in terms of: I tease the state and I will do so as long as I please, and - not just any state but the one that refused even the Russian to have her teased.

On 22 July 1950, Salko Pirija was returning home on foot, skipping the sleepers between the rails towards his house. It was early in the afternoon, the sun was high and it was scorching hot so he could hardly see anything ahead, such was the shimmering before his eyes. Salko was putting one foot in front of the other, thinking, thinking: where can you get following this track if you go past his Konjic? He knows what lies about a hundred kilometers farther down and all the God’s places coming one after the other, but he is now thinking of what lies farther, beyond those hundred kilometers, and so, kilometer by kilometer, the landscapes, the seasons, the physiognomies, the races, the nations, and the colors of the sky change; you are farther from this miserable place and closer to some other likewise miserable place.

This track can take you wherever you want, and even if you are to advance on the road, asphalt, concrete pavers or macadam, or follow the goat trail, just keep on walking, and let the new in and see changes before your eyes, and your soul will be more satisfied. All these paths lead to the end of the world.

What’s over there? Probably what’s here too. There are people, probably, of blood and flesh, and there, in all likelihood, they walk on two feet, their water is probably as wet as ours and the stones are hard enough to break your head. When it’s all the same everywhere, why do some people have such an enormous will to dash around the world when it’s all the same. Where one goes to is never the same as where one comes from.

Salko is troubled by the veil of memories, consumed with longing, and melancholy has the intention of stifling him; he’s already twenty-four years old. In as many years, he never went anywhere, except for going from home to work and from work - straight home. He never so much as peeped into the coffee-house, nor was he interested in that at all. A strange bird.

On one occasion only, and because he had to, he went to Mostar to take out a birth certificate for little Haris, and on another, he went to assume his railway switchman duties in Sarajevo, twenty-five kilometers after Konjic.

And that was all.

That moment of reminiscence for a moment gave way to dull absent-mindedness in which he continued to count the railway sleepers crossed.

Salko liked most to daydream about America, the land of Indians and cowboys, the land of miracles, power and might. Behind his closed eyelids, in the darkness of the bedroom, he brought to life enormous eagles that seemed to be flapping their huge wings over his temples, and then, all of a sudden, he was deafened by the endless waterfall and, through the waterfall mist, he saw a bare-chested Indian on the saddleless white horse with a black spot on the leg. He was so dazed that he truly did not know whether it was caused by the Indian and his stunning horse or by this July swelter.

- I’ll put my head on the block if it’s not forty in the shade – Salko managed to sigh under the heavy load of images, air and water, and the unbearable sultriness that made everything flicker before his eyes. His wife Ajša and son Haris were the only ones who understood how strong that bond was, she waited for him by the window, behind the pots of touch-me-not, to show upon the track after the bend. As soon as he arrived, while still at the table and having lunch, after he had signed his name passing the forefinger over the oil clot hat least a hundred times, he suddenly began