INTERVIEW Dušan Kovačević: After 50 years, a person feeds only on memories, we have collected 20 years of life in “Srpska kafana”

He created this work in the months of general isolation and collected memories and songs between the covers, which, unlike the title, “look” like its creator and his famous drama: many verses begin happily, fluttering, and then a sudden and unexpected follow black mood. turn … However, it is mainly about memories and intimate reflections, more vulnerable and open to Duško than the one we know, who gave us the opportunity to meet some people who are especially dear to him. “I sing it there”, in fact, was created over the course of half a century.

– For years I have the feeling that I need to do an archaeological order in my manuscripts scattered in drawers, shelves and a study. I knew there were things that were dear to me, but also those that I needed to get rid of. I kept putting it off. I thought of everything, there would come a better time to do that, and then it absurdly happened that the time and opportunity came to sit down and fix those songs. The first version was written by hand, I still have no contact with the computer …

* Among other things, do you offer an interesting account of the missing generation of poets and their recitation of verses in the tavern?

– A little older, who remember the sixties and seventies, they know that poets were crownless kings of public and cultural life. And that poetry was the first and most important type of art. That time was marked by frequent visits to taverns. Generations have lived them as their second home. We from Atelje 212 visited “Srpska kafana”. We must have “accumulated” twenty years of life in it. Here a whole generation of actors met, which will later be marked as one of the most important.

* His age began in the thirties, he writes in the book. Many left prematurely?

– Of course, that’s how it is when a man decides to commit suicide voluntarily and tense. And to a great extent. When you spend most of the day at night, drinking and smoking, what can you expect but to be affected by some of the diseases associated with these “pleasures”? It happened that I arrived at the Writers Club and around midnight Brana Petrović appeared (or was already sitting there), got up in a moment and recited one of her songs in a hoarse voice, a bit tired, but with tremendously great energy. And you are listening at that moment, and you do not know that the history of Serbian poetry is happening. He recited most of the poems in the Writers Club. And I listened to Miko Antić in Novi Sad, where I finished high school. In the fortress and in the hotel “Vojvodina”, I saw him get up and speak a little stuttering, but so well and with such emotion that the whole cafe is silent and listening. It didn’t happen often, and when it did happen, it was like the best show he’s ever been to.

* Have you never pronounced your verses in public?

– No, because I am not a poet by vocation. They were both born poets, although they did other things along the way. The mother gave birth to the poet …

* Can you find many things in this book that you haven’t talked about until now?

– Yes, it is a sentimental trip. There are written autobiographical facts that I did not mention. They are very personal and, in a way, universal. The life I lived for 70 years was lived by the baby boomers in a very similar way. When we get to a few years, we realize what values ​​there are in life. When we are young, we run. The running man doesn’t see much. When you have time to sit and think, especially if you’re going up a hill, see better and farther. And he realized that he was climbing to the top with a very slight incline, he did not even notice the ascent. Only when he reaches that hill and looks back does he see behind him the path that he has passed. Then suddenly he realized that a steep descent awaited him. It can last ten, twenty, thirty years … It leads to a town, and in it, as in any town, there is a cemetery. Looking back at the journey begins to bring back memories. Because now you have to go down, not stumble and not fall fast. I think it is a symbolic image. If I liked drawing, this would be life. Images that you thought were ordinary and normal begin to appear in memory. Like the fact that someone loves you. And suddenly you miss that love.

* How did your mother and your grandmother Ljubica love you?

– There are material and spiritual valuable things in life. You remember those spirituals. You have used up the material. It could be called invoking the mind. When you go all the way constantly working, running, getting nervous and wanting to achieve so-called big jobs and goals, you realize that those days were better when you only had the attention and touch of the people who loved you. And that all that was written in the memories, in some flavor. After all, after fifty, you only eat your memories.

* The title of the book is reminiscent of a famous movie. However, there is another association: you got lost at the age of three, you moved away from home and sang alone, in the corn …

– That was told to me by my uncles who still lived in our common house, in the village. It was a cooperative at that time. They remembered looking for me in a panic and found me walking and singing in the neighboring cornfield. My memory is linked to those areas that, as I get older, are more and more alive in my memory. It is absurd for a person to begin to conjure up some images of his earliest youth, and in fact it is the fear of inevitability. The man flees to memories, to the time when he was protected and thought that life was infinite.

Dušan Kovačević

* Psychology states that a person realizes his mortality only at the age of forty. He has experienced it since he was six years old, when he contracted meningitis. Are you saying that all your thoughts about reincarnation, even the paranormal, are a consequence of that experience?

– One of the themes that runs through all my dramas and movies is figuring out the ending. Not just death, but what happens next. No one knows for sure, as they do with many things. We visit this planet, very briefly, and then we leave. When I read books, which I perceive as my beautiful private toys for adults, I always count how long the writer lived. There is a small line between the year of birth and the year of disappearance. Well, that line is, symbolically speaking, our life. It is a measure of our existence and existence, of our being on this planet.

* Thinking about what’s behind the “line” follows you throughout your life. After all, you did that at the “Collection Center” and the “Marathoners.” Are you a religious man?

– Yes, and in his own special way. There is not a day in my life, from an early age, that I did not start without being baptized, and I do the same before I fall asleep. So I wish myself a “good day” and a “good night”. With gratitude for having survived that day as well. It is not a straight story about faith and religion, but about gratitude for existing in this world. Now the way you appeared in life is one of the biggest incredible. You have to be grateful for the miracle that in the long history of your family, in which everyone could have died or your parents could not have met, which complicates everything, you appear in this world. In a huge galaxy, we are just a grain of sand on a large beach.

* Were you the oldest (and favorite) grandson in the family, and did you also announce that you love Vuk’s grandson “more and more beautifully”, even though you have three more grandchildren?

– I love them the same. But when I wrote to you, we were still waiting for you. The wolf came first … I already said that I was born in a kind of cooperative, my grandmother, my grandfather, their five sons and a daughter lived together. One by one they left the house, and when I was born some of them were already in school. I was the first grandchild and Grandma Ljubica held me in her arms until I was three years old. I think I only walked then.

* And do you hope to meet again in some “other place”?

– There is no end to it. While we are alive, loved ones are present in our memory. The story of the “Reunion Center” is my great wish that our meetings be repeated. I made it up, but let someone show me it’s not true.

* In some songs do you talk about going back to the country, not only for sentimental reasons, but also out of necessity imposed by the times we live in?

– I know at least a dozen people who bought or exchanged an apartment for houses outside of Belgrade. This megalopolis has become cramped and claustrophobic. From New Belgrade to downtown, when it’s crowded, you need an hour. At that time, you can also go from the center to a place, 50 kilometers from the city, where you have land, a house, a patio and the opportunity to grow whatever you want. When I arrived in Belgrade in 1968, it had about 700,000 inhabitants. Today two and a half million. He lived in New Belgrade, in a rented room on Georgi Deža street, in a building with sand behind it. And very often, like Lawrence of Arabia, I would walk along the sandy road to the hotel “Yugoslavia” and wait for the bus to the center. And that is the most elite part of today, with the most expensive square.

* Do you think that when “this monster with the crown passes, the hungry will attack the site”?

– We inevitably face a great economic crisis. Of course, what happened after the Spanish fever will be repeated in another way, when from 1918 to 1920 fifty-odd million people died. Incomparably more than those who died in the Great War. The economy was destroyed, a crisis arose, and the world experienced a terrible collapse. Only the German machine benefited from the madman who “made” tractors under the auspices of the crisis, and in fact prepared tanks.

* Does that danger threaten us again?

– Not that way, but there will certainly be social unrest. This is what you get in the US They have never been so terribly divided, purely and clearly, into Republicans and Democrats. These are two types of persuasion and political attitude and, in fact, economics is behind this. Right now, about 40 million people in the United States are in danger, due to lack of work or inability to work. If vaccines are effective and provide health, do not forget that there are eight billion people on the planet. It is impossible for everyone to get vaccinated in the next two to three years.

* Will people continue to die because they cannot get the vaccine or because they refuse to get it?

– Absolutely, one of those two reasons will be. The medical sector will be overwhelmed, the economy will not work and a thousand more things could happen, so all this will take at least a few more years.

* Finally, let’s go back to the beginning: you dedicated the book to your wife Nada, with whom you fell in love at first sight, in 1967 in Novi Sad Strand. How did you manage not to “waste” love for so many years?

– There is a scene in “St. George” called “Spelling of Love” and that my dear professor Vava Hristić said was the most moving story he saw in the theater. It is about how a person is taught to say “I love you.” He cannot say that out of shame, tradition and a thousand other things. Then they ask him if he knows what love is. He responds that he knows, that it lasts for a while, and when it passes, there are concerns. And if a person learns to live with worries, then it lasts a long time … Love and passion, which appear at the beginning, in most cases turn into a great friendship. And friendship is the most precious thing. The word love, attention, tenderness and everything else is hidden in it. If there is no friendship, there is no love.

to get sick …