In the sixties the name Kevrin Creek was changed to Ahmet Fetahagić Street, which those in the neighborhood continued to call Kevrin. Not from stubbornness or persistence, and not because of the memory that was so important to my Nono with his cabbies, but to differentiate themselves from people who weren’t from our neighborhood. For it was really only the people from Mejtaš, the Mejtašians, who called it Kevrin Creek. It was not one of those strong place-names that have survived the vicissitudes of empires, changes of population, or humane and inhumane migrations.
They named the street after Ahmet Fetahagić – he also had a school named after him where as an eighth grader I won a republic-wide geography contest – a prewar student and fighter in the Spanish Civil War, one of the great Partisan heroes of the Second World War, who died on Christmas Day, according to the Gregorian calendar, in 1944, near the village of Izačić, several hundred meters from the place where the border gate between Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina now stands.
At the dead end of Mile Vujović – a small, ugly, nothing of a street with steps that lead down to Mejtaš through a short passageway covered in the piss of the neighborhood’s drunks and unfortunates – Nađa and Šerif lived with their child in one of the basement apartments. Nađa was Zehra’s daughter, and as Nona did not have a better friend in life than Zehra, she carried over her friendship to Zehra’s daughter. We went to Nađa and Šerif’s place to visit at least once a month. On an uneven whitewashed wall beneath the low ceiling of their living room hung a tapestry depicting the Kaaba. The black stone building was enormous and around it were tiny people like ants with ornaments surrounding them. We would sit there, tucked up and protected, on the low settees and little chairs. Nona would talk with Nađa, and I would ask Uncle Šerif about his motorcycle. He had a big black bike with a sidecar. German. Upright and dark-skinned, with a Clark Gable mustache, Šerif was a serious man from my childhood. He died young. But by then they’d already moved away to somewhere in Novo Sarajevo, where people lived that we didn’t see anymore.
Mile Vujović, after whom the street was named, a teacher and a native Sarajevan from Nadkovač, was a cultural education officer of the Užice Partisan brigade. He was killed on Zelengora in April 1947 and his remains were brought to the Lav military cemetery to lie in peace.
Like Mehmed Pasha, Nemanjina Street was built in the sixteenth century. It had been a road in the neighborhood of the Hajji Balina Mosque, which the people would remember as Čekaluša. But Čekaluša did not get its name from the word čekanje, or waiting, as is sometimes thought today. Originally it was Čegaluša, which probably came from Čegaleu, the name by which Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha was known, the one who built the Brusa Bezistan and that wondrously beautiful bridge across the Željeznica River.
Rüstem Pasha died in 1561, and if the Venetian ambassador Bernardo Navagero is correct, he was born in some hamlet quite close to Sarajevo. As there was at the time just one Sarajevo hamlet suburb, which was called Bilave, perhaps this was the birthplace of Grand Vizier Rüstem Pasha. This story is actually contradicted by Hazim Šabanović, a dedicated historian and researcher who, on the basis of documentary evidence, maintains that Rüstem Pasha was born in Herzegovina, on Bijelo Polje near Mostar, as the brother of Mehmed beg Karađoz, whose name would be given to the miraculous Mostar mosque, to which Skender Kulenović would dedicate an even more beautiful sonnet.
The street was named for Stefan Nemanja, founder of the famous Serbian dynasty, in 1919, one of those years of ours that were considered years of liberation only to later be designated as years of servitude.
There is one very steep čikma off of Nemanjina. The čikme are blind alleys, appendices, the sightless bowels of Sarajevo’s side streets. My father grew up in a čikma off Nemanjina, a one-room apartment with a bathroom in the entrance hall. In the misery and poverty of an enemy childhood. His mother lived here, my grandmother Štefanija. I visited her place only once.
And in the end, before we close out the full circle: Mustafa Golubić Street. It had once been known by the name of the Croatian and Yugoslav politician Ante Trumbić, but in June of 1948, twenty days before the Cominform Revolution, it was given the name of the spy and Comintern assassin Mustafa Golubić. There are several lovely Austro-Hungarian country villas on this street, dilapidated and crumbling, as well as the Militia Building, on the other side of Veliki Park, whose graveyard was transformed in Austro-Hungarian times into a very pretty, well-conceived and constructed square, to which the new Yugoslav authorities had added a public bathroom. They did not think about the fact that this had once been someone’s graveyard. Sarajevo is full of graves, as well as disappeared names, individuals, and entire peoples.
They are here no longer and will not be coming back.
Sepetarevac: The Ascent
And now, slowly, up we go on Sepetarevac.
You’ll be going up this street for twenty-four years. Until the summer of 1993, when you’ll go for a short stay in Zagreb and never come back. It’s good you didn’t come back, you know that today, but maybe it’s not good that you didn’t go farther. Though this too is just a game of chance, and who knows what might have happened to you and whether you would still be around, friend, if you had gone farther.
There are surely steeper hills in Sarajevo. Once in a while you climbed one or two of them too, but not one would etch itself in your memory like Sepetarevac. It’s clear that the street was named after the crates, or sepeti, that were carried – mostly by Jewish porters – up to the shops on Bjelave. One of them, Samuel, was described by the Sarajevo author and pulmonary physician Isak Samokovlija in a short story, which put it on Sarajevo’s literary map, a map that must be differentiated from the physical map of the city. The former city exists the way it is described, and only those streets that live in the stories and poems of the better writers are present in it. Some of the tiny backstreets and alleys squeezed between the houses on the city’s literary map are more important and visible than the unnamed, pale wide avenues that lead out of town. Sepetarevac is one such vital street.
There are steeper streets in the city, but none is described by its steepness and talked about like Sepetarevac.
Which, in all the time you’ll be ascending it, will officially be called Miladin Radojević Street.
No one hurries on this street. Or the only people who hurry are those who don’t know it and are not from here: boys on their way to see girls at the Women’s Teachers Center on Duvanska Street, or to the trade and medical school on Lajoš Košut Street, or to Bjelave on God-knows-what sort of errand. But this is certain: to be rushing on Sepetarevac you can’t be from here, or you have to be so angry that your anger drives you up the hill. Anyone who lives here and knows that he’ll have to climb the street again tomorrow finds no reason for hurry. You have to climb so as not to break a sweat and get yourself out of breath, to be able to think while you’re climbing, comfortable, resting.
You’ll live here long enough that you too will learn at last how to rest while climbing. Leaning forward a little, you can see the street from the kitchen window. And you can watch your neighbors, the ones you know and the ones you don’t, slowly creeping uphill. And sometimes you’ll meet the ones who fall, collapse, or fly downward. There are people who, for their own private reasons, don’t rush down the street either, but the majority dive toward town, taking pleasure in the downgrade as if they’ll never have to come back up.
The first fifty meters are the hardest, though this is not the steepest part of the street. You have to get used to it, find the thought that will keep you going all the way up, easing the ascent. The first house on the right, at the corner of Ivan Cankar Street, belonged to a woman whom everyone called the Dalmatian. You never knew her name. If you heard it, you didn’t connect it to her. She was a widow, a small woman in colorful dresses of the sort worn in town, and was never very dressed up. In one of those years from the First World War, she had m
entioned in conversation she was from Dalmatia. You would run into her as she opened her courtyard gate with that big iron key. Nona would strike up a conversation with her, but she never set foot in the courtyard. There was no reason to.
All the streets that connect to Miladin Radojević do so from the right side except for one. The first, Fadil Jahić Španac, is very long. It’s one of those winding streets that cut across Sarajevo’s slopes, connecting one climbing site to the next. From Sepetarevac it extends all the way to Hajduk Veljkova Street. In older times it passed through two districts: Sarač Ismailova and Kasim Katibova, which over time merged into the Više Husrev Begova baths. The street was originally named after someone named Hajji Sulejman.
The street got the name by which you would call it in June 1948. It was named after the carpenter and idealist Fadil Jahić, who in 1936 set out from his hometown of Bijeljina to defend the republic. He had been a maker of window frames, doors, footstools, and roof beams, and then, carried away by his faith, he went off to Andalusia, Granada, Castile, Barcelona, gaining through his wayfaring the nickname that was commonly used in our provinces – Španac, “the Spaniard.” In it was both a calling and a symbol of faith. It is nice to believe that Hajji Sulejman was similar to Fadil, that he was a hajji in the same way that Fadil was a Spaniard. There is something similar in the two nicknames. Both were achieved with difficulty and through great faith.
Afterward Fadil Jahić the Spaniard served as a commander and then political commissar in the famous 38th “Majevički” Partisan Division. He was killed in battle in February 1942, alongside another Partisan hero, Ivan Marković Irac, after being surrounded by the Chetniks. This was in the village of Vukosavci on Mount Majevica.
After Fadil Jahić Španac Street comes the most level part of Sepetarevac, about fifty paces long, before the big steep part, which starts after the bend beyond Džemil Krvavac Street. From Turkish times to today, this street too has kept its old name: Vejsilagin Way. Who this Vejsilaga was has of course been forgotten, though by some miracle on this very street there was an old Sarajevan named Vejsil whom the neighbors sometimes affectionately called Vejsilaga. The name fit the old man somehow especially well, the rhythm and the melody of it, and maybe the sense of it too, with that “aga” at the end, as if he were a minor Turkish lord.
On that street, our handyman Vjenceslav Šulc lived with his wife and son in a lopsided Turkish house of bricks on the verge of collapse in the middle of a courtyard with a fountain and fine round cobblestones. He’d been an airplane mechanic before the war at the military airport in Rajlovac. Before dying at the beginning of the eighties, he would repair anything that broke in your house, except the TV. For that Mr. Fišeković had to be called.
Though I didn’t know much about him, I composed a book of poems about Šulc the handyman. He impressed me after he was no longer around. But it was completely normal for you when you lived next to him. You did not know that in other lives there weren’t any retired airplane mechanics who busied themselves by repairing all sorts of broken things. Children did not have such knowledge and were not surprised by anything. The time for surprise came later, when you had grown up and everything disappeared.
Džemil Krvavac was an official in Sarajevo’s main post office. Your cousin Budo Dimitrijević knew him, the husband of your aunt Mila, on the Jergović side. Budo had been a soldier on the Salonika front in the First World War, awarded Karađorđe’s Star and the Order of Saint Sava, and later a respectable and esteemed postal official. And at the time, between the two wars, the post office was the most important civil service organ along with the railroads. Gentlemen worked in the postal service. “Do your work quietly, Džemil, son. Nothing good will come of your doing things so everyone can hear and see them, and you’ll suffer for it. Listen to me, son. Work quietly.” Džemil was fifteen years younger than Budo, but as he and Aunt Mila did not have any children, Budo called any man younger than he was “son.” My uncle Budo Dimitrijević was apolitical, didn’t understand communism, respected the emperor, and didn’t convince Džemil. Born in Herzegovina somewhere near Gacko, a journalist and aspiring writer, Džemil Krvavac was arrested by the Ustaše police on November 12, 1941 and deported six days later to Jasenovac. He fell in spring of the next year, along with a large group of inmates, during one of the unsuccessful uprisings. Uncle Budo recalled him to the end of his life. Then he too died, while Džemil, the wretch, was turned into a street.
The steepest part of Sepetarevac comes after one passes Džemil Krvavac Street. Here drivers would shift down into first – which was not that simple in a little Fiat since you had to stop the car to shift and then start up again using the emergency break, which was one of the most delicate maneuvers in driving tests from those years – while in winter, with the snowfall and frozen surfaces, and with the children’s sleds transforming it into a completely smooth, slippery ice sheet, this part of Sepetarevac was nearly impassable. We all climbed up, young and old alike, by digging our fingernails into the facades along the way. Older gentlemen and strict fathers returning home from work would lose all authority here, in their thick mountain ascent shoes, their hats, their bulky clothes and good coats, trying to remain serious, but in vain, for seriousness led to despair on this most inconvenient portion of Sepetarevac, from street number 19 to 23.
You lived at number 23.
The building was constructed at the end of the fifties by the brothers Trklja – Branko and Obrad. Ten years later Obrad sold his half and moved to Belgrade. In the summer of 1969, when everyone else was at the beach, you moved into his apartment. Professor Branko Trklja taught econometrics and other subjects in the department of economics at the university. A quiet and calm neighbor and an introverted bachelor, unhealthily clean and orderly. He had some kind of secret. You would never discover it.
Several years ago I read the collected works of Franz Kafka, a thick book with completed and unfinished prose works, extremely varied, but all with a detached anxiousness. The main character in all the stories reminded me of someone. I finished the book, unable to remember who it was. Then it struck me: Branko Trklja! Who knows what might have happened, and with what sort of eyes you would have looked at him, had you read the book in time…
He retired in the eighties, sold his apartment, and moved to the village of Osijek, one of Sarajevo’s western suburbs, where he lived peacefully until the war. He died as a refugee, in a camp somewhere in eastern Bosnia. He had a deep voice and never laughed.
Below you was Franjo Hauptman’s garage and below the garage, a three-story building at number 21, an old, unstable, quite dilapidated Turkish structure of yellow adobe. By the time all the wars had ended at the close of the nineties, one wall of the building had separated itself and collapsed. From your bedroom you could see a cross-section of the whole building at number 21, from the ground floor to the attic. They tore down the building several months later.
Milojka lived a little farther down, opposite Džemil Krvavac Street. Alone in an old Turkish structure. Her son had hanged himself one spring.
Once you’ve passed the steepest incline, there’s a little intersection around number 25. To the left, a short street that has no name drops off toward Ahmet Fetahagić, and to the left is Abdičev Street. At the intersection of Abdičev and Sepetarevac there’s a nice three-story built in modern times by a certain developer named Čarkadžija, perhaps after the Second World War. We don’t know who designed it, but the spirit of modernism is palpable in its shape and can be felt in its balconies and staircases.
Abdičev Street was named after the Muslim family that had several houses here two or three centuries ago. Today it extends between Miladin Radojević and Drvarska Streets, but before the beginning of the twentieth century it went farther on to Bulbulina.
After Abdičev the ascent continues, but for a stretch there are only houses on the right side. It’s as if Sepetarevac has been sliced in half here. By now you’r
e quite high above the city. Turn around and you’ll see the whole of it, if the valley is not pressed down with the November-December mist and smog.
You’ll have to go on yourself from here because I’m not confident in my memory’s ascension. I don’t have a map of Sarajevo. It would not be of any use to me anymore, so before reaching Bjelave I remember just one street. About three hundred paces or so from Abdičev comes Hadži Hajdarova.
This very old and beautiful side street, sheltered, hidden, and well preserved, gave off an air of some bygone time. Coming up to Hadži Hajdarova was like entering a museum. The street had this sort of aroma, and the people who lived on it had this sort of appearance. You might have believed they never went down to town. Their wives had been very old for a long time. They went around in Turkish pantaloons and wore kerchiefs on their heads strewn with brownish-gold ornaments, while the men wore French berets and short gray vests, or housepainters’ slacks and coats with caps fashioned from the liberation of the day before. On Hadži Hajdarova Street it was surely not 1975 or even ’79 but some century or two before. It’s unclear when time here began to run outside the time in which we were living, but it seems to have happened long ago. Some of the first shells that struck this part of town in April and May 1992 fell on Hadži Hajdarova. The calendars were thus brought into accord, and the time in which the little street had lived disappeared.
For a long time, it was mistakenly thought that the street got its name from Divan Hajdar Kjatib, the court scribe Hajji Hajdar who laid the foundation for the White Mosque of Sarajevo’s Vratnik Quarter. But this Hajji Hajdar was older and had been a harness maker at the bazaar. A wealthy, devout man, he had wanted to leave something behind and so had built the mosque, around which a neighborhood arose, which in the sixteenth century acquired the name Saddler Hadži Hajdar’s Quarter. It would continue to exist into Austrian times under the name Upper Saddler’s Quarter.
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