TE23 Double Feature

The President Shop

Vesna Mari ć

experience, full of activists and workers and intellectuals, all of whom managed to create a kind of a school for a communist education. The in-mates fought to be kept in one room, rather than in solitary confinement, where they were being kept originally. They won this right through hunger strikes that left the authorities with no choice but to relent. They studied Marxism in depth, and got local criminals to bring them books in exchange for cigarettes. An entire library was created, but books had to be camouflaged. A Marxist text had pages from The Count of Monte Cristo added to them, the President said, so that the guards would not sus-pect anything. “Anyway, even if the guard had looked properly at the pages where Marx discusses economic issues, he’d have thought a Count Monte Cristo had written them!” said the President, and Mona, Ruben, and Rosa chuckled. The President spoke of the fact that, inside their cell, every-one had to study a topic and 303

he escaped prison—once by way of filing down the iron cell bars and breaking them, like in the old cartoons—but then was ar-rested once more and served a six-year sentence in the decade preceding World War II. Upon his arrest, the President did not want to deny being a communist, even though the Communist party had been declared illegal. “Why should I denounce such a strong idea, one that I believed in and for which I was ready to give my life?” he said in his later retellings of his biography. In prison, he was tortured and he went on a hunger strike, and even the President’s first wife was arrested. All this had been told to a series of writers once the Nation was formed, and published in various collected volumes that most people inside the country had on their bookshelves. The Maric family of course had sev-eral collections, and, sometimes after dinner, Ruben read aloud from the books to Mona and to snoozing Rosa.

The President spoke of prison as a formative

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