TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Catherine the Great and the Small

end of an angular hallway. The tenth floor, all around us the immensity of the metropolis. Life has never promised anything to anyone, all of this is a gift fromheaven and I amgrateful, even if my only anchor is a rickety table painted the color of yellow sponge cake. Hunched over this table, I write for myself and myself alone, much to the amusement of my household. “An extravagant hobby, that’s for sure,” they say, and they chuckle. Writing one’s memoirs, a hobby worthy of an empress, of one Catherine the Great. None of themwill be sweeping up the the bits of broken plate. In this city of dreams, I’m not seeking adventure, I’m not on the lookout for soulmates. It’s the beginning of summer, 1978. Grown-ups tell us we are the lucky generation who should be disgusted by revenge attacks and butchery, we should break the cycle. And they teach us: When they throw stones at you, throw bread to them. They don’t pronounce the word for bread hljeb , with a drawl, but say hleb . No one said hljeb back then—we encountered that version only in story books. And we stared at the difficult word, which appeared only paired with motika , the word for hoe in that saying: There can be no bread without a hoe. Good old Communism , we agree after a huddle in front of the building, to answer stones with bread—the finest social system in the world . We had never read the Bible. It was not available CATHERINE THE SMALL 1.

53