Verónica was asleep in the window-seat beside me. I was trying to, only the woman seated to the left of me on Austrian Airlines, flight 757, kept elbowing me for most of the hour-long flight between Vienna and Butmir (Sarajevo) Airport. So, I abandoned hope of a nap and instead took to musing on the mysterious friendship that had developed between us and Goran Simić, the internationally acclaimed Canadian/Bosnian-Serb writer, whose poetry and short fiction spoke so eloquently of the Siege of Sarajevo and its aftermath, and particularly of the devastating impact war has on a civilian population. It’s hard to pinpoint with any certainty the moment when the invisible no-man’s line between casual acquaintance and friendship is crossed, but Veronica and I felt we were friends with Goran from the moment we first met.
I was preparing for a reading at the (now defunct) I.V. Lounge Reading Series, and in the course of conducting a little routine research on then-host Alex Boyd, I came across ‘Comfort and Canadian Poetry’—an opinion piece by Alex exploring the trivial versus the meaningful and valid in Canadian poetry—that contained a few lines of, and in general lauded, Goran’s Sprinting from the Graveyard (Oxford Press, 1997), versioned by David Harsent, while questioning why certain other Canadian poets with big reputations so often choose to write about seeming trivialities. Intrigued by the lines from the poem ‘The Mice of War’ quoted in the essay, I purchased a copy of Immigrant Blues (Brick Books, 2003), Goran’s first trade volume of poetry to appear in Canada, in order to judge for myself what I was dealing with.
My approach to literary criticism is simple, like that of a douser: if it’s great literature, you’ll know it in your bones; it will just register as such. It’s the feeling I got when I first read Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo (and The Burning Plain, his book of short stories). A pang of sorrow ran through me as I read the following lines over a coffee in my local Tim Hortons:
They took everything from me,
even the flag I was wrapped in when I was born.
I could keep just what wasn’t written in my
Customs Declarations:
just sorrow, memory and pain.
My immediate verdict was that I was in the hands of a contemporary master, an author who for one reviewer at The Globe and Mail ‘recalls figures such as Isaac Babel and Vladimir Mayakovsky’, and whom A.F. Moritz declared ‘one of the great post-war poets of Eastern Europe.’ When I got home, I wrote to Alex to say I had enjoyed his opinion piece and that I shared his and, it seemed, everyone else’s high opinion of Simić and his work. His gleeful one-line reply—‘ha! You’re reading with him tomorrow night!’—caused me to start. I re-read the line, and smiled, struck by the unmistakable sense that somehow this was not an accident.
March 10 2006 marked my first reading since the July 2004 launch of my translation of two volumes of the poetry of Mexico’s Jaime Sabines, Weekly Diary and Poems in Prose & Adam and Eve (Exile Editions, 2003), and my first since relocating to Canada after a four-year-long sojourn in northern Mexico. I was slightly apprehensive, especially now that I was reading with an internationally acclaimed author. On the night, there was some talk of Simic reading first: ‘It doesn’t really matter, we all have to read anyway,’ he said, but something in me rebelled against this. ‘Alex, you can’t put Simic up first,’ I remonstrated, and he replied, grinning ‘Okay, you go first, then.’ So, I was up first, and I must have done pretty well because during the intermission at the end of my set, in the presence of thirty or forty other people, many of them writers themselves and the majority of whom were there to hear Goran, he walked directly over to our table, smiled, and embraced me. I don’t remember what words passed between us, but I was touched and surprised. In a public and open manner, he was telling me, and by proxy those other writers gathered around us, that something in my poetry had moved him.
Gradually, at readings, his apartments and informal gatherings in bars and pubs over the course of the next two years in Toronto, we got to know Goran and his intimate and long-standing circle of friends, the core of which were: poet Fraser Sutherland; documentary filmmaker Zoran Mladic; Višnja Brčić, Goran’s Croat-born second wife; and sculptor Saša Bukvić. We all got along famously. But this time I would be spending two weeks up close and personal with the man on his spiritual home turf (the complexity only deepened when he confessed that Toronto was his true home), with no way of effacing myself into the background if things went south. What awaited me? Would I say or do something in a mindless moment that would unravel this slowly deepening mutual respect that existed between us.
We had just emerged into the powerful heat of Sarajevo, jet-lagged from the late-night flight from Toronto and an intense four-hour walkabout in Vienna, when he appeared: tanned, a little ruddier and better fed than we remembered, and with his characteristic basket-ball player’s lope, wearing a light-blue T-shirt with the word CUBA on it. As soon as he saw us, he deftly slipped the pipe he was cleaning into his pocket, and threw his arms around us. ‘Welcome to Sarajevo,’ he said, grinning, his eyes glinting like those of a small boy.
We got our luggage into the car, and as we headed off down the road from the airport, the scars of war—shrapnel-riddled walls and gables, bombed-out buildings, shell-pocked apartment blocks, and ubiquitous mortar-damaged red-tiled roofs—came into focus. As we drove towards Ilidza—a Sarajevo suburb that was under the control of Radovan Karadics’s Bosnian-Serb Army during the three-year siege, and which formed part of what was then known as Srpska Sarajevo (“Serbian Sarajevo”)—it was immediately apparent the whole city would have been a sitting duck to the Bosnian-Serb artillery tasked with forcing its capitulation. Even in Baščaršija, the heart of old Sarajevo, as we were to find out during our first exploratory strolls around her exquisitely charming cobblestone streets, here and there the bombed-out shells of houses showed through the mass of gleaming glass and steel structures. Still, despite local complaints about the slow pace of progress twelve years on from the end of the genocide, one got the vague senstation things had moved on somewhat. The young were no longer interested in hearing anything about The War. They were too young to remember, or simply fed up with hearing the stories, but for those like Goran who had witnessed firsthand the steady, senseless killing of family members, friends, neighbors, work colleagues, and pets, The War would never be over.
We continued along the broad freshly-tarred boulevard leading from the airport, past the new Turkish university, until we got to the road that skirted the base of the hills, turned left, and then, against the flow of oncoming traffic Goran spun another abrupt left, and we trundled down a narrow unpaved lane until we pulled up in the forecourt of a spacious dark-tiled bungalow. The majority of the surrounding houses showed signs of heavy shelling. There were two tables: one laden with food and drink; the other was Goran’s daily writing haven, upon which there were heaps of books, notebooks, sheafs of poems and translations with corrections, drawings, pens, and his pipe and tobacco pouch. He would sit there every day for hours, basking in the Balkan sunlight beneath a canopy of trained lattice vines. He was as happy as I had ever seen him.
Evening shadows were lengthening as we sat down to a meal of ćevapčići, the national dish, and salad, washed down with a few Sarajevsko pivos (beers). The ladies sipped wine. Dessert consisted of Turkish (Bosnian) coffee served with sickly-sweet baklava. Then an exchange of gifts: a couple of books and a bottle of Crown Royal whisky for Goran. And a surprise: five freshly printed copies of Immigrant Sorrow: (LyricalMyrical Press, 2008), a slim bilingual volume of seven of Goran’s longer poems that Veronica translated into Spanish, printed by the late Luciano Iacobelli. Suddenly a deep sonorous voice reverberated through the Sarajevan twilight. It was the voice of the Muezzin in his minaret calling the faithful to prayer.
Over the course of the next ten days, we visited museums, bars, restaurants, churches and mosques. We weren’t allowed to pay for everything, and we ate and drank like royalty. In order to address this, I offered to work in Dubravka’s long back garden, moving rubble, cutting the grass, and renovating the old potato drills that had lain untouched since the dark days of the Siege. Goran eventually joined me. As we hacked and picked the soil with shovels and a hoe, the notion struck me that there could be unexploded munitions buried in parts of the garden. I communicated this to Goran. Looking towards the hills in the near distance, he said, “Yeah, this area got hammered during the war. There’s a good chance,” and suggested we dig carefully, and try not to disturb the soil too much. I chuckled to myself, darkly. If we set off a grenade, we’ll both be blown arse-over-head into the potato drills—or eternity, I remember thinking. But we worked on in silence, each secretly hoping to find something I could take home as a war trophy. But we found nothing of interest. We removed all the stones we dug up with the aid of a battered wheelbarrow, and by the end of the week the entire garden was ready for planting.
Around two months later, Goran returned to Canada. I don’t know why. He seemed content in Sarajevo, he had a girlfriend, a roof, he was well fed, and he had friends all over the Balkans and beyond. He was standing outside The Trane, then a blues and jazz joint just off Bathurst Street. when I arrived. Once he had got his pipe going, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a crumpled-up Marlboro pack and handed it to me, grinning. Thinking it was some kind of prank, I asked, “What’s this?” “Open it,” he said, staring at the rain impinging on the wet leaves with a crackling hiss. Inside it was the rusted casing of a spent bullet, some of the soil from his garden still inside it. About a year or so later, I emailed him a copy of the following poem, which I included in my Selected Poems: Ghost Homeland (Scotus Press, 2020)—
THE BULLET
for Goran
Afternoons were reserved for sweaty toil:
bare-chested laborers, with hoe and spade
we dug and hacked the mortar-blasted soil
of Ilidža – thoughts of unexploded
ordnance suppressed in a tacit, sustained
joint effort to snag a real war souvenir.
But all we gleaned from those drills that had lain
undisturbed since the siege were broken beer
bottles, tin cans, and a child’s shoe. We’d meet
again, in Toronto two months later,
at a blues bar on a dark, leaf-strewn street:
rooting through your pockets for a lighter,
you produced a spent, rain-rusted bullet,
the dust of your ghost homeland still in it
He called me, via Facebook. He was crying, blind drunk: “I love you, you Ireesh bastard…I love you…I love you and Veronica…I love…” Then the phone went dead.
Sometime later we were sitting having a Turkish coffee in his then bar-restaurant, Fellini’s Shoe, on 226 Carlton Street, in Cabbagetown. Goran was about to set up his own publishing house, Luna Publications, and when he asked me if I had anything I would like to submit, I said I did. For much of the period I had spent in voluntary exile between 2001 and 2005 in Mexico’s arid north-east I worked on a broad selection of the great Mexican poet Jaime Sabines, but I was at a loss as to what to call it. My tentative attempts at a title having been met with polite silence, the talk turned to football and politics, and then in a lull in the conversation, in the hope of eliciting a chuckle from him I quoted a few lines of my sardonic poet—
Whenever you feel like dying,
hide your head under the pillow
and count four thousand sheep
—and he rounded on me, his face suddenly lit up, stabbing the air with his pipe, and blurted: ‘That’s it! That’s your title,’ before withdrawing behind the haze of his tobacco smoke, satisfied. That book didn’t see the light, as a publisher who was backing him financially and who had her eye on a translation of her own, blocked the book. But Goran went one better: he published a collection of my own poems, my third, under the title Ceasefire in Purgatory (2007). One night, at a New Year’s Eve party in Karen Shenfeld’s then Toronto home, attended by Goran, Veronica, Fraser, and Zoran, among others, Goran called me outside. As we chatted, he reached into a jacket pocket and handed me a folded-up stamped envelope. Inside was a review—my first ever—written by Shane Neilson, the Canadian critic and poet, and just published in Arc Poetry Magazine. My hand shook slightly as I read it. ‘It’s good,’ I blurted, relieved. Goran stared at me blankly: ‘Do you think I would show you a bad review on New Year’s Eve?’
By this time, his marriage to Višnja had broken up, and the restaurant, which had been losing money, was sold. Goran’s personal finances took another dive. From the moment he landed in Toronto, under the auspices of PEN Canada, he faced economic challenges. His first job in Canada was as writer-in-residence at Massey College. It was a plum gig, but it only lasted six months, and after that he was forced to work as a casual laborer to make ends meet. It was a humiliating and depressing come-down in the world. He went from being one of the former Yugoslavia’s leading poets, earning his living as a bookseller and reviewer, and then it was all gone: his livelihood, his past, his country, his future, his beloved Sarajevo, burned up before his eyes—and by his own people. I can’t remember how many times we moved his furniture and belongings from one apartment to another. Goran would host makeshift parties at whatever apartment he happened to be living in, always in some dilapidated high-rise building, where we would watch old Yugoslav movies projected onto the biggest wall in the flat. There was never enough furniture and Fraser would often sit on a pillow on the floor, his back leaning against an armchair or sofa, in his olive-green army surplus parka. Cigarette and pipe smoke filled the air to such a degree it made smoking redundant.
In 2009 Veronica and I moved back to Mexico. The Canadian winter was just too severe and the cost of living too high, the climate too cold, and we wanted to start a family. So, once I finished up my literature degree at the University of Toronto we applied for ESL teaching jobs in a private school in Veronica’s hometown, Linares. Suddenly cut adrift from my writer friends in Toronto and not yet fully cognizant of the magnitude of the danger we were in (in our absence, a Narco war had exploded between rival drug cartels), I dreamed of ways of retaining a connection, however tenuous, to the city of my birth. Initially, I toyed with the idea of opening a bookstore and inviting authors to give readings in it, but when I mentioned this to a fellow teacher, he smiled at my naïveté. ‘No one here reads,’ he said. Then I remembered that once a year, almost always during the third week in March, the students and staff of the school organized a Semana Cultural (Culture Week). Many of the events I attended in previous years I found tedious, and from an educational viewpoint, largely futile, but for my purposes the week prior to Holy Week was ideal. The Linares International Literary Festival featured a contingent of Mexican writers and performers along with several celebrated international writers, including Goran, Albert Moritz, and Marjan Strojan, Slovenia’s leading poet and translator. I have an enduring image of Goran and Marjan sitting at a table on the porch of the country chalet we housed them in sipping plum brandy, chatting about the old days in Yugoslavia, and imbibing the scent of orange blossoms that blew in periodically from the surrounding groves.
Despite their marriage disintegrating, Goran and Višnja collaborated on an anthology of Canadian poetry in Bosnian called Tetovirana Zemlja: Antologija Savremene Kanadske Poezije / (Tattooed Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 2009), which included two of my poems in Bosnian. Compiled, edited, and introduced by Goran and translated by Višnja, the book was published with financial support from the Canada Arts Council and five fortunate poets whose poems were showcased in the book, including yours truly, were chosen to represent Canada at the 49th edition of the Sarajevo International Poetry Days Festival. I still consider it be one of the high points of my personal and literary life. Goran invited me to participate in the opening ceremony, along with writers from eight other countries. When I walked outside, to have a cigarette, a TV crew interviewed me on the spot. I participated in two readings in Sarajevo (at the festival’s opening ceremony and the launch of the anthology), and one in Goražde, where I read with authors from five of the constituent republics of the former Yugoslavia. I was also interviewed on national TV and featured in Bosnia’s most prominent national newspapers, Osblodenje and Dnevni Avaz. People would stop me in the street and say, I saw you on the TV. Or in the newspapers. I was unaccustomed to this level of attention. One afternoon I was sitting at the coffee bar in the lobby of Hotel Bosnia when an Australian writer I had been chatting with rushed and shouted, ‘Colin, come on up quick; you’re on the telly!’ But it was too late. I missed the opportunity to see myself on Bosnian TV. ‘I’m always on TV,’ I deadpanned her. ‘It gets to you after a while—everywhere I go, being hounded by film crews.’ She stared at me for a second, then we both burst out laughing.
The last time I saw Goran was in a rustic bar in a house by the Miljacka River. There was no one else present. I had the feeling that it was open just for us, outside of hours. Our party consisted of Sasha, Goran, Fraser, my dad and brother. (It stuns me to think that three of the people we drank and made merry with that night are now dead.) Fraser, who had experienced the equivalent of a personal genocide, having lost his son and wife within a few years, smoldered within himself. He was ashen-faced, irritable, and angry with Goran, whom he denounced, with some justification, as “unreliable”, in his posthumous memoir The Book of Malcolm: My Son’s Life with Schizophrenia. I looked Fraser in the eye. He’s dying slowly, I thought. We downed as many Sarajevska pivos and glasses of slivovitz as we could get into us, laughing and joking and reminiscing about the good ole days in Toronto, Linares and Sarajevo.
As we walked in the direction of the bridge leading to our Airbnb on a high hill overlooking Sarajevo, just above the iconic Park Prinčeva Hotel, I hoped Goran would join us for a nightcap, but alas he had somewhere to be. He embraced us warmly, smiled, and disappeared into the dimly illuminated darkness. When I looked back, his tall black silhouette had faded. Later that night, while Fraser, Barney and John slept, through the big living room window I watched snow falling on the graveyard across the road, and recalled the anecdote I had recounted to Goran earlier in the bar, about a Slovenian boy who when asked what he thought Sevdalinka music was, replied, ‘It’s when my father is singing and crying at the same time.’ And that’s how it is with me now. Singing of our friendship and the subtle, brutal beauty of his verse. And crying at the thought of him lying in the wet clay of Sveti Marko Cemetery. He can’t be dead.
