Dona’s Set of Dishes (Cadik Danon’s Story)

Our families slowly disappeared from Belgrade. Children scattered about the world and the old died faster, so that Olga and I inherited a “new” piece of furniture more frequently. It was the hardest when we were forced to empty the apartment and sell out our furniture. Along with the pieces of estranged items, our memories, the closest and dearest, disappeared too. It became painful to touch the objects that they had used for decades. The more valuable, well-preserved furniture, we somehow integrated with our own in our large apartment, so that in the same room, next to each other, were lined clocks from different epochs, strangely, all working. Upon the inherited chests of drawers and tables, besides the reliefs and inlays, many other things were written. The visits of a young married couple, friends whom we first met during one of our first trips to Greece, helped us overcome it all. I have spent hours talking to the middle-aged M., whom, for myself only, I named Crni (the Dark or Black in Serbian).¹ We liked when they came for dinner. Then we relaxed, and without any embarrassment could show all the beautiful things that were dear to us. One December night they were in our home and Crni, drinking strong drinks, walked through the spacious dining room in search of a “new” object.

I am used to confiding in Crni, telling him what happened to our families without hesitation or inhibition. We read together the concentration camp postcard that my father sent to his friend in Sarajevo before his execution. He was allowed to write only thirteen words. Twelve of them listed the names of food he was asking his friend to send. From such details, it seems, Crni better understood what had happened during his own childhood than others had. Day by day the differences disappear, generational as well as the ones dealing with more. Crni is a son of a Serbian Orthodox priest and has been raised in an entirely unlike spirit.

Story by story, through friendship with Crni, the past returns to me with quite a different view. I am not as gloomy and lonely as before, while I watch the ships passing down the Danube, a cigarette butt in an ashtray, not quite extinguished, or the moment of serenity the soft rain brings. Finally, I am able to talk about my memories freely and loudly while looking into someone’s eyes. By the widening and narrowing of Crni’s pupils I know what in my stories touches him deeply, or what only passes by his consciousness.

The war blazing in the 1990s seems to have broken the walls of nonunderstanding. Atrocities took place again, with the news of horrifying bestialities reaching us. The horrid stories about concentration camps were repeated. As if all of that prompted our first conversation during the vacation in Greece. Sitting alone on the hotel’s terrace, I started talking openly about ugly things. Already the second day, Crni told me:

“Write down your memories that you are telling me now, record it all! They deserve to be heard by others.”

As we start coming closer to each other, I tell him with ease about the most intimate things: my mother Dona, my escape from the camp, and how, after the war, I slowly, and often quite by chance, learned how those closest to me lost their lives, how my family tree was cut down. Crni absorbs each word as if an unknown world is opening up before him during a miraculous journey into the past, which, from one story to another, becomes more difficult to take as the events grow more gruesome. He constantly asks for details: wants to know what my father’s haberdashery and fancy goods store looked like, our dining room in the family home on Jovanova Street looked like, how big our dinner table was, and whether the children ate together with the guests. He made me remember Meinel’s store with its pleasing aroma of roasted coffee wafting through the air, all...