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Last year, as you know, I went to Sweden at the invitation of the Institute for Theater Research. A Mrs Johansson, Kristina Johansson, served as my guide and mentor. I saw five or six productions, among which a successful Godot – for prisoners – was most worthy of note. Ten days later, when I had returned home, I was still living in that far-off world as if in a dream.

Mrs Johansson was a determined woman, and she intended to use those ten days to show me everything there was to see in Sweden, everything that might interest me ‘as a woman.’ She even included the famous Vasa, the sailing ship that had been hauled out of the sludge after several hundred years, preserved like a pharaoh’s mummy. One evening, after a performance of Ghost Sonata at the Dramaten, my hostess took me to the Royal Library. I barely had time to eat a sandwich in a bar.

It was about eleven by then, and the building was closed. But Mrs Johansson showed a pass to the man at the door, and he let us in, muttering. He held a large ring of keys in his hand, like the guard who had let us into the Central Prison the day before to see Godot. My hostess, having delivered me into the hands of this Cerberus, said she would call for me in the morning at the hotel; she told me to examine the library in God’s peace, the gentleman would call me a cab, he was at my disposal… What could I do but accept her kind offer? The guard escorted me to an enormous door, which he unlocked, and then switched on a dim light and left me alone. I heard the key turn in the lock behind me; there I was, in a library like a dungeon.

A draft blew in from somewhere, rippling the cobwebs, which, like dirty scraps of gauze, hung from the bookshelves as over select bottles of old wine in a cellar. All the rooms were alike, connected by a narrow passageway, and the draft, whose source I could not identify, penetrated everywhere.

It was at that point, even before I had had a good look at the books (and just after noticing the letter C on one of the volumes in the third room), that I caught on: each room housed one letter of the alphabet. This was the third. And, indeed, in the next section all the books were marked with the letter D. Suddenly, driven by some vague premonition, I broke into a run. I heard my steps reverberating, a multiple echo that faded away in the darkness. Agitated and out of breath, I arrived at the letter M and with a perfectly clear goal in mind opened one of the books. I had realized – perhaps I had read about it somewhere – that this was the celebrated Encyclopedia of the Dead. Everything had come clear in a flash, even before I opened the massive tome.

The first thing I saw was his picture, the only illustration, set into the double-column text in roughly the middle of the page. It was the photograph you saw on my desk. It was taken in 1936, on November 12, in Maribor, just after his discharge from the army. Under the picture were his name and, in parentheses, the years 1910–79.

You know that my father died recently and that I had been very close to him from my earliest years. But I don’t want to talk about that here. What concerns me now is that he died less than two months before my trip to Sweden. One of the main reasons I decided to take the trip was to escape my grief. I thought, as people in adversity are wont to think, that a change of scene would help me escape the pain, as if we did not bear our grief within ourselves.

Cradling the book in my arms and leaning against the rickety wooden shelves, I read his biography completely oblivious of time. As in medieval libraries, the books were fastened by thick chains to iron rings on the shelves. I did not realize this until I tried to move the heavy volume closer to the light.

I was suddenly overcome with anguish; I felt I had overstayed my welcome and Mr Cerberus (as I called him) might come and ask me to halt my reading. I therefore started skimming through the paragraphs, turning the open book, insofar as the chain would allow, in the direction of the pale light shed by the lamp. The thick layer of dust that had gathered along their edges and the dangling scraps of cobwebs bore clear witness to the fact that no one had handled the volumes in a long time. They were fettered to one another like galley slaves, but their chains had no locks.

So this is the famous Encyclopedia of the Dead, I thought to myself. I had pictured it as an ancient book, a ‘venerable’ book, something like the Tibetan Book of the Dead or the Cabala or the Lives of the Saints – one of those esoteric creations of the human spirit that only hermits, rabbis, and monks can enjoy. When I saw that I might go on reading until dawn and be left without any concrete trace of what I had read for myself or my mother, I decided to copy out several of the most important passages and make a kind of summary of my father’s life.

The facts I have recorded here, in this notebook, are ordinary, encyclopedia facts, unimportant to anyone but my mother and me: names, places, dates. They were all I managed to jot down, in haste, towards dawn. What makes the Encyclopedia unique (apart from its being the only existing copy) is the way it depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes – the multitude of details that make up a human life. The reference (for example) to my father’s place of birth is not only complete and accurate (‘Kraljev?ani, Glina township, Sisak district, Banija province’) but is accompanied by both geographical and historical details. Because it records everything. Everything. The countryside of his native region is rendered so vividly that as I read, or rather flew over the lines and paragraphs, I felt I was in the heart of it: the snow on distant mountain peaks, the bare trees, the frozen river with children skating past as in a Brueghel landscape. And among those children I saw him clearly, my father, although he was not yet my father, only he who would become my father, who had been my father. Then the countryside suddenly turned green and buds blossomed on the trees, pink and white, hawthorn bushes flowered before my eyes, the sun arched over the village of Kraljev?ani, the village church bells chimed, cows mooed in their barns, and the scarlet reflection of the morning sun glistened on the cottage windows and melted the icicles hanging from the gutters.

Then, as if it were all unfolding before my eyes, I saw a funeral procession headed in the direction of the village cemetery. Four men, hatless, were carrying a fir casket on their shoulders, and at the head of the procession walked a man, hat in hand, whom I knew to be – for that is what the book said – my paternal grandfather Marko, the husband of the deceased, whom they were laying to rest. The book tells everything about her as well: date of birth, cause of illness and death, progression of disease. It also indicates what garments she was buried in, who bathed her, who placed the coins on her eyes, who bound her chin, who carved the casket, where the timber was felled. That may give you an idea – some idea, at least – of the copiousness of the information included in The Encyclopedia of the Dead by those who undertake the difficult and praiseworthy task of recording – in what is doubtless an objective and impartial manner – everything that can be recorded concerning those who have completed their earthly journey and set off on the eternal one. (For they believe in the miracle of biblical resurrection, and they compile their vast catalogue in preparation for that moment. So that everyone will be able to find not only his fellow men but also – and more important – his own forgotten past. When the time comes, this compendium will serve as a great treasury of memories and a unique proof of resurrection.) Clearly, they make no distinction, where a life is concerned, between a provincial merchant and his wife, between a village priest (which is what my great-grandfather was) and a village bell ringer called ?uk, whose name also figures in the book. The only condition – something I grasped at once, it seems to have come to me even before I could confirm it – for inclusion in The Encyclopedia of the Dead is that no one whose name is recorded here may appear in any other encyclopedia. I was struck from the first, as I leafed through the book – one of the thousands of M volumes – by the absence of famous people. (I received immediate confirmation as I turned the pages with frozen fingers, looking for my father’s name.) The Encyclopedia did not include separate listings for Mažurani? or Meyerhold or Malmberg or Mareti?, who wrote the grammar my father used in school, or Meštrovi?, whom my father had once seen in the street, or Dragoslav Maksimovi?, a lathe operator and Socialist deputy whom my grandfather had known, or Tasa Milojevi?, Kautsky’s translator, with whom my father had once conversed at the ‘Russian Tsar’ café. It is the work of a religious organization or sect whose democratic program stresses an egalitarian vision of the world of the dead, a vision that is doubtless inspired by some biblical precept and aims at redressing human injustices and granting all God’s creatures an equal place in eternity. I was also quick to grasp that the Encyclopedia did not delve into the dark distance of history and time, that it came into being shortly after 1789. The odd caste of erudites must have members all over the world digging tirelessly and discreetly through obituaries and biographies, processing their data, and delivering them to headquarters in Stockholm. (I wondered for a moment whether Mrs Johansson might not be one of them. Had she brought me to the Library deliberately, after I confided my grief to her, so that I would discover The Encyclopedia of the Dead and find a grain of comfort in it?) That is all I can surmise, all I infer about their work. The reason for their secrecy resides, I believe, in the Church’s long history of persecution, though work on an encyclopedia such as this understandably requires a certain discretion if the pressures of human vanity are to be avoided and attempts at corruption thwarted.

No less amazing than their secret activities, however, was their style, an unlikely amalgam of encyclopedic conciseness and biblical eloquence. Take, for example, the meager bit of information I was able to get down in my notebook: there it is condensed into a few lines of such intensity that suddenly, as if by magic, the reader’s spirit is overwhelmed by the radiant landscape and swift succession of images. We find a three-year-old boy being carried up a mountain path to see his maternal grandfather on a sweltering sunny day, while in the background – the second or third plane, if that is what it is called – there are soldiers, revenue officers, and police, distant cannon thunder and muffled barking. We find a pithy chronology of the First World War: trains clanking past a market town, a brass band playing, water gurgling in the neck of a canteen, glass shattering, kerchiefs fluttering… Each item has its own paragraph, each period its own poetic essence and metaphor – not always in chronological order but in a strange symbiosis of past, present, and future. How else can we explain the plaintive comment in the text – the ‘picture album’ covering his first five years, which he spent with his grandfather in Komogovina – the comment that goes, if I remember correctly, ‘Those would be the finest years of his life’? Then come condensed images of childhood, reduced, so to speak, to ideographs: names of teachers and friends, the boy’s ‘finest years’ against a backdrop of changing seasons, rain splashing off a happy face, swims in the river, a toboggan speeding down a snow-swept hill, trout fishing, and then – or, if possible, simultaneously – soldiers returning from the battlefields of Europe, a canteen in the boy’s hands, a shattered gas mask abandoned on an embankment. And names, life stories. The widower Marko meeting his future wife, Sofija Rebra?a, a native of Komogovina, the wedding celebration, the toasts, the village horse race, pennants and ribbons flapping, the exchange-of-rings ceremony, singing and kolo-dancing outside the church doors, the boy dressed up in a white shirt, a sprig of rosemary in his lapel.

Here, in my notebook, I have recorded only the word ‘Kraljev?ani,’ but the Encyclopedia devotes several dense paragraphs to this period, complete with names and dates. It describes how he awoke on that day, how the cuckoo in the clock on the wall roused him from his fitful sleep. It contains the names of the coachmen, the names of the neighbors who made up the escort, a portrait of the schoolmaster, the guidance he offered to the boy’s new mother, the priest’s counsels, the words of those who stood at the outskirts of the village to wave them one last farewell.

Nothing, as I have said, is lacking, nothing omitted, neither the condition of the road nor the hues of the sky, and the list of paterfamilias Marko’s worldly possessions is complete to the last detail. Nothing has been forgotten, not even the names of the authors of old textbooks and primers full of well-meaning advice, cautionary tales, and biblical parables. Every period of life, every experience is recorded: every fish caught, every page read, the name of every plant the boy ever picked.

And here is my father as a young man, his first hat, his first carriage ride, at dawn. Here are the names of girls, the words of the songs sung at the time, the text of a love letter, the newspapers read – his entire youth compressed into a single paragraph.

Now we are in Ruma, where my father received his secondary-school education. Perhaps this example will give you an idea of how pansophical, to use an old word, The Encyclopedia of the Dead actually is. The principle is clear, yet the erudition, the need to record it all, everything a human life is made of, are enough to take one’s breath away. What we have here is a brief history of Ruma, a meteorological map, a description of the railway junction; the name of the printer and everything printed at the time – every newspaper, every book; the plays put on by touring companies and the attractions of touring circuses; a description of a brickyard… where a young man, leaning against an acacia, is whispering a mixture of romantic and rather ribald words into a girl’s ear (we have the complete text). And everything – the train, the printing press, The Bumptious Bumpkin, the circus elephant, the track forking off in the direction of Šabac – it all figures here only insofar as it pertains to the individual in question. There are also excerpts from school reports: grades, drawings, names of classmates, until the next-to-the-last year (section B), when the young man had words with Professor L.D., the history and geography teacher.

Suddenly we are in the heart of a new city. It is 1928; the young man is wearing a cap with a final-year insignia on it and has grown a mustache. (He will wear it for the rest of his life. Once, fairly recently, his razor slipped and he shaved it off completely. When I saw him, I burst into tears: he was somebody else. In my tears there was a vague, fleeting realization of how much I would miss him when he died.) Now here he is in front of the Café Central, then at a cinema, where a piano plays while A Trip to the Moon unfolds on the screen. Later we find him looking over newly posted announcements on the notice board in Jela?i? Square, one of which – and I mention it only as a curiosity – announces a lecture by Krleža. The name of Anna Eremija – a maternal aunt, in whose Juriši? Street flat in Zagreb he will later live – figures here side by side with the names of Križaj, the opera singer, whom he once passed in the Upper Town; Ivan Labus, the cobbler who repaired his shoes; and a certain Ante Dutina, in whose bakery he bought his rolls …

In that distant year of 1929, one approached Belgrade via the Sava Bridge, probably with the same joy of arrival as one feels today. The train wheels clatter as they pass over the metal trestles, the Sava flows mud-green, a locomotive blows its whistle and loses speed, and my father appears at a second-class window, peering out at the distant view of an unfamiliar city. The morning is fresh, the fog slowly lifts off the horizon, black smoke puffs from the funnel of the steamer Smederevo, a muffled horn hoots its imminent departure for Novi Sad.

With brief interruptions, my father spent approximately fifty years in Belgrade, and the sum of his experiences – the total of some eighteen thousand days and nights (432,000 hours) is covered here, in this book of the dead, in a mere five or six pages! And yet, at least in broad outline, chronology is respected: the days flow like the river of time, toward the mouth, toward death.

In September of that year, 1929, my father enrolled in a school that taught surveying, and the Encyclopedia chronicles the creation of the Belgrade School of Surveying and gives the text of the inaugural lecture by its director, Professor Stojkovi? (who enjoined the future surveyors to serve king and country loyally, for on their shoulders lay the heavy burden of mapping the new borders of our homeland). The names of the glorious campaigns and no less glorious defeats of the First World War – Kajmak?alan, Mojkovac, Cer, Kolubara, Drina – alternate with the names of professors and students who fell in battle, with my father’s grades in trigonometry, draftsmanship, history, religion, and calligraphy. We find also the name Rosa, Roksanda, a flower girl with whom D.M. ‘trifled,’ as they said in those days, along with the names of Borivoj-Bora Ili?, who ran a café; Milenko Azanja, a tailor; Kosta Stavroski, at whose place he stopped every morning for a hot burek; and a man named Krtini?, who fleeced him once at cards. Next comes a list of films and soccer matches he saw, the dates of his excursions to Avala and Kosmaj, the weddings and funerals he attended, the names of the streets where he lived (Cetinjska, Empress Milica, Gavrilo Princip, King Peter I, Prince Miloš, Požeška, Kameni?ka, Kosmajska, Brankova), the names of the authors of his geography, geometry, and planimetry texts, titles of the books he enjoyed (King of the Mountain, Stanko the Bandit, The Peasant Revolt), church services, circus performances, gymnastics demonstrations, school functions, art exhibits (where a watercolor by my father was commended by the jury). We also find mention of the day he smoked his first cigarette, in the school lavatory, under the influence of one Ivan Gerasimov, the son of a Russian émigré, who took him one week later to a then-celebrated Belgrade café, with a Gypsy orchestra and Russian counts and officers weeping to guitars and balalaikas… Nothing is omitted: the ceremonial unveiling of the Kalemegdan monument, food poisoning from ice cream bought on the corner of Macedonia Street, the shiny pointed shoes purchased with the money his father gave him for passing his examinations.

The next paragraph tells of his departure for Uži?ka Požega in 1933, in May. Traveling with him on the train, second class, is the unfortunate Gerasimov, the émigré’s son. It is their first assignment: they are to survey the terrain of Serbia, make cadastral and cartographic sketches. They take turns carrying the leveling rod and the theodolite; protecting their heads with straw hats – it is summer by now, and the sun is beating down – they climb hills, call, shout back and forth to each other; the autumn rains begin; pigs start grubbing, the cattle start getting restless; the theodolite has to be kept sheltered: it attracts lightning. In the evenings they drink slivovitz with Milenkovi?, the village schoolmaster, the spit turns, Gerasimov curses first in Russian, then in Serbian, the brandy is strong. Poor Gerasimov will die of pneumonia in November of that year, with D.M. standing over his deathbed, listening to his delirious ramblings – just as he will stand over his grave, head bowed, hat in hand, meditating on the transitory nature of human existence.

That is what remains in my memory; that is what remains in the notes I hurriedly jotted down with my frozen fingers on that night or, rather, morning. And it represents two entire years, two seemingly monotonous years, when from May to November – bandit season – D.M. drags the tripod and the theodolite up hill and down dale, the seasons revolve, the rivers overflow their banks and return to them, the leaves turned first green, then yellow, and my father sits in the shade of blossoming plum trees, then takes refuge under the eaves of a house as flashes of lightning illuminate the evening landscape and thunder reverberates through the ravines.

It is summer, the sun is blazing, and our surveyors (he has a new partner named Dragovi?) stop at a house (street and number noted) at noon, knock on the door, ask for water. A girl comes out and gives them a pitcher of ice-cold water, as in a folk tale. That girl – as you may have guessed – will become my mother.

I won’t try to recount it all from memory, everything, the way it is recorded and depicted there – the date and manner of the betrothal, the traditional wedding where money is no object, the range of picturesque folkways that were part of that life: it would all seem insufficient, fragmentary, compared with the original. Still, I can’t help mentioning that the text gives a list of the witnesses and guests, the name of the priest who officiated, the toasts and songs, the gifts and givers, the food and drink. Next, chronologically, comes a period of five months, between November and May, when the newlyweds settled in Belgrade; the Encyclopedia includes the floor plan and furniture arrangement, the price of the stove, bed, and wardrobe, as well as certain intimate details that in such instances are always so alike and always so different. After all – and this is what I consider the compilers’ central message – nothing in the history of mankind is ever repeated, things that at first glance seem the same are scarcely even similar; each individual is a star unto himself, everything happens always and never, all things repeat themselves endlessly and unrepeatably. (This is why the authors of the majestic monument to diversity that is The Encyclopedia of the Dead insist on individuality; this is why every human being is sacred to them.)

Were it not for the compilers’ obsession with the idea of the uniqueness of every human being and the singularity of every event, what would be the point of providing the names of the priest and the registrar, a description of the wedding dress, or the name of Gledi?, a village outside Kraljevo, along with all those details that connect man and place? For now we come to my father’s arrival ‘in the field,’ his stay from May to November – bandit season again – in various villages. We find the name of Jovan Radojkovi? (at whose inn, in the evenings, the surveyors drink chilled wine on credit) and of a child, Svetozar, who became my father’s godson at the request of a certain Stevan Janji?, and of a Dr Levstik, a Slovene exile, who prescribed medication for my father’s gastritis, and of a girl named Radmila-Rada Mavreva, with whom he had a roll in the hay in a stable somewhere.

As for my father’s military service, the book traces the marches he took with the Fifth Infantry stationed in Maribor, and specifies the names and ranks of the officers and N.C.O.s and the names of the men in his barracks, the quality of the food in the mess, a knee injury sustained on a night march, a reprimand received for losing a glove, the name of the café at which he celebrated his transfer to Požarevac.

At first glance it may seem quite the same as any military service, any transfer, but from the standpoint of the Encyclopedia both Požarevac and my father’s seven months in the barracks there were unique: never again, never, would a certain D.M., surveyor, in the autumn of 1935, draw maps near the stove of the Požarevac barracks and think of how, two or three months before, on a night march, he had caught a glimpse of the sea.

The sea he glimpsed for the first time at twenty-five, from the slopes of Velebit mountain on April 28, 1935, would remain within him – a revelation, a dream sustained for some forty years with undiminished intensity, a secret, a vision never put into words. After all those years he was not quite sure himself whether what he had seen was the open sea or merely the horizon, and the only true sea for him remained the aquamarine of maps, where depths are designated by a darker shade of blue, shallows by a lighter shade.

That, I think, was why for years he refused to go away on holiday, even at a time when union organizations and tourist agencies sent people flocking to seaside resorts. His opposition betrayed an odd anxiety, a fear of being disillusioned, as if a close encounter with the sea might destroy the distant vision that had dazzled him on April 28, 1935, when for the first time in his life he glimpsed, from afar, at daybreak, the glorious blue of the Adriatic.

All the excuses he invented to postpone that encounter with the sea were somehow unconvincing: he didn’t want to spend his summers like a vulgar tourist, he couldn’t spare the money (which was not far from the truth), he had a low tolerance for the sun (though he had spent his life in the most blistering heat), and would we please leave him in peace, he did very well in Belgrade behind closed blinds. His romance with the sea is elaborated in this chapter of The Encyclopedia of the Dead in great detail, from that first lyrical sighting, in 1935, to the actual encounter, face to face, some forty years later.

It took place – his first true encounter with the sea – in 1975, when at last, after pestering by the whole family, he agreed to go to Rovinj with my mother and stay at the house of some friends who were away for the summer.

He came back early, dissatisfied with the climate, dissatisfied with the restaurant service, dissatisfied with the television programs, dissatisfied the crowds, the polluted water, the jellyfish, the prices and general ‘highway robbery.’ Of the sea itself, apart from complaints about pollution (‘The tourists use it as a public toilet’) and jellyfish (‘They’re attracted by human stench, like lice’), he said nothing, not a word. He dismissed it with a wave of the hand. Only now do I realize what he meant: his age-old dream of the Adriatic, that distant vision, was finer and keener, purer and stronger than the filthy water where fat men paddled about with oil-slathered women, ‘black as pitch’.

That was the last time he went to the seaside for his summer holiday. Now I know that something died in him then, like a dear friend – a distant dream, a distant illusion (if it was an illusion) that he had borne within him for forty years.

As you can see, I’ve just made a forty-year leap forward in his biography, but chronologically speaking we are still back in 1937, 1938, by which time D.M. had two daughters, myself and my sister (the son was yet to come), conceived in the depths of the Serbian hinterland, villages like Petrovac-on-the-Mlava or Despotovac, Stepojevac, Bukovac, ?uprija, Jelašica, Matejevica, ?e?ina, Vlasina, Knjaževac, or Podvis. Draw a map of the region in your mind, enlarging every one of the dots on the map or military chart (1:50,000) to their actual dimensions; mark the streets and houses he lived in; then walk into an courtyard, a house; sketch the layout of the rooms; prepare an inventory of the furniture and the orchard; and don’t forget the names of the flowers growing in the garden behind the house or the news in the papers he reads, news of the Ribbentrop– Molotov Pact, of the flight of the Yugoslav royal government, of the prices of lard and coal, of the feats of the flying ace Aleksi?… That is how the master encyclopedists go about it.

As I’ve said before, each event connected with his personal destiny, every bombardment of Belgrade, every advance of German troops to the east and their every retreat, is considered from his point of view and in accordance with how it affects his life. There is mention of a Palmoti?eva Street house, with all the essentials of the building and its inhabitants noted, because it was in the cellar of that house that he – and all of us – sat out the bombing of Belgrade; by the same token, there is a description of the country house in Stepojevac (name of owner, layout, etc., included) where Father sheltered us for the rest of the war, as well as the prices of bread, meat, lard, poultry, and brandy. You will find my father’s talk with the Knjaževac chief of police and a document, dated 1942, relieving him of his duties, and if you read carefully you will see him gathering leaves in the Botanical Gardens or along Palmoti?eva Street, pressing them and pasting them into his daughter’s herbarium, writing out ‘Dandelion (Taraxacum officinale)’ or ‘Linden (Tilia)’ in the calligraphic hand he used when entering ‘Adriatic Sea’ or ‘Vlasina’ on maps.

The vast river of his life, this family novel, branches off into many tributaries, and side by side with the account of his stint in the sugar refinery in 1943–44 runs a kind of digest or chronicle of the fate of my mother and of us, his children – whole volumes condensed into a few cogent paragraphs. Thus, his early rising is linked to my mother’s (she is off to one village or another to barter an old wall clock, part of her dowry, for a hen or a piece of bacon) and to our, the children’s, departure for school. This morning ritual (the strains of ‘Lilli Marlene’ in the background come from a radio somewhere in the neighborhood) is meant to convey the family atmosphere in the sacked surveyor’s home during the years of occupation (meager breakfasts of chicory and zwieback) and to give an idea of the ‘fashions’ of the time, when people wore earmuffs, wooden-soled shoes, and army-blanket overcoats.

The fact that, while working at the Miliši? Refinery as a day laborer my father brought home molasses under his coat, at great risk, has the same significance for The Encyclopedia of the Dead as the raid on the eye clinic in our immediate vicinity or the exploits of my Uncle Cveja Karakaševi?, a native of Ruma, who filched what he could from the German officers’ club at 7 French Street, where he worked as a ‘supplier.’ The curious circumstance, also Cveja Karakaševi?’s doing, that several times during the German occupation we dined on fattened carp (which would spend the night in the large enamel tub in our bathroom) and washed it down with French champagne from the same officers’ club, the ‘Drei Husaren’, did not, of course, escape the attention of the Encyclopedia’s compilers. By the same token, and in keeping with the logic of their program (that there is nothing insignificant in a human life, no hierarchy of events), they entered all our childhood illnesses – mumps, tonsillitis, whooping cough, rashes – as well as a bout of lice and my father’s lung trouble (their diagnosis tallies with Dr Djurovi?’s: emphysema, due to heavy smoking). But you will also find a bulletin on the Bajlonova Marketplace notice board with a list of executed hostages that includes close friends and acquaintances of my father’s; the names of patriots whose bodies swung from telegraph poles on Terazije, in the very center of Belgrade; the words of a German officer demanding to see his Ausweis at the station restaurant in Niš; the description of a Chetnik wedding in Vlasotinci, with rifles going off all through the night.

The Belgrade street battles in October 1944 are described from his point of view and from the perspective of Palmoti?eva Street: the artillery rolling by, a dead horse lying on the corner. The deafening roar of the caterpillar treads momentarily drowns out the interrogation of a Volksdeutscher named Franjo Hermann, whose supplications pass easily through the thin wall of a neighboring building where an OZNA security officer metes out the people’s justice and revenge. The burst of machine-gun fire in the courtyard next door reverberating harshly in the abrupt silence that follows the passing of a Soviet tank, a splash of blood on the wall that my father would see from the bathroom window, and the corpse of the unfortunate Hermann, in fetal position – they are all recorded in The Encyclopedia of the Dead, accompanied by the commentary of a hidden observer.

For The Encyclopedia of the Dead, history is the sum of human destinies, the totality of ephemeral happenings. That is why it records every action, every thought, every creative breath, every spot height in the survey, every shovelful of mud, every motion that cleared a brick from the ruins.

The post my father held after the war in the Land Office, which measured and registered the cadastre again from scratch, as happens after great historic upheavals, is accorded the detailed treatment it demands: quality of terrain, title deeds, new names for former German villages and new names for freshly colonized settlements. Nothing, as I say, is missing: the clay caking the rubber boots bought from a drunken soldier; a bad case of diarrhea caused by stuffed cabbage that had spoiled, at a bistro in Indjija; an affair with a Bosnian woman, a waitress, in Sombor; a bicycle accident near ?antavir and the bruised elbow that came of it; a night ride in a cattle car on the Senta– Subotica line; the purchase of a plump goose to take home for a New Year’s celebration; a spree with some Russian engineers in Banovi?i; a molar pulled, outdoors, near a well sweep; a rally at which he got soaked to the bone; the death of Steva Bogdanov, surveyor, who stepped on a tripwire mine at the edge of some woods and with whom he had played billiards the previous day; the return of Aleksi?, the stunt pilot, to the sky above Kalemegdan; serious alcohol poisoning in the village of Mrakodol; a ride in a crowded truck over the muddy road between Zrenjanin and Elemir; a dispute with a new boss, a man named Šuput, somewhere around Jaša Tomi?; the purchase of a ton of Banovi?i coal after queuing from four in the morning at the Danube railway station, in –15°, the purchase of a marble-top table at the flea market; a breakfast of ‘American’ cheese and powdered milk in the ‘Bosnia’ workers’ canteen; his father’s illness and death; the visit to the cemetery on the next Day of the Dead; a bitter quarrel with one Petar Jankovi? and one Sava Dragovi?, who advocated the Stalinist line; their arguments and his counterarguments (which ended with my father’s muffled ‘F—— Stalin!’).

Thus, the Encyclopedia immerses us in the atmosphere of the times, in its political realities.

The fear in which my father lived and the silence I myself remember – a heavy, oppressive silence – are construed by the book as infectious: one day he learned that that same Petar Jankovi?, a colleague and distant relative, was reporting to the State Security Building every morning at six for a talk (as a result of having been denounced by the aforementioned Dragovi?), and would arrive at the office late, his face black and swollen from blows and lack of sleep; and on it went, every morning at sunrise for six months or so, until Petar recalled the names of some other people who shared his delusions about the Russians and listened to Radio Moscow.

Passing over the side streams – quarrels, reconciliations, spa visits (a whole family chronicle in miniature) – passing over the things that my father would bring home and that the Encyclopedia itemises with homely solicitude, I will mention only an Orion radio set, the Collected Works of Maxim Gorky, an oleander in an enormous wooden box, and a barrel for pickling cabbage, as I find them more important than the other trivia catalogued in the book, down to the lined fabric I bought for him with my first wages and the bottle of Martell cognac he drained in the course of a single evening.

But The Encyclopedia of the Dead is concerned with more than material goods: it is not a double-entry ledger or a catalogue, nor is it a list of names like the Book of Kings or Genesis, though it is that as well; it deals with spiritual matters, people’s views of the world, of God, their doubts about the existence of the hereafter, their moral standards. Yet what is most amazing is its unique fusion of external and internal: it lays great stress on concrete facts, then creates a logical bond between the facts and man, or what we call man’s soul. And whereas the compilers make no comment on certain objective particulars – the conversion of tile stoves to electricity (1969), the appearance of a bald spot on my father’s head or his abrupt slide into gluttony, the refreshing elderberry drink he made from a recipe in Politika – they do interpret his sudden passion for stamp collecting in old age as compensation for his prolonged immobility. They have no doubt that peering at stamps through a magnifying glass represents, in part, the repressed fantasies so often lurking in staid, stable people with little proclivity for travel and adventure – the same frustrated petit-bourgeois romanticism that determined Father’s attitude toward the sea. (He replaced journeys and distant horizons with more convenient, imaginary wanderings, using his first grandson’s interest in the butterfly world of stamps as a pretext to keep from looking silly in other people’s eyes and in his own.)

This, as you can see, is an area of the spiritual landscape quite near to the river’s mouth, where friends’ and relatives’ funerals follow so closely on one another that every man – even one less inclined than my father to silent meditation – turns philosopher, insofar as philosophy is the contemplation of the meaning of human existence.

Dissatisfied with his life, rankled by the melancholy of old age that nothing can assuage, neither devoted children nor affectionate grandchildren nor the relative calm of everyday life, he started grumbling and getting drunk more often. When he drank, he burst into fits of anger quite unexpected in so mild a man with such a gentle smile. He would curse God, heaven, earth, the Russians, the Americans, the Germans, the government, and all those responsible for granting him such a miserable pension after he had slaved a lifetime, but most of all he cursed television, which filled his dreary evenings by bringing into his house – with an impudence verging on rudeness – the grand illusion of life.

The next day, himself again and mutely contrite, he would feed the goldfinch on the balcony, talk to it, whistle to it, lifting the cage high above his head as if brandishing a lantern in the murk of human tribulations. Or, taking off his pajamas at last, he would dress with a groan, put on his hat, and walk to Takovska Street, to the main post office, and buy stamps. Then, in the afternoon, sipping coffee while perched on the edge of an armchair, his grandson at his side, he would arrange the stamps in albums with the help of delicate tweezers.

Occasionally, in moments of despair, he regretted his past life, wailing as old people do: how God never granted him a proper schooling, how he would go to his grave ignorant, never tasting the finer things in life, never seeing the seas and cities of the world, never knowing the things that rich and educated people know.

And his journey to Trieste ended as ingloriously as his trip to Rovinj.

It was, in his sixty-sixth year, his first border crossing, and it, too, took a good deal of pushing and pulling. Nor were his arguments any easier to counter: an intelligent person did not go to a country whose language he did not know; he had no intention of making a fortune on the black market; he had no craving for macaroni or Chianti and would much prefer an everyday Mostar žilavka or a Prokuplje white, at home.

Nevertheless we persuaded him to apply for a passport.

He came back ill-humored, ill-tempered, crushed: he had had a falling out with Mother (the shoes she had bought him leaked and pinched), and the police had searched them and ransacked their luggage on the return trip to Belgrade.

Need I mention that the visit to Trieste – the downpour, with Father under the awning of the Hotel Adriatico without an umbrella, lost, like a bedraggled old dog, while Mother rummaged through shoes by the Ponte Rosso – receives in the Encyclopedia the coverage an episode of the sort deserves? His only consolation during the whole wretched excursion came from buying some flower seeds outside a shop there. (Fortunately, the packets had pictures of the flowers on them and clearly marked prices, so he did not need to haggle with the saleswoman.) By then D.M. had become quite ‘involved in cultivating decorative flowers,’ as the Encyclopedia puts it. (It continues with an inventory of the flowers in pots and window boxes on the front and rear balconies.)

He had simultaneously begun to fill his time by painting floral patterns all over the house, a kind of floral contagion. This sudden explosion of artistic talent came as a surprise. Dissatisfied – as he was dissatisfied with everything – with the way a retired officer, an amateur housepainter, had whitewashed the bathroom (singing ‘The Partisans’ March’ all day long to pace his brushstrokes) leaving behind large, unevenly covered portions, my father rolled up his sleeves and set doggedly to work. Having failed to remove the dark spots on the wall, he decided to camouflage them with oil paint, following the outlines of the moisture stains. And thus the first flower – a gigantic bellflower or a lily, heaven only knows what it was – came into being.

We all praised him. The neighbors dropped in to view his handiwork. Even his favorite grandson expressed sincere admiration. That was how it all started. Next came the bathroom window, which he covered with tiny cornflower-blue posies, but he left them slanted and unfinished, so that the design, painted directly on the glass, gave the illusion of a windblown curtain.

From then on, he painted all day, unflaggingly, a cigarette dangling from his lips. (And in the silence we could hear the wheezing of his lungs, like bellows.) He painted flowers that bore little resemblance to real flowers, painted them all over old scratched trunks, china lampshades, cognac bottles, plain glass vases, Nescafé jars, and wooden cigar boxes. On the aquamarine background of a large soda-water siphon he painted the names of Belgrade cafés in the lettering he had once used for islands on maps: The Brioni, The Gulf of Kotor, The Seagull, The Sailor, The Daybreak, Café Serbia, The Vidin Gate, The Istanbul Gate, The Skadarlija, The Three Hats, The Two Deer, Under the Linden, Three Bunches of Grapes, The Šumatovac, The Seven Days, The March on the Drina, The Kalemegdan, The Kolarac, The Homeland, The Plowman, The Obrenovac, The Oplenac, The Town of Dušan, The River’s Mouth, The Smederevo, The Hunter’s Horn, The Question Mark, The Last Chance.

The curious fact that he died on his first grandson’s twelfth birthday did not escape the compilers’ attention. Nor did they fail to note his resistance to our naming his last grandson after him. We thought that we were indulging his vanity and that he would take it as a sign of special attention and favor, but all he did was grumble and I could see in his eyes a glimmer of the terror that would flash behind his glasses a year later when the certainty of the end suddenly dawned on him. The succession of the quick and the dead, the universal myth of the chain of generations, the vain solace man invents to make the thought of dying more acceptable – in that instant my father experienced them all as an insult; it was as though by the magical act of bestowing his name upon a newborn child, no matter how much his flesh and blood, we were ‘pushing him into the grave.’ I did not yet know that he had discovered a suspicious growth in the area of his groin and believed, or perhaps even knew for sure, that, like a tuber, a strange, poisonous plant was sprouting in his intestines.

One of the last chapters of the Encyclopedia details the funeral ceremony: the name of the priest who administered the last rites, a description of the wreaths, a list of the people who accompanied him from the chapel, the number of candles lit for his soul, the text of the obituary in Politika.

The oration delivered over the bier by Nikola Beševi?, a Land Office colleague of many years’ standing (‘Comrade Djuro served his fatherland with equal honor before the war, during the occupation, and after the war in the period of the revitalization and reconstruction of our ravaged and sorely afflicted country’), is given in full, because, despite certain exaggerations and platitudes, despite lapses in rhetoric, Beševi?’s oration over the body of his dead comrade and fellow countryman clearly exemplified something of the message and principles represented by the great Encyclopedia of the Dead (‘His memory shall live forever and ever. Praise and glory be unto him!’).

Well, that is more or less the end, where my notes stop. I shall not cite the sorry inventory of items he left behind: shirts, passport, documents, eyeglasses (the light of day glistening painfully in empty lenses just removed from their case) – in other words, the items passed on to my mother, at the hospital, the day after his death. It is all painstakingly set down in the Encyclopedia; not a single handkerchief is missing, not the Morava cigarettes or the issue of Ilustrovana Politika with a crossword puzzle partly completed in his hand.

Then come the names of the doctors, nurses, and visitors, the day and hour of the operation (when Dr Petrovi? cut him open and sewed him shut, realizing it was useless to operate: the sarcoma had spread to the vital organs). I haven’t the strength to describe the look he gave me as he said goodbye on the hospital stairs a day or two before the operation; it contained an entire lifetime and all the terror that comes of knowing death. Everything a living man can know of death.

So, frozen through and in tears, I managed in those few hours to look through all the pages in his entry. I had no idea of time. Had I spent an hour in the icy library, or was day breaking outside? As I say, I lost all track of time and place. I hastened to put down as much information as possible; I wanted some evidence, for my hours of despair, that my father’s life had not been in vain, that there were still people on earth who record and accord value to every life, every affliction, every human existence. (Meager consolation, but consolation nonetheless.)

Suddenly, somewhere in the final pages devoted to him, I noticed a flower, an unusual flower, that I first took for a vignette or the schematic drawing of a plant preserved in the world of the dead as an example of extinct flora. The caption, however, indicated that it was the basic floral pattern in my father’s drawings. My hands trembling, I began to copy it. More than anything it resembled a gigantic peeled and cloven orange, crisscrossed with fine red lines like capillaries. For a moment I was disappointed. I was familiar with all the drawings my father had done at leisure on walls, boards, bottles and boxes, and none was anything like this one. Yes, I said to myself, even they can make a mistake. And then, after copying the gigantic peeled orange into my notebook, I read the final paragraph and let out a scream. I awoke drenched in sweat. I immediately wrote down all of the dream I remembered. And this is what remains of it…

Do you know what was in the last paragraph? That D.M. took up painting at the time the first symptoms of cancer appeared. And that therefore his obsession with floral patterns coincided with the progress of the disease.

When I showed the drawing to Dr Petrovi?, he confirmed, with some surprise, that it looked exactly like the sarcoma in my father’s intestine. And that the efflorescence had doubtless gone on for years.