youngest child—a position Luka occupied for only three years, and from which he was demoted following the birth of the family’s first and only daughter. There were five boys before him, the oldest ten years his senior, and while he watched them file, one by one, into the rituals of manhood prescribed by Korcul’s own upbringing, Luka found himself clinging to the foundations of his mother’s life, the stories of her girlhood travels, her insistence on education, on the importance of history, the sanctity of the written word.
So Luka grew up with the feeling of a world that was larger than the one he knew. As he became more and more aware of himself, it began to occur to him that his father—that feared, well-respected, but illiterate man— knew nothing of that greater world, and had done nothing to arrange for the futures of his children in the context of it. During the time he spent with his father, learning, with his brothers, the life of a butcher, he understood that his father’s knowledge extended to cuts of meat and types of blades, the warning signs that an animal was ill, the smell of meat gone bad, the right technique for skinning. For all his prosperity, Luka found Korcul’s ignorance ugly, his disinterest in a larger life, apart from battle trophies, profane, and came to abhor Korcul’s tendency to overlook cleaning his apron, or to eat bread with blood-rusted nail beds. While his brothers were pretending to bash one another over the head with makeshift cudgels, Luka busied himself reading history and literature.
For all his resistance, however, Luka could not avoid the rites that came with family. By the age of ten, he was butchering sheep, and when he turned fourteen, his father, following a tradition of many generations, gave him a knife for cutting bread and locked him into the barn with a young bull whose nose had been filled with pepper. Like his brothers before him, Luka was expected to subdue the bull and kill it with a single knife-thrust to the skull. Luka had spent most of his life dreading this ritual—the violence, the pointlessness of it—but he found himself hoping that, despite his unfortunately wiry frame and thin hands, he might have some unexpected success, some miraculous burst of strength that would enable him to just get it over with. But the bull came tearing out of the back of the stable and smeared Luka across the dirt in front of the butcher and his five other sons, and twenty or thirty villagers who had come to watch the show. Someone who witnessed the event told me that it was like watching a tank crumple a lamppost. (I have since surmised that this rich analogy could not have come about until at least a decade after the actual event, when the witness would have had occasion to see his first tank.) Luka had the bull by the top of the skull, his armpits braced against the boss of the horns. The bull—sensing, perhaps, that victory was imminent—dropped to its knees on top of Luka’s torso, pressed the boy into the ground and plowed the dirt with him, crashing into crates and troughs and hay bales until a physician who had come all the way from Gorchevo climbed into the barn and lodged an ax in the dome of the bull’s back. Luka had a concussion and three broken ribs. A few days later, his father also broke Luka’s left arm in a fit of rage.
After that, Luka bought an old gusla off a gypsy peddler, and went into the fields to shepherd for a few of the local families who needed hired hands. A lot of this is probably tainted by hindsight, but people say that he was too easy in his manner. His voice was too soft, his mind too eased by quiet evenings playing his new gusla. He was too eager to strip naked and bathe with other young men in the mountain lake above the pasture—although no one will ever accuse the other young men of his generation of being too eager to bathe with him. This may be because the young men of Luka’s generation are the fathers of the men telling these stories.
All this aside, Luka became renowned for sitting under the summer trees and composing love songs. I have heard, from more than one source, that Luka was unnaturally good at this, even though he never seemed to be in love himself, and even though his musical talent never quite caught up to his prowess as a lyricist. Though there are those who say that any man who heard Luka play the gusla, even in wordless melody, was immediately moved to tears. One spring—and this, like so much of what is said about someone in admiration, is probably a lie—a wolf came to hunt in the pasture, and Luka, instead of throwing rocks or calling for his father’s dog, subdued it with music.
When I think of Luka in his youth, I sometimes picture a thin, pale boy with large eyes and lips, the kind of boy you might see sitting with his feet bare and his arms around a lamb in a pastoral painting. It is easy to see him this way when you hear the villagers talk about his songs, about the gravity and maturity of his music. In this early image, he is a beloved son of Galina. Maybe it is easier for them to remember him as this mild boy instead of the enraged youth he must have been, the adolescent consumed with the smallness of his life, and then, later on, the man in the red apron who beat a deaf-mute bride.
This much is certain: Luka was angry enough, determined enough, good enough to leave Galina at sixteen and make his way to the river port of Sarobor in the hope of becoming a guslar.
At that time, the Sarobor guslars were a group of young men from all over the neighboring provinces, who had found one another through some small miracle, and who would converge nightly on the banks of the Grava to sing folk songs. Luka had first heard about them from his mother, who had described them as artists, philosophers, lovers of music, and for years Luka had been convincing himself to join them. Without a word of objection from his father—who had hardly uttered a word of any sort to him since the incident with the bull—Luka crossed three hundred miles on foot to reach them. He had a vision of men with serious faces sitting around a pier with their feet in the bright water below, singing about love and famine and the long, sad passage of their fathers’ fathers, who knew a lot, but not enough to cheat Death, that black-hearted villain who treats all men equally. It was, Luka believed, the only kind of life for him, the life that would certainly lead him farther, perhaps even to the City itself.
In his first week in Sarobor, while renting a thin-ceilinged room above a whorehouse on the eastern side of town, Luka learned that there was a strictly observed hierarchy to all musical proceedings on the river. The musicians did not assemble, as he had supposed, in a convivial atmosphere to share and trade songs; nor were they proper guslars. Instead of solitary men playing the one-stringed fiddle he had come to know and love, he found two considerably sized warring factions—one that favored the brass sound that had come out of the West, and one that retained the frantic string arrangements that harkened back to Ottoman times. Each group, often twenty strong, would assemble nightly on opposite sides of the river and begin to play; then, as the evening progressed, and revelers, drunk with perfume and the moist heat of the river, began to fill the street, each band would take a little bit of the bridge. Slowly, song by song, dance by dance, the musicians would advance along the wide cobbled arch, each band’s progress depending solely upon the size of its audience, the grace of those who had been moved to dance, the enthusiasm of the passersby who stopped to join in the chorus. The songs were not, as Luka had hoped, serious meditations on the fickle nature of love and the difficulties of life under the sultan; instead, they were drinking songs, songs of indulgent levity; songs like “There Goes Our Last Child,” and “Now That the Storm Has Passed (Should We Rebuild the Village?).”
As to the musicians themselves, they were more complicated than Luka had originally expected, a little more ragtag, disorganized, a little more disheveled and drunk than he had imagined. They were wanderers, mostly, and had a fast turnover rate because every six months or so someone would fall in love and get married, one would die of syphilis or tuberculosis, and at least one would be arrested for some minor offense and hanged in the town square as an example to the others.
As Luka became better acquainted with them—crowding in with the string section, night after night, his gusla silent in his hands except for the two or three times he picked up a few bars of some song—he came to know the regulars, the men who had lingered on the bridge for years. There was a fellow who played the goblet drum, a Turk with pomade-glossed hair who was known for being a sensation among rich young ladies. There was also a straw- haired kid whose name no one could ever get right, and whose tongue had been cut out as a result of some mysterious transgression, but who kept good time with a tambourine. On accordion: Grickalica Brki?, whose teeth, whenever a buxom woman stopped to hear his playing, would begin to chatter uncontrollably, and thus made for interesting accompaniment. The fiddler was a man known only as “the Monk.” Some say this was because he had left the Benedictine order because God’s calling for him was in music, not in silence. In reality, however, this
