Bojan Bili

Our German Wall Clock

Yesterday while waiting at the station in Vrbas, my hometown, I saw a train that was

carrying Syrian and Afghan refugees towards Hungary. Like all other trains that pass
through this small place in the north of Serbia, this one also stopped for a few minutes

giving its exhausted passengers an opportunity to refill their plastic bottles with water
and buy some food from the station shop. If they stop in Vrbas, I thought, it means that

they have almost made it only around 50km are separating them from that promised
EU land which they so desperately desire, but which, however, does not seem to want
them they are still to encounter its much less appealing face, the one of racism and
exclusion

After the highly unusual commotion, as the refugees continued their journey towards

Subotica and then, hopefully, Budapest, I thought about how, seventy years ago my

grandmother and her sons, arrived in Vrbas also on a train.. I can picture her,

disciplined and serious as she was, wearing a traditional Montenegrin shirt and making
sure that her braids even during that at least ten day long odyssey are always in

order. She is sitting on the ground of an old coach and telling her three little boys who
just lost their father that as if she could know that for sure their destination is no
longer so far away a little bit of patience is still needed pain, exhaustion, hopes,
uncertainty, curiosity everything is clogging in the breasts soon they will be

arriving... Zelenika Mostar Sarajevo Bosanski Brod Slavonski Brod Vinkovci

Novi Sad Vrbas...

I often wonder about what these Montenegrin newcomers thought when, after such a
long trip, they saw their newly allocated houses which their German owners had been

forced to abandon how was the first night in that long and cold winter of 1945 when
they arrived in Vojvodina and slept for the first time in beds which did not belong to
them,

but

which

they

were

supposed

to

start

considering

their

own?

Some of my grandmothers fellow-travellers, especially the old ones, could not stand

immense Pannonic landscapes and sultry summers when air becomes heavy and total

stillness that can last for days brings to mind the images of cold mountainous springs.

Their longing was so strong that they decided to return. Others asked their loved ones

to take them, when the moment comes, on one final journey and bury them in the stony
soil of the homeland. But still, many including my grandmother remained, giving this

peaceful and slow province a spurt of fresh blood full of ambition, determination and

impetuosity that often accompany those who are left with little more than their instinct
to survive.

Lacking delicacy and bringing their deeply patriarchal customs with them, they were
not welcome in their new environment where people spoke with long vocals and where

social life had a rhythm very different from the one they were used to... even seventy
years later, the graft between the coarseness and the resilience of the mountaineers
(kolonisti/dooi) and the calmness of the locals (metani/mjetani) has not
become seamless (jebo te voz koji te dono) if that was and still is so difficult and
painful with people of the same language in which many of them more or less loudly

pronounced the promises of their socialist future, how will it then be for Syrians and
Afghans in Germany and Sweden?

***

In the very centre of the German house (vapska kua) assigned to my grandmother

by the new authorities, there was, like a hearth, an old wall clock, one of the last traces
of that vanishing layer of the palimpsest of life. Obviously there was no room for it in the

elementary luggage that one has to prepare before departures hastened by arms. So it

stayed with us, witnessing our joys and misfortunes and welcoming our guests always
with the implacable indifference of its tick tock.. tick tock.. tick tock Even if our house
is new, built on the same spot as the previous one, the old, but impeccably functional,
German clock is still in its centre. Behind a small glass door there is a key with which my

father has been winding it up for more than five decades. Sometimes when he gets

carried away by this weekly ritual and winds it up a bit too much, the clock stops and

stubbornly insists that its minute hand is turned only clockwise so that it can chime all
the hours that passed in the meantime.. As I observe its rare wrinkles, scratches that
removed its shiny black colour, I wonder who was doing all of this before my

grandmothers arrival.. Would the clock still prefer its former owners after so many
years? Has it got used to a new language? Has it made peace with the intruders that it

continued to serve with the loyalty and the precision of a German soldier?

Along with the clock, in our attic there is a bed that was also found in the old house Its
sturdy frame, covered with blankets and pillows, still resists, protected by my fathers
reluctance to throw it away.. Who was sleeping in it, suffered from tuberculosis, made

love, gave birth, died? Were those people really physically forced to leave, were they
wounded? I also wonder whether they were German enough there where they finally

settled and continued their lives... Were they a burden, refugees that were told to
forget (Hannah Arendt, We Refugees) as if that could ever be done? I imagine some of
them years later stopping for a moment by our/their house and telling their children

look, this is where we were born, where we ate, played, cried and loved Then they
proceed to one of the many overgrown cemeteries of Vrbas to look for those whom they
left behind.

I remember that twenty years ago our first neighbour ika uro (was he actually Georg

or Gyrgy?) would regularly receive postcards from Germany beautiful, bright and

remote places that were always full of nice buildings and smiling, happy people.. ika
uro would put the postcards over boiled water to remove stamps and give them to me
for my collection with her incredibly small and inaudible steps, his wife, tetka Marija,
would bring us her homemade cookies.. next to their house which is now empty and

dilapidated, there lives a family of local Vojvodina Ukrainians.. next to them Rusyns,

Croats, Montenegrins, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Germans, Hungarians, Romanians,

Bunjevci, okci and many others Hengl, Burbah (Burbach), Tama, Rot (Roth), Juruk,
Na (Nagy), Pehan (Pechn), Kunc (Kunz), Meser (Messer), Markovi, urovi,

Avramov, Ratkov, Bajac, Sadakov, Debeljaki, Pavi, Vinji, Bubanja, Koprivica, Bili...

We do not need to do much more than take a look at our own (grand)parents to realise
that we are all, in one way or the other, refugees, migrants, travellers, nomadsjust
humans caught in the perennial inevitability of moving