Born Under an Evil Star

I, the servant of God, Marko son of Spiro, have always written something down whenever work let me be, or when the foul weather kept me from doing anything outdoors. I didn't write anything grand, just simple things—what was happening in the village and what I felt was worth recording. My kin wanted me to study for the priesthood, but there were no means for it; so, after four years of school by our church, I learned to read and write, to do sums, and to chant along with the church books. Truly, I saw no great schools, but that desire for books remained burning within me. For as long as I’ve known myself, I’ve been fussing over papers, writing for the villagers whatever they needed—a legal complaint for the court or a reply to someone in America.
In our house, there were three brothers and two sisters. My sisters died of the Spanish flu when they were still little. My eldest brother perished right there down the street, on the very threshold of our house, as they say. A horse struck him with its hoof squarely in the forehead. It was as if he’d been hit by a bullet; he died on the spot. We had some livestock, a few olives, two small gardens in front of the house, and a larger meadow behind it, and that is how we got by. My father and mother grew old and frail, and my older brother became firmly set on escaping this misery of ours. Little by little, his wish to go to America turned into a hardened resolve, and there was no force or way that could break his intent.
My brother Petar left before the Great War—I think five or six years prior—with Pero Filipov and Niko Jovov. First to Kotor, then to Trieste, and then by a great steamer (vapor) to America. We barely scraped together some meager savings to send Petar away. I had a bit of money tucked away from what the villagers gave me for writing letters and legal pleas. We sold some of the little livestock we had, and so we sent him off.
My brother Petar was inseparable from Pero son of Filip, more so than if they’d been born brothers. And so, the two of them went to Butte, Montana, to the mines, while the clever Niko Jovov stayed with them only a short while before turning to trade; he ended up in Fresno as a merchant. They said in the village that he had about fifty men under him, working as day‐laborers (argati) and bringing him money. "Money goes to money," the elders always said. Jovo, his father, knew how to handle a coin even though he was never rich.
Our Petar stayed in the mine with his friend, digging. Petar wrote a letter nearly a year after they had left, which I still keep today along with two others. But after that, few letters came from either Petar or Pero. Pero’s mother always begged me to write. And so, in the evenings by the oil lamp (uljarica), I would write while the poor woman wept, pleading in the letter for her son to come home and for the devil to take the money. And when I finished the work, Pero's mother would insist, bickering with me until I accepted a wheel of goat cheese and a quart of mulberry brandy she had brought; she felt it was too little to give for such an important task I had done for her.
Then the Great War began. My mother and Pero's mother died within a week of each other. A year later, my father passed away, and I was left a wretched orphan with no one in the world. What little misery we had before the war, the devil took it all for funerals and memorial feasts (karitade i parastose). What could be done—it had to be so. One must see off their dead with dignity, so that those who remain don't feel the lack of anything in their own mouths. Gather wild chicory, fennel, thistle, and wild garlic; season them with a scrap of bacon rind, some milk, a wheel of cheese, or cook a mash if there was any, and endure.
During those years, I didn't even have oil for my lamp. I would come home at dusk, lie down in the silence, and just be still. I thought about the village, the chores, and the stories I had no way to write down. I thought of all these things, hoping sleep would trick me in my hunger. But I was always pulled by a desire that one day I would record all these stories that crowded my mind.
I thought about the Great War that had just ended. Misery was everywhere among the people. On top of it all, some were crushed by the grief for the 'male heads' who vanished during the war. Some fell fighting in the Montenegrin army or had fled to join it from the Austro‐Hungarian ranks; others, forcibly mobilized by the Austro‐Hungarians, remained God knows where. Some ended up in Northern Italy, across Bosnia, or on the Austro‐Hungarian steamers that pulled them down into the sea. Those who refused to wear the Austro‐Hungarian uniform ended up before firing squads or crippled by rifle butts in prisons, never even seeing the start of the war.
No one came for me to join the army. God looked after me, for I was born alone. I was crippled in my right arm, and even more so in my right leg, which was shorter by nearly a hand‐span (peđa). My mother used to look for a girl for me when I was younger, thinking she might find some similar female companion to join us together, so that someone might remain after me. But I found her myself—or better to say, God joined two broken souls who yearned to live just like everyone else.
In the neighboring village lived a girl my age, beautiful in vain, for she was of ill luck and even worse fate. Just as she grew into a young woman, while chasing cows to stop them from entering someone else's garden, she fell; a cow's horn caught her just below the eye and ripped a gash more than five centimeters long. In vain did her mother apply ribwort plantain, seek out ointments, and rub her with St. John’s wort oil. Rub or not, she remained scarred, and the eye on that side drooped downward, as if she were cross‐eyed.
Misfortune never comes without company, or so it always seemed to me. Not a year had passed when, while reaping wheat with a sickle, a snake bit her on the left hand. Her mother, seeing this, acted quickly and used that same sickle to cut off the thumb of that hand. After two weeks of agony over the wound, it all settled, and she survived. I saw her after that at church for Christmas; we looked at each other then, and later at the threshing floor (guvno) during a wedding, always where other people were.
Perhaps we would have spoken if we could have been alone. But God ordained that we should meet. I had set off for the mill in the neighboring village, and she was driving her livestock. I stopped there with her, we talked, and agreed to meet at the top of a hill from which the sea can be seen. She drove her cattle right there, and I went from the mill to meet her. We sat and agreed where to meet again, and so it went. I cannot tell you her name.
We couldn't endure even a day without one another. We swore to each other that we would tell no one of our bond. She used to bring me paper from sacks, which I would cut and prepare at home to record something or to write a letter for someone. One day, while she was driving the livestock, I arrived; we began to talk, and through tears, she confided in me how, three years ago, our monk had dragged her into the bushes and violated her. My blood boiled, and I could feel my cheeks burning with rage. She wept and begged me not to tell anyone of her shame. There, she bound me by an oath and swore she would never belong to anyone but me.
At night, I would imagine her, beautiful even in her brokenness. Her breasts, full but not too large, and her skin that smelled of orange rind, rose oil, and the wormwood leaves (pelin) she tucked into her bodice to scent her for me. I imagined her hair as she unfastened it, and my hands brushing over her, while sleep eluded my eyes. At dawn, I would run as fast as I could to finish whatever chores I had, just so I could go to our hidden spot, always looking back to ensure no one saw me. It wasn't for my own sake, but so as not to bring further ruin upon her.
We had already agreed that if she conceived, we would tell the village and I would take her home. But fortune would not smile upon our happiness; either she could not conceive, or God had crippled me in that way too, so as not to father 'cloven' children (kljastu đecu). It must have been the latter, surely. I did not enter the church for some time, and the monk sent word to my kin asking why I was absent, for no one knew how to chant in church better than I. It pained me, and I would often walk along the ridge above the house just to see the church, to cross myself, and to chant while looking down as if I were inside.
"God is everywhere," I thought, "and He watches over His children."
He is with me everywhere. It is no sin not to go to the church, I told myself. May God forgive me, but sometimes when I did go to church, I caught myself looking at certain people from the village and asking:
"What are these people doing here?! How dare they foul this holy house!"
There, I thought most of Mitar, Jefto’s son—a foul excuse for a man. Even if I had tried to blacken him in my stories, I couldn't have made him as dark as he truly was. Always favored by the monk, he would speak with him in the churchyard after the service. I couldn't bear to watch it; as soon as the service ended, I would flee home to vanish as quickly as possible.
But you see how God ordains things—Mitar’s brother, Mirko, was a man of great character, a true bastadur, a man of mettle. It was a joy to encounter him; a day was fortunate just for seeing him. Mirko was nearly my age, and we got along well. He always brought me a pencil from his travels or fine papers bound like a book. I received books from him, even geographies. I can see them now. He always encouraged me to write.
"Write, Marko, God has gifted you with the pen—write!"
Mirko had completed high studies in Russia. His father was well‐to‐do, as had been the whole family for the last three generations. I do not exaggerate when I speak of him. Tall, with a mustache—a titan of a man (vila ljudska). But his schooling and work took him away from the village and into the wide world. His brother Mitar, compared to him, was like a footstool next to a proper chair. And even worse, he was human dross, a piece of filth (rđa ljudska i splačina). It was as if the same mother had not borne them. One, a human evil the likes of which only such a man can be; as my late mother used to say: "Born under an evil star."
Mirko, on the other hand, was now in Constantinople, now in Odessa. He traded greatly in hides (čapare), wool, and other goods. In one street in Constantinople, he owned several workshops for preparing hides and dyeing wool. Men who went to Stamboul for seasonal work (pečalba) said he helped many, finding them jobs and supporting them with money, leaving many of our folk in foreign lands indebted to his kindness. He spoke several languages. Of course, he had learned Russian in school, but he spoke Turkish fluently as well. He could write Ottoman Turkish (osmanlica) from right to left. Once, he showed me and wrote my name and surname in those characters. Never before had I seen such letters, nor would I have believed they were letters at all, had it been anyone but him.
He also spoke Armenian and Georgian. He told me of these two nations, then under the Russian Imperial crown, saying they were among the oldest Christians and describing what their churches were like—righteous peoples and great merchants to whom trade was second nature. Whenever he visited, he would tell me:
"Marko, I had to learn; work and trade drove me to it. People respect you more when you speak their tongue and know their customs. One must guard one's own, yet hold one's ground as well."
We would spend the entire night in conversation, and I knew many things about his life that he didn't even tell his brother. He would pour a little wine and talk. He told me of a distant city, Samarkand, where a people lived who were pressed by the great Russian Empire. My Mirko said he could never master their tongue, save for a few words he needed for work. He told me how those people loved horses and how skilled they were with them, and how much hides, wool, and other goods his men drove from there to the markets around the Dnieper and Dniester rivers. I saw where those rivers ran in the Russian geographies.
Odessa was everything to him. There he met his wife, Olesya. Of all the cities he spoke of, I carried the most beautiful image of Odessa because he spoke of it most often and most fondly. He knew how much his stories meant to me, and for me, that was his greatest gift. He knew of my poverty, and I know he would have helped me had I asked. But I did not want to put our friendship 'on the market.' Mirko was wise and a good friend; he knew what I thought and did not want to insult me in my destitution. Instead, he would sometimes bring a smoked ham (pršut) or a piece of kid or mutton.
"Come now, for the sake of your honor, dry this and prepare it—no one does it better than you—so that I may eat my fill of pršut and kastradina (dried mutton) with you," he would say.
He was married to a Russian woman, Olesya, who came from a wealthy house. She was tall, her hair wound in thick coils (kotolač). Her blue eyes were worth more than other women’s entire beings; when she looked at you, it was as if she were caressing you. One could see how much she loved Mirko. They were truly a match for one another. I saw his wife several times when they came to the village together. She was some five or six years younger than Mirko, and even then, in her mature years, she was a woman so striking that one could not look at her enough.
Mirko told me how his father‐in‐law had helped him greatly until he stood on his own feet and became a great merchant. He revered the man, not just for the aid, but because he had been like a parent and a counselor to him in that foreign land. I will tell you more of that later. As Mirko spoke, I nodded in agreement (pofermava), waiting for what he would tell me next. It seemed to me that, even crippled as I was, I would leave everything behind just to see it all with my own eyes—Stamboul, the Bosphorus, and the Golden Horn of which he never ceased to speak, and that Odessa of his, which I had grown to love through his stories. I wanted to see just how black that sea truly was, those distant markets, and the people who cherished their horses.
"Eeeh, my Marko!" he would say. "All this treasure I’ve toiled for, all the lands I’ve seen—I would cast it all beneath my feet for just one thing."
He grew quiet then, poured more wine into his glass, and began to speak of the child he had with his Olesya.
"Eeeh, how God took him from us, Marko! Our Pyotr—Peter, we called him, after my grandfather. That little soul (makanja) left us and bowed before God. My Olesya could never conceive again. We remained paupers despite all our wealth, left to haul this burden for as long as we live. I believe, Marko, that God gives exactly to the measure; if He errs and gives you too much in one place, He immediately takes something precious to even the scales."
He spoke of his brother reluctantly, only when he had to. He respected him as a brother, yet he could not believe that Mitar would do everything in his power against him. It was as if he were trying to convince himself it couldn't be true. I didn't want to speak against his brother in front of him. They were kin, I thought, and it wasn't my place. But I knew plenty about Mitar. When Mirko first left for Stamboul, Mitar rushed to the court in Kotor to transfer all their father's land into his own name. Our monk was one witness, and the other I shall not name—may God rest his soul. He lied to the judge, saying Mirko had renounced everything. Surely, he paid them off as well. They said in the village that he told the judge his brother was a Russian spy, while he himself was a faithful servant to the emperor (Ćesar). He would have been a servant to Franz Joseph or the Devil himself just to achieve his aim.
Mitar never liked me and would have harmed me if he could, as he did others in the village, but even crippled, I held my ground. I knew of some foul deeds he had done, so he kept his peace before me.
Jovo, son of Špiro, butchered his own mother with a brush hook (kosijer) because of Mitar's malice. Jovo was a hardworking man, but poor like most in the village. He wasn't very bright or wise. He was hot‐tempered; he would pluck a man's eyes out over the smallest matter or strike him with whatever he could reach without a second thought. He was the kind of man who acts first and thinks later. Mitar knew this well.
He wanted revenge on Jovo because, at a village gathering, Jovo had struck him squarely in the forehead for a lie Mitar had invented about Jovo's sister. It was late afternoon, a beautiful day, and that wretch of a man was walking along the path right by Jovo's property. Poor Jovo was gathering thorns and juniper branches to fence off a small garden so the goats wouldn't get in. Mitar bid him good day and, with a humble air, casually remarked that Jovo's mother had gone mad.
Jovo looked at him and said:
"Get out of my sight, you filth."
But Mitar continued, saying that Jovo's mother had rolled over all the wheat in the field below the house—wheat that was almost ready for harvest—ruining the entire plot. Jovo didn't say a word. He turned and ran in a blind rage straight to the field. When he saw the trampled and ruined wheat, the blood rushed to his head. He went straight home to the terrace. He found his mother washing clothes and snarled at her:
"What have you done, have you lost your mind?!"
The poor woman had no idea what was happening and said:
"Stop, son..."
but it was too late. Jovo swung the brush hook and, in that fit of madness, butchered her. When he realized what he had done, he fled to the sea. The village gathered. That wretch Mitar was the one calling out to them. I watched all of this as I was returning secretly from that hill by the sea, so no one would see where I was coming from. I knew exactly what was going to happen. If only I could have run to tell Jovo’s mother to flee. To Mitar, inventing and executing an evil deed was as easy as drinking a glass of brandy. It was he who had trampled and crushed all that wheat and blamed it on Jovo’s mother.
The gendarmes searched for Jovan for three days. The villagers said he had hidden in a cave by the sea. The gendarmes kept watch and caught him on the evening of the third day; he had come to eat figs in someone’s garden near the shore. They led him through the village, and he cried out for Mitar with a braying wail, like an ox being slaughtered. They say he could hardly walk in the chains. When they set out by boat to take him to Kotor, Jovo somehow broke free from the gendarmes and, bound as he was, threw himself into the sea and drowned. That is how Mitar took his revenge. A true human evil.
I skip from one story to another. I never finished the tale of our Petar and Pero. Those two remained in the mine like two galley slaves (sužnji). They had nothing but the strength and stature God gave them as a gift, for both were simple‐minded. They didn't go with Niko, Jovo’s son, though he urged them to. Much later, Niko told me about their city, Butte, Montana. It sat in a deep valley, pressed in on all sides by high mountains. A massive mine. Petar wrote to me in his letters about that mine and how hard they lived. They dug for copper ore—not coal, as I once thought.
There wasn't a nation on God’s green earth that didn't have someone there toiling for a crust of bread. The city grew around the mine: taverns, bathhouses, grand houses for the mine managers. And every house was made of wood. That seemed strange to me, and I kept asking Niko how they could have wooden houses despite all the wealth those Americans took from the mine. Niko laughed heartily:
"Well, Marko, my two houses, shops, and warehouses in Fresno are all made of wood too. There are forests there, Marko—not like ours, but vast as our sea. When you look up from the bottom, a cedar tree stands as if we were ants looking up at it. Why would we need stones when there is so much wood?" "It isn't easy to make a coin in America," he would tell me. "Blood‐suckers, Marko, blood‐suckers. You work, you earn a bit of misery, and then they take from you for this, and they take for that; you can never save enough to say you’ve truly earned something. They put everything before you at the market. Your eyes don't know where to look first. They even put women on the market," he said, his eyes dancing and a smile forming. "Red lanterns for embracing women for money—they are beyond counting. America stands before you like one grand, fine table (taulin), and everything is upon it. You can do anything with money, and you can do nothing if you haven't made it. And money is the God in America, in whom everyone believes, no matter their faith."
Niko told me he couldn't endure six months in that mine. He left for Fresno with an Irishman and somehow freed himself from that wretched miner’s life. He didn't succeed at first, but he married an American woman a bit older than himself. Her father worked on the railroad. Our Niko first worked for him in a large warehouse, while his wife kept a shop. They built a small house, but soon after, everything burned down in a great fire that consumed half the city.
"And how could it not, when they build houses of wood," I thought to myself.
Then they started over, building the house, raising three children, until they finally gained something. From our Petar, I have two more letters, and he never wrote another, nor did Pero. Petar’s last letter was sent with a photograph of him and his wife, an Italian woman who kept a small canteen for the miners. In the picture, she was a beautiful woman to behold. She looked like one of our own folks from the village. In that letter, he sent four five‐taler bills, which I still keep here within these writings of mine. There was no one of our people there at the time to tell where those two finally ended up. Some said many of our men went far north to search for gold in the cold of Alaska.
Mirko told me that that part of America used to be Russian, but they sold it for money. Niko, Jovo’s son, visited here three times, and he had nothing new to tell me about those two from our village. He never returned here again. The last time he came, he had forgotten much of our tongue; he would twist his mouth to say something, but you could only understand every third word, so much had he mixed our language with the American one. Who knows, perhaps he knew something but didn't want to say if it was some great misfortune. They never returned home again.
The darling of my heart fell ill. A fever took hold of her, and in ten days, the Devil carried her away. At first, I thought she was bitter toward me and that was why she didn't come, but later I learned from the village whispers that she was very sick and wouldn't survive. I went to her house to pay my respects. I intended to kiss her forehead as she lay on the bier (odar), but at the last moment, I changed my mind, for I would have revealed to everyone what had been between us. So, pretending to steady myself against the casket while limping, I placed a sprig of wormwood (pelin) from our secret place inside.
That evening, after the wake, I headed home alone, and halfway there, in the pitch black, I turned toward our spot where we used to love one another and stayed there until dawn; only then did I go home. I did not attend the funeral feast (karitad). The next day, I lit a candle for her in the church. Everything in me had burned out; I no longer had the will to live. For a long time after, I couldn't sleep, and when I did, I would dream of us running together to our place, my eyes fixed on her. She had no foul mark on her face, the finger her mother had cut off was back in its place, and she was all in white. I couldn't marvel at myself enough—I looked at my legs, and each was equal to the other. I ran like the finest lad in the village. Then I would wake up drenched in sweat and weep until sleep took me under its wing again.
In Russia, the Great War had sent many folk to the Devil. The Russian Empire dissolved. I couldn't believe such a thing could happen to such an empire, least of all that the Tsar himself and his entire family were executed. My mind was occupied with Mirko, my friend. How would he fare, and where would he go? Would he return here? The Great War ended, but Mirko was nowhere to be found. I wandered through the village, hoping for some news, but there was nothing.
A good half‐year passed, and then, there was Mirko. He arrived first in Dubrovnik by steamer from Trieste, and then at the Kotor waterfront. He came to his brother's, for he had nowhere else here, and the hearth called to him; he had yearned for it deeply. His brother