Father would often take me to the cinema. He enjoyed watching films, so he used to take me with him. Only at the college I realised that I was different, that I was of the Yugoslav origin.

Of the Yugoslav or Serbo-Croatian origin – something like that.

Bota, my father, took great pride in it. Since my childhood days, he kept saying that he would once explain to me how I got the name Angelo.

So, he would take me to the cinema, and I remember one amazing film that we watched together in 2019.

The film was ‘Silent Gunpowder’, and we watched it at an unusual afternoon film projection, on the occasion of the Festival of European Film Culture, or something like that.

I was shocked… The film had a glaze of complete madness, although one could not say that we were not used to watching films full of violence.

But that film, that sort of violence, was totally different, something that instilled deeply rooted innate restlessness in my blood. In some mountains, people from two neighbouring villages were fighting their own world war, and speaking the language of my father.

They killed each other so brutally, shamelessly and wildly that I felt shivers run down my spine.

This is me, I thought while watching the film, and my father, sitting next to me, glowed with sweat, absorbing the film with his face partially twitched.

I had never seen my dad so frightened, so ashamed…

(I was later searching for the film on the Internet, the director was Bato Čengić and the music, full of lament and horrors of mourning, was composed by Goran Bregović.)

At that point, Father tried to explain to me who I actually was and where I was from.

‘You belong to these folks’, he said, ‘they are us’.

‘Who is us?’, I asked him.

‘Well, all, all of them are us, they keep killing each other’, he said and burst into tears.

I can’t remember I have ever seen Father cry.

‘Dad, calm down, please!’ I was hugging him in vain.

He started chaotically explaining to me how our blood was mixed up in the gunpowder juice, that it was easily flammable, and as solid as the black soil stamped upon.

‘All of them are yours, your grandmother Karmela’s and your relatives, and also your grandfather Milutin’s relatives, and mine, as well, all those slaughtered, tortured, beaten up, burnt people, all those crying women, all that lament, my son… There was a boy after whom you were named. He was good, he was my friend, we were inseparable during the war…

He, Angelo, my son, he was… he killed himself by a bomb, because he couldn’t bear all that any longer, all that hatred and blood. In our language his name and your name are spelt Anđelo, but the pronunciation is similar… You keep his memory, my son!”

‘That’s why we have wings, Dad, isn’t it?‘, I said smiling.

He looked at me.

He was crying and he said: ‘Yes, that is why both of you have wings!’

‘Do you know, my son,’ he added, wiping away a remaining tear, ‘that Rembrandt depicted The Night Watch as a daylight scene…’

Translated by Ana Stanović Obradović and Mirjana Savić-Obradović

From, Why Are You Sleeping on the Floor? Chapter 31 – “Angelo, Anđelo, ‘Silent Gunpowder’” by Darko Cvijetić

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