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🦋 Dragi Sol

The story "Cartas para escribir una novela" is the central piece in Zupcic's book Dragi Sol -- all the stories are meditations on the narrator's relationship with his absent immigrant father, this story is likely the most successful. I think it is the heart of the work. Read the opening to get an idea of the voice he is developing and the complexity of narrative style he is achieving.

Postcards: towards a novel.

by Slavko Zupcic

The personal journal of Vojislav Didic
(Notes on the life of my father, Zlatica Didic;
his postcards and photos. His memory.)

for Leticia Z

"Huyo de mi semejante;
en todo semejante hay un doble."
-- Georges Braque

Yes -- I know what Anton said on his recent visit, I know all he said; but this will not be the day I regret having translated, having copied out fresh, written out on good white paper my father's old postcards. Quite the contrary: there is something to having saved these cards from oblivion, something enchanting, something heartening -- the marvel of seeing a new world, a new universe, just an ocean away from my own. Some -- the majority -- were written in Serbo-Croatian; others in a mix of English and French, a jargon my father picked up as he made his way through Europe during the Second World War; and a few letters, two or three, written in Spanish, a Spanish peppered liberally with Serbian idiom. Almost all were sent from my father to his brother Vinko Didic (Hrastovica, zp: Petrinja), and to his best friend in Yugoslavia, Stevo Valec (L.R. 168, Karlovac); also to Ankika Car in the United States (R.R.I. Box 118A, Hobart, Ind.), who was his first girlfriend, and Van Hecke Zimmerman (Junín 1689D, 1233 Buenos Aires), a German engineer my father had met on board the Fontainbleau -- not the legendary ship, one built in imitation of it which sailed the Atlantic Ocean for many years under an Argentine flag. The others are replies to his letters, from Vinko, Stevo, Ankiko and others my father wrote to occasionally.

Of his siblings, my uncles and aunt, Vinko was the only one he wrote to very frequently, and the only one he received letters from. He wrote a few times to Marko and to Nikolas. Never to Anna, or if he did those letters were among those that we destroyed, my sister and I, ten years ago. We know her name and where she lived (Leigh Creek, S.A., Australia), because these points are mentioned frequently in the letters, as are the corresponding data for Zlatko -- how he sings, how he pisses. And Zlatko, he never could have written to my father: dead men*, as dead as he has been for the past 40 years, do not write.

*Information in my father's letters suggests that Zlatko Didic died in 1944, fighting with partisan troops against a German convoy, drilled through by a bullet from the Nazi front.

Anton B., an old Yugoslavian diplomat in the service of the Italian government and lately a friend of our family, had no trouble confirming the date and locale of my uncle Zlatko Didic's demise. Where his skepticism lay was with the circumstances under which it took place. Indeed he appears to be taken with a complex theory which suggests that not even the address we have for my aunt Anna is accurate.

(I think "Correspondence" would actually be a better word to use in the title and header.)

posted evening of Friday, October 28th, 2011
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