As we round the curve, the driver pulls up short—at least, as short as you can when you’re only going five miles per hour in the first place. As the minibus shudders to a halt, we all shift in our seats to get a better view out of the windshield. There, up ahead on the single-lane “road,” mired in the clay mud and tilted to the right, toward the sheer edge of the cliff and the valley thousands of feet below, is a bread truck.
Our driver takes stock of the situation, shifts the bus into reverse, and begins backing down the side of the mountain, oblivious to the groans of his passengers. The bread truck follows, its driver preparing to take another run at the mud patch. Forty or fifty yards down, he believes that he has the distance to pick up enough speed to carry him through. He throws the truck into drive and guns the engine.
Our driver hits the gas, too, not waiting to see whether the bread truck will make it through the mud. We’re only about 15 yards behind when the truck driver cuts left again just as he hits the mud patch, and the bread truck’s wheels start spinning. Our driver swings to the right—this curve is the widest spot we’ve seen on the mountain road, almost one-and-a-half cars (but not buses or bread trucks) wide, and, for a moment, he seems to think that he might be able to pass the bread truck on the cliff side. Then he hits the brakes, thinking better of his plan.
Less than a kilometer down the road, we had picked up a young man in a slightly oversized, rumpled suit, carrying in each hand a two-liter bottle filled either with water or a clear distilled beverage—most likely the latter. He had thanked us profusely for offering him a ride, but he’s getting impatient now, leaning forward in the front seat, tapping his foot, and he finally says something to the driver, who opens the door to let him out. As he leaps from the bus, he shouts over his shoulder, and Srdja Trifkovic, laughing, translates for the rest of us: “Thank you, but I’m in a hurry.” The man scurries around the right side of the bread truck and disappears up the road.
It’s been a long day already. We had departed Budva, on the Adriatic coast of Montenegro, before seven A.M., and the more realistic of us hadn’t even tried to go to sleep before two. Budva’s annual carnivale had taken place the night before, and the stage for the live bands and, later, d.j.’s had been set up at the base of the old city’s medieval walls, right across from our hotel rooms. As if the sound system itself weren’t loud enough, the wall amplified the noise. After we had returned from an excellent seafood dinner and the others had gone up to their rooms, Tom Fleming, Jürgen Elsässer, and I sat on the hotel’s terrace, drinking cheap but excellent Montenegrin beer and watching crowds of young Serbs dance the night away to the rhythmic thump thump thump of turbofolk.
The bus ride might have been an opportunity to recapture some lost sleep, but, as we climbed up the long, winding road out of Budva back into the mountains of Montenegro, our vehicle began to make a rather strange noise, and any thoughts of rest were quickly banished. We stopped a few times while the driver circled the bus, opened the hood, and kicked the right front tire, before he decided that stopping in itself had lessened the noise, and we continued on our nervous way, passing a half-dozen closed service stations in Podgorica, about the time that the noise came back, louder than before.
It became clear, as he increased his speed on the other side of Podgorica, that our driver was now in his element. Away from the sea, we were hurtling through the heart of the Montenegrin mountains, traveling on a well-kept two-lane asphalt highway high on the edge of a sheer chasm, with a brilliant blue-green river at its bottom, hundreds of feet below. The bus sat up high enough that those of us on the chasm side could see, at every turn of the road, the burnt-out, rusted carcasses, usually hanging upside down on outcroppings of rock, of the cars that had failed to stay on the highway. With a few fingers of one hand on the wheel, the other pressed into service to make his point, our driver would look over his shoulder to answer Srdja’s questions just as we came up on each curve.
Then we flew through a dark, two-lane tunnel through the heart of the mountain, and, emerging on the other side, found ourselves on a rather beautifully engineered bridge, high above the valley below. Our driver slowed and pulled over to talk to a woman who, oddly, was walking across this bridge, miles from the nearest house that we’d seen. She pointed over at the side of the mountain on the opposite end of the bridge, then raised her arm up and to the right, her finger extended toward the sky. Following her gesture, we saw several cars crawling, quite literally, along the side of the mountain. “That,” said Srdja, “is where we have to go.“
And thus began our ten-kilometer trek. Fifty minutes later, having backed even farther down the path to a point where the bread truck could pull over and let us (just barely) pass, we have made our own run through the mud and entered the final stretch. Up ahead, at a hairpin curve, a number of trucks are parked, and our driver makes the turn and then backs down into an open spot. An hour up the mountain, and now we’re completing our pilgrimage on foot, walking the final hundred yards to the newly consecrated Serbian Orthodox monastery of Saint Mark, whose feast day is today, a week after Orthodox Easter.
We are met at the steps at the base of the monastery’s wall by two children around eight years old—one holding a tray of blessed bread and salt; the other, a tray of slivovitz. We take the bread, dip it in the salt, and follow it up with a bracing shot of the plum liquor before climbing the stairs, which lead us to the clearing in front of the newly constructed church. The liturgy has just ended, and Metropolitan Amphilochius, the spiritual leader of the Serbian Orthodox Church in Montenegro (and once a guest at Chronicles’ offices in Rockford, Illinois), is emerging from the church. The program to celebrate the consecration of the monastery, and to honor the family who funded its construction in memory of their son, is about to begin. Tom, his wife, Gail, Jürgen, Joe Bissett (the former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, at the time of the breakup), Srdja, and I take our seats in the front row with the metropolitan.
As children come around with more slivovitz and the sun bakes our skin in the thin, dry mountain air, 4,500 feet up, Srdja tells me what he knows: how the son had left Montenegro to go fight alongside his fellow Serbs, who were being ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in the Krajina region, now part of the newly formed state of Croatia. How he had died defending his countrymen, and his father had found comfort in Saint Mark. How Saint Mark had once appeared on this mountaintop, and the spot had long been revered as holy.
The father is speaking now, telling us of his decision to give 60 gold pieces to fund the construction of the church and monastery in honor of his son. The guslar, a storyteller who, in Serbian folk customs, plays a quasireligious role, plucks his one-stringed instrument and recites a litany that he composed for today—extolling the names and deeds of the ancestors of the young man, back to the first one to convert to Christianity, centuries ago. This boy, not yet a man (he was only 21), had yet, sings the guslar, the virtues of a man, as he proved in fighting and dying for his people and his Faith. He was a warrior and a Christian, from a long line of Christian warriors.
As each member of our little band of pilgrims is called up onto the stage to offer our words of celebration, time seems to melt away, and the sun stands still in the sky. To these people, so deeply steeped in history and inseparable from this rugged and beautiful land, this young man’s ancestors and he are still alive, as alive as the Christ in Whom they place their faith and His evangelist to whom they dedicate this spot. If Heaven is a Timeless Moment, then moments when we are caught up out of time are a small foretaste of eternal life. Intellectually, this is not a difficult concept, and Christians have always understood their liturgy to be one of those moments out of time, but now, suddenly, I see that all of Christian life strives not just for Heaven but for moments such as this. Thy Kingdom come—and right now, right here, it has.
America, we incessantly repeat, is a nation of immigrants, a grand experiment, a country that threw off the shackles of the past and started anew—and therein lies our problem. We have never stopped starting anew; we constantly change the parameters of our experiment; our migration never ceases long enough for us to put down roots, let alone throw up branches. We sever the ties between generations—sometimes unthinkingly, sometimes with a glee bordering on the demonic. Many of us do not know where our grandfathers came from, and some of us do not even know their names, much less the name of the man who first committed our family to Christ, in Whom time and the Timeless meet.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream
bears all her sons away.
They fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the op’ning day.
Yet here in this place, here at this moment, the stream quiets, time and the Timeless meet, the amnesia of modern life melts away, and the New World, humbled, learns from the Old.
Eternal memory. Eternal memory. Grant to your servant, O Lord, blessed repose and eternal memory.
First published in the July 2005 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.