"He must go to art school," the teacher said to Milutin.
"Art school?"
"Art school. There is one on the coast, in Herceg Novi."
The old man looked at her as though she were speaking of America.
"He is gifted, this son of yours, extraordinary!" The teacher was insistent, fascinated by the boy's drawing ability. "Cetinje is not far," she looked Milutin straight in the eye, leaving him little room for second thoughts.
"Is it difficult? This art school?"
"Nothing heavier than a spoon will he ever lift in life, Milutin."
Descending on foot over Njeguši into the Bay of Kotor with his father, Jakov saw the sea for the first time, and an expanse the likes of which the Cuce highlands did not possess. Nor Cetinje.
He would later say that was the moment he first glimpsed the world.
"Look here, buddy — did you draw this?" he asked me, pointing to a pencil drawing on brown wrapping paper.
"I did. I looked and drew."
"Looked? Where did you look?"
"I have a book back home. There was a black-and-white photograph of some old woman, and another one beside it, of her hands. That's what I looked at." My voice was trembling.
Jakov continued to sift through the drawings I had brought for his review, scattered haphazardly across the large table. On another table in the atelier stood a printing press. Student works hung drying on a wire grid along the wall, clipped with paper fasteners. The smell of primer and paint mingled with the thick tobacco smoke of his Lovćen cigarettes. I stared unblinking at the works, awaiting his reaction. Some of them, even with only a first pass of colour, radiated talent.
The rustling of paper alternated with the crackling of his cigarette and my shallow breathing. From time to time, he would run his white, fleshy fingers across his greying moustache. I had never seen such a moustache before — shaved clean in the middle, curled to a point at each end, in the old-fashioned way.
"Listen…" he broke the silence in his rough, warm voice, exhaling a thick cloud of smoke. "…everything you've brought…" He paused while gathering the drawings into a pile, one on top of another at the centre of the table, pushing them toward me. "…I'd tell you you're better off giving up," he continued, looking at me, then at my parents. He set one sheet aside on the table, face down.
"But…!", he turned the drawing over and slid it toward me, "You are certain this is yours? Look… this is a serious matter. Better tell me now if it isn't."
"It is my drawing."
"This one could get you into the Academy."
He gazed piercingly, testing my trustworthiness, straight into my eyes, behind a cloud of tobacco smoke. Silver curly hair, nearly an afro — the strangest hairstyle I had ever seen — fell just above his ears; thick eyebrows almost joined together. A black leather jacket with epaulettes, sleeves rolled to the forearms like Judge Dredd, a grey turtleneck, wide front teeth, chestnut eyes, and nonchalantly unshaven.
"Without this drawing, everything else he's brought…" he addressed my parents, who were seated behind me, "…I would have advised him toward Law, Economics — there are options… Architecture would be excellent for him." In my mind, I could see myself just the day before, while I was packing, deliberating whether to remove that very drawing from the portfolio. It differed in both style and technique from everything else.
"Have him come next week to the Academy — his peers are preparing for the qualifying exam down in the basement. Let him try. We admit three in June, three in August. There's a young lad from Herceg Novi, been applying for seven years — never gave up. He got in last year. Get them in touch, so the lad can explain the process. Design, is it?" He turned to me.
I was looking straight through him, lost at seven years of trials...
"Design is good. You can make a decent living from it. When you come for the prep sessions down at the Municipality, find me — we'll give you the assignments."
Large-format print portfolios lay across the floor. Jakov was merciless when it came to the exhibition setup. He allowed no compromises when it came to his art. No frames — each work sandwiched between two sheets of glass, non-reflective, attached by four white screws into the wall: Each artwork set at a precisely determined position and height. The prints had to be immersed in the whiteness of the wall, so that only the colours — the art alone with itself, and alone for itself — radiated free of the ephemeral logistics of gallery conventions.
The subjects were butterflies and The Lone Pine. Swarms of butterflies, then a tree. They followed one another by the numbering the artist had marked. His abstract organic forms were as archaic and authentic as the Altamira cave paintings, yet perfectly attuned to the era in which they were made.
One large yellow butterfly, drawn specifically for the wall between two windows facing the sea, toward a peninsula surrounded by sunlit blue and a boundless horizon. The butterfly and the windows became a triptych. The windows — a static frame within which an infinite dance of sea and sky, currents and clouds, light and darkness endlessly unfolded — and the yellow butterfly at the centre, a bridge across a million shades of blue.
Had it taken place today, the exhibition would have been on every corner of the internet. Back then, it was honoured by a handful of genuine art lovers who came to Herceg Novi for the occasion. For the butterflies, that was enough.
And for Jakov, too. His exhibition at the Sue Ryder Gallery would be remembered as his swan song — a hot-air balloon ascending toward the heavens, subtly, without the need for wild guesses, hard questions, or complex answers, a simple and graceful witnessing of the lightness of life in motion.
Apart from stone and sky, and two or three trees, there was little else in The Lone Pine. A handful of grey houses with roofs covered in stone slabs merged into the landscape. Beyond the poetry in the place's name, what struck one most was a miniature church set apart by the hue of its deep-red tile roof, a simple, slender wrought-iron cross atop its bell tower, and a fence of the same material. It jutted up at the highest peak among several similar limestone structures, beneath which brownish footpaths wound their way. The odd green dales, no larger than a car park, a few of them cultivated. Two or three sheep, a donkey. The heat radiated from the rocks, the haze softening the horizon, and gentle gusts of warm summer breeze came along every once in a while, just enough to ease one's breathing. The butterflies were tireless, alone and in clusters, strikingly red and yellow — an incident of colour in the stone desert of The Lone Pine.
Milutin stepped forward, a young man in his twenties, tall and thin, with striking eyebrows. Anyone who had seen Jakov even once could tell they were same kin.
"I will read you a poem by Rudyard Kipling that Jakov always carried with him, in his pocket."
It surprised me that I had not known this Renaissance detail about the great man and my professor. "Do we ever get to truly know someone…?" — the thought has stayed with me to this day.
He pulled out a yellowed scroll, no larger than a cigarette, and unrolled it like a parchment. In a voice as steady as though he had spoken before audiences a thousand times, he recited the timeless verses.
"…If you can love and not make love your master;
If you can be strong, and yet remain gentle…"
He finished reading the poem by the great author with a gentle tremor in his voice that faded back into his deep baritone. A slight notice of sorrow swallowed in a blink. He thanked everyone who had come — from Cetinje, from Belgrade, from Herceg Novi — three places that had been his father's path, and three places his father had changed forever.
Four close relatives stepped forward, took the ropes in hand, and lowered the coffin into the grave.
We set off toward the car park, a procession in silence. A single yellow butterfly circled around us along the way.
"We know each other," I thought. "And I got to know The Lone Pine now…" I said to the butterfly aloud.
A footpath of red earth, cracked from drought, belonged more to Saharan Africa than to the Adriatic coast. Golden blades of field grass, knee-high, stretched out on either side across meadows bordered by grey stone walls.
"This is where I used to play as a kid," I was showing my three-year-old daughter the surroundings as we strolled through the olive groves of the Luštica peninsula.
"Look, Daddy, that crooked tree!" She pointed to an almond tree that had grown horizontally from the ground, right along the wall.
"That is my favourite tree in the whole wide world. Want to know why?"
She looked at me curiously with her large, almond-shaped eyes.
"Because its trunk grows so low, see, just above and parallel to the ground, while the branches reach high up into the sky. When we were little, that was where we played the most, because we could easily climb up."
"I want to, too!" she squealed with delight. I lifted her onto the tree, which resembled a wide bridge between the ground and the lowest branches. She clapped her hands, thrilled to be alone in a tree yet safe because it was so close to the ground. She hopped back and forth without fear.
"That's where we used to pick and eat almonds — crack them open with stones, five or six children at a time, all at once," I continued, as she scrambled up a branch into the heights. "Do you know what menduli are?"
"Mm-mm," she shook her head.
"Almonds. In the Bay of Kotor, we say menduo."
"Aha."
"Look, Daddy, so many butterflies!" she exclaimed, enchanted.
I had not been paying attention to our surroundings — paying close attention to her dancing in the tree.
"Look at that… boy, there really are so many, yellow ones… Come on, let's keep going." I picked her up and seated her on my shoulders.
We continued down the footpath toward an old stone house with a rusted iron gate in front. We kept talking about why the houses are made of stone and are so old, who had lived there before us, and whether everyone had their own crooked tree where they played as children.
"They do…" I said. "Everyone has their own Lone Pine."
In the devastating earthquake that struck the Bay of Kotor in 1979, the year I was born, the Sue Ryder Foundation assisted several institutions and restored an unknown number of buildings. It was founded by Margaret Susan Cheshire, a member of British special operations during the Second World War. Her husband, the pilot Leonard Cheshire, had witnessed the nuclear destruction of Nagasaki and founded a charity for persons with disabilities.
The building in the old town that today houses the gallery was named Sue Ryder in honour of Margaret's foundation and the support it provided to the Bay.
Beside the entrance to the gallery stands a printing press over a century old, above which a single yellow butterfly traces its path forever.
To Jakov Đuričić, my lighthouse and forever mentor.