Petrijin Venac -1980- · Safe

“We’ll miss the festival in the next valley,” he moaned. “The authentic kolo dance. Without that footage, the film has no third act.”

“The sun is moving,” she said, sitting down beside him. Her back cracked like a rifle shot.

Saveta found Miloš sitting on a rock, head in his hands, the script scattered like dead leaves around him.

It was 1980. Tito’s picture hung in every schoolroom and tavern down in the valley, but up here, on the venac, the only portrait that mattered was the one in Saveta’s mind: the face of her husband, Petar, who had gone to Germany to work on the autobahns in 1968 and had never come back. Not because he died. Because, as his rare postcards said, the asphalt is smoother here . Petrijin venac -1980-

But she let them stay. The village had seven souls left: Saveta, two other widows (Jela and Kosana), a deaf shepherd named Mirko, and three children whose mothers had sent them up from the town for the summer, to learn "where food really comes from." The children hated it. They wanted to watch Little League on the new color TV at their grandmother’s apartment.

On the last night, the crew fixed the van using baling wire and a prayer. They built a bonfire. Jela got drunk and taught the camerawoman to curse in Turkish, words left over from the Ottomans. Kosana danced alone to no music, moving like a ghost remembering a body. And Saveta sat on her stoop, watching the fire catch in the young director’s eyes.

Saveta was sixty-three, though she looked eighty. Her hands were map of blue veins and broken knuckles. Her domain was a house of three rooms, a crumbling chicken coop, and a field of stones that, with enough prayer and sweat, begrudgingly produced a few dozen peppers and a sack of beans each year. “We’ll miss the festival in the next valley,”

She stood up. “You want a story? I’ll give you a story. But you have to help me pick the beans first.”

The crisis came on the third day. The van broke an axle on the rutted path. The crew was stranded. No way to call for help—the village phone, a heavy black rotary at the post office (which was also Kosana’s kitchen), had been disconnected for non-payment. Kosana hadn't noticed. She hadn't made a call since 1975, when she tried to order a new sieve from the catalog.

The film crew arrived in a cloud of white dust, a convoy of two rusty Fiats and a van. They had come from Belgrade to make a film about "the dying spirit of the old ways." The director, a young man with a beard and round glasses named Miloš, had read a book about Petrijin venac. He saw it as poetry. Saveta saw it as Tuesday. Her back cracked like a rifle shot

In the morning, they left. The van coughed down the mountain, and the dust settled slowly over the stones. Saveta stood at the gate. Jela came out, buttoning her coat against the wind.

Miloš approached her, his camera off. “What’s the real story, Saveta? Of this place?”