The neighborhood in which I grew up has been civilized since. The open market, the bursting watermelons, the stench of pickled cabbage and fish, the peasant women pissing into the sewer holes, erect, their legs straddling the iron grill innocently and savagely, and the yellowish foam, the remainder, sticking to the grill and a red pepper stuck in it for everyone to witness, and also the horses, the bustle… All gone. There is a school there today. Square, gray, and hygienic, of course. The Russian cemetery is still there, but the concrete block, the monument itself, commemorating the young men and boys who died fighting the Germans in a foreign capital, Belgrade, is also gone together with the awkward red letters, the names, and this once cozy place is now full of flowers and benches, where old men sometimes play chess and talk about their ailments. The musty old restaurant, where all the local celebrities played dominoes, cursed and sang, discussed politics, or whatever remained of politics, and where the peasants ate something or other out of newspapers by themselves in the corner, is also gone. The kids are gone, grown up, domesticated and stabilized. They still live there, enveloped in fat, sitting behind the steering wheels of small cars and fiddling with the switches. The big holes left after the German bombing of April 1941 have been filled, leveled, developed, and crowded with people who like to watch television and say politely: “Good morning.” Their kids play basketball, not soccer, in the school yard. The most glorious of all such holes, overgrown with shrubs and ignoble trees, is now a supermarket, full of shiny plastic balls and refrigerators. That is progress, and that is that. I am not bemoaning it, God forbid! Progress is good, as it makes people say, with true understanding: “I wonder why the elevator doesn’t work today?” But I remember this last jungle, this pre-supermarket heaven, where people sometimes made love in a hurry behind the tottering fences, where dogs chased each other, let alone the cunning cats, where kids masturbated solemnly and collectively, and where peasants defecated after a long day behind a stand overflowing with cucumbers, peppers, plums, and sour apples… All the palpable progress notwithstanding, I remember this jungle with delight that is perhaps regressive and unwarranted. I can thus still see a boy, the hero of this story, a boy just a couple of years the senior of the rest of us from the same tenement, a boy who enjoyed tormenting the younger ones and especially the squeamish girls, a boy with an almost brutal face and shaved skull, for his parents wanted him to have strong hair when he grew up, a boy who let us admire his ingenuity and bravery by publicly cutting the hind legs of pink rats, newborn and squirming, their eyes still shut tightly, that he found in the basement of our building among the piles of coal and sacks of moldy potatoes, a boy who demonstrated to us, the real kids, the art of masturbation and who taught us how effectively to compare our virilities among ourselves, a boy who used to live one story above myself and my family, and whose window still gapes into the same narrow courtyard where I had overheard or listened to quarrels, love affairs, illnesses, and the drunken uproar of the superintendent on Fridays and sometimes also on Saturdays. Yes, that boy is directly related to the place that was once upon a time a veritable jungle, although a benign and wonderful one.

This is how this indestructible connection was forged. We were climbing the trees there one day, the rickety and pale trees, a whole pack of us, when this boy, whose name I remember well but choose not to divulge, fell from his branch, head down, with his mouth open in an attempt to let out a screech, and landed in a voluminous turd abandoned there, underneath the tree, by an undoubtedly fat peasant who certainly did not suspect the ultimate consequences of his uncivilized behavior, and then, when this brutish boy got up, for the fall was short and not that bad in itself, and when he realized that his mouth was now full of something terrible, something unheard of, something subhuman, he moaned in utmost panic, afraid to move his wretched mouth and thus worsen his condition, and then, after an extremely short pause highlighted by outstretched and rigid arms and legs, extended as far from the defaced body as possible, he started to run toward the public faucet in the middle of the open market, where some people preferred to wash the fruit they had just purchased before eating it. The faucet was quite far away, and the boy ran with such incredible fear reflected in every muscle and in every jump, and he ran with such heroic energy, leaping and bounding over piles of bricks, over shrubs and fences, vaulting uphill like a tiger, soaring like an eagle, thrusting himself forward like a young and spirited God, his mouth opened wide and his jaws rigid, his moans muffled, until he disappeared from our sight into the open market. This run beyond time, this jungle, and this otherwise pathetic incident, are still the most appropriate images, or representations, of human energy, boundless and inexorable, that I can call upon when in need. The passion of that boy, whose family soon moved from our tenement, still surpasses anything I have ever seen in purity and unity of purpose.