Though he was three years Miroslav’s junior, Mihajlo Danilo Danilovic — known to everyone simply as Miša or sometimes Miš Miš, or even beba džin, “the baby giant”—was already four centimeters taller than his older brother by the time he turned six. Whereas Miša spent all his time outdoors, shadowing their father in the fields, killing sparrows with his slingshot, playing football with boys twice his age, there were many days when Miroslav would not even leave his bedroom.
“Children are meant to move,” said Stoja, wise as always.
“His mind is moving,” Danilo replied, unconvincingly. Indeed, Miroslav was exceptionally bright — this much had been clear from the beginning, and more than one of his teachers had called him the most naturally gifted child they had ever seen — but he was also prone to bouts of melancholy, stubbornness, and obsessive behavior.
Instead of performing his farm chores, he would draw great maps of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) fighting off various invading hordes on the walls of his bedroom. At first, this practice was forbidden, but you could steer a horse away from water only so many times. Tired of rapping his knuckles, Danilo and Stoja eventually relented, and Miroslav began covering his bedroom with endless battlefield minutiae as he listened to old Partisan fight songs on his transistor. Every man, every gun, every trigger needed to be sketched, or else they wouldn’t exist and that side might lose the war because they were one soldier short. But just as soon as one soldier was added, the tides shifted, and another soldier had to be added to the other side. It was a never-ending task. A perpetual fractal of warfare. The hens would go hungry as Miroslav spent hours rendering the thousands of tiny soldiers, each with gun, trigger, backpack — stars on the hats of the JNA, squares on the hats of the invading foreigners.
No manner of beating could sway the child from his task, and there came a point at which Danilo found it was hopeless. He would be what he would be.
“Feed the chickens, would you, Miša?” Danilo sighed. “I don’t know what to do with your brother.” And Miša ran off without complaint, eager as ever to please the man he would one day become.
Soon the walls of Miroslav’s bedroom could no longer contain the war. He began to build armies of soldiers from screws and paper clips and bottle caps and bits of clay — thousands of them lining his desk and then his floor, arranged into elaborate formations, poised to attack and counterattack. Yet somehow, their static nature bothered him much more than the two-dimensional figures on the walls. Now that his men were rendered in three dimensions, he became all the more aware of their lifelessness. Simply moving them with his hands was both unsatisfying and inefficient: he was always conscious of his intervention, and he could move only a handful of men at a time. He stood at an impasse: how to control his men without implicating himself as the control?
His first tactic employed an old electric football game. When switched on, the vibrating metal pitch would cause his army of wary soldiers to tremble as if possessed by an evil spirit. They would chatter across the board, occasionally colliding with one another in a meager display of hand-to-hand combat. More often than not, however, the random shudderings from the electric game would result in the soldiers spinning in circles before collapsing and spasming in place, seemingly felled by their own volition. Miroslav could not stand such incoherence. He needed to be able to control his men, not watch them suffer the random consequences of electrical pulses. He shelved the game and searched for another way to gain complete command over his domain.
A solution came to him after watching a television program about a Volkswagen assembly plant in Sarajevo, in which cars were swung from station to station suspended on tracks. Inside his bedroom, Miroslav hung a series of coat hangers on four long rods that could slide back and forth using a system of pulleys. He then attached a tiny thread to each soldier and tied these threads to the rods above. In this way, he could manipulate the pulleys to draw the two armies into battle, and while he could move the soldiers only one company at a time, and while their battling was still limited to awkward, imprecise collisions, he could use his imagination to soften the clumsiness of his system and fill in the gaps of real warfare. When a tank blasted an artillery shell into the enemy ranks, he would release a string and a whole swath of soldiers would collapse to the ground, bloodied and wailing. Later, he would tug on the strings, and their souls, as one, would gently float to heaven. This was how he started to give life and death to the lifeless things around him. It was also where he came up against the essential dilemma of the puppeteer: that is, the governance of objects that have no minds to be governed.
From the moment Miša entered the world, he had idolized his brother, despite the vast chasm between their proclivities, outlooks, manners, bodies, and minds. In his eyes, his brother could do no wrong. “Miša would drink Miroslav’s bathwater,” as Danilo once put it. But such adoration was hardly mutual. Miroslav showed little patience for his brother’s clumsiness and lack of imagination. When Miša tried to join in one of his elaborate battlefield maneuvers, Miroslav would quickly become furious at how his brother was breaking the strict rules of engagement or letting the strings get tangled or moving too many men or too few. His hands were much too big for such delicate matters, and there was little room for error with a system as delicate as mass warfare.
“Get out of here, shithead!” Miroslav yelled after another entanglement had halted the battle. Miša, banished and inconsolable, would retreat to the safe space of the chicken coop.
A temporary truce was usually called between the brothers each Christmas. On Christmas Eve, it was custom for the eldest son to go with the father into the woods and cut down the badnjak, the oak tree branch that would serve as the Yule log. But Miroslav showed little interest in this tradition, and so it was Miša who eagerly climbed the tree, bow saw in hand, and felled the branch onto the snowy ground. He would wrap the branch in a blanket like a child and show it to his brother upon his return.
“It’s a good one, Miša,” Miroslav would say, knowing how much each and every word meant to his younger brother. “You can name him Otik.”
“Otik?” repeated Miša in wonder.
“If you wish hard enough, he’ll come alive,” said Miroslav.
“Okay,” said Miša, and off he would go to stare at the branch for hours.
Christmas Eve was also the time to bring out the vertep, the traditional puppet theater, which the boys of the town would use to tell the story of the nativity. Children would don paper crowns and fashion wooden swords for themselves, pretending they were the Persian kings on their way to see the Christ child. Predictably, most household vertep performances were rudimentary at best, with a few hand puppets utilized in haphazard fashion. Many kids simply used the occasion as an excuse to go around town and sword-fight with one another.
In contrast to those of his peers, Miroslav’s vertep was a fully automated electromechanical puppet theater with multiple hidden compartments, elaborate lighting and synthesized sound effects, and a loudspeaker from which he could perform the voice of God. His nativity productions soon became legendary in Višegrad, where he would perform several shows to a packed audience in the town square. Miša was his loyal if clumsy stagehand, though this relationship ended one Christmas Eve when Miša tripped and knocked over the entire stage during a matinee.