“You look as if you’ve just seen a ghost,” she said to him.
Her name was Stojanka Stevovic. She was from Trebinje. Her mother was a Catholic Croat, her father was a Communist Serb, and she spoke like a Montenegrin, but she called herself a Yugoslav. Danilo was smitten by the strength of her eyes. Every time she opened her mouth, a little vacuum of space opened up inside his chest.
“Don’t go with her,” his mother warned when it was clear he was going with her.
“Why?”
“She’s not a believer.”
“That’s not a good reason.”
“That’s the only reason. If you go with her, I will never speak to you again.”
He called his mother’s bluff and went with her. He had no choice. She had seen him see the ghost. And she went with him, despite her ideological resistance to becoming a farmer’s wife. Stoja had always maintained a vague dream of moving to Belgrade and becoming a movie star, smoking her long, thin cigarettes in the Danube clubs as men hung on her every word. She would later say she never made it to the city because she was scared, because she did not trust herself enough to be on-screen, but this was not true, for she trusted herself completely.
Danilo asked for her hand in marriage on the banks of the Drina. It was early evening — the time of day when light moved slowly, laterally, striking the earth with such acuity of angle that everything was forced to step back and glow in wonder. They had just been for a swim, and they lay on the rocks soaking up the last of the day’s heat, watching the bugs spiral across the surface of the water, their paths now and again igniting into silver pinpricks of luminescence. Nervous at the absence of words in his head, Danilo wiped some moisture from his lip and tried to say what he meant to say in the right way, but in doing so said it all wrong, which turned out to be the right way after all. Technically, she did not give an answer, but it was clear from her smile and the heat of her silence that she would be bound to him until her last breath.
There was just one problem with their union: when the priest at the local Orthodox church heard of Stoja’s questionable lineage, he refused to marry them. Danilo suspected Darinka’s influence in the matter, so to spite her, he married Stoja in a civil service, where the Lord’s name was mentioned only once, and then only because there was a clerical error in the document read by the flighty municipal clerk.
After a period of time just long enough to make them both nervous that such a thing might never be possible, Stoja became pregnant. When a baby boy emerged into the world — small, thin-boned, but otherwise healthy — Danilo Danilovic made a decision that startled even himself: the child would not be named Danilo. They would call him Miroslav, though Danilo insisted that this was not after Miroslav of Hum, creator of the illuminated book that had so transfixed him as a child, nor even — as everyone would later assume — for Miroslav Stevovic, Stoja’s father. The child was simply named Miroslav, for himself.
“Are you sure?” offered Stoja. “We don’t have to. I don’t even mind the name Danilo. I married you, after all.”
“Every tradition is meant to be broken,” said Danilo, though he was not sure — nor would he ever be sure — if such a thing was true.
Darinka, on the other hand, was so upset that she refused to attend the baptism and did not lay eyes on her grandchild for the first six months of his life.
When their second child came along, she again intervened.
“There’s still a chance for you to honor your father,” she said.
Danilo thought about this long and hard. He came back to his mother with an offering.
“His name will be Mihajlo Danilo. Danilo will be his second name.”
“What is a second name?” Darinka asked, furious. “And who is Mihajlo?”
“Mihajlo is my son.” Mihajlo, the name of no one, and this was exactly the point.
“You’re a wicked man, Danilo Danilovic. I didn’t know this about you until now. You spit on your father’s memory. On your grandfather’s memory. On all of their memories.”
“I hope you’ll find room to love them, Mama.”
She would not find room to love them, at least not in this life, for she died a week later from a massive heart attack that killed her while she was sitting on the toilet, her skirt at her ankles, the red bandanna with its secret cross still hanging from her throat. The thread of time had been cut.
2
On Miroslav’s fourteenth birthday, Miša gave his older brother a pair of trainers. For weeks, Miša had been bubbling with the excitement of giving this most perfect of gifts.
“He can run everywhere in them,” he said.
Danilo remained skeptical. He thought such a gift would be wasted on his eldest, with his staid body and his wandering mind, but in the end, he gave Miša the money and sent him to procure the shoes from the sparsely stocked sporting goods store in town. Miša came back proudly toting his prize, elaborately hiding and re-hiding the box beneath his bed so that his brother would not discover it prematurely.
When Miroslav tore through Miša’s ungainly wrapping job that evening, his eyes lit up as he touched the new trainers, gingerly, carefully, as one would touch a newborn animal. The trainers were a pale shade of blue, the color of shallow water in the early morning. Miša’s pronouncement proved more true than he could have ever known, for Miroslav had been stuck on a project for several months now: how to perfectly replicate the movement of a man in motion. He had been studying Eadweard Muybridge’s famous sequences, frame by frame, trying to build a mechanical automaton that could jog a dozen paces without intervention from its creator.
The problem was proving terrifically difficult. Apparently a team had achieved the feat in Tokyo, but then, this team was Japanese, with all the resources afforded the Japanese, and Miroslav was convinced they had cheated anyhow. He was hung up on just three engineering challenges: the balance of the torso, the airborne transition from one foot to the other, and the limited flexibility of the knee joint. As it turned out, these three problematic areas were also the essential components of the humanoid stride. Without them, you merely had a body that tumbled earthward again and again and again.
Fig. 2.3. Eadweard Muybridge, “Animal Locomotion. Plate 63” (1887)
From Røed-Larsen, P., Spesielle Partikler, p. 960
Yet Miša’s gift awakened something within him. The trainers made him realize the solution had been right in front of him all this time: he would become the automaton. He did not need to build a running man when he himself could be that man. All he needed to do was separate the him part of himself from his body and he would essentially have the perfect robot, one that could mimic nearly all human movement. He would be his own puppet.
Except that excising the him from himself — leaving only a body in motion — proved more difficult than designing any automaton. His lanky frame and obsession for repetition made him perfectly suited for cross-country running, but as he covered ever longer distances, he could never quite outrun himself. He went wherever his body went.