TO LIVE FOREVER

In one of the photographs, a woman is lying on a bed; you can see blankets and crumpled sheets and pillows; the lens of the person photographing her is above her. The woman is not looking at the lens or at the one taking the picture, but is calmly looking at something behind the lens, something aside, at the wall, the ceiling, or even farther away. I don’t know what the woman is looking at, I can’t know that, nor can I say I know the woman. I know her name, her name is Negrica Đorđević, I know some other things about her, but not so much; her son Stefan told me and wrote to me a little about her, it was he who took the picture back then. I don’t know much about Stefan, I don’t know much about Boško, either, I don’t know them well, I can say that, too. Now I know the woman they photographed, their mother, better than I know the two of them, that’s what I think now. And I can say it now. I’ve got to know her looking at their photographs. They followed her day after day, photographed her; they lived through that part of her life, and of their lives together. They were doing theirs, she was living hers. They shared all and it is all in their photographs. Negrica worked with Stefan and Boško and participated in photographing. Now I know her well as I can say and well as I think I know her, thanks to the two of them. In one recurring photograph, a work by Boško, that woman’s face is spreading out in water and, at the same time, water is spreading over her face. And her calm face is taking on a watery expression; it is a diluting face. And then the water takes on the expression of the woman’s face, and it is as if you can see that woman in the water. If you can see her in the water, then you can see her anywhere, I thought. I remember well this calm expression on her face; it is etched in my memory. I was looking at all these photographs for days and I remembered Ludwig Wittgenstein at one point, who wrote in his diary: “It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.ˮ I remembered this sentence, I saw that while looking at all these photographs, while looking at this lovely woman, Negrica, and thought: this woman let these two photograph her, and all the time the calm expression of this lovely woman in the photographs is saying it: “Here I am. That’s me.”

Srdjan Valjarevic
writer