Churchill

Raša Todosijević


If we assume there was no emperor Franz Joseph I, no two world wars and no arrivism of the communist leaders – the disease that transforms the powerful into shameless imitators of their dethroned predecessors – my friend Churchill would never have got that name.
As the ninth child in a proletarian family – father was a bootblack, mother, naturally, a housewife – poor thing by his birth acquired the attractive and intangible privilege that Josip Broz, the master of the Second Yugoslavia, be his godfather, to give him – as customs dictate – some valuable small gift and christen him as he wishes. For a child of the street bootblack such god fatherhood was not just a whim of willful fate, but also a sure passkey to the unknown landscapes of the future.
After a touching family celebration and a week of expectation – until the comrades in the Marshalcy arrange everything properly – the infant was finally granted the honor to be named; instead of a noble sign it got a cheap surrogate concocted out of bad taste, mockery and the surname of the British military commander, the statesman and the future Nobel Prize winner – sir Winston Churchill.
It will remain secret if this apparently senseless alchemical procedure, this transformation of an English surname into a homeless name, was influenced by the then reigning political circumstances, possibly by primaeval dialectics of the patrimonial concept of power, by holy egoism or by vindictive imitation of a long forgotten and mischievous goat, a Zagorje count, a great admirer of Franz Joseph.
Be it as it may, if in the sea of fatal causes and even more fatal consequences I have not recalled that small lively Gypsy, the Belgrade Churchill, a small grubby street urchin who would, after each frustrated thief’s undertaking, noisily, and not without certain effect, time and again appeal to the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces of Yugoslavia, and loudly threaten with that eminent godfatherhood, almost fatherhood, I really would not jump into murky waters of metaphysics nor would this pretentious story, truly written too late, in the twilight, exist at all.