Raša Todosijević, 1980
A traveler caught by nightfall in Belgrade, and curiosity that distracts him from the solitude of a hotel bed, may stop by the tavern “By the Mirror.” There, from the mouth of the Storyteller, secretly, whispered in exchange for a glass of red wine, he will hear the tale of the Unicorn. The story of the Unicorn, brief and clear, like a small marble relief, ranks among the most enigmatic tales of Belgrade.
According to one rather rarely told version of this allegory, dedicated to human fate, it is believed that the hills of Belgrade and the dense thickets along the riverbanks were something like a dreamed Arcadia and the homeland of this marvelously beautiful creature. The Unicorn is said to be unique—a being of one age, a figure without a counterpart, relative, or heir. Legend has it that the Unicorn resembles a white short-haired goat, fast, cunning, and fierce. Its gentle white head, with eyes the color of honey touched by the sun, is adorned with a long, menacingly sharp horn.
Its sudden appearances on the hilltops always foretell that something unexpected is about to happen. While a small bird in the forest darkness announces the coming day with its sweet song, the appearance of the Unicorn resembles a murky foreboding, maternal care, an inscrutable mark, an ornament of destiny, or the long echo of an invisible hunting horn sounding from across the river, warning that the unknown, inevitable event is near. Neither swift joy nor expected doom disturbs the souls of decent people as much as that solitary unicorn-like creature, the herald and embodiment of terrible uncertainty.
When rumors start to spread that the Unicorn has been spotted nearby, that it is here, and that its hidden eyes are watching us unblinkingly, it is a sure sign that Fate has sat long enough, that it is rising, stretching its legs, and beginning its dreadful dance.
Legend tells that no brave or skilled hunter, with dogs and weapons, has yet succeeded in capturing the Unicorn by force. But, as it often goes, what cannot be gained by strength, hunting skill, or honorable combat can be achieved through cunning.
Where the Unicorn most often appears, typically in neglected rose gardens at twilight, a fair maiden must be brought and left alone to wait. The Unicorn, a creature to which ancient peoples attributed both the appearance of pure gentleness and the cruel nature of a wounded beast, sensing the nearness of virginity, forgets its inherent caution, approaches the maiden, lays its head in her warm lap, and falls into a deep sleep. It is then up to the hunter to silently approach, receive confirmation of the trap’s success from the maiden’s eyes, and swiftly pierce the heart of the sleeping Unicorn.
II
Of the people who, through wisdom and imagination, managed to unravel part of the mystery of the Unicorn’s tale, it has been written that they knew how to transform the wild clearings of folk storytelling into harmonious gardens of poetry. However, given some minor, seemingly insignificant obscurities surrounding what the horn represents and what the maiden embodies, there are good reasons to suspect and claim that these venerable elders were not always impartial in their interpretations of this vividly woven tale. Depending on this or that gray beard’s will, in this or that situation, the Unicorn was either a dark shadow foretelling our ruin or an angelic voice announcing our salvation.
These old storytellers, the flickering reason of darkness at dawn, like all people of flesh and blood, were rather unreliable interpreters of the past and quite far from the saintly images their less esteemed successors and later credulous generations, who gathered in the tavern “By the Mirror,” created and spread about them.
Taking into account everything, particularly their concern for fame and profit, it becomes apparent that these wise heads diverted the course of the story, tore out and hid many important strands of its unraveling, and in the process, exalted the virtue of steadfast virginity in the face of the temptations of the slender horn, while in this crafty game around the maiden’s purity, they forgot their sacred missions.
Thus, it turned out that the cunning ones succeeded in transforming the wild Arcadian beast, at the very heart of human faith, into a tame creature and cruel jailer of feminine pleasures. In other words, they managed, within a few generations, to change the spiritual inheritance and all that goes with it. Today, when even the brightest memories are fading, it is futile to wonder about the connection between the Unicorn—the swift hunter of lustful laughter from reckless maidens—and that dreadfully obedient servant, the taster of stale water, the creature to whom the powerful added heavy horse hooves, a foul lion’s tail, and a fearsome command to watch over the blossoming maiden until her virginity withers, her passions fade, and she becomes a shriveled, ill-tempered old crone.
Knowing the most fragile points of human nature and the meaning of all deceptions about immortality, these ancestors of today’s preachers of a better life gradually solidified a strange doctrine that only a girl with a pure soul and untouched virginity could tame the Unicorn. Supposedly for the common good, justice, and ultimate deliverance from the woes of mortality, they established an unsubstantiated claim about the importance of an intact maidenhead in aligning earthly matters with the unpredictable workings of fate, which the lonely Unicorn foretells.
III
The clasp with which the Storyteller, full of himself and his worn-out conspiratorial theatrics, closes the box of the Unicorn legend may seem to some like a cheap carnival trinket that possesses the mystical allure of a grand diamond brooch only as long as the intoxicating Levantine chatter in the half-darkness of the tavern “By the Mirror” lasts.
In the light of day, for the man who, out of curiosity or by sheer chance, finds himself on that dangerous edge of worlds, the clasp will remain in memory only as a crude trick by an uncouth provincial charlatan who can skillfully and characteristically turn others’ money into a handful of tin soldier buttons before a stunned and envious crowd. For the poor man and for all those unfortunate souls who live a life without choices, the meaning of the clasp, or the meaning of the Storyteller’s conclusion, carries the undeniable, incomprehensible, and devastating allure of illusory vengeance for all those long-accumulated and never truly righted wrongs of a devalued life.
So, as one might imagine, no one has succeeded in capturing the Unicorn. Neither the conscious sacrifices of thousands of naked saints nor all their nightly vigils, disheveled robes, panting, fainting, fanatical sighs, and false ecstasies in overgrown thickets in deliberately neglected rose gardens have been enough to capture the Unicorn and thus acquire its horn, hide, and hoof as supposedly conclusive evidence of the legitimacy of questionable beliefs.
If we exclude the grand tapestries, through which nameless conservators, with much effort and skill, slow the inevitable decay, and if we add to that the rare, polite, but dreadfully antiquarian allusions that old ladies and old whores sometimes use to discreetly, in the style of bygone days, describe a good lover—a true Unicorn or at least its specter—still, no one has ever seen one.
The only reliable and universally present proof of its existence—and our firm guarantee that it indeed originates from the hills of Belgrade—is the custom, widespread throughout Europe, of extending the right hand for this or that reason, while gently bending all fingers except the longest, the middle one.