At night, Teofilović’s imaginings in the spacious mansards on Third Avenue stretched from the dusty coal lines and spread ever longer and more ambitious, growing like titanic nails and cascades of hair. He covered the walls with the drawings he created, and looming models of wattle and loam descended down the rasping pallet floor for years.
During the day, Teofilović regularly went to work, indifferently but conscientiously fulfilling his obligations. He spent his lunch breaks in an Italian restaurant with a meal he usually left behind half of, looking long at the unfinished food on his plate. It should be said that Teofilović, being of humble and unpretentious character, did not in the devising of his burial monument start his work from conceit, his own personal significance, or delusions of any kind. On the contrary, his work had as its sole purpose responding, with gratitude and sublime respect, to the gift that nature extends to man: to consciously face the matter of his own, inexorable, and final disappearance. It will be a monument to my unfinished lunch, was written in Teofilović’s comprehensive yearly diary for 1915, which the work of incredible circumstance would one day bring to the hands of Dr. Stojimirović. These writings (in whose margins Stojimirović’s notes were added here and there) indicate that in his years of work Teofilović turned a considerable profit and established for himself a fairly comfortable life in Manhattan, in the age of electric trolleys and skyscrapers, steel towers and locomotives, the era of gilded splendor and hysteria, world’s fairs and human zoos, Mercuries in winged sandals carved into palaces inspired by unrelenting progress. Teofilović himself, though aesthetically attuned to modern architectural expression, tended to live outside the inspiration of his dictated surroundings and time, except for that which impelled him to design his tomb. At the start of the first decade of the twentieth century, via telegraphic transactions and an intermediary in Belgrade he leased a plot sufficient for the construction of a bulky chapel, approximately the size of a small domicile, in Belgrade’s newly-founded New Cemetery, contracting in advance all the legal details of the property and characteristics of the future edifice. From the aforementioned writings not a single scrap of information exists regarding Teofilović’s familial, friendly, romantic, or work-related relationships in Belgrade or New York, not a single mention—excepting the unnamed intermediary in Belgrade—of any person to whom the process or purpose of his actions was even partially communicated. From Teofilović’s every act, recorded thought, and architectural idea, a figure emerges sincerely uninterested in closeness, a man non-social and full of scorn, one might even say an everyday grump—but we shall refrain here from such oversimplifications and harsh accusations. There can be no doubt that he was a well-situated lone wolf, to use a common term, in his late forties with a secure career and fixed habits when, at the end of April 1915, out of the blue and with not a word extra in his written statement, he quit his position in the New York studio and set sail in a transatlantic liner towards war-torn Europe and Belgrade. This abrupt rush was most likely due to his intent, as a citizen of the United States (a country neutral in the war), to secure his plot in the Belgrade cemetery in the hopes that, independent of the circumstances of politics and war and notwithstanding into whose hands Belgrade would fall, he would find understanding and respect for legal process, whether under one sovereign or another. After all, Belgrade had for Teofilović been the setting of his childhood and adolescence, the events of which are in any case to us unknown, secret, and inaccessible, except for one detail mentioned in Stojimirović’s notebooks concerning an attempt using hypnosis to awaken memories in his silent patient. Chestnut, Teofilović had stated and Stojimirović recorded, later adding a number of pages of botanical drawings of chestnut leaves and fruits beside the word as though its meaning were hidden in those illustrations. It had been the only response Teofilović had given to the doctor when requested to describe his parents’ home.
Mr. Teofilović’s architectural sketches, having disappeared with the sinking of the Lusitania, we may judge based solely on the descriptions found in his notebooks and the presuppositions Dr. Stojimirović enumerated in his comments; thus it remains to us only to imagine the possible outcomes of the lost project, bearing in mind Teofilović’s predicative fascination with anatomy and the features of Jugendstil (of all the common names, only this German one is mentioned in the writings). It remains unclear, however, whether even Teofilović himself fully grasped the entirety of his work, being that the project of the tomb was so complex that he had needed to create some dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of individual drawings that built on each other as though they themselves were parts of a natural, biological or tectonic process of excreting, accreting, fermenting, suffusing, effusing, inundating, hybridizing, joining, perforating, undulating, disintegrating . . . In Teofilović’s preserved notebooks, Stojimirović underlined specifically these words, with which the artist had named each individual drawing respective to each act to be built into the monument. Nameless grave made all of verbs, wrote Stojimirović in the margin of the notebook, indicating that Teofilović’s future tomb had no space for a name, nor for any written word.
Information regarding the interior of this unusual chapel is scarce, and in all probability Teofilović’s original portfolio of drawings with which he boarded the RMS Lusitania on May 1, 1915, was significantly different from the later one, which appeared after his fall into the earth, but more on that a little later. News of Teofilović’s death in the shipwreck arrived in Belgrade in a long string of unconfirmed and contradictory reports that followed the sinking of the famous transoceanic ship. For days the company Cunard Line supplied diplomatic agencies, affiliated associations, and individuals with lists of passengers living, dead, and missing. The lists changed from one day to the next: the living were declared dead and sometimes the dead living, and the list of the missing spilled over onto both sides, until those changes subsided, and with them the hope of any little good news. As things stood, no one in Belgrade, after a quarter century’s absence, knew of or connected Teofilović with relatives living or dead, except—through written correspondence—individuals from the cemetery administration who had drawn up the contract with him for the leasing of the plot, and that aforementioned unknown intermediary. As no one had made any special effort to find out on which list this passenger of Serbian origin was to be found, the public in short order elected to inter him, thereupon publishing a pathetic text on the suffering of the returnee and an odd narrative about Teofilović’s lease, along with a statement from a representative of the cemetery on the legal proceedings that would follow upon confirmation of the tenant’s death.
On the sixth day of the Lusitania’s journey, May 7, Teofilović was shaken from his work by a muffled explosion, and soon after by another, followed by a barely-perceptible tilt. Calmly putting down his drawing tools and donning his coat—in whose inside pocket he kept a notebook he would lean over as though to record the grimmest secrets, especially during meals on board the ship—Teofilović, from his cramped windowless cabin, went into the corridor. The uncommon utilization of that notebook cost him an unpleasant, interrogatory conversation with the staff in charge of identifying war spies: on the very first day, sitting on the front deck with his nose stuck in his little book, he was brought along with three German citizens into a small area near the command bridge. About those three, the ship’s security staff had no doubt: they were immediately locked in a special chamber, which, as the records stand, they never left. Teofilović was freed reportedly at the behest of Captain Turner himself, who had already had his nerves tested by the security officers, even more than by the passengers, for whose blather and senseless questions, particularly those from the more expensive tickets, the captain harbored deep scorn and not infrequently responded to with mocking remarks, which in turn provoked the muffled laughter of the staff and the astonishment of the gentleman in question. Perhaps that was why the silent Teofilović in Turner’s eyes seemed a model passenger who simply attended to his own work. Turner himself, thanks to his own short-tempered character, subsequently became a prime target for accusations that had no basis in his actions: contrary to the claims, Turner, like a captain from lore, was among the last to leave the sinking ship. When the first explosion that morning sent half the crews on duty to lower the lifeboats, not suspecting the scale of the damage, Teofilović went to seek out the source of the blasts. When he reached the bridge, breaking through the corridor filled with individuals more confused than frightened, under the light of a bright, chilly day, a startling spectacle of death emerged before him: terrified passengers leaping into lifeboats hanging over the slanted deck railing, a few barely clinging to the edge hanging over the abyss. A moment later and the front hoist yielded under the heavy load and a mass of bodies, as one, tumbled from a great height into the sea. The second explosion, following a few minutes after being struck by the German torpedo—the origins of which even today are disputed—was presumably more destructive than the first blow, and its strength was so devastating that it all but halved the lower decks of the massive ship and swept away all possibility of control from the surviving crew. Like Teofilović, many passengers took more than ten minutes to fully grasp what had befallen them, given the size of the Lusitania and the distance of the passengers from the epicenter of the fatal events. The moment he realized he didn’t have much time left, Teofilović attempted to return to his cabin to fetch his drawings. The sudden worsening of the situation prevented him in this, as water was rushing across the open bulwarks of the already sharply upturned ship, breaking through the staircases and corridors, carrying drowning bodies from the lower decks and broken ship furniture with them, and only by the will of an unknown passenger or sailor who thrust a life vest over his head in the midst of the utter confusion was Teofilović saved from certain doom. The vest for survival in the case of a shipwreck was fashioned from a resistant canvas filled with cork. Despite its light weight, the hardness of the cork caused injuries to the neck and jaw upon falling into the sea, even incapacitating a number of passengers, in the case that they survived the fall at all. Teofilović’s fall into the sea in his later testimonies was linked and alternatively referred to as his fall into the earth, an expression he would unconsciously use to describe the large gap in his memory; thus two events are left to us, between which lies an interval of at least a few weeks, to link to the whole that will best present Teofilović’s experience from the moment when he, unconscious and on the brink of death, was loaded into the tugboat Indian Empire, one of the vessels sent from Queenstown harbor, whose horrified crew, unprepared for the sight that awaited them, collected the living and dead passengers of the Lusitania till the late hours of the night. Teofilović, being that his name was not recorded on the list of those rescued, was at first situated alongside the deceased and unloaded ashore like a great number of other passengers, frozen and lacking visible signs of life, who in the following hours would rise from the dead. However, those who did not return from death were considerably more numerous; in the city a day of mourning was quickly declared, and a mass funeral followed shortly after the city officials concluded that so many bodies and calls for the return of the deceased to their places of origin simply could not be properly dealt with.
