Yugoslavia, My Fatherland E-Book

Goran Vojnović

• Herausgeber: Istros Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 395

Beschreibung

Years after the end of the conflict that tore about the country of Yugoslavia, a man goes in search of this father's true identity. A hard-hitting examination of a generation from the former Yugoslavia that escaped the bullets but not the war.

Leseprobe

GORAN VOJNOVIĆ

YUGOSLAVIA, MY FATHERLAND

Translated from the Slovene by Noah Charney

To Barbara.

First published in 2015 by Istros Books(in collaboration with Beletrina Academic Press)

London, United Kingdom

www.istrosbooks.com

Originally published in Slovene as Jugoslavija, moja dežela by Beletrina Academic Press

© Goran Vojnović, 2015

The right of Goran Vojnović to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

Translation © Noah Charney, 2015

Cover design and typesetting: Davor Pukljak | www.frontispis.hr

Cover photograph courtesy of Naklada Postscriptum, Zagreb, Leksikon YU mitologije

ISBN: 978-1-908236-272 (printed edition)

ISBN: 978-1-908236-777 (Ebook)

This Book is part of the EU co-funded project “Stories that can Change the World” in partnership with Beletrina Academic Press | www.beletrina.si

The European Commission support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents which reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

MAP OF SFR YUGOSLAVIA

1

It must have been a normal, early summer day in 1991, when my childhood suddenly ended. The day was heavy and close, and since early morning, the grown-ups had been saying it would rain that afternoon, while the children wondered why people who didn’t even have tomatoes or courgettes planted in their gardens, would summon rain in the middle of the prime swimming season. Our world at the time was a far cry from the one our parents seemed to inhabit. For most of us, grown-­ups were creatures from a distant planet, only worth noticing if they were missing an arm or a leg, if they had a wild, long beard down to their toes, dressed like an Indian or had tattoos on their backs, or giant biceps like Rambo, with all his sequels.

On that sultry morning we set off to see one of those rare, interesting grown-ups. Mario and Sinisha couldn’t believe that I had yet to see the guy with the red lump on his face. It was just a big brain tumour; at least according to some, while others were convinced that it was something called bulimia, a new disease that had recently been discussed on TV, and which turned a person’s head into a huge red lump, or so Sinisha claimed. Mario claimed that everyone aside from me had already seen the guy with the lump, while Sinisha recounted one escapade after another featuring Lump Guy as protagonist. According to the biggest bigmouth in Pula, a German tourist took one look at Lump Guy and started to back away from him, and walked backwards the mile or so back to her hotel. An Italian family was even supposed to have notified the police and the Italian embassy in Belgrade about him. Mario and Sinisha both said that I just had to see Lump Guy, cause how often can you see someone with only half of his head normal, while the other half was inflated like a basketball and as red as a sliced watermelon? It didn’t take long to convince me and, in no time, we were marching together past the shop and towards the workers’ dormitory.

A humdrum, white rectangular building housed the guy with the lump, as well as the workers who, following their hard working days at the shipyard, would sit peacefully in front of the entrance, sipping their beers, and chewing over their Bosnian topics. Even though they lived just around the corner from our apartment buildings, they lived in their own parallel – and almost invisible – world. They fraternized only with each other, and gathered in the evenings in the common room on the first floor of the dormitory to watch the news, a live broadcast of a football match, or some series on national TV.

Along the way, my well informed friends explained that, during the day, Lump Guy vegged out in front of the box and watched TV Zagreb, motionlessly: everything from the domestic family sagas to documentaries picked by the head of Croatian national television. Sinisha told me rumour had it that Lump Guy’s room-mates had once collected money, bought him a small portable television set and installed it in his room, but he kept hanging out in the common room, though he never spoke to anyone. Mario added that Vaha, the welder, once tried switching the program every ten minutes, but Lump Guy hadn’t reacted at all, as if he didn’t give a damn what he was watching.

As I listened to these stories, I approached the entrance of the dormitory with high expectations, almost as high as when we set off to visit a circus tent next to the Istra Football Club stadium, on the eve of the circus’ premiere, to secretly observe performers practice. But before we had crawled through the tall grass and managed to peek inside, a small screaming Gypsy girl scared the shit out of us, and we ran like headless chickens from that tiny black creature.

That day at the workers’ dormitory turned out wholly different than expected. Instead of encountering a lone guy with a lump, the tiny TV room was packed, everyone staring at the television screen, on which the news was unwinding. The atmosphere was similar to the previous year, when a similar euphoria possessed the single men after Piksi’s second goal at that unforgettable quarterfinal match of Yugoslavia against Spain. That time, only the police could restore order, and Ramo ended up at the ER, because he had been got an electric shock while French kissing the television set and the antenna.

Twelve months later, Sinisha, Mario and I were looking for the ‘watermelon man’ in the multitude of supporters cheering on the noon TV news, and were surprised to find that only a small part of those gathered supported the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. One could see from afar that the group was led by Milo Lola Ribar, who could down a case of beer solo, and was shouting louder than anyone ’fuck Yugoslavia,’ for having bottomed out last year against those Serbo-phobes from Argentina, and that he was no longer interested in the sport. Next to him, and right next to the TV, stood Little Mirso, a sixteen year old with a face more adult than a soldier’s and behaviour to match, who warned all those present, in the most serious manner, that sunbathing, ferragosto and fireworks were over in the Arena, but he did not say why. Plenty of amateur screamers were gathered there in the hall of the dormitory, their plain, flat voices forming an incomprehensible wall, even though their flushed faces told us that they were doing their best.

Cera, a famous cinema operator from Pula, stood at the entrance, where it was so crowded that we got stuck, jammed into the bottleneck. Cera used to let us in the Belgrade Cinema for free; calling us his little buddies. At the time, the cinema was usually empty, as all of Pula knew that, after eight o’clock, Cera tended to ‘mix up’ reels and show films from the middle or the end, or sometimes even backwards. But, his love of Istrian brandy, aside, Cera was one of the kindest people I knew. After he saw that none of us even remotely understood what the news was reporting that fateful day, he immediately turned to us and said, ‘The Slovenians can go swim their asses over to Luxembourg, if they don’t like it here in Yugoslavia.’

It was obvious that Cera’s ‘reels’ got mixed up much earlier than usual that day, so we continued to watch, astonished that this news hypnotized the crowd before us. We all believed that anything, even the ‘TV Calendar’ would be more interesting than the evening news, even though we didn’t understand a word they said. Sinisha and Mario suggested that we hit the road and head towards the apartment building, but I still had this idea that we’d find the guy with the lump, so I stepped forward to scour the crowd of ever more frenzied television viewers. Instead of our ‘watermelon man’ I saw, through the glass wall on the opposite side of the hall, none other than my father, slowly making his way home.

His path home from work usually led him to the dormitory, where he stopped for a while for a beer or two and to hear the day’s news and its accompanying commentary, often in the company of his favourite, little Mirso. But that day, as Mirso stepped up onto a chair in front of the TV and addressed the gathered crowd with vigour, shouting ‘the time approaches when even the biggest of fools will learn a lesson or two,’ my father walked away thoughtfully, as if oblivious to what was happening only a few metres away from him.

I tried to muscle my way through the crowd and catch him in front of the entrance, on the far side of the building, but I quickly realized that jostling through this hand-waving mob would soon land me with a ‘labourer’s slap’ on the back, or the head. So I doubled back and decided to intercept my father in front of the shop. I could tell that he was dragging himself more slowly than usual, so there was no way he would get away from me. His gaze was empty, like a blind man’s, and I stood before the shop and watched as he approached. I felt like he was about to go past me, just as he had passed by the crowd in the dormitory. As my Aunt Enisa would have said, ‘He walked by without so much as a glance.’ But he did stop, eventually he did, and gave me a bear hug that nearly took my breath away, and under his uniform I could feel his abs, which the military had sculpted for him, and which he enjoyed showing off while wading through the shallows on beach holidays. Mother and I liked to tease him about that, and then he would divert us with some story about the difference in water and air temperature, and how it wasn’t healthy to dive into the sea. My father never drank at work, and I heard him say, countless times, that only in Yugoslavia would people drink more while at work than after work, and that this would send the country to an early grave. But that day he held me so powerfully in his muscled arms that I thought, in all seriousness, that he must be drunk.

He finally let go, but only to grab me by the arms a moment later, drawing me close and staring at me with an strange look in his eyes. After what felt like far too long, at the point when I thought he had finally lost it, he asked me if I’d like to go with him to the market and get a He-Man.

Such a suggestion could mean only one thing: something was horribly wrong. Action figures from my favourite cartoon were the best toys ever, but Mother had lain down the law and said that I couldn’t get any more, since I already had three from the series (He-Man, Skeletor and Tilo) and that, she said, was more than enough. She thought these action figures were way too expensive, and that I wouldn’t even play with them, since I was too old for that sort of toy. She also said that I only got them because I was spoiled. When she said this, she’d look at my father in a special way, and he would always pretend that he had no idea what she was talking about.



We walked in silence toward the market. My father didn’t stop every few metres to say hello to someone or go off for one of his ‘quick drinks’ with Vlatko or Mate, resulting in my having to carry the bag of shopping home myself. Such events would inevitably end in him stumbling home in the evening, giving my mother a drunken hug, a sort of dance in which she would scoot away, offended, then he’d hug her again, and promise there would be no more quick drinks next month. But that day, my father was strolling around Pula, his head bent low, hardly even nodding to the people he knew. What surprised me even more was that he didn’t want to stop at Nikola Tesla Park, where there was an old shack smothered in graffiti that read ‘Republic for Kosovo, Continent for Istria,’ and where we would almost ritually show up to count the gaggle of barefooted youths who multiplied every time. Father and I had taken to naming these kids ‘little Gypsies,’ because so many of them went swimming, every day, at the end of a long jetty wearing only T-shirts: just like Jovan’s son, Milan, a skinny teenager who, according to my mother, wore the shirt into the water in order to hide his prominent rib cage from the girls in class.

I never found out what the little Gypsies were hiding under their shirts, and I was never really interested, to be honest. My father, on the other hand, kind of adored the little Gypsies, and loved to say that he was one of them, especially when he was draining a bottle of his beloved Stanzec plum brandy. Then he would explain, in all seriousness, that when he had been no bigger than a bread loaf, his Gypsy parents, who had eighteen more little Gypsies to go along with him, had forgotten to take him with them, when they left the town of Futog, in Vojvodina, with their circus tents. By necessity, he had been adopted by a nice Serbian uncle, and an even nicer Hungarian aunt who, unfortunately, had died too early and wound up leaving him with the Yugoslav People’s Army when he was just a little boy. People used to listen attentively to my happily gregarious father, but never knew whether they should feel sorry for him, or envy him, for his life full of stories.

Regardless of whether or not my father had really been forgotten by Gypsy circus performers, or whether he had invented the story to gloss over a sad orphan childhood, raised by captains and corporals, it was nevertheless an indisputable fact that I was the proud owner of multiple He-Man action figures through the good graces of Maki, the Gypsy who sold them from one of the stalls. Father would haggle with him as long as it took, sometimes taking a good half hour to bring the price down from eight to four dinars. Only then, when Maki had accepted defeat and mumbled that four dinars was outright thievery, stealing from the mouths of the good people who smuggled the toys for him, would my father put ten dinars in Maki’s hand, pat him on the back, and say that he’d never met such an honest Gypsy in his life.

But there was no haggling that day. Father put the money in Maki’s hand without saying a word. Before I’d had a chance to glance over the shelves full of colourful junk, he had already disappeared into the crowd of Pula market. For the first time in my life, I was worried about my own father, and I began to push my way through the shoppers, almost in a panic. I had this idea that my father, lost in thought, would step out into the street without looking both ways, and some crazy Italian tourist, or an old drunk on a Vespa, would run him over. So I was running, action figure in hand, ever more nervous, bumping into ladies in floral dresses as I skittered through the market. My father was nowhere to be seen. It even occurred to me that he had forgotten we’d come together, and had headed home for lunch, when I finally saw him standing in front of the entrance to a department shop, looking confused. I was about to run to him when someone put their hand on my shoulder and rooted me to the spot. I turned around and saw Maki anxiously looking at me with his big black eyes. ‘Your old man is being very weird today. He wasn’t seconded, too, was he?’

I had never heard the word ‘seconded’ before and had no idea what it meant. I was eleven years old, and dreamed only of Mario borrowing his father’s boat and the three of us gliding off to a nearby island.

2

‘Republic for Kosovo, Continent for Istria’

I hadn’t a clue as to how this long-lost graffiti came to appear in Pula, but sixteen years later it seemed as though the letters beat a rhythm into my racing heart. Images, faces and places I had buried deep beneath the surface of my consciousness flashed before my eyes, like some strobe-lit MTV video. My past life flooded back like an hallucination, and I felt like I was on an uncontrollable merry-go-round which was about to catapult me into a world I’d long been convinced that I could block out. My turbulent, unrestrained subconscious shook itself loose and I surrendered to it, against my will. The bold black letters sprayed against the white walls of Pula flashed brighter and more vividly, as if they might explode with the cubes of stone on which they were painted. REPUBLIC FOR KOSOVO, CONTINENT FOR ISTRIA!

I sat in my twenty-year-old wreck of a car, parked in a garage next to the enormous brightly painted heating-plant in downtown Ljubljana. I should’ve driven straight over to Enes, my nearly legitimate mechanic, so that professional Bosnian clown could massage my car into shape for its first long-distance trip in many moons. But instead I just stared at the garage wall, where my illusions were locked in combat. I tried to put my left leg into the car and press against the soft Japanese clutch, but my leg, as if it belonged to someone else, just lay on the concrete garage floor, disinterested in the rather important detail that Enes’ random working hours were probably winding to a close. For a moment I got worried that I would never be able to tear myself from this petrification of body and brain. I couldn’t recall the last time I thought about Pula, of those white officers’ apartment buildings and my childhood there before that summer of 1991. I’d buried them all in the ground one day, without bothering to mount a tombstone; without coffin, without grave candles, without eulogy or procession. Buried them and walked away, never looking back over my shoulder and convinced that this forgotten world would never burst from its grave and pursue me.

Motionless for what must have been over twenty minutes, I tried without success to return to the state of clinical mental lethargy; to that beloved indifference that had protected me for all these years, against the siege engines of emotion. But I couldn’t move, not an inch. My father, until recently deceased, assailed me now, sixteen years after his death, with an immortality so relentless that I could physically feel the sense of horror that grew inside me, nailing my feet to the ground.

Everything was flooding back: Pula and its graffiti, the Bristol Hotel in Belgrade, the unbearable humidity of Novi Sad. The image of Ljubljana was also coming back: the Ljubljana that once was. My mother, too, came back to me, as she was when she was still my mother. The festival of memories in my head played to its climax, and the great fireworks were about to begin. I gasped for air but couldn’t breathe; feeling I would surely faint.

At that point it seemed that the innocent white lie I’d unspooled to my boss, which had rewarded me with a week’s sick leave, was beco­ming an unwanted reality. The coffee vending machines that relied on my healing hands were surely missing me.

I made every effort to concentrate on trying to recall which CD Nadia had asked me to bring in from the car. I shifted my gaze to the corner of the garage and, to distract myself, I tried to remember what was hidden in the dog-eared cardboard boxes piled there, forlornly. Who had put them there in the first place, and why had the corner of the garage been made to look like a rubbish dump? I started the ignition. She resisted, the old mare, but started eventually, on the first elongated attempt, for which I was grateful. Without consciously deciding to do so, I pushed down on the gas pedal and slowly reversed. It was at that point, that I heard the loud scratching sound. I saw the open door scrape against the garage wall and pulled up the handbrake at the last minute, just before the car door hit the frame of the garage door and my window shattered into a thousand shrapnel shards. I turned the engine back off.



‘When are you leaving?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When will you need the car?’

‘As soon as possible. Tomorrow, if that’s possible.’

‘And where will you go?’

‘I don’t know... yet.’

‘Listen to yourself. You don’t know... yet. You sound like my cousin. He knows he’s going to get laid someday, because he’s a young stud, he just doesn’t know when and who the lucky lady will be.’

Enes had this routine he’d dance through before he took the keys from me; then he muttered that he’d call when the car was good to go. He was finally the boss, after years of slaving for other morons just like himself, and so he enjoyed airing his valves and exhausts, so to speak. His partially legal workshop was called Dino, named after his first son, and located by the railroad opposite the old Ljubljana stadium. ‘It’s so well hidden that even the Albanians never sold ice cream here,’ he had once described his black hole to every poor devil who wandered into it. Now I was the poor devil in question. After what felt like ages, Enes stuck his head under my hood.

‘Who replaced your fan?’

‘Nadia was driving...’

‘Why didn’t you bring it to me?’

‘The car stopped in the middle of the road.’

‘And where did she take it?’

‘To Dolgi Most.’

‘To Dolgi Most. And how much did the thugs in that neighbourhood charge for this?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘Well, well, well... Why didn’t she call you and then you could’ve called me?’

‘That’s not how Slovenians do this.’

This magical argument satisfied him completely.

‘Not that it matters. We’ll take care of it.’

For some reason I always spent at least half an hour at Enes’ for no good reason. It crossed my mind that I ought to get some discount in this asshole part of the city, especially if he thought I was one of ‘his guys.’ It never crossed my mind to explain to every vocal instrumentalist from middle Bosnia that I’d never felt like one of ‘their guys,’ nor did I want to. It was easier, and often cheaper, to put up with the good old-boy chatter, always conducted in ‘our language,’ and amuse myself by guessing what discount I would get if I were a Slovene.

‘You know, I don’t ask you where you’re going for no reason. I mean, I don’t give a rat’s ass, go where you like. The main question is whether you’re going up or down.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, if you go up, the roads are great. No holes. Just fire it up and off you go. But if you’re headed down... You know how it is.’

I had no idea. I hadn’t been south of the Kolpa River in recent memory.

‘I’m going down.’

‘Cuz! Come here and fix this car up, and I want it flawless. This guy here is one of ours. Bosnian.’

‘Aren’t they all?’ he replied.

‘Don’t be stupid.’

Enes’ cousin grabbed the keys with his grime-black hands and stepped into the car. This time the old wreck started at only the third twist of the keys.

‘What are you laughing at, motherfucker?’ Enes inquired. ‘In ex-Yugoslavia we Bosnians fucked, while all the others brought up children. The two of you are young and don’t even realize that half of these Slovenians, Croatians and Serbians jerking their way around the Balkans were fathered by Bosnian Toms, Dicks and Harrys.’

Enes was a happy man. He had a captive audience who didn’t object to him, which was all he ever wanted.

‘Back in the day, Bosnians could fuck anyone they wanted, but women didn’t want to marry us. Yugoslav women didn’t want their kids to be given some Muslim name. Or even Enes. There’s brotherhood and unity for you. No wonder it ended like it did.’



As I marched from the Dino mechanics shop toward the civilized centre of Ljubljana, my well-being was suffering a crisis of such extent, that even the Slovenian cab drivers couldn’t make me feel worse. I climbed into a blue Opel Vectra and made the conscious decision to set an over-high price of ten euros, rather than watch the driver press the taximeter and stare at it the whole while as it turned at the speed of three euros per minute, while he drove me on an elongated route. I felt even less like talking. I didn’t have the energy for cab debates, so I simply stared out the window while the rundown Opel ran down towards the city centre in blissful silence.

‘Is here okay?’

He stopped at the bus station. To my pleasant surprise, the taximeter showed six euros and fifty cents. I got out, crossed the street and found myself at the main entrance to the Polyclinic hospital, not knowing precisely what I wanted to do there. The thought that I’d have to wait there for quite some time, observing the mixed procession of the nearly-­dead, people with broken bones and hypochondria, didn’t exactly appeal, but I had this feeling that I’d already been sitting in a socialist dentist’s waiting room for three days, so what would the difference be? Yet still I wasn’t mentally prepared to enter the building, to make the first move in this winner-takes-all battle.

Passive-aggression suited my current mind-set much more. I leaned against a pillar and prepared myself to spend an indefinite amount of time scanning patients as they passed by, without giving them the impression that they were being scanned; remembering that my mother had taught me that staring wasn’t polite. Dusha, after years of working at the hospital, knew all about that.



‘I don’t need anything. I’ll just have a smoke.’

A lady with a walker waddled towards me followed by some bald guy, probably her son, who stood looking confused, unsure whether he should quickly get her cardigan, drag the lady back inside, or have a smoke himself. He seemed like the sort of person with a great deal of experience confronted by simple questions for which he could not find simple answers. After much deliberation, he decided to head for the stairs. But the old lady stopped next to me, took a cigarette from her pocket, and lit it.

‘Want one?’

I nodded and she offered me her lighter as well. I wasn’t a smoker, but every now and then I had a serious urge to suck some poison into my veins.

‘Healthy or sick?’

‘Healthy.’

‘That makes two of us. These modern kids and grandkids just don’t understand that people are old when they hit eighty, so they bring me here for examinations just so these nitwits can find something, which they do every time. Cholesterol, veins, that sort of stuff. And then these clowns want me to enrol in aquatic aerobics and stop smoking and eating pork roast and who knows what else. Come on, gimme a break. Can’t I die in peace, without them watering me here like a house plant?’

I was trying to nod at the appropriate moments, to at least appear interested in her story, but the truth is I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even see Dusha walk past, and only caught a glimpse of her when she was ten metres beyond me. I threw the half-burnt stub of my cigarette into the bushes and took off after her.

‘Dusha! Dusha!’

She was at the crossroads by the time she finally turned around and saw me. She wasn’t the sort of person who was easily surprised, and even less likely to show it openly. I hadn’t seen her for months, and I’d obviously been lurking outside of the Polyclinic for her, but she met me without expression, as if I was a walk-on character in a Mexican soap opera. That look would have made me hate her, if I didn’t already hate her for so many other reasons. The only other time I had hated her more was when she decided she would speak Slovene to me. I had insisted on speaking Serbo-Croatian; and rarely with as much as plea­sure as that day.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Where is he?’

‘Who?’

‘I want the phone number, address, anything. I want to know where he is.’

‘Who are you talking about?’

‘You know.’

My mother, the Terminator, seemed to be in shock for a moment, a rare occurrence, but then she turned and started to cross the road, as if her plan was to run away from her own son. I hoped she would at least stop on the opposite pavement, but soulless old Dusha kept right on going towards her car, where it was parked on Ilirska Street, as it had been every day for years. Her husband, Dragan, had scored her a permit through his connections with various and sundry ‘southern scum,’ so that Mrs. Ćirić would never have to pay for parking. I knew that she was capable of getting into her shit-yellow Clio and driving home without replying, without a word. As she always had, Dusha simply went into shutdown mode.

I chased and grabbed her hand, but she wouldn’t stop. It was clear that she really did intend to drive off, and I had no choice but to pull her away from her car, and make her talk to me.

‘I know he’s alive and I want to see him.’

Rather than answering, she tried to shake off my grip. First she pushed, and then kicked, but luckily she didn’t know what she was doing. I held her firmly by the waist, and I waited for her to calm down and stop wriggling like a fool. Dusha was renowned for her stubbornness. At one point she dug her long red nails into my hand. I pulled away reflexively, and we both stumbled back toward the high fence at the edge of the pavement. While she regained her balance, I positioned myself between her and the Clio. Naturally she tried to push her way past me, but I had no hesitation in pushing back.

I had often suspected that when she shut herself off like this, she wasn’t really herself. But this time I was sure, as she took a few steps back, to sort of get a running start, then literally jumped around me, into the road, in order to get to her car from the other side. Only when I threw myself into her path did she pause. She stepped back onto the pavement, puffing heavily. After a moment, Dusha finally turned to me.

‘Come tomorrow during the break and we’ll talk in peace.’

This didn’t sound like her.

‘Promise.’

‘I promise.’



Her promise meant little to me, but I knew my mother well enough to know that this was as much as I could hope to get from her. My hope that she really would show up in the morning was because this time it was serious: I needed a piece of information that would mean her coming out of her comfort zone. I also counted on her knowing that I was as stubborn as she, and I could wait indefinitely for her in front of the Polyclinic if necessary. But at that moment her Clio was moving out of sight, and I still wasn’t sure whether I was indeed going to see her the following day, less still that I would manage to extract information from her.

I was tempted to get onto some obscure city bus, maybe the number ten, and circle the city once or twice, staring out the window, sitting quietly like some forgotten scarf in the company of autistic teenagers on their way home from school. But it was almost three o’clock, and I knew that there would be no seats free. An even if I could find one, the inevitable old lady would come on-board soon enough, drooping supermarket bags in hand, and inform me eloquently with her gaze that I should make myself scarce and yield up my seat.

So I slowly meandered home, past the Medical Centre, with the honest intention of planning how I would explain all this, or any of this, to Nadia. Or what would I do if, in the middle of a sentence, I realized that I couldn’t tell her anything?

Though we had been together three years, I’d never managed to completely understand Nadia. I wasn’t sure just what she was doing with me, and how she viewed our relationship. She came from another storybook altogether: a top microbiology student from an orderly suburban family. But more than that, she belonged to a generation cool enough not to worry about the daily forecasts of impending doom. From the moment her pubescent pimples departed, Nadia had never had any problems, or at least none that I (with my inherited insensitivity) could notice. Sometimes I thought she was with me only because a two-metre-tall lifelong unsolvable problem like me would thoroughly complicate her otherwise immaculate life and was, therefore, the only thing missing from her as yet unfinished childhood.

If I felt anything for Nadia, it was probably gratitude. I was grateful because she didn’t nag me, because she wasn’t interested in my life story, because she didn’t make a fuss that I’d never introduced her to my mother. Her light touch was endlessly appealing, and I was frankly afraid to shatter that with a story about my father, who until recently, had been deceased.



Luckily for me my dilemma was delayed that evening by Nadia’s student obligations. Our little rented flat had been invaded by a pair of classmates from her hometown: aspiring microbiologists Matthew and Nina who, along with Nadia, were drinking all our beers. These three linked studying with the endless freedom won by leaving home, and thus looked upon microbiological studies at the University of Ljubljana as heaven on earth. As I walked in the door, they were in the midst of some crucial discussion, and barely noticed me, so I was able to slip into the bedroom, shut the door, and try to get some sleep.

My study habits couldn’t have been more different. I enrolled at the uni’ only in order to get my hands on references from student services, and to help my former boss avoid paying out to the state. Years later I’d managed to convince myself that the absorption of knowledge on a daily basis might actually be a good way to bring some semblance of organization and meaning to my melee of a life, so I began, along with a crowd of fellow enthusiasts, frequenting the Faculty of Arts. On the first day they hit me with Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories, followed quickly by child development psychology, then Slavic mytho­logy. I did ethnology in my first year, cultural anthropology in my third, and was in no particular hurry to continue. I still liked to listen to lectures, and sometimes enjoyed a beer or two with classmates afterwards, but that was it. I couldn’t imagine indulging in regular binges with them at student parties.

I could hear the three of them arguing about some banality outside, but no discussion that evening could have pierced through my bedroom wall to disturb my slumber, and I did not need to convince myself that the three microbiologists didn’t get on my nerves. The whole world bothered me, so there was no reason for them to be a notable exception.

‘Are you okay?’

Nadia was stoned and standing in the doorway, smiling at me mis­chie­vously. She had probably gotten up to pee and en route, recalled that she had a boyfriend.

‘We’re going to get some booze. Wanna come?’

‘Should I wake you when I get home?’

Nadia’s smile grew more mischievous, which was always a turn-on but, alas, my mood was not erectile that evening.

‘No need.’

‘Fine. Goodnight.’

The microbiological gang slowly made their way out, in a cascade of drunkenly resounding whispers, but I was no closer to falling asleep. I kept thinking about tomorrow’s meeting with Dusha, about my father and everything she might tell me. Or not tell me.

I was awake when Nadia subtly stomped through the door at half past four and tried, in vain, to quietly go to bed. I threw a secret glance at her while she changed her clothes, thinking her nudity might provide some welcome distraction, but not even her young body possessed the super power to shift me out of my current state of complete emotional turpitude. She laid down next to me and fell asleep in immediate, drunken peace. Her long, brown hair smelled of pot and I thought that I might help myself to a joint, but didn’t feel like getting up and ransacking her handbag in the middle of the night. I soon heard her purr, as she did whenever she’d imbibed too much beer. I knew that I could scream and she wouldn’t hear, so I dared to speak to her.

‘My father isn’t dead. But he is a war criminal.’



‘Meet me at eleven. At the Second Aid Bar. Love, Dusha.’

Dusha never gave a damn about things like atmosphere, either in her daily life or in mine. We might as well have met in a boiler room or operating theatre. At least the message, that beeped at half past seven and woke me up, assured me that I had managed to get some sleep, after all.

Dusha arrived as sleep-deprived as I was, full bags under her eyes poorly hidden by make-up. The idea that something might have finally struck a nerve in her was a pleasant one. She ordered a double espresso and a large glass of water, and then lit up. She offered me one, and asked if I smoked, politely, as if we were strangers meeting for the first time. We sat at a table on the terrace, smoking, and I noticed that we each held our cigarettes in just the same way. I also saw that her hand was shaking.

‘I don’t have a lot of time, so just tell me what you want.’

‘I want to see him.’

‘You know you can’t. He’s in hiding. They’re looking for him.’

‘I don’t care.’

‘Nobody knows exactly where he is.’

‘Do you?’

She shook her head. Dusha avoided my eyes, but did check her watch three times, and glance six times at the entrance of the bar, all in the space of a few minutes.

‘The last time he got in touch with me was three years back. I don’t even know if he’s alive.’

I quickly did the sums in my head: how many years had passed since Dusha decided to break it to me that, ostensibly, my father had died somewhere on the front. Yet now it turned out that she had been in touch with him for twelve years... In touch with a dead guy, fallen in the midst of an offensive against common sense.

‘Where did he contact you from?’

‘I think it’s better... ’

‘Where did he contact you from?’

‘He’s hiding from everyone. Why do you think?’

‘Where did he contact you from?’

‘From Brčko.’

‘Address?’

‘Why would you think he’d..?’

‘Maybe he was hoping you’d visit him? Or that I’d visit him? That we’d write... ’

‘Vlado, look... ’

‘Address!’

The waitress brought the double espresso and a large glass of water for Dusha, and a juice for me. Dusha paid immediately, saying she was in a hurry.

‘Address!’

‘He said that he wouldn’t stay at that address, that he was going elsewhere, that he wasn’t safe there anymore. That was three years ago. I’ve never heard of any new address.’

I could’ve repeated ‘Address!’ with the same tone a hundred more times. I could’ve repeated it until the next morning, and Dusha knew it. She downed her large glass of water and started on her small cup of coffee.

‘Look, I know you’ll never forgive me for telling you he was dead. But I’d like to say that, in all these years, over all this time, he’s never once said he was innocent. He has never said that to me. He has also never said that he was sorry. I would like you to know that there’s a real possibility that he is guilty. I would like you to know that. Just that.’



‘There, almost done.’

Enes probably had no idea what was happening to my old wreck in his workshop, which had been left at the mercy of his cousin’s youthful exuberance. Enes, as the undisputed star of his team, had treated himself to a small beer and a Williams’s pear schnapps, while holding court, entertaining ‘our people’ with his jokes at the café he frequented and was owned and occupied by ‘our people.’

‘When can I come by?’

‘When are you leaving?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Then come this afternoon.’

‘How much is this gonna cost me?’

‘We’ll arrange something, my dear Vladan.

3

The ‘youngster’ who washed the windows of my tired old car at a petrol station somewhere in the midst of a blasted heath halfway to nowhere, but approximately between Zagreb and Brčko, looked so much like Maki that he could’ve easily convinced me that he was the son Maki had forgotten sometime long ago, while moving iridescent kitsch from his stall at the market. Four toddlers lurked nearby, holding buckets of water and filthy cloths. They peeked out at me, ready to sprint for my change, which I intended to spend on a double espresso and juice at the nearby Javori Restaurant. I thought how my old man would have loved to take them on, but I didn’t inherit any useful talents from him, like wrestling undernourished toddlers. When I opened my car door, outstretched hands were suddenly upon me: a whirl of torn and dirty clothes, and they succeeded in jogging my conscience enough to relieve me of just enough change to transform my plan into a single espresso and a glass of water. Mildly pissed-off, I tried to push my way past them, to ignore them, but they did an Indian sprint so that one was always just in front of me, underfoot. They kept showing me how clean my car window was, shoving dirty palms ever nearer my face.

‘I don’t have any change!’

I showed them my empty pockets.

‘That’s okay, you can give us bills.’

‘I only have euros.’

‘Not a problem.’

Defeated, I pulled a two-euro coin from my wallet and put it in the hand of the Maki lookalike. But my battle was far from over, as the other four scrambled for their share.

‘Come on, off you go, don’t make me... ’

An elderly waiter, in a uniform left over from socialist days, stood before the entrance to the restaurant. When two of the little Gypsy children heard his stern voice, they instantly stepped back, while the furious waiter managed to grab the youngest by his frayed collar and literally flung him toward the parking lot.

‘Go fuck yourself, you little thief!’

‘Fuck you!’

‘Watch it, kid, don’t make me come over there!’

‘Suck my dick, you idiot!’

Apparently I’d found myself in the middle of an enduring siege between the uniformed army at the restaurant, and the Gypsy guerrilla children; wrestling for supremacy of the muddy path linking the improvised parking lot and the improvised restaurant. Just then a Volkswagen Golf with Bulgarian plates pulled in, and the little Gypsies forgot the unhappy waiter and ran off with their slop buckets. The waiter returned to his sentry duty by the door, and continued his smoke break.

I sat at a table covered in a white cloth, as well as aged coffee stains, which lay over an even dirtier red tablecloth. A plastic ashtray sat in the middle, alongside a vase containing plastic flowers from the Yugoslav Mesozoic period. I had to wait, of course, to earn the right to pay for a sour coffee, hand-mixed with a disposable thin plastic spoon, amidst this particular ambience. It was my first time in such a setting. The hono­rary waiter extended one smoke to two, spoke with a comrade who stood behind a stainless steel bar, and managed to somehow get lost on the way from there to my table.

It seemed as though I were experiencing the genuine tradition of southern hospitality that I’d heard so much about. Others, far wiser than I, had tried and failed to change this mode of behaviour, so it was futile for me to do anything but absorb it. I tried once to communicate with these local human-like creatures, asking the innocent question, ‘How far is it to Brčko?’ To which came the reply, ‘I don’t give a... ’ from one of the death row inmates working that day.

The uniformed guy with a moustache, who had taken my petrol money, seemed to have hated himself that morning, but graduated to hating the whole world in the afternoon. His spontaneous reaction to my question about Brčko, a town which history had consigned to his outrage because it had not ended up in Croatian hands at the war’s end, did provoke something in the same phylum as a smile. This was probably just to give me the false sense that he was joking, rather than intending to terrorize all passengers en route to the Serbian Entity.

I was fed up, and I had only just started.