The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

12 AN ACTRESS WHO LOST HER HOMELAND

I don’t know how to begin the story about M, an actress who has lost her homeland in the war. While she sits in an armchair facing me, I cannot help but think how small she looks, smaller than when I saw her last. And quite different from when up on the screen. This is probably always the case with film stars: it is difficult to recognize them because in person they hardly look like the characters they play in the movies. I saw her in Zagreb a year ago at a premiere of a film: the war had not yet begun, people were celebrating the advent of the new government, the streets were clean, the freshly-painted facades shone in their pretty colours, new shops were being opened, the future looked like a birthday cake with whipped cream and pink sugary icing. M was glowing, people thronged around her and kissed her on the cheeks. She was laughing. She looked happy. That night in the Balkan Cinema foyer, everybody was her friend. And then…

The attacks on M began when it came to the attention of the press that she had given a brief, ten-line statement in the bulletin of Bitef, Belgrade’s international theatre festival. The theatres from Croatia had boycotted the festival held in Belgrade which in the meantime had ceased to be the capital of the joint state of Yugoslavia and instead become the capital of the enemy state, Serbia. M was the only actress from Zagreb performing at the festival, in a production of Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique. She knew she was the only one, but nevertheless believed that art could remain unscathed, that even in war art could preserve its freedom. In the festival bulletin she wrote that she had decided to appear at the festival in order not to lose faith in the possibility of us all working together and that in this way she was saving herself, at least temporarily, from utter despair. ‘Not to play in this performance would mean signing one’s own capitulation,’ she said then, near the end of September 1991. The war had already been raging for several months, Osijek was being bombarded every day, the battle was on for Vukovar, the Federal Army was attacking Dubrovnik. The Zagreb- Belgrade highway was closed to traffic, the trains that used to connect the two cities by a four-hour journey were no longer running: this railway had continued to operate smoothly and regularly throughout World War II but since the summer of 1991 nobody has travelled on it. The mail service was still functioning, one could send letters, but by the autumn it was already impossible to make a phone call from one city to the other. For the last five years M had lived in both cities; she was an actress in the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb but as her husband was working in Belgrade, she used to spend part of the time there, occasionally doing some work in a TV series or a theatre production. It was possible – complicated and sometimes exhausting – but possible nevertheless. She travelled even when the war had already started, as if trying deliberately to maintain at least some ties between the two cities to each of which half of her life belonged.

The newspapers in Croatia published her statement when something tough and cold was already hardening in people. Attacked and driven into basements, they started to bite, to snap, especially at those who did not share their misery. Even before this, suspicions of treason had been poisoning the city like the plague, and in times of greatest danger, when the air-raid sirens howled eighteen times a day, anyone’s absence was seen as cowardly at best, treachery at worst. Fear abolished the right to individual choice and what little tolerance exists in a big city, even at war, simply disappeared, evaporated into thin air. They were out to get her. The first to attack her was a woman journalist who wrote that M was parading her naked breasts on a Belgrade stage while people were being killed in Croatia. A genuine mud-raking campaign against her ensued, in the press, on television, through the grapevine. Perhaps the worst was the accusation that she was a collaborator, a Mephisto, a Gustaf Grundgens who continued to perform in the theatre after Nazi occupation. Overnight M became an enemy, publicly renounced by friends and colleagues. Had she said nothing or returned to Zagreb, things might have been different. She would not now be sitting in New York, thirty-six years old, without work, without anything, having deliberately given up her profession at the height of her career.

Her face is small, pointed, framed by long hair. Nothing except her face and hands is visible, the rest of her is hidden in a large black sweater and trousers. While she speaks, her light eyes look straight into you and her soft husky voice curls around you. In this prosperous New York apartment on the Upper East Side well isolated from street noise, where none of us belongs, M seems nervous and insecure. She sits straight- backed on the edge of an armchair, never relaxing. She has been here for two weeks now and every couple of days she moves into another apartment belonging to another friend, another acquaintance, another friend of a friend… She and G, her husband, came here straight from Belgrade, they did not even stop in Zagreb to pick up their winter clothes; some friends brought their suitcases and documents to Vienna and so they left, as if it were possible to get rid of the burden of their Zagreb past. She tells me she was afraid for her life and that while she was still in Belgrade she hardly ventured out in the street: it all began with the horror that had set in deep within her, which has not left her since. Now it is the middle of December and M asks me where she could buy a reasonable winter coat. I give her the names of some stores in the Village, but I cannot quite accept the fact that she and I are sitting together in New York and not in Zagreb.

I do not know what exactly took place between the publication of her statement and her departure for the States. She tells me about the letters, anonymous phone calls, insults. She speaks in short, agitated sentences, halts, speaks again. Obviously it was the phone calls that made her decide. The people who called her on the phone did not ‘merely’ threaten: they called her a ‘Chetnik whore’, they graphically, to a detail, described how they would torture her to death, which parts of the body they would cut off. She says she could feel herself die while she listened to the messages, and she heard only a small number – G would not allow her to hear the rest. Her answering machine was full. She was given a dismissal notice from the Croatian National Theatre, signed by the director, an actor who is a war orphan, a Serb from Mount Kozara whose whole family is said to have been slaughtered by the Ustashas in the last war. At first M could not believe it. Then she simply could not stay silent. She wrote ‘A Letter to the Citizens of Zagreb’ and left. Now she says it is for good; I am not sure I quite believe her, because to leave the country forever is like a death sentence, it’s as if part of you has been amputated.

wrote M in her open letter, her defence and accusation at once, a letter which marked the beginning of her journey into exile.

It was a Monday afternoon early in November, when Danas, the weekly that published her letter on two pages, came out. Dull winter rain was falling. Still standing in the street, I opened the paper and began to read and as I read I felt the weight of these words as if someone was just passing sentence on me. I remember reading her words, I remember the long silence which surrounded me in the middle of the city and the muted plop of raindrops falling on the paper.

For days that letter was the talk of the town, nobody spoke of anything else, people excitedly rolled little mudballs over their tongues: the performance was more important to her than protesting against the aggression being shown to Croatia; she may be a professional but she is no human being; how could she, we’re at war, after all. Those in the know explained that her mother was Jewish and her husband Serbian: this suddenly became the key to her case, because if it wasn’t for him – who had obviously made her do it – all this wouldn’t have happened, M was always our little girl, our favourite, our friend, our mistress. Others said she should have returned to Zagreb, nothing would have happened to her. She has blown the whole thing out of proportion, of course, but then she has always been hysterical, hasn’t she? Her colleagues were the loudest, as if by attacking her they could confirm their own political rectitude. It was not so much her defence, her protest against art being reduced to mere propaganda during the war, that aroused their ire. That did not really matter, she herself did not really matter except insofar as she articulated a moral position, a position of non-compliance and individual choice. In fact, now it was those who saw her as a Mephisto whom M was accusing of condoning the war, of being accomplices, as it were. She did not doubt that a different option was possible. Claiming they could have opted for art, M turned from the accused into the accuser and therefore had to be dealt with mercilessly. Talking about her, people actually spoke of their own moral position, of their own reasons for war. An avalanche of emotions suddenly descended upon this one person: the burden of conscience of an entire city lay on her shoulders.

‘I am sorry, my system of values is different,’ she wrote at a time when it was already out of the question to write, to say – even to think – such things because any difference, individual, political, artistic or of any other kind had already been suspended.

It must have been night when she sat down to write that letter. She wrote it in one go, she could not sleep. Outside they were washing the street, the slush of water and human voices rose to the window and then fell back without quite reaching her. The heating in her apartment was already turned off. G slept: he threw himself across the bed and fell asleep in his clothes as if dead tired. She could not sleep, could not shake off the feverish anxiety that had been gnawing at her for days. Then she sat at the kitchen table and wrote the letter. She read it. Like a testament, she thought, while the grey fingers of the dawn crept in through the window.

I carry her letter around with me as my own burden, as an inner picture of the war, as a way of explaining to others what is happening to us and our friendships in the war: how the war devours us from the inside, eating away like acid, how it wrecks our lives, how it spawns evil within us, and how we tear the living flesh of those friends who do not feel the same as we do. It is not enough that death is everywhere around us. In the war death becomes a simple, acceptable fact. But life turns to hell.

I watch her sitting on the edge of the chair, tense as if still expecting nothing but blows. She does not say much, she has said it all in the letter and now she can speak no more. She can only repeat herself. When I mention Zagreb, her cheeks burn red, she appears to be on the verge of tears. She says she does not know what she will do – what can a foreign actress do in someone else’s city? I’d rather wash dishes, she says. Her choice, her life-changing decision is condensed into a single word: rather. For a while we go on sitting in a friend’s apartment in a foreign city and talking about the war. We talk about how the war cannot be escaped by leaving for New York, the war is here, too. The very fact that she has left, that she has changed her life, is also the war. The war has become the pivotal point in our lives and it determines everything else. Besides, an escape also defines you, labels, determines and cripples you. I watch her lovely face aware that this is no longer a face from the movies. But I cannot see the most important things, eyes cannot reach so deep. The loneliness and the desolation of a woman who has lost her profession and her homeland can only be guessed at.

I do not tell her that the Balkan Cinema in Zagreb where she last saw all her friends has changed its name. It is now called the Europa Cinema – the name symbolically conveys the whole meaning of this war.