The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

5 ON BECOMING A REFUGEE

When I entered the tiny apartment on the outskirts of Ljubljana vacated by my friend who had fled to France, at first I felt relieved. The window overlooked a quiet green river, late yellow roses were in bloom in a neighbouring garden and on a wooden table near the entrance someone had left a few green apples. That night I could listen to something that I hadn’t heard for a long time, the serene silence of a dormant city sleeping without fear. This is another city, another state, not Zagreb, not Croatia, I kept thinking as if I needed to convince myself that I could relax now, take a deep breath at last. I had left Zagreb temporarily, to give myself a break from the growing feeling of panic, of being caught in a trap. At the same time, I knew perfectly well that I might never go back. The country was at war and I wouldn’t be the first one to leave home for a few days only to lose it all and have nothing to go back to.

But for a long time I had refused to leave my home, even to consider such a possibility. For months and months, ever since January, I could hear its noise coming closer and closer, but nonetheless I still chose to ignore it. I know these symptoms of denial by heart now: first you don’t believe it, then you don’t understand why, then you think it is still far away, then you see war all around you but refuse to recognize it and connect it with your own life. In the end it grabs you by the throat, turning you into an animal that jumps at every piercing sound, into an apathetic being trudging from one side of the room to the other, into the street and to the office where you can do nothing but wait for something to happen, to hit you at last. You learn to breathe in death, death becomes your every second word, your dreams are impregnated by dismembered bodies, you even begin to picture your own end. In the morning you don’t recognize your face in the mirror, the sickly grey colour of the skin, dark circles under the eyes and the pupils unable to focus on any one thing for longer than a second. The war is grinning at you from your own face.

The first week in Ljubljana I felt like a guest in a better-class hotel in a familiar nearby city. I had taken a few books that I was determined to read finally after having postponed reading them so many times; there were some people I knew and could sit and talk with. Nonetheless, I was a little uneasy with the language. Of course, Slovenians and Croats understand each other, so it was not a problem of understanding but of something else, of a particular context. I was disturbed by the look people give me when I started to speak in Croatian. In the post-office, in a shop buying bread and milk, at a kiosk buying a Croatian newspaper I constantly had the odd feeling that whoever I addressed was looking down at me as if I was begging, telling me without a word that I was not only a foreigner now – but a very special kind of foreigner. That week on the Ljubljana news I heard that there were 8000 refugees from Croatia in Slovenia, and it was only the beginning. To the people of Ljubljana, I was clearly one of them. Yet my perception of my position was still stubbornly different. It took me some time to realize that I was no guest. There was only one thing that distinguished me from the ordinary holiday-maker, I thought, the fact that I was glued to the TV screen and radio broadcasts – the uneasiness, the hesitation and hunger all at once while I listened or shuffled through the pages of the paper, the dryness in my mouth while I read descriptions of the mounting toll of destruction, and the sudden changes of mood depending on what I had read that day. I was a news addict and that symptom alone would have been enough to brand me an exile. Except that during my first week in Ljubljana I wasn’t aware that it was a symptom. I thought that what distinguished me from the rest of them was the fact that I planned to go back home soon. I didn’t know that this too is typical.

My first weekend began well. It was a warm blue day, Indian summer. I went to the open market as I would have done in Zagreb on Saturday mornings, trying to maintain the routine of everyday life, because I know it helps. Piles of red pepper, the smell of ripe melons, fragrant honey in small glass jars offered for sale by local peasants, green heads of lettuce, the pungent odour of fish, all gave me a feeling that I was at home there, picking up pears, tasting grapes, touching reality with my hands as if I were privileged, or as if that touch had the power to make me feel alive, present, there.

Returning to the apartment I remembered that I needed to have my shoes repaired, but I didn’t know where to find a shoemender, I hadn’t passed one. I will have to ask, I thought, seeing that by then I had a new kind of need already and I was not prepared for that. This was not the need of an ordinary visitor, but of a person trying to adapt to a city as one gets used to someone else’s coat or shoes as protection from the cold even if they are not comfortable enough. Or as if I had to learn to walk again, only this time forgetting churches and monuments and seeking out instead shoemenders, pharmacies, libraries, discount stores. Perhaps then I realized that I would have to start establishing my life there, or go back home. Soon.

It was on Sunday morning when I finally understood what it would mean to become an exile. I was not yet fully awake when the smell of coffee entered the apartment and gently stirred my nostrils. It was the smell of freshly brewed coffee made in an espresso machine, strong and short, the Italian way. This was just as I used to make it on lazy Sunday mornings, drinking it wrapped in an old pullover over pyjamas while tufts of a milky smog still hung on the hortensias in the garden. Then I heard voices, the voice of a small child asking something and a woman’s voice, answering quietly and patiently. Someone turned on a radio, there were more voices, the window above me opened and I saw hands hanging out wet socks, towels and sheets on a clothes line. A penetrating smell of roasted meat and chocolate cake, a sound of cartoons and children laughing. I looked around ‘my’ apartment: except there was not one thing there that was mine. Only a suitcase not yet emptied and my winter coat hanging in the closet with my friend’s summer clothes (she took winter clothes with her too), which I had put there hesitatingly, hoping I wouldn’t be there in time to wear it because I’d leave before winter, definitely I would. This was not my home, there were no pictures and posters on the walls which I had put there, no books I had bought. There were no dusty book shelves that I was promising myself I’d clean as soon as I had time, nor my daughter occupying the bathroom so I’d have to quarrel with her to let me in. There was no nervous phone ringing together with the sound of a washing machine and a student radio station weaving a fabric of sounds into which I can sink comfortably, because I know it, it is the sound of my own life.

That first Sunday in Ljubljana was empty and white like a sheet of paper waiting for me to write something on it: new words, a new beginning. But I couldn’t. My hands were shaking and I didn’t know what to write. Living in uncertainty, in constant expectancy of what would come next, I knew I had been deprived of the future, but I could bear it. But until that moment I wasn’t aware that I had been deprived of the past too. Of my past I had only memories and I knew they would acquire the sepia colour of a distant, undistinguished event, then slowly dissolve, disappear in the soft forgetfulness that time would bring as a relief, leading me to doubt that I had ever lived that part of my life. The way sun enters my living room in Zagreb, shining on the porcelain cups on the table, the marmalade jar, the butter, the rye bread. The feeling of a wooden staircase under bare feet. The cracking sound in the wall before I fall asleep. My daughter’s rhythmic breathing upstairs, a dog scratching in his basket. Security. Suddenly, in the Ljubljana apartment, I felt as if I had woken up with my hands and legs amputated. Or worse still, as if I was standing naked in the middle of the room, my skin peeled off, stripped of everything meaningful, of sense itself. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it, I just didn’t know.

That evening as I walked along the river an old man passed me by, then returned. ‘I saw you coming with your suitcase the other day, I live in the building opposite yours. Where are you from?’ he asked me. When I told him I was from Croatia his tone of voice changed instantly. ‘I’ve read in the newspapers that you refugees are getting more money per month from the state than we retired people do, and I worked hard for forty years as a university professor for my pension. Aren’t we Slovenes nice to you?’ The irony in his voice was already triggering a surge of anger in me. I felt an almost physical need to explain my position to him, that I am not ‘we’ and that ‘we’ are not getting money anyway. I think I have never experienced such a terrible urge to distinguish myself from others, to show this man that I was an individual with a name and not an anonymous exile stealing his money. I started to explain to him that I was not what he thought I was, but then I stopped mid-sentence, my anger hanging in the air for the moment, then descending to the wet grass below. That dialogue on the bank of the river had nothing to do with us – him, a university professor from Ljubljana, me, a writer from Zagreb. It was the war speaking through our mouths, accusing us, reducing us to two opposing sides, forcing us to justify ourselves. I walked away. But his two sentences were enough to strip me of my individuality, the most precious property I had accumulated during the forty years of my life. I – no longer me – went to ‘my home’ that was not mine.

The night was chilly, the river under the three white stone bridges dark and silent. As I stood there, I realized I was in a no man’s land: not in Croatia any more, nor yet in Slovenia. With no firm ground beneath my feet I stood at the centre of the city realizing that this was what being a refugee meant, seeing the content of your life slowly leaking out, as if from a broken vessel. I was grateful that the stone under my fingers was cool and rough, that I breathed fresh air and I was no longer terrorized by fear. But at that moment, at the thought of becoming an exile, I understood that it would take me another lifetime to find my place in a foreign world and that I simply didn’t have one to spare.