Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

10

I don’t know exactly how many days had passed since that Wednesday when my father had last called and promised to come for us, or whatever else he had promised my mother, who had stood nodding there in the hall, before she finally decided not to wait for a next phone call. Maybe she realized that the country’s unrest would inevitably escalate into conflicts, and that the ‘field’ was just a gentler code for the war which the Yugoslav People’s Army had been preparing all this time, though its soldiers had long remained convinced it would never happen. It wasn’t easy to confess all that had piled up inside her in the days that had passed, or for her to release herself to the interrupted and crackling voice on the other end of the phone line. Especially not in the hall of an apartment that housed nine people, at least one of whom walked past the phone every minute of their conversations.

Until our final day there, the Radović and Gojković families sought to ease Dusha’s sorrow at least a little, but none of them could understand that any military conflict would prove fatal for her, regardless of its duration, who was involved, the number of victims, or the final result. Unlike them, Dusha Borojević was surely aware that a Serbian officer’s wife could wait for her husband only in Serbia. This meant that she was obliged to accept the Serbian side as her own, and Serbia as her homeland. But Serbia was a place she was trying to get away from, as far as possible, all the time. Now it was near impossible for her to hide. Once, when we were trying to fall asleep, despite the pendulous heat, she even said, ‘If I could, I’d leave, just leave, even back to Ljubljana!’ This was proof positive of how confined and hopeless she felt in Novi Sad.

I suppose my mother wanted to convey all this to my father, in those long conversations at the Bristol Hotel, and in the phone calls in the Radović’s hall, where she struggled with being overheard. But by then, he had already been called up and sent to the ‘field,’ and was unable to get himself out of whatever he had gotten himself into. At no point did my father dare tell my mother that he wasn’t able to renounce his uniform or that he would remain an officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, even when it was no longer Yugoslav and no longer of all the people. He probably did not even want to believe what she had told him; preferring to fold himself under the wings of other officers; their opinion preferred to hers, because they were telling him the story he wanted to hear. The story that everything would be over soon, and that things would then be like they had been before.

Who knows where Colonel Emir Muzirović was when he could have still said to him, ‘Go, comrade, run away while you can. This isn’t a war fit for rats, let alone people.’ Who knows, maybe Emir actually did tell him that? But Nedelko didn’t listen to anything but his orders, waiting for the morning when he would again wake from this ugly dream and, lying in his bed back in Pula, turn off the silver alarm clock, a gift from our neighbour, Enisa, for his thirtieth birthday. Unfortunately, my father was always worried about being seen as a coward. He never realized that, in those days, deserting was the bravest and most daring act of all.

His vivid imagination in particular left him hanging, when it might have been all that could have saved him, if only he could’ve imagined a new life, one without a uniform, even if just for a second. Nedelko, officer in the third-largest army in Europe, could never imagine himself as Nedelko, New York cab driver, or Nedelko, Stockholm shoe warehouse manager, or Nedelko, Toronto furniture mover. In his past life, Nedelko could imagine everything, but not without his uniform.

I don’t know when my mother finally realized that the future General Borojević would not give up active participation in uniformed madness. I only know that, at some point, she knew well that the man who would return from the ‘field’ someday would no longer be her husband, and that the main question was whether he would return a human being. Maybe my mother was also looking for an apology for everything other officers’ wives took on as a martyr’s burden — justifying it with their love, devotion, their desire to hold their families together. Was she never able to find it? In the moments of greatest despair, Dusha Podlogar reverted to a rational human being, clinically cold and calculating, a fighter for her own survival. She had decided that she would not be a martyr in her own life story the moment she ran away from her father.

So in the end, the decision to set off for Slovenia was completely rational and well-considered. My mother first presented it to me as such, and I realized, with this news, that the longed-for summer in Pula my friends and I had been waiting for would not come, at least not for me. And then she explained the plan to Danilo and Sava. She spoke in short, clear sentences and appeared so determined that even these hosts, who forcefully maintained their guests out of a special breed of politeness, did not oppose.



The following morning, Danilo came huffing and puffing down the stairs, and yelled from the hall, ‘the bus leaves at five.’ This was like an air-raid siren for the gathered company, who had been hibernating over their morning coffees for over an hour. In an instant, they were on their feet in order to better commence panicking. It turned out that only my mother and I were actually ready to go, while the others either didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe, that we would actually go through with this crazy idea. The day would not pass by without general hysteria, howling and tears, hugging, kissing and pompous farewell words that felt as artificial as the wailing of old ladies at Orthodox funerals. But still, a kind of genuine sadness could be felt among the Radović and Gojković families, which none tried to hide from the gathered assembly.

Something in all this farewell fuss made me, and I suspect my mother as well, feel awful, as we descended the stairs past a long procession of waving, sniffling people, who dragged along behind us. I never considered these people to be my family but, at the moment when Danilo rearranged our luggage for the sixth time in the back of his Zastava 101 car, and lined up with the rest of them at the entrance of the apartment building like a grieving army, they were just that. They were the family I never had, and I was sincerely sorry to leave them.