Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

14

The day I met Daniel, my only real friend in primary school, I was pushing my way through a crowd of children, my head bent down, hoping no one would notice me and I might slip through the day, and then the year, and remain ignored. It was the first day of school, and the children in front of the school gates were happy to see one another again. I didn’t dare speak, nor attempt any Slovene, and certainly not in my native language, though I realized that most of my new schoolmates understood Serbo-Croatian very well, and probably spoke it too. I was silent, wandering around the school and looking for Class 5. I found it, entered and stood in a corner by the window, waiting.

My new classmates entered behind me, looked at me with surprise and waited for someone to introduce the new kid. The next ten minutes were excruciating, and I cursed myself for not having waited for the teacher to arrive, back in the relatively safe haven of the crowded hallway. But it was too late, and the gazes piled on, some kids even pointing fingers at me asking me who I was, and what I was doing in their class. Luckily, none of them decided to come closer. Standing stock-still, my gaze dancing away from the many eyes that were upon me, I probably looked sufficiently weird to prompt the others to keep their distance, waiting for Mrs. Juvan without saying a word to me.

‘Oh, here you are, Vladan. You’re Vladan, right? Why didn’t you come to the faculty room to see me? You understand Slovene, don’t you?’ My saviour went right for the jugular as she entered the room.

Mrs. Juvan was a history teacher obsessed with good manners who, as I would soon find out, spent most of the lesson on the battle of Thermopylae informing us ill-bred little gremlins that it was not appropriate to spit on the floor, throw firecrackers into bowls of food, beat up the kids from the younger years, move fire extinguishers around the hallways, hide people’s shoes in toilets, claim that eating three hot dogs constituted a snack, grope our classmate Alma, call the biology teacher names, wee into the bushes in front of the school, escape tech class through the open window, and so on. Mrs. Juvan briefly introduced me to these classmates, saying that I had moved from Pula and was still learning Slovene, inviting them to help me with it which, who knows why, provoked showers of laughter throughout the room. Then she sat me down in the third row, next to Daniel.

Daniel Šehić definitely didn’t teach me much Slovenian, because he could hardly wait for any excuse to speak Bosnian with someone at school. He thought that I was cool right away, and saw a potential friend in me, which meant that he refused to beat me up, even if he was in a foul mood and everything was getting on his nerves. Instead of teaching me Slovene, Daniel taught me the Bosnian variant of ‘our’ language, translated unfamiliar expressions for me, all the while alternately scorning and admiring my Croatian. He regularly shared my unusual Croatian words with classmates, especially with fellow Bosnians Boris and Ermin, so they might all have fun at the expense of my strange accent and incorrect use of ‘southern scum Serbo-Croatian,’ as the language was called in our area. There were only a handful of phrases from my language that were considered generally acceptable to use, and Italian words, unlike Turkish, were totally inappropriate. So Daniel, Boris and Ermin teased me for days on end, every time I made what they considered a mistake.

But Daniel did teach me a set of precise rules on nationalism that he had mastered. On the first day, he asked me my father’s name, and on the second he explained that I was a Serb, because Nedelko was a Serbian name, and so was Vladan, and that it didn’t matter that my mother was Dusha, because nationality was determined by the father. He was a Muslim because his father was Muslim, and said that Daniel could just as well be a Muslim name, and that he should’ve been called Adnan, but that his stupid mother didn’t like it. Daniel, who should’ve been Adnan, also told me that there were seven Slovenians, two Croats, three Muslims, eight Serbs, one Macedonian, one Albanian and a few fags who wouldn’t say what their fathers were called, and so were hiding what they were so they wouldn’t be teased.

All this was new to me because, in Pula, we only knew that some people had ‘nonnas’ and others had ‘grandmothers’ and some had ‘grannies,’ and none of us realized that this meant something, but we certainly didn’t ask people what their father’s names were, in order to draw conclusions based on something so bizarre. We only knew that the ones who had ‘nonnas’ spoke Italian fluently, and went to their nonnas every day for lunch, and those with grannies went to visit them in Serbia only during the holidays. Here, the rules were clearly different. Daniel knew perfectly well where everyone was from, down to the Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian villages their parents had emigrated from, in order to take up manual work in Slovenia, and his father, Samir, gladly explained anything he didn’t understand about it.

Daniel was the first person to explain to me, in some detail, what was happening in the disintegrating Yugoslavia, and told me that Serbs wanted to extend their territory into a ‘Great Serbia’ that would extend all the way to Karlobag. Even though no one had the faintest idea where this Karlobag was, he still found it horrible, and instructed me that I should too, despite my being a Serb. Boris also found it horrible, and his mother was from Serbia too, Daniel explained, and said that my classmates, Srečko and Nenad, sitting in the third row, thought that Slobodan Milošević was the coolest and that Great Serbia should extend to our doorsteps, and not only to Karlobag. Srečko even supposedly hit our classmate, Alma, because she said that Serbs were idiots, and Nenad didn’t speak to Denis because he had the Serbian version of the swastika, four Cyrillic Cs, written on his pencil case.

Nevertheless, the biggest problem in the class, according to Daniel, was with Croats, especially Nikola and Andrej, because they thought they were something better than the rest of us, and were all hostile and total nationalists, and so Daniel would fuck them all some day, them and their dull jokes. He told me that I should tell him immediately if any of them talked down to me, and that ‘he’d get them,’ whatever that meant.

Even though a proper miniature civil war, and daily battles over Karlobag, went on in our class, all pre-pubescent nationalist boundaries were forgotten as soon as PE started. We raced: Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Slovenians and the fags who hadn’t told their fathers’ names. We all raced to the gym to play football. There, it was no longer important who was who, because everyone wanted to be on the same team as Milan, who was the best dribbler, and everyone wanted fat-assed Adis to be the goalie, because his fat ass blocked the ball, and Boris liked to play with Nikola, because they really hit it off in attack. I, having been successfully transformed by Daniel from a new classmate from Pula into the ninth Serb in the class, in just a few days, fitted in quickly in the gym and, after a few goals, felt I had been at the school for ages. On the football field, Serbs became strikers, Croats — left backs, Muslims — goalkeepers, and the fags who didn’t want to tell their fathers’ names, were mainly radiators, heating up the bench for the reserves. I was soon considered an expert marksman and competition for Milan in the fight for the best footballer in the class, and I was already in the starting line-up when we played against D class for the first time in the season. And even though we lost that match 5 to 2, Adis came running over to me after I scored a goal and enthusiastically shouted in my face: ‘Keep it up, scum!’

Which meant that I was finally in. I was one of them.



In order for my assimilation into local life to attain perfection, I had to fraternize with the team hanging out in front of our apartment building, and do so all the time. Its recognizable hissing formation was mostly comprised of my new neighbours, with whom I couldn’t establish a connection in any way. They were a year or two older, and they claimed the bike storage space for themselves, after stealing so many bikes from it that people finally gave up on a joint place for all bikes in the apartment building, and reluctantly accepted the change in its usage, as a place for problematic kids to hang out.

Each time I came back from school or the shop, and was making my way past them towards the lift, they examined me thoroughly, and let me know, with their threatening gazes, that only their poor form that day was saving me from a beating that would result in my various parts being scattered around the parking area. They seemed more hostile by the day, and I started avoiding them. I entered the apartment building from the opposite side or waited, at a safe distance, for them to go somewhere, and then ran home.

In those days, a police car often drove in front of our apartment building, and was usually looking for one of the Azizi brothers. Rumour also had it that the Đurić brothers beat up a neighbour who had complained about something. But the funniest was the story of a furious older man, who came, with a stick in his hands, to the bike storage space once looking for Bigwig, a cousin of the Azizi brothers and a Kung Fu coach. Bigwig was famous for a photo of him standing next to Jean Claude van Damme, which he kept in his car. The old man supposedly waved his stick and shouted at Bigwig that his favourite proverb was ‘the bigger they are, the harder they fall.’ To which, according to trustworthy witnesses, Bigwig said, yawning: ‘Granddad, my proverb is: Whoever gives me a hard time will walk around with an artificial leg.’

That was an urban myth that nicely described the situation in front of my new apartment building; where there was no shortage of drugs and alcohol, nor of loud rap music croaking from the former bike storage space, round the clock. The loud music used to regularly be item three on the agenda at the meetings of the Residents’ Council, though it gradually graduated to number two and, in the spring of 1996, even came in on top of the list of problems in the apartment building. But then Zigi’s legendary radio broke down, and miraculously there was peace the whole week.

I almost managed to infiltrate this colourful council of the talented offspring of a variety of local criminals, when Hashim, the youngest of the Azizi brothers, stopped me once, in front of the apartment building when I was coming from school, and asked me: ‘Hey, what’s your name?’ Then he came up to me, pulled a packet of green firecrackers from his pocket, and suggested I buy them from him and then sell them to my friends. As we lived in the same apartment building — he lived on the sixth and I lived on the ninth floor — he would even give me a discount, he claimed, so that I could make loads of money. At least he tried to convince me of all this and, in the end, he sold me, his neighbour, a packet of firecrackers at a price five times more expensive than for his other, regular customers.

I wanted to be a part of this apartment building gang, the bike storage gatherers, so badly, or at least I wanted to know them enough so that none of them would ever beat me up for no reason, that I just didn’t dare turn down an offer to re-sell his firecrackers. Hashim told me that his uncle smuggled them from Italy, and then Daniel explained to me at school that Albanians — and the Azizis were Albanians — bought them for half the price at a police warehouse, where confiscated stuff regularly popped up, and then resold them at outrageous prices. He also told me that, in any case, it was better to be a part of this game, which included the Azizis’ brothers and the rest of the apartment building gang, because they fucked up everyone who wouldn’t buy their stuff. So I didn’t tell Hashim that I thought it was all a scam, or that I didn’t have the money to buy the packet but, instead, I pretended to believe him when he tried to convince me that I was only taking a sort of loan, that I would later sell these firecrackers to my classmates and make big bucks, and that he was really doing me a favour, because we were from the same apartment building: he from the sixth floor and I from the ninth.

So I bought a hundred green firecrackers from him, and was hungry every other week for the next month. I didn’t buy my snack at a shop in the morning before going to school, but my snack money went as instalments for Hashim ’s firecrackers, which I hid under the mattress, so that they chafed me while I slept, and I was always afraid that they were going to explode. But my plan backfired: Not only did Hashim and I fail to become friends, we actually never spoke another word to each other again, and just nodded in greeting from the day of my purchase onward.

When hunger was the worst, I consoled myself that, because I had bought a hundred firecrackers, I was now safe from the Azizi brothers and their thrashings, and so I’d made a good investment in my safety. I tried to convince myself that I was actually their business partner, and they didn’t beat up business partners, but Daniel kept warning me to be careful all the same, because I was a Serb, and Albanians didn’t like Serbs, because of Kosovo. Every time someone mentioned Kosovo, I remembered the driver, Shkeljqim, who was from the same village in Kosovo as the father of Fadil Vokrri, the best Kosovan footballer. I even thought that Shkeljqim could tell the Azizis to leave me alone, because he was my friend. And then I realized that I would never learn what had happened to Shkeljqim, and that some people simply vanished from your life. And each time I thought about my father, and asked myself if he was among them: those who disappeared and were never coming back.