Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

19

Dusha’s story returned me to a place I hadn’t visited for a long time. I had suppressed the time of Nedelko’s death, and for years that ice cold February day didn’t exist for me. My father had to stay buried deep within me, because he had no other grave, and his death had to remain unreachable to all my everyday thoughts and feelings. Emma, one of my first girlfriends in secondary school, was the only one who managed to pry the information out of me that my dead father didn’t have a grave. She asked me several times how I could live with that. She was telling me about her grandmother, who was left without a brother and father after WWII and who, for over fifty years, yearned for a grave at which she could kneel, light a small white candle; a place to pray at and silently say their names. I kept claiming that I didn’t need my father’s grave, that my father was dead and that his story was finished for me.

So Dusha returned me to where many people keep returning, but from where I had once fled, in order to escape my sadness. As I listened to her tell me about those difficult times, I kept returning to that tree beside the football field, lighting those green firecrackers, one after another, which cracked closer and closer to my legs, until I started putting them on the ground right next to me. If I had had more firecrackers back then, and they would have let me throw them all, I thought, they would have started cracking in my lap and in my hands, sooner or later. I had been driving pain away and at the same time, calling it back. In the end, the part of me that hadn’t wanted to grieve, that had resisted the pain, had probably won.

But now Dusha also woke that other, more sensitive and vulnerable part of me, and I sat there next to her, incapable of responding to her words. She returned me to the foot of that tree by the icy football field, and it all began all over again. Only that this time my father didn’t really die, I just felt like he had died. Died daily, for sixteen years.

I pulled Nedelko’s letter from my pocket and pushed it into her hands.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘From Brčko.’

She took it and started reading. I watched her face carefully, but couldn’t tell anything from it.

‘Who is J?’

‘How am I supposed to know that?’

‘Wasn’t he bringing you his letters?’

‘No. Nobody was bringing me his letters. The letters came by post, and were sent from Slovenia. In ordinary white envelopes, bought and sent from here. Without a name or address. I never knew who was sending them. I thought it was better that way.’

I don’t know if my helplessness really touched Dusha, but I had a feeling that she was apologizing to me, and that she was genuinely sorry that she couldn’t help me.

‘Maybe…’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Tell me!’

‘Maybe Brane might know something. I can ask him to meet you.’

Brane was Lieutenant Branko Stanežič, who used to come to Pula for holidays every summer, and had brought father his plum brandy. Back then he was General Stanežič, the man Dusha had hoped would help her find a job when we came to Ljubljana, but she couldn’t get a hold of him. Although she called him at home and at work, and although even I sometimes spent afternoons by the phone, incessantly dialling his work number, nobody ever answered. In the end, he was just Mr. Stanežič, who began to appear on TV, and replaced his military uniform with a nice blue suit. Soon after that, Dusha finally gave up on him, and I was set free from my redialling duties.

At that time, Mr. Stanežič became an overnight star of round tables and TV panels, and journalists addressed him with visible awe, even though the titles written under his name grew more indefinite by the year, as did his words. At least that was how it appeared to me, trying to see in him the Brane who used to barbecue on the beach with Emir and Nedelko, and fall asleep in the sun after lunch while I, together with his sons, had to move him into the shade, so that he didn’t get burnt. I wanted to recognize the person in him who put on his younger son’s yellow snorkel mask, and gathered tiny shells for hours on end, while his ‘white as that Italian cheese’ butt stuck out of the water; the guy who made us all sing Partisan songs in the evening, before he finally passed out drunk, and Emir and Nedelko took him to his Lada, which we then towed back to Pula, because his wife didn’t have a driver’s license.

But regardless of the effort I put in, I just couldn’t see that funny quasi-uncle in Mr. Stanežič, who liked so much to talk about social changes and democracy, and thanks to whom I still sing ‘Through Valleys and Over Hills’ with a Slovenian accent. Brane was Mr. Stanežič, even when he unexpectedly turned up in the final act of the disintegration of my family, which began exactly the way a tragicomic Balkan story should; with a wedding.

While in all other circumstances it was forbidden, traditional weddings brimmed with men’s overtly-expressed emotions, disastrous hairdos, poorly-tailored cheap suits, awkwardly-tied ties and background music, which was probably used to keep uninvited busybodies at bay. It was a typical Serbian suburb wedding, where a God-forsaken Serbian village moves for the day to Slovenian tarmac and settles among apartment buildings to suitably celebrate the wedding of its ‘son/brother/grandson/nephew/cousin/neighbour’s Slovenian best pal, Dragan’ who, for this occasion, ‘fuck it, found a Slovenian girl, but fuck it, may he be happy and live long and healthy.’

Wedding guests’ cars which, from our balcony, looked like overly-decorated wheeled wedding cakes, took over our square, and the accordion played in the parking lot for the disabled, and people who came from very far, with their hard-obtained visas, to walk my mother from one entrance to the other, all howled the ‘song of their homeland.’ At the same time, they were passing around a hipflask of schnapps, and hastily preparing themselves for the gala event, which they anticipated would be the indisputable peak of their partying careers. Young women, who had successfully turned into their mothers, with a lot of help from lipstick, danced arm in arm to folk music in front of the bike storage space. Young men who, for this occasion, replaced their mandatory tracksuits with their fathers’ oversized blazers, applauded them from a safe distance, while their sweaty uncles offered them drinks, and proudly patted each other on the back. Aunties of all ages adjusted their over-tight dresses, pretending that they didn’t care that they couldn’t buy a new custom made outfit for this occasion, which their moustached husbands had been promising since 1987. A few children, decorated like Christmas trees, ran around, and young dads had to catch them before they ran off into the street, and all the while two girls took pictures with twenty different cameras.

The accordion player was just carrying out a music request made by ‘uncle’ Blagoja from Geneva, and the oldest wedding guests wound back to ‘the good old days’ with the sounds of the ancient hits, when I came out of the apartment building with a scared and confused Dusha, and suddenly found myself in the midst of this pack of the most foreign people I had ever had the chance to meet.

I was fifteen years old, and everything in this world was a nuisance, but that my mother got married in front of everyone at a public gathering of Serbian migrant workers most resembled, for me, a recipe for a social suicide and lifelong virginity. So by way of protest, I put on the rattiest pair of jeans I had, and sagged them even lower below my arse than usual. A Chicago Bulls cap was on my head, with the clear intention of suggesting to these retards that there was a world out there which was versed in the wonders of electricity and tap water and Michael Jordan.

The final touch to my wedding attire was a pair of earphones in my ears, which would have thrown Dusha off track on any other occasion, but on her wedding day she didn’t even mention them, because she was simply not interested in me on that occasion, nor anybody else, for that matter. That day, she was just an indifferent observer of the circus parade that, waving Serbian flags, first stormed Ljubljana Castle for the civil ceremony, then invaded an orthodox church in its wedding zeal and, for the grand finale, took over a factory canteen on Airport Road. Somewhere between deteriorating industrial plants and the railroad, we were welcomed by freshly-roasted piglets and even more freshly-tanned singers and seven less-than-freshly-uniformed waiters who, yawning with great dignity, served two kinds of food and three kinds of drinks.

All this time, Dusha’s thoughts were elsewhere, but her absentmindedness was interpreted by Serbian guests as immense happiness because she, a Slovenian, was marrying a genuine Serb. Her silence was justified with the notion that the woman couldn’t get over her good luck, and at least three proud owners of a bouffant hairdo swore that they had also been beside themselves on the most important day of their lives, and that they hadn’t been able to speak for three days after their weddings for all the excitement. So Dusha just nodded and smiled, while the horde of drunken Serbian uncles, cousins and other hairy slobs, most of who were not actually related to any of us, passed her around, and their wives gave advice for a successful life alongside a ‘piece of good Serbian meat.’

The newlywed Dragan managed to get close to her that day only to put the ring on her finger and swear that he took her to be his lawfully-wedded wife, and then he was kidnapped again by his ‘relatives,’ so that they could tell him, while consuming litres of the strong stuff, as many Balkan jokes as possible, all at the expense of that naive moron who had allowed his woman to convince him to get married. But unlike Dusha, Dragan accepted this game with open arms, and he was drinking and dancing and — probably the worst realization for her — was no more refined than the other participants in their celebration.

On that miserable day, I was too offended not to gloat over her poorly-hidden appalled gaze, as she watched her new husband, shirt widely unbuttoned shirt, stuffing German Deutschmarks into the shirt pocket of the accordion player and, hugged by two friends, yelling ‘This is our last eveniiiiiiing,’ and then sending her drunken kisses from the other side of the factory canteen. I was too young not to enjoy her nose-dive, although even today I’m overcome by a special kind of discomfort, whenever I think of the slightly over-age bride, sitting alone at that long wedding table, full of gnawed pork bones and plastic glasses, kindly smiling at revellers inviting her to join them in the Kolo dance.

The only extenuating circumstance for me was that these merry Serbs correctly recognized in me a creature from another planet and that, after a few failed attempts to communicate, quickly gave up. They let me sit in the corner with earphones in my ears, giving them the opportunity to develop theories about ‘how the West destroys children,’ and establish that ‘it’s completely logical that we couldn’t live with them.’ This was the first time I found myself in the role of a representative Slovenian as I obviously was in the eyes of the Serbian guests. Despite this, that was an endlessly long and exhausting day for me, and when Dusha finally approved my departure, I left without looking back on those few drunks who wanted to say goodbye to ‘Dragan’s new son,’ after our unforgettable gathering, with kisses and hugs.

At the exit, my path was intercepted by the quick steps of a mystery man in a nice blue suit, who had spent the evening quietly sitting in the corner of the hall, and only when he stood right beside me, did I recognize a familiar face from the TV. Mr. Stanežič asked me if I knew who he was, and then he had a weird ten minute friendly, patronizing speech about how I should allow my mother to get on with her life, and that I would understand her when I was older, and that my father would have surely wanted this, if he had still been alive. I didn’t listen to him, and I didn’t take the bit I did hear too seriously, because I was convinced that he was just another person who had consumed a litre or two too much that night.

A little later, I carried out an immediate self therapeutic detox at home, with a combination of cranking up my favourite band, Public Enemy, and watching some German soft-core porn, which assisted my masturbation, before I finally fell asleep on the couch in front of the glowing TV. This was an urgent fade out, in which Grandmaster Flash and bouncing German boobs joined forces to erase all the images and sounds of the past day, including the voice of Branko Stanežič.



For four days and five nights of Dusha’s honeymoon in Montenegro, in the peace and quiet of the empty apartment, I figured out that I was none the lonelier alone than I was with her, and that nothing I could call a family existed in this world. My father was still dead, my mother was lost, and I came to the conclusion that I didn’t have anyone who would ask me, with genuine interest, how I was, what was bothering me and what my problems might be.

My primary school classmates, including Daniel, had scattered, overnight it seemed, to their respective carpentry schools and schools of commerce or postal services, and other vocational secondary programs, while I ended up in a grammar school, among the unknown faces of young men and women from various small towns, where the most carefree children of this world lived, children who had never heard of Arkan, or known in which country smouldering Vukovar was located. These kids watched me in awe, because I was from a bad part of town and because my name was Vladan Borojević, and they would’ve been unable to see the difference between me and other guests at Dusha and Dragan’s wedding. I had nothing in common with these kids, who had counted numerous friends before the school year even began. Compared to them, my ex-classmates, who wore sweaters stuffed into the widest pants, listened to techno and folk music, and were ready to fight if someone didn’t believe them that a child must, by law, be baptized, seemed like completely unrelated human beings.

Kids from the high school skied in France; they played tennis; visited European capitals; skated and tried pot. They were kind and clever and they listened to professors during lessons, and were afraid of unannounced verbal tests and unexcused absences. Those kids couldn’t care less about Serbs, Croats and Muslims, and most of them didn’t even distinguish between them. They didn’t ask each other about their fathers’ names, and didn’t fight about who started the war in Bosnia. They didn’t have cousins who had been drafted into the army, uncles who were left without their legs, grandmothers and grandfathers who were exiled, or aunts killed by grenades. Grandmothers bought these high school kids scooters, uncles promised them jobs in their companies, and cousins lent them their course notes.

To find a friend among them was even harder than to keep in touch with the classmates from back home. While Dusha was enjoying her honeymoon, I didn’t have anybody to call up and meet with after class. I was somehow isolated from the world, stuck in our small apartment, thinking about my loneliness and feeling sorry for myself long into the night. I impatiently waited for midnight, when the porn program started, distracting myself with unenthusiastic masturbation, and slipping into deeper depression after each orgasm. It would be an overstatement if I said that I missed my mother, but in some weird way I was pleased with her presence, when she returned and took her part of our common space.

It was at this point that I decided to run away, even though I was totally unprepared for such a move, without a detailed plan, no idea where and how. But at that point, it seemed this was the way forward. I was fifteen years old, and I felt I was old enough to take care of myself. It seemed to me that all I still got from my mother was lunch money. The only thought running around my head, while I packed my things to leave for the unknown, was that I would soon have to make my own rent money. That I would soon have to start working.

These feelings interrupted my growing up, and forced a decision in me to go out and live in the world of adults, by their rules. It was a kind of teenage rebellion, which no one was there to nip in the bud. When I was banging my hot young head against the wall, no one sobered me up with two slaps, and explained to me how very idiotic this idea of my independence was, and how devastating it might turn out to be for me.

Offended as I was, throwing my stuff into a bag, I probably looked like a schoolboy getting ready for his class trip. Dusha probably didn’t even take me seriously, but thought that I would come back as soon as I had calmed down a bit, and that we would talk in peace then. I seriously doubt that she would have let me march out of the apartment, if she had felt for a second that I wasn’t going to come back. But Dusha couldn’t have known that, because even I didn’t know exactly where I was headed. I only wanted to get away from her, away from the traitor, away from everything, and I had no idea how far my childish flight might take me.