Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

27

After a long time, I awake alone in my bed, and find myself in this blinding and deafening emptiness, which pushes me away from my own thoughts as I try in vain to compose them. I feel like I’ve just emerged into this world, without memories and impressions. Everything is new, but I lay here without expectations, without desires and without any longing to discover what might await me. My town no longer extends beyond the walls of the room. For me, there is only an even larger emptiness than the one I’m stuck in now.

I’d thought countless times about leaving and now, with Nadia no longer by my side, I realize that nothing except fear of other foreign cities is keeping me in Ljubljana. I’ve been afraid of the realization that all the cities in this world are equally foreign, and that the same people walk everywhere. People you can never really know, just as I’ve never known them in this town. For me, Ljubljana has always been, and remains, the town of vaguely familiar foreigners. Here, where my home is supposed to be, nobody misses me. The best witness of this is my phone, which hasn’t rung for the four days and five nights that have passed since Nadia’s last call.

Nadia and I have occasionally spoken on the phone. These have seemingly been conversations about exams, about her home life, about coffee machines, about the weather, about everything and nothing, conversations in which the unspoken has out-shouted the spoken. Nadia hasn’t said anything about our relationship being irrevocably over, and I’ve never told her how much I want her to come back to me. I know my story frightened her, but I also know that I couldn’t comfort her and that, with me, her fear would only grow.

I’m not the kind of person who forms bonds with people. Everybody, slowly and invisibly, has drifted away from me until they ultimately leave me altogether. But still I’ve never felt so abandoned by anyone as I feel abandoned by her. Nadia came close to me, close like nobody before her, but I don’t know how to show her this. And I know even less how to tell her this, and with every broken past relationship, the burden of the unspoken only grows heavier and more unbearable. So I stopped calling her, and I know that soon she’ll stop calling me, too. In the end, you can overcome everything, but you can’t overcome yourself. I’m beginning to believe that each of us is destined to be themselves, and that is all.

Since I got back from Vienna, I often compare myself to Nedelko, recognize myself in him and him in me, and more and more often I think about how similar we are. He was a runaway war criminal and I was an abandoned hero, but I’m overcome by the feeling that my life has punished me the same way his life has punished him. We were both hiding from people, and are caught in the dark mazes of our inner worlds, as if we had both been serving the same sentence. I thought countless times that his crime was my crime, and am slowly accepting it, like I’ve been accepting everything life has brought me over the years.

I return to Tomislav Zdravković’s apartment in Brčko every day, and feel like somebody has locked me in there and forgotten about me. I sense that Tomislav’s great loneliness has swallowed me. I used to be sure that only people chased by great sins, like Nedelko’s, could tumble down into this loneliness. But now, as I wander around Nedelko’s empty hideaway, and look in vain for an exit, I realize that this loneliness is the most devastating legacy, and that it is slowly becoming the loneliness of all of us who remain behind after they are gone, and dream about our own innocence.



One morning I am awakened from this loneliness by Dusha.

‘Vladan, have you heard?’

It’s like I’m getting a call from a Dusha of the distant past. Her voice is the voice of my mother. Not only because of her use of Serbo-Croatian this time, but also because there’s something in this voice that sounds like she is calling me from my non-existent memories, as if Dusha has become my mother again.

‘No. What is it?’

‘Nedelko… he killed himself… They said… They found him… this morning… dead in Vienna.’

Nedelko flashes before my eyes for a second, but disappears again immediately, and everything vanishes. I start running my hand over the bed, as if I want to make sure that the world is still where I’d left it.

‘Hello, Vladan, can you hear me? They told me… ’

‘I heard.’

Dusha goes quiet. I realize that she doesn’t know what to say. When Nedelko died for the first time, she didn’t say anything. But then I hear those short trembling breaths, revealing a person who is about to cry. It dawns on me that, for her, this is his first death, and that she can’t overlook it the way she had overlooked it when Nedelko had died for me alone.

I realize that Dusha secretly loved Nedelko in her own way, maybe even as powerfully as when he was waiting for her with a rose in his cut-up palm, on Platform 2 of Pula railway station. Suddenly, listening to her cry over the phone, I feel sorry for her; sorry for my mother who isn’t allowed to mourn his death in front of anyone except me; sorry for her because only now can she begin her new life; that only now, when so much has irreversibly passed, can she really start her life with Dragan and Mladen.

So, in a strange way, I experience her call as our farewell. When she runs out of tears, the last invisible tie between us, which has separated and connected us for years, will be broken, and we will finally be severed. We will finally live in parallel, mutually untouchable worlds and we will be able to spare each other pain. When she runs out of tears, this will be the end for us, and we won’t look back. Goodbye, she’ll say, goodbye, I’ll say, and this will be the end, once and for all, of a seventeen year game that not only took away my father, but also took away my mother. When she runs out of tears, this will be the end, once and for all, of the Borojević family.



At that moment, I suddenly hear Loza, Emir Muzirović, yelling with his Bosnian accent, ‘Fuck Yugoslavia and God!’ and I see myself in a vague mist, silently asking my mother what the word ‘andgod’ means, and then I see Dusha explaining to me that this is probably a word we inherited from Turkish, and that we would learn about these left-over Ottoman words when we read about the Bosnian Nobel laureate, Ivo Andrić, at school.

Next to us sit three former friends, Nedelko, Emir and Brane. After a missed penalty kick by Faruk Hadžibegić, in the quarter-finals of a world championship, they sit in front of the TV, as if they’ve been waiting for the match to continue, and for Yugoslavs to get another chance.

‘That’s our character for you and one day that will fuck us up. He could’ve spat on anyone he wanted, he could’ve spat on Burruchaga from head to toe, like our Refik did at the World Cup, and the ref would’ve pretended not to see. But he had to spit on Maradona. Because Burruchaga can get spat on by anyone, but only he, Refik Šabanadžović, the Bosnian motherfucker, can spit on Maradona!’ I hear Emir yell.

‘I would’ve understood if he’d spat on Tito’s picture, but not on Maradona. That’s like spitting on football, like… like spitting on God, fucking God and his father!’

His voice keeps echoing in my head, and I stare at Nedelko, as he pours another glass of plum schnapps, saying: ‘That’s us for you, Loza. We spit on God and then it backfires and we’re surprised.’ I stare at his teary eyes and hear Dusha say the very thing she shouldn’t at that moment: ‘When’s the next championship?’

‘What championship?! There’s no championship anymore! It’s oveeeeeerrrr!’ Nedelko screams inside my head, and even Emir is quiet in the living room, staring at his compadre, while Brane Stanežič catapults from the armchair, so that I can distinctly see him wipe away his last Yugoslav tears. While my mother is gently leaning a glass against her lips, approaching my father and gently hugging him. And he, not trying to resist her, wraps his hands around her, and presses her head firmly against his chest. Now I see my mother indicating that I should come closer, and father letting me join their embrace, so that soon his strong hands clutch me.

So there we stand, the three of us, squeezed against each other, and father is squeezing mother and I more and more powerfully, kissing us in turns, and I, with my head against his chest, am listening to his heartbeat. Ba boom. Ba boom. Ba boom. Ba boom. Ba boom. Ba boom.

The remote, faded image of three people hugging in our apartment in Pula grows more and more powerful, more and more vivid, and I suddenly feel someone squeezing me, leaning my head against their chest, so I can hardly breathe that hot air trapped between the hugging bodies.



I try to pull myself away from this stifling image in my head, and start carefully listening to Dusha’s sobbing again.

‘Vla… ’

‘Yes.’

Her breath gets longer and deeper, and everything becomes quieter, until my mother, on the other side of the phone line, becomes completely inaudible, and I don’t know if she hung up, or she finally ran out of tears.