The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War

16 THE WOMAN WHO STOLE AN APARTMENT

I would have never had thought that a timid, fragile girl like her was capable of stealing anything, much less a whole five bedroom apartment. Probably she didn’t consider herself a thief either, which is precisely the problem. But nevertheless, this is what she tried to do.

Ana – although of course this is not her real name – is twenty-six years old and already an accomplished young journalist. She started to write while still at high school. In a way, she was forced to support herself. Once she told me that she was from a poor farming family, from a village about forty miles from Zagreb. When she came here to secondary school, her parents didn’t have money to pay for her schooling in a big city, so seeing no future for herself in the place where she was born, she had to find a way to survive in Zagreb. She started to write for a youth magazine. Modest as she was, she needed only a little money and that was an ideal place to earn it and to learn a profession too. Curiously – curious, that is, only in the light of what she did later – she was interested above all in writing about social issues. It was a very unpopular subject among young reporters who preferred to hang around the city and have fun. If they had a sharp tongue, and could write with wit and humour about movies, books, the theatre or culture in general, they even stood a good chance of making a name.

This is why Ana’s choice was unusual and welcomed by the editorial board of permanent ‘students’ in their thirties who were only waiting to grab an opportunity to start work on a ‘big’, real paper. On the other hand, for anyone who knew her it wasn’t such a strange choice. The first thing that struck you about Ana was her seriousness. Perhaps that’s why she gave an impression of being older than she was. Even if her face framed with limp blonde hair looked childish, its expression was tense and stern and her whole attitude quiet and withdrawn. If she lacked one thing, it was a sense of humour. One always had the feeling that Ana was very dutiful – towards her parents, at school (she was an excellent student), at her job. If her writing lacked style, she compensated for it with accuracy and reliability and she had a feeling for a good story as well. I remember her articles on tramps, beggars, prostitutes, public kitchens and numerous other social injustices that the communist government would have preferred to brush under the carpet. However, the overall impression was that of diligence, of the dutiful pupil.

As soon as she finished her journalistic studies at the faculty of political sciences she started to free-lance for a big political weekly and soon became a staff writer following the same kind of stories there. She was the youngest member of staff and everyone liked her. This was when I came to know her better. I even considered her something of my own ‘child’, someone I especially cared about. I was impressed by the fact that she, only two years older than my daughter, was working for a serious magazine. The other thing that struck me about her was that she had supported herself all through her school and university years.

One day Ana came to me crying. I’d never seen her in that state, usually she was able to control herself and to handle her problems without help. But this time she was desperate: she had to leave a rented apartment she lived in and didn’t have anywhere to move to. It was the beginning of the school year in 1990 and the city was full of students searching for apartments, the worst possible time to be thrown out. By coincidence, my friend – let’s call her Marta – had just moved out of her apartment to join her husband in Belgrade. Although she could have got good money renting it to a foreign businessman for example, she didn’t want to let it but instead was looking for someone to stay there to take care of her valuable collection of paintings. When she asked me if I could recommend someone I told her about Ana. In my view, she was an ideal candidate, young, responsible and without money. I put them in touch and Marta was happy to entrust her apartment to her. Suddenly relieved of the need to search further and with the prospect of staying there for a couple of years at least, Ana was overjoyed.

In the following months the situation on our magazine changed considerably for the worse and Ana left for what she thought would be a better paid job in a new daily newspaper which went down after just two months of publishing. Shortly afterwards, she started to work for another new magazine, a sensational political tabloid, a particular kind of publication characteristic of all ex-communist countries after 1989. I would never have thought she would have been willing to work for such a paper, but I didn’t want to blame her too much because, to tell the truth, there was not much choice.

In the meantime, war had broken out in Croatia and I spoke to her a few times on the telephone. She sounded saturated with emotion, confused and unable to analyse the new political situation, succumbing more and more to the phenomenon of total national homogenization. It was not hard for this to happen to her because, like the rest of her generation, she was not only completely depoliticized (which actually meant a refusal to discuss or understand politics, as a form of rebellion against the then apparently immutable communist regime) but also lacked the education, the intellectual means for analysis of this kind.

During that time Marta was commuting between the two cities of Belgrade, where her husband lived, and Zagreb where she was a professor at the university. When in Zagreb, she stayed in her brother’s apartment. Her brother was a diplomat in one of the African countries, diplomacy happening to be a family tradition. Their late father, a well-known and highly placed party leader in post-war Yugoslavia, served first in the government and then as ambassador to many countries in the West; as a result Marta had spent half her life in Berlin, Rome, Paris, Geneva and so on. In fact, she had never lived for a long period of time either in Zagreb or anywhere else in her own country. She was more of a cosmopolitan orientation, spoke at least four languages fluently and had a lot of excellent connections abroad – a common curriculum vitae for the children of the ‘red bourgeoisie’. There is no doubt that she – as opposed to Ana – was a member of Yugoslavia’s communist elite and so she never suffered from any lack of apartments, foreign travel, books or the company of interesting people. After all, she herself was a philosopher and the author of a number of books, in short a respected intellectual in her own right.

When the war approached Zagreb with the air-raid alarms of mid-September 1991, she wrote about her experiences for Belgrade’s leading liberal opposition paper. Describing the atmosphere of growing fear, suspicion and danger, she wrote:

She goes on to describe her neighbours turning into self-appointed policemen, dirty cellars sheltering people far too ready to collaborate with the war, the way one becomes an enemy. She concludes:

The reaction to her article was as vehement as it was unexpected. It wasn’t the fact that she wrote for a magazine in what was already the enemy state of Serbia, because it was well known for taking a pro-Croatian position anyway. It was more that it was a clear sign that she’d gone ‘too far’ in expressing her individualism, her unwillingness to participate in what she called ‘war games’. However, she had chosen perhaps the most unhappy moment of the war in Croatia: Osijek was being shelled every day, Vukovar had been surrounded and was systematically being destroyed, the blockade of Dubrovnik had just begun, many Croat villages had been burned down and a river of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the occupied territory was flooding Zagreb. Young boys, her students, were getting killed. Yet she had written of feeling imprisoned in the city, as if it were a jail, as if she were displeased with what was going on.

The letters that appeared in the press were bitter: she was accused of cynicism and lack of empathy, but most of all, for equating the victim with the executioner. In the eyes of the public, she had become a traitor, a ‘fifth columnist’. This Marta couldn’t understand, she couldn’t understand that every occasion for public discussion, for intellectual nuances or plain differences of opinion had suddenly been poisoned, usurped, swept away by the war. Under the everyday threat of shelling (between 15 September and 4 November there were forty air-raid alarms in Zagreb, the front line was less than twenty miles away, the presidential palace in the middle of the old city was hit as well as villages on the outskirts of Zagreb) things became black and white. Moreover, she was perceived as a person who wrote from Olympian heights, as someone who had other options, who could go somewhere else if she wanted, while the majority couldn’t even think of an alternative. So the message against her in the media was: Go! Get out of this city and don’t come back!

It was hard to find a single person to defend her position even among the people who knew her. ‘You agree that her apartment should be taken away from her, don’t you?’ I heard one of her acquaintances saying. In fact this was not the first time that her apartment had been mentioned; one of the hate-letters published in a magazine mentioned that she lived in a ‘big, luxurious apartment in the very centre of the city’, as if by living there she’d committed a crime in itself, or as if, having been proclaimed as ‘enemy of the people’, she didn’t ‘deserve’ such an apartment at all.

Now, the story of her apartment is the story of the majority of apartments in this country: they were communal property, state owned. But because the party ruled in the name of the people, it also meant they were, in a broader sense, owned by the people – nominally, at least. In short, these apartments were rented through state-owned companies and in reality no one could take them from a person who had a certain type of contract. One’s children too were entitled to the same rights. Marta, in fact, had inherited the apartment from her father. The proposal I heard from her acquaintance was thus by no means illogical: she was only talking about the typical bolshevik method of stripping her of the right to live there, similar to the method of nationalization or confiscation of property belonging to ‘enemies of the state’ after World War II and the communist revolution in Yugoslavia. This was the mood of the people about her ‘case’.

Confronted by such a violent onslaught Marta was frightened. She finally understood that the war was not happening simply to others, but to her as well and that this was the way she was experiencing it. Words too, she learned, could become a dangerous weapon. As she had already received a six-month grant to teach in France, she left soon after for Paris.

Time passed but ‘Marta’s case’ didn’t disappear under the welter of troubles that now hit Croatia. Periodically her name would pop up here and there in articles discussing, listing or enumerating traitors, dissidents, enemies, cowards and so on. Obviously, this purge of ‘internal enemies’ was an aspect of the war in the city and it was related to something which no one would admit to in words – revenge. Many apartments left by such people were broken into, especially those left behind by Federal Army officers, but not only by countless refugees, but by ordinary, self-righteous individuals who saw a way to solve the problems of their own inadequate living conditions and didn’t see anything wrong in usurping the apartment of an ‘enemy’.

A couple of months after she left, an article by a popular woman columnist appeared discussing the matter of Marta’s apartment. ‘I am very concerned,’ she wrote sarcastically, ‘that poor Marta – so disgusted by Croatia that she had to leave for Paris – might now be permitted to buy a communal apartment from that same disgusting republic. As an ambassador’s daughter, ambassador’s wife and ambassador’s sister, Marta was used to getting everything from Yugoslavia for free. Perhaps it would be good therefore to give her the apartment for free too, so she doesn’t report us to the Helsinki Tribunal.’ The columnist (who knew her personally) concluded that greedy Marta had acquired the apartment at the people’s expense.

Reading this, I realized that the information about Marta’s attempt to buy off the apartment from the state had come from Ana. Not only did Ana live in Marta’s apartment, so she was bound to know about it, but she also worked for the newspaper in which the article had appeared. However, it was very hard to believe that Ana had any reason to give away this type of information, that she would have any reason to do it at all. I then asked around and discovered that Marta had come back from Paris during the Easter holidays to arrange to buy the apartment when the new law permitting that possibility was passed. After living in her apartment for more than a year free and because Ana and her boyfriend were now making decent money as journalists, Marta had asked them if they’d be willing to pay a rent by monthly installments according to the new economic prices set by the government, which wouldn’t cost them more than renting another apartment.

On the telephone, Ana didn’t say a word. But the first thing next morning she went to the special commission of the Croatian Parliament (the official owner of the apartment) denouncing Marta for not even living in the apartment she was attempting to buy, suggesting that she should be denied the right to buy it because she was a war profiteer of a kind and that the apartment should in fact be taken from her. Perhaps Marta should be given a smaller apartment to buy, she added, not the big one she inherited from her father. As for herself, Ana didn’t claim the right to the apartment directly, but she did think she and her boyfriend deserved something. I don’t know if Ana mentioned the word ‘reward’ but this is what she meant.

Having heard what Ana had done, Marta went to a lawyer and started proceedings, first to expel Ana and her boyfriend from her apartment and second, to assert her right to buy it under the new legislation. The problem is, however, that until Ana withdraws the claim she lodged with the government Marta won’t be able to buy the apartment and with an ongoing war, this could take forever. It also means that Ana could continue living in Marta’s apartment (which she is doing) until the case is legally resolved. In the meantime, when Marta went to the same Parliament commission, she found that the file containing her application to buy the apartment had simply vanished, together with the rest of her documents!

In essence, Ana has tried to steal the apartment. Not for herself- and this is the point, because this is where her sense of ‘justice’ comes in – but so that she can give it back to the state, to ‘the people’. She is doing a favour to the state by reporting on a person of communist background, and a traitor too, who doesn’t deserve to have such a luxurious apartment. But this tiny, timid, diligent reporter with a special sense of justice and duty has demonstrated a sound instinct for the realities of war too; in her judgement, this has been the perfect chance literally to take the law into her own hands. Never mind the fact that the apartment was entrusted to her or that she didn’t pay a rent for it. At the ‘right’ moment, when Ana saw that it was possible to act according to the new rules of the game, she was able to abandon any moral scruples. Indeed, when she saw the chance for a girl like herself from the provincial proletariat to get something for nothing, she didn’t hesitate. Given the opportunity, aren’t others – refugees, soldiers, ordinary citizens, even a neighbour in the same building – doing the same? The newspapers are full of stories of this kind, people talk about it in local bars and supermarkets, in every neighbourhood there are similar cases. And what happens to them? Nothing. So Ana must have thought, Why not me? She didn’t see herself as someone who would denounce people in an attempt to profit by it, she didn’t see that she was taking it upon herself to judge who should be left without an apartment and for what reason. But most important of all, Ana wouldn’t have dared do what she did if Marta hadn’t been proclaimed a ‘traitor’. In this way, Ana saw no harm done: the people give, the people take away.

When I discussed the matter with a friend familiar with the case she said to me: ‘Are you sure that Ana was wrong in doing this? When Marta’s father was given the apartment it had most probably been taken from a rich Jew, a bourgeois or enemy of the people during the previous regime.’ This is very likely the truth, but on the other hand Marta’s mother’s family house as well as several apartments were also confiscated and no doubt given to someone else in turn – namely, to someone who ‘deserved’ it because of their achievements during the War. If you want to correct historical mistakes and restore justice – which is not the task of the individual anyway, but of the law – the question is how far back do you go and what is the point in doing it if you allow the very same pattern to be repeated?

However, even the ‘revolutionary law’ of Tito’s partisans was different from breaking the law, which is what Ana did. But if one asked Ana, I am afraid she would see no harm in the ‘new bolshevism’ or her own act. In my view she merely behaved as the dutiful, diligent child of communism. By her act she merely showed she had graduated in the revanchism of the proletariat against its class enemy: this time the communist or ‘red bourgeoisie’ itself. Just as she’d been taught in their school.