Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

9

Sixteen years later, Misho’s answer accompanied me like irritating music, all the way from Goražde on to Novi Sad, on those bumpy Bosnian and Serbian roads. This ten-year-old, a year and a half my junior, knew very well back then what he was talking about, but I decided to be ignorant. Every kid, no matter how young, would have found out, sooner or later, that an officer of the Yugoslav Army in the ‘field’ in Slavonia could only be there to kill Croats, even though at the Radović’s house, the TV only indicated when Serbs were in danger. Now, when I think back on it, Dusha at least anticipated all of this, or maybe even knew that such killings brought an end for those who were killed, but never for those who killed. I was sure that, on those muggy August days, surrounded by ever more ferocious news, Dusha was, night after night, inconspicuously saying goodbye to her husband, and squeezed on the couch between the Radovićs and Gojkovićs, was gathering strength to set off on a new life. The strength to escape the madhouse, where the television helped lunatics to believe they were normal, day after day.

I drove on the bridge past Petrovaradin Fortress, and my gaze dived into the invisible currents of the Danube River. Novi Said, which awaited me on the far side, was still a charming town, despite its eternal searching for better times. I circled its dusty streets and tried to discover places I’d last seen sixteen years ago. This way I intentionally avoided reaching my destination, in front of Danilo Radović’s home. Instead, I watched the people of Novi Sad walk around their town on a beautiful winter’s day, from the warmth of my moving shelter. With swift steps adjusted to the parasitic Pannonian cold, they moved from ‘the hairdressers to the bakery to the market to the Chinese shop.’ I had never seen these people wrapped up in scarves, and I didn’t recognize them in this flat icehouse as the people from my memories.

My gaze soon shifted from the faces to the walls, which were scrawled in writing. The once beautiful walls of Novi Sad, poorly hidden behind crowds of rushing citizens, threatened everyone: Hungarians, Albanians, Croats, Gypsies, Fags, Undertakers… The walls of Novi Sad believed that Kosovo was Serbia, that General Maldić was a hero, that fags were sick and, above all, that ‘Only Unity Saves the Serbs.’ A new war raged upon these walls, between spray-painted Chetnik symbols and Nazi swastikas, while locals had clearly grown used to them, and walked past without taking any notice. Perhaps once they used to say to each other, ‘Leave them to their graffiti, they’re just kids,’ then grew silent and looked away from the writing on their ancient walls, the backdrop to their own town, and convinced themselves that this was none of their business, looking to the ground and thinking, ‘Rain will wash this away.’



I climbed up the stairs which Danilo had once enthusiastically dragged me up to his apartment. The stairway was just as savaged by negligence as it had been back then, and memories vividly leapt before my eyes, as if nothing had changed in all these years. Even my present fear, which mounted with each stair, was like an echo of the fear I experienced during that first visit.

This time, my arrival was unannounced. I wasn’t the touted son of Nedelko Borojević, Danilo’s first cousin once removed. My ties with the Radović family had long ago been broken, and I approached the apartment as a stranger. According to unwritten rules, and people from the Balkans adhered more to unwritten rules than written ones, I should not have shown up without a gift in hand. But the rules in this place no longer applied to me, or so I told myself, and my inappropriate guest behaviour would probably be chalked up to the perverse world I had just driven in from. ‘This is how things work in Slovenia,’ they’d say and, at best, wonder what irreparable damage had prompted the beautiful little boy who had once lived with them to ‘become a skier,’ as they said of the Slovenes, referencing their love of this sport, so unimaginable for those who lived on the plains of Slavonia.

What will give me away, I thought, is my instinctive move backwards after the second greeting kiss on the cheek, forgetting that Serbs always give a third. What will give me away, I thought, is that I won’t hug and squeeze my cousin Jovana, as was appropriate in this touchy culture, instead offering my hand, like a banker who had just increased my credit rating. What will give me away, I thought, is that I’ll keep addressing Danilo and Savo formally, even after they will have said to stop this Slovenian nonsense, because I was one of their own, and should only use the informal form of address. What will give me away, I thought, are the thousands of trivialities, which, now more so than on my first visit, divide me from these people, make me different and foreign. As I stood before the front door of Danilo Radović’s apartment, I felt more Slovenian than ever before. I was Slovenian head to toe.



I couldn’t hear a thing from beyond the door. I was pretty sure that meant no one was home, because otherwise at least one member of the howler monkey family, surely the loudest in the Balkans, would be heard? I was about to turn and knock on the neighbour’s door and ask about them, when I heard steps coming towards me, soon followed by the sound of a lock being slid open. The door opened a crack and I saw a skinny old man who could only be Danilo, though he looked nothing like the Danilo of my memories.

‘May I help you?’

‘Danilo?’

‘Yes, I’m Danilo.’

‘It’s me, Vladan. Vladan Borojević. Nedelko’s son.’

The old man did not respond to my words, and his dehydrated, wrinkled face was unreadable. He seemed to be studying me with his gaze, still peeking from behind the half-closed door. Then, suddenly, he approached, so close alongside me that I could fell his mildly unpleasant breath, and looked right at me. He seemed to be digging through the archives of his memory; but in vain. I thought that maybe he was a victim of early senility, and that I had irreversibly slipped away from his past.

But then Danilo gently leaned his small head against my chest, slowly wrapping his veiny arms around me and began hugging until I hugged back.

‘Vladan… where did you… why didn’t you call and tell me you were coming… holy fucking shit… ’



Life had stopped in the apartment of Danilo Radović: each piece of furniture was still just where it had been, as if no one had touched anything in all these years. An out-of-date wall calendar was still affixed to a cupboard door with tape. The phone was still perched on a stool in the hall, and the mirror had never been mounted but just learned against a wall. The apartment was littered with awkward silences, which reminded me of the sleeping Jovana and the eight kitchen-whisperers, which had highlighted the gaping emptiness, placid and dead, like a bad still life.

I followed Danilo into the kitchen, where leftovers were laid out on the table for lunch, or at least something that looked like lunch. The smell of food was a week old, and the stove spoke of someone driven into the kitchen by a life emergency.

‘Sit down, Vladan, my boy, sit down. Well… why didn’t you call and tell me you were coming?’

Danilo quickly moved the dishes from the table to the sink, which was already stacked high, but he somehow managed to slip in a plate and saucepan. When he had squeezed in the saucepan, he waited a moment, to see if the dishes would remain in place or ooze onto the kitchen floor. Then he removed a full ashtray from the table, swept the breadcrumbs to the floor with his hand, and tried to kick them under the table without my noticing.

‘Oh my, what can I offer you now?’

‘I’m fine, Uncle Danilo. I’m not hungry. You can just sit down.’

‘Do you want me to put on some coffee?’

‘Sure.’

‘Coffee it is. And a glass of schnapps. Which would you like more?’

‘We can have schnapps.’

‘You drink one for me, I mustn’t drink it. But we’ll have coffee together, okay?’

He buzzed around the small kitchen, wearing confusion, opening and closing drawers and cabinets, unsure where he kept his copper coffee pot, where he’d left his coffee, where he stashed the sugar. He tried to dig up a coffee spoon from a mound of unwashed dishes, gave up, then went back to it with no more success than before. I watched, wondering what had happened to him in all these years, why he no longer looked like the man I remembered. He was emaciated almost beyond recognition and his once round face was now inhabited by haggard age.

It was sad to watch him, as he seemed almost intentionally neglected. His hands shook as he turned on the gas stove, as he heaped coffee into the hot water, as he poured schnapps into a teacup, apologizing that he had nothing else on hand to offer. His pants were too wide and his over-large shirt was stuffed awkwardly into them. He had lost all his former savagery, eaten his former pride and, for someone who once appeared to be an inconsiderate tough guy, he had folded into this humble little creature who could not even hide his misery from an unannounced visitor.

‘Vladan, my child, what are you doing here?’

‘I’m looking for Nedelko.’

‘What? Here?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘But… he isn’t in Novi Sad.’

‘I thought you might know where he is.’

Danilo poured us some coffee and finally took a seat beside me. Now his eyes began to hide from this man on the hunt for a war criminal, and I had the impression that I had scared him.

‘He was here once, but that was… back then.’

‘Did he keep in touch?’

‘Are you hungry? I can go to the shop… ’

‘No need. Please.’

‘Is the coffee okay?’

‘It’s okay.’

‘Would you like some milk?’

‘No, I’m fine.’

‘Here’s some sugar.’

‘No thanks. I like my coffee bitter.’

‘Just like Nedelko.’

I looked at this man, a heap of smoking bitter blackness, and he put his weak hand on mine. He slowly squeezed it and tried to smile at me, as if he wanted to show that he was pleased I was there with him.

‘Did Nedelko happen to get in touch with you? Later, I mean.’

‘I hope you don’t believe all this.’

‘All what?’

‘This crap he’s being framed for.’

I could only shrug my shoulders. Danilo’s words suddenly made me feel uncomfortable. I was overwhelmed by this feeling of guilt, with the realization that this hadn’t even occurred to me as a possibility. I hadn’t instinctively defended my father, hadn’t relied, for a moment, on what I had known about him. The thought that my father was indeed responsible for the murder of innocent people sent shivers down my spine, but I didn’t even try to escape this unbearable idea, never slipped into denial, never tried to convince myself that it must be a lie.

Unlike me, Danilo was my father’s ally.

‘Don’t believe it, my dear Vlado. Don’t believe it, please. It’s all part of their game.’

In some strange way, Danilo’s words felt good, and encouraged a now mounting desire to believe in them, to hide my doubts and fears behind them.

‘You can see that they’re chasing anyone they choose. You know that there is no war without victims. And besides… In that army of his, maybe there were even a few real soldiers, but most of them were ordinary people whose families had been killed, or their houses burnt. They were desperate, poor devils without anyone, without homes. And now you tell me how to forbid such people to take revenge.’

He believed his every word, and gave the impression of a speaker re-articulating well-circulated thoughts.

‘If they’d like to sell this story, they should begin at the beginning, and ask themselves who killed those families and burnt the homes of Nedelko’s soldiers. But they don’t want to do that, because it ruins the foundations on which they’ve built their lies. So they need Nedelko, a so-called mass murderer with a grand plan to obliterate the poor and the innocent. This is a cleaner morality play, not the whole story, from beginning to end. They need a cartoon villain, a Serbian general who appears out of nowhere and starts killing women, children, and old men, for no reason. Because this is the only way their version of truth can exist, the idea that only Serbs fought and killed. That’s why they made up that Hague Tribunal of theirs; so they could imprison one Serb after another. Because of this simple story about evil Serbs, that serves all their interests. No one wants to combine three stories in order to get the real picture about what happened. Then we would see who they really are. And what they did. Only then would the right questions be asked.’

For the first time since walking into his apartment, Danilo showed signs of life. His eyes glowed. He had rediscovered the meaning of his own existence once more inside this story.

‘In this war, no story is told from beginning to end. They always speak about Srebrenica. But never of the Serbian villages above Srebrenica, and of those who slaughtered, raped and burned there.’

Danilo poured a finger of schnapps into the glass on the table and immediately downed it, as if unaware of what he was doing. He was completely absorbed in his story, re-convinced with each fresh utterance.

‘You need to know what their goal has been since the very beginning. Since Kosovo. Their goal has always been to break Yugoslavia up and buy it for peanuts. Tito wouldn’t allow this, and neither would Milošević. When it couldn’t be done the nice way, it had to be done the hard way. They couldn’t buy up all of Yugoslavia, because we were too big and powerful, so they started breaking off little pieces. What’s easier than buying those small shitholes: buying up little Kosovo, Slovenia before that, Montenegro tomorrow, Vojvodina and Herzeg-Bosnia. Divide and conquer, that’s been their plan all along. But Serbia, the largest and strongest, refusing to sell itself, they first proclaim as the aggressor, then call it a fascist state, accuse it of a million war crimes, kidnap its president and, in the end, when the poor thing collapses, take it for free, bring in a quasi-prime minister, that pushover Đinđić, and all the while pretend that they are saving Serbia from itself. It’s all part of their plan, my Vladan. They’ve bought us all. As you can see, they’re saving us from people like Nedelko, but you and I and God and the people know that no one needs saving from people like him, that he fought for his country like any true soldier should. You see, everyone is allowed to fight for his country, except us Serbs. We, who fought for our own, were labelled as the aggressors, invaders, criminals.’

Danilo’s voice grew fragile again, and his irreparable spirit flickered through. His narrative had brought him back to life and exhausted him at the same time. His withered appearance was in stark contrast to his increasingly hostile words. Now he looked more like the helpless old man recounting his adventures to his grandchildren in a trembling voice. A strange calm spread over his wrinkled face, which surely could not have been linked to his words. At the same time, I felt that his angry words brought him a measure of comfort; that the longer he talked, the more pleased he appeared to be. At some point, I wasn’t sure if he would stop.

‘Has Nedelko contacted you at all?’

‘A year ago was the last time. He was already afraid my flat was bugged. You know, when you can hear yourself in the receiver? This always happened when he called, and supposedly means your phone has been tapped. So he didn’t call again. He only called when Sava died. He apologized that he couldn’t attend the funeral. As if I didn’t know his predicament.’

‘And do you know where he is now?’

‘I was hoping you’d tell me.’

‘Why me?’

‘Well… ’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I thought he’d gone to Slovenia?’

‘Why?

‘I don’t know. I had a feeling. He probably said something that made me… I just… I don’t remember anymore.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘What do I know? He told me he had to get out of here. I know that. And he mentioned you, so I thought… ’

‘How did he mention me?’

‘Oh, Vladan, that was such a long time ago… ’

‘Please.’

He tried to remember. He wanted to remember Nedelko’s words, but in the end he just shook his head. He was sorry for me, because I had betrayed my hope, but it seemed he felt even sorrier for himself, silently observing the life as it leaked out of him, silently swearing at the adversities of old age, which had clutched at him too early. My hope quickly faded, and soon all I wanted to do was help this sad man to regain a bit of his self-respect before I left him.

‘How are Jovana and Misho?’

‘Jovana’s in America.’

‘She is?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how’s she doing?’

‘Well… okay, I guess.’

‘Where in America? In which town?’

‘Who knows? She moved again last year. Seatl… or something.’

Danilo was crawling back inside himself and closing the door. That little life which had accumulated in him now receded, and not even the mention of his daughter could wake anything more. The more the story was his, the more it should inspire him, the more he seemed to pull away from it, the more lifeless the telling.

‘What about Misho?’

‘He’s in Belgrade. He’s into books.’

‘And how’s he doing?’

‘You think I know? I’m not allowed to ask him anything.’

This time he couldn’t hide his disappointment. A picture of his life was coming together, an image drawn on the outlines of his exhausted face that had aged too early. With the years, his apartment that had once burst at the seams with life was now a graveyard scattered with the bones of unfulfilled dreams rotting together in the ominous silence. His time came to a static halt and he, caught up in his fear of tomorrow, couldn’t muster enough strength to push forward. I thought how this man, who seemed to have lived on the safe verge of the war, had never really seen it end. Unlike Jovana, he was too old to escape to the other side of the world. It was now impossible to tell if he had been guilty of anything. I didn’t know him well enough to know if he deserved the carcass in which he lived but, as he soullessly sat across from me, he seemed like another one of the many innocent victims of that endless madness.

‘Sit for a while more.’

‘I can’t, Uncle Danilo. I need to get to Ljubljana. It’s a long way.’

Danilo smiled and nodded. This was just another in a long line of defeats, small and large.

‘Take it slow. The police are on the roads.’

‘I will. Thank you.’

I got up and headed to the door, while Danilo remained at the table. It seemed that he didn’t even have the strength to see me off with his gaze. I grabbed the doorknob and turned to him once more.

‘Do you happen to know the story of Milutin and Agnes?’

He got up without looking at me. While he approached, I caught sight of that green telephone that still sat on the small table in the hall, where Dusha had stood when she had spoken to Nedelko. Suddenly I saw her stop for a moment on her way to the kitchen, to stare at the thing that hadn’t rung for days, and I saw that offended expression of hers, with which she inspected and accused the silent green device. And I remembered that, when I had seen her at that time, it was clear to me that we wouldn’t wait for it to ring for much longer.