Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

11

According to Danilo, my grandfather Milutin was only thirty-two when he had a heart attack, lost control of the company Zastava 750 and veered off the road. He died on the spot, leaving behind a ten-year-old son, Nedelko, and a young Hungarian wife, Agnes. His best friend, a doctor named Miroslav, whose parents had come to Vojvodina from Herzegovina after the war, just as Milutin had, to cultivate land abandoned by the Germans, confirmed to the young widow that it really was strange for such a young man to experience sudden heart failure. But then he had added, ‘the heart may grow old because of what the eyes have seen.’ Agnes then repeated this sentence to anyone expressing their condolences, but never learned its true meaning, because her late husband had never told her what his eyes had seen. Slightly more than two years later, my grandmother died of cancer, which was another thing Nedelko had never told me, as he used to guard stories of disease as if they were state secrets. He didn’t even tell me that, after she had died, a story circulated around the village about a young girl who had been destroyed by sadness, and that the saying, ‘sad as Agnes,’ still existed in her village, although no one remembered the beautiful widow of Milutin Borojević anymore.

So Nedelko was twelve when he moved in with his father’s cousin, Vida, in Novi Sad, his only living relative. Many years later, Vida told him the truth about the Borojević family from the village of Žilica, near Tomislavgrad, which was burnt down by the Ustasha Croatian fascists one morning in 1942. They threw the slaughtered and gunned bodies of eleven members of the Borojević family, onto a pile of corpses several metres high, heaped before their burning houses, then stood and watched what they had done for a good long time, enjoying the scent of Serbian ashes.

At least, this was how Danilo summarized the story told by his own mother. Apparently, she was the only one my grandfather had entrusted the story to, the sad tale of how he had found a pile of death in front of his house, where the bodies of his bodies of his mother, his sister, his maternal aunt and uncle and four of his cousins had lain. At the time, my future grandfather, Milutin, was just ten: a freckled, red-haired kid on his way from the pasture. Just ten years later, he described with surgical precision, how he recognized the killers in their black uniforms from where he was hidden and how, after they had finally gone, he slowly approached the pile, stopped right in front of it, and gently touched the bloody face of his dead mother, to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He watched this surreal scene for a long time, thinking that it was all just a game. Surely it would end soon, and the bodies would become alive again?



This was a story that Nedelko learned from Vida several years later, and which I in turn was now told by her son, Danilo. This was a story about the worst disease of our world, a story of memories which would follow me to Ljubljana, and which I knew would follow me wherever I might go.

‘People remember,’ Danilo said to me, ‘it’s their worst curse.’

His words followed me along the curves of Mount Fruška Gora, across the plains of Ruma, until they were briefly, and violently, interrupted by a Croatian Customs officer. This man, coat-of-arms emblazoned across his chest, saw the meaning of his existence contingent on preventing me from bringing a single bottle of Serbian alcohol into his country, but the mention of Novi Sad stopped him in the midst of his patriotic mission.

‘You’re coming from Novi Sad?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how is it there, these days?’

‘Fine.’

‘That was a beautiful town, back then. Do people still walk along the Danube River?’

‘I think so.’

‘The fuck they do. If you only knew what a beautiful town it used to be. Wonderful. And the girls! I’m sure there are no more girls like that there. It all fell apart. But back then! I still get a hard-on when I see the Danube River on TV. Everything that walked there… if you only knew, Vladan. You can’t see that anymore. Not even in America.’

He returned my passport, but I wasn’t sure that it was a good idea to depart in the middle of his ‘yearning’ moment. Finally, he managed to gesture for me to drive on. I would gladly have been on my way, if my old wreck of a car hadn’t decided to go on strike at that very moment, which likewise interrupted the officer’s wet dreams of Novi Sad, and shifted him back into the role of Defender of Our Universe.

‘What now?’

Luckily, the car realized the severity of the situation and saved us from any potential post-nostalgic aggression from this ‘seagull’ of the left bank of the Danube. I don’t know why, but I’ve always been afraid of people who become emotional in this way. I had a feeling that such seeming tough guys from the Balkans, whom certain gentle songs could coax into tears, were the most dangerous sort of beasts you could find in this unfriendly environment. In my imagination, these song-singers were capable of atrocities, which less emotionally excitable people could ever imagine. I could picture our Customs officer, gently humming along against a backdrop of the shimmering strum of a tamburica, while raping a thirteen-year-old girl from Novi Sad who, for some reason, had been deemed responsible for his inability to walk along the Danube River, arm in arm with his fellow adult female comrades.

Once I tried to describe to Nadia this potentially homicidal emotional state. I called it ‘Infantile Balkan Sentiment Syndrome’ and defined it as an important spice in the irrational fratricide, which was ritually carried out in these parts every fifty years or so. The idea of the last in a series of local genocides, I explained, might have been monstrously calculated, in cold blood, but during its realization, amateur murderers undoubtedly fell into just such a state of yearning; smashing cups and heads at the same time, against the backdrop of mellow accordion music.

That was how I always imagined Balkan butchery. For me, they were never the spiritually-dead executioners carrying out orders from on high. No. In my fears, they were a sweaty, drunken fraternity, punching away to the same beautiful songs that their victims used to listen to while falling in love, the sort of songs they’d dance to at their weddings. This was my metaphor for the war in Bosnia: one big nightmare of ‘yearning,’ one big bloody orgy of mental pain. The revenge of the lovesick, of the twisted and the eternally immature. The local phrase, ‘He who sings means no harm,’ probably entered the minds of these uniformed adolescents, as they sang and shot and threw bodies into ditches and hugged and kissed and bared their sensitive Balkan souls to one another. All this was just the torture and grief of overly-sensitive Neanderthals.



‘You know, he didn’t have anyone, aside from you and Dusha. When they took you away from him, his whole world came crashing down.’

I didn’t know exactly who took us away, and I suspected that this was another in a series of Danilo’s imagined conspiracies against Serbs and Serbia, but the idea that he conveyed still set me on edge. It rang true to the poorly hidden confession that there was a possibility that Nedelko had indeed done some of the things he was being chased for. And also an implicit justification for it.

As I drove, I passed the memorial field for the fallen of the Syrmian Front. Suddenly it shot through my mind that maybe Nedelko had been one of those sensitive sociopaths who, armed with a battalion of fellow lunatics under his command, saw executioners everywhere. Maybe his mind was so clouded by the pain of being apart from his family that he could do nothing but follow the path of his pain, submissively, and sublimate it into a killing spree?

It no longer seemed so impossible that my father should’ve flattened an entire village full of women and children. I saw him watch the raging solders with teary eyes, listening to the inhuman screams of death-row inmates along with the melancholic crooning of some local folk singer. I imagined how entreaties for mercy fell on ears tuned only to old love songs, with their cries merely deepening his emotional hypnosis. Maybe Nedelko really did know how living people burned, how mothers watched their children die, and how beardless soldiers cut down hunchbacked old men, but he couldn’t pull himself away from that temporary insanity anymore. He was drowning in the pain of feeling double-crossed, betrayed and cheated, and he sowed death to punish the life that had taken from him what little he had loved. He was a betrayed lover, husband and father, hunting the killer of his happiness. Maybe Nedelko Borojević, on that Slavonian night in Višnjići, wanted to kill the damned war itself: Chop it, burn it, torture it, maul it, slaughter it, dismember it and impale it on a stake before him. He wanted to destroy everything that had led to it, everyone who had encouraged it, yearned for it, dreamed of it. He wanted to kill all who hated, incited and called upon Death. Nedelko might very well have been killing and burning all this, that night.

Who knows when, if ever, Nedelko Borojević completely awoke from his delusion and, finding himself covered in gore, figured out that instead of the war, he had merely slain thirty-four innocent people. And that even as his fire turned to embers in what had once been a village the war fanned into a flare that spread, unstoppably, across the Sava River.



I stopped on the hard shoulder of the road somewhere between the exit for Osijek and Slavonski Brod, and got out of the car. I could barely breathe. I was working so hard to put myself in Nedelko’s shoes, into his disturbed inner world, that my chest tightened. I was shaking — tears in my eyes — teeth grinding. I slammed the door and kicked the guardrail until it hurt, and then finally I stopped. I screamed somewhere in the general direction of Hungary, where remote houses peered out through the darkness. The road was barren aside from the howl of the wind blowing across the endless Pannonian plain. That thirteenth of November must’ve been a night similar to this one, I thought. A few lights, flickering off on the misty horizon. A village awaiting its end.

I was furious. Furious with the person who had once meant so much to me, but one day transformed into a monster. I refused to believe in my own explanation of his transformation, because I still didn’t want to understand him. Understanding meant justifying, but I wanted nothing in this world to be able to justify his actions, because no personal fate was so horrible that it could justify what he had done.

I wanted to imagine Nedelko as a dedicated soldier who saw erasing a village from the face of the earth as just another military manoeuvre, crucial to attaining an anticipated goal. The thought of an officer strolling between vanishing houses, to check if his soldiers had thoroughly carried out the task imposed upon them, and hadn’t carelessly left a bed-ridden old lady alive, was sufficiently unintelligible, and therefore calmed me down. Such a person could not be understood, and perhaps that very fact comforted me. It was easier to accept the idea that Nedelko Borojević dehumanized himself overnight, morphed into a mechanical murdering machine, and therefore, was no longer my father. It was easier to imagine that there were two completely different people with his name, and that the second was the consequence of some horrible disease or shock or who-knows-what. At that moment, everything was easier than accepting the thought that people had been dying while he had been thinking of Dusha and me.

I was well aware that I had to find him, because he was the only person who could reject this naïve and childish theory, and explain to me what really goes on in a person’s mind, when they find themselves in the midst of a mass killing. Only he could free me from being involved in this dreadful scenario.

And, at the end of the day, he owed me that.