Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

20

Dusha set me up with a meeting with Brane Stanežič, over at his company’s offices, in a leafy neighbourhood of Ljubljana. I was welcomed by a kind secretary, who gave me some coffee and juice, smiled at me every few minutes, and apologetically informed me that the director’s meeting was going on longer than expected. I had been nervously moving from seat to seat in the grey marble waiting room for almost an hour, before Mr. Stanežič finally appeared and invited me, arrogantly and without apology, to follow him into his office. He was just as official as on TV, and even less recognizable, and I was wondering how much plum schnapps it would need to turn this uptight bureaucrat into the human being from my memory.

He didn’t turn to me immediately. Instead, he started looking through the papers that awaited him on his desk. I stopped at the office door, watching him until he showed me, with this hand, to sit down. Then he buried himself in those papers again and browsed them, always returning to the first one, reading individual sections, comparing them and doing everything a person with a tie can do in his office with a stack of paper. Meanwhile, an unpleasant feeling arose in me that this person was bending over backwards to show me that there were more important things for him in this world than my visit. But then he did me the honour of leaving the paperwork on his desk for a second and turning to me: ‘Talk to me.’

‘I’m looking for my father, Nedelko Borojević.’

His suspicious gaze finally paused on me for a longer period, which I felt was a success.

‘I got some information that he might be in Slovenia.’

‘What information?’

‘My Uncle Danilo is sure that the last time Nedelko called him was from Slovenia. And one of his letters suggests as much.’

‘Yeah. So what do you want from me?’

‘I thought…actually Dusha thought…that you might be able to help me find him.’

‘Well… Vladan, listen. Let me tell you straight away. In Slovenia, we don’t hide people accused of war crimes. It’s very simple. No one here can offer him the logistical and financial support that a person accused by an international court needs in order to facilitate years of hiding. Such support must be institutionalized, if you know what I mean. Saying that Nedelko Borojević is in Slovenia would be saying that this person has the support of local political leaders, or of at least of the local security services. I believe that you realize yourself that this has no logical basis. Such institutionalized support in European systems isn’t really possible, what with the dispersed power, well-organized legislation and efficient supervision authorities, both military and in terms of security. And besides… Vladan, believe me that it’s in no one’s interest, especially for modern political leaders, I mean really in no one’s interest to hide a war criminal.’

His gaze wandered back to the papers. For him, our meeting was more or less over.

‘If that was all you wanted from me, I’m afraid we’re done. As you can see, unfortunately I can’t help you find Nedelko.’

‘You sent Dusha those letters, didn’t you?’

‘I can’t help you. If I could, I would. Believe me. For Dusha’s sake.’

‘You can at least tell me who brought you Nedelko’s letters from Bosnia.’

‘Vladan, I hope you don’t really think I had regular contact with a person accused by The Hague Tribunal, at any time. These are serious accusations. You know?’

‘In his letter Nedelko mentions a person he refers to as J, who brought his letters to Slovenia. He always had a connection here. You just seem to fit the bill.’

Silence misted the room, but this time it was slightly different than the silence into which we had entered a few minutes ago. Brane Stanežič suddenly woke from his bureaucratic comma, and the atmosphere filled with tension.

‘How’s work, Vladan? Still with those vending machines?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are you satisfied?’

‘I am.’

‘I still think you should finish this study of yours as soon as possible, but okay… The important thing is that you’re doing well and you’re satisfied. You have a girlfriend, don’t’ you? Nadia?’

It had been ages since Dusha last asked me what I did for living, and I doubt that she knew about my belated wish to get a university education. I was even more convinced that I had never told her my girlfriend’s name. Which could only mean that Mr. Stanežič knew a lot more about me than he should, and that if he wanted to intimidate me this way, he was doing a good job.

We stared into each other’s eyes, and I tried to hide the fear growing inside me, and reflect back an equally threatening and scornful gaze. But Brane just gave me a benign smile. He had defeated me in his game, and was determined to show me that he was well aware of having done so.

‘Look, Vladan, I know that you want to find your father, and that it’s hard to accept the fact that he’s wanted for war crimes. I understand all that. But this won’t get you anywhere. If you’re asking me, then I’m telling you what I think about this. You’ll find Nedelko when he wants you to find him. Not before. Do you understand?’

‘And what do you think I should do in the meantime? Stare into the air?’

‘I don’t know, Vladan, I really don’t know. Try to live a normal life. That’s all that I can say.’

I couldn’t imagine what exactly that could mean, that I would find Nedelko when he wanted me to find him, and I knew even less how to live a normal life. I only realized that Brane Stanežič was just another dead end and that I was back to square one. So as I drove my car, I had this feeling, all the while, that I was driving in the wrong direction, and the closer I got to my destination, the more tempted I was to turn around. But I was left clueless as to how to continue the search for my runaway father, and I didn’t want to just turn away from all that awaited me at home, not without a plan. So I entered the apartment that day feeling like a loser, walking away from the scene of the lost fight, empty and helpless. It was more than just disappointment, which Nadia accepted as people accept any unpleasant characteristic of their partners. My return home this time was a forced capitulation, which I couldn’t accept. Her gaze read in me another painful defeat, but was also carrying a revelation. A revelation that difficult times were ahead of us.



Who knows how long I lived the so called normal life, aware that time was passing only because Wednesdays came after Tuesdays and then, most of the time, came Thursdays. I went back to work maintaining coffee vending machines, had lunch in the Stegne Industrial Zone, spent time among storage containers, called Nadia after work and asked her if she needed something from the shop, and went to the supermarket across the street, and smiled at saleswomen, who knew that I was buying a round loaf of white bread and skimmed milk, a shopping list that they thought told them everything about me, and maybe it did. I also started going to the faculty again, and listening to lectures as aimlessly as ever before. I had a beer now and then with new and old fellow students, who were getting ready for exams and exchanging notes. But transience was stolen from all these days that I was struggling to get through, waiting for something or someone, but nothing changed, everything just remained the same. Wednesdays were like Tuesdays and Tuesdays were like Mondays.

Nadia patiently waited for my time to start moving again, for oblivion to finally start healing my mounting fears, and I didn’t want to remind her that time, it is wasn’t spent meaningfully, was powerless in its fight against memory. I was only waking to remember that each morning was like the one before, and I felt like Bill Murray probably did, in that film in which he got stuck in one day and couldn’t get out.

Expecting to live this apparition of a normal life, Brane Stanežič probably figured I’d bury my living father for a second time, which I couldn’t, even though I occasionally wanted to. I couldn’t convince myself that I would never see him again, and consciously kill my own hope, which I might have spurned and despised, but which I could no longer deny. I accepted the fact that a part of me wanted to see my father and I was secretly looking forward to our meeting; sometime, somewhere. In time, I allowed myself this tiny weakness, and accepted it as my own, and I comforted myself that this was just the child in me, wishing for his father to hold his hand again and take him to see Maki at the market in Pula.

In despair, I resorted to my computer more and more often, and typed the names Nedelko Borojević and Tomislav Zdravković into Google countless times. I was reading the same news about him, over and over again, and soon started obsessively looking for anything new. So I began including verbs in the searches. ‘I give to Nedelko Borojević,’ ‘I see Nedelko Borojević,’ ‘I speak with Nedelko Borojević.’ I was typing entry after entry, thinking it would lead me to a new discovery. I started browsing for information about Brane Stanežič too, and Emir Muzirović and even Danilo Radović. Sometimes I sat at the computer all night Googling. The same names, the same entries, over and over: ‘I give to General Borojević,’ ‘I see General Borojević,’ ‘I speak with General Borojević.’ The same pages in the same order, over and over again. I looked for hits in different regions, in each region separately, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. I didn’t skip one single country. This was an addiction, an obsession which frightened me, but I couldn’t stop myself. I had to sit at the computer and type his name into the search engine. Into all search engines. ‘I give to Borojević Nedelko,’ ‘I see Borojević Nedelko,’ ‘I speak with Borojević Nedelko.’

Sometimes during the day I managed not to think about him for a long time, and such dullness felt good, but I was aware that this was just emotional numbness, and that the memories would return, together with feelings and thoughts. There were moments when I was losing hope, and was afraid that I would never emerge from this emptiness, and there were moments when I wondered how much power I had left, how many indistinguishable days I could wake up to. There were moments when I thought about everything, including what I shouldn’t have.

During this time, I began to feel that Nadia began fearing that the silence, which spread between us on those normal days, would swallow us up in the end. She dreaded that we would slowly go silent forever and that eventually everything that was ours would go mute.

She tried to talk to me, but this always turned out to be an attempt to beat my silence with her words, and most often, she failed. Our conversations were rarer and rarer, and increasingly disappointed Nadia as she tried to fill the space between us. She turned on the TV, put on some music, intentionally clattered anything that produced a sound, from the clothes she was putting in the wardrobe to dishes she washed. She opened the windows wide in the middle of the winter to invite the cold, urban sounds into the apartment, but even the deafening noise of the Ljubljana traffic whooshing by couldn’t drown out my unspoken words.

I felt sorry for her as she, ever more annoyed, persisted with these hopeless attempts. And I felt sorry for her when I saw how she was trying to hide her weariness from me. I felt that she was giving up, and that she was joining me in my absentmindedness ever more often. I believed that she was loosing her sense of time, too, and that her days were also blending into one. Except that Nadia didn’t deserve this: this wasn’t her fate, it was mine. I had no right to keep sharing it with her, and I even thought that I should gather my strength and drive her away from me. But I was too selfish, and at the same time too helpless in this selfishness to drive away my only fellow fighter. Instead, I was consumed by fear of her departure, a fear that grew every day, until it became my private paranoia. Soon I didn’t dare open the door of our apartment when I came home, petrified that the distant solitude I knew so well would welcome me once more.