Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

23

‘Do you know Boss Bar, on the terrace above the farmer’s market?’

‘I do.’

‘When can you get there?’

‘In fifteen minutes.’

‘See you.’

Twenty minutes later at Boss Bar, I found a man at the table by the window, and he bore only a passing resemblance to the man I’d spoken to in his offices not so long ago. Brane Stanežič wasn’t wearing his nice blue suit, but he still stood out in a bar like this, a sore-thumb in this meeting place of the remnants of the bourgeois proletariat.

‘I used to live there. That balcony on the fourth floor with short curtains. Can you see? Right there. My sons grew up on that terrace. A small wooden train used to be there, you couldn’t get them off of it. When the hell was that? In those days, we sat here, just sat and sat.’

Everything was different at that time. Back then, Brane still drank plum schnapps and sat in places like this, where the feeling of ancient dirt spread, and you could still see wiped stains of bad wine on the tables, with traces of juice with cream still stuck to them. Invisible beer foam overflowed on the floors of these bars, in which long-ago discarded cigarette butts floated, and you could still smell the breath of the regulars, living and dying at the bar, no matter how much fresh air the new owners ushered in. Brane probably used to be one of them, but some day he got lost in his transition disguise, which placed him in the strata of those who wiped their mouths with cotton napkins, before taking a sip of a South African wine.

Sitting in Boss Bar, Brane returned home to moonlight with those who still had large draft beers for lunch. He returned to his old world and, sitting in front of me now, was again that funny man with a yellow diving mask, who once clumsily removed little bones from anchovies, grilled on Dusha’s stove, with his fat fingers, for his sons and me on the beach.

Or was he just telling me the story he assumed I would like to hear?

‘I like coming here, to reminisce about my life as an officer. You know, it’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that this fucking wellness world isn’t my thing. I miss beer on the bench in front of the apartment building with my mates.

‘We used to sit over there, so I could watch the kids riding that wooden train into their imaginary remote countries. I can buy the whole place, but I can’t buy that beer anymore. You can no longer find the atmosphere and the feeling that, at some point, you have everything you’ve ever wanted. There’s nothing like that anymore. I do still come here to meet someone from way back when, but that’s not the same as it was, and it never will be. I’ll never again try for two hours to take the kids home for dinner, while leisurely ending a debate about some skier’s jumpsuit. Never again. Never again. But that’s how it is. You’ll see how it is when you’re my age.’

After he stopped singing his song of mourning over his previous life, Brane returned to the present day, pulled an envelope out of his pocket, and threw it in front of me. Photos peeked from inside it.

‘I actually wanted to show you this.’

In the topmost photo, there was a soldier tying his shoelaces. I wanted to put it aside to look at the rest of them, but Brane pushed it towards me.

‘Take another look.’

It was only then that I realized the soldier was standing next to a woman’s body, leaning on it with his foot, so that he wouldn’t have to bend too much while tying his shoelaces.

‘What is this?’

In the meantime, Brane slid another photo into my hands. In it there were four bodies, lying on top of each other, as if someone had piled them up, with barely recognizable remains of a house burning in flames in the background. In the third photo, a soldier was standing next to a pyre where a fifth body, a child’s, had been dumped. The flame behind him had already gone out, and only smoke still rolled around the site of the fire.

‘What is this?’

‘This is Višnjići.’

I took another look at the photo and the soldier who stared motionlessly at the pile of corpses in front of him. Nedelko was stretching his left arm towards one of the corpses, as if he had wanted to touch it. Just like my grandfather Milutin once did I thought, and instantaneously made myself shudder. Brane, who surely didn’t know the symbolism of the scene, was offering me the remaining photos, but I had seen enough.

‘What is this?’

‘It’s so you know who you’re looking for.’

‘I know.’

‘If you knew, you wouldn’t have stopped at the third photo. The next ones are much worse.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to know what this is all about, Vladan. The person we remember from Pula doesn’t exist anymore. Nedelko Borojević is just a war criminal now, responsible for the death of the people in the photos. Are you still sure you want to meet him?’

We were looking each other straight in the eye, but I could only see Nedelko and his arm stretched out, about to touch the bloody upper arm of a child.

‘Vladan, you don’t know this, but your father asked me to look after you when you came to Slovenia. And I tried. I did my best. But I’m not your father and I can’t tell you what to do. I couldn’t then and now I can even less. It’s your life, Nedelko’s your father and the decision can only be yours. But I’d still like to warn you, I don’t know, as I friend, let’s say. People who shield convicts from the Hague Tribunal shield them for a reason. By shielding them, many of these people shield themselves. And you’re not the son of these people. Get it? I mean that this could end up bad for you, if these people suspect that you’d betray Nedelko and turn him over to the police. The war is still going on for these people, and they don’t kid around.’

I hadn’t even thought about helping someone bring Nedelko to justice, even though I probably should have. Maybe I should have gone to the police and told them everything I knew about the runaway war criminal. The story I took as my own was, more than mine, a story of thirty four other people. It was the story of their surviving relatives and friends.

‘Vladan, I really hope you understand. If these people feel threatened, even for a second, they won’t even think. I hope you know what kind of people we’re talking about.’

I nodded, although my mind was elsewhere and I didn’t think about the people Brane was warning me about.

‘Are you really sure you want to see him? Just see and nothing else?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Okay.’

Brane looked at me, as if he had wanted my gaze to approve his words.

‘Be at the Stomach Restaurant in Vienna on Saturday, the seventh of February. The table will be in your name. Did you memorize that?’

‘The Stomach Restaurant.’

‘Yes, in Vienna. Saturday, seven p.m. You have time to think this over and change your mind if you want to. If you’re not there, you’re not there.’

‘I’ll be there.’

‘It’s your decision. I just hope you know what you’re getting yourself into.’



A minute or two later, I watched him through the window of Boss Bar, stopping on the terrace, just before he descended the stairs towards the farmer’s market, watching a small playground where a wooden train used to stand, one which had taken his sons around the world. His stop on the platform of his past life ended, and he walked back into the present and disappeared from sight.

So I was left alone with Milutin and Nedelko and their stories, which intertwined in front of my eyes in the cruellest manner. Everything pointed to the fact that Nedelko’s father’s early death turned Nedelko into a man identical to those who had killed Milutin’s family. Into a man who burnt down houses and piled up corpses. This was a vicious circle, and for a moment a thought went through my head that I might be a part of this damned story, and that some day my corpse might be thrown onto a pile of other corpses, at which those left behind would stare. In this untold story, victims became executioners and executioners became victims, and everybody in this story killed and was killed.

I didn’t want to be a part of this story, but I wasn’t sure I could get away from it anymore. I no longer believed that I was the one who could finish the story without an end because it’s every end was just another beginning or, better yet, thousands of new beginnings. The end of Nedelko’s story wasn’t only the beginning of mine, but also the beginning of many other, much more painful stories. It was the beginnings of the stories of all of his victims, which have been recounted around here for years. It hurt because I was trapped among the bodies of innocent people and their executioners. It hurt because I knew that the only question that remained unanswered was what role would be intended for me in these stories, and whose story I would end up in.



‘Are you going to Vienna?’

Nadia put the question to me that very evening, after I had returned from Boss Bar, slightly intoxicated, and repeated, word for word, my conversation with the man in the yellow snorkel mask. I shrugged my shoulders, which was, at that point, the peak of my communication ability. I was tired of my solitary wandering around the world, and I wanted her company. Only I wasn’t completely sure if I wanted it on the way to Vienna, or only in my life after it.

‘Tell me if you want me to go with you. So that you don’t get lost unnecessarily.’

I’ll probably never understand when my little student, who took bags of her dirty laundry to her mother on the weekends, and was sure that by buying second hand jumpers, she was saving the poor in China, became a mature person who understood such a complicated being as me. It seemed that just a little while before, she had been babbling about the war against terrorism, the Happy Youth concert, the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream she’d eaten in London, the theft of her mum’s bike. Someone who once seriously thought that we would all have been better off if it weren’t for the horrible Americans. She was now the clever one in our relationship: she asked the right questions, she ignored my immature mumbling, she saw though my childish shrugs and she persisted in this one way adult conversation.

That evening, Nadia lambasted my theory about happy kids who never really grow up because they live hidden from reality in their dollhouses. As she so patiently accepted my inability to reply to any of her questions, and verbalize my problems maturely, I just had to admit that happy kids might mature faster than us, we poor souls who remain captives of our early and only ostensible adulthood. Poor souls who were constantly educated by the vagaries of fate, but never the wiser for it.

Nadia was a happy kid, and when I was watching my first news broadcast from the front line, she was crying because her sister got a new bike for her birthday, while Nadia had to continue riding the old one. While I was left without a father, she resented her parents for not buying her new Converse All-Stars before she went to school. While I was left without my mother, Nadia was appalled to find out that her maths teacher didn’t like her, and that was why she gave her a B. While I was alone in the middle of a foreign world, Nadia fretted over not being able to go to a school dance.

Nadia was a happy kid, and she was irritated by her father, who wouldn’t let her pierce her nose. Nadia was a happy kid, and she was grounded for three months, because her mother found pot in her schoolbag. Nadia was a happy kid, who was dumped by her first boyfriend just before her end of school exams, and so got thirty points less than she probably would have otherwise. Nadia was a happy kid, and she got over all her childhood diseases, one after another, and now she was sitting opposite me, ready for a conversation about serious matters.

Unlike her I, who had been smacked on my head by life at eleven, was sitting next to her without a clue what to do with my childishly boisterous feelings. So I suppressed, rejected and denied them, and hid from everyone who came close to me. I remained a child, a child who maybe knows what happened in Srebrenica all those years ago, and what had happened before that in Vukovar, but still a child who couldn’t have a serious conversation about anything. Least of all about the serious stuff he should talk about.

‘Do you have time to go to Vienna?’

‘You know, I’ll adjust to you.’

‘Okay.’

‘When would you like to go?’

‘I don’t know yet if I’m going.’

‘Okay.’

Poor me, I couldn’t manage anything more that evening, and I lowered my gaze in embarrassment. The roles were definitely reversed, and Nadia was no longer my little schoolgirl. Now I was her helpless baby, who couldn’t take care of himself and needed her help.