Yugoslavia, My Fatherland

7

When the phone woke me in the morning, I couldn’t remember where I was at first. I scoured the surroundings and, because of the small TV on the desk, I figured it must be a hotel room and that last night, I had broken a sixteen-year promise to myself. I reached for the phone.

‘Where are you?’

It was a call from another world, as the distance between us could not be measured in kilometres alone. One morning ago I’d left sleeping Nadia in a world I felt I no longer belonged in. Somewhere along the way, I had crossed an invisible border and entered my old, forgotten life, and was no longer sure that I was the Vladan Nadia wanted to hear from.

‘I’m in Goražde.’

‘Where?’

She wasn’t ready to articulate the hanging question of what the hell I was doing in a town she’d never heard of, and even less ready to hear the answer. The answer I couldn’t utter. I realized yesterday that I could not bring myself to tell her made-up stories, and it was equally clear that I had no other to offer. The only story that wasn’t made-up, the life and times of Vladan Borojević, had been crushed into fragments, and listeners couldn’t orientate themselves in it. I could only remain silent.

After a few painful seconds of silence, Nadia hung up. I realized that I had just shut myself off to her in the same pathetic way that Dusha had once shut herself off to me, and I remembered the feeling of the dirty carpet against my sweaty back on the floor of room 211, waiting for mother to come out of the bathroom and notice me, crying for the last time I can recall in my life. In the cold room of the Behar Hotel in Goražde, I felt the horror of a lonely little boy, backstabbed by the thought that his mother was no longer interested in him, and that he was alone in the middle of a vast foreign territory. I felt Nadia crying in the same way I had cried back then, breathless and red-faced, sweat gathered on my eyebrows and matted hair stuck to my temples.

When Dusha finally came out of the bathroom, she didn’t hug me or comfort me, because I had already wiped away my own tears and hidden them from her, as I had ever since. And I didn’t call Nadia back now and continue our conversation, hoping instead that on the other side of the disconnected phone line, she would wipe away her tears and hide them from me.



I turned on the TV and, while surfing channels, stopped at Bijelina TV. Maybe I was amused by the fact that Bijelina had its own television network, or maybe because I was curious what sort of programming was available to residents of this small town in the Serbian entity, or maybe because it was the only channel not occupied at that moment by folklore groups or recordings of waterfalls set to music. Thanks to the cynical and witty fates, I had the honour of seeing something that I would not have believed existed, had I not seen it with my own eyes.

In a village near Bijelina, relatives and friends and even a priest formally welcomed home a local hero, returning after eight years, coming straight from the International Court in the Hague, where he had been arrested for war crimes, his guilt proven by the wicked and corrupt international community, even though his aunts and uncles swore on their dead mothers’ graves that he wouldn’t hurt a fly, and that their beloved Milan was a known philanthropist.

This was, or so it seemed at first, the start of a new tradition, which could be added to weddings and funerals in the roster of village events. Villagers overloaded tables with delicacies and decked them out with flowers for Milan, who was suitably close-mouthed at this special occasion. A sympathetic journalist did not prod him with annoying questions, not after all he’d been through, but let him soak up the warmth and kindness of this home he had yearned to see for eight long years in a cold Dutch prison.

It was weird watching these people who, not for a moment in all these years, doubted their darling Milan, and who were so completely convinced of the conspiracy of this foreign court, with its foreign judges, these Dutchmen in their white wigs. If only they’d known Milan the way his friends and neighbours had, as a little boy, they would realize that he couldn’t possible have stolen a tricycle, much less commit a war crime, whatever that meant. So each villager paraphrased the same sentiments, each in their own words. At the same time, they volunteered themselves as victims and sincerely shared with me, the random viewer of Bijelina TV, their wrongfully inflicted pain. I was immediately envious of their belief in his innocence, their trust in this man who sat, sneakily, modestly, in the corner of the room, moving in ‘slow motion’ and only occasionally, fearfully glancing around the room, still expecting the official atmosphere to evaporate and all this to turn out to be a dream. At first glance this guy looked a far cry from a war criminal but, in a hotel room in Goražde, I trusted the prosecutors from the Hague a good deal more than the ecstatic protestations of Cousin Yela.

The true nature of this place in which I was searching for my father slowly became clear. It was governed by different laws and considered with a different mindset. I would certainly understand both Nedelko Borojević and Tomislav Zdravković here, but unfortunately I belonged to another world from the one I stared at in disbelief on TV, and which forced me to convince myself, over and over, that what I was watching was real and not a surrealist sketch comedy.

At that moment, and for the first time, I doubted that I might ever fully understand what had happened here, and why. These people who so shamelessly celebrated the return of a convicted war criminal to his native village appeared hopelessly alien. If they had shared these attitudes with me, a random viewer of Bijelina TV, I was afraid to think what they were telling the world at large.

I switched off the TV before the program had ended, because I didn’t want to hear the summary of events that the journalist was bound make to the viewers. I had consumed enough poison, and had a busy day ahead.



‘Why, young man, are you looking for him, eh?’

The receptionist at the Behar Hotel simply overflowed with kindness. He then asked me if the Tourist Disco was still running in Ljubljana. Suddenly the milk of human kindness had been replaced by a flowing nostalgia.

‘I served the army in Ljubljana,’ he said, and proceeded to tell me all the places he liked to hang out. When he said, in a low voice, that the adult cinema, Sloga, ruled ‘way back when,’ he winked at me. I was pretty sure that I could sleep at the Behar Hotel for free if only he would toast his nostalgia with a little of the short, strong stuff.

After long enough, his giddy trip down memory lane hooked me too and I asked him, now his good buddy, if he knew where I might find Emir Muzirović. But as soon as I mentioned the name, the receptionist suddenly grew serious and, to my surprise, settled into the role that I had initially feared, that of a pre-war fuck-up even more fucked-up by the war.

‘Did you hear what I asked?’

The receptionist now took on the failed bully complex of the incurably skinny. With all that cluttered love for the old days and the Sloga Cinema, he was first-class Balkan slime. Around the forty-fifth year of his pathetic existence, he now exercised what little supreme authority he had, over a worn-down Slovene guy on a road trip.

‘He was a good friend of my father’s.’

I needed time to prepare, before I dropped the names of either Nedelko Borojević or Tomislav Zdravković, but with the receptionist doing his best Steven Seagal impersonation behind the desk, I felt it was the right moment to, at least temporarily, called Nedelko my father again.

‘Who is your father?’

I understood the question. The now somewhat fearful Seagal was suddenly concerned that my father was some ‘fearsome character’ who, upon hearing of his attitude, would ‘fuck the living daylights out of him,’ or if he was a rickety old Latin professor who even this receptionist could tell to bugger off.

‘General Borojević.’

I have no patience for people who pump themselves full of hot air and deflate faster than a blow-up doll. I knew that the word ‘general’ would make him slink back to his original aggregate state, so we could again talk like a couple of friends jerking off in the back balcony of the Sloga Cinema. Turned out I was right.

‘Why didn’t you say so! All sorts come here, but I know that General Muzirović doesn’t like just anyone knocking on his door. He especially hates journalists, so I like to screen for him. It’s not the way of the world for every single person to be able to go anywhere they like, isn’t that right, Vladan?’

Luckily for me, the present subspecies of Neanderthalus Balkanus wasn’t too married to nationalism, failing to recognize the hostile element in General Borojević and certainly not seeing him as a Yugoslav People’s Army officer who was a key cog in the machine that tried to raze his city to the ground. The receptionist was that special subsection of chauvinist who divided the world not by race, religion or nationality, but only into the strong and the weak. The strong would be respected and feared while the weak were there to be bullied, mocked and despised. That was all. And a general, Borojević or otherwise, was an aristocrat of the strong, and was therefore on the side of our people, in the eyes of this guy. He had probably been trying to join the team of the strong all his life, stuck to the class bully like a sweaty leotard as early as the year three.

He stepped out from behind the desk and took me to the hotel exit. At the front door he threw a hand over my shoulder and pointed me towards Emir Muzirović’s house.

‘You can’t miss it. Violet façade.’ He gave me a friendly pat on the back.

‘Say hi to the general for me. Tell him that Salko from the Behar sends his best. He’ll know.’



Emir Muzirović’s violet house indeed could not be missed. The colour of bitter, antibiotic memories was proudly splattered over the walls of this bizarre building. It probably took several architectural geniuses to conceive of such a structure, an out-of-tune symphony in violet concrete. Two black limousines sat in the muddy driveway, a sure sign of their village mentality, and I was happy to drive my old wreck up alongside.

A creature that did not disappoint my expectations opened the door. He had a frown like an ingrown toenail, a shaved head, and a black leather jacket in lieu of uniform.

‘What?’

‘Good afternoon. I’m looking for Mr. Muzirović.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m Nedelko Borojević’s son. His good friend from Pula.’

The character took a moment to consider whether or not he liked my answer, and I sensed this could take a while.

‘Borojević?’

I nodded. For some reason this was his cue to slam the door in my face. I wasn’t sure whether to ring the bell again, or get the hell out of there while I still could.

I had no idea what else to do with my time in Goražde besides lurking around the violet house. I started looking around and quickly determined that there were two types of houses in Bosnia: new buildings that looked as though their owners had ordered them from a catalogue of discount Chinese building parts, and then the beautiful old Bosnian houses, with their regular shapes and subtle colors. But those in the last category were falling apart, their roofs and load-bearing facades barely holding them together. The Bosnian world was irreversibly divided: the poor in the beautiful houses, the rich in the alien, ugly ones. The sense of aesthetics of the ruling elite revealed the direction in which that elite would be taking this unfortunate country.

The door opened again.

‘Take off your shoes.’

This was an invitation to come in and make myself at home. I did as I was told, and the leather guy pushed my trainers against the wall, alongside a few other neatly-arranged pairs of shoes. For someone who looked so dangerously grumpy, he was remarkably tidy.

The house was decorated modestly, in stark contrast to the kitschy exterior. Oriental rugs covered the floors, the walls were decked with framed pictures, and the pleasant smell of a wood fire dispersed through the air. The stairs creaked in a familiar way beneath our feet. Though it may sound strange, the violet house felt familiar. A photograph of a mosque in Mecca hung on a wall, and made me think that Emir had probably quit drinking. Not even plum schnapps.

Just then, another guy in a leather jacket opened the door at the top of the stairs, and we entered a large room with an enormous wine-red couch and a small wood-burning stove in the corner. Emir Muzirović huddled next to the stove, looking uncomfortable and perched like an oversized bird on a sitting apparatus hidden by his ample form. A woollen blanket was draped across his broad shoulders. He smoked and tapped cigarette ash into the fire.

He tried to say something, but a roaring cough stopped him.



‘Most of all you want to know why, right?’

Emir beat me to it. Of all the questions I’d been asking myself over the past few days, this one had yet to come up. My thoughts were still disorderly, passing like dropped index cards, lost in the labyrinth of my consciousness. Emir caught me off-guard and I could not avoid hearing his explanation, even before I had formed my own. But the thought that I didn’t want to hear what Emir was about to say is what scared me. This was happening too fast: seated in his violet house, it occurred to me that things were getting out of hand. I had set off on this trip impulsively, without knowing exactly what I was looking for, apart from the intangible Nedelko Borojević.

‘Somehow I’ve explained this to myself. But I’m not sure how well I can explain it to you. Not sure that you can grasp this. Much less accept… ’

Emir was forced to clear his throat again, and it gave me a moment to think that finding a war criminal in hiding could very well be the least demanding aspect of this trip. The real search would begin only when I sat, eye to eye with Tomislav Zdravković, and began to look within that stranger for the remnants of my deceased father.

‘You don’t look much like him. But there’s something of him in you: Maybe just the eyebrows and the eyes. You have his eyes.’

Even as a child, I’d felt uncomfortable around Emir, but now his gaze was stricter and his high-strung body advised those around him not to relax.

‘Oh, Vladan, my boy… they all used to be Yugoslavs. And they were all communists. Fuck them, nationalistic motherfuckers. You know, this was not the war we wanted… but it couldn’t have been any different, if we who defended Yugoslavia stood side-by-side, in the same uniform, with those who demolished it. We sang the same anthem and bore the same coat-of-arms. But what was mine to me wasn’t theirs to them. So here… I can say this now… There was never a bin of more nationalistic trash than the communist party. Communism only collapsed because it was played out by uptight rednecks, who saw only a new church in it, run by a new breed of priests. The country fell apart because it didn’t mean more to any of them than their own arseholes, which in the end was all that these great Yugoslav people died for. In the end, Partisans and Chetniks and Ustashas and Mujahideen, the religious and the non-religious, all united and set out to fuck us all up. The Yugoslavs disappeared overnight, as if they’d never existed. They were, of course, all frightened to death by Milošević, so they scattered across the globe, or reverted to a moronic state, while we tried to save this country of losers. I had prepared for thirty years to save it from the enemies within and the enemies without. Then suddenly, there was no one to fucking defend it for. Fuck it all! And all of us who believed in it… ’

The cough interrupted him again, piercing and relentless. I thought he would be unable to continue. He was quiet for a long time, gathering his thoughts or calming his lacerated lungs.

‘After all this, I’m only sorry about my old man, who built this country with his bare-hands. I’m glad he died before he could see the scum he’d built all those bridges, schools, and hospitals for. The scum he left all this to. They lived among us all those years, smiled at us in our Tito’s Pioneers uniforms, waved flags but, in the end, they couldn’t wait for it all to end, so they could fight with each other. Fuck them, motherfucking fuckers… ’

He grabbed his chest, but didn’t cough. It seemed that he’d decided to tell his story from beginning to end. Time had not played a role in his life for ages. Dark descended, dawn broke, hours rolled by, and there he sat, settled under his blanket, next to his stove, smoking. At least, this was how I imagined it, there and then; those last five, ten years of this man’s life.

‘And all this just because each of them had a story of some long-lost past, of deaths never recovered from. About grandmothers and grandfathers, mass burials in caves and concentration camps in the Second World War. A story that had been nagging them for all these years, about which they’d only whispered, in secret, to each other, waiting for other times to come, when they would tell these stories again, aloud, before us all, those who killed on their behalf. They had silently, subtly bred their anger and their guilt, had prepared their formal apologies for the slaughter of the innocents, for torched villages and raped girls. Their stories permitted them all this. Stories made excuses for everything. They comforted their consciences and soothed restless souls to sleep each night. Because they had all made oaths to their dead and so we, the living, were unworthy and unimportant. They were not the ones who killed, but the ghosts of their murdered fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, in the names of whom they had done all they had done — they did the killing instead. Rape and burn and slaughter. Everything was sacred in the name of those graves. Everything was necessary.’

I opened my mouth, because I felt like Emir expected me to reply to his words. But I saw, just in time, that he knew that I had nothing to tell him. As he discarded the cigarette butt in his hand, he pulled a red and white box from his pocket with the other. But it was empty.

‘Can you get me a pack? Over there, on the cabinet in the stairway.’

I got up and opened the door that had been closed behind me by the leather guy, who was now standing at the foot of the stairs, eyeing me carefully as I removed a pack of Marlboros from the stack and returned to the room. Emir immediately lit a fresh smoke and I watched him inhale, as if it was the first cigarette after years of abstinence. I wondered if he wasn’t intentionally poisoning himself. He smoked like a man in a hurry.

I noticed a pile of newspapers, similar to the one I’d found on Tomislav Zdravković’s doorstep, on the floor by Emir’s legs. It occurred to me that the two old friends read the same newspapers, and maybe communicated through coded ads for non-existent apartments in Banja Luka or Derventa. Emir’s words sounded sufficiently mysterious, and his warm room, with its pleasant wood-smell felt like the oval office of a secret brotherhood of retired officers.

He looked at me again, and this time his gaze was more piercing.

‘Nedelko had his story, too. He had the story of his father, Milutin. You probably know that story… ’

I shook my head.

‘Yeah, right. How could I… ’

I stared at him, expecting the story of Milutin and Agnes, the story Nedelko had never told me. ‘Leave it,’ he’d say, if Dusha mentioned grandfather and grandmother, so I’d never learned anything about them, aside from the fact that they had died when Nedelko was still just a child.

‘I’m sorry, but I made a promise to myself never to tell these stories. Not to you, not to anyone. I haven’t told my own, so why should I tell those of others? Damn all these stories. They shouldn’t be permitted. Those who tell them should be shot for poisoning their children and grandchildren with them. If you want it enough, you’ll hear it from someone, someone who doesn’t care about you and so will happily tell you about your grandfather Milutin. I know that. But at least you won’t hear the story from me.’

He grew quiet, as if he wanted to underline his own words with silence. My grandparents’ story probably unfolded before his eyes again, there and then, and he examined it in silence, right in front of me. He closed his eyes and patiently waited for it to pass, while I tried not to think about what it might entail.

‘You know, I would’ve killed them both that night. Colonel Barac and Zhana. At the Fisherman’s Shed Restaurant. If it hadn’t been for your father, I would’ve killed them. I was crazy: Drunk and crazy. Everything went black. And if he hadn’t… He saved their lives. Mine too. I would’ve killed them, Vladan, my boy. I know it. So… I can’t tell you where he is. I know you came here to ask this, but I won’t be the one to tell you. I made a promise. If you want to listen to me, I’ll tell you to go home and forget about everything, because this is what would be best for you both. But I know you can’t do that, so I’m just asking you to tell him, if you do find him some day, if someone does take you to him, that I’ve already fulfilled his final wish, and that everything is ready for him. Just the way he wanted it. This is… ’

The cough, again. Something in his voice blocked me from objecting. I knew my questions would be in vain. He was pledged to silence for the sake of his old friend. Distracted, he tapped ash into the stove and inhaled, as if he was drowning and trying to capture air. Something told me our conversation was over. I thought I could just sit next to him, hoping for a final show of mercy, but I knew this man, this ruthless settler of accounts, was incapable of mercy.

My only other option was Uncle Danilo.