Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Page 10
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.
10
I don’t know exactly how many days had passed since that Wednesday when my father had last called and promised to come for us, or whatever else he had promised my mother, who had stood nodding there in the hall, before she finally decided not to wait for a next phone call. Maybe she realized that the country’s unrest would inevitably escalate into conflicts, and that the ‘field’ was just a gentler code for the war which the Yugoslav People’s Army had been preparing all this time, though its soldiers had long remained convinced it would never happen. It wasn’t easy to confess all that had piled up inside her in the days that had passed, or for her to release herself to the interrupted and crackling voice on the other end of the phone line. Especially not in the hall of an apartment that housed nine people, at least one of whom walked past the phone every minute of their conversations.
Until our final day there, the Radović and Gojković families sought to ease Dusha’s sorrow at least a little, but none of them could understand that any military conflict would prove fatal for her, regardless of its duration, who was involved, the number of vic
tims, or the final result. Unlike them, Dusha Borojević was surely aware that a Serbian officer’s wife could wait for her husband only in Serbia. This meant that she was obliged to accept the Serbian side as her own, and Serbia as her homeland. But Serbia was a place she was trying to get away from, as far as possible, all the time. Now it was near impossible for her to hide. Once, when we were trying to fall asleep, despite the pendulous heat, she even said, ‘If I could, I’d leave, just leave, even back to Ljubljana!’ This was proof positive of how confined and hopeless she felt in Novi Sad.
I suppose my mother wanted to convey all this to my father, in those long conversations at the Bristol Hotel, and in the phone calls in the Radović’s hall, where she struggled with being overheard. But by then, he had already been called up and sent to the ‘field,’ and was unable to get himself out of whatever he had gotten himself into. At no point did my father dare tell my mother that he wasn’t able to renounce his uniform or that he would remain an officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army, even when it was no longer Yugoslav and no longer of all the people. He probably did not even want to believe what she had told him; preferring to fold himself under the wings of other officers; their opinion preferred to hers, because they were telling him the story he wanted to hear. The story that everything would be over soon, and that things would then be like they had been before.
Who knows where Colonel Emir Muzirović was when he could have still said to him, ‘Go, comrade, run away while you can. This isn’t a war fit for rats, let alone people.’ Who knows, maybe Emir actually did tell him that? But Nedelko didn’t listen to anything but his orders, waiting for the morning when he would again wake from this ugly dream and, lying in his bed back in Pula, turn off the silver alarm clock, a gift from our neighbour, Enisa, for his thirtieth birthday. Unfortunately, my father was always worried about being seen as a coward. He never realized that, in those days, deserting was the bravest and most daring act of all.
His vivid imagination in particular left him hanging, when it might have been all that could have saved him, if only he could’ve imagined a new life, one without a uniform, even if just for a second. Nedelko, officer in the third-largest army in Europe, could never imagine himself as Nedelko, New York cab driver, or Nedelko, Stockholm shoe warehouse manager, or Nedelko, Toronto furniture mover. In his past life, Nedelko could imagine everything, but not without his uniform.
I don’t know when my mother finally realized that the future General Borojević would not give up active participation in uniformed madness. I only know that, at some point, she knew well that the man who would return from the ‘field’ someday would no longer be her husband, and that the main question was whether he would return a human being. Maybe my mother was also looking for an apology for everything other officers’ wives took on as a martyr’s burden – justifying it with their love, devotion, their desire to hold their families together. Was she never able to find it? In the moments of greatest despair, Dusha Podlogar reverted to a rational human being, clinically cold and calculating, a fighter for her own survival. She had decided that she would not be a martyr in her own life story the moment she ran away from her father.
So in the end, the decision to set off for Slovenia was completely rational and well-considered. My mother first presented it to me as such, and I realized, with this news, that the longed-for summer in Pula my friends and I had been waiting for would not come, at least not for me. And then she explained the plan to Danilo and Sava. She spoke in short, clear sentences and appeared so determined that even these hosts, who forcefully maintained their guests out of a special breed of politeness, did not oppose.
The following morning, Danilo came huffing and puffing down the stairs, and yelled from the hall, ‘the bus leaves at five.’ This was like an air-raid siren for the gathered company, who had been hibernating over their morning coffees for over an hour. In an instant, they were on their feet in order to better commence panicking. It turned out that only my mother and I were actually ready to go, while the others either didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe, that we would actually go through with this crazy idea. The day would not pass by without general hysteria, howling and tears, hugging, kissing and pompous farewell words that felt as artificial as the wailing of old ladies at Orthodox funerals. But still, a kind of genuine sadness could be felt among the Radović and Gojković families, which none tried to hide from the gathered assembly.
Something in all this farewell fuss made me, and I suspect my mother as well, feel awful, as we descended the stairs past a long procession of waving, sniffling people, who dragged along behind us. I never considered these people to be my family but, at the moment when Danilo rearranged our luggage for the sixth time in the back of his Zastava 101 car, and lined up with the rest of them at the entrance of the apartment building like a grieving army, they were just that. They were the family I never had, and I was sincerely sorry to leave them.
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.