Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Page 11
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.
12
The only thing I remember from my first trip to Ljubljana is the wakefulness of our fellow passengers. Nobody tried to sleep that night. No one’s head was lowered in exhaustion, not even for a moment. In my memory, everyone around us sat upright in their seats, and in palpably impatient expectation, stared through the darkness, through which we slowly made our way towards our destination. My mother was certainly wide awake the whole night through, and urged me from time to time to get some sleep, repeating that it would be a very long trip, and I would be exhausted for days if I didn’t catch some shut-eye. But the thought that, at eleven years old, I’d finally be getting grandparents, who were already waiting to meet us, was too exciting. The other passengers kept looking over at me all night, as if wondering why I, who was too young to understand the horror they were fleeing and that kept them awake, didn’t fall asleep.
The city of Ljubljana, into which we finally stumbled in August 1991, after more than thirteen hours’ drive, was never again as white and dreamy as it was that morning. It was still summer, but the air there had a northerly harshness to it, and I was mad at the bus driver, who was dozing in his seat as we waited to board the local bus to my grandparent’s village. He made us wait outside the bus until the clock struck precisely half past seven, and it was time to leave. Only then was he ready to stretch his arms, light a cigarette and step outside to begrudgingly open the boot for us. Then he watched with poorly hidden pleasure as we struggled to lift our four large suitcases and two boxes inside. After all this, he gladly charged us for our effort, including the luggage surcharge.
It was there, in the Ljubljana bus station, in front of an annoying representative of Slovenian public transport, that I first heard my mother speak a foreign lang
uage. Slovenian, the language that should have been my mother tongue, if she hadn’t insisted on tearing herself away from her family and pushing through her life on broken Serbo-Croatian, even when she talked to her baby. Dusha messed up the words to fairy tales, made her own freestyle versions of children’s songs, and my father had fun singing along with her mistakes, even after many years, when her Serbo-Croatian had achieved a near-perfect, military timbre. On that white morning, when my mother asked the grumpy bus driver a few questions in Slovene, I couldn’t understand a word. But the whole way, I had this feeling that I didn’t even know the person who spoke from within her. That was the first time my mother had seemed foreign to me, and when the bus finally stopped and we got off, along with a few other passengers, I felt that she was one of them, one of these weird foreign people who spoke some weird foreign language.
The expression worn by Dushan Podlogar when he saw us on his doorstep, with our six pieces of luggage, was that of a man who would like to quickly shut the door and pretend it was all just a dream. My grandfather was not a person who would be pleased with irrefutable evidence of something he thought was right, which Dusha’s humble ringing at his doorbell certainly was. My grandfather didn’t need evidence to prove that he was right, especially not in a form as annoying as we proved to be. He had a meticulously orderly daily routine, and any intrusion, particularly one unannounced, into his minutely precise schedule was calamitous. Luckily for us, in his manic tidiness and fear of what the neighbours would think, he could not bring himself to leave women and children on his doorstep, where they would be on exhibit for all the village spies to see. Finally he jerked his head, which mother understood as an invitation to quickly get her ass and her stuff inside, with ‘stuff’ presumably including me.
Just then her renowned curiosity led Maria Podlogar to the front door. Unlike her husband, who got out of the way as soon as he invited us in, she was more of a moving obstacle. She was too upset to say anything, but she was probably afraid that, if she left the entryway, she would miss something that we might want to say to her. Of course, I didn’t speak Slovene and my mother, after thirteen years, didn’t feel like starting a conversation that she knew very well couldn’t end well. So Maria managed only to pull herself together enough to shove slippers into our hands and walk us to the kitchen, where Dushan, in the meantime, had put on his strict police chief face, and awaited us. This face made clear that we would be interrogated, and that judgment would come unto us from on high. Mother probably knew this face very well, and it quickly disarmed her, so she sat at the edge of the table, like a scared little girl. Dushan indicated for me to sit down beside him.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked, after a few moments of silence, by way of his opening speech.
Mother jumped in to tell him, her voice noticeably shaky; adding that I didn’t speak Slovene, but Dushan just repeated the question to me, with the same tone, without looking at her.
‘What’s your name?’
I told him that I was Vladan, and he unexpectedly smiled, stretched his hand towards me and, not realizing his strength, gave me a pretty rough pat on the head. From that moment until his death, I was the only one for whom this fearsome former police chief had spontaneously demonstrated obvious signs of affection and eventually, something scientists might categorize in the phylum of love.
‘Would you like to eat something?’ he then asked, and moved his hand as if it held an imaginary spoon.
I nodded and he quietly said, with a strict tone, ‘You must say please,’ but followed this immediately with a smile, no doubt attributing my lack of manners to my no-good parents. At least that was how I interpreted his knife-sharp look across the table at his daughter.
So my first Slovenian word was prosim, ‘please,’ which I repeated after my grandfather, and which immediately made me his favourite, a fact he announced to the world with a barely visible nod, and which my mother could never understand, much less accept. Naturally, Dusha never admitted this to me, but I’m sure that her own futile relationship was also characterized by her jealousy of the attention Dushan showed me, among many other factors. At this first attempt at communication with his long-lost grandson, she was already all sour smiles; the sort a person can’t hide even if they want to.
It was our first visit with my grandparents, and we were already making up for lost time. To begin with, Dushan had decided that my mother and I really must relive, play-by-play, Slovenia’s Ten-Day War for independence from Yugoslavia, since we had been absent from it without his permission. So Dusha was dubbed, at least privately, as a state traitor, an aggressor against the sovereignty of the young state of Slovenia, as well as other unflattering labels hidden between his spoken words, interjections and indefinable sounds that erupted from Dushan in her direction. It turned out that Dushan Podlogar had irreversibly lost his faith in self-governing socialism, in Tito, in the Party, in brotherhood and unity, in the Non-Aligned Movement, in the working classes, and much more, all at the very moment his only daughter had eloped with an officer of the Yugoslav Army. The former police chief, who once struck fear into the hearts of transgressors of the socialist order, had welcomed the downfall of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and was now a brushed-up Slovenian nationalist with exemplary mileage. During the Ten-Day War, he had bravely stood up to the invaders on the other side of his television set. And when the invaders shamelessly marched straight into his house, in the form of this treacherous daughter of his, he unleashed upon the enemy his full patriotic arsenal. So, after the spontaneous and frequent blows she had received from Danilo and Risto, particularly during the evening news, Dusha was on the receiving end of haymakers of a different political leaning courtesy of her father. To him, Dusha was a representative of the enemy, one of Milošević’s Serbs now under his own roof, whom he would oblige to hear all his thoughts, comments, arguments and insults. In the main, this role of enemy was justly divided between Nedelko Borojević and Slobodan Milošević, neither of whom Dushan would mention by name. His constant bombardment never seemed to affect Dusha, and I felt like Maria’s passivity in this combat made it worse for her. There were days when I heard my mother shaking off her pain on silent Maria, blaming her for Dushan’s words, despising her for applauding him with her silence from behind the closed kitchen door. Maybe my mother was afraid of her father, maybe she had never loved him but she never expressed such open contempt for him as she did for her mother. Dushan’s words might have stung, but Maria’s silence spat. It was a betrayal that Dusha never got over and in those days, I suspected that Dusha had fled this home and country not as much from Dushan as from Maria and her submission, which Dusha’s stubborn and rebellious nature could never accept.
After a few days, Dusha unexpectedly announced the end of Podlogar’s Ten-Day War and told us all that she’d found a job and rented an apartment in the Fužine neighborhood of Ljubljana. The only thing Dushan could utter, upon hearing this, was ‘To each his own.’ Maria, of course, vanished into the kitchen without comment. I later saw her there, trying to hide her tears, before returning to the living room, once more wearing the indifferent face that allowed her to survive this thing called life.
So my mother and I ended up in Marinko Square, which soon became Rusjan Square, in a thirty-square-metre apartment, which was meant to eventually become my home. This, however, never happened. Our rented studio remained a part of a foreign world, which marginalized me and made me feel lonely on a daily basis, until the very day I said goodbye to Dusha. To call it a home, I would’ve needed someone of my own there with me, but most of the time I just co-existed with a woman who was tired and lost, and who continued to run away from me and her life until she let herself get tangled in the life of Dragan Ćirić.
We dropped off our four suitcases and two boxes at 13 Marinko Square, with the assistance of Irfan, the friendly cab driver who, li
ke many other ex-Yugos, had beautiful memories of Pula from the time he spent there doing his military service. Soon after, the life that awaited me became clear. Almost at once, Dusha revealed her doubtless long, premeditated plan to speak only Slovene to me from that moment on. While she tried to provide a substantial, multipart explanation of her decision, from psychological, sociological and who knows what other aspects, I decided for myself that I would never speak a word of Slovene to her, no matter what. This was the first direct locking of horns of the two exemplars of Podlogar stubbornness, which Dusha had inherited from Dushan, and I had in turn inherited from her. With its cosmic dimension of a Greek tragedy, this led to a mother and son never speaking to each other in the same language again. We both spoke and lived past and around one another, although there were times when she tried to justify her decision, explaining how important my knowledge of Slovene would be since I would shortly start at a Slovenian school, with Slovenian classmates.
Duels of stubbornness were soon a regular feature in our small apartment; in the lift; in the lobby; even in shops. With an audience of a shelf lined with bread, a tired saleswoman, and nervous people lined up behind us, Dusha would repeat the question, ‘Would you like a poppy seed roll?’ over and over, for a few minutes, while I remained quiet until someone behind us yelled, ‘Smack him or buy it for him. We can’t wait here for you to raise him!’