Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Page 14
‘Yeah.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘It says so.’
‘Where does it say so?’
‘On the Internet.’
‘And you believe what...’
‘Yep.’
‘All right. And where have you been these past two days, if I may ask?’
‘I went looking for him.’
‘Looking for him? Where?’
‘Bosnia. And Serbia...’
Slowly, with a little help from the exasperation on her face, I realized the magnitude of my actions. I expected Nadia to leave the room in protest at any moment, or maybe turn hysterical, or attack me with a shoe, but the childishly bubbly woman I fell in love with for her girly smile was nowhere to be seen that night. Standing before me was a woman who had matured without me noticing. Nadia was just another thing I took for granted in my life, but she had become a woman who easily saw through my game, and wouldn’t let herself be led into it.
‘I can wait.’
‘For what?’
‘For you to tell me. Everything. Whenever you’re ready.’
This was more powerful than a shoe to the head. Nadia somehow knew what she had to say and how to act in the most impossible of all impossible situations. I felt like she was ready to take me in hand and sober me up. She didn’t intend to take hold of my anger, and flatter me with an outpouring of tearful pity. She wanted to fight and, for the first time in many years, I had this brief, miraculous feeling again that someone was on my side; a feeling I had forgotten a long time ago. At first it intimidated me, but her presence brought comfort, and I enjoyed sitting in silence next to her. Even though words were still very far away.
Who knows how long we sat there, Nadia motionlessly waiting for me to start telling her my life story, after almost three years into our relationship. She was waiting for me to finally introduce myself to her with my real name. But trying to explain to her who I actually was made me realize that even I didn’t know. I was searching for the right words that would determine, or at least describe me, but the further the story of my life went, the further away we became from the real me. Each new chapter opened more and more questions, and I was turning into a stranger before her eyes.
Despite this, Nadia nodded, trying to understand. I had never told anyone that I loved them, and I had no clue how these words sounded, or what the feeling when saying them was like. But that evening, when I told Nadia about Nedelko and Dusha, about Milutin and Agnes, about the villages of Žilica and Višnjići, and about Pula, Belgrade and Novi Sad, when I spoke about myself for the first time, I actually did tell her that. That I loved her. Everything else was just words, incomprehensible and devoid of meaning, words I could keep hiding behind. These told Nadia the only thing she really wanted to know about me.
I beat the silence that night into which Milutin and Nedelko were trapped, the silence in which memory stopped Milutin’s young heart, and in which Nedelko was slowly turning into a slave of his own pain. I spoke and told her a story my grandfather and father had been afraid to tell. I told it from the only beginning I knew, and did not stop until the last sentence I knew, and I felt, with every word uttered, that this story was less and less mine. And I felt this was only right.
Nadia just listened to me. She didn’t ask anything: She didn’t sigh and she didn’t patronize me by patting me on the shoulder. She only listened, took care that my words that came with difficulty didn’t linger in the air, and that my life didn’t vanish into it. And although she didn’t show it, I knew that fear was mounting inside her with every new chapter of my story, and that she was thinking to herself, with trepidation, what my story could bring to her, or rather take away from her?
‘Do you think your father is guilty?’
I was about to say that I didn’t know, but as I watched her sit opposite me, in her pyjamas printed with tiny strawberries, it became clear to me that I could answer whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to defend myself anymore with innocent little lies. I could just nod.
‘What about your mother’s husband?’
‘Dragan?’
‘Yeah.’
We were lying in bed, determined to try and fall asleep. But day was already breaking outside.
‘What about him?’
‘You haven’t told me anything about him.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’
‘What do you mean? You probably care that she’s found someone.’
‘So she did. Fuck it, better than being alone all her life.’
‘That’s what you think now. But you didn’t back then.’
‘The guy just whispers.’
‘What does he do?’
‘Whispers.’
Nadia felt that I couldn’t keep it up any longer, and that it was no use trying to get the story about Dragan out of me. The story which really wasn’t a story, or at least I didn’t think of it as such. I only thought about a tall, dark, sombre boy who appeared so thick headed that he could be a bouncer at the school dance, winking at thirteen year old girls from my class. And who had once brought us a new dishwasher. He wouldn’t let Dusha help him, although he was visibly struggling, and when he finally put the dishwasher down in the middle of the kitchen, and wiped his dirty, wet hands on his trousers, he shook my hand tight and said: ‘Ćirić!’ It sounded like an archaic manner of greeting people, perhaps once used by his generation. I thought that he was stuck in the past, and for a moment, I even felt sorry for him, but he was just standing there in the middle of the room, awkwardly shifting weight from one foot to another, looking towards me then towards Dusha. Then he stammered, ‘Yeah... well... then... I think... I’ll see you around... or somethin’... yeah,’ and left. Dusha walked him out, and I heard him trying to finish that sentence in the hall, but it seemed that he wasn’t doing any better than before.
The next time I saw him was when Dusha went for a coffee with him at the Borsalino Bar, and I accidentally ran into them on my way home from Daniel’s house. All three of us pretended that such a situation was something completely normal, and even sat at the same table for a while, looking at each other, without anyone even trying to start a conversation. In fact, we were all waiting for me to drink up and leave. At some point, Dragan leaned towards Dusha and whispered something in her ear, which seemed extremely rude and unacceptable to me. As a child, whenever I’d whisper something to someone at a table when others were present, my father would scold me, and say, ‘It’s rude to whisper in company.’ When he was drunk, he could also yell that ‘only motherfuckers whisper.’ So there you go. Offended that Dusha even hung out with such people, I got up, and just said, ‘I’m off!’ and left. When Dusha carefully asked me that evening what I had thought of Dragan, my anger had luckily already evaporated, and I kept my opinion to myself.
Nevertheless, Dusha never officially told me that she and Dragan were a couple, but she expected me to draw this conclusion myself. So she started mentioning him more and more often, and later regularly reported that she had gone for a drink with Dragan, that they were going to the cinema together, that he came by to see her at work, that he invited her to watch a basketball match. She especially tried to emphasize those occasions when Dragan helped her with something, probably wishing for him to win me over. But, since the moment he had leaned towards her in Borsalino and whispered something in her ear, he was just a looser to me, and even if Dusha spoke ever so nicely about him, well, that didn’t affect me much.
Later Dragan began visiting us at our place more frequently, and for longer periods. He mostly sat with us in front of the TV, being nice and trying with all his might to make a friendly connection with me. Attentively, and with great interest, he listened to everything I had to say and by some weird coincidence, the same shows and films amused him as they did me. He did everything h
e could for me to like him, but he only managed to be promoted from a looser to the ‘whispering one,’ which was a mild upgrade. And he remained just that.
The next morning, Nadia and I were sitting on the couch and slowly returning to the pre-earthquake state. She stroked my hand and, from time to time, tried to ease the heavy atmosphere with meditations on breakfast and going to the post office. But I didn’t play along, so she soon dropped it and joined me in an absent-minded, vegetative state. At some point, I looked at her and she smiled at me, compassionately. I don’t know if I’d ever been that grateful to anyone in my life as I was to her for just sitting next to me and patiently waiting for our lives to go on. I moved closer to her, squeezed myself to her and let her hug me. I gave a tender kiss and Nadia kissed me back. I felt her loyally following me devoted and willing to do anything that might return me to her. I squeezed her tight and gently touched her cheeks with my lips. I wrapped my hands around her and put them under her pyjamas. I enjoyed touching her bare skin, I enjoyed squeezing her tight and kissing her. She didn’t resist when my hand started sliding down her back, down her warm body, and when I slowly made my way across her hips and gently spread her legs. She responded to my touch with a barely audible sigh, I squeezed myself to her even more tightly, and leaned my lips against her neck. I thought that I never wanted to let her go, and that I could stay wrapped around her forever. We were lying almost motionless, united, one in the other. I kissed her neck and face, and Nadia held me more and more powerfully, and sighed softly, as if she was whispering in my ear. I wished for time to stop at that moment, for us to be able to stay clenched, confined to each other in the unfinished morning.
We remained lying, still hugging each other, and Nadia affectionately kissed my cheeks. Then she tilted her head back and closed her eyes. I put my head on her breasts and listened to her heartbeat, which was slowly calming. It was gratitude and it was love and I didn’t know where the first one ended and the second one started, and it didn’t seem important. It was enough for me to feel something so good, and this beat all other feelings.
Nadia has never told me why, on that January evening almost three years ago, she let an unknown lover of old Serbian punk rock take her home in his Japanese wreck. Nadia jokingly told me that she came from somewhere in the impassable fog of the Ljubljana marshes. I was ‘special, free, and all my own’ that night, while she was a future microbiologist who couldn’t stop her contagious, drunken giggling. When I had offered to drive her to her village, I wasn’t serious, but when Nadia replied to my suggestion with a seductive gaze, and called me a ‘geeeentlemaaaan,’ there was no turning back. It was a game we both accepted for a moment, but in which nobody wanted to be the first to quit. The only one who quit that night was my car, only a few metres on, after we turned from the road to meandering marshes, and got lost in the fog. The car obviously didn’t want to go any further into that unknown night, and so Nadia and I were stuck.
‘Dream on,’ thought Nadia, and out she went and disappeared in the clouds of fog that rolled lazily across the swampy ground. I revved the engine, hoping the sound would sow just a bit of a doubt into her theory of my dishonest intentions, because now she was making her way home through the marsh night-mists somewhere, all alone. But these were just desperate cries into the night, and I was sure that our story would end forever right there, with this scene in which our innocent beauty runs from a pervert with a crappy car who is then swallowed up by the icy night.
But suddenly Nadia peeked out from the fog and knocked on my steamed-up window. I opened it and she kissed me on the forehead, saying: ‘Write!’ She then proceeded to dictate her phone number and thanked me for the ride home, and then disappeared again. And sitting in my cold wreck of a car, sunken in the fog, I had thought that it would be really interesting to continue this game.
Daniel took the keys from my hands and threw them to Alan, telling him to wash this Japanese scrap heap of mine, and dragged me towards his silver Audi. A moment later, his acceleration threw me back into my seat, since racing along the narrow streets was the highest calling of Daniel’s life. Daniel had a car wash in this part of town, and he was doing really well. If you put these two together, it all makes perfect sense. He had two Audis, two kids, two women, two mobile phones and two years’ probation, because he once did something to someone that he shouldn’t have. Otherwise, he did everything to everyone every day, but only those who were allowed to in this country. Daniel had opened his car wash about seven years ago, and I’d worked for him for two months, because I didn’t have anywhere to go. The fact that he hired me, a total ‘nerd’ by local standards, to scrub off bird poo brought him a special sort of satisfaction.
We stopped in front of a three-hundred year-old Albanian cake shop, next to the church where they still pour plastic-tasting lemonade, which was being mixed all day long in those transparent square containers. The cake shop was empty, but Daniel knew the owner, so we got two scoops of ice cream and a pair of Cokes, on the house. Daniel didn’t drink alcohol, because he was a Muslim, and because that was his business stance, and because he was driving all the time, and because he had crashed badly a few years ago, drunk, and they’d barely been able to patch him up. He looked around at some point, as if he had wanted to check that no one was eavesdropping on us here, in this forgotten world.
‘Hey, Vlado, what’s you baby bro’s name?’
‘My brother’s?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Mladen.’
‘He lives round here?’
‘Yeah.’
‘That’s him, then.’
‘What’s him?’
‘Nothin’. Just watch him a bit.’
Daniel didn’t know that the relationship between Mladen and me was not of the sort that would make it possible for me to ‘watch him a bit.’ My only true friend didn’t really know much about me and, at that moment, I didn’t feel like informing him about my complicated family situation, so I just nodded.
The waiter stepped out for a smoke, because he could probably feel the conspiracy of our conversation, and didn’t want to burden us with his presence. All conversations with Daniel, since primary school, bore the cloak of conspiracy, so this smoking stunt was probably routine, since Daniel was a regular.
‘Nothing to panic about, don’t worry. I’m just tellin’ you, cause you’re my mate, and I wouldn’t want your kid bro to get fucked up.’
‘Thanks.’
‘He and his associates swiped a few motorcycles. Mopeds, scooters. Nothin’ much. We’ve all done that. All cool. They brought half of ‘em to me. To, like, sell them. But before that, the little fuckers were riding them around. Get it? So I asked them real nice, but they lied. Fuck it, you can’t trick me. I know everything that happens around here. I don’t need to be there. I know. And I know the little ones are stupid, and that they’ll get caught. I can get myself out of any sort of shit, but they’ll be screwed. You can’t do that. So, bro, watch you kid bro, slap some sense into him and tell him a thing or two. If you don’t, someone else will.’
The last time I saw Mladen, he was a proper, greasy-haired local. He was trying to give the impression of a world-weary warrior who, at thirteen, had lived through at least three shoot-outs in front of his apartment building, six orgiastic fist-fights in the lift, and twelve police raids of his bedroom. So some concrete slapping now and then would definitely do some good. But I couldn’t count on a written permission from his parents for such an educational measure.
The old car was shiny, inside and out, and it smelled like a teenager who’d just gotten his hands on his first stick of Old Spice. Daniel, satisfied with his humanitarian activity, greeted me with a nod and then indefinitely disappeared again from my life. While driving home, I tried to figure out what to do with the not-entirely-surprising intelligence that my
younger half brother was a moron.
It was so predictable, so unoriginal. His story had already been written, and the kid had only to recite it in front of the whole class. Stealing mopeds at thirteen meant that he was going to be a businessman at fifteen, and mysteriously vanish for some time at eighteen, only to turn up, with his body jacked and tattooed, and brag around that he ‘went on holiday.’ Even if he were to one day legalize his business practices, his life would still run on the bookmaker’s bench in front of apartment building twelve. At twenty five, he would still be listening to turbo folk music, and think that silicones and spoilers made the world go around. At best, he’d have an office in the Albanian cake shop.
At that point, it crossed my mind that Daniel’s information could actually help me. I had already driven past the heating plant, but decided to turn around. Dusha should be home from work any minute now, and Mladen was probably already having office hours on the bench in front of the apartment building.
16
When Dusha, with that unforgettable smile, first told me, fourteen years ago, that she was expecting a baby and that we would move in with Dragan, aka the ‘whispering one,’ at his apartment on Pregl Square, while his parents, the ones who hadn’t taught him that it was rude to whisper in company, would move to our, smaller apartment, everything went black before my eyes. My inhibitions fled before me, and I couldn’t hold back anymore. That day, Dusha was ‘a slut, a cow, a shit-face, an ass kisser, an idiot, a piece of shit, a pig, a moron, a dunce, trash, a fuck-face, and stinker, and a ‘slut’ a few more times. For me, this helped. I don’t even know what I resented more that day; the fact that she had buried my father without my permission, or that of all the men in this world, she had given herself to Dragan Ćirić from Pregl Square, who was never more than the sum of his parts. Whatever it was, it drove me to primal scream therapy, until I could hardly breathe. I threatened her and threw things around the apartment. Dusha hid her head in her hands and sobbed, while I was yelling and waving my hands at her, and I finally told her, at least ten times, that she could go fuck herself, but that I wouldn’t be moving to Pregl Square, that I didn’t want to see her kid, that I didn’t give a fuck about it all, and couldn’t care less, even if I never saw her again.