Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Read online

  At that point it seemed that the innocent white lie I’d unspooled to my boss, which had rewarded me with a week’s sick leave, was beco­ming an unwanted reality. The coffee vending machines that relied on my healing hands were surely missing me.

  I made every effort to concentrate on trying to recall which CD Nadia had asked me to bring in from the car. I shifted my gaze to the corner of the garage and, to distract myself, I tried to remember what was hidden in the dog-eared cardboard boxes piled there, forlornly. Who had put them there in the first place, and why had the corner of the garage been made to look like a rubbish dump? I started the ignition. She resisted, the old mare, but started eventually, on the first elongated attempt, for which I was grateful. Without consciously deciding to do so, I pushed down on the gas pedal and slowly reversed. It was at that point, that I heard the loud scratching sound. I saw the open door scrape against the garage wall and pulled up the handbrake at the last minute, just before the car door hit the frame of the garage door and my window shattered into a thousand shrapnel shards. I turned the engine back off.

  

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘When will you need the car?’

  ‘As soon as possible. Tomorrow, if that’s possible.’

  ‘And where will you go?’

  ‘I don’t know... yet.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. You don’t know... yet. You sound like my cousin. He knows he’s going to get laid someday, because he’s a young stud, he just doesn’t know when and who the lucky lady will be.’

  Enes had this routine he’d dance through before he took the keys from me; then he muttered that he’d call when the car was good to go. He was finally the boss, after years of slaving for other morons just like himself, and so he enjoyed airing his valves and exhausts, so to speak. His partially legal workshop was called Dino, named after his first son, and located by the railroad opposite the old Ljubljana stadium. ‘It’s so well hidden that even the Albanians never sold ice cream here,’ he had once described his black hole to every poor devil who wandered into it. Now I was the poor devil in question. After what felt like ages, Enes stuck his head under my hood.

  ‘Who replaced your fan?’

  ‘Nadia was driving...’

  ‘Why didn’t you bring it to me?’

  ‘The car stopped in the middle of the road.’

  ‘And where did she take it?’

  ‘To Dolgi Most.’

  ‘To Dolgi Most. And how much did the thugs in that neighbourhood charge for this?’

  ‘I can’t remember.’

  ‘Well, well, well... Why didn’t she call you and then you could’ve called me?’

  ‘That’s not how Slovenians do this.’

  This magical argument satisfied him completely.

  ‘Not that it matters. We’ll take care of it.’

  For some reason I always spent at least half an hour at Enes’ for no good reason. It crossed my mind that I ought to get some discount in this asshole part of the city, especially if he thought I was one of ‘his guys.’ It never crossed my mind to explain to every vocal instrumentalist from middle Bosnia that I’d never felt like one of ‘their guys,’ nor did I want to. It was easier, and often cheaper, to put up with the good old-boy chatter, always conducted in ‘our language,’ and amuse myself by guessing what discount I would get if I were a Slovene.

  ‘You know, I don’t ask you where you’re going for no reason. I mean, I don’t give a rat’s ass, go where you like. The main question is whether you’re going up or down.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, if you go up, the roads are great. No holes. Just fire it up and off you go. But if you’re headed down... You know how it is.’

  I had no idea. I hadn’t been south of the Kolpa River in recent memory.

  ‘I’m going down.’

  ‘Cuz! Come here and fix this car up, and I want it flawless. This guy here is one of ours. Bosnian.’

  ‘Aren’t they all?’ he replied.

  ‘Don’t be stupid.’

  Enes’ cousin grabbed the keys with his grime-black hands and stepped into the car. This time the old wreck started at only the third twist of the keys.

  ‘What are you laughing at, motherfucker?’ Enes inquired. ‘In ex-Yugoslavia we Bosnians fucked, while all the others brought up children. The two of you are young and don’t even realize that half of these Slovenians, Croatians and Serbians jerking their way around the Balkans were fathered by Bosnian Toms, Dicks and Harrys.’

  Enes was a happy man. He had a captive audience who didn’t object to him, which was all he ever wanted.

  ‘Back in the day, Bosnians could fuck anyone they wanted, but women didn’t want to marry us. Yugoslav women didn’t want their kids to be given some Muslim name. Or even Enes. There’s brotherhood and unity for you. No wonder it ended like it did.’

  

  As I marched from the Dino mechanics shop toward the civilized centre of Ljubljana, my well-being was suffering a crisis of such extent, that even the Slovenian cab drivers couldn’t make me feel worse. I climbed into a blue Opel Vectra and made the conscious decision to set an over-high price of ten euros, rather than watch the driver press the taximeter and stare at it the whole while as it turned at the speed of three euros per minute, while he drove me on an elongated route. I felt even less like talking. I didn’t have the energy for cab debates, so I simply stared out the window while the rundown Opel ran down towards the city centre in blissful silence.

  ‘Is here okay?’

  He stopped at the bus station. To my pleasant surprise, the taximeter showed six euros and fifty cents. I got out, crossed the street and found myself at the main entrance to the Polyclinic hospital, not knowing precisely what I wanted to do there. The thought that I’d have to wait there for quite some time, observing the mixed procession of the nearly-­dead, people with broken bones and hypochondria, didn’t exactly appeal, but I had this feeling that I’d already been sitting in a socialist dentist’s waiting room for three days, so what would the difference be? Yet still I wasn’t mentally prepared to enter the building, to make the first move in this winner-takes-all battle.

  Passive-aggression suited my current mind-set much more. I leaned against a pillar and prepared myself to spend an indefinite amount of time scanning patients as they passed by, without giving them the impression that they were being scanned; remembering that my mother had taught me that staring wasn’t polite. Dusha, after years of working at the hospital, knew all about that.

  

  ‘I don’t need anything. I’ll just have a smoke.’

  A lady with a walker waddled towards me followed by some bald guy, probably her son, who stood looking confused, unsure whether he should quickly get her cardigan, drag the lady back inside, or have a smoke himself. He seemed like the sort of person with a great deal of experience confronted by simple questions for which he could not find simple answers. After much deliberation, he decided to head for the stairs. But the old lady stopped next to me, took a cigarette from her pocket, and lit it.

  ‘Want one?’

  I nodded and she offered me her lighter as well. I wasn’t a smoker, but every now and then I had a serious urge to suck some poison into my veins.

  ‘Healthy or sick?’

  ‘Healthy.’

  ‘That makes two of us. These modern kids and grandkids just don’t understand that people are old when they hit eighty, so they bring me here for examinations just so these nitwits can find something, which they do every time. Cholesterol, veins, that sort of stuff. And then these clowns want me to enrol in aquatic aerobics and stop smoking and eating pork roast and who knows what else. Come on, gimme a break. Can’t I die in peace, without them watering me here like a house plant?’

  I was trying to nod at
the appropriate moments, to at least appear interested in her story, but the truth is I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even see Dusha walk past, and only caught a glimpse of her when she was ten metres beyond me. I threw the half-burnt stub of my cigarette into the bushes and took off after her.

  ‘Dusha! Dusha!’

  She was at the crossroads by the time she finally turned around and saw me. She wasn’t the sort of person who was easily surprised, and even less likely to show it openly. I hadn’t seen her for months, and I’d obviously been lurking outside of the Polyclinic for her, but she met me without expression, as if I was a walk-on character in a Mexican soap opera. That look would have made me hate her, if I didn’t already hate her for so many other reasons. The only other time I had hated her more was when she decided she would speak Slovene to me. I had insisted on speaking Serbo-Croatian; and rarely with as much as plea­sure as that day.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I want the phone number, address, anything. I want to know where he is.’

  ‘Who are you talking about?’

  ‘You know.’

  My mother, the Terminator, seemed to be in shock for a moment, a rare occurrence, but then she turned and started to cross the road, as if her plan was to run away from her own son. I hoped she would at least stop on the opposite pavement, but soulless old Dusha kept right on going towards her car, where it was parked on Ilirska Street, as it had been every day for years. Her husband, Dragan, had scored her a permit through his connections with various and sundry ‘southern scum,’ so that Mrs. Ćirić would never have to pay for parking. I knew that she was capable of getting into her shit-yellow Clio and driving home without replying, without a word. As she always had, Dusha simply went into shutdown mode.

  I chased and grabbed her hand, but she wouldn’t stop. It was clear that she really did intend to drive off, and I had no choice but to pull her away from her car, and make her talk to me.

  ‘I know he’s alive and I want to see him.’

  Rather than answering, she tried to shake off my grip. First she pushed, and then kicked, but luckily she didn’t know what she was doing. I held her firmly by the waist, and I waited for her to calm down and stop wriggling like a fool. Dusha was renowned for her stubbornness. At one point she dug her long red nails into my hand. I pulled away reflexively, and we both stumbled back toward the high fence at the edge of the pavement. While she regained her balance, I positioned myself between her and the Clio. Naturally she tried to push her way past me, but I had no hesitation in pushing back.

  I had often suspected that when she shut herself off like this, she wasn’t really herself. But this time I was sure, as she took a few steps back, to sort of get a running start, then literally jumped around me, into the road, in order to get to her car from the other side. Only when I threw myself into her path did she pause. She stepped back onto the pavement, puffing heavily. After a moment, Dusha finally turned to me.

  ‘Come tomorrow during the break and we’ll talk in peace.’

  This didn’t sound like her.

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I promise.’

  

  Her promise meant little to me, but I knew my mother well enough to know that this was as much as I could hope to get from her. My hope that she really would show up in the morning was because this time it was serious: I needed a piece of information that would mean her coming out of her comfort zone. I also counted on her knowing that I was as stubborn as she, and I could wait indefinitely for her in front of the Polyclinic if necessary. But at that moment her Clio was moving out of sight, and I still wasn’t sure whether I was indeed going to see her the following day, less still that I would manage to extract information from her.

  I was tempted to get onto some obscure city bus, maybe the number ten, and circle the city once or twice, staring out the window, sitting quietly like some forgotten scarf in the company of autistic teenagers on their way home from school. But it was almost three o’clock, and I knew that there would be no seats free. An even if I could find one, the inevitable old lady would come on-board soon enough, drooping supermarket bags in hand, and inform me eloquently with her gaze that I should make myself scarce and yield up my seat.

  So I slowly meandered home, past the Medical Centre, with the honest intention of planning how I would explain all this, or any of this, to Nadia. Or what would I do if, in the middle of a sentence, I realized that I couldn’t tell her anything?

  Though we had been together three years, I’d never managed to completely understand Nadia. I wasn’t sure just what she was doing with me, and how she viewed our relationship. She came from another storybook altogether: a top microbiology student from an orderly suburban family. But more than that, she belonged to a generation cool enough not to worry about the daily forecasts of impending doom. From the moment her pubescent pimples departed, Nadia had never had any problems, or at least none that I (with my inherited insensitivity) could notice. Sometimes I thought she was with me only because a two-metre-tall lifelong unsolvable problem like me would thoroughly complicate her otherwise immaculate life and was, therefore, the only thing missing from her as yet unfinished childhood.

  If I felt anything for Nadia, it was probably gratitude. I was grateful because she didn’t nag me, because she wasn’t interested in my life story, because she didn’t make a fuss that I’d never introduced her to my mother. Her light touch was endlessly appealing, and I was frankly afraid to shatter that with a story about my father, who until recently, had been deceased.

  

  Luckily for me my dilemma was delayed that evening by Nadia’s student obligations. Our little rented flat had been invaded by a pair of classmates from her hometown: aspiring microbiologists Matthew and Nina who, along with Nadia, were drinking all our beers. These three linked studying with the endless freedom won by leaving home, and thus looked upon microbiological studies at the University of Ljubljana as heaven on earth. As I walked in the door, they were in the midst of some crucial discussion, and barely noticed me, so I was able to slip into the bedroom, shut the door, and try to get some sleep.

  My study habits couldn’t have been more different. I enrolled at the uni’ only in order to get my hands on references from student services, and to help my former boss avoid paying out to the state. Years later I’d managed to convince myself that the absorption of knowledge on a daily basis might actually be a good way to bring some semblance of organization and meaning to my melee of a life, so I began, along with a crowd of fellow enthusiasts, frequenting the Faculty of Arts. On the first day they hit me with Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theories, followed quickly by child development psychology, then Slavic mytho­logy. I did ethnology in my first year, cultural anthropology in my third, and was in no particular hurry to continue. I still liked to listen to lectures, and sometimes enjoyed a beer or two with classmates afterwards, but that was it. I couldn’t imagine indulging in regular binges with them at student parties.

  I could hear the three of them arguing about some banality outside, but no discussion that evening could have pierced through my bedroom wall to disturb my slumber, and I did not need to convince myself that the three microbiologists didn’t get on my nerves. The whole world bothered me, so there was no reason for them to be a notable exception.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  Nadia was stoned and standing in the doorway, smiling at me mis­chie­vously. She had probably gotten up to pee and en route, recalled that she had a boyfriend.

  ‘We’re going to get some booze. Wanna come?’

  ‘Should I wake you when I get home?’

  Nadia’s smile grew more mischievous, which was always a turn-on but, alas, my mood was not erectile that evening.

  ‘No need.’

  ‘Fine. Goodnight.’

  The micr
obiological gang slowly made their way out, in a cascade of drunkenly resounding whispers, but I was no closer to falling asleep. I kept thinking about tomorrow’s meeting with Dusha, about my father and everything she might tell me. Or not tell me.

  I was awake when Nadia subtly stomped through the door at half past four and tried, in vain, to quietly go to bed. I threw a secret glance at her while she changed her clothes, thinking her nudity might provide some welcome distraction, but not even her young body possessed the super power to shift me out of my current state of complete emotional turpitude. She laid down next to me and fell asleep in immediate, drunken peace. Her long, brown hair smelled of pot and I thought that I might help myself to a joint, but didn’t feel like getting up and ransacking her handbag in the middle of the night. I soon heard her purr, as she did whenever she’d imbibed too much beer. I knew that I could scream and she wouldn’t hear, so I dared to speak to her.

  ‘My father isn’t dead. But he is a war criminal.’

  

  ‘Meet me at eleven. At the Second Aid Bar. Love, Dusha.’

  Dusha never gave a damn about things like atmosphere, either in her daily life or in mine. We might as well have met in a boiler room or operating theatre. At least the message, that beeped at half past seven and woke me up, assured me that I had managed to get some sleep, after all.

  Dusha arrived as sleep-deprived as I was, full bags under her eyes poorly hidden by make-up. The idea that something might have finally struck a nerve in her was a pleasant one. She ordered a double espresso and a large glass of water, and then lit up. She offered me one, and asked if I smoked, politely, as if we were strangers meeting for the first time. We sat at a table on the terrace, smoking, and I noticed that we each held our cigarettes in just the same way. I also saw that her hand was shaking.

  ‘I don’t have a lot of time, so just tell me what you want.’