Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Read online

  My English was poor, and I avoided forming long sentences, trying instead to communicate with individual words. When I should have been learning English, I had been learning Slovenian. I forgot the little Italian I had learned in Pula, and I also forgot the little German from secondary school. I was trapped within the narrow boundaries of my two mother tongues and compared to me, Nadia was a genuine babel kid, who felt at home in the babel of Vienna.

  So only the domestic-sounding words of passers-by calmed me down, in the midst of this disorderly chaos, and I was delighted to see each migrant worker from Vienna who snuck behind my back and crossed the street with me. I listened to ‘our people’ on the tram, and felt at ease in understanding the little snippets of conversation I could catch in Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian. I was walking behind Nadia, catching conversations of people from my world like blips on a radar, believing they might make this massive unfamiliarity more familiar.

  The room at the Wild Pension, the cheapest hotel in Nadia’s guidebook, was my hideaway, my refugee centre, where my puppy-dog eyes asked the receptionist for asylum. I was on the run from the treetops of the Vienna rings, from the clean subway stations, from cars stopping for pedestrians, from the endless multitude of museums, from carefully renovated façades, and from the whole world that had run away from somewhere to gather again here, by the Danube River.

  I was on the run from good and bad Vienna, because I couldn’t tell the two apart. Locked in the room, I avoided getting closer to the window and looking out on Lange Gasse street. I lay on the bed, turned on the TV and waited for night to come. The knowledge that I didn’t have to leave the room anymore that night was like a balm to me, and occasionally, I even managed to forget about what awaited me the next day.

  I had fended off any panic attacks and my heartbeat was finally settling down. Nadia came out of the bathroom and sat down next to me. She gently hugged me and reassuringly stroked my hand. A film featuring Reese Witherspoon started on the TV. We had seen it many times, but due to the special circumstances, I was unexpectedly happy about it that evening, and put the remote on the bedside table. Nadia gratefully kissed me, thinking that I left the film on for her.

  We didn’t say a word that night. When the film ended, I turned the TV off, rested my head on Nadia’s arm and fell asleep.

  

  I entered a dark Viennese restaurant with low ceilings from which Bosnian tables hung, upside down, filled with far too much colourful plastic, decorative food. As if he had recognized me, a waiter in a long black apron nodded and subtly directed me with his hand to a narrow hall, and then up the stairs to a wooden terrace spread with nicely adorned tables. Under a low stone arch in a remote booth in the corner of the room, somebody was sitting at a small table, on which there was only a drink, and an ashtray full of cigarette stubs oozing thick smoke. I sat down and gazed at him, wanting to find his eyes above the unkempt white beard, but he was successfully hiding in the shadow of the stone arch. I was afraid that he would draw away from me, that he would swing even deeper into the darkness of the restaurant’s corner and disappear through a secret passage, but then suddenly he leaned forward and his eyes (which were also my eyes, as Emir Muzirović Loza had recently reminded me) peered from the darkness for a second. He was crying and when, a second later, he closed his eyes, two tiny tears rolled down his face, which were followed by others along the beaten, watery path meandering around his wrinkles. I was watching him, and it made me feel warm and lovely, his tears calmed me down like his large warm hand on my head used to, when I was small. I was watching him cry and enjoying myself, as if he had been singing ‘Red Dawn is Still Not Dawning’ to me, with his deep, mellow voice, and I would slowly fall into a sleep from which a hot summer morning would wake me. I finally saw his hands, with which he tried to wipe his teary eyes. They were large hands, too large for his face, even though it was hidden behind a white beard, and they couldn’t make their way into the small eye sockets. I had a feeling that his hands were growing before my eyes, while he awkwardly waved them around his tear stained face; and then he desperately let them down, settling like birds back onto his lap, and lowered his head, as if he wished to admit defeat. And then, suddenly, his head dropped straight onto the table, crushing a glass of red wine underneath it. He just lay there in front of me, as if dead, but I could still see his tears rolling down his covered face.

  

  I woke up in the middle of the night and didn’t have the guts to look at the watch to see how far away from dawn I was. There was more finality in waking up in the dark than any bright light, no matter how strong, and it was more than obvious that my night’s sleep at the Wild Pension was over. I was awake and I had to come to terms with it. My exhausted body could’ve used a few more hours of sleep, but my head was wider-awake than ever before. I knew this feeling, which I barely managed to escape with the help of the soppy film and Nadia the evening before.

  This was panic, spelling out ’rEPUBLIC FOR KOSOVO, CONTINENT FOR ISTRIA!’

  I got up. Nadia was fast asleep on her side of the bed. There was no one below our window in Lange Gasse street. Everybody was asleep at the hotel across the street, as well. I waited for a few minutes, to see if somebody would walk by and distract me with their appearance, but there was no one. Vienna at night looked similar to Ljubljana at night, and life in it died out shortly after every sunset. I went to the bathroom and tried to drink some water as quietly as possible, so as not to wake Nadia. The Austrians seemed like a nation who would ensure that water was drinkable, and a good thing, too, as I was drinking it as if my survival depended on it. Then I tried a miniature version of shock therapy, and splashed my face with ice-cold Austrian water. But nothing worked.

  rEPUBLIC FOR KOSOVO, CONTINENT FOR ISTRIA!

  I went back to the room. Nadia still hadn’t moved. She hadn’t felt the emptiness on her right side, and she had stretched across my side of the bed. I took another peek at Lange Gasse street, but I could only conclude that the people of Vienna didn’t see fit to walk around at this time of night, and that the street would be empty until morning. I drew the curtains shut and sat down on the floor by the window. I looked at Nadia sleeping, and I remembered, again, the eleven year old boy crying in room 211 at the Bristol Hotel in Belgrade, while his mother was fast asleep next to him. I was that boy again, trapped in the hotel room, waiting for a distant morning, which wouldn’t bring anything but another unpleasant day.

  Nadia had booked a double room at this hotel, online. Nadia had bought us train tickets and ordered us a taxi at seven in the morning. Nadia had picked a compartment and Nadia had reminded me that we had to change trains in Maribor. Nadia had known how to get from the Vienna train station to the hotel, and at which underground station we had to change trains. But Nadia was asleep, and I was awake, sitting alone and squeezed against the wall of our hotel room.

  rEPUBLIC FOR KOSOVO, CONTINENT FOR ISTRIA!

  The more the hour of my meeting with Nedelko approached, the more I moved away from him in my mind, and didn’t know if I would even be able to speak when he was around. The questions I wanted to ask him were disappearing. I was afraid of all the possible answers, and even after I had listened to them in my head countless times, I still didn’t recognize the answer to the simplest question of all: do I even want to know? I didn’t want his remorse and for him to make himself human in my eyes, at least for a moment, I didn’t want reasons I could understand.

  But most of all I was afraid that I would recognize my father in this man; and on the floor of the Wild Pension in Vienna, I sincerely wished, for the first time, that Nedelko Borojević had indeed died when his wife, Dusha, had buried him for me. I wished for my father to still be dead, and that someone else would be there in his mysterious home in Vienna. I wanted to believe that my father had been killed by secondment for which even he, a professional know-nothing, knew would be his last. I wanted him not to be this man hidi
ng from ostensible justice here in Vienna. I wanted to love my father and hate the war criminal, General Borojević. I was hoping these two men would never meet in the same body, and that I would never recognize one in the other. I believed that General Borojević should remain the person with a storm-cloud gaze in the photos from Višnjići, which Brane had thrust into my hands. And I believed that my father should no longer be my father, after having marched in there.

  My father should be that eternal nice uncle, from whose broad shoulders I used to throw myself into the sea; who once drew a picture of a Renault 18 for me, and promised to buy it for me when I got my driver’s license; who only hit me once when I picked our neighbour’s figs, even though I didn’t eat them; who let me watch Eurovision to the end, to the last name in the closing credits, even though it was long past my bedtime. My father had to remain my father, and mustn’t turn into General Borojević because, if my father became General Borojević, I would be left without a father, and my only ten years of happiness would vanish with him, razed to the ground, like a village in Slavonia.

  

  ‘What’s with you? Is everything okay?’

  Daylight was breaking and Nadia, who lay on my side of the bed, woke up to see me, still sitting on the floor, squeezed against the wall.

  ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How long have you been sitting there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It’s six o’clock. Come here.’

  She put the phone back to the bedside table. I climbed onto the bed and Nadia squeezed herself to me and put her head on my chest.

  ‘Your heart’s pounding.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you afraid of the meeting?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to. We could go for a stroll around the city ... ’

  ‘I’d like to go home.’

  ‘Okay.’

  Nadia closed her eyes and I closed my eyes, as well. I was tired and the thought that we would soon be sitting on a train to Ljubljana calmed me down. Lange Gasse street was waking up below our window, and its sounds slowly put me to sleep.

  

  When the train at the Vienna train station finally flinched and a moment later the locomotive pulled the cars behind it towards Ljubljana, I felt relieved, as if someone had pulled me out of the water while I was drowning, and I could breathe fresh air again. I was saved, but only until the suburbs of Vienna began vanishing in the distance, and I began silently admitting and regretting that my fear had defeated me. I tried to hide it behind some kind of imaginary principles, but it pierced through and reminded me that the decision not to meet Nedelko hadn’t actually been only mine. He whispered that my fear was making decisions for me. I tried to convince myself that it only made my decision easier, but I couldn’t buy that either. I was on the run.

  ‘What are you thinking about?’

  We were sitting alone in the compartment and Nadia was inconspicuously offering herself as a friend to speak to, ready to share my fears, and chase them away with words. But I was only shaking my head and didn’t look away from the passing green emptiness outside. There were thoughts I could never explain to anyone, and didn’t even try anymore. On this train, I remembered people returning home from abroad, overcome by the loveliness of the first hills in their homeland, and some kind of warmth caressing their chests.

  I vaguely remembered that feeling, though it was a long time ago. I was maybe seven or eight years old, when we returned from the Plitvice Lakes, and I had fallen asleep on the back seat of our white Yugo, during the long journey back. It must have been past midnight when we came to Pula, and father suddenly woke me up. My mother was furious and told him to let me sleep, that it was late, but he kept repeating: ‘He’s home, he’ll be glad.’ And indeed I saw, half-asleep, the contours of a large ship in the shipyard, and then the Army Hall, and as we began descending Omladina Street, and our apartment building appeared in the distance, and my father said to me, ‘There’s our house,’ and I could really feel my home, and it felt like home.

  I didn’t have a home anymore, because I got stuck abroad sometime later and I couldn’t return. I knew that I could only pass from one foreignness to another, and that I wouldn’t feel anything when the train from Spielfeld rumbled past the heating plant, and through out-lying Slovenian villages and towards the train station, where the ‘Ljubljana’ sign appeared on the platform. I also knew that I wouldn’t be able to explain this to Nadia; that she wouldn’t understand, even if she wanted to. So I kept silent and in my mind, accused invisible crowds of little people who had destroyed my only home on my large continent, in order to get their little ‘Republic for Kosovo’, just like the graffiti said.

  Who knows if Nedelko used to think like that, I thought to myself, and I felt guilty for sharing my thoughts with him, but this was more powerful than just me. The more we approached the point where my world used to begin, the more exiled and trapped into some kind of intransience I felt. And the more I was connected to this man who no longer deserved to be called a man.

  I wondered if Nedelko had really known what he was fighting for, and against whom, when it all started. As someone who had always proclaimed himself a Yugoslav, did he let himself be convinced that he was fighting for his homeland, and for his home in Pula, when he did what he did in Slavonia? Did he see that people like him, who wished, for everything to be the way it had been, never had their own army? These people all gave themselves up the first day of the war, hid in shelters or irreversibly escaped to their eternal foreign exile. They were the minority, defeated before the first bullet was shot, humiliated and exiled. And maybe Nedelko didn‘t see this, or didn’t understand, and maybe that was why he didn’t put his gun down and strip his uniform off?

  While I absentmindedly stared through the window of the speeding train, I wondered if Nedelko had ever really realized that, with every soldier or civilian fallen in this war, on either side, a tiny part of his world had inevitably died? I understood that the man I had once known as my father couldn’t have survived such a realization. Such a realization could maybe be endured by the other Nedelko, the Nedelko who had kept the story of his father, Milutin, from us for years, the Nedelko who had never really got over his father’s fate, the Nedelko who could only be born after the death of the other Nedelko, rising like a phoenix from pain. The Nedelko who had only his story, the story of Milutin and Agnes, the story which ‘justified’ him there, in Višnjići.

  Only in this way could my father kill the people with whom he had sunbathed on the rocky beaches below the Lungomare promenade, next to whom he had sat in the Arena theatre, and with whom he had laughed at the same films. Only this way could he, at some point, stop seeing in them the people who had liked watching the same evening quiz show, and bought the same music cassettes for their children. Only this way could he find some way to distinguish himself from them. Because he wasn’t himself anymore.

  I kept staring at the valleys of Austria, resisting the feeling of guilt for finding some kind of understanding for a man who was no longer deserving of the name. But my understanding only extended as far as his feelings, his disappointments, and the extreme boundaries of his humanity. Beyond this boundary, there were his gruesome acts that I continued to refuse to understand. Beyond this boundary, there was no despair, no sadness, and no anger. Beyond this boundary, there were only the instincts of a killer, an insensitive monster who did not kill in self-defence, but who killed in self-offense. I didn’t want to breach this boundary, and I didn’t want to enter this inner world of his. I actually wasn’t even interested in how Nedelko himself could have overstepped this boundary, as this was a question only he could answer.

  I had no questions for him.

  

  It was rage that
turned me around and dragged me off that train somewhere in the middle of the neatly mown, green panorama between Vienna and Graz. Nadia silently followed me, exhausted and reconciled, while I was torn up by rage, asking Nedelko, in my name, why he decided to live, and why he wanted to meet me now, after all those years of hide-and-seek. Why did he suddenly choose to appear? Of all those questions, only the seemingly trivial ‘why’ was actually still bursting inside me, a question I wanted to throw in his face, like a glove with which I would challenge him to a duel and settle the score with him, right there in the middle of a restaurant in Vienna. I was furious because he was toying with my life, and this rage drew me to him.

  Now Nadia toddled behind me, catching the first train back to Vienna and sitting down in the first empty place on the train that drove into the station, to who knows where, from who knows where. I could only see seven o’clock in the evening, and a table in the corner of the terrace of a dark restaurant with low ceilings, as I had imagined, under the influence of last night’s dream: the Stomach Restaurant.

  In Vienna, Nadia felt like she should take charge again and I followed her to the Wild Pension, along a familiar path. But this time, I was no longer able to listen to people around us, I only obliviously stared through the window of the subway train, and waited patiently for speed to blur the point upon which my gaze was fixed. Everything that was happening to me, since getting off the Ljubljana-bound train, only counted down the minutes, and I thought I felt those seconds and minutes rolling past me, slow and tired. And then they paused for a moment, and everything stiffened, and I panicked again, and then they started moving, and the world was unnoticeably turning round again.