Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Page 3
‘I want to see him.’
‘You know you can’t. He’s in hiding. They’re looking for him.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘Nobody knows exactly where he is.’
‘Do you?’
She shook her head. Dusha avoided my eyes, but did check her watch three times, and glance six times at the entrance of the bar, all in the space of a few minutes.
‘The last time he got in touch with me was three years back. I don’t even know if he’s alive.’
I quickly did the sums in my head: how many years had passed since Dusha decided to break it to me that, ostensibly, my father had died somewhere on the front. Yet now it turned out that she had been in touch with him for twelve years... In touch with a dead guy, fallen in the midst of an offensive against common sense.
‘Where did he contact you from?’
‘I think it’s better... ’
‘Where did he contact you from?’
‘He’s hiding from everyone. Why do you think?’
‘Where did he contact you from?’
‘From Brčko.’
‘Address?’
‘Why would you think he’d..?’
‘Maybe he was hoping you’d visit him? Or that I’d visit him? That we’d write... ’
‘Vlado, look... ’
‘Address!’
The waitress brought the double espresso and a large glass of water for Dusha, and a juice for me. Dusha paid immediately, saying she was in a hurry.
‘Address!’
‘He said that he wouldn’t stay at that address, that he was going elsewhere, that he wasn’t safe there anymore. That was three years ago. I’ve never heard of any new address.’
I could’ve repeated ‘Address!’ with the same tone a hundred more times. I could’ve repeated it until the next morning, and Dusha knew it. She downed her large glass of water and started on her small cup of coffee.
‘Look, I know you’ll never forgive me for telling you he was dead. But I’d like to say that, in all these years, over all this time, he’s never once said he was innocent. He has never said that to me. He has also never said that he was sorry. I would like you to know that there’s a real possibility that he is guilty. I would like you to know that. Just that.’
‘There, almost done.’
Enes probably had no idea what was happening to my old wreck in his workshop, which had been left at the mercy of his cousin’s youthful exuberance. Enes, as the undisputed star of his team, had treated himself to a small beer and a Williams’s pear schnapps, while holding court, entertaining ‘our people’ with his jokes at the café he frequented and was owned and occupied by ‘our people.’
‘When can I come by?’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Then come this afternoon.’
‘How much is this gonna cost me?’
‘We’ll arrange something, my dear Vladan.
3
The ‘youngster’ who washed the windows of my tired old car at a petrol station somewhere in the midst of a blasted heath halfway to nowhere, but approximately between Zagreb and Brčko, looked so much like Maki that he could’ve easily convinced me that he was the son Maki had forgotten sometime long ago, while moving iridescent kitsch from his stall at the market. Four toddlers lurked nearby, holding buckets of water and filthy cloths. They peeked out at me, ready to sprint for my change, which I intended to spend on a double espresso and juice at the nearby Javori Restaurant. I thought how my old man would have loved to take them on, but I didn’t inherit any useful talents from him, like wrestling undernourished toddlers. When I opened my car door, outstretched hands were suddenly upon me: a whirl of torn and dirty clothes, and they succeeded in jogging my conscience enough to relieve me of just enough change to transform my plan into a single espresso and a glass of water. Mildly pissed-off, I tried to push my way past them, to ignore them, but they did an Indian sprint so that one was always just in front of me, underfoot. They kept showing me how clean my car window was, shoving dirty palms ever nearer my face.
‘I don’t have any change!’
I showed them my empty pockets.
‘That’s okay, you can give us bills.’
‘I only have euros.’
‘Not a problem.’
Defeated, I pulled a two-euro coin from my wallet and put it in the hand of the Maki lookalike. But my battle was far from over, as the other four scrambled for their share.
‘Come on, off you go, don’t make me... ’
An elderly waiter, in a uniform left over from socialist days, stood before the entrance to the restaurant. When two of the little Gypsy children heard his stern voice, they instantly stepped back, while the furious waiter managed to grab the youngest by his frayed collar and literally flung him toward the parking lot.
‘Go fuck yourself, you little thief!’
‘Fuck you!’
‘Watch it, kid, don’t make me come over there!’
‘Suck my dick, you idiot!’
Apparently I’d found myself in the middle of an enduring siege between the uniformed army at the restaurant, and the Gypsy guerrilla children; wrestling for supremacy of the muddy path linking the improvised parking lot and the improvised restaurant. Just then a Volkswagen Golf with Bulgarian plates pulled in, and the little Gypsies forgot the unhappy waiter and ran off with their slop buckets. The waiter returned to his sentry duty by the door, and continued his smoke break.
I sat at a table covered in a white cloth, as well as aged coffee stains, which lay over an even dirtier red tablecloth. A plastic ashtray sat in the middle, alongside a vase containing plastic flowers from the Yugoslav Mesozoic period. I had to wait, of course, to earn the right to pay for a sour coffee, hand-mixed with a disposable thin plastic spoon, amidst this particular ambience. It was my first time in such a setting. The honorary waiter extended one smoke to two, spoke with a comrade who stood behind a stainless steel bar, and managed to somehow get lost on the way from there to my table.
It seemed as though I were experiencing the genuine tradition of southern hospitality that I’d heard so much about. Others, far wiser than I, had tried and failed to change this mode of behaviour, so it was futile for me to do anything but absorb it. I tried once to communicate with these local human-like creatures, asking the innocent question, ‘How far is it to Brčko?’ To which came the reply, ‘I don’t give a... ’ from one of the death row inmates working that day.
The uniformed guy with a moustache, who had taken my petrol money, seemed to have hated himself that morning, but graduated to hating the whole world in the afternoon. His spontaneous reaction to my question about Brčko, a town which history had consigned to his outrage because it had not ended up in Croatian hands at the war’s end, did provoke something in the same phylum as a smile. This was probably just to give me the false sense that he was joking, rather than intending to terrorize all passengers en route to the Serbian Entity.
I was fed up, and I had only just started.
Twenty minutes later, I was sipping undrinkable coffee at the restaurant next door, wondering why this unspoken, projected accusation could still make me feel like shit. I put my hate for moustache guy on the boil, and it bubbled into an imaginary biography, in which he was a smuggler of stoves and washing machines stolen from Serbian houses. I could picture Mr. Moustache carrying Gorenje appliances up and down the village, after his shift at the petrol station ended, offering them to neighbours, claiming that they all came from his nice Swedish son-in-law, who had just bought brand new Electrolux appliances for his holiday home and didn’t need them anymore. But when Mr. Moustache vanished into my hallucinatory Slavonian mist, several washing machines under each arm, logic settled back into place, and it seemed to me that it would be hard to find a mo
re normal petrol station attendant in the middle of this lousy stretch of nothingness between Zagreb and Belgrade. For the locals, it was surely normal that their grasp on geography in this, their God-forsaken world, did not extend to the escarpments of misery behind the Sava River, from which I had come. It was also probable that Serbian expatriates, whose relatives in Brčko likely lived in the houses of expelled Muslims or Croats, and were none too likeable to begin with. So it was normal that he wouldn’t pretend to be professional, just to please a passers-by.
This version of normal was strange to me, but that didn’t explain why I still felt bad. I’d never thought of myself as sensitive, and barrages of swearing don’t move me at all. But I suppose I felt that all of this was somehow connected to my father’s Lazarus situation, and I wondered if Mr. Moustache could read my sense of guilt. Hadn’t my own sense of innocence, which I had believed whole-heartedly until recently, irreversibly ruptured the moment I decided to Google my dead father’s name? Was that why I couldn’t look Mr. Moustache in the eye and tell him to fuck off? Was that why I now felt like someone in the dock, judged by the self-righteous?
The village of Višnjići, in eastern Slavonia, was now on my conscience, even though I couldn’t have found it on a map. I knew even less about what had happened there, on the night of 13 November 1991, at a time when Dusha and I were already living in Ljubljana. But I felt guilty all the same, and this feeling grew stronger now that I was nearing it.
‘Anything else?’
‘Sorry? Uh, no... no thanks.’
‘Twelve kunas.’
It seemed that my time at the Javori Restaurant had come to an end.
This was the first time I had come to the country of my birth and also my first contact with Croatian citizens, if you set aside the encounters on the streets of Ljubljana, and the customs officer in the nice light blue uniform at border control
I thought of Nadia, whom I hadn’t even managed to inform of my departure. When I set off, she was still in sweet dreamland, and I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. I would have been able to concoct a story that would plausibly mask my true intentions and travel plans, which was full of holes anyway and unpredictable in every way, including its duration. But when my phone rang for the third time in thirty minutes, I knew I couldn’t ignore her any longer.
‘Hello.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Nadia... something’s happened.’
‘What?’
‘My father’s... aunt... Milosava. She’s dead.’
‘Really? Where are you now?’
‘I’m going to the funeral. Driving.’
‘Where to?’
‘Bosnia.’
‘Bosnia?’
‘Yes. Now I’m here... in Croatia.’
‘And why didn’t you tell me? Why did you just drive off to Bosnia? Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine. It’s just... I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. Long story.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah. Whatever. Call me.’
Nadia hung up and I got this irresistible urge to call her back and continue our conversation. I couldn’t put my phone down, but I also had no idea what else to say to her. She certainly didn’t deserve my lying to her from a parking lot in front of the Javori Restaurant about my supposedly deceased Aunt Mirosava, my only relative on my father’s side, who had unexpectedly passed away, aged ninety-two, while cutting down an apple tree in the garden of the only nursing home in eastern Bosnia. I had invented my aunt’s life story in such detail that, without any hesitation, I could have recounted stories of Milosava’s stuffed peppers that she used to pack, every winter, into vacuum containers and take to the bus station, along with a letter for my mother and twenty Deutschmarks for me, and give them to the driver of a bus destined for Ljubljana. I could have also told her about my aunt’s husband, Slavko, who had sadly died of stomach cancer, which she had always blamed on her unhealthy home cooking, resulting in her turning to organic food at the age of eighty-five, which led her Bosnian neighbours to assume she suffered from dementia, causing them to put her in a nursing home and take possession of her house.
My imagination was vivid, and I liked to indulge it when it came to the ladies, but this time, I’d reached an impasse. Nadia’s voice numbed me, and I stopped midway through my first invented sentence. I could feel how much good an honest conversation with her would do me now. I could use an ally in this unexpected and harshly true story in which I found myself. I missed her attentive listening. I missed her rational summary of my incoherent words, her sharp conclusions, which I was too blunt to draw myself. Nadia was a whole lot smarter than me: Younger, more naïve, but cleverer. I even thought, for a second, about turning around and driving back to her. But I was too stubborn. I wasn’t the kind of person to give up before the end of a story.
The information on what exactly had happened at Višnjići was sparse, even online. There was probably a lot more detail in Croatian newspapers back in the ‘90s, and certainly there were people around who knew a lot about it, but I had no idea who to ask, and how much they might want to tell. From what I had managed to piece together I knew that on 13 November 1991, the Third Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Army, under the command of General Borojević, looted and burnt down the village of Višnjići, near Vukovar. In the process, they had murdered thirty-four unarmed villagers, including children, women and old men. They had buried the bodies in a mass grave that had been found in the forest a few kilometres away. I also learned that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had issued an indictment from The Hague against Nedelko Borojević years ago, but that he was still at large. The court charged him with a commander’s responsibility for the war crimes perpetrated in Višnjići. In the course of my search, I also came across a number of theories about where the runaway General Borojević might be hiding within the vast territory of the Serbian Entity, and how he, like many Hague defendants, was being protected by members of Serbia’s secret intelligence service. In the comments section below one article, someone claimed that Borojević had been living in a fortified house in the vicinity of Užice, southern Serbia, for years. Other anonymous commentators upheld this theory, and added that his protection was by direct order of the political elite of Serbia, and was well-known among foreign intelligence services, being the responsibility of the Serbian army.
I had last seen General Nedelko Borojević in the restaurant of the Bristol Hotel in Belgrade, in the summer of ’91, when he was still a colonel. Looking back now, I guess I’d never really known this person who had played the role of my father so well, during my childhood in Pula. I had no doubt that I had loved him as any child loves a father, and when my mother told me that he was gone, I grieved. I sometimes indulged myself with the idea that I had never really got over losing my father, and there was some raw form of comfort in thinking that I never would. My childhood memories of him had faded away, and washed like water over watercolour paint, blurring the colours over the years. The most telling thing for me was that I could no longer remember his face. It only came back to me through photographs, but its direct image had been scraped out of my memory. I recalled him now through several black and white photographs from various birthday parties, or his driver’s license picture, which featured a boyish, tender face, at a time when he barely resembled himself. Back then he didn’t have the bushy brows that met in the middle when something confused him. I couldn’t recall his dark eyes that strained to see the TV without glasses. I didn’t see his full, mobile lips, which pushed and prodded pieces of food while my mother incoherently regurgitated details of her day’s work, every lunchtime. I couldn’t picture how he would pinch himself with impatience at the Arena cinema, waiting for the Parti
san film of the week to start, yet I knew he did it every time.
In my memory, I only saw him from afar, a distant humanoid figure appearing on the horizon, like a brazen statue. I saw his elegant officer’s uniform hanging in front of the mirror at home, just before Yugoslav People’s Army Day; saw his body in a bathing suit, lying on a towel that was too short, telling me to come out of the water because my lips were turning blue. I saw his white parade shirt, bought in Trieste...
I knew that, on the road I was taking, I could reach Vukovar, and also Višnjići, in a few hours, but I didn’t really know if I wanted to see either. Given that I had never been to Slavonia, I wove a picture of Višnjići that felt correct; imagining I’d already visited. I saw homes scattered across a wide treeless plain; smoke billowing out of chimneys; the warmth of active fireplaces; the darkness broken only by lights that streamed through windows into the rooms of peaceful residents who never saw that November night coming. A dog barked, summoning the Greek chorus of other village dogs, and then it would grow quiet once more. In the distance, someone slowly tramped home along a muddy bank between two fields. Someone else stepped out of a house, releasing the avian coo of children’s voices from inside, before it disappeared again, hushed by the closing door and overtaken by the hum of wind and crickets and the creak of a nearby forest. It was a November evening like thousands of November evenings before, in this non-existent history of the village of Višnjići. But somewhere, off on that flat horizon, the Third Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Army, under the command of General Borojević, slowly approached.
‘Green card, please.’
Luckily, Enes had warned me that Bosnian customs officers might check my green card, so I had it with me. Satisfied, customs officer Muharem Hodžić next took a look at my passport, staring for a minute without turning a single page.
‘Where are you going, Vladan?’