Yugoslavia, My Fatherland Page 6

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  If you just glance at towns like Brčko, it’s impossible to tell whether they might have a cybercafé. But had I stopped random passers-by and asked them about it, I would surely have ended up at the police station sooner or later. So I had to target my inquiries, and sought out fashion­able young people who did not look as though they’d just stepped out of a black-and-white film.

  Initially, those I asked just shrugged their shoulders, but some stopped and thought and pointed in a variety of mutually exclusive directions. Someone even asked me ‘How did you manage to choose Brčko as a place to surf the ‘net?’ In the end, a cute redhead remembered that someone she knew had recently opened a place like that. She referred me to a glum guy, and I found myself in a place that proudly called itself ‘the first cybercafé in Brčko.’

  ‘What do you need Internet for?’

  I didn’t understand the question but, luckily, the guy realized that we were dealing with a foreigner.

  ‘This computer here has a camera, but its keyboard is a little fucked up. L, M and K are a real mess. If you’re gonna write emails, the computer over there is better.’

  ‘I just need to look up something online.’

  ‘Go for it then. Sit wherever you want. Mice are as good as new.’

  I sat at the computer without the camera. I clicked the icon and typed Loza’s name into the browser.

  6

  ‘Don’t worry, Loza’s gonna take care of everything,’ my father said to my mother after we had been waiting a good fifteen minutes at the reception desk of Belgrade’s Bristol Hotel, because when we turned up, no one knew who my father was, or who to call to sort out our accommodation. Yawning hotel staff eventually heard something from someone somewhere about a directive for officers’ families to be settled on the third floor, but none of them were doing anything about it. Their hesitation might also have been moral: no one was in a rush to serve the army of a country about to break into pieces. We weren’t the only family there: a few more families waited on the good will of the receptionists. What made the situation worse was the realization, on all our parts, that this current situation was extraordinary in all respects, and this call to duty differed in its feel from all previous ones.

  ‘Normally, such things don’t just happen overnight,’ a lady with a fresh perm moaned, the wife of a colonel from Zadar who must’ve been two metres tall. Meanwhile a skinny pale-faced daughter of a tight-lipped colonel from Karlovac added how strange it was that the family should likewise be ordered to move immediately.

  ‘Normally, there would be apartments on the boulevard waiting for us,’ added the lady with the perm. ‘Normally, hotel staff would treat us with more respect.’ She raised the volume of her last statement, hoping to be overheard by the current masters of our fate. But they were obviously members of this new, abnormal generation, and acted accordingly.

  My father, visibly nervous and withdrawn from the rest, paced back and forth, sometimes striding past my mother and me, repeating his only response to the scene: ‘Don’t worry, Loza’s gonna take care of everything.’ That was my parents’ nickname for Emir, Captain Muzirović, who had meanwhile been promoted to colonel. He was called Loza, after all the lozovača grape schnapps that he used to drink on account of a broken heart. He wasn’t married, he didn’t have kids and his life was dedicated to the Yugoslav People’s Army. The only reason he was never promoted to general was that his superiors dreaded him.

  Uncle Emir was half a head taller than my father, and owned the broadest shoulders in the Balkans. When he walked around Pula looking morose, people crossed to the other side of the road, just to be on the safe side. When he came to visit us, my friends loitering in front of the apartment building immediately went silent and waited for him to pass. In our apartment, he would always sit in the same chair, the fourth one in around the dining table, for there he was the ‘good uncle.’ After a few glasses of plum brandy, he’d persuade my father to sing ‘that song of his’ along with him, and I can’t recall any of his visits that did not feature the double-act of Colonels Borojević and Muzirović singing, arms around each other’s shoulders.

  Emir was the only one who knew the truth. After all these years, Emir never really opened up to anyone, remaining a mysterious intro­vert, even to my father. Dusha, who couldn’t stand introverts, overlooked this characteristic only because Emir loved her husband so much and, in moments of brimming intoxication, liked to say that Nedelko Borojević, his beautiful Dusha and sweet Vladan were the only real family he had, and he would do for them what he wouldn’t do even for his own brother, if he still had one. My mother and I never learned what my father had done to make this brooding man love us so, to visit us so often and drink schnapps and sing love songs into the small hours. I only know that in the end my mother grew tired of his visits.

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  ‘Don’t worry, Loza’s going to... ’ My father began for the third time, but this time my mother interrupted him with a stare that could petrify and promised painful consequences. By then it was probably clear that Loza wasn’t going to take care of anything, that the situation was beyond even his formidable powers, more serious than the time he had intervened so we hadn’t had to move to Bitola. Whether father believed his own words, and in Loza’s assistance, I never knew, but I don’t think he could really have been so naïve as to always believe what his superiors told him. He liked to wait for orders and act on them, without giving it too much thought, because that was how the system had raised him, and the grateful Colonel Borojević respected it and took for granted whatever the system fed him. He didn’t really need to believe in Loza, per se, but that everything would be all right because nothing could be otherwise in this world of uniforms. If he was worried about anything, it was the uniform-less presence of my mother and me, and his silent fear of how we would cope with this rapid, significant change.

  We were still sitting there in the crowded hotel lobby when a military transport stopped in front of the hotel, and a young soldier informed officers Borojević, Lukovac, Marković and Grabić that their lift to barracks had arrived. Marković complained that it would be more appropriate for officers of the Yugoslav Army to first see their families comfortably accommodated at the hotel, while Grbić and Lukovac immediately headed to the transport. My father stopped himself before he referenced the almighty Loza once more, instead hugging my mother and whispering ‘Everything’s gonna be fine.’ But all she replied, with a cold, forged smile, was ‘Fuck you all.’

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  So my mother and I stayed behind at the Bristol Hotel. She returned to her withdrawn inner world, but I was initially excited about the fact that, in June 1991, I was at a hotel in Belgrade instead of on the beach in Pula. I used to spend all my summer vacations in our boring old apartment, and was envious every summer of all the tourists who filled the hotels and swam in the hotel pools where we local children weren’t allowed. To me, a hotel room with a big, new TV you could watch while in a bed someone else had made was like an amusement park. I was captivated by the carpets, the spacious bathrooms without visible boilers or heaps of dirty laundry, the shower cubicles instead of bathtubs, balconies, decorative armchairs and coffee tables. I lost track of the moments in my childhood when I’d wished, more than anything, for the three of us to go to a hotel, a giant clean hotel room, to swim in the indoor pool at the Brioni Hotel all week, instead of being stuck on the beach below the lighthouse, playing ‘all you can eat’ every morning. The Bristol Hotel didn’t have an indoor pool, and the room in which my mother and I were finally settled wasn’t exactly like the rooms I’d seen on posters, that drew tourists from around the world to Pula. Even the more modest holiday apartments there, which I’d sneak peeks at on my way to the beach, were luxurious in comparison to our room 211. This room had just two beds pressed against the wall, covered with grey woollen blankets, one tiny television, a miniature, untidy bathroom, a door that
had seen better days and which rubbed against the floor and walls which could’ve used a fresh layer of paint.

  Understandably, my mother didn’t feel like being stuck in this stuffy room, and I didn’t feel like sightseeing around Belgrade. So she left me in the room and went out to get some air, while I settled in to one of the longest evenings of my life, sitting on the edge of the bed, switching between three rustling programs, in search of cartoons, before deciding that the TV news was the best option on offer.

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  The next morning, out of sheer boredom, I agreed to go for a walk with my mother around the city. We walked along in silence from one boring, identical Belgrade street to another, past smoggy Belgrade houses, through a pale green park and then for a long time along a sidewalk by a wide street along which slid tramcars. I never asked where we were headed, and I wasn’t really interested. After more than an hour, mother finally stopped before a red brick socialist apartment building, and stepped up to the entrance. She looked at the names on the letterboxes and eventually found ‘Mladenović.’ Then she stepped away, leaned back in, undecided. But when she saw a boy and a girl approaching the entrance, she jumped up, as if pricked with an electrical charge, and raced past them back towards the road, without even looking back to see if I was following her.

  We continued our aimless wander, and she softly said that her friend Goca, whom she’d once visited after secondary school, lived in that brick apartment building beside a wide street called ‘the boulevard.’ Goca Mladenović had been her classmate from secondary school back in Ljubljana, but had moved to Belgrade with her parents. Now she guessed that only Goca’s mother, whom she had known as Aunt Zdenka (and who, in Ljubljana, was referred to as ‘the famous lady from Belgrade’) lived there. Goca probably married and changed her surname, mother continued, without trying too hard to get me to understand.

  I soon admitted that I was getting tired, so we turned back to the hotel. After lunch she went out for a walk again, and I stayed alone in our room until evening, until she returned, showered, and lay on the bed in silence. Eventually, she fell asleep: Even back then I thought that she might be deliberately trying to drain herself. Despite giving the external appearance of a strong, decisive woman, and widely known for her Podlogar stubbornness, in truth she was sensitive and vulnerable. A single inopportune word from father was enough for her to spend a sleepless night.

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  Her withdrawal continued over the following days and, soon enough, she no longer woke me when she left the room. Sometimes she returned for lunch, sometimes she even missed dinner, but it was clear that Dusha could not, or rather would not, be a mother at the Bristol Hotel in Belgrade. Father called us every day for the first few days, and sounding like a radio announcer, recited his questions about what we’d eaten for lunch and whether mother had taken me to the parks, the Kalemegdan fortress and the Avala mountain, names of streets which I knew from playing Monopoly, but not from real life. Each day his questions became dumber, and I was afraid that he would eventually start talking to me like a baby. When he asked me, ‘Have you asked for your daddy?’ this wasn’t far off. He talked to my mother at greater length, but I could never tell what they were talking about by listening to my mother’s side of the conversation, except that he didn’t sound like such an idiot with her. Mother sometimes sat for fifteen minutes, there on the edge of the bed, holding the receiver to her ear, listening to the voice on the other side, sometimes whispering ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but most often, just bowing her head, eyes closed, sighing – which was her usual reaction when she didn’t like what father had to say. With all of this going on, I had no choice but to combine mother’s ability to shut herself off with father’s vivid imagination, creating an imaginary world in my confused, lonely, hotel-locked head: A football world, in my case. I came up with an elaborate football championship, complete with clubs, players and coaches, and played match after match with a small rubber ball that I’d found, the door of the hotel room as my goal. I passed the ball to myself, outplayed invisible defenders and ran my own play-by-play commentary, in the style of my favourite announcer. I even imitated crowd cheers, re-enacted slow motion replays and gave post-match statements to the non-existent media. To entertain myself and drain repressed energy, I staged, down to the smallest detail, the path of my invented Pula club, which I dubbed Patinaggio, to the top of the Yugoslav League. I drew up biographies of the club’s star players, along with their personal characteristics. Among the best, for example, was Alen Dino, a twenty-two year-old player from Rovinj, a great hope for Yugoslavia and world football in general. He was unstoppable one-on-one and had a killer left leg. When the commentator informed the viewers of TV Vladan that the rubber ball had reached Dino, I transformed into him, nutmegging one, two, even three opponents, and letting shots fly with my left foot at the hotel room door. If I hit the lower edge of the door the commentator went nuts and the crowd in the stadium rose to its feet. I ran around room 211, my hands held high, celebrating his thirteenth goal in ten matches. I played three or four games per day, and then lay flat on my back on the bed, breathless and sweaty, running through commentary and analysis on the results, announcing the forthcoming matches, devising new players, selecting for the Yugoslav national team, and analysing potential transfers.

  My mother and I lived in parallel worlds those days in Belgrade. I had my made-up football league; she had her tourist routes. She had the world below her window; I had my world within it. I no longer asked where she went every morning and whom she met along the way, and she never asked what I did all day, stuck in a small room. I knew she wouldn’t want me to kick a ball around the room, and possibly break a table lamp. She had never let me run around our apartment in Pula, and whenever I grew too boisterous, she would shoo me into the backgarden, her effective cure for my hyperactivity. But one day, my mother returned from her urban wanderings in the early afternoon, just when Martini, Dino’s partner in attack, found himself with a golden opportunity to score the decisive goal in the final minute of a tight match against Vučko from Sarajevo. In the heat of the match, I threw myself after the rubber ball in order to make a futile save attempt as opposing goalie, saving the visiting Bosnian team from a harsh defeat. So when the door of room 211 opened, I was lying, breathless and red-faced, on floor by the bed. My hair stuck to my forehead, drops of sweat beaded on my brows, sweat stains spreading across my armpits. She couldn’t have entered at a worse moment. But she chose to take no notice. My fear of her losing her temper over my domestic romps morphed into a fear that, for her, I had entirely ceased to exist, and was now invisible.

  Lying there on the floor of room 211, I suddenly felt that I had neither a father nor a mother anymore, that I was without friends, that everyone in the hotel had forgotten about me, and that no one in the world would be interested in me anymore. So I kept on lying there, waiting for Dusha to emerge from the bathroom. I felt so unwanted, so lonely, that I promised myself that the Bristol Hotel would be the last hotel I would ever set foot in.

  7

  When the phone woke me in the morning, I couldn’t remember where I was at first. I scoured the surroundings and, because of the small TV on the desk, I figured it must be a hotel room and that last night, I had broken a sixteen-year promise to myself. I reached for the phone.

  ‘Where are you?’

  It was a call from another world, as the distance between us could not be measured in kilometres alone. One morning ago I’d left sleeping Nadia in a world I felt I no longer belonged in. Somewhere along the way, I had crossed an invisible border and entered my old, forgotten life, and was no longer sure that I was the Vladan Nadia wanted to hear from.

  ‘I’m in Goražde.’

  ‘Where?’

  She wasn’t ready to articulate the hanging question of what the hell I was doing in a town she’d never heard of, and even less ready to hear the answer. The answer I couldn’t utter. I realized yesterday that
I could not bring myself to tell her made-up stories, and it was equally clear that I had no other to offer. The only story that wasn’t made-up, the life and times of Vladan Borojević, had been crushed into fragments, and listeners couldn’t orientate themselves in it. I could only remain silent.

  After a few painful seconds of silence, Nadia hung up. I realized that I had just shut myself off to her in the same pathetic way that Dusha had once shut herself off to me, and I remembered the feeling of the dirty carpet against my sweaty back on the floor of room 211, waiting for mother to come out of the bathroom and notice me, crying for the last time I can recall in my life. In the cold room of the Behar Hotel in Goražde, I felt the horror of a lonely little boy, backstabbed by the thought that his mother was no longer interested in him, and that he was alone in the middle of a vast foreign territory. I felt Nadia crying in the same way I had cried back then, breathless and red-faced, sweat gathered on my eyebrows and matted hair stuck to my temples.

  When Dusha finally came out of the bathroom, she didn’t hug me or comfort me, because I had already wiped away my own tears and hidden them from her, as I had ever since. And I didn’t call Nadia back now and continue our conversation, hoping instead that on the other side of the disconnected phone line, she would wipe away her tears and hide them from me.

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  I turned on the TV and, while surfing channels, stopped at Bijelina TV. Maybe I was amused by the fact that Bijelina had its own television network, or maybe because I was curious what sort of programming was available to residents of this small town in the Serbian entity, or maybe because it was the only channel not occupied at that moment by folklore groups or recordings of waterfalls set to music. Thanks to the cynical and witty fates, I had the honour of seeing something that I would not have believed existed, had I not seen it with my own eyes.