I notice a man waving enthusiastically, and it takes me a second to recognize him as a patient who had a cyst removed from his groin last week. I’d been working my weekend shift at Peter the doctor’s clinic and was required to hold a little sterilized dish while the offending cyst was removed. I wave back. As if the sudden change from “groin-cyst patient and disgusted assistant” to “ogler and oiled-up young woman” were a perfectly normal progression of our relationship.
“Let’s bring these girls up here, one by one. Can I hear a big round of applause for Contestant Number One!?” Monica shouts, and Nina steps lithely onto the stage, the pointy heels of her knee-high boots holding steady as she strides down the runway. She pauses at the end, puts a hand on her hip, raises a thin, arched eyebrow, and smiles at the judges. That’s how you do it, I find myself thinking, as if I’m a beauty-show connoisseur.
“Let’s hear it for Nina, from Sarajevo!” Bane says. The resounding cheer from the audience can be largely attributed to her fellow Sarajevans, refugees who make their presence known with whistles and shouts of solidarity. Many non-natives also cheer in support of Sarajevo, knowing what that city endured during the war.
• • •
Onstage, Nina smiles and blows a kiss to her fans, receiving applause so thunderous it makes the floor shake.
The crowd is riled up. They’ve been drinking, and shouting, and when Zora from Montenegro takes the stage, she too receives an uproarious welcome.
Montenegro is mountainous and beachy, war-free, and once a vacation destination for many Yugoslavians. Montenegrins are known for being tall and dark, and Zora’s height, her tan, the nearly black hair that falls down her back like a horse’s mane, are a definite hit with the crowd.
When it’s my turn to go up, I take the stairs carefully, remembering that I slipped during rehearsal and praying I don’t repeat the humiliation. I don’t like taking chances, so I walk at half the pace of everyone else, out of time with the pop music that plays. The applause slows, but not in a mocking way—the crowd simply matches it to the speed at which I’m walking, clapping to a beat that propels me along. I get to the end of the runway, and mouth hvala at the crowd, which means “thank you,” and I am answered with whistles and cheers. I’m supposed to greet the judges, so I nod to one of them, Peter the doctor, a dark Montenegrin in an Armani suit. He’s told me sternly not to expect special treatment just because I work at his clinic—most of the other girls and their families are his patients. Beside him is the middle-aged Macedonian owner of Joy nightclub. At the end of the judging table is the woman who runs Fantastic Face Beauty School. Two of her students were conscripted to do our makeup, and I find her regarding my hair, trying to work out if I’m wearing a wig. I toss my head, attempting to flick my hair over my shoulder as I’ve seen other girls do, but it barely moves. One of the sausages just hits me gently on the side of the face, and I turn inexpertly on my spiky heel, making my retreat slowly back down the runway.
• • •
Backstage, everyone is euphoric, thrilled by the positive reaction of the crowd. We have half an hour before we’re onstage again, for the Evening Wear portion of the show. I’ll be wearing a long red silky dress, which I bought with the intention of returning to the store tomorrow and getting my money back. Someone points out that the patrons are eating ćevapčići—delicious skinless sausages—and we realize that, even though we’ve been here for hours, no one has offered us anything to eat. Sasha promises to bring us food, and as we wait, Zora and a couple of others start preparing for the next part of the evening, during which we will be asked questions.
“Describe yourself,” one of the girls quizzes Zora, as the sausages arrive and we pick them up daintily with our fingers.
“I’m ambitious, confident . . .” Zora says, then rolls her eyes. “Yeah, right.”
To avoid staining a dress I don’t actually own with a greasy skinless sausage, I stay in my casual wear for a bit longer. I slide onto the floor next to Nina, and we chat in a mix of English and our native languages, both of them varieties of Serbo-Croatian—for me Serbian, with my clipped Belgrade accent, for her Bosnian, with her melodic Sarajevo accent. Before the wars started, when Nina and I were kids, Yugoslavia was held together under the optimistic slogan of “Brotherhood and Unity.”
Yugoslavia, which had been formed after World War I as part of a long-cherished dream to unite the Southern Slavs, was re-formed into a Communist whole after World War II. That’s despite the fact that its people had been at one another’s throats during World War II, due to deep religious and cultural differences. In Tito’s new, socialist Yugoslavia, the people were expected to live in “Brotherhood and Unity,” and nationalists who held on to past hatreds were punished with death or jail for their insubordinate grudges. Marriages between ethnicities were encouraged and celebrated, symbolic of a unified Yugoslavia. Nina herself is the product of a mixed marriage. But the policy of “Brotherhood and Unity” alone could not eradicate the pull toward nationalism. Many wanted to be independent from a greater Yugoslavia. Hence, the wars. The messy wars that sprouted up in varying degrees of intensity, from Slovenia, to Croatia, to Bosnia, to Kosovo.
As Maggie crouches near us with her camera, Nina starts to tell me about the war. She was ten years old, playing in a parking lot with neighborhood kids, when a grenade exploded.
“The boy in front of me died straightaway,” she tells me, and Nina felt something hot in her foot. “I looked down at my leg, and saw it was covered in blood.”
As she says this, I can’t help but look down Nina’s leg, skinny and veiny up close, to her foot, on which she now wears strappy high-heeled sandals, showing carefully pedicured toes and a faint scar. After seeing the blood on her leg, Nina fainted, and lay unconscious surrounded by dead, wounded, and crying children.
“When there’s an explosion, no one comes to help, because there’s always a second one coming,” she says.
Lucky for Nina, the second explosion missed them. The bomb, Nina tells me, was most probably set off by the Serbs.
“How do you feel about Serbs?” I ask, even though I know that Nina wouldn’t be here, at an ex-Yugoslavian event, if she hated Serbs. I’m asking the question for the benefit of the camera, because I know my audience of non-Yugos has no idea how our community works. I asked Nina the question to highlight a contradiction: not only do we not hate one another, but we actually love one another. And while there are nationalists out there (known for clashing at sporting events, or in nightclubs), those people are not here tonight. Nina, and most of the people at Joy nightclub this evening, are Yugo-nostalgics: they remember, and pine for, Yugoslavia as it was before the wars, before politicians and crazy people took over, when kids of all nationalities played in the parking lots without fear of death.
“Just because I was wounded by the Serbian side,” Nina says dutifully, glancing at the camera, “doesn’t mean I hate Serbs.”
She asks if I want to touch the shrapnel that is still lodged in her foot, and she guides my finger along the side until I feel a little lump, like a pebble under her skin. It moves around freely, and she says it hurts when the weather changes.
The other girls can hear our conversation, but continue doing their makeup. For most of us, war has always been present, if not in the foreground, then as a constant background noise, the details of mass graves, bombings, rigged elections buzzing like an old fridge, always there in the form of radio news, infiltrating our parents’ arguments. It’s not surprising to me that these women keep curling their eyelashes while Nina talks about being wounded. Or that the two of us can then get up from the floor, hug each other, and keep idly chatting without pause, turning a conversation from tragedy into something like breast tape, as we slip into our evening gowns, for part two of our evening of objectification.
Showtime. Nina is introduced to the audience again, now wearing a sparkly, cream-colored dress that plunges low between her breasts. This time, instead of walking offstage,
she pauses by the microphone to answer questions. She waves at the crowd happily, like she was born to do this. “She’s good,” I whisper to the camera, falling into the on-the-ground-reporter style myself.
“What is your unfulfilled wish?” Monica asks, placing the microphone to Nina’s lips.
As if Monica isn’t there, Nina looks out at the crowd and says, in Bosnian, “For Yugoslavia to be like it once was.”
The cheer from the Yugo-nostalgics is so loud and long that Nina laughs, beaming out at the audience.
Waiting by the stage, I feel my eyes prick with tears, the fantasy of a Yugoslavia “like it once was” taking me to my happiest memories, of all of my family and friends in one place, before phone calls were long distance and expensive, before my parents became angrier at each other, before my dad got sick. Is the cheering crowd crafting Nina’s wish into their own fantasy, bringing back loved ones, making themselves un-foreign and loved, telling themselves: everything would be fine if only Yugoslavia was still around?
Monica the Aussie host cheers as well, as if the answer Nina gave makes complete sense to her, even if it was in a foreign language. Gushing at Nina in a way that suggests she’s partaken in some recreational drug use with members of the community, Monica asks: “And why do you think you should win the competition, and this ticket back home?”
“Because I’d like to see my family, which I haven’t seen for ten years,” Nina says, this time in her Bosnian-accented English.
Next up: Zora, her thick hair now up in a dark, elegant bun, answers the same question with her prepared answer: “Because I think I deserve to win, and I can win, and I think going overseas would give me the opportunity to appreciate not just what I have here, but what I left back at home.” Boom. Holding her head high, she spins around, strutting down the runway, and judging by the cheers, gathering a solid faction of supporters in her wake.
When it’s my turn, I feel grossly underqualified. I stand with my hands on my hips to stop the sweat from staining my expensive red evening gown. “Why do you think you should win?” Monica asks.
“Well, I believe I should win because I’ve never actually won anything.” I’d thought it was a good answer when I planned it (and it was true), but the crowd and Monica seem to be waiting for me to say something more to win hearts and minds, because there is silence. “Ever. Before.” The crowd starts to laugh and I shrug, starting my walk down the runway, forgetting that I’m supposed to stay and answer another question. I am now pretty much resigned to the fact that I’m not going to win this thing, though I send out an appreciative kiss to my mother, her clients, and the man with the cyst, all of whom continue to clap out of sympathy and nepotism, even though it’s painfully obvious I’m the losing horse in this race.
Back in the safety of our dressing room, we pose for a photo. In our beautiful gowns and our carefully made-up faces, we look like we’re dressed for prom. Except we don’t have dates. Like nuns are the brides of Christ, we are the brides of a dead Yugoslavia.
The evening gowns come off, and the bikinis come on, nervous energy spreading through the room. One of the Fantastic Face Beauty School students is using concealer and a tiny brush to cover the stretch marks on my thighs, while I, following the advice of my fellow contestants, slip rubbery inserts, called “chicken fillets” inside my bikini top, to make my breasts look bigger. During rehearsals, every now and then, a chicken fillet would become visible from the side, a rubbery mass trying to escape from under my armpit. I consider walking down the runway without moving my arms, to prevent the fillet from flying out into the audience and smacking a refugee in the face.
1
Hello, Collapsing World
I was born into a country destined for collapse. It was November 1982 and the timing was incredibly inconvenient, not only on a geopolitical level, but also because I picked a particularly bad night for it. Due to gasoline shortages, the people of Belgrade had been ordered to drive in shifts: only half the cars were allowed on the roads each weekend, and the license plate on my parents’ Fiat 650 was not on the list that day.
To make matters worse, my mother, Koka, went into labor in the middle of the night, when the lights had all gone out thanks to electricity shortages. As the contractions started, my parents threw off their gray polyester blankets, revealing my mother, in her giant maternity nightgown, and my father, his skinniness accentuated by his saggy, brown cotton pajamas. My parents, like the rest of Yugoslavia’s citizens, were used to inconveniences such as blackouts, but still, they started squabbling. They’d been married two years, and this was their go-to form of communication: my mother with her “constant nagging,” my father with his “negative energy.” And on this night, the familiar bickering offered some comfort in an unfamiliar situation.
Luckily, my mother was a dedicated smoker, so the apartment was full of lighters and matches, which they now started striking to illuminate their home.
“How dilated would you say your cervix is?” my father asked, grasping wildly at any useful phrases he could remember from that birthing book they had read.
In our language, we call the stare she gave him gledati ga kao da ti je ubio oca (“Looking at someone like they’ve just killed your father”). I believe the term in English is “murderous.” How the hell was my mother supposed to know how dilated her cervix was? All she knew was that she was having a contraction and her insides hurt like she might die.
Moaning with pain, my mother put on the navy maxi-dress she’d been wearing every day since she became huge, and layered her purple fall coat over it. Her stomach parted the coat like curtains; I was ready to be born, shoving my way into life like a bald diva, with little regard for the logistical challenges I was creating for my parents.
Some months ago, my mother had made the inadvisable early eighties decision to regularly shave her eyebrows, and then draw them on in thin arches. But tonight, she remained eyebrow-less—the blank forehead giving her an expression of endless surprise, as if her eyebrows were raised so high they’d disappeared under her hairline and were hiding in her perm. In the soft light of a flame, she panted, her pointy eyeteeth bared, nostrils flared in panic. She fiddled with her thin gold necklace, where a small golden dachshund charm dangled. The trinket was a present from her mother that she never took off, and she grasped the loyal little dog now like some religious people might a gold cross. Even though she was technically Serbian Orthodox, like many people in postwar socialist Yugoslavia, she was not religious. But tonight she hedged her bets, looking upward and muttering, “If you’re there, help me.”
My father put on his glasses, which magnified his blue eyes in the fallen darkness, and scratched at his light-brown beard. Lola was my father’s nickname, a girlish moniker to Western ears, but it was his preferred, unusual shortening from his old-fashioned name: Slobodan, meaning “he who is free.” He could have called himself “Sloba” or “Boba,” which were both common shortenings, but in a quiet way, my father liked to be different. In another life, he would have studied literature, and in his ideal life, he would have just lain around reading fiction all day, inhabiting imagined worlds.
When the lighter that my mother was holding got too hot, she snapped it out and dropped it, and was forced to feel her way along the walls toward the bag she’d packed. Her hands touched the frame of a painting: an abstract watercolor of Belgrade as seen from the Danube, in serene light greens and blues. She collected art, in the modest way that people with limited resources and high aspirations do: she kept her eye out for artists, she attended gallery openings, and every now and then she twisted her husband’s arm to let them buy something that she knew he considered a waste of money. Yes, Dad’s family was poorer than hers. They’d come to Belgrade when they’d had enough of the sulfur from the mine in the Serbian town of Bor, where my dad’s father worked as an engineer. But my mother’s parents didn’t have much money either, and certainly no savings.
In 1980s Yugoslavia, no one was wealthy—regardles
s of profession. Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) left the country to earn money, but otherwise there was enough money only to put food on the table, and sometimes for a trip to the hairdresser, or a holiday nearby in Europe. Beyond this, there were no savings, and my family was no different. People were used to not having much—it had been like this for decades.
There were no baby things in the home yet. In our culture, you wait until you have a healthy living baby before you get stuff, so as not to tempt fate. And my parents hoped I’d be one of those healthy babies, so healthy that people would pretend to spit on me three times, making a noise like “poo-poo-poo,” to scare off witches or the devil, who might want to steal such a delectable newborn. It was grandmothers who followed such superstitions mostly: spilling a bit of alcohol on the floor before drinking to someone who’d died, turning on the faucet when someone was in labor to provoke a smooth “flow.” And now, like an old lady, even though my dad rolled his eyes, my mother hobbled to the bathroom and turned the tap on, releasing a slow trickle, and leaving it to flow while she was gone. What’s the harm?
As my mother kicked over a pile of books she had brought home from the university where she worked as a psychology tutor, my dad shook his head. If he had his way, the apartment would be spotless, minimal, stripped of the “junk” my mother accumulated: rocks from vacations lined up on the bookshelves, all those vases from her aunts. To her, that rock meant the beach in Croatia, the smell of whitebait and the taste of ice cream. But my dad kept his memories deep inside—he didn’t need an object to stir his imagination, or a rock to remind him.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 2
