Stojan, a journalist, looked over at me. “These days, you might be wise to name her Serbislava,” he said. My mother groaned. “It’s true!” he said. “Call her Glory to Serbs. Let’s not pretend it’s not happening. We are living in a country where the words ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ will very soon be dead in the water.”
“Why do you have to ruin everything with politics?” my mother said.
“What about Sofija?” my mother’s best friend, Dada, said, as she peered into my serious face.
“Like Sophia Loren,” my dad said.
“It’s international, so she can travel the world,” someone said, and my dad added, “Or emigrate.”
“God forbid,” both of my grandmothers said in unison.
“We’re not going anywhere,” my mother said, looking at my crinkled face. “Sofia: goddess of wisdom.”
Nods around the room. Everyone agreed that more wisdom was exactly what we needed right now. But it’s not what we would get. Whatever wisdom existed in our little country—as imperfect and weird as it was—would soon be replaced by chaos, and this pleasant world I was born into wouldn’t last for long. Over the coming years, the people milling about in our living room would scatter all over the world.
2
The Fuzzy Worm of Capitalism
When I was a baby, my parents were featured on a Serbian television program about modern parenting. My mother knew someone at the TV station, and she jumped at the chance to show off her baby on TV. She was well connected to the “intellectual elite” of Belgrade, a gregarious group that would come to our apartment to talk and drink. For the TV shoot, my parents stood side-by-side, trying to look relaxed in Tašmajdan Park in Belgrade’s center. My dad held me to face the camera in my white sun hat, my mouth open in wonder at the boom mic that loomed above our heads. My mother sported her new haircut—she’d lost the perm in favor of a trendy Rod Stewart style with fluffy bangs. An interviewer asked them questions about modern parenting, as elderly passersby peered toward the camera. My parents explained that, unlike the generation before them, they shared parenting duties. “Except breastfeeding,” my dad added, and the interviewer laughed.
My mother enjoyed maternity leave and continued leading an active social life. Every few days, she and I would go to meet with her friend Dada and her new baby Marko, or to the café near the university, where she’d catch up with her colleagues and I’d smear ice cream on my face as the adults cooed. She continued hosting parties at our place like she’d done before I was born, and she tried to keep the political discussions to a minimum, calling them “boring” and choosing to ignore the news reports of rising nationalist tensions and increased unemployment.
In 1985, after one year of paid leave, and two years unpaid (another perk of Yugo socialism), my mother went back to work tutoring psychology students at the University of Belgrade a few days a week. While my parents worked, I was left in the care of grandparents.
My earliest memory is from when I was four years old, in Tašmajdan Park, where I’d been filmed as a baby. Still agape at the world around me, I sat beside my grandfather Gonzo on a bench, dangling my legs off the edge while he talked. Gonzo, the former mining engineer, explained that the word Tašmajdan derived from Turkish, and underneath where we sat there used to be a stone quarry during the Ottoman times. Many of Belgrade’s century-old buildings were made from the stone that came from under where we sat, Gonzo said, and then suddenly he put his hand across my knees to stop my legs moving and put his finger up to his lips. I froze, terrified I’d done something wrong. Even though I was basically never scolded, the praise of adults was what I lived for. So now I watched my grandfather with bated breath.
Gonzo said: “Shall we catch a pigeon?” And to my astonishment, he got off the bench, tucked his tie out of the way, and, squat-walking in his brown suit, cupped his hands and slowly advanced toward some pigeons. Very gently, he encircled a pigeon with his hands and grabbed it, the other birds flying off in a burst, and Grandpa Gonzo sat back beside me, holding the captured pigeon. With pounding heart, I stared at the bird, as he brought it closer to my face. I’d never considered a pigeon this closely, with its smell of feathers and straw, its head cocking from side to side in a panic. Gonzo told me I could touch the bird—despite being ravenous for experiences, I was not one to take initiative. With Gonzo’s encouragement, I brought my finger up to the pigeon’s chest and stroked it, feeling the bird’s soft feathers and quickened heartbeat, which was similar to my own. He let the pigeon go and it cracked its wings open and flew away. I would never look at a pigeon the same way, now that I knew about their heartbeats, those beady, strange eyes, and the musty smell.
My grandfather died not long after that, and whenever I thought of him after he was gone, I would remember either that thrilling day in the park, or when, for my fifth birthday, the doorbell rang and I found a bike on the doorstep—my grandfather running up the steps flailing his arms, saying “She got away from me!”—implying that the bike had climbed up on its own. That day, there was a party at our place and I was the center of attention, our home filled with family and friends gushing over me, like they did every birthday. That was only a few weeks before Gonzo was diagnosed with lung cancer, and only six months before we left our comfortable world, but I had no inkling of these things, and I ran down the stairs followed by my grandfather carrying my bike, bursting to take it for a ride around the block.
• • •
In my preschool years, my parents split their spare time between obsessing over me—praising me for my vocabulary, taking my childish monologues seriously, talking to me like I was an adult; more modern parenting methods that they believed in—and falling into fits of argument about money, politics, or our family’s future. During those latter times my advanced conjugations of the plural forms of tricky words like “buffalo,” which had impressed endlessly, would fade into the background as my parents’ gazes would turn from me to each other.
In 1986, the news reports warned that the radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster might reach us over in Yugoslavia, even though we were over six hundred miles away. My mother, who was in the early weeks of her second pregnancy, booked an abortion because she was terrified of the possibility of her child having birth defects from the radiation. In a panic, my parents rolled up the carpets as the news instructed, and my mother ran to the grocery store and bought every canned good they had, determined to save her living child from the poison that might be floating our way. The contaminated cloud however went north, toward Sweden and Finland—a rare case of wealthier countries suffering while we went unscathed. Nevertheless, for the next year, my mother remained shaken, and she insisted that all my milk, fruits, and vegetables come from cans. Every now and then, she would pull me close and look at my eyes and throat as if she was a doctor, and if ever I coughed, her eyes would widen with terror.
• • •
That summer, like many Yugoslavians, we went on our annual vacation to Croatia. With my mother’s mother, Grandma Xenia, we headed to Cavtat, where her sister Olga lived. Olga’s husband, Great-Uncle Marko, had been born into a rich Croatian family, and they were among the people who’d had their wealth stripped from them by Tito’s army, the Partizans, after the Second World War. Old money had been seized, in line with the Communist ideals that the Partizans held sacred. Though Great Uncle Marko’s family had once owned half of Cavtat, he had been left only with this little house surrounded by oleander bushes and hydrangeas. A tortoise lived in the garden bed, and I fed it slices of tomato.
Grandma Xenia and Great Aunt Olga sat together in the courtyard in their matching cotton summer dresses, their skinny legs crossed at the ankles and reminisced as I listened. “When we were children,” they would say, “our mother made us brush our hair with fifty strokes each night. Our hair would be beautiful and shiny, as if we were going to a party. But we never went anywhere . . .” I would imagine these wrinkly, veiny old women when they were little girls just
like me, with tightly braided hair and strict parents. I savored their stories, which they told through clouds of smoke as they inhaled cigarette after cigarette; there was the one about a tiny old relative who, when she came to visit, would walk off the train wearing five dresses one on top of the other. She said it was more practical than packing a suitcase and having to crease all the dresses. “She was so small, she slept in a washing basket,” Grandma Xenia said, and I pictured this Thumbelina snoring in a soft bed of clothes.
Each day we left the old ladies talking in the little house and went to the waterfront. My parents sat in cafés by the sea, wearing not much and laughing with their friends, while we kids splashed in the water, or sat bored beside them as they stayed for one last drink or cigarette.
On the beach, my parents always read Time magazine, which was sold in the local store, where you could buy Croatian, Serbian, and foreign papers. Dad loved learning about Bill Gates, and the other entrepreneurs making it in the West, reading snippets out loud to my mother, who feigned great boredom. She, on the other hand, furrowed her brow looking for bad news, now that Chernobyl was behind us. Time is where she first read about the deadly new disease AIDS, which caused her to stop getting pedicures: who was to say it couldn’t be transmitted via nail hygiene tools? She read darkly about the hole in the ozone layer as I waded carefully into the shallows, naked except for my arm floaties.
The world was becoming a terrifying place, she decided, squinting at an ad for a “microwave” and announcing it was probably yet another source of radiation. “I would never buy one of these, even if they were available in Yugoslavia.”
“Nothing is available in Yugoslavia,” Dad laughed, looking over his glasses at her.
• • •
At Belgrade University, as well as teaching, my mother was getting her master’s in clinical psychology, focusing on analyzing children’s drawings for their psychological content. She would come home with the drawings of damaged or abused children whom she’d interviewed, and when I asked about the children, she would give me the details, treating me like an interested colleague rather than a preschooler. One of the drawings that my mother particularly admired was framed in our hallway, the work of a girl who was five, just like me, but who’d had half her brain removed due to a tumor and was now disabled. Her drawing was a surreal representation of people at a beach, their colorful bodies bent into unnatural shapes, throwing a ball to each other. Another of my mother’s case studies was a troubled eleven-year-old boy who drew hyperrealistic images of people who looked like superheroes performing acts of violence. Among his drawings strewn out on our dining room table I once saw an eerily accurate sketch of my mother with a knife plunged into her head. When I gasped, my mother snapped it up, laughing. “It’s symbolic,” she said, as if that would reassure me.
Often, she’d bring home diagnostic tests and subject me to them, eager to make sure I was developing well, and not going the way of her deranged clients.
“Sofija,” she said, and I looked up from the princess I’d been drawing. “If you were a flower, what flower would you be?”
“A rose?”
“Would you have thorns?” she asked, and I thought, What does Mama want me to say?
“Yes.”
“Oh my god,” she said, scribbling something in her notebook, shaking her head sadly. Having given what was obviously the wrong answer, I tearfully went back to drawing, distressed that I’d failed her. Her detailed notes on my progress stated that for my first four years I was above average as far as my language, comprehension, and problem-solving was concerned. A rooster I drew at the age of two was proudly displayed on the psychology faculty notice board, beneath it my mother’s handwritten caption: “Sofija, two years old, drawing at four-year-old standard.”
By the age of five, however, my glory days were behind me. My mother’s notebooks presented me as having regular intelligence, but being a bit of an emotional mess:
“She watches the scene in Disney’s ‘Dumbo’ where the mother elephant is shackled, and cries. Once it is over, she insists we play the scene again, and cries again.”
“When other children in kindergarten are reprimanded by the teacher, Sofija will often cry.”
“When her grandmother gave her a book she already had, she cried because she thought she’d disappointed her grandmother,” and so went my mother’s notes; her pride at my empathy intertwined with concern at my lack of emotional robustness.
• • •
At the age of five, I had a long face and dark blond bangs that stretched from ear to ear. As for my ears, they were always perked up, trying to make sense of the conversations around me. I listened keenly to my parents’ conversations, trying to piece together what “inflation” meant, and how it related to shitholes, the cost of cigarettes, and a mysterious place called zapad (“the West”). This was the place my dad and his friends talked about, where people who knew about computers were seen as heroes and received fat paychecks.
Although the Serbian language has a smaller vocabulary, it contains much more profanity than English does, and in general treats cursing as a more accepted practice. Walking the streets of the neighborhood where I grew up, it’s not unusual to hear someone’s grandma shout “To cock with it all!” when she drops her groceries. And in my case, it wasn’t unheard of for my mother to tell my father (with the same potency as “Take your visa and piss off!”), “Take your visa and go back to your mother’s cunt!” This was how my mother responded to my dad’s suggestions that our family should procure visas and emigrate somewhere far away.
“But in the West,” my dad shouted, “you can live like a normal person—you don’t have to line up for detergent, like we do in this shithole!”
She knew this. She knew that Dad was eager to join the technological revolution, that he wanted his children (there was a baby on the way) to speak English, to have access to the liberal Western style of education. She also knew that the West was an unknown place, far from family and friends, where there was violence and disease and where she would have to speak in a foreign language to be understood—yes, a language she’d learned at school, but it was also a language in which she felt clumsy and inarticulate. She could put up with lining up for detergent if it meant being at home. So Belgrade was gritty and politicians were always snapping at one another—big deal, she’d rather her children grow up in an environment full of familiar faces than be torn from their roots, living the lives of Dynasty characters and stuffing themselves full of McDonald’s.
My go-to mode was introspective distress mixed with bursts of extroversion. I loved to express myself, and, as always, relied on the encouragement of adults around me to boost my confidence. When I got the doting attention of a kind adult, I would go forth like an excited puppy, telling stories and espousing theories that would make grandparents cluck, “You’re so clever, Sofija!” But when an adult was busy and brushed me away, I would recoil, withdrawing like a pup smacked on the butt with a rolled up newspaper, crawling into myself anxiously, before replenishing my excitement for the next time it was desirable. At age five, I had taken a serious interest in Lepa Brena, an icon of the contemporary folk genre known as “newly composed music”—an urbanized version of folk that would later transform into the even more frenetic turbo-folk. In the late eighties, singers like Lepa Brena were enjoying huge success with hits including “Long Legs” and “Mile Loves the Disco.” The news increasingly showed politicians arguing about things that made no sense to me. Nationalism was rising in parliament as well as among militant peasants, who I watched on TV, shouting their grievances in villages, and there were grim reports on the economic crisis—the country’s debt, the rising unemployment, the scarcity of goods. Many people in Yugoslavia liked to turn away from these unpleasant reports of ethnic unrest and increased poverty and would flip the channel to the gyrating performers and folksy beat, letting their minds drift to a simpler world. It was the contemporary version of Tito’s parades, washin
g over troubling issues with explosions of dance and goodwill, a pacifier for the whole nation. My Grandma Beba and I liked to watch the performers on TV, or hum the earworm melodies while sitting in the dark, a frequent occurrence due to the ever-increasing electricity shortages.
On the tram on the way home from Grandma Beba’s one day, I couldn’t help myself. I’d had a day of grandparental attention and several slices of my favorite, walnutty “Rozen torte,” and I was feeling relaxed and energized. When I wasn’t cautious or distressed, concerned about my parents’ arguments, disturbed by what was unsaid but hung in the air: that all roads were leading out of Belgrade and into the unknown—I felt a great energy inside, a desire to tell stories that were as thrilling as the picture books I memorized, or the Disney films I knew scene-for-scene. When I shook off the tension that encroached from the television and the adults, I felt bursts of uninhibited lust for life.
Now, on the tram, full of cake and generally pleased with myself, I caught a woman’s eye and winked at her. I put my hands on my hips, stuck out a foot, and jigged my leg up and down in the style of Lepa Brena, singing the words to one of her hits: “Miki, Miki, you have such a good body . . .” I crooned, to the surprise of the woman, and the mortification of my mother. I had expected the entire tram to break into applause as I sang and danced—“Look! A tiny replica of the great Lepa Brena!”—but in reality, most people ignored me, my voice came out as a squeak, and my mother pulled me onto her lap and asked what had got into me. Often, the way I imagined things was not the way things turned out, and despite my occasional unbridled attempts, my actual life was so much less dazzling than that of my favorite characters from books or films.
• • •
While my mother tried to keep one unblinking eye on my inner life and the other on her child psychology and global disasters research, my dad had his own unrelated obsession. He’d gone halves with a friend to buy a computer and he’d glassed in our balcony to make what he called “the computer room”—a tiny space dominated by the large, whirring PC, on which he programmed when he came home from his job as a software engineer. It was the eighties, we were among the first in our circle to have a computer, and Dad’s nerd friends would come over to marvel at it. Through the computer room’s glass you could see our building’s backyard, where I would go out and play with kids, looking up every now and then to see my dad’s face glowing green before his screen.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 4
