Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  “Just you wait, one day everyone will have a personal computer!” my dad would say to my mother.

  “What idiocy! Why would anyone want a computer?” my mother would respond, looking at the horrible bulky machine, with its green text rolling down the screen, and, like most people in the era before email, finding it hard to conceive that she would one day have her own laptop, from which she could access information about the world, communicate with her friends, and whittle away hours looking at animal videos.

  I would sit on Dad’s lap while he programmed with zeal, both of us admiring the script running down the page by itself. His engineering skills and passion for trying to conquer developing technologies made him a sought-after employee in the booming field of information technology. While Yugoslavia itself wasn’t experiencing corporate growth, Western countries on the brink of the information age were keen to get their hands on plucky programmers from overseas—to drain the brains of smaller, poorer countries just like Yugoslavia, luring the talent to enjoy their towering skyscrapers and large paychecks.

  One night, I was eavesdropping on my parents while pretending to play with the Lego set that my mother had got for my birthday from the international store, which also sold the latest editions of English-language psychology books that were not translated into Serbo-Croatian, that she would save for. I felt special for having the Lego, as none of my friends did. Even though my clothes were hand-me-downs, and my toy supply was limited, my mother spoiled me as much as our means allowed. Despite her love of our homeland, she admired things that came from other countries, saying “Look at that quality.” Even though, unlike the West, we didn’t have ads that overwhelmed us with choice and fueled materialism, my mother still recognized that luxury items from abroad were superior to some of our shoddy local products, and she wanted me to have the best.

  Not only did I have Lego, I also enjoyed Lindt chocolate elephants mailed to us by my businessman uncle Misha, who lived in Paris. The chocolates were luxurious compared to the locally produced chocolate banana candies which we bought less frequently ever since my mother had found a steel nail in one that we were sharing.

  I was playing with my special toys when, out the corner of my eye, I saw my parents standing around the dining room table with brochures from the Australian embassy spread out across the surface, where the drawings of mentally compromised children normally were.

  “Australia!” my dad said in the adventuresome tone he used when trying to get me to eat food I didn’t like, this time trying to engage my mother. He had applied for an Australian visa, just to see if he could get one and to both my parents’ surprise, it was approved. My mother, with her pregnant belly sticking out, was now waving around an image of Uluru, the great desert monolith of Central Australia, asking with venom in her voice whether this was where he expected us to live.

  In those preinternet days, my parents knew nothing about Australia, except that it was quicker to get a work visa for there than it was for America and Canada. But at least my parents knew about those countries from reading and watching films. For Australia, their main references were Crocodile Dundee and All the Rivers Run, a television show about a female paddleboat captain.

  Ignoring my mother’s negativity, my dad called out to me. “Sofi, look what I got as a souvenir from the Australian embassy,” he said, tossing a tiny heart-shaped soap wrapped in fragrant tissue paper in my direction. “When we move to Australia, you can have soap like that all the time.” As my mother’s nostrils flared with fury, I sat on the floor of our living room, on the rug that had been there since my mother was a girl. I looked down at my little Lego village, just as the heart-shaped soap landed in the middle of the scene like a meteorite from space.

  • • •

  In the evenings, my parents’ friends would come over, and there’d be the usual laughter, punctuated more frequently now by arguments about politics. They talked about Kosovo, a region that had long been a point of contention and debate. Unrest due to ethnic tensions had persisted between the Orthodox Serbs and Muslim Albanians in Kosovo throughout the twentieth century, but after World War II, Tito “solved the problem” by doing what he did best—quashing nationalism (or at least sweeping it under the rug). To curb Serbia’s dominance, he made Kosovo an autonomous province within Serbia, with its own government. Tensions between the growing Albanian population and the minority Serbs simmered until 1987, when an ambitious Serbian politician named Slobodan Milošević went against Communist Party lines and took the side of the Serbs. Favoring one group over another was a violation of Yugoslavia’s guiding principle of “Brotherhood and Unity.” “No one will beat you,” he said to the Serbs who claimed they’d been mistreated by Albanians.

  This single act—of taking the Serbs’ side—was a dangerous thing to do, and he knew it. Much of the tension in Yugoslavia was based around the fact that the Serbs were numerically dominant, but the country couldn’t function if they were also politically dominant: the principle of “Brotherhood and Unity” that had held the country together more than forty years was based on a pact that the groups would be given equal weight, without one looming over the others. And now, here was someone taking the side of the Serbs, and many were eager to hear it. The other groups within the country, afraid of impending dominance, were not.

  Milošević’s statement, which was broadcast nationwide, was enough to unravel everything Tito had done to quiet nationalism, and all over the country, nationalist rumbles began, from Kosovo to the republics of Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia.

  This is what my parents and their friends talked about in our smoky living room. My dad brought up our last vacation in Croatia, when his friend Miki, a Serb like us, had showed up to the café in a fury. He’d been to a nearby bakery and had asked for hleb—the Serbian word for bread. The Croatian baker pretended not to understand. In Croatian dialect, the word was kruh. Everyone in Yugoslavia knew both of the words—the language was called Serbo-Croatian and both words were acceptable. Miki was offended by the Croatian baker, who was expressing his separatist feelings by pretending not to understand him. Brotherhood and unity, my ass, the baker probably thought, deciding to show the Serb where he could shove his hleb.

  “A war is brewing,” my dad said now, as they all sat in the living room.

  My mother tried to downplay it: “If anything, there’ll be a separation, like what happened in Czechoslovakia, and we’ll still go to Croatia every summer and laugh about it.” But she hadn’t been through military service like Dad and some of their friends had. She didn’t know how broken the country was, they told her now. Especially in the rural areas. Pockets of Serbs living in Croatia were still sore from the Second World War, our friend Boris said. “A Serbian living in Croatia said to me, ‘I love Belgrade. Over there, everything seems so nice and harmonious, you’re always going to galleries and embracing each other like everything is just fine. Over here, the graves are still fresh from the war. I know the people who killed my grandparents.’ And he pointed to where they lived.” Boris’s story was met with concern.

  Serbs and Croats had been on opposite sides during the Second World War—the puppet Croatian fascist state fought with the Axis powers, while the Allies supported Communist and Serbian resistance movements. The new, socialist Yugoslavia was formed afterward by Tito’s Partizans, under the understanding that former feuds would be forgotten. And as far as urbanites like my mother were concerned, it had worked—she had Croatian friends and Bosnian friends, and they all loved one another. She’d gone to Croatia her whole life and never had a problem! But not everyone felt the same, especially those living in areas where Serbs and Croats had fought during the war, and where memories of the war were still strong.

  As the months passed and the discussions at our apartment got bleaker, my mother, heavily pregnant with my sister, seemed willing to admit that our country was fucked, and she would throw her hands up in the air, for once without words, and glance at my dad, who would inevitably ment
ion emigration.

  People always stayed late at our place, and when he got tired of the drunken conversations, my dad would go to bed early with a book. I would peek from my room into my parents’ and see his familiar form propped up in bed, his glasses on the bedside table. He seemed to be mirroring the framed illustration above him: a boy in bed reading. Except the boy in the fanciful illustration didn’t have a lamp, as my father did, but a bright-eyed cat, who lit up his manuscript. The illustration was from a children’s book about the famous Yugoslavian inventor Nikola Tesla; my parents had been given it as a wedding present, and both loved it.

  When he went to bed to read, my dad became oblivious to the noise, lost in the world of fiction. My mother had become used to this, one of her husband’s quirks that everyone knew: at any point in the evening, Lola might disappear, unapologetically choosing the company of a book over that of people.

  • • •

  On the days my parents worked, often my mother’s mother, Grandma Xenia, picked me up in the morning. Sometimes she glowered at my dad, because she disapproved of his shouting at my mother, and their arguments did not stop for company. Although I was used to my parents’ disagreements, and I’d certainly heard neighbors and friends’ parents fighting too, it would take some time for me to realize that my parents argued more than other people. Once, my mother’s friend Divna said point-blank to my dad, “You’re rude to her,” and after Divna went home, my mother said to me, “Sometimes people who love each other shout at each other, and then there are people who don’t say a mean word to each other, yet they hate each other.”

  The other thing Grandma Xenia did not love about her son-in-law was his eagerness to leave Belgrade, and the possibility that her daughter and granddaughter might suddenly be transplanted to the other side of the earth did not sit well with her. Three mornings a week, Grandma Xenia took me to French kindergarten. Multilingualism was considered important, and throughout their schooling, Yugoslavian children learned two languages. My parents were planning to send me to a primary school that taught French and English, so I was, like many of Belgrade’s kids, getting a head start on the French part. Following socialist ideals, kindergarten was free, equal, and inevitably, overcrowded. Grandma Xenia spoke French, and on the way to kindergarten, she would quiz me on the simple phrases we repeated daily as a chorus. We walked hand in hand—my mother secretly following us, I later discovered, peeking from behind the plane trees that lined the street, late for work but determined to observe the state of what she referred to as my separation anxiety.

  I would request that Grandma Xenia recount my favorite stories, and as she told them, letting her voice rise or fall with emotion, taking dramatic pauses, I was a rapt audience, repeating the stories to myself and imagining telling them to my parents, or even to a crowd of children who could in turn watch me create a magical world.

  There was the story about how when she was living in a small town, despite being forbidden to by her parents, young Xenia would sneak into the high school gym at night and tumble across the mats, vault over the horse, all by herself in the darkness, determined to become an Olympic gymnast. I marveled at her bravery, her disregard for rules. There was the story of how when Grandma Xenia was pregnant during World War II, she left her husband Novak in Belgrade (she was angry at him because he’d been gambling) and convinced a German officer to pretend she was his wife so she could sneak across a Nazi checkpoint to be with her parents. Then there was the story of when she was traveling for work and met a hemophilic peasant boy on a train, and helped hold a towel to his throat, which had been sliced by a blade of wheat and would not stop bleeding due to his disease. Every now and then, Grandma Xenia and I would break into full-throated renditions of Serbian love songs from her youth.

  It wasn’t just Grandma Xenia who told dramatic tales. Ex-Yugoslavians are prone to telling melancholy stories and singing songs about heartbreak. Most ex-Yugos have in their arsenal tales that feature something alarming conveyed in a jovial tone, be it murder, infidelity, or, in the case of my own great-grandfather’s life story, kidnapping. Great-Grandfather Aleksandar was a swaggering young pilot who would go to villages and “abduct” a pretty woman, then fly with her under the bridge of the town, skimming the water of the river below. Observers would scream, concerned he was going to bring down the bridge or crash, and then they’d applaud wildly when he passed the plane under the bridge, like threading a needle. He’d get put in jail for his delinquency, and come out days later a hero. The kidnap victims, apparently, would swoon. Even my other grandma, Beba (the kidnapper’s daughter), who was known for her sunny disposition, liked telling Grimm-like stories, such as the one in which a family came to her cosmetics salon bringing their daughter whose face was covered in hair. “She was a freak who had been living locked in a room because of her unsightliness, and they had come all the way from their village to see if I could help,” Grandma Beba whispered. “I got out my wax, and started. Little by little, we revealed a nose, mouth, a beautiful face that had been covered in bearlike fur.”

  These were the stories I grew up on. Stories that entwined tragedy and comedy with chaos, set in a land many times battered by war, where people were poor, often drunk, and frequently heartbroken. I played these stories in my head, imagining my family as protagonists in thrilling scenarios, in my very own Belgrade; or in villages, forests, or caves by the Danube River; or even farther, in glamorous parts of Europe, where Grandma Xenia’s work as an agricultural expert took her to exciting conferences. On her travels she saw beautiful French women at a Parisian hotel, wearing matching chic bathing suits. She attended a circus performance in Hungary featuring little people, some of them clearly miserable. And she went all the way to America, where she was the only woman in a conference room of men talking about agriculture, who were forced to respect her when she appeared as the representative of the entire country of Yugoslavia to express her opinions on the cross-pollination of fragrant flowers.

  And even if some of the adult-themed stories that I savored chipped away a little at my innocence, they generally enriched my inner life, and played in my head when I daydreamed.

  The story that knocked the breath out of me, however, wasn’t one of Grandma Xenia’s, though I heard it on a day like any other, not long after Grandma Xenia and I walked up the steps of the gray building where other grandparents dragged little children to their classes.

  When we got to the echoey hallway, my grandma joined the other grandparents. She was following my mother’s instructions not to leave, in case I got upset, which happened often, so, amazingly, for my three-hour kindergarten stint she stayed. The old people sat on vinyl chairs, where they would smoke and complain about their pensions and the cost of eggs. I went into the classroom, where there was a long table and chairs. I found my friends Milica, Ana, and Eva, and we all sat with our notebooks open, ready to copy down words Madame Marie wrote on the board. I considered Madame Marie very beautiful and glamorous. She wore a navy suit jacket with shoulder pads, matching blue eye shadow, hair in a voluminous bob, coral lipstick, and strong perfume mixed in with the smell of cigarettes (the base smell for everything in my childhood). For good work, we would receive heart stickers in our notebooks. I liked to flick through the pages of my book and admire those hearts.

  As usual, that day I stared down the long table at Nemanja. I had first been drawn to him at our kindergarten concert a month earlier. I had been dressed in my finest outfit for the concert: a dark blue woollen dress with a pinafore, hair held back with colorful clips, and, like all little girls at that time, white socks with lace at the top and black patent shoes. During our performance, I stood in the “tall row,” staring at him in the shorter-people row before me. In a white shirt and bow tie, Nemanja sang along to “Alouette,” the sadistic song about plucking a lark, one body part at the time: “First I pluck your back, then I pluck your head . . .” Everyone sang but me. I didn’t care about the performance because all I could concentrate on was
Nemanja’s delicate ear. I didn’t know what I wanted to do; reach out and touch it, and then take it from there? But of course, I didn’t. I just watched breathlessly, admiring his half profile, his soft hair. This must be love, I said to myself then, comparing the emotions I felt with those Snow White had for the Prince, or the singer Lepa Brena had for Miki with the good body.

  Now that it was months later and we were back in class, a curveball was thrown at my unrequited romance. Short-haired Dina put her hand up to go to the bathroom. Nemanja’s hand shot up straight after, and he followed her out of the room. Smelling a rat, I threw my hand in the air. “Le toilet s’il vous plaît!”

  I ran down the hallway, past my grandma, who held a cardboard cone containing fried whitebait, something I normally loved, but now I ignored the delicious fish, hurtling toward the bathroom, looking to all the world like I was having a toilet emergency.

  I threw the door of the bathroom open and was greeted by a tender scene that rendered me speechless.

  Past the tiny stalls with the child-height toilets, Dina was washing her hands at the sink. Leaning against a wall, Nemanja stood there watching, entranced.

  “Wash, wash,” he said.

  I watched, agape. Okay, yes, as five-year-olds, we were used to being told to wash our hands. But I had never heard an instruction said with so much adoration. As far as kindergarten exchanges go, Nemanja’s utterance was positively romantic. It was like the Tramp had come out of my television screen and was talking to Lady, right in front of me. His love was palpable.