I wanted Nemanja to say “wash, wash” like that to me. I wanted him to look at me the way he looked at Dina. I imagined him turning from her, and seeing me, realizing his mistake—realizing that I was the one he loved. And then he would come over and—something. A hug?
But they didn’t even notice me, their attention focused on Dina’s meticulous washing. She did everything right.
I thought of all the wonderful things about Dina. How she could scrunch up her mouth and move it side to side like a sassy cartoon character. How she had nice short, dark hair. My hair was long, with massive bangs—because my hairdresser was my mother, and she wasn’t very good.
Suddenly, I was filled with the fury of the unloved. I slammed the door of the bathroom as hard as I could, hoping that the force would snap them out of it, or at least that it would banish the image of the two of them from my mind.
I marched down the hallway and back to class, too heartbroken to even glance at my smoking grandmother, who tilted her cone of whitebait in my direction. I just grabbed a handful and shoved it in my mouth, the delicious saltiness turning to ash on my tongue.
Once everyone was back in class, it was nap time. We put our arms on the table and crossed them over, using them as a pillow to rest our heads, legs dangling under the table. I kept my miserable eyes open, staring at Nemanja, then at Dina. Nap time usually gave Madame Marie a chance to talk to Madame Violet from the class next door. They hovered at the doorway, chatting in low voices about money or men, while we pretended to sleep. But today, Madame Marie was sitting at her desk, alone, even more testy than usual. For whatever reasons of her own, suddenly, she interrupted our nap and said: “Let me tell you the true story of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.” We raised our heads like little meerkats. We’d never heard of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The Disney film wouldn’t be released for another eight years, and as five-year-olds we were not familiar with the literary works of Victor Hugo.
Madame Marie sucked on her cigarette in the way she did when she was angry. Her legs were crossed—one of her high-heeled shoes jiggling from the end of her raised foot, as she launched into her own version of the story.
“The Hunchback was a young man who had a big humpback,” she said. “He was nice, and smart, but horrible to look at. He was in love with a beautiful girl. But she didn’t love him back.”
Yes, I thought, eager to hear the tale of a kindred soul.
“The girl didn’t love him because of his disability. Who wants to be seen with someone like that? With a big humped back?” she asked our class, several small heads nodding along in agreement (except mine, as I was 100 percent Team Hunchback).
“The Hunchback thought if he could just lose the hump, she’d like him.” Madame Marie inhaled on the cigarette.
“So he decided to have it surgically removed.”
I held my breath for what came next.
“He gathered money. He begged for it and borrowed from his relatives.” A murmur of understanding went around the classroom—lack of funds was a familiar issue in many of our households. We listened to our parents argue about it, we heard rumors of pensioners eating pigeons.
Madame Marie continued. “So he went to the hospital to have the hump removed, but the surgeon warned the Hunchback: ‘This operation is very dangerous. If it is not successful, you will die. You will lose a lot of blood.’ But the Hunchback just said: ‘Do it.’ ”
I felt tears building in my eyes. I repeated it to myself, moved: “Do it!”
“Anyway, then the surgeon performed the operation and it was a failure.”
We stared at her.
“He died,” she said, to drive the point home.
I looked down at my notebook, so Madame Marie wouldn’t notice I was crying and send me out to my grandma, as per usual.
“That should teach you to use your money wisely,” Madame Marie said obscurely, looking pleased with herself.
I don’t know why Madame Marie chose to tell this story to a group of five-year-olds that day. It could be that she was having financial problems, or cosmetic problems, or relationship problems. Or she was just fed up with her job, like a lot of people.
What had shocked me most, apart from the gruesome image of someone dying from bleeding to death on an operating table, was the injustice of it all: injustice that I had been rejected by Nemanja, and that the Hunchback had been rejected by his love and then died, for no good reason. Why were we not good enough? I pondered, allying myself with the tragic hero. It was the first time I felt the sting of being rejected, of being denied acceptance into something I wanted to be part of. Still, there was a strange comfort in being able to dramatize my personal pain through the lens of the Hunchback’s story. I believed my heartbreak and the Hunchback’s were equivalent, and I felt some luxury in that pain, in having my own tragic story to tell.
• • •
I don’t know if it was the birth of my little sister Natalija in 1988, or the mounting pressure from my dad, but somehow, when I was five and a half, my mother finally buckled under the pressure, and we were leaving Yugoslavia. The thought of bringing up two children in a country that was becoming poorer and more politically unstable spooked her. The deal my parents struck was that we would go to Australia, where it took two years to get citizenship, and then we could return to Yugoslavia, knowing the door to Australia was always open. My mother was going to take maternity leave anyway, and her job would be waiting for her, as long as she returned within the generous three-year period allotted by the university. As for me, since I had never left Yugoslavia before, the concept was abstract to me, and the only thing I could compare it to was when we left Belgrade to vacation in Croatia, so I imagined a similar sort of trip.
Dad’s professional visa arrived the day my mother went into labor. “So many exciting new things, kid,” Dad said, as we waited for the phone call that would tell us Natalija had been born, red-faced and chubby.
Dad and I went to the hospital parking lot, threw a ball of twine, and sent my mother food in a basket. But instead of having a party at our place afterward, we came back to our bare apartment, where my parents had taken down some of our paintings to sell. Dad quit his job the next week and got a ticket.
Friends came over and told us we were crazy to leave. My mother’s best friend, Dada, showed up one day and tearfully took photos of me and her son Marko, with our arms around each other. “Who knows when we’ll be together again?” she asked.
Three weeks later, my dad was gone. He would search for a job and a home, and the three of us would follow. In my mother’s mind, we were going overseas for two years, no more. Only if there was a war, as my dad darkly predicted, would we stay there. If he could show his wife what living in a liberal democracy was like, surely she’d get used to it, surely she’d appreciate the stability, and the calm. “But there won’t be a war,” my mother said defiantly. All those speeches about “Brotherhood and Unity” and how our people stuck together. Those weren’t just words, those were principles embedded in our people, people who enjoyed free health care and education, who cherished Yugoslavia just like she did. There would be no war, she repeated to herself.
• • •
Now Natalija was two months old, with a tuft of dark hair on her head, like a cake decoration, and we were about to join my father. The night before we were to leave for Australia, my mother put me to bed, and before embarking on her repertoire of lullabies, she said: “The smell of your birthplace is something you’ll always remember, and it will make you feel at home.”
“What about if you were born in a dumpster?” I asked.
“Then the smell of garbage will feel like home,” she said, and tears filled her eyes, as if she’d been born in a dumpster herself and was getting sentimental about it.
For me, the smells of the old, dark city of Belgrade were, indeed, home. The smell of the Boulevard of Revolution: chestnuts roasting by the side of the road, piss in the doorways, wafts of women’s perfume and Lucky S
trikes, mixed in with new snow. But I didn’t realize that, because I’d never not smelled those things. Yet.
On the evening of our departure, Grandma Xenia held my face in her hands and said, “You will never see Grandma again.” When my face crumpled up at this horrible thought, she continued by way of explanation: “It’s because I’m old, and I will probably die soon.” I sobbed. Grandpa Gonzo had died several months earlier from lung cancer, and my parents presented the concept of death to me by saying he had gone far away. Now we were going far away, and those we left behind might disappear the way of Gonzo.
At the airport, the three of us, my mother with Natalija in her arms, and me with a little backpack—all of us red-eyed and puffy—joined another tearful family we’d been introduced to via friends. This family’s dad had also gone to Australia, and they were now following, just like us. The mom, Branka, was thinner than my chubby mother, with a short haircut, a cigarette clamped in her lips. She held a big-eyed baby, Aleksandra, who was Natalija’s age, but also notably thinner. And the son, Miloš, was my age, both of us had big noses and long bangs, though for once I felt like less of a baby, as Miloš had never been on a plane and was even scared of vacuum cleaners. I told him that we had made previous airplane trips to Cavtat and that the noise of the plane was indeed similar to a vacuum cleaner.
On our last trip to Cavtat, my mother had gathered rocks from the beach, in case it was our final visit, and then insisted on packing them in boxes of our things that were sailing to Australia. Something to remember all the happy family vacations. That summer, I helped her collect rocks and wished my name was Sanya, because of the popular song that was playing everywhere at the time, and which we sang along to as we collected: “Boats sail down the Danube, is one of them called Sanya?” That trip felt so fresh in my mind, but now we were at Belgrade Airport. Instead of our summer clothes and a light duffel bag, we were holding everything we owned. Instead of traveling for one hour to a place we knew, we’d be traveling almost thirty hours, to the other side of the world.
• • •
During the flight, sensing my mother’s anxiety and eager to make the trip smoother, I kept my crying to a minimum despite my devastation at leaving home and possibly never seeing Grandma Xenia again. Instead, I thought about seeing my dad soon, and tried to lose myself in the new books my mother had bought me for the trip. Our fuel stop was in Singapore, and as we got close, the plane’s air-conditioning stopped working. The rest of the descent is a terrifying blur: as the temperature rose, my mother screamed for the flight attendants to bring ice, stripped my sister down to her diaper, and rubbed ice on her while Natalija howled like a demonic version of those fat greeting-card cherubs. Finally, we landed. Sweaty and exhausted, we walked off the plane and through a tunnel—two worn-out mothers toting newborns, and two sullen, exhausted five-year-olds, one of whom had just vomited (me). The powerful air-conditioning in the tunnel turned our sweat into a chill on our bodies, but then we were inside Singapore Airport, and my whole world changed.
Everything I knew up until then had been confined to crumbling, socialist Yugoslavia. It was my home and I loved it, but that’s because I’d never been to the Singapore Airport. It was like a humongous version of the international store in Belgrade, full of colorful, delicious products. I felt like we had been plopped into one of the Disney films I was obsessed with.
“It’s so clean!” my mother said, forced to admit that there were, in fact, some perks to shiny capitalism. She’d traveled around Europe before, but this was something new, and like the rest of our group, she was impressed.
“You could eat off the floor,” Branka agreed, and I was inspired to grab a snack and do so.
It was in this glorious place that I had an earth-shattering realization: everything I’d thought was good up until then was actually terrible. I was suddenly gripped with a crazy delight. The world was a massive, fun, bright, beautiful place and I’d been stuck in a small gray corner of it. Until now.
“Orchids!” my mother exclaimed, referring to the perfect white flowers growing out of planters every few steps.
I wanted to get down on my butt and scoot across the shiny white tiles. I wanted to jump on the escalator and travel up and down, up and down, singing and dancing to the pleasant music that seemed to be playing wherever we walked. Why were the other travelers not marveling like we were? Everything smelled like perfume, and as we walked through the airport, a beautiful Singaporean woman dressed in a suit spritzed my wrist with some when I held it out tentatively, copying my mother.
Everywhere we looked, there were marvels of capitalist beauty: gigantic glass-walled stores, full of colorful apparel; screens advertising entertainment systems, shoes, Walkmans, and most enticingly to me: a fuzzy worm. The ad featured a bunch of happy children laughing while the most gorgeous fuzzy worm wriggled around, climbing up their arms and over their faces. Up close, the worm looked adorable: little googly-eyes on a pointy face, sweet fluffy fur. My mother must have seen my face as I watched the ad in stunned silence, while in my imagination I was having one of those Looney Tunes moments, in which my jaw dropped and my eyes turned to love hearts and popped out of my head, accompanied by a loud “A-roo-ga!” My mother understood.
Then and there, she apparently became an immediate convert to consumer culture. We marched to the currency exchange counter, where my mother slammed her dinars down, procured some dollars, and bought me the worm. Had my dad been present, there might have been a discussion about money, about a need to exercise caution as we didn’t have much of it; about how we were picking up and moving to a whole new, expensive country. An argument would certainly have ensued. But it was just my mother there. Her eyes glistened, remembering my tears as I said goodbye to Grandma Xenia, remembering her own childhood, which was uninterrupted by politically spurred migration, feeling sorry for me and thinking—Why should my child be any worse off than the other children at this airport!?—And even though the worm wasn’t expensive, she didn’t even look at the price tag; however much the worm had cost, my mother would have bought it for me in that moment.
It was curled up in a little round plastic box. My heart pounded as I held it, desperate to get on the plane again because that’s when I would be allowed to open it and start playing.
As the gentle music of the airport played, the babies finally dozed off, and our mothers collapsed on a bench and sipped coffee in takeaway cups. Then, we heard our names over the loudspeaker, and the announcement that our connecting flight was about to leave us at the airport. Amid the excitement of discovering this heavenly place, our mothers had lost track of time.
“Run!” my mother shouted, and we all made a mad dash toward the gate.
• • •
On the plane, as my mother caught her breath and Natalija slept, I took out the little box that contained the worm. I opened it ever so carefully. I touched the worm gently, and its fuzzy fur felt as soft and delicate as the feathers of the pigeon my Grandpa Gonzo had once caught. And then, quietly, I whispered one of the three words I knew in English: “girl . . .”
My mother looked at me.
“Girl . . .” I said again, waiting for the worm to wake up, to start wriggling around, climbing up my arms, tickling me under the nose like it had done to the kids in the ad.
“Sofija, for a smart child, you are sometimes very stupid,” my mother said, and showed me that the worm was not in fact alive, or robotic as I had thought, but that it moved with the aid of a nylon string. Pulling the string along made the worm crawl, and when you did this, it did indeed tickle you, wriggling up and around. I got Miloš’s attention from across the aisle and then stuck my arm out, making the worm crawl up it. He watched solemnly, impressed.
And so, with my enchanted worm on the tray table in front of me, I dreamed about my future in Australia. I imagined a scene as best I could: a shiny white classroom, full of little children like me. “Wow, did you see that magic girl?” the kids would say to each other. And
I would stand there with my worm, the new kid on the block. In my head I repeated the words “hello,” “tomorrow,” and “girl,” my entire English vocabulary. I smiled, content, looking out the window into darkness, as we flew farther away from our small bubble of a world, heading for our exciting future at a great speed.
3
Asshole of the World
“Well, I guess this is it. The asshole of the world.” That was what my mother had been calling Australia, because it was so far from Belgrade, which, to her—bickering populace and economic crisis aside—was the earth’s beating heart. As we got off the plane, she and Branka glanced around for a place to smoke, with the desperate eyes of addicts who’d been forced to go cold turkey, and the added torture of babies and preschoolers whining at them. The Melbourne Airport was clean, and busy, full of locals wearing flip-flops and big T-shirts, some of them overweight and sunburned, their hair in little braids after vacations in Bali or Thailand. A woman with bare feet walked by—the sign of a true-blue Aussie—and my mother concluded that she must be schizophrenic.
At the luggage carousel, friendly airport officials stood and uttered greetings like “G’day,” which baffled foreigners, who tried to link the bizarre language they were hearing to the phrase books they’d studied, or words they’d heard on an English-language tape. The Australian accent was formidable to my mother, who had just flown across the earth with a vomiting five-year-old and a cranky newborn attached to her, and was just about ready to eat a cigarette. My mother—who had learned English at school and used her knowledge of the language mainly for watching the import shows that hadn’t been dubbed and reading academic books she got from the international bookstore—was now squinting suspiciously at an elderly airport employee wearing shorts and socks to his knees, who called her “love” even though they’d only just met. Was he a sex addict? my mother wondered, sizing up the eager old man. Meanwhile, I had never seen an adult dressed like that. I was fascinated by his exposed elderly legs, and his red, scabby nose. I would soon learn that Anglo skin does not take well to the hole in the ozone layer, and elderly Australians often have to have their skin cancers removed, losing small chunks of nose skin in the process. The old man pointed toward the exit to indicate there would be no smoking until we were all the way out of the airport.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 6
