Finally, we had the bags on a trolley, with Natalija strapped to our mother like an angry troll, her hair wild from the static of our mother’s nylon sweater. We crept through customs, toward a set of metal double doors that opened automatically, taking us suddenly into the free world, or more specifically, into the giant, bright arrivals hall. We paused, getting our bearings. Self-consciously, new arrivals ran their hands over their unbrushed hair, straightened their wrinkled clothes, wished their breath was fresh and that they could get the smell of airplane toilet out of their nostrils. The spectators, on the other hand, were waiting for loved ones, full of anticipation as each person walked out, their faces falling whenever the metal doors spat out a stranger. Feeling those disappointed eyes, the three of us couldn’t do much but keep going along the walkway, hoping to spot Dad and scamper to him.
I looked at the waiting faces along the way, so many more ethnicities than I had seen in homogeneous Belgrade. Families were waiting with balloons and flowers, toddlers in their best clothes ready to meet grandparents for the first time, people holding signs, crying or laughing, grown men yelling “Mama!” and waving maniacally to little old ladies with heavy European coats. A plane ticket to Australia in the eighties cost a huge amount of money. If a person had come all the way to Melbourne, they meant business.
And then, there was my dad at the end of the walkway, wearing his old jeans and smiling through his beard. He stepped out from the crowd, squatted down to my height, and opened his arms. The people around me blurred as I ran to him, throwing myself into his loving embrace. When we walked out of the terminal, we said goodbye to Branka and her family, and my mother finally got to light her cigarette, all the troubles of the world temporarily leaving her as she exhaled them in a blessed stream of smoke, going out into Australia’s unpolluted air. We looked up at the sky, which extended above us like a vast blue dome. Gone was the small gray sky of Belgrade that hung low like a blanket. Gone were the tall buildings that had surrounded us, the crowded streets and concrete. The sun shone bright above us. This was our introduction to Melbourne winter: fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit and snowless with a cold, unfamiliar wind.
My dad led us proudly to a silver secondhand Holden Commodore that would be our family car. “Look at that tacky stripe!” my mother said, pointing at the orange trim running along the side.
“I thought it looked good,” Dad said, looking again at the orange stripe, which had held so much charm until that second. My mother rolled her eyes, keeping to herself the nice things she had said about him when he wasn’t there. (“Lola is a genius,” I’d overheard her saying to friends. “Can you believe he rented a car the day he arrived in Australia and drove himself to a job interview? And he got the job straightaway, even though he was jet-lagged and speaking English!”)
Leading up to the move, my dad, who always made an effort to read English-language novels and magazines in the original, had cranked up his studies, constantly looking up strange spelling rules (“i before e except after c”) and conversational sayings. He wanted to be the kind of guy who could say, “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and know exactly what it meant, rather than just staring dumbly, like a sad immigrant, as those around him bantered. He felt empowered that first day as he drove the rented car toward a job interview in Melbourne’s downtown with the window down, making his way from the sparse suburbs where we would eventually live, through leafier inner suburbs, to the guts of this large city. The building where my dad was headed stuck out from the rest, a high-rise towering above high-rises—the headquarters of BHP (Broken Hill Proprietary)—a giant multinational mining company, which was arming itself with nerds who could automate systems. While someone with an accent like my dad’s was regarded as a “wog” by certain Australians (who used this derogatory term for those from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe), a tech guy with an accent like Dad’s was regarded as “a good bet”—programmers from Slavic countries had a positive reputation in the world of software engineering. He left that day with a job offer and a salary of thirty-six thousand dollars—about ten times more than he had been earning in Belgrade. That afternoon, he bought the secondhand Holden Commodore with the orange stripe and went back to the suburbs to find a home to rent for his family.
Our new home was a three-bedroom, low-roofed brick house in a cul-de-sac opposite a small park. Melbourne is a large city—back then the population was about 3 million, but it was spread thinly and our home was ten miles from the city center. Back in Belgrade, our apartment had been considered large, but it was tiny compared to this place. Our yard in Belgrade was shared by two buildings that backed onto each other, where the resident kids went wild when they came home from school. But now we had a yard that was just for us, a lonely, large expanse of green grass with a bizarre structure in the middle. It was an Australian institution—the Hills Hoist washing line. Essentially, it was a pole with rotating blades resembling those of a helicopter, and clotheslines strung in between. Dad showed us how it turned, and I imagined swinging from it. “That,” my mother said, “is the ugliest thing I’ve seen.”
“I thought the curtains were the ugliest thing you’ve seen,” Dad quipped, recalling a comment she’d made minutes ago, and offering her a spoonful of the Nutella he had bought from the supermarket earlier that day. “Oh, I love Nutella!” she said, remembering the treat Uncle Misha had once sent from abroad, and suddenly she had a mouthful of Vegemite, a brown, yeast-based spread that tastes as opposite to a chocolate hazelnut treat as possible. While she shouted curses at my father from the bathroom, where she was now brushing her teeth, I sampled a tiny bit; the bitter saltiness of the Vegemite both thrilling and shocking.
Now wise to my dad’s prankster mood, my mother walked over to the wall, and reached her hand up toward a gigantic, furry spider. She’d assumed it was a prop set up by my dad, but as her fingers brushed it, it scuttled off and we all screamed. This was our introduction to the huntsman spider, an impressive beast often spotted on Australian ceilings. I wasn’t scared of spiders, having trapped many of them in glasses to observe them carefully with my grandma Xenia, but the size of this one, and the horrified reaction from my parents, made me think that, like the backyard, and the house, perhaps everything in Australia was bigger and scarier than back home.
When darkness fell that first night, we went outside to look for the Southern Cross constellation in a sky that was, according to my mother, all wrong: “It’s like someone threw a stone up there and upset everything.” I realized I hadn’t paid enough attention to the sky before, because to me it looked as I imagined a sky should look. As I stood there gawking up at the heavens, trying to connect the stars that were meant to be a cross, Dad broke a leaf off the eucalyptus tree and snapped it in two. I inhaled the beautiful fragrance and touched the moisture from the leaf with my fingers, rendering them sticky and lovely smelling. And then we heard a deep breathing sound from very close by. This was a time when “sex predators” were a staple of news programs, and my mother, who believed Melbourne was an isolated backwater, did not doubt that the suburb of McKinnon would be the perfect lurking ground for a sex maniac, a creep breathing his frantic breaths from behind the bushes as he watched the young immigrant family. She clutched sleeping Natalija to her chest and drew me to her and my heart sped up, as Dad walked over to a plum tree. Was someone going to jump out from behind it? Instead, Dad discovered a cat-sized, bug-eyed creature with a curled tail sitting on a branch, breathing as loudly as a human pervert might. This was an Australian ring-tailed possum—a marsupial often found feasting on the fruit in people’s gardens. On a nearby branch was another possum, and what we had overheard was a plum-related face-off, a territorial dispute among curly-tailed creatures. We stood for a while staring at the possums, animals that reminded me of nothing I had seen until then, as they stood still, watching each other intensely, apparently unaware we were even there.
• • •
We learned more about the possums soo
n enough, from fellow Yugoslavians eager to share local knowledge about these fruit-gobbling pests. A party was thrown in our honor, at the house of an older, established Serbian couple. The guests were members of the old guard who had been here since the sixties and seventies. They had left Yugoslavia for various reasons: so they could start businesses in a capitalist society, because they were nationalists who opposed Tito’s policy of “Brotherhood and Unity,” or because they were royalists opposed to Tito’s presidency. This old guard was comprised of a hodge-podge of Yugoslavians who lived in large houses in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and spoke Serbo-Croatian with English words thrown in. “Havaya,” a man with slicked-back hair explained to my dad, “is an Australian greeting.” It was months before my parents worked out that “havaya” was actually a mutation of “how are ya,” a phrase uttered in the Australian accent and misheard by Yugo ears, which had become a greeting in the Aussie-Yugo community.
These were the seasoned immigrants, whereas we were the first trickle of a new wave, the brain drain that would soon fill out the diaspora. One of my parents’ new acquaintances gestured proudly in the direction of the piglet roasting on a spit and said, “Just like home!” Later, when we were in the car, my mother said, “Not like my home. Do they think we come from a village?” Even though the ex-Yugos were, technically, “our people,” they were not the small circle of Belgrade’s intellectual elite that my parents had hung around with. Melbourne was not the place for parties with loveable drunks talking about philosophy, politics, and art—at least not our part of Melbourne, anyway. According to my mother, the only thing she shared with the diaspora was a common language. “There’s only so many conversations I can have about recipes,” she would say after parties like this, and before she could finish her sentence, Dad would call her a snob.
The diaspora was out of touch with the things that were going on back home, so my parents couldn’t talk to them about their dislike of Slobodan Milošević, who had recently become the president of Serbia, after managing to unseat his predecessor and set the path for his ascent to power in Yugoslavia. They couldn’t speculate on when he’d fall and withdraw to whatever nationalistic hole he’d crawled out of. Until other new immigrants started to arrive in the months that followed, with fresh news and opinions from back home, my parents could only have their speculative political arguments with each other, which made them frustrated, snappy, and stir crazy. The only world news program on Australian TV was focused on the Iraq-Iran war, so my parents’ information about Yugoslavia was based on the scraps they heard over the phone or in letters: Milošević was gaining more support from nationalists, but he was on his own against the majority. Any second, my mother reasoned, he would fall and the nationalists would be silenced. “Don’t be naive!” my father responded. “This is just the start of something bigger!”
But when they tried to initiate political conversations at our welcome party, my parents found that Australian Yugoslavians preferred to speak about buying houses, the price of cotton clothing, and gossip within the diaspora. A man proudly informed my mother that he’d been jailed for smuggling racing pigeons from Yugoslavia into Australia. “Plucked, anesthetized, and tucked into a sock!” he said, beaming, and my mother remembered the horrendously long flight we’d taken to get here, trying to picture what it would have been like if we were seated next to someone with sedated bald pigeons sticking out of his socks.
As he regaled my mother, every now and then, the pigeon-smuggler would kiss his watch. Eventually, he stuck his arm out to show her that it had a hologram of Marshal Tito on it. When his adored leader died, this man decided to make Australia his home, having no desire to live in a Tito-less Yugoslavia. In Melbourne, he turned to pigeon racing as a lucrative hobby, finding that birds from his beloved Yugoslavia were champions at high flying, and starting to smuggle them over.
“What happened to the pigeons you smuggled when you were caught?” my mother asked, now genuinely taken by this eccentric and keen to write about him to her friend Dada.
“The customs officials broke their necks,” the man said with tears in his eyes.
Since getting out on bail, he had stopped smuggling live pigeons. “But,” the pigeon fancier said, glancing at my mother’s thick, Rod Stewart–like locks, “it’s quite easy to pin an egg in someone’s hair. Or hide it in a brassiere.”
The party marked the beginning of a weird new phase of my parents’ lives, and it felt a bit like they were in the film Casablanca, surrounded by expats gone wild, far from home. They were now part of an ethnic minority, alienated from mainstream society and bound to the diaspora by their accents and their status as new immigrants. For the first time they lived on the periphery of the city, ill-equipped, shackled by their linguistic and cultural shortcomings, and unable to muscle their way into its center.
After he helped himself to the roasted piglet, Dad discovered some engineers and got into an excited discussion about tech, and my mother eventually extricated herself from the pigeon man and started quizzing some women about sunscreen, as she was now living beneath the hole in the ozone layer.
Meanwhile, I was in a room with two girls my age, sitting around a pile of Barbies. The girls, who were born in Australia, to Yugo parents, had been instructed to speak Serbo-Croatian with me because I didn’t understand English. As soon as we were left alone, however, they started speaking in English. They waved their hands in front of my face like I was an idiot, shouting words I didn’t understand. “Shall we speak in our language?” I suggested, in Serbo-Croatian, thinking that they might have forgotten the instruction left by the adults. They continued their English chatter, while my ears filled with the impossible words and I sat there staring at a Barbie in my hand, as if she might have some idea of what I should do next. But Barbie delivered nothing but a perky smile, and I was left sitting there like a fool. Mute and humiliated, I imagined shrinking to the size of nothing, and I was seized with an impulse to flick Barbie in her joyful face a couple of times, hard.
I remembered that my baby sister was in another room, hidden in her stroller, away from the thick smoke of the roast outside. In her two months on earth, Natalija had not held much interest for me, but blood was fast becoming thicker than water, and I found myself suddenly warming to the boring newborn who was my biological teammate. I went and stood by her stroller and talked quietly to her in our language, as if she was not a baby, but my friend. The two little girls soon appeared, and tried to come into the room, impressed by the baby. “No,” I said, in English, waving my arms around like an air traffic controller. Yes, I was an outsider, and couldn’t play their foreign-language games. But as far as this room was concerned, where my personal sister was lying, farting and gurgling in response to my conversation, in that space, they were the outsiders, and they stepped back as I chased them out, swinging my arms maniacally.
• • •
The next week, my parents took me to Bentleigh West Primary School, where I would join the “prep” class, the Australian equivalent of kindergarten in the U.S. I now spelled my name “Sofia” because the principal, an older gentleman in a bright red sweater, suggested we remove the j, explaining that even though it was pronounced “y” where we came from, it would be confusing to Australians. He showed us around the big schoolyard, full of multicolored play equipment, and a large, friendly brick building with a mural on it, painted by students. As we walked, he picked up a discarded bag of chips, placing it in a trash can and deeply impressing my family. (“The principal picking up trash!?”) Even though we had come from a place where everyone was a “comrade,” a school principal would never pick up trash, and children were expected to talk to adults using formal address, so we were particularly taken aback when a child ran past and called “Hey, Mr. B!”
Unlike everything else about the school, which seemed futuristic and liberal, the students wore uniforms, something that didn’t exist in Yugoslavian schools, and it was strangely old-fashioned: white-and-blue checked dres
ses for girls; gray shorts for boys, or blue sweatpants, a yellow T-shirt with the school logo, and a yellow cap with a long train for extra sun protection. Instead of sitting at desks, they sat on the floor with their legs crossed.
Unlike the glamorous and icy Madame Marie with her meticulous makeup, my new teacher, Mrs. Melville, wore no makeup, had a red nose, and wore large, bright shirts and sandals that she would remove, wiggling her toes near where we students sat on the ground. However, in my eyes, even though she was aesthetically opposite, she was equally as cruel as Madame Marie.
During my third week at school, frustrated at my slowness with a word-recognition activity, I started to cry. I understood when Mrs. Melville, who had witnessed my breakdowns daily, said to the other children: “Ignore her,” as the word “ignore” is similar in Serbo-Croatian. Rather than celebrate my private victory of having actually comprehended a word, I cried even harder. Not only was I dumb but others were instructed to treat me like I didn’t exist. I stared at the page in front of me and sobbed. In Serbian I conjugated words and tenses perfectly, according to my mother’s notebooks. I was asked trick grammar questions by my parents’ friends, which I answered without a glitch, and I bathed in the applause. Now suddenly I was the dumbest kid in class, and the other students snickered, turning their heads away as I sat there like a fool.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 7
