• • •
To everyone’s delight, Grandma Xenia came to visit, paying for her ticket with the cash she kept in an envelope under her couch. Grandma Xenia, who had told me I would never see her again because she would probably die, was very much alive and en route to Australia! We stood at Melbourne Airport arrivals and waited. She came out onto the walkway, the most glamorous of all the travelers, in the Chanel suit she’d purchased thirty years ago when she was a working woman, when she flitted around the world, coming back from New York with the latest haircut, knowing her children were being looked after by their grandparents. “I have now been to every continent except Africa,” she told us, lighting a cigarette and looking up at that big Australian sky once we were outside.
She was here to look after us, to take her rightful role as grandparent and give my mother a break. In Yugo culture, grandparents don’t go on cruises, or have independent, active social lives like grandparents in the West do. And when they get really old, instead of going to a nursing home, Yugo grandparents stay in the family home, and are taken care of by those same people whom they took care of before. Still in the active-grandma phase, Grandma Xenia was here to help, immediately assuming the role of caretaker rather than guest.
She cleaned the house, cooked whatever we requested—from chicken schnitzels, to potato soup, to cakes—and cheered my mother up. My mother now had the enthusiasm to attend a Yugo party and quickly make a friend she actually liked: Davorka, a Croatian doctor, who had a toddler my sister’s age called Ivan, and Dina, a girl a year older than me. When their family came over, the adults laughed in the living room and Dina and I hung out in my room, speaking English. Dina was the first person my age who genuinely found me funny. Even though I was still hesitant around my school friends, I would in time become more confident and preposterous in front of Dina, making jokes that would cause her to roll around on the floor laughing and farting simultaneously—a true measure of success. We would lie on my bed looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars that were stuck to the ceiling, listening to the New Kids on the Block tape Dina had brought over, and stuffing ourselves with the plum dumplings Grandma Xenia made.
Not long after she arrived, we took Grandma Xenia on “the tour.” Now that we’d been here for a while, my parents had the authority to tell fresh immigrants and visitors like my grandma all about Australia, from an insider’s point of view. In the evenings, we took Grandma to Brighton Beach, when the sun had already gone down and the hole in the ozone layer, a lingering obsession of my mother’s, couldn’t kill us. We took her to the Dandenong Ranges on the outskirts of the city, where rhododendrons grow, and Grandma Xenia examined various plants up close—amazed at how large certain species grew in Australia. I showed Grandma a “paper bark” tree. “People call it the bush toilet paper!” I explained, as I’d somehow got the idea that this bark was used in the Australian outback by people who had no access to toilet paper.
At this time of my life, an avid television watcher as always, I became obsessed with an ad for chewing gum. In it, happy, beachy people jumped around, smiling with their bright white teeth. “It’s a piece of Australia, the clean, fresh taste of Australia,” the jingle went. I was unaware that this was an international ad campaign, and that Wrigley’s used the same visuals in various countries. The “clean, fresh” people I liked so much were not specific to Australia, as I’d thought, but generic. In the U.S., the same ad was running with the lyrics “the clean, fresh taste of America.” But back then, I was convinced Australia was the promised land, and this chewing gum song was its unofficial anthem. When I saw anyone on the street who was brown or Asian, or big-nosed and pale like us Yugos, I would smile broadly, like the people in the ad. “Welcome to Australia,” I hoped to convey with my smile. “You might be struggling right now, but just wait and see, we Aussies are a kind and welcoming people, clean and fresh.”
• • •
Soon after our second anniversary in Australia, we went to an Australian citizenship ceremony at the town hall. I took my certificate to school for show-and-tell, unafraid to get up in front of the class and educate them on the intricacies of Australian citizenship.
With Alicia and Cara, the friends I’d legitimately made now that I was no longer just a crying foreign kid, I sat on a massive fallen tree that had been sanded down and repurposed as a bench. Simply because of its cylindrical shape, some boys had named this tree “the big dick,” but it was our special place, where we made flower bracelets and talked about exciting developments in our lives, such as the upcoming premiere of a TV series that had been heavily promoted: The Simpsons. Meanwhile, Mimi, Josephine, and Matilda chewed on grass behind us, and if they’d been any smarter, they would have felt the sting of my lapsed attention. I had abandoned my very first Australian friends. Ruthlessly, I refused to look back.
Alicia and Cara had been suspicious of me back when I arrived, but eventually allowed me to join a game they had devised called “Goblins and Girls.” I started off as a goblin, but was eventually promoted to girl, and now, two years after my arrival at the school, we were inseparable. My mother gladly allowed me to go after school to Alicia’s place, where we would read books from the school library, jump like loons on her in-ground trampoline, making up aerial dance moves to the tune of her dad’s Roxette tapes, and, eventually, lie on the trampoline exhausted, shoving barbecue-flavored chips into our mouths.
• • •
And then one day when I was seven years old, everything changed. I was in the sunroom, leafing obsessively through the encyclopedia of dogs that my parents had got for me in place of the real dog I begged for, my legs up on the recliner we’d got at a garage sale, snacking on the cheesy Aussie snack Twisties, when my dad dropped a bomb. Now that we were citizens, we could go back home to Belgrade. My parents had been planning this for a while, but I’d been too occupied with my new life to eavesdrop. This was the deal they’d struck, and my mother was making Dad honor it. The war he’d long feared had been kept at bay and, as my mother insisted, it was time to go home.
The door to Australia was open, Dad said, and we could always come back here if we needed to. Even though I’d come so far—I’d gained the power of language, friends, an Aussie accent—I was powerless in the face of my parents’ whims. I just lay there on the recliner—too stunned to cry, too confused to know what to think. “Home!” my mother said, reminding me of our Belgrade apartment, of our family and the kindergarten friends I’d left behind: Ana, Milica, and Eva. But I was scared to admit that I only vaguely remembered any of it, that as far as I was concerned, my friends were Alicia and Cara, not some girls I hadn’t seen since kindergarten. But I didn’t want to hurt my parents by acting like an Aussie. We were going home.
And so we packed up our clothes and our books and our rocks, we sold our furniture, and we made our way back to the Melbourne Airport. With our precious citizenship certificates, on the day before The Simpsons premiered, we boarded a plane and began the long journey back to Belgrade, back toward a land where there were no Simpsons, no Twisties, no clean, fresh taste of Australia. Where we were headed, though my parents didn’t know it, there was just the grisly taste of impending war.
4
Politics for Preteens
When we got back to Yugoslavia, 1991 had just begun, and there was still no war. To those in Belgrade, my dad’s insistence on going to Australia to get our citizenship just became another one of his odd decisions, like how he put cotton buds in his ears when he was cold. From what we were told, nothing had changed in Belgrade—“It’s still the same shithole!” my mother’s friend Dada said, hugging my mother to her at the airport. “We’ll see,” Dad said, and Dada and my mother rolled their eyes in unison, their mannerisms so similar, Dad had to laugh. To me, however, the people waiting for us, who my parents embraced fiercely, were unfamiliar after several years spent in a different world.
We too had become different versions of ourselves, bearing the marks of our time away. My
mother’s homesickness had manifested in emotional eating. She’d always struggled with her weight, but her time in Australia had made it worse and lately she fought it with yo-yo diets, slurping revolting cabbage soups one day and standing in the kitchen looking defeated and eating slices of bread the next. She now wore baggy clothes that tried to hide her weight, looking longingly into shop windows that contained small, chic clothing, playing with the little dog charm that hung from her neck.
My dad now wore an Akubra, a sort of cowboy hat made from fur felt, with a wide brim to block the Australian sun and rain. He paired this with another Australian item: a long Driza-Bone oilskin trench coat. Though he worked in an office and this gear was technically only useful in Melbourne for walking home from the train station in extreme weather, he didn’t mind that the getup had the people of Belgrade imagining him galloping through the stormy desert on a camel. We had, after all, been to the end of the world and back. Our friends were intrigued, and my dad liked the waft of the exotic we had about us after our travels to distant lands.
Natalija was now a toddler, gravitating toward pieces of poop, glass, or cigarette butts on the street, eager to put them all in her mouth. I assumed she’d get a disease here in Belgrade, far from the innocuous grass and paperbark she had been consuming in Australia, and I found myself constantly hissing at her, less sibling, more Dickensian matron.
As for me, I was eight: taller, chubbier, and lispy. My speech was affected by an Australian lilt, my sentences coming out not like the rough barks of the Serbo-Croatian language, but rising at the end, as if everything was a question. Since learning we were leaving Australia, I’d become increasingly anxious; I avoided cracks, counted my breaths, and divided stairs into sets of threes and fives in my head. When we returned to Belgrade, I became fixated on the spit and trash that lined the busy streets of my hometown, the Roma women sitting on the ground, breastfeeding babies and begging for money.
Now that we were back in this grim atmosphere, all of Australia’s faults were forgotten and it became a faraway paradise in my eyes. I complained in my diary that my parents had grown lax in the safety of suburban Melbourne, and said that I now felt they weren’t keeping a close enough watch over my sister: “I fear,” I wrote, allowing myself to be inspired by the books and films I consumed, “that Natalija may be kidnapped.” I didn’t trust my parents, who, in my opinion, didn’t keep a careful eye on my clueless two-year-old sister, with her tendency to hug strangers. I still got chills remembering when she’d wiggled out of my mother’s grasp at Melbourne Airport, grabbed onto a moving escalator handrail, and was lifted into the air, whooping with joy, until my mother jumped and plucked her back down.
Though you wouldn’t know it in Belgrade—where our family and friends gathered in our apartment the day we arrived, drinking and laughing like before—tensions were rising in the countryside. Thanks to my revived predilection for eavesdropping, I gathered that something was up between Serbia, where we lived, and another of Yugoslavia’s republics: Croatia.
But really, it wasn’t until years later that I was able to piece together how our country ended up at war. For one thing, two nationalist leaders came to power after Tito’s death. Tito’s Yugoslavia depended on an ethos of “Brotherhood and Unity” in which nationalism was illegal. With Tito gone, Serbia’s president Slobodan Milošević was spouting nationalist rhetoric and trying to strengthen Serbia’s position above the other republics. Meanwhile, the people of Croatia had voted for their own nationalist, a leader of the conservative Right named Franjo Tuđman. Now we had two nationalists leading the two republics that had always been at odds.
Add to that the long-standing grievances between ethnic groups, which had been swept under the rug for forty years by Tito and were now ready to burst out. Tuđman embraced the Croatian checkerboard flag from pre–“Brotherhood and Unity” times, which incensed the Serbs living in Croatia. (That was another ingredient for war: ethnic groups were not confined to their own republics, so there were, for example, many Serbs living in Croatia—about an eighth of the population.) The Serbs in Croatia were furious, because the checkerboard flag had last flown during World War II, when Germany’s puppet Croatian state had killed hundreds of thousands of Serbian people, who were their enemies at the time.
Although recent tensions in Croatia had started as yet another uprising by poor, rural people—the Serbs protesting the flag—the kind of thing that Tito had quashed thousands of times, the uprising was still not resolved, months later. And now those who had asked fearfully “What will happen when Tito dies?” were learning the answer.
We were about to see that Tito’s banning of nationalism did not destroy it; that, in fact, it may have inflamed it, and that there were plenty of people who were ready to jump at one another’s throats like their forebears had done in the Second World War.
Yet my dad, who had predicted war three years ago, was still being told by family and friends that he was paranoid. “The international community is not concerned,” my mother’s friend Dada said, pointing out that the international press had paid Yugoslavia no heed. This will blow over, the intellectuals of Belgrade said, flipping through opposition newspapers where caricatures of Serbia’s and Croatia’s presidents abounded. My parents’ friends assumed that most people felt the same way they did. Meanwhile, in the countryside, those people who had been ignored under Tito—who were crushed by unemployment, poverty, and ignorance, and spurred to nationalism—were learning how to use guns.
• • •
My former kindergarten gang, Ana, Milica, and Eva, came to our place on one of those first, disorienting days in Belgrade. They looked different to the photo I had been referring to for the past two years, where we all looked like a version of the same little girl. Ana, like me, had had a growth spurt. She was gangly, while Milica and Eva were still slight, asserting themselves with coordination, while we early developers suffered with our awkward bodies.
As my friends were observing the new me—with my accent, my rounder face, my manner affected and self-conscious—I presented them with a plan. From Australia, I had brought a brand-new Baby-Sitters Club do-it-yourself kit, which included membership cards and other tools needed to set up an enterprise like the one in my favorite books. I tried to explain the concept to my friends, who, while I was in Australia immersing myself in Western entertainment, had not been exposed to these American classics. In my Australian-accented voice, the plan came out flat: “We will look after neighborhood children, earn money, and have interesting adventures.” I’d imagined resounding excitement, my friends high-fiving each other, putting together a list of clients, suggesting the names of boys who could join our ranks.
To their credit, even though my plan sounded dead-boring, and they were living in a culture where children babysitting other children for money wasn’t a thing, my friends agreed. I opened the packaging I’d left untouched until now and declared that the four of us would be the Baby-Sitters Club of Belgrade. I grandly removed a sticker that read “Baby-Sitters Club Headquarters” and was meant to frame a light switch, only to find it didn’t fit on the Yugoslavian switch, which was a different shape to the wide, flat switches common in Australian homes. I tried to smooth it over, but it bulged with air bubbles, the corners of the sticker coming off the sides of the light switch.
Undeterred, I handed out pieces of paper, so we could vote for our president, which I assumed would be me, as I was the brains behind this operation, not to mention the owner of the kit. I was taken aback to find that three of the slips said “Milica,” except for the one written in my own careful hand, which naturally said my name. “Fine,” I said, wobbly voiced, scrunching up the pieces of paper. My friends suddenly seeming infinitely stupid, childish, unaware that to be a teenager, they must follow my guidance as I was the one who had read about teenagers. “Why don’t you run this meeting?” I said sourly, handing Milica the “President” pin that should have been mine. And that is how Baby-Sitters Club of Belgra
de died that very day.
• • •
While Belgrade was turning out to be underwhelming from my perspective, my mother, who had felt suffocated for two years by her Australian cultural alienation, was back in her element. The parties resumed as if we’d never gone, and I listened from my bed and tried to make sense of the heated political discussions.
The adults spoke about the opposition to Milošević in Serbia, fronted by a man named Vuk Drašković, a conservative patriot, whom I’d seen in the opposition papers my parents read, a tall and charismatic figure with a wild beard. The name “Vuk” means wolf in Serbo-Croatian, a strong name that was given to infants in the olden days in the hope of warding off spirits, illness, and predators. Now when I considered the name, I thought it fit Drašković perfectly, with his fiery eyes and scraggly beard.
My parents supported Drašković, and also the recently formed Democrats, a center-left party of liberal academics, led by my mother’s friend from student days, Zoran Đinđić, a handsome, silver-haired philosopher. My mother referred to him by the nickname “Zoki,” and I soon adopted the language I’d overheard, lecturing to friends about the prominent democrat “Zoki Đinđić” as if I shared a close personal relationship with him.
I didn’t understand the politics, except in black-and-white terms: Milošević was a bad guy who wanted war. The opposition were the good guys. I listened along to the opposition broadcasts, laughing when my parents did at the sketches making fun of Milošević, less because I understood them, and more because I felt this was a way to connect with my parents, and be part of something. When I drew a caricature of Milošević, or made a disparaging comment about one of his cronies, my dad would say, “Bravo, kid,” and my mother would laugh, and my heart would swell. It swelled even more to see my parents getting along better now that their lives were “back to normal” as my mother called it. But for me, Belgrade was not normal.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 9
