Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  I was home but it was strange. While I hadn’t fit in in Australia, now I was confused to discover I didn’t fit in here, either. I was anxious for my parents, myself, and especially Natalija, the smallest and most vulnerable member of our group. This was a child who had spent most of her life in the shiny playgrounds and soft lawns of suburban Australia, and now she was here, in a filthy city, where bits of metal stuck out from seemingly everywhere, ready to impale children.

  When there weren’t adult conversations to eavesdrop on while I was struggling to get to sleep, I would fixate my attention on Natalija’s breathing across the room. I would grow panicky as I listened, imagining that she was suffocating or, if I was in a particularly strange mood, that her breath was actually the hissing of a predator awaiting us both in the shadows. So I’d tiptoe over to her bed, look under the bed, then open her eyelids. The presence of her eyeballs, which rolled back as she slept, was a satisfying sign, enough for me to go back to bed, my anxiety somewhat abated, my loneliness once again appeased by my unwitting little sister.

  These were the days when my parents programmed their alarm clock to wake them up with the morning news. Which meant, usually, the whole family would wake up to a booming voice reporting on skirmishes among Croatian and Serbian populations or threatening speeches by nationalist politicians. If Natalija or I made noise while the news was on, we would get screamed at, or smacked on the butt or head, a response that my sister thought was driven by my parents’ passion for news media rather than their obsession with monitoring the daily escalations of our political conflicts. Just as my mother used to wake little Natalija from her afternoon nap by saying “Get up, Nani, I’ll put Snow White on for you!” my sister would climb into my mother’s bed, bring her little face right up to my mother’s, and say, in the same promissory tone: “Wake up, Mami, I’ll put the news on for you!”

  • • •

  My parents went back to their old jobs. My dad returned to the engineering institute and my mother not only worked at the university but also landed a gig hosting a television show exploring the emotional development of children, called Mom, Dad, Me, and Everyone Else. She adored going each week into the TV studio, where she sat across from experts and explored the kind of issues that had always thrilled her, like whether you should play music for your baby, and why children wet the bed. Natalija and her friends were sometimes plonked in a playpen as cute extras, the camera cutting to them as my mother and her colleagues talked.

  My parents resumed active social lives, as there were plenty of adults around to look after us. Though Belgrade had felt foreign and disappointing when I first returned, I soon realized it was my city, full to the brim with people who seemed programmed to automatically love me. Not only did our own neighbors (whom I had all but forgotten) kiss me and Natalija three times when they saw us, offering us jam and candies, the neighbors of my relatives smothered us too, welcoming us back from Australia like we were their own family. There were framed photos of us at both of my grandmothers’ places—of me in my school uniform, Natalija looking jolly with a potty on her head. We were beloved here: the children who had gone away, who had broken hearts by doing so, and who were now back, like heroes returned from war! It was the opposite of how I felt in Australia, where we were nobody.

  Grandma Beba’s cosmetics salon became a key point of interest. Now, as an eight-year-old who dreamed of being a teen, it proved very relevant to my preoccupations. When I was in the salon, I stretched out on a spare reclining chair with my feet daintily crossed, enjoying my celebrity status of “granddaughter from Australia” while Grandma Beba tended to her clients, ladies who came to get their legs waxed with the dark brown, delicious-smelling thick, gooey substance that Grandma Beba mixed in a large heated vat.

  Some of Grandma Beba’s clients were into the increasingly popular musical genre of turbo-folk—so she put the television on in the background, and we watched men and women gyrating on screen while the clients patiently waited for the vibrating disks attached to their thighs and butts to cause their cellulite to disappear, as the brochure Beba handed out promised they would.

  In between clients, Grandma Beba would squeeze my pores, or massage my face and then apply the special skin balms that she made herself, and I would inhale the scent of the balm, damp cotton balls resting on my eyes to soothe them. One day, Grandma Beba suggested we pierce my ears, and before I could think about the germs that might crawl into the holes, and the fact that my mother disapproved of children having pierced ears, she had clicked the gun twice, and it was done, my earlobes burning and my pride swelling at being suddenly grown up.

  • • •

  On the weekends, I often slept at Aunt Mila and Uncle Tim’s place. Aunt Mila was my mother’s sister, her husband Tim was an Englishman, and together, they were a television-making duo. She wrote and he directed some of the most famous Yugoslavian kids TV shows from the last few decades, and they were beloved figures in the city. Aunt Mila went every day to Radio Television Serbia, where she was head of children’s programming, passing the office of the Milošević-installed news team who were in charge spreading pro-Milošević propaganda and keeping opposition opinion off the air. Because the children’s department was apolitical, Aunt Mila managed to keep her job despite her contrary political opinions, while her Milošević-opposing colleagues in the news division were not so lucky, and got fired.

  Thanks to a bit of nepotism, I was given a small role in one of my aunt’s television shows, Broom Without a Handle, about child detectives solving a mystery involving a pet store robbery. I was featured in a scene at a birthday party, in which I was meant to catch a runaway rabbit that had snuck under the couch and offer it to the main character to pet. I also appeared in a scene where a group of children went to an eccentric old lady’s home and she asked, “Do you like šnenokle?” (a type of dessert), to which I answered as somberly as if I was reciting a wedding vow: “I do.” During the day’s filming, I was breathless with excitement, but also suffering from conjunctivitis, for which one of the adult actors kindly squeezed cream into my eye. I went home as proud as I’d ever been, imagining that a Hollywood executive who happened to be in Belgrade would spot me in my fleeting television appearance and make me a star.

  In my aunt and uncle’s apartment, there were framed illustrations of the two of them which had appeared in newspapers over the years showing them in all their eccentric glory—Aunt Mila in one of her signature brimmed hats and bright red lipstick, Uncle Tim with his domed bald head and long pointy beard. The only person I knew who spoke Serbian with an English-language inflection the way I did was Uncle Tim Byford, who had quit his work with the BBC and moved to Belgrade to marry my aunt, after they met in Sarajevo in the seventies. Uncle Tim was known for his accent—which, in a country with not many foreigners, had been named the “Byfordian” accent. I adored my aunt and uncle and their sons, Andy and Jovan, who had just started university. At their place, I spent hours reading the English-language Asterix comics and Famous Five books that my cousins had long outgrown, but my favorite activity was watching films with Aunt Mila.

  Like me, my aunt enjoyed watching films many times over, and she was happy to spend weekends showing me the classics, including all of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, Gone with the Wind, and psychological thrillers like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? If films and books had been important to me before, now they became sacred. A good film was able to ease out all concerns from my mind: my anxiety about living in Belgrade, the heated political debates, the prospect of Natalija meeting her end, and my own confusion about where I belonged.

  Some of my favorite memories are of settling in on a comfortable armchair for a late night of film watching, swaddled in a blanket, my belly full of Aunt Mila’s delicious food. We watched in complete silence, respectful of each other and of the scenes unfolding before us. Between films, Uncle Tim offered us “After Eights,” thin squares of dark chocolate, with a smear of mint inside them, packaged in small enve
lopes: delectable and sophisticated. I would slip one onto my tongue while I watched the black-and-white scenes playing on the screen, and just for a while, I felt like a proper grown-up.

  • • •

  When the school year began, I was enrolled in third grade at Vladislav Ribnikar Elementary School. The differences between my new school and the one I’d come from in Melbourne were so stark they made my head spin. In Yugoslavia, children did not wear uniforms or sit on the floor. Instead, they sat at little desks, with a hard floor underfoot, and wrote with fountain pens. In some ways, I appreciated the more adult seating arrangement; we were elevated to the level of the teacher, rather than sitting by her wiggling toes, as we had done with Mrs. Melville. However, children at school in Yugoslavia were not expected to have a casual, friendly relationship with their teacher, but to be deferential and formal. They learned three languages during their schooling, including Latin. It dawned on me that after spending two years away from this multilingual education system, I was screwed.

  A map and a blackboard were the sole decorations in our classroom. The décor was made slightly less depressing by one element: the familiar and enduringly handsome face of Nemanja, my unrequited kindergarten love who, having followed his French studies to this elementary school (other nearby schools taught Russian, German, English, and Italian), happened to be in the same class.

  Well, well, well, I thought to myself, tucking my hair to show off a pierced ear, we meet again—all grown up.

  However, Nemanja did not show any signs that he knew who I was. No matter. I took a seat at a desk behind him, where I could resume the role of silent stalker that I was born to play. When the teacher, Ms. Danica, walked in, we all stood up. Ms. Danica gave us permission to sit, and we began the first day of third grade with dictation. After that, we were instructed to open our textbooks, containing Serbian poetry we were supposed to memorize throughout the term. I didn’t have a book yet, as the store had run out. “You’re the one from Australia?” Ms. Danica asked.

  “Yes,” I said, expecting she might ask me to introduce myself to the class.

  “Have the book by the end of the week, or you get a big fat fail.”

  • • •

  Every day after school, sitting at our old dining room table, sobbing, I practiced the Cyrillic alphabet, learned to write with a fountain pen, and, with the help of a private tutor (one of the students from my mother’s university who gave affordable lessons in French), caught up on two years of French that I had missed while in Australia. In my diary, I wrote exclusively in Serbian and in fountain pen to practice. After several hours catching up on my Serbian education, I would spend some time on my English, thanks to a friend of my parents from the Yugo-diaspora in Australia, who sent me Baby-Sitters Club books by the boxful.

  I raided my parents’ library, each inside cover stamped by my dad with a neat, blue-inked “Library Stefanovic” in Cyrillic. I read Serbian and Croatian translations of English books, as well as the immensely popular Winnetou series, about an Apache Indian chief. These books were huge in Yugoslavia, and I only found out later that they were written by the German author Karl May, who had never actually been to the Wild West, which he wrote about so extensively. Not knowing this, I soaked up the details of the life of Native Americans and cowboys. Believing them to be true, I pictured myself riding on horseback, enjoying the delicious meat of grizzly bear paws, and inhabiting the vast planes of America, where the good guys ultimately won, a fantasy world that took me far away from the realities of school, family, and politics.

  • • •

  Every day I caught the tram in front of our apartment building, rode two stops, picked up two delicious pastries—a triangular pašteta filled with cheese, and a round pogačica, also filled with cheese—from a bakery, and walked the rest of the way to school gobbling them down. Unlike my mother, who was acutely aware of her weight, I didn’t notice the weight I put on as a result of my decadent sampling of all the delicacies I was surrounded by.

  One morning, still sated from my cheese pastries, I was sitting behind olive-skinned Nemanja as Ms. Danica explained the rules of Serbian spelling. “We are lucky our language is phonetic,” she explained. “Certain other languages have very strange, unintuitive spellings. Take for example, in English, the word ‘chair,’ which we would simply spell ć-e-r. In English, it is actually spelled like this.”

  She wrote “SCHAIR” on the blackboard. My hand shot up, Aussie-style, one finger in the air instead of two.

  “That’s not how it’s spelled,” I said, excited to show my intelligence and elicit praise. “There is no s!”

  “You are wrong,” Ms. Danica said. “And you should only put your hand up if I have asked the class a question. I have had enough of your interruptions!”

  The constant hand in the air, high and excited, was my thing. Asking questions and making observations had been encouraged in Australia, and it was something I’d embraced wholeheartedly at Bentleigh West Primary School once I felt confident speaking English. In Australia, I had my hand up constantly, my legs crossed, my back rod-straight, bursting to be allowed to speak. Knowing the answers and being able to express them in an articulate way was a source of pride for me, and a way to obliterate the humiliating traces of being the dumb foreign kid. Tolerant teachers indulged me, letting me show off my knowledge, ask questions, and enhance their lessons with sage but unnecessary observations like, “You say the sunset is orange, but I have also seen purple.”

  But now, when I finally felt I could make a contribution, when I’d hoped I could achieve some much-needed status in class even though I knew I was right about “schair” I was shot down. My arm wilted to the side of my little wooden desk in humiliation. I was done trying to be noticed, at least for a little while. Nemanja turned around and gave me a “ha, ha, you got in trouble” look, and despite my low mood, I thought perhaps this would turn into one of those teasing flirtations, and considered approaching him after class to remind him of our kindergarten past. But, as he turned away from me again, I figured he’d probably say “I don’t care,” or, more specifically, “my butt hurts,” which is, inexplicably, the slang expression we use for “I don’t care” in our language.

  • • •

  The only time we could rise from our seats during class was when we were called upon to recite a poem we’d memorized, or when Ms. Danica entered or exited the room. But one day, she announced that we’d be doing a drama exercise. Had my ears deceived me? We were actually doing something fun? I felt like bursting from my desk in rapture, mentioning my CV—that role on Broom Without a Handle, several monologues from old Hollywood films that I knew by heart. Could it be? Was this my Grace Kelly moment?

  Ms. Danica spoke up: “The most talented children, please step up to the front: Jasna, Nemanja, and Nikola.”

  Apparently not.

  Jasna, the girl every boy seemed to love, stood at the front of class, where she would be playing—what a surprise—a princess.

  I observed her small, pretty nose and wondered why some people had all the luck. My mother had recently commented that I had a “prominent nose,” which had stopped me dead in my tracks, because I’d never even considered my nose before. But from that moment on, I saw myself as nothing but a giant, walking nose—and now I seethed as I watched Jasna, convinced she had been chosen not for her skills but her appearance.

  The drama these so-called “talented” students were called up to perform was a famous poem by the Yugoslavian author Dušan Radović called “The Ballad of Nađa and Kađa.” It begins at sea, with a princess called Nađa.

  The king, Nađa’s father, was to be played by Nikola, whose nickname was “Dicksie” because we children knew the English word “dick” and we also knew that he was ruled by his. Nikola was the tallest boy in class, and even though he was only nine, he had taken the computer game Leisure Suit Larry to heart. Somehow all of us had managed to access this adult-only game (stolen from older siblings, played at
friends’ places, or painstakingly copied), in which Larry’s goal was to have sex with women.When he succeeded, a “CENSORED” sign appeared across the screen, bobbing up and down to block the “sex” that was apparently occurring. It was illicit and thrilling, and we loved to huddle around computers while our parents weren’t watching and giggle as the pixelated animated Larry did his thing. Whenever we waited for our teacher to arrive, Nikola, parroting Larry, would approach girls when they weren’t looking and thrust his pelvis into their butts. The girls jumped away and screamed, “That’s gross!” and he’d laugh.

  Maybe it was because I was unpopular, or because I was increasingly fascinated by sexual things as I lurched toward teenage-hood, or I was just influenced by watching a lot of romance films, but I thought, This is the closest thing to passion I have seen up close—and every now and then, I leaned slightly over a desk, pretending to look at my notebook, and, inevitably, Nikola came up behind me and “humped” me. I always jumped away, saying “That’s disgusting!” like the other girls did, but secretly, I felt a thrill, a flush in my cheeks, the addictive sensation of being singled out and wanted. Though I understood that there was positive attention—such as the satisfaction I got from being told I was good, or smart—and negative attention—like the bullying I’d faced in Australia—I miscategorized Nikola’s advances as being in the good category: the sort of attention that made me feel both special and worthwhile.

  Ms. Danica’s final casting decision resonated with me: Nemanja was to play Kađa, a rugged, handsome bandit who wins the princess’s heart. Ms. Danica began by reading the poem aloud while the “talented” children “performed” it, swooning around the front of the room.