I decided to break it to them lightly, using a joke appropriated from a television program we’d been watching every night, for lack of other things to do in Whyalla. That evening, once Natalija was asleep, I emerged from the bedroom nonchalantly, leaned on the door frame, and said, “Well, as Rose from The Golden Girls would say, ‘I never thought I’d grow a hair there!’ ” while pointing in the direction of my crotch. My parents, jolted from their conversation, stared at me for a few seconds with raised eyebrows, getting their heads around what I was saying. My mother smiled before telling me this was a normal part of growing up, and that I should go back to bed. She added, “There will be more! And under your armpits, too,” and Dad said, “You don’t have to tell us about each one!” As I climbed the ladder to my bunk, I heard them laughing—and I imagined less callous, more attractive TV actors taking their place as my parents.
Meanwhile, Natalija became interested in drawing. She worked with her hair tied in a palm-tree style, her cheeks ruddy, her eyes focused on her works, her chubby bare feet swinging from the porch, delectably out of reach of the ant lords. She gave her drawings to our mother, who surveyed them with concern, then filed them away, like she did with the pictures of her traumatized child clients. Looking over my sister’s shoulder, I tried to interpret the drawings, based on the knowledge my mother had previously shared with me, or that I’d overheard. Troubled kids drew pictures of blood and guts, or sometimes, monstrous suns burning people below. Parents who were abusive in real life were often depicted with oversized, menacing hands. Natalija’s drawings were different. They were of houses, some of which had wheels, while others had wings. The folder in which her drawings were stored was labeled in my mother’s handwriting: “The child who befriended the moon (lack of permanence in early childhood).” My mother planned to write a thesis on children like my sister who moved around a lot, who had trouble working out where their home was. She talked about writing something and getting it published, but more often than not, she’d just look through the folder of portable houses, the quotes from Natalija about being friends with the moon, sigh, and put the folder away again. She was feeling low again, and the thought of exploring her daughter’s psychological issues made her even more depressed.
But unlike during our stint in Melbourne, she would not be a stay-at-home mom. A few weeks after we arrived, my mother got her first job in Australia. As Slobodan Milošević’s reputation grew worse globally, Yugoslavia’s standing also became flimsier, and many people were struggling to have their Yugoslavian degrees recognized. But, because she’d already secured her position in the Australian Psychological Society, my mother had no problem getting a job—at the public hospital in Whyalla, where she was hired as a children’s counselor.
Every day, she boarded an empty bus that stopped in front of our place. It took her through the bare streets of Whyalla and onto the highway, past auto repair stores, and delivered her, often still the only passenger, to the front of the hospital.
When she came home from the hospital, along this same lonely route, she would tell my father that there was more familial abuse here than she’d ever seen before, and that she wished we were back home.
Inevitably, my father would say something like: “Are you forgetting that your precious Yugoslavia is an experiment that failed?!” My mother would shout that there were still some good things about that place, she would assert that it was her home, she would shout that she was lonely, and inevitably she’d start crying. The evening would often end with Dad reading in his room, and my mother watching Twin Peaks—as if living in a creepy small town while people murdered one another back home wasn’t enough; she had to watch a TV show about a creepy small town in which people murdered one another right there. I would often fall asleep to Twin Peaks’ haunting, jazzy soundtrack and the smell of her cigarette smoke.
• • •
I was enrolled at the local primary school, in a class of sixty kids, ranging from grades three to six. There were three teachers to handle the high volume of children (though one quit after my first week, because, according to the other children, she had won a Mercedes in a raffle, sold it, and was now rich). I was adopted by a group of girls who had known one another since birth—their parents went to the Aussie rocker Jimmy Barnes’s concerts together—and these girls all listened to Jimmy Barnes’s kids’ band, the Tin Lids, which I pretended to be into, too. In many ways, the setup was familiar: children sat on the carpeted floor, the classroom was colorful, and the work was easy—after my grueling time in a Belgrade school, I was well ahead in math and science. Kids raised their hands all the time, and even the kids who gave the wrong answers, or weren’t good at their work, who weren’t “talented” as Ms. Danica might have put it, were praised.
Natalija was enrolled in the kindergarten class attached to my school, and when my mother and I dropped her off one day, we spied through the window, to see how she was settling in. Natalija, with her palm-tree hairstyle, sat confused in a circle of small children and a sunburned, matronly teacher. All the kids except Natalija were familiar with the board game they were playing, which involved shouting names of farm animals. Every now and again, Natalija would echo something one of the other kids said—“Pig!” “Moo!”—not sure of the rules exactly. Nevertheless, the teacher lavished praise on her. “Very good, Natalija,” she said, “this chicken belongs to you!” And she grandly handed my sister a card with a chicken on it, which Natalija graciously accepted, pleased with herself. My mother chuckled as we walked away, saying something about a land of unconditional praise. From then on, every now and then, my mother would say to my dad “Very good, Lola, this chicken belongs to you!” when he did something seemingly simple, like taking out the trash, and my parents would laugh. They couldn’t help but be charmed by a system that rewarded everyone, but they’d also complain about the incompetence of their colleagues and blame it on the Aussie system, or they’d hear about just how many sports and cooking classes I did compared to math or science and they’d say, “Well, what do you expect in this country?”
• • •
Not long after the emergence of the fledgling pubic hair, I woke with a brownish substance on my underpants, confirming that I was destined to always be the weirdo. At nine, I was the first kid in my class who got my period.
Wearing the gigantic pad my mother provided me with, I felt like a clandestine cowboy. I stood around uncomfortably with the girls at lunchtime, in the heat of a Whyalla summer, feeling like an impostor both because of my contrived, Tin-Lid-loving personality and the hidden period. I looked over at the foursquare court where an attractive, blond, spiky-haired boy called William was playing with his friends. Jessica told us that William’s dad, who lived in Coober Pedy, six hours’ drive north of us, had found a black opal when he was renovating his bathroom. Coober Pedy, I knew by then, was a mining town, known for its underground homes—people escaping the heat by building burrow-like lodgings in the earth. In fact, there was even a Serbian Orthodox church underground, built by the growing community of ex-Yugos hoping to strike it rich in the mines.
As I was listening to the girls talk about the difference between regular opals and the more expensive black kind, the ball bounced from the foursquare court toward us. Never sporty, but always keen to make contact with a boy I liked, I picked the ball up and tried to toss it casually back to William, but instead, with some freakish new period-power that What’s Happening to Me? never mentioned, I threw it hard and whacked him in the chest. His blue eyes grew wide, and he resembled a deranged child James Dean. He screamed, and ran toward me, and for a shocked second, I found myself thinking: William is the type of child my mother would be interested in, whose drawings she would store in a special folder.
“What the fuck did you do that for?!” he screamed and, before I had a chance to process that he’d said the F word, which was against school rules, he pushed me in the chest, causing my new boobs to hurt. Next, he had knocked me to the concrete and was pi
nning me down by the throat, his face right up against mine. Kids started howling with excitement. Up until that moment, I had never been in a fight, but I had received some basic training. My mother sometimes encouraged Natalija and me to scream into a pillow, as loud as we could, to get out any anger we had inside. She also got us to play a verbal game that was meant to teach us to stand up to bullying or abuse. She would say “yes” and we would forcefully say “no” back at her, and the more insistent she got, the more insistent we got, until we were screaming it at the end: “NO!” Which is what I shouted now as I kicked William in the balls, and he jumped back reeling, cupping himself and rolling on the ground. I stood up, disheveled, red in the face, my pad slightly slipped off to the side, but still intact. I’d fended off a tough kid. For the rest of the day, I felt the adrenaline running through me. Yes, I was new, I was foreign, I had my period, but William wasn’t my first bully. I wasn’t a little girl feeding farm animals through a fence and crying anymore. It occurred to me for the first time that I might be a tough kid, too. William was punished, and for the rest of the day, the girls stood protectively around me, in the electrified way kids gather after a drama.
• • •
It was 1992 and my parents had somehow found a morning Serbian-language radio program. Now, like in Belgrade, every morning we were jolted from sleep by bad news. The six-republic-strong Yugoslavia I’d been born into was decreasing in size, and the republics that now referred to themselves as Yugoslavia were just Serbia and Montenegro. Slovenia and Macedonia had gained independence, Slovenia with its brief war, and Macedonia managing to leave after a referendum, without casualties. The war for independence in Croatia was still in motion, but recently, and as predicted by my parents and their friends back home, the republic on every news announcer’s lips was Bosnia, home to Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs, in roughly equal numbers. Bosnia had declared its independence, which triggered a war with the Bosnian Serbs. The capital, Sarajevo, the most diverse city in Yugoslavia, was soon occupied by rival militias, each with their own nationalist agenda.
Every night after the news, my parents yelled at each other in an intense way that might have been disturbing to onlookers. But strangely, the people least traumatized by their arguments were my parents themselves. They experienced the screaming matches as a sort of cleansing, intellectual debate. When she shouted at my dad, my mother didn’t feel like she was attacking him personally. She was yelling into the abyss, and exploring various sides of an argument. Thus, they challenged each other’s opinions, and explored truths that were hard to swallow.
When my mother was feeling ambivalent about her own Serbian identity, instead of stewing on it, she would scream at my father, accusing him of being anti-Serbian: through him, she was attacking the part of herself that was uncertain. My father would then jump to defend this anti-Serbian stance, which he would embrace for the sake of the argument. Often, when my dad was in a political discussion with someone else, he would appropriate one of my mother’s points that he had vehemently opposed in a previous argument, as if this was completely normal.
Though their fights were unpleasant for me and Natalija, causing us to shut ourselves in our room, they were my parents’ way of venting. They ranted and raved at each other, the equivalent of screaming into a pillow, bemoaning the miserable piece of land that we came from, which seemed doomed to war after war.
Based on my parents’ heated conversations, which carried through our tiny house so easily I didn’t even strain to eavesdrop, I reasoned that Yugoslavia would soon be destroyed—in my mind I saw scorched earth where the land had once been, gone and along with it our language, and the entire population. On the inside cover of my diary, in a careful cursive, I wrote a riddle in English:
If when I die someone finds this diary, it is written in XXXX so to read it you will have to find some-one who speaks XXXX. Please do not think that it is spooky to read a dead woman’s diary because I will not haunt you or anything like that. P.S. You will find out what XXXX means on the other side of April showers.
I imagined a girl from the future discovering my diary in an attic. If she solved my genius riddle, the future girl would realize that “April showers” was the poem on the back cover of the diary, and that I’d glued a page to the inside cover that, when peeled back, revealed the following note:
Dear Finder,
You are very clever. My name is Sofia (Sofija in my language) Stefanović. I am writing this in the year 1992. It is raining outside. This is spooky because you are reading this when I am dead! You probably have much more advanced technology.
Yours sincearly,
S Stefanović
PS XXXX means Yugoslavian
I pictured the future girl musing to herself, “Yu-go-slavia—what is this place?” She’d go to an ancient library, eventually discovering that Yugoslavia was a land that once existed—like Atlantis, or Lemuria—whose people had all died in a bloody war. The language and customs were destroyed, and there was nothing left. She would realize I was someone who got out, and then lived out the rest of her days in Australia, cherishing the old language in this very diary. The future girl would learn the language and stay up late in the evenings, with my diary before her, savoring each word she translated, wondering about this girl, this Sofija. Was she beautiful? the future girl would muse. Did she find love? she would ask. “Yes,” I whispered, imagining my ideal future. “And she became a famous film writer-actor-director.”
In reality, the future girl would probably feel swindled, having learned an entire lost language only to find that the secret musings contained in the diary were mainly complaints about other children at school and my worries that Natalija would be “spoiled” by my parents’ permissive upbringing. But I didn’t consider the boring contents of the diary then. Instead, with a mix of sadness for the future of Yugoslavia, and egotism about the prospect of becoming a beloved ghost, I carefully signed my name at the bottom of the note, and stuck the last page of the book down on top of it.
Meanwhile, back in the very country I was romanticizing, Serbs were taking control of parts of Bosnia, hoping they could section them off, in the way they had tried to take parts of Croatia. Croats were also after Bosnian land, wanting to augment their own nearly independent state. It was at this time that Bosnia’s leadership called for the international community to send in peacekeeping forces—assistance that did not come.
Sarajevo had become a war zone, with Bosnian Serb forces attacking it, and locals, including soldiers loyal to Muslim president Alija Izetbegović, criminal gangs, and laypeople defending it.
We made phone calls to Aunt Mila and my grandmothers, who were delayed voices on the telephone, their quick political summaries punctuated by the sound of cigarette smoke being inhaled and exhaled. The Milošević-controlled Serbian television programs downplayed the siege of Sarajevo, airing photographs of the city from peaceful times, intentionally hiding the actual havoc from the population, so that the bloodshed was not apparent to Milošević’s potential voters.
In Belgrade, where the population was predominantly Serbian, there was no fighting. Our family and friends were feeling the effects of war through poverty and sanctions and embargoes from the rest of the world, which disapproved of what it saw as Milošević-supported violence in Croatia and Bosnia. People in Serbia stopped driving cars because they couldn’t afford gas, homes went without heating, hospitals lacked medicine, and by 1993, about half of the people would be living at or below the poverty line. There was also the rise in corruption. War profiteers were becoming the most powerful people in Serbia, rich from looting in the war zones and especially from smuggling into the country goods that were scarce—cigarettes, alcohol, gas, coffee, and cosmetics—and selling them on the black market.
As I watched the atrocities play out on the TV, I was pretty sure we came from the most horrible place on earth. Yugoslavia was self-destructing—and it was represented on the news by explosions and guns. I could understand
the words of the people screaming in the background, about dead loved ones and destroyed homes, in Bosnian dialect, as English-language voice-overs talked about the deaths and ethnic cleansing. Here in Australia, where people had previously just filed us away in the “foreign” or “wog” categories in their minds, we were now from a place they’d heard about—a place they’d seen on TV. If we said we were from Yugoslavia, people thought we were from the war zones, and we’d have to say, “No, we are from Serbia, there’s no fighting there.” And then, people would reply, “Oh, you’re the bad guys.”
I wanted to respond, “No, my family opposes the war, and they are against Milošević, that’s the whole reason we left.” But, just like me only a few years earlier, people often had mental space only for “good guys” and “bad guys.” The intricacies of our messy homeland, with all the ethnic groups, and all the pockets of fighting, all the leaders, were hard work to understand, and even harder to explain. I became embarrassed to talk about where I was from.
• • •
For the first couple of months in Whyalla, I walked the same way to school, feeding my lunch to a dog that was owned by a man who slept on a deck chair and drank beer. I casually mentioned this ritual to my mother one day as I was scoffing schnitzels after school, and she banned me from walking down that street, shattering my dreams that we could adopt the dog—whose owner called him simply “Dog”—and that I would become the lead in my own kid-meets-dog buddy story.
The next day, my mother made me walk a different way to school, one that took me past a large wall on which I saw some graffiti I didn’t understand. When I got home, I asked my mother what “Piss on the Abos” meant. She wasn’t sure. “Piss on” was obvious, but “Abos” was a new word, and one we couldn’t find in the dictionary. Later, my dad explained that it was derogatory slang for “Aboriginal.” He said the graffiti was written by racists.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 13
