Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  We’d never learned about Indigenous history at school. I had never met an Aboriginal person. Later I learned that many Aboriginal people had been murdered or displaced during colonization and beyond. The land had been declared “terra nullius,” “nobody’s land,” by the British who chose not to recognize the traditional owners who had inhabited the land for over fifty thousand years before European settlement.

  Seeing the graffiti was the first time I understood that my homeland wasn’t the only place with blood on its hands. Australia, which had seemed to me so clean and fresh, like the chewing gum ad I adored, also had filth beneath its surface. I would later learn about the “Stolen Generations” of Aboriginal children who were forcefully removed from their mothers and placed with white families, cleaved from their culture and history. I would learn as a teenager that the government had refused to issue an apology to the Stolen Generations, and that to this day, Aboriginal people and their cultures suffer from the wrongs done to them in the past, into the present.

  These early experiences began shaping the beliefs I came to later on, that wars and oppression don’t end when the acts of violence stop; so that on a random day in Whyalla, someone will write a racist remark on a wall in giant letters, in an act of hatred that stretches back for generations, continuing the cycle of violence and degradation. From then on, whenever I passed the graffitied wall, I walked as fast as I could lest an Aboriginal person drive by and see me next to it and associate my white schoolgirl form with the hateful words.

  • • •

  Three months ahead of schedule, my dad finished his work at the factory. We had been there for nine months, and would be leaving Whyalla the day after my school’s end-of-year talent show, also known as my last hurrah. I declined to participate in the synchronized dance the other girls were planning, opting instead for a solo performance. If I was going to be leaving this place forever, I might as well go out with a bang.

  My version of “a bang” was to lip-sync the popular standard “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” as sung by Mama Cass Elliot. I was obsessed with Elliot—who was rumored to have been unhappy in love, and tragically died young from an obesity-related heart attack. Up there onstage by myself, I was wearing an oxblood velour tracksuit from Belgrade, with diamantés sparkling on the front—an iconic image to go with the iconic lyrics, I thought. I wished parents had been invited to the show so that I could have an even bigger audience, but I had to settle for just the students and teachers.

  I fake-crooned the romantic lyrics, shifting from one foot to the other, behind the mic, which was too high and obscured most of my face. My performance was full of emotion, tears in my eyes from nerves and the thrill of being onstage at the culmination of my time in this strange new place, but to everyone not sitting in the front row, it appeared as if I was just standing there while a slow song played over the stereo.

  “Night breezes seem to whisper ‘I love you,’ ” Mama Cass sang, and my voice, breaking out of lip-sync mode, accidentally boomed out the “I love you.” The kids didn’t throw their hands in the air, or link arms. They didn’t sing along, like I’d dreamed, which would have prompted me to take the mic off the stand and walk to the edge of the stage, bending down, still lip-syncing, holding my hand out for people to touch, some of them shouting over the music “Don’t leave!”

  About fifteen seconds into my performance, one of the teachers banged a gong and people cheered. I didn’t know that the gong was meant to send bad performers offstage, so I just kept standing there mouthing the words until someone shouted, “Get off!”

  As the music kept playing, I stepped away from the mic, leaving the stage in my blood-red tracksuit, Mama Cass’s voice singing on.

  I couldn’t bring myself to look at any of the other kids for the rest of the talent show, as they cheered for the dancing girls, and the acts continued uninterrupted by any soundings of the gong. This was certainly not a “this chicken belongs to you” scenario in which I was praised just for being there. The tables had turned, and I felt that my subtle performance was ignored in favor of prepubescent girls in bikini tops. No one seemed to care about my feelings, and I was reminded that school environments are cruel, no matter if you’re sitting on the floor or at a little desk. “I cannot wait to leave this provincial shithole,” I said to myself in Serbian, channeling my mother.

  • • •

  The next day, after I’d told my parents about my humiliation and they acted appropriately outraged (calling everyone at the school “fools” for missing the artistry of my piece), my family started the twelve-hour drive to Melbourne with a euphoric rendition of our made-up song “Why, why, why, WHY-ALLA! ” to the tune of “Delilah.” As we drove through the wine-growing regions of South Australia, heading toward more temperate Victoria, we talked about all the things we wouldn’t miss about Whyalla: “The Pizza Hut!” my mother said, recalling one of the town’s only attractions. “The steel factory!” Dad said. “The dickheads at school!” I said, and didn’t get reprimanded, because my parents really didn’t care if I swore or not. We watched the countryside zip past us, taking us farther from Whyalla.

  Eventually we started reflecting on our nomadic life, and on the funny things that had happened over the years. Dad recalled an exchange with one of his BHP colleagues in Melbourne who, seeing a framed reproduction of the Mona Lisa in his office, asked if Dad had painted the woman himself. I recounted a memory from Belgrade, when we’d bought a tiny blown-glass elephant family on a snowy night as we walked home. “What happened to those elephants?” my mother asked, and we tried to remember which relative was keeping them for us. Suddenly, out of character, Natalija shouted, “Shut up! Stop talking about all these memories!” and she started to cry. “All of you always remember things, and the only thing I remember from before is a green door! That’s all, just a green door! I don’t remember anything else about our life!”

  My mother said this was a great memory—the green door was the entrance to our building on the Boulevard of Revolution, our home in Belgrade. Dad comforted her by saying she was only a baby when these memories happened, assuring Natalija that there would be plenty of new things to remember in the future. I realized then that my sister had enjoyed being in Whyalla, and that she didn’t like being in a car, off to some place new again.

  My mother looked thoughtfully out the window, considering how this outburst tied in with Natalija’s fantasy world, where we had a house on wheels, where we didn’t have to keep saying goodbye. We stopped talking about the things that had passed, and I kept to myself my suspicion that four-yer-old Natalija didn’t really remember the green door in Belgrade. I suspected that her memory of it came not from the real thing, but from the photos we looked at, my parents and I touching the images like precious objects, while little Natalija just sat there staring at the photos, trying to remember, struggling to be part of our story.

  • • •

  Instead of returning to the suburbs of Melbourne, we found ourselves in the beautiful, bustling neighborhood of Carlton, right near the center of town. Dad’s work had provided us with a furnished apartment while we sorted out our living situation, and it was the most luxurious place I’d ever stayed. There were soft towels and thick carpets, and whenever we walked in or out of the building’s sliding doors, I looked around, hoping someone would be watching us enviously.

  On our first evening, we went for a walk, and saw that Melbourne had a side we’d never appreciated from the suburbs. There were people on the streets, packed restaurants, stores open past 5:00 p.m., trams, students, dogs. We walked down Lygon Street, Melbourne’s Little Italy, where loud Italian men cajoled passersby to come try the spaghetti, and we did. It was the best spaghetti marinara my mother had ever had, she said, while my dad, sister, and I devoured our fettuccine carbonaras. We stopped at a music store after dinner, and as I savored a maple-walnut ice cream from the New Zealand ice cream parlor, Dad said I could have any CD I wanted. I chose Madonna’s Immaculate Col
lection.

  Later that night, in my own room that I didn’t share with Natalija for once, I got into my fancy bed, which, instead of the mismatched bedding and old blankets I was used to, had a top sheet that smelled floral, tucked so tightly that I squeezed myself into it like a letter in an envelope. I stayed up looking at the CD itself, a shiny silver disc with light blue polka dots. We didn’t have a hi-fi yet, so I treated the disc like a precious object, and the lyrics to the songs were printed in a booklet which I examined closely from my cozy spot, excited about the adult content of the songs (“Like a Virgin”!). I fell asleep imagining: What if this was our life now? What if I was now a fancy, romantic girl, like Estella in Great Expectations, or Milady in The Three Musketeers, or Cathy in Wuthering Heights? With my head on the softest pillow on earth, I lay in the center of the bed, stretching my arms and legs out to occupy the entire twin mattress with my now ten-year-old form. I didn’t dwell on Yugoslavia or my family, I didn’t spare a thought for Whyalla, and I didn’t think about starting school again in a few weeks, after summer vacation was over. I was just a girl, in a plush bed, with not a care in the world.

  • • •

  Within two weeks, we found an apartment to rent, in the same suburban area where we’d lived before. It wasn’t a house, I noted, but we were on the lookout for one to buy, and I would sit between my parents on the couch excited, as they flipped through real estate listings.

  My mother got a job as a psychologist at Health and Human Services, where she counseled abused children under the age of five. Grandma Xenia dipped into her savings once again and came to stay with us, while I went back to Bentleigh West. My old friends Alicia and Cara were ready to welcome me with open arms, but then, observing the new me, they immediately told me I needed to go on a diet, as I was now not only a head taller than them but also, in their opinion, “chubby.” To demonstrate their point, the three of us squatted and I was dismayed to see that my thighs were indeed the thickest, curving out from my knees. They referred me to Girlfriend magazine, which featured thin young women, and when I told them about my period, my weight was forgotten, and we all pored over the articles discussing periods, my friends in awe of my early admittance into adulthood.

  Natalija started at the school, too: she was now five, the same age as I had been when we first came to Australia. But instead of being scared like me, she was audacious, unafraid to approach us in the big-kid part of the playground. When my friends demanded we stop speaking Serbian to each other—“You are in Australia! You have to speak English!” Cara said—I was the one who obeyed, shushing my sister unless she spoke to me in English.

  My bold little sister even led a raid of the candy jar in her classroom, stealing the candy that was meant as a treat for good behavior. As usual, I was afraid that Natalija would fall prey to something terrible; in this case, I feared she was headed toward a life of crime. I couldn’t abide my sister becoming a thief, so I went to the staff room during lunchtime and gave her up. That is how desperate I was to toe the line, terrified that people would think badly of me or my family, forever marked by that incident with my mother—the stolen lollipop and the smack across the face, the fear that someone would say, “Look at that ethnic, stealing from us.” So, due to me being a snitch, Natalija was given her first reprimand, and forced to return the Jelly Babies she had secreted in her little schoolbag.

  • • •

  As the troubles back home intensified, more people were leaving Yugoslavia and coming to Melbourne, and our diaspora community was growing by the day. Those from Serbia came on professional visas if they could; those from warring Croatia and Bosnia came as refugees. We found ourselves at Yugo parties every weekend, explaining to people from Belgrade, Zagreb, or Mostar that Vegemite was pretty delicious once you got used to it. Among the new arrivals were Tamara and Neboysha, the artists my parents had met at the Belgrade protests, in the bathroom of the Hotel Majestic. My mother became a huge admirer of Neboysha’s work, which included alchemical symbols, and figures with third eyes and many heads. Finally, she felt like some of “her” people were coming to Australia.

  Soon, my dad’s best friend, Darko, and his family would come over, too. Darko and Dad had been friends since they were both five-year-olds new to Belgrade, bonding because the Belgrade kids made fun of both Darko’s Bosnian accent and my dad’s rural one from the mining town of Bor, where he was born. I liked this story—that my dad had been a new kid once just like I always was—and I wondered if I would make a friend for life in the way he had.

  One day, some refugees from Bosnia came to our place. The parents went to the living room with my mother, while Dad tactfully went to work at his computer in another room, indicating that this was more of a professional visit than a personal one. My mother told me in advance that the daughter of this family had a tic from the war, which meant that she kept blinking, but that I was not to comment on this. The girl with the tic and I sat in my room, drawing on large pieces of paper, decorating our creations with sparkly stickers that had been bought for the occasion, while our parents talked in the next room. We heard the girl’s mom crying, but neither of us commented. The girl blinked every few seconds, hard, her whole face grimacing, and I pretended not to notice, though I was certain I was blinking more frequently too, her blinking affecting me the way a yawn is contagious. After they left, I asked my mother why people have tics, and she said that they can come from trauma, and reminded us how lucky we were that we never had to listen to bombs falling near our beds at night. The next time there was a news report on Sarajevo, I looked at the bombed-out buildings and reminded myself that there might have been children sleeping inside.

  • • •

  Our three-room apartment was about to accommodate not only our family and visiting Grandma Xenia but also Dad’s friend Darko and his wife and son, who would stay with us while they looked for a place. Despite the sudden crowd, my parents kept an important promise they had made to me, now that we were in Melbourne again. Finally we were here to stay, which meant we were getting a dog.

  Dante was a miniature dachshund, like the dog on the golden charm my mother wore, and he was nearly as small as a trinket. In the car, Grandma Xenia held him in the palm of her hand all the way home from the breeder, while my sister and I cooed at him. When we got home the two of us fed him slices of cheese, kissed him, and passed him to each other until he vomited.

  While Darko and his family were staying with us, the news reported a breaking story from Mostar, in Bosnia, where Darko was born. Most means “bridge” in our language, and Mostar was named after the defenders of the beautiful stone bridge, who stood guarding it in medieval times. According to the news, it had been shelled around sixty times by the Croatian army, which was fighting the Bosnian Muslim army for control of the city. On our television screen, the old bridge collapsed, as the adults all held their hands up to their mouths in shock.

  • • •

  When summer vacation was over, and our houseguests finally moved out of our place, Darko’s son, Vuki, started at my school. At the assembly at the end of the week, a teacher made Vuki stand up in front of the whole school so he could introduce him. “Vuki is a child from Bosnia,” he solemnly told the students. “You may have seen the footage on television: Bosnia is a war zone. Please make Vuki feel welcome and safe in his new environment.” I was annoyed, not only because I’d never received such special treatment, but also because Vuki wasn’t from Bosnia, he was from Belgrade, Serbia. His father was born in Bosnia, but that wasn’t the same thing. Lucky Vuki doesn’t speak English yet, I thought, as he stood in front of the school, slightly baffled as everyone clapped.

  After this awkward introduction to Vuki, my fifth grade class stood up to perform a song for the entire school, Michael Jackson’s recent hit, “Heal the World.” Even though I knew that Vuki wasn’t from Bosnia, and I found him slightly annoying and childish, I found myself looking in his direction as we sang. He was sitting on the floor with his ne
w third grade classmates, wearing jeans instead of the prescribed school uniform, looking around confused as I’d done when I first came here. I imagined he was scared, just as I had been. Other kids whispered to one another, and he sat among them, friendless. I thought of the little girl with the tic, Vuki, and me, and I found myself sobbing out “Heal the World” with genuine emotion.

  • • •

  When I was twelve, just before I entered high school, my mother, Grandma Xenia, and I started attending house auctions. My parents had sold our Belgrade apartment for a small sum, and with their wages, now we had enough money to get a mortgage and buy a house of our own. Dad didn’t go with us to the auctions because, according to him, my mother and grandmother picked places that were out of our budget, and we would only be disappointed. So we went along and just watched, imagining one day bidding. On a sunny spring day, we attended an auction in the backyard of a lovely suburban 1950s brick house. We leaned against the blond brick and breathed in the jasmine that was creeping down the side of the house. The auctioneer stood by an avocado tree, and my mother held Dante’s leash as he let out a puppyish yap every now and then. Grandma Xenia was holding a few bags from Bentleigh market, where she snagged secondhand bargains every week.

  The bidding began, then not long after, it stopped. The desired price had not been reached, and therefore, the house was still on the market. “Let’s get it!” my mother yelped.

  We drove home, where Natalija and Dad were playing their favorite game, “Mom and baby.” Six-year-old Natalija pretended to be an overanxious, demanding mother, and Dad pretended to be an idiotic baby. Natalija would order him with zeal to do something, he’d get it terribly wrong, and she would laugh like crazy. When we arrived, Natalija was squashed on the couch under a blanket, Dad sitting on top of her, pretending he had no idea where his “mama” was. “I’m here, you stupid baby, I’m here!” she squealed from under the blanket, laughing so hard I worried she would pee herself.