Even though I was further from my birthplace than ever before, forgetting little details about Belgrade, slipping in English terms into my conversations at home, I was the most Serbian person the Aussies in my life knew—the only Serbs other than me were those on television—and they didn’t look good.
In those days, my parents argued a lot, mainly about what was going on back home. Fundamentally, they shared a worldview: they both wanted the war to end, even if it meant that Yugoslavia would no longer exist. But every day, there were new atrocities, and they were getting mixed reports about what was actually going on. They weighed up the information, from the news, the radio, and our relatives and then argued as they tried to make sense of it. On the Australian news, the Serbs were, as usual, portrayed as the oppressors and murderers. And even though there were plenty of Serbian bad guys (some of them later being tried as war criminals), my parents (especially my mother) were pissed that the Australian news didn’t also show the other side: that Bosnian Serb civilians were being killed and driven out of villages, too. And there were plenty of Serbs who opposed the war—like us, and there was the opposition movement in Serbia—that never got any airtime. There were perpetrators and victims on all sides.
My mother started seeing media manipulation in all news reports, and my dad sometimes agreed, though other times he called her paranoid, or teased her about being a Serbian nationalist. “I never, ever called myself a Serb, I was always a Yugoslavian, until I came here and saw how they represent us in the news!” my mother shouted, suddenly patriotic. She hated that the news was so black-and-white. Slobodan Milošević was seen as the butcher behind it all, and the media aligned the Serbian people with his image. But how culpable was he? How much control did he really have over the Bosnian Serb army, which was led by local generals?
“Humans are all swine, once you scratch below the surface!” she yelled. “And we come from a fucked-up place where every fifty years there’s a war, and our swinishness comes out!” Her shouting was directed at my father, but really she was yelling at the army generals, at the soldiers on the ground, at the psychopathic paramilitary raping and murdering, at the Western media who were against us. She yelled at the world, demanding for it to see us all as swine and all as victims. Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, and Croats were losing their homes and their lives at one another’s hands, and, depressed, my parents watched each night, trying to make sense of it all. Every now and then, Dad would take his glasses off and put his head in his hands, saying he was tired of it all, and my mother would look at him, slightly surprised, not used to being alone with her rage.
• • •
I wanted out. I didn’t want to hear the horrible stories. I reasoned that whereas my panicky parents, with their accents, and their insistence Belgrade was their “real home” were inextricably welded to ex-Yugoslavia, and were therefore stuck with the diaspora community, I was not. I could become friends with kids who were not bound to me by ethnicity, but in other ways, ways that could be even more meaningful. I had the opportunity to reach further. I resolved to make friends with those who had a connection to my soul, people who liked to read, who were artsy, cynical, intelligent, and whose conversations were not exclusively about the war in Yugoslavia. One person who I was keen to connect to was Harry, a dark-haired kid from Alicia’s music class, who read even more than I did, and who I could talk to about such pressing issues as dating, books, and cigarettes.
I talked to Harry on the phone every day, and dreamed about dating him. Sometimes he cleaned his aquarium while we talked, and when there was a lull in the conversation, I heard splashing noises from his end, while I observed myself in the mirror checking to see what I look like when I laughed, or kissing my reflection passionately, hoping to prepare myself for “the real thing” one day. Luckily, if while I was talking to Harry my parents yelled at my sister to get the fuck out of the living room when the news was on, I could pretend that that was just my folks calling Natalija for dinner, since Harry didn’t understand Serbian. Harry and I gossiped about who had got with who, casually using words we’d just picked up, like “pashing” for kissing. I don’t think we ever talked about the war in Yugoslavia, but if we did, I would have brushed it off, as if it was no big deal. I’d pretend I wasn’t aware of the intricacies, even though they filled my home and ears in the hours I wasn’t at school. What was important was the microcosm of McKinnon High School, where certain kids were smoking weed, others were pashing and possibly more, and that is what we talked about, ceaselessly.
It was during one of these conversations that I casually said, “We talk on the phone so much! We should probably go out?” and then I laughed like it was a joke, though actually, I felt as if my heart had come out of my chest, through my mouth, and was now being squeezed through the little holes in the phone speaker, like meat going through a mincer. “Nah,” Harry said, “I think we should just be great friends.” I pretended like I didn’t care one way or the other—going out with him, not going out with him, no big deal, I chuckled, hoping it wouldn’t sound hollow, like the pretend laugh of someone who had finally gathered some guts and now felt like those same guts were being shoved back down her throat. But friends it would be.
• • •
One sunny afternoon, I was engaged in a new activity—applying eye liner in the school bathroom—when, over the PA system, it was announced that there would be auditions for Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The drama department welcomed all students to audition, so even as a lowly year-seven, I would have the opportunity to try out for the romantic lead: Miranda. Landing a part in the school play would be the perfect way to wrap up my first year of high school. I felt my courage rise, hope rearing its excited little head, my Disney princess dreams resurrected once again.
I imagined myself going into the audition, delivering my lines, somewhat hesitantly at first, but then allowing the passion of the scene to overcome me. When I finished the powerful piece, the drama teacher, Mr. Fisher, would stare at me for a few seconds inscrutably. Then he’d say, “You may go.” I’d turn, eyes downcast, and as I got to the door he’d call, “One more thing.” I’d spin back around. “You’ve got the part. Welcome aboard, Miranda.” And, like in the movies, I’d leap into the air, whooping with abandon, because suddenly, I’d be queen of the school.
With trembling hands I brought home the photocopied sheet of paper that contained the audition piece for Miranda, my confidence somewhat depleted once I’d actually read the thing. For one, I couldn’t understand the complicated Shakespearian language. As I stared at the nonsensical lines (“The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch / But that the sea, mounting to th’ welkin’s cheek / Dashes the fire out”) I zoned out. “What the shit is a welkin?” I practiced how I would say it on the phone to Harry, trying to recoup the cool I had lost at the horror-themed party at Alicia’s the week before. I’d zealously coated myself in zombie makeup and then had to sit on Alicia’s mom’s couch on top of a towel so I wouldn’t smear it with body paint. Looking like a creep, I watched thirteen-year-old couples slow-dancing stiffly to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts,” and worst of all, I had to witness Harry touch tongues with Toto during spin the bottle. The bottle didn’t land on me, so I’d sat there, my hideous makeup hiding the hope draining from my unkissed face. My childish excitement at dressing up had made me look like a fool next to Toto, who was ingeniously dressed as a vampire’s victim in a tight top and baggy jeans, with two tiny red marks on her neck. As she hung her arms loosely around Harry’s neck and leaned her head against his chest during a slow dance, I thought, She looks like an adult woman in a film.
After I’d spent hours memorizing the monologue, Dad came home and I recited it to him in a confused rush. Even though he seemed exhausted, his inner nerd was activated, and he insisted we look up each of the things we didn’t understand in a massive annotated Shakespeare book he had. He loved the English language, and Shakespearean English was a particularly juicy challenge. This was unlike my mo
ther, who saw our adopted language as the enemy, out to trick us with stupid spellings and nonsense phrases. (“Kevin Costner—why a K and a C, when they make the same sound!?” And: “Why would a woodwind instrument be called such a stupid thing? A recorder is something that records, damn it!”)
Dad and I examined this monologue, in which, I eventually understood, Miranda was imploring her father, Prospero, to stop the storm he’d conjured with his magical powers, because it was causing a shipwreck off the coast of their island home.
“If by your art, my dearest father,” I recited in a singsong voice.
“If,” Dad interrupted me, putting a hand to his heart, “by your art”—he looked heavenward, dramatically illustrating which words needed emphasis—“my dearest father . . . you have put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.”
In Belgrade, Dad had been the star of his college production of Romeo and Juliet—a reprieve from his engineering course. The photos from that play show him at nineteen, a Romeo with thick seventies sideburns and a delighted, almost maniacal smile, revealing his white teeth. I knew this gleeful expression of my dad’s; I’d seen it at various times. Like when he did a headstand in front of his friends, just to prove he could do it, or whenever he won a game of cards.
It was clear from the photos, and from the way he read the lines, that my dad still loved the arts. Knowing that literature wasn’t practical to study, he’d gone into engineering instead. Thinking about those delighted photos of Dad as Romeo made me wonder where we’d be if he’d followed his passion. Would we have managed to get a visa for Australia?
At thirty-nine, Dad’s face was leaner than in the photos from his acting days; his blue eyes seemed smaller behind his glasses. And as we practiced the monologue, I noted that Dad’s skin, normally pale, was looking especially dark, almost as if a yellow glow was emanating from inside him.
Dad looked at his watch and jumped up. It was, of course, time for SBS World News, which meant our Tempest session was over. He turned the TV on full blast, and like Pavlov’s dog responding to a treat, my mother ended the phone conversation she was having with Aunt Mila, leaving the cordless phone on the bed and rushing to the screen. I put the phone on its cradle to charge, hoping it would fill with enough juice so I could talk to Harry.
We all sat silently in front of the television as usual, our faces glowing blue by the light from the set. I sat closest to the phone, because if it rang, it would definitely be for me—no ex-Yugoslavian in their right mind would make a phone call during SBS World News, and there’d be hell to pay if my parents missed a single word of the broadcast because of the phone ringing.
Croatia was up first, which was unusual, as these days Bosnia was the most war-torn. What we didn’t know, as we watched the screen, was that this was the final battle in the Croatian war, “Operation Storm,” a major Croatian offensive against the Serbs. My mother said “See!?” to no one in particular as we watched local Serbs being driven out, and my dad snapped “Shut up!” so he could hear the report.
The camera followed a truck loaded with people, and it zoomed in on an old lady, her daughter, and small granddaughter. The old lady was crying, as the truck rolled past some soldiers who held their machine guns in the air in a celebratory gesture. In the shaky footage, the daughter comforted the old lady, who used a clenched fist to wipe away tears, clutching a cheap leather bag. My mother cried as we watched, as she often did. I looked at the old lady, with her short haircut, her old clothes, and the bag she held to her, and I imagined her buying that bag, at the market, in better times, when Serbs and Croats mingled with one another, bargaining. I considered if these people leaving their home would end up here, in our diaspora.
And then the report was over. The anchor started talking about Afghanistan and my mother turned the volume down, as if these people in Afghanistan, also being blown up and fleeing, were not important. “Each to their own tragedy,” I imagine she would have said if challenged. There’s a difference between seeing strangers suffering, and seeing people who are speaking your language.
The tension seemed to shift from the screen into the room, and I knew what came next: my parents arguing about what they’d just seen.
Their arguments were getting nastier; their patience with each other was shorter, and sometimes they looked at each other with a kind of bemused distaste, both of them apparently wondering how they had ended up here, and why they were stuck with each other. Now I was older, I could tell that their arguments were bad, that, with their name calling, they weren’t just lively debate partners, but people who found each other increasingly annoying.
They never mentioned a separation, though. Here, far from home, where they were foreign, it was a frightening concept, more frightening than staying together, snapping at each other like dogs in a cage.
“Let’s go play Nintendo,” I said, in a sudden burst of compassion for my sister, who, like me, had to listen to this every day. Her hair was in a short, boyish cut, which she had insisted on getting soon after I got my short cut. She didn’t know that I, in turn, had copied it from Winona Ryder—a person who looked good with a pixie cut thanks to her superior bone structure and shiny locks, unlike me, with my angular, pointy features and brushlike hair. The cut didn’t work on either me or my sister, and as she jumped to her feet, touchingly delighted that I agreed to play with her, she looked like a smaller, sillier version of me, a living testament to all the ways I’d failed. We left our parents to their fighting.
“Would you like to be Princess?” Natalija asked me respectfully once we were in her room, ready to play our video game. Nobody looked at me the way my sister did: she was the only person in the world who thought I was all-knowing, beautiful, and magical. In typical older sibling style, I appreciated her when I needed it, and I ignored her the rest of the time. Now I settled in front of the screen and picked up the controller, as Natalija did a butt-shaking dance, which I encouraged by wiggling my head and shoulders, flaring my nostrils comically, and singing along to the Mario Kart theme music in a way I did when my friends weren’t around and I could afford to be childish. Harry was probably talking to Toto right now. My sister picked up her controller, as I scrolled past Princess and chose Bowser, the scaliest monster of Mario Kart.
• • •
The morning of The Tempest audition, I got in the car to find Natalija murmuring to herself, preparing for a stupid joke.
“If by your fart my dearest father!” she said, misquoting my lines and guffawing. But I was not in a friendly mood. Today was possibly the most important day of my high school life, and of course a stupid eight-year-old wouldn’t have the sophistication to appreciate that.
To ignore her, I looked out the window. In the front seats were both of my parents—we had a whole-family doctor’s appointment before school and work. The doctor thought Dad might have hepatitis so the rest of us needed to be vaccinated. Even though it felt like a little-kid thing to do, I’d made a card for my dad, trying to make light of something troubling. I drew a cartoon of him as a superhero, with his yellow skin, his bushy beard, and a red cape. A banner declared that he was “Hepatitis Lolitis.” He had laughed and put it on the table next to his bed, beside a neat stack of books.
In the clinic he was taken away for a scan, and our GP, Dr. Kearney, asked my mother, sister, and me to bare the top of a butt cheek for a painful injection. As we were walking out to the parking lot after the appointment, all of a sudden the world went slippery and black.
The next thing I knew, Dr. Kearney was looming over me, commanding, “Hold them up!” I was flat on my back, splayed out in all my ridiculousness. I looked up at my mother’s plump face with her concerned eyes and high, arched eyebrows. I saw my dad’s yellowish face with his light brown beard and his big glasses, his blue eyes squinting at me. Each of them was grasping one of my shiny black school shoes. They looked funny from this angle, my parents, the people who saw me as a baby even now, despite my awkward adolescence. I was reminded of
my legs, which I hadn’t started shaving yet, covered in blond fluff, the cellulite distributed around each thigh, displayed for all to see. My pink cotton underpants, which my mother got from Target, were undoubtedly revealing some pubic hair out the side. I tried to sit up, but Dr. Kearney wouldn’t let me. “You’re going to stay down there for a few minutes. You fainted from the injection.” Though I’d always been interested in fainting, like a waif in a book or film, the reality was less dignified than I’d imagined: I was more upside-down cockroach than pallid heroine.
My sister looked at me, impressed, while people peered through the windows of the waiting room. What were the chances, I wondered, that some kids from my school were being carpooled down this very street, and that they’d look out and see me and then say to each other: “Did you see that girl Sofija lying on the ground on Jasper Road with her legs in the air? What a loser.” I remembered the attractive girls on the netball courts, with their cute boyish bodies like Winona Ryder, and their lean, muscular legs. I freed my terrible legs from my parents’ grasp and sat up.
• • •
The school day passed in an awkward blur. I was distracted by the humiliation I’d had to endure in the morning, and nervous about the one I might have to endure soon, as the Shakespeare audition neared. At lunchtime, I found myself in front of bald Mr. Fisher, who looked at me unmoved as I shakily recited the lines I’d so carefully prepared with my dad. I tried to imagine Mr. Fisher not as a portly drama teacher, in a hall smelling of teenaged sweat, but as a powerful wizard on a desert island, whipping the weather up into a frenzy. “If by your art,” I said, closing my eyes, putting my hand up to my heart, “my dearest father, you have put the wild waters in this roar, allay them . . .”
At the end of the day, looking at the long list of names on the cork-board outside the staff room, I saw that the lead role of Miranda had gone to Sally Martins in year ten. She was an older girl, someone who was much more capable of playing a romantic lead than I was. I knew nothing about romance, except that I wanted to be in one.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 16
