“Well hello,” I said, approaching my dad’s work colleagues; a thirteen-year-old dressed like a grownup with pants that zipped in the back, my face puffy as Rocky Balboa’s after a fight. “You must be Dad’s friends from work, I’ve heard so much about you,” I lied. They said polite things like, “we’re sorry for your loss,” to which I didn’t know how to respond, so I kept repeating, “yes, yes,” and nodding in a businesslike way.
Playing host was foreign to me, but the setting of the funeral wasn’t. I remembered how in Belgrade I used to go with my grandmothers and visit the graves of family members—arrange flowers, pull up weeds, and eat ice cream. The cemeteries weren’t empty, like this one, but full of old ladies and children spending their Sundays there, hearing stories of a grandpa Vladimir or a great aunt Anica. Once all these weeping people left his graveside in Melbourne, it occurred to me that my dad would now be alone. Australian cemeteries weren’t busy in the way those in Belgrade were.
On the day Dad was buried, I didn’t notice the lovely Italian grave opposite his, with a statue of an angel. She sits under a domed stained glass roof, where some of the panels have broken, letting the rain in, leaving stains under her eye that look like tears.
I imagine the angel watching over Dad’s grave, which is made of gray marble with his name engraved on the stone, written in Cyrillic and then in the Latin alphabet below, his name appears in white marble letters, “SLOBODAN LOLA STEFANOVIČ.” The stonemason got the accent wrong—so my mother used a permanent marker to make the Č into a Ć. Dad would have found it funny that they spelled his name wrong, she said—he appreciated language games and cultural mishaps and would have found this a good one: until the very last, he’d been misinterpreted by the Aussies.
• • •
Back at our place, while my mother and the funeral-goers gathered in the living room, I logged onto our family computer. It was 1996, and computers were only just starting to be used for social communication. I knew, for example, that one of our Yugo family friends had gotten divorced from his wife because he met an American woman in a romantic internet “chat room,” and now, after doing some searching online, I discovered a chat room for people in mourning.
I clicked to join, and my name came up immediately as “Stefanovic.”
“Hi Stef,” someone typed.
“Welcome, Stef,” someone else wrote.
“Hi everyone” I typed back speedily, proud of my sixty words per minute touch-typing abilities (Dad had bought us a program and I practiced to impress him).
I felt that my friends, like the people at the funeral going through the motions, couldn’t understand what I was feeling. I couldn’t talk to them about death, about what my family had gone through over the last year and a half. I couldn’t talk to them about the guilt I felt for abandoning my dad in the end, for not wanting to talk to him anymore, for feeling alienated from him as he took on his feeble-voiced, hallucinating, weak form. I couldn’t talk about the dreams I had about him all the time, where he showed up and told us that his illness had been fake, that we’d been nursing a doppelgänger, that in fact he was alive and well, that he’d been in jail for political activities instead, and now he was back. I couldn’t discuss with them the feeling I had whenever I woke up and it hit me that he was dead. In the chat room, I thought that these were “my people,” the ones I could actually talk to. Strangers were a good audience. I could put my thoughts and emotions out there, on the computer screen, and still be alone and protected.
In the chat room, there was a back-and-forth going on about how to handle financial considerations after the death of a loved one. I knew that Dad’s company, BHP, had given us a “death benefit,” a lump sum of money we used to pay off part of our mortgage, and that my sister and I were going to receive a $250 fortnightly pension for as long as we were students. Here is my way in, I thought, biting into some burek that someone had brought for the post-funeral gathering, making sure I kept it far from Dad’s precious keyboard. I’ll explain our finances and join in the conversation.
“I’m thirteen, and my dad died four days ago,” I typed, and pressed Send. Boom—there it was on the screen, and already, someone was replying. I was thrilled by the novelty of this immediate conversation with real-life humans, somewhere out there.
“Sorry, Stef”
“Sorry to hear”
Having introduced myself, I hurried to add the part about our arrangement with BHP, but instead of calling it a “death benefit” as I had meant to, my brain sent the wrong message to my speedy hands and I typed “death penalty” instead, hitting Send before I realized that I was announcing to a room of internet strangers: “my dad got the death penalty.”
“Oh no. I’m so sorry,” someone typed.
“Stef, that’s terrible,” someone else added.
I stared at the stupid words I couldn’t delete. Before I could witness any more reactions to my idiocy, I reached across and pressed the power button, immediately shutting the whole thing down. I hit my forehead on the desk and stayed there. I imagined people in the chat room wondering what had happened to that kid whose father was killed in the electric chair. I pictured my newly buried father turning in his grave for the slander I was spreading (and probably even more for the improper way I’d shut his computer down).
“Hope she’s okay!” I imagined the people in the chat room saying.
“He must have done something pretty bad to get the death penalty.”
“I hope the kid doesn’t turn to a life of crime.”
“These things run in families.”
I got myself up from the desk and wandered into the living room, which contained what looked like the entire ex-Yugoslavian diaspora of Melbourne. And my mother, who had always complained about the diaspora, was now slumped among them as they held her. I went into my room and shut the door.
8
A Honeymoon for Mourners
Three months after Dad’s death, we booked a trip to the Indonesian island of Bali—a popular destination for Aussie tourists. We would be vacationing as a newly three-person family unit, joined by my mother’s friend Davorka and her son, Ivan, who had become Natalija’s closest friend. Though I knew this trip was meant to cheer us up, I couldn’t help but think about the money it was costing. My mother was notoriously bad with finances (for example, she only opened mail that had “urgent” printed on it and threw everything else out), and I worried the vacation would send us into a downward spiral and I would be left to take over Dad’s role as the responsible one if my mother bankrupted us.
Before we left, I listened to the Pearl Jam song “Alive” on repeat, and when Eddie Vedder sang, “While you were sitting home alone at age thirteen, your real daddy was dying . . .” I understood it as if he was speaking to me directly. It wasn’t just Pearl Jam, though. I decided that all artistic expression about pain was specifically meant for me. I was on the same wavelength as Edgar Allan Poe when he mourned the tubercular Annabel Lee, and with Nina Simone when she sang “Why? (The King of Love is dead)” after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I took Dad’s old gray Levi’s sweatshirt and wore it often, letting it hang baggy over my hands, as if I’d lost them in a war. I listened to his favorite Billie Holiday CD, trying to hear what Dad might have heard. I liked “Gloomy Sunday” because it suited my mood of despair: “Sunday is gloomy, with shadows I spend it all.”
While I wanted to put up a wall between me and anyone who asked how I was feeling, I was happy to listen to music, watch films, read, and blubber my heart out, as long as I was alone, vulnerable to nothing but art, writing emotional, unself-aware poems inspired by Poe and Pablo Neruda. One of my poems was entitled “Les Nuages”—meaning “clouds” in French; another one contained the lines “I brush away all expression / The mask falls and I gasp / You look into my self and soul.” The journal was secreted away to be reread by my tearful eyes only.
Natalija was eight years old, and she mourned in her own way. Mostly she watche
d Jurassic Park over and over, lost in the fantasy of dinosaurs that could crush humans to death, of kids who overcame the odds. She didn’t want to talk about Dad.
As for my mother, she told me many years later that she kept a diary during this time, which she later burned because its contents were so dark. I pictured her in front of our fireplace, prodding her diary with a poker, bathed in a red glow, as her scribblings and sketches sizzled, turning into ghosts floating up the chimney to join Dad.
• • •
It was the wet season in Bali when we arrived, which meant there were fewer tourists, and vendors were especially attentive to us, running up with suitcases full of knockoff designer watches or perfumes, as I hissed to my mother, “Just don’t buy anything.”
On our first day, we went to an outdoor market, and Davorka, who had been to Bali before, told us we were supposed to bargain hard. She moved around eyeing objects she liked, but pretending she was underwhelmed by them. Her face—tanned, usually smiling, with an endearing gap between her teeth—now held a tight-lipped expression. Davorka would pick up a scarf, look at it halfheartedly, throw it over her ample shoulders, say “it doesn’t even fit,” and offer half of what the vendor asked. They would go back and forth until Davorka ended up paying about 13,000 rupiah for an item that had been marked 20,000, and we’d walk off triumphant, marveling at her mastery in saving money.
My mother would do it her own, far less effective way. First, she would elaborately fall in love with something. She’d call us all over, telling us in Serbian how much she loved it, though it was clear what she was saying whether you understood the words or not, because she would gesticulate wildly and hug the desired object to her bosom. Davorka would try and save the situation by saying, “You could get a better one in Australia.” My mother, not catching on, would say, “Nonsense! In Melbourne, I would pay ten times what this man is asking!” My mother would turn to the vendor, throwing Davorka an “I know what I’m doing” look: “You say thirty thousand, well, I will offer you twenty-nine thousand!” The vendor would try for twenty-nine-and-a-half, and she would agree, delighted.
Many of the local men pointed to my oversized T-shirt with the Pulp Fiction film poster printed on the front: Uma Thurman lying on a bed, seductively smoking a cigarette. The men would give me a sleazy thumbs-up or wink, which made me feel dumb for wearing a shirt that seemed to advertise sex rather than announce that I was an art house connoisseur.
Every now and then, there was a huge downpour, when we would get soaked and then stay soggy, despite the heat, because of the humidity. Trying to look happy for the camera, but pale and sweaty, we posed for photos under big, beautiful flowers bowing toward us from the rain-heavy treetops.
When we got back to the hotel that first day, our mother said she wanted to go back to the market for something, and left Natalija and me in the room. After half an hour, I felt a tinge of anxiety. I remembered something she’d said recently: “You’re big, I’m not worried about you. When Natalija is your age, I could die as well.” I was too stunned to respond in the moment, but afterward, in the darkness of my bedroom, I pretended to answer: “What a bitch you are. I am thirteen years old, and I’ve just lost my father. Why would you threaten that in just five years, you’ll give up and die, too?” I simultaneously hated her for saying what she’d said and felt desperately afraid, because I needed her. And what was so bad about being alive? Didn’t she have Natalija and me? When someone says something hurtful, in Serbian we say, “You’ve bitten me on the heart,” and this is what I thought as I looked out the hotel window and it started pouring.
The sunlight disappeared with the rain, and it was suddenly, aggressively, night. Across from our hotel were some stores, and their lights glowed orange through the rain. I watched a woman drape plastic over some sundresses that were hanging on a rack out in front, while her toddler watched, scratching his butt. People tried to avoid the rain by going into stores or standing under trees, and I wondered where my mother was, and if she’d taken an umbrella. Probably not, I decided. As I remembered her heart-biting comment, I didn’t consider how horrible she must have felt for her to say it in the first place. She was counting down the years because she didn’t want to be in the world—not even in her beloved Belgrade.
The fact that my mother hadn’t taken us back there after Dad’s death was a surprise to everyone. She’d decided to stay, to spare us further disruption in our lives, and she must have felt like she was sacrificing herself for our sakes.
As the rain continued, my heart sped up, and I thought, What if she’s dead too? The sidewalk was slick. I could hear vendors yelling to each other in a language I didn’t understand, and the slap of sandals on concrete, though it was properly dark now and it was hard to make out the individual people.
Natalija joined me at the window, and finally my fears of orphan-hood abated as we spotted our mother walking through the rain, short, stout, and wet. We watched her stop in front of the store across from the hotel, peer at the dresses under the plastic, and then suddenly shift her attention to a parked motorcycle, which, we only now noticed, had a small light brown monkey chained to it. My mother leaned toward the monkey, putting her hand out, and it jumped at her, bearing its teeth, straining its chain, batting at her with its claws. She jumped back, we gasped, and as our mother ran across the street toward our hotel I said to my sister, “If that thing had bitten her, she could have got rabies.” My resentment toward my mother had returned now that I knew she was safe. I would not let her know I’d been scared.
Moments later she appeared in the room, brushing water off herself, bringing noise into the quiet space, excited to reveal her purchase: an antique Balinese puppet, a beautiful woman with a wooden heart-shaped face and cat-eyes, her hair painted a dark brown, her mouth small and red. There were little wooden sticks attached to her hands. “I had to go back for her. Isn’t she beautiful?” my mother asked, and even though I thought she was, I muttered instead: “Couldn’t you have just got her tomorrow instead of running out there like a crazy person?”
• • •
Our final night in Bali was my fourteenth birthday, and my mother treated us all to dinner in our hotel. I sat quietly during the dinner, pretending to be bored by the adults’ conversation, enjoying the delicious seafood noodles I’d ordered and glancing at myself every now and then in the large Balinese-style mirror beside me (to check my new wire-rimmed glasses and super-short nineties bangs that weren’t working in the humidity, and to assess the shininess of my face). The waiters came out singing “Happy Birthday,” and plonked a chocolate cake in front of me. Natalija, Ivan, and I gobbled it up, and I was impressed by the check, which amounted to almost nothing, considering all the things we’d eaten.
We’d made it through international travel without Dad waiting for us at the end, holding his arms open to catch us. We were surviving. But on the inside I felt like I was missing a part. The hopeful, excited part of me, the part that could feel awed by a captured pigeon in my grandpa’s hands, or the possibility of a role in a play, was gone.
• • •
When we got back to Melbourne, my mother declared that we would not be a house of mourning. We would not draw the curtains and cry, and we would not be pitied by others. This was when she burned her diary.
“The only way to fill the emptiness that your dad left in this house,” our mother said, “is to invite lots of people over.”
And so the parties started.
Our house soon became a hub for all of our friends and acquaintances. Stoner boys from my school who lived in the neighborhood were welcomed in for snacks. I became more popular because my mother was “super chill” about teenaged drinking and sleepovers. My sister’s little school friends ran around spreading head lice and making a mess they weren’t expected to clean up. And in her “coming out” of mourning, my mother dragged the ex-Yugoslavian diaspora out with her, imposing her renewed sense of adventure on our little ethnic group by staging consta
nt get-togethers.
Her few artsy friends were happy to comply, but my mother wanted numbers, so she coerced those who were more hesitant. The ones she’d previously deemed conservative, and about whom she’d complained to my dad, were pushed out of their comfort zones and forced to join the madness, too. The door was always unlocked, and there was no Dad reading in his bedroom and complaining about mess. There were poetry recitals, game nights, and art projects, but most often, people would simply be there, popping in and out of our home, just to see what was going on, their continuous presence ensuring that the house was always full of voices, drowning out the haunting silence of Dad’s absence.
One evening, I saw a man in drag lingering outside our place, an uncommon sight in our sleepy suburb. Eventually I recognized the tall, tanned form as Peter, the Montenegrin doctor whose office space my mother used to see clients these days. It turned out my mother was having a “Mr. Universe” party in which participants were encouraged to dress up and bring props. I entered the house via the backyard, where there was a break in the proceedings. The audience was seated on folding chairs in front of a makeshift stage, and I spotted Biljana, an old family friend who had gone to university with my dad. She looked around, half baffled, half delighted, while my sister and the other kids ran around the backyard with water pistols.
Out of nowhere, a man in a fitted police uniform appeared, and Peter, in a short skirt, followed behind him, chuckling. Peter had been waiting for this surprise guest out front. An awed hush fell over the crowd and the children stopped running to stare. The man wore snug pleather pants, and tapped his hand with a baton.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 19
