“We’ve had some complaints that this party is getting out of hand,” he said, a hand on his hip. “I need to speak to the lady of the house.”
But the lady of the house, as I could see through the window, would not be participating. She had dragged Peter into the kitchen and was berating him—she liked to be the boss at her parties, and this kind of thing, which the Mr. Universe contestants had organized without her knowledge, wasn’t to her taste.
Meanwhile, the sight of a cop had taken poor Biljana back to socialist Yugoslavia, where the police were feared and respected, and she watched him anxiously.
“Well,” the cop said, looking at the unfamiliar group before him: people speaking another language, some of them dressed in elaborate costumes, rowdy children peering at him, fascinated.
“If she’s not here, I’m going to need another volunteer.”
Biljana’s hand shot up.
Heads turned.
“I volunteer, Officer,” she called out in her Serbian accent, her expression solemn and resolved.
“Nice,” said the cop. “Come on up!”
In her glasses and sensible clothes, Biljana walked to the cop, stone-faced, as everyone laughed and cheered.
“How dare you laugh!” she hissed in Serbian as she walked up to the front.
In her fearful state, she hadn’t noticed some of the clear signifiers that this man was not the picture of law enforcement—like the tight, shiny pants and the boom box he carried. Biljana felt it was her duty, as my mother’s old friend, to take responsibility for this trouble, and if she needed to go to jail, then she was willing to do so.
But as far as everyone else at the party was concerned, as she took a seat on the chair the cop provided, she was some kinky woman who, despite her mousey appearance, was big into role-playing, and this was why she sat primly, looking respectfully up at the man who now walked back and forth, slapping his baton on his hand.
To Biljana, he must have seemed like a sadist, and when one of the party guests yelled “Yeah, baby!” Biljana stared at the woman in disbelief. Who were these people who celebrated public shaming?
And then, as Biljana sat there for a few seconds longer, her face started to change ever so slightly. The cop instructed her to hold his baton between her knees, pressed Play on his boom box, and took off his massive fake policeman’s hat, releasing his black shiny curls. When he whipped his head around and started dance-walking toward Biljana, it finally clicked. This man was not an upstanding member of the police force: he was a stripper, and she was about to get a lap dance.
She dropped the baton and ran into the house, leaving the policeman hanging.
But the music was pumping, and the excitement was high, so an Aussie social worker colleague of my mother’s and a Serbian piano teacher jumped up and took Biljana’s place, taking the policeman’s pants off with their teeth, while the crowd cheered and the children watched in awe, until my mother came outside and put an end to the whole fiasco.
• • •
Six months later, when I was starting ninth grade, a man named Vanja moved into our spare room. Vanja was the son of a famous Belgrade psychology professor who had taught my mother at university. Vanja’s family was Jewish, and his parents had escaped to Serbia from Hungary during the Holocaust. Though he was born in Belgrade, Vanja felt like a not-quite-legit member of the ex-Yugo diaspora since he didn’t identify with any of the ethnicities that had gone to war with one another. He managed to leave Belgrade the day before his conscription papers were served, and instead of driving a tank in a war he didn’t believe in, he became a taxi driver in New Zealand. Now he was in Melbourne, enjoying the freedom that taxi-driving afforded him: no boss to answer to, and plenty of waiting time in which he could read the papers and doze. Vanja had a degree in philosophy, and came from an eccentric family of his own, so he was welcomed with open arms into our household. He didn’t mind the mayhem, and soon he became my mother’s most devoted sidekick.
For a few sleepless weeks during semester break, Harry and his musician friends would come over to watch reruns of Twin Peaks, and my mother would buy us donuts and make us hot black coffee so we could pretend to be like Special Agent Dale Cooper. On the night when we watched one particularly scary episode, she made Vanja stand outside a window, and stare in at us until one of us saw him, and we all started screaming just as my mother had hoped.
On top of everything else that was going on, my mother decided to embark on a renovation of our home that would last an entire decade. The ex-Yugo community was full of laborers who now spent a lot of time at our place, smoking in the yard with my mother, striving respectfully to see her strangest ideas through.
First to go was our fireplace, which my dad had stared into during his worst days, and where my mother had burned her diary. Natalija and her delinquent prepubescent friends were allowed to graffiti the wall in our dining room before builders took it down.
One Saturday morning, when my mother was at work, I woke after an evening of drinking with my friends to find Rajko, Dad’s serious card-playing friend, in my room, folding my clothes. He had let himself in through the door my mother always kept unlocked. “Your mother doesn’t take care of you properly!” he said, picking up my dirty things and folding them clumsily. “Look at this mess!” He gestured at my room. My mother never came into my private space and poked around, and I was outraged to see Rajko in my unaired room, fumbling with my underthings, acting like he had any right to touch my stuff. Furious and embarrassed, I got out of bed, and pushed Rajko through our house, like a cartoon character, putting the weight of my whole body into it. I pushed him through the kitchen, past the unwashed dishes, past tiles that had been pulled up by the builders, and out the back door, which I closed and locked. “None of your business!” I yelled, adrenaline coursing through my usually lethargic body.
I knew that my mother’s way of dealing-with-grief-through-chaos would have made Dad turn yet another 180 degrees in his grave—the mess, the unopened bills, the electricity that kept getting turned off because she forgot to pay. Rajko cared about us, and he was disturbed by my mother’s bacchanalian approach to healing; he probably believed he owed it to my dad to make sure his children didn’t grow up to be slobs. But slobs we were, and for all our infighting, the three of us stuck together whenever anyone tried to tell us what to do.
At fifteen, my friends were deep in the throes of puberty, and Alicia, and our new friend Jasmine, a super smart and cynical nerd, often came to my place where we could be together in our angst. After school, we’d climb over the gaping holes in the floor, sit in my room, and roll our eyes and talk in disaffected tones about how vacuous the sporty kids at school were. Other times, I’d hang out with Harry and his friends, and we’d drink alcohol someone’s older sibling had bought, or we’d kick my little sister and her friends out of the Nintendo room and watch A Clockwork Orange, which I’d got from an underground bookstore in the city. Finally, I had a solid friendship group, and even though I’d never been asked to be anyone’s girlfriend, I certainly wasn’t unpopular. My friends and I called ourselves “alternative”—yes, I wore glasses, but I also carried vodka in a little water bottle to parties. Yes, we hung out at the library, but we also smoked bongs at the park near school. We were (to ourselves and to my little sister’s group of friends at least) both complex and fascinating.
• • •
I started doing things to prove my alternative and artsy identity, such as wearing a beret. I had only once kissed a boy, at a party, but I was determined to become sexually liberated in the way an artist might be. I went to see Danish director Lars Von Trier’s bizarre paranormal hospital series The Kingdom at an art house cinema (for the second time), where I decided to give a hand job to my date, a long-haired Aussie boy from my class, who shared my interest in avant-garde films. Only a bohemian would be this edgy, I thought, as we stared at the screen and I tried to get an awkward grip on my stunned companion’s erection.
&nbs
p; The next weekend, seemingly out of nowhere, Alicia started dating a nice eighteen-year-old Italian guy she’d met at the supermarket where she worked on the weekend. I was dumbfounded at her sudden graceful leap into adulthood. She informed me that boys our age were immature. I found myself torn between my bohemian, hand-job-giving self and my desire to not be left behind. So I tried to strike a balance, hanging out with my school friends half the time (going to jazz clubs where the professional musicians let Harry and some others “jam” with them, even though they were underage) and devoting the rest of my time to the new group Alicia introduced me to: second-generation immigrants—mainly Greek—from a couple of suburbs over, who smoked cigarettes and souped up their cars.
One of guys in the new group was Dan, a likeable, ponytailed nineteen-year-old virgin who called me every night. I would not be participating in a lame-ass romance with Dan, I told myself. I preferred the aloof guys, including a friend of Dan’s who was a drummer in a band that tried to sound like Pearl Jam. The drummer was tall, surfy, and blond, a real Aussie, and he had a girlfriend, who was, in his own words “a psycho.”
Soon after, when the drummer got drunk and declared he was “on a break” from his girlfriend, I lost my virginity to him in Alicia’s parents’ study. Afterward, I regretted telling him that my dad had died, and I regretted having responded when he asked when, “One year and three months ago,” like a sad creep who counts months. I’d been attracted to the drummer’s detachment to begin with, and I didn’t want him to see that deep down, I was still the soft girl who had loved Nemanja in kindergarten, and who dreamed about justice for the hunchbacks and all those of us who were hurting but didn’t know how to get help. Even though I played it cool, part of me wished he’d make me his girlfriend, tell me I was more special than a one-night stand, that I was worthwhile.
• • •
A couple of months before my sixteenth birthday, my mother, Natalija, and I went on a one-month trip overseas during the school holidays. I’d recently dyed my hair pink, trying to demonstrate that I marched to the beat of my own drum while simultaneously copying the kids I thought were cool—I have pink hair, deal with it, I thought whenever someone looked my way.
On the way to Europe, we had a stopover in China. My mother’s best friend, Dada, now lived in Beijing with her family (most of our friends had left crumbling Belgrade to work abroad), so we were going to stay there for a few days.
After a day of sightseeing, I went out with Dada’s fourteen-year-old son, Marko, whom I’d known since he was born. Our mothers had always dreamed we would grow up together, and maybe even get married one day. I was used to drinking alcohol snuck from parents’ liquor cabinets at house parties, but Marko took me to a club, something I’d never experienced. It was filled with smoke and people dancing to techno, children of diplomats and entrepreneurs, a melting pot of rich kids partying and making out with each other like the end of the world was nigh. Marko walked through the crowd barely acknowledging his peers as they greeted him, his glossy black hair falling into his eyes as he parked himself at the bar. He outpaced me, four drinks to one, and I wasn’t drinking slowly.
As we stood smoking outside the expat club at the end of the night, Marko told me he wanted to move back to Belgrade.
“See that smog?” he said, pointing at the sky. “Each year we live here, it takes four years off our lives.” He exhaled smoke grandly, as if cigarettes, unlike smog, would bring him only health, wellness, and glamour.
• • •
As we flew toward Belgrade the next day, I thought of our hurried trips to the Great Wall and the Summer Palace, the spicy food, and the vodka I drank with Marko, which I was struggling to keep down. I thought about the diplomatic compound where his family lived, and the insane traffic. I thought about my mother and Dada, who had grown up together in Belgrade, and imagined they’d be neighbors forever, and who now found themselves living in two different enormous countries so unlike the poor, little one they’d come from, their lives having assumed entirely unpredictable trajectories. Whereas my mother’s friends were a hodgepodge of ex-Yugos, Dada’s crew was comprised of diplomats who she claimed were the most boring people on earth.
I listened to my Walkman, playing a mixtape Dan had made for me, recording his own introductions between songs. “This is a song that should have been titled ‘Sofija,’ ” Dan’s voice said, before “Angie” by the Rolling Stones came on. I scoffed, as I did whenever I heard him say it, but at the same time, I felt a little surge of confidence. As we started our descent into Belgrade’s airport and Natalija barfed in a bag, I thought about the ways I’d changed since I was last here. I was a non-virgin, my hair was pink, men were interested in me (well, one man was, and I had the tapes to prove it), and I was fatherless. I was not the little girl I used to be.
• • •
My kindergarten friend Ana’s parents had found work and moved to Damascus, Syria, but Milica (the one who had usurped my Baby-Sitters Club leadership role) and the once-unimpressive Eva were still there. Seeing teenaged Eva’s flawless skin and long, silky hair and Milica’s giant, glamorous sunglasses, and their simple European-chic clothes, I felt frumpy and underdressed. As we walked down the street, I couldn’t help but stare at all of the women wearing skintight outfits and impossibly high heels, strutting along the streets like gravity couldn’t topple them. These women had glossy hair, wore elaborate, precise makeup, and were surrounded by clouds of perfume that seemed to set them apart from mere mortals like me.
As we caught up over thick hot chocolate, my friends explained the concept of sponzoruše (“sponsor girls”)—a derogatory term for women who dated rich men. The rise of the sponsor girls had coincided with the socioeconomic decline of Belgrade. A typical “sponsor” was a man who wore a lot of gold, who had made money from war profiteering, either on the black market or through other criminal activities. These men gave their women money to buy clothes, have their hair done, and so on. It was well known the women’s style was tacky: heavy makeup, push-up bras, over-the-knee boots with pussy-length dopičnjak skirts. They were fashion choices that my friends frowned upon, sticking instead to more European-inspired styles, such as subtle makeup, tight jeans, and Converse sneakers—casual clothes that were neither fancy nor ill-fitting. My sloppy style of dressing, which fit into neither of these categories, did not fly in Belgrade. While my Australian friends considered it cool to shop at vintage stores and dress as if your clothes were hand-me-downs, in Belgrade it was a sign of poverty—and as the people became poorer, looking poor became a source of humiliation.
As I tried to fix my posture and hide my scuffed boots under the table, my friends told me about the protests they’d attended in the winter, when students and Serbian opposition parties organized a series of marches in response to electoral fraud attempted by Milošević as he ran to be reelected president. The students marched for eighty-eight days, during which they toilet-papered the Electoral Commission building and wreaked other types of havoc. I knew about the voter fraud already since my aunt had gone to the electoral office on a hunch that something fishy might be going on and found that my dead dad had mysteriously cast a vote for Milošević, the politician he spent half his life abhorring.
Listening to my friends talk about being part of a political movement stirred me, and made me remember the things I’d found exciting about politics back when I was a kid. I wanted to wake up and know more, to feel a part of something again.
Milica, Eva, and I walked over to the bookshop at the university where my mother had once taught, passing anti-Milošević graffiti and a slew of attractive students. At the bookstore, I bought a bound volume of images from the student protests my friends had talked about. It showed women trying to break the line of young policemen by kissing them, giving them roses, or trying to make them laugh; passionate young people holding ironic placards and marching through snow and rain. The protests had gone on for months, drawing crowds of two hundred thousand people. My fr
iends told me that they’d missed months of school to attend.
“Not that our education will be recognized in the rest of the world,” Milica said darkly. “We won’t be able to work outside of this shitty country; Milošević has destroyed our prospects.”
My Australian passport could take me anywhere in the world, while my friends’ Serbian passports meant they had to jump through hoops to go anywhere. They were regularly denied visas, which had happened to Milica earlier that year when she’d wanted to visit us in Australia. I felt guilty about it, as if Australia had told my friend she wasn’t good enough.
I wanted to say: “But Belgrade is great, I’d love to live here. There are so many young people, the parties are so fun, everyone is out in the city every night. In Melbourne, we have to drive from suburb to suburb, hanging out in people’s backyards, while you have massive concerts, and you fight for the things you’re passionate about.” Instead, I just listened and said nothing because I was afraid my friends would admonish me for my privilege, that they’d ask me why I wasn’t happy where I was, why I wasn’t grateful to not have to worry about money or my education.
That afternoon, I picked up some pizza on the way to my grandma Xenia’s apartment, and since I couldn’t resist the nostalgic smell, I got a paper cone filled with whitebait as well.
My grandmother’s studio apartment was 250 square feet and smelled of cigarette smoke. We sat there as Grandma Xenia piled the leftovers of the whitebait onto the slice of pizza I’d brought her, folded it over like a sandwich, and dug in.
“Why waste it?” she asked, and I questioned when she’d last eaten, as she was far more interested in smoking and weighed only seventy-two pounds. Was this her habit, not eating for days and then doing what she was doing now, eating one massive meal in huge mouthfuls at a time, like those snakes that ate sheep and then digested them for weeks? I worried she would choke when I wasn’t there.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 20
