Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  When I was a kid in Belgrade, I would often go to friends’ places and there would be an old lady sitting in a nook of the apartment watching TV, or muttering to herself. Everyone would kiss the old lady as they bustled past, and she sat, swaddled in blankets, eating treats. These were grandmothers who had done their duty, looking after their grandkids while the parents worked; they’d got old, and could now kick back. This was the natural order of things: paid child care was not common, and minding and cooking for young ones was a grandparent’s duty. Then when the grandparents got old, the younger family members cared for them.

  When they got old, Grandma Xenia’s older sisters, Olga and Mara, were looked after by my aunt Gordana. As the sisters aged well into their nineties, they would boss Gordana around, and cheerfully have baths together like when they were little, or play cards and smoke, regardless of the time of night. Willow-thin, with their matching short, loose perms, preoccupied with talking about things that had happened decades before, they chatted all day, enjoying each other’s company and the comfort of living in a family home where they were loved. Now my grandma’s older sisters were dead and her family was scattered across the world. She would not get to be the elder in a home full of children; she would not get to eat bacon on bread and watch game shows all day. War had upset the natural order of things.

  Grandma Xenia’s apartment looked the same as it had when I was a child, except now everything—Grandma included—looked like a scale model of itself. There were the Murano glass swans that had once seemed so grand, the encyclopedia of animals that had seemed so precious, the photographs of her grandchildren, who had all moved away. And my tiny grandmother sitting there like a little doll, her features smoothed by the smoke that served as a soft focus around her.

  On the other side of town, I caught up on the local gossip with Dad’s mother, Grandma Beba. Local gossip was my preferred topic of discussion, otherwise Grandma Beba would talk about my dad, and even though it had been awhile since he died, talking about him made me cry. Just around the corner from Grandma Beba lived Arkan the paramilitary leader and behind the massive walls of his compound, that were patrolled by armed guards, lived the tiger I’d petted as a cub. No one saw the tiger these days, though Arkan would walk his bloodthirsty dogs around; the rumor was that his idea of a joke was to let them loose on neighborhood dogs. That afternoon, I walked past there with my five-year-old cousin on the way to the bakery, and as we passed the armed guards, he jumped in a puddle, splashing them. Instead of shooting us as I’d expected, the young men with the guns said, “What a badass—he’s going to be like us one day!”

  • • •

  Grandma Beba insisted on taking me to the town where our extended family lived, three hours southeast of Belgrade. In Serbian Orthodox culture, each family celebrates their patron saint with a feast, with each different saint being celebrated at different time of the year. This part of my family was more religious than my parents had been, and we arrived just in time for the family’s Saint’s Day dinner. My great-aunt Rose had spent weeks preparing the food, and, as soon as we walked in the door, Grandma Beba rushed to the kitchen to help her sister with the finishing touches. The town was small and poor, and their house was run down and musty. To avoid the older women, who kept bursting into tears and saying how much I looked like my dead father, I sat in the living room with a beautiful young woman called Anita, who had recently married my first cousin, Bojan. Why would you stay in this shithole if you look like her? I thought, as if beauty gave you a free pass from a life of poverty. Anita limply held a Transformer toy, while her toddler son stacked blocks. “These are all toys from when Bojan was a boy,” she said.

  When Bojan came back from work, he behaved just like I remembered him from the last time I’d visited as a child: he was guileless, eager to please, taking orders from his mother, Rose, never seeming to get anything right.

  “You’re such an idiot, Bojan, why didn’t you bring the chairs from upstairs like I told you?”

  Bojan jumped up, laughed as if he found the whole thing funny, and ran off.

  “When I come back,” he said to me, “I’ll tell you about my great new job.”

  During dinner, Bojan explained that his boss ran a five-star recreation center, which seemed an odd fit for the town.

  “Tomorrow, you’ll go there with me, and we’ll play tennis,” he said as the phone rang and he rushed to get it.

  Great-aunt Rose said, “He’s at their beck and call!” and the rest of us held our tongues, as Bojan was known for being at her beck and call.

  Bojan came in again, and sat down, then the phone rang again and he leaped out of his seat. “What can I do? They need me!”

  My great aunt called him a moron, and we heard him talking in the other room, laughing in that apologetic, goofy way of his. The rest of the dinner was taken up by talk of whether I had a boyfriend, and news of a relative in America who had had a nose job and, in unrelated but equally exciting news, was getting divorced. We left early the next day, so I didn’t get a chance to see the tennis court, or meet my first rural mafia boss, which is what some of our relatives speculated Bojan’s employer might be. I was glad to leave the town, with its depressing, empty streets, its youth getting stoned amid broken-down cars.

  • • •

  Back in Belgrade, we had another family dinner. Some of my other relatives—cousins who had moved to Europe for business opportunities even before we left for Australia—happened to be in town at the same time as us, so it was time to visit my mother’s side of the family. A cousin who was in her midtwenties and lived in Austria kept squinting at the tags on my clothes. She apparently did not find what she was looking for, since most of my things were from secondhand stores or Dangerfield—an Australian brand of edgy fashions that my friends and I adored, like the low-cut purple corduroy flares I wore most days.

  “Look,” my cousin said magnanimously, “all you need is to get a magazine at the start of the season.”

  Then, in case I didn’t know what a magazine was, she said, “Like Vogue.”

  She advised me to look at the styles that were coming into fashion and then to get things that looked similar, but were cheaper. She gave me a bunch of makeup samples that she had collected, and a bottle of perfume. “It’s more of a brunette scent,” she said, running her fingers through her blond bob and looking at my hair, “and that pink dye seems to be growing out.” My cousin was chic; her skin was smooth. And while her jeans and shirt looked simple, if you looked closely at the labels you would see that they were from Chanel or Lanvin. Her earrings were small gold hoops. “My husband got them for me when we had an argument,” she said, laughing. “He knows to head to Cartier when he’s done something wrong!”

  Spending time with my mother’s jet-setting family was very different from being with dad’s family in eastern Serbia, but this dinner made me just as uncomfortable as the rural one. Natalija and I were quizzed about our knowledge of history, and if we didn’t know the answers to questions like “When did the reign of the Hapsburgs end?” everyone laughed at us. If I admitted to not having read something my family considered to be an important literary work, like The Iliad, I’d be mocked: “And you say you’re interested in literature? Ha!” Not that any of them found time to read much nowadays, but they felt that they had done the groundwork, unlike me.

  A thirtysomething businessman relative who had been particularly determined to show my sister and me as ignorant, spoke to us in English “to practice,” and at one point when he was recounting a conversation he’d had with a colleague, he said:

  “I didn’t want to be an ass-whore, but I told him what I really think. And if that makes me an ass-whore, then that’s what I am.”

  Natalija and I tried to suppress our delight as we exchanged a look, silently agreeing we would not correct him, praying that he would refer to himself as an ass-whore in public until the end of time.

  When we’d finished the meal, my gastroenterologist au
nt started giving the three of us very detailed instructions for the use of her Paris home. Our plan was to tour Paris for three days en route back to Melbourne, and we were going to stay in her empty apartment.

  As she was talking, she didn’t seem to notice my mother start to show signs that my sister and I understood all too well—flared nostrils, her lips turning into a line. She was getting pissed off. “When you’re in there, you must take your shoes off,” my aunt said for the third time. “There is a white carpet, and you understand it is important to keep it that way.” At which point, for anyone who wasn’t used to the signs, it seemed as if my mother very suddenly snapped. Whether my aunt had meant to insult my mother or not, she had managed to provoke a slew of emotions that had been building, and my mother had apparently had enough of being made to feel inferior.

  “How dare you tell me to take off my shoes!?” she shrieked at my aunt, standing up from the table with her large frame and gripping the sides, as if she might tip the whole thing over, dishes and all. “You think my children and I are animals? You don’t want us to soil your precious apartment?”

  She always hated feeling “less than” for being an immigrant in Australia, and she now felt that her own relatives were humiliating her for her apparent slovenliness. The next twenty minutes were a blur of shouting, my mother telling my aunt exactly how she felt, and my aunt biting back. Some people left the room, uncomfortable, but Natalija and I sat there, entranced, staring. As I looked at my mother, overweight, wearing her clothes that came from Target on Centre Road, I felt suddenly proud to be on her team.

  I can only imagine what we must have looked like to our fancy European-transplant relatives. Crazy Koka, as my mother was known behind her back, had gone to Australia, a wilderness in which no one cared about what make of car you drove, or what designer you were wearing. I thought about the camels that roamed in the outback of Australia, how they had been brought over way back when people used to trek across the desert, before there were roads or even railways. The camels had adapted to the harsh Australian climate and eventually become feral. That’s how we seemed to our relatives. Gone wild in the outback, returning with our dirty shoes, eager to trample snow-white Parisian carpet. Crazy Koka and her kids who didn’t know how to dress themselves, who weren’t even proficient in French. They had all laughed when I told my mother I’d been gifted a “Bvulgari” perfume, because I didn’t know to pronounce it Bulgari.

  “Let’s go!” my mother yelled. My sister and I got up, and followed her out of the apartment, rushing to my aunt Mila’s place so we could get on the phone and book a Paris hotel last-minute.

  • • •

  We found two rooms at the Chat Noir, in the Pigalle neighborhood of Paris. On our first evening, my mother, sister, and I sat in the café beneath the hotel, ate baguettes, and listened to a jazz band. This is probably where Toulouse-Lautrec spent his time, I thought, feeling like I could relax for the first time in ages. Here, unlike in Belgrade or Melbourne, I had no context, there were no stakes. I was impressed that several very old men in very old suits lived in this old hotel, and I envied them, imagining a life full of art and wine, where a maid cleaned your room every day and you were free to wander the cobbled streets eating croissants.

  Harry happened to be on a high school exchange program in France, and he caught the train to Paris to see me. Leaving my family behind, we walked through Pigalle, to the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. We bought wine and walked past the Moulin Rouge to a square where we sat on a bench and drank. Suddenly, the things I had cared about—whether my relatives considered me fashionable enough, or my Belgrade friends thought I was too privileged—didn’t matter. Sitting with Harry, who I was still a little in love with, talking about writing, books, and films, I reveled privately in the idea of a creative life as my salvation from all of that.

  It occurred to me that my relatives who lived in Western Europe were probably trying desperately to fit in. Yugoslavians were considered Eurotrash, and my relatives wanted to distance themselves from the economic ruin and our history of fighting and war crimes that tarnished us and made us seem barbaric and uneducated. Their affected sophistication was simply a defense mechanism. There were, I realized, different ways to be an immigrant, different techniques for dealing with being out of place.

  Here in Paris, on this bench, I was free. For the first time since Dad’s death, I felt a tingle of excitement, the promise of stories yet to be told, the possibility that life held some excitement yet. Thanks to the beautiful environment, the company of my friend, or too much wine, an uncharacteristic earnestness took hold. I am ready to be uniquely, unapologetically myself, I thought. And even though I didn’t really know who that was, I felt inspired to find out.

  9

  Sex, Bombs, and Rock and Roll

  At sixteen, for the first time in my life, I started to earn my own money. After school a couple of days a week, I worked at Peter the doctor’s clinic in Dandenong, an outer suburb of Melbourne. I did some admin work and awkwardly labeled little vials to be picked up by the lab, worried about getting urine or blood on my hands. With my modest wages, I bought wine, or cigarettes to share with my friends, or I saved up for items from Dangerfield. Peter didn’t care if I brought my schoolbooks to work with me—it was my second-to-last year of high school and I was keen to do well so I could go on to an arts degree at university.

  Peter’s practice was frequented by people from all of ex-Yugoslavia, though most of the patients were Bosnian Serbs. Considering that some of the people who crossed paths at Peter’s had been enemies during the war, I often wondered which of them were nationalists, and how they all felt about the other people in the waiting room. It was hard to tell. There was a rumor that someone had their eye taken out at a local bar thanks to a nationalistic dispute, but mostly I saw people being friendly, sometimes even hugging and kissing.

  Peter was one of those gregarious doctors who was beloved by his patients (and also the kind who smoked, partied, and dressed in drag for select parties). He served as a conduit between his patients and the unfamiliar Australian medical system. Part of my job was to placate people in the waiting room as he ran late, while laughter emanated from his examination room. He’d come out slapping his patients on the back, a look of relief on their faces, like they’d finally been understood in a country where everything was foreign.

  The clinic operated like an ex-Yugo outpost, and even though I’d gone out of my way to avoid the community in the past, I now enjoyed my role as an authority behind the reception desk, and I particularly liked the disposable income I was receiving, for doing not much. People told jokes from back home, swapped opinions on whose home-preserved sausages were best, and slipped in “Havaya” or other Aussie-Yugo slang into their speech. Every now and then a non-Yugo would appear in the clinic, and there would be a sudden hush, as if we’d been busted doing something illicit. The staff and patients would switch to speaking English, with varying degrees of success. One patient, by the name of Jagoda—a Yugoslavian botanical name as common as Rose or Heather in English—introduced herself to an English-speaking physiotherapist (who had come to see a couple of Peter’s patients) by translating her name literally: “Hello, I am Strawberry!” she declared.

  From where I was sitting, the atmosphere seemed lighthearted. But I soon realized that perception wasn’t always accurate. Many of Peter’s patients who had taken factory jobs in Australia were suffering from injuries—ranging from the consequences of repetitive strain to serious injuries sustained from accidents involving heavy machinery. People were often seeking compensation from their employers, and in such cases Peter dictated as I typed and refined his reports, bringing to his clinic my excellent control of English and speedy touch typing skills.

  Most ex-Yugos, and even the average Australian, could not afford to see a psychologist. However, when they were injured at work, counseling sessions were covered by their employers. More often than not, Peter referred his injured patients to my mot
her, who rented a room at his clinic twice a week. Even though their technical reason for seeing her was because of their work-related pain or depression, my mother’s clients inevitably ended up talking about the war. It was only because they’d lifted something heavy and slipped a disk, or their hands got crushed in a machine, that my mother’s clients were able to share their old traumas.

  • • •

  Through her clients, my mother was drawn into the heart of the war. While in the past she had been at a distance—first as a Belgrade intellectual protesting in the streets, and then as an immigrant watching the Western news and trying to interpret what was actually happening in her homeland—now she was getting first-person accounts that painted a new picture. Her focus was zoomed right in on the suffering of individuals, case by case.

  My mother hadn’t worked with refugees before. In Belgrade, she tutored psychology students, her research was mostly focused on children, and in her private practice in Melbourne, she counseled couples and individuals dealing with common issues such as anxiety, relationship problems, and depression.

  While their individual experiences were foreign to her, my mother shared with her new clients a language and a collective memory of a faraway place called Yugoslavia, which had existed before the wars. For her clients, having someone say, in a familiar language, “I understand what you’re talking about,” turned out to be extremely important, and her practice quickly grew. After all, my mother and her clients had all been born under Tito, they’d all been taught the same songs in primary school, they knew the taste of creamy kajmak spread and what “Brotherhood and Unity” had once meant.

  When I typed up her reports as part of my admin duties at the clinic, I pointed out to her how many people suffered from insomnia, and she said that not a single one of them could sleep. “They relive the war in their dreams,” she said. The dead of night was when my mother’s clients were visited by their terrors: not having enough food for their babies, being in a concentration camp, watching a cell mate die from a beating. “Once you get down to talking about it, it’s not about Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians,” my mother said one day, after a client of hers had left with red-rimmed eyes. “War is the same all over the world. It’s about the extremes of human experience, people being pushed to their limits.”