Even though the Bosnian war had officially ended three years earlier, for these people it was still going, and it would continue for the decades to come. To outsiders they may have seemed like any other forgettable foreigners living in their Housing Commission apartments, with their strange language, their accents, their dark clothes, smiling automatically in the way browbeaten people do to avoid being told off, leaning forward, straining their ears to understand what Aussies were saying to them. But these were individuals with their own specific nightmares. Even under warm blankets, in a snowless climate, they felt the cold from a faraway winter, and each night they woke, their hearts racing.
As Peter and my mother worked, I poked around in files, or listened closely in the waiting room. And in this way, I got a glimpse beyond the sometimes slapstick veneer of our diaspora’s roasted piglets and bawdy jokes. I found out the backstory of a woman with a perm whose brother had died by losing his head and an arm (he was sliced from his neck, through his torso, until his arm and head were removed). I heard about the Bosnian Serb who was a prisoner of war in a Bosnian Muslim camp. His job was to “swap” corpses, dragging dead Serbs for burial on the Serbian side, and taking dead Muslims and dragging them back for burial on the Muslim side. The dead on both sides were people he knew personally, who had lived in his town. He was like Sisyphus, rolling a boulder up a hill each day only to have it roll back down, but instead of a boulder it was heavy corpses, and his brutal penance for dragging his dead neighbors through the mud was that he still heaved them now, every night, in his sleep. Did he wake up questioning why he’d survived and they’d died, or did he wonder whether he was alive at all?
I started to absorb images far more specific than my imagination had previously conjured. Like the couple whose daughter committed suicide with a hand grenade on their balcony in Sarajevo. The family was unable to move because of the war, and for several years they had to sit with a hole in the wall as a reminder. There was the woman who blamed herself for her son’s poor performance at school because when he was a baby and they were on the run, her milk dried up and he almost died. The couple who couldn’t decide whether to sell the home in Bosnia in which a relative’s throat had been slit, or keep it—what was the more respectful thing to do? The teens who now suffered from low self-esteem because they’d grown up in European refugee camps in their old clothes and their too-small shoes, the butt of jokes from local kids who lived near the camps. The man who served in a battalion that was later accused of war crimes. (When asked if he had participated in the atrocities, he said: “I didn’t have to participate. Each time we arrived at a place, the commander asked for volunteers. The same men always volunteered to rape or kill.”)
“I don’t even know if it’s psychology, what I do,” my mother said one day, after a particularly grueling batch of sessions. “I just listen. When I listen to them, I validate: that they survived, that they are alive,” and after the listening, she said, “I try to help them find something in the world that interests them still, a reason to keep on living.”
Up until my time at Peter’s, I had simplified the act of war in my mind: people shot at one another, many died, many were made refugees. On immigration forms, people could tick a box that said “refugee,” which whittled their stories down to that: they were humans seeking refuge. But now I realized war could not be explained easily. It was full of individual stories, and the people at Peter’s were just a tiny portion of the refugees all over the world, who had fled their homes in Afghanistan, Rwanda, Vietnam. War doesn’t actually end when a date is stamped on it for the textbooks, when the headlines are printed, when the newscasters announce it. After the tanks roll out and the bodies are buried, those left alive are left with nightmares, anxiety, twitches, and a fear that is passed on to their children. War isn’t just about men with guns; it’s about old people and mothers and children, and those not yet born.
• • •
Through my report-writing for the clinic, I became a tiny mouthpiece: “Ms. X has suffered from anxiety ever since shrapnel lodged in her stomach.” I stated facts, helping Peter and my mother send information into the world in order for their patients to receive benefits they deserved. I was in the unique position of being an English-speaking fly on the wall, and beneath my Serbian-receptionist-schoolgirl costume, I dreamed of being a serious writer. English was the language of my favorite books, and I wished I could command it like Angela Carter or John Steinbeck did. I loved reading fiction, but more and more, nonfiction spoke to me: I knew that telling stories like my grandma Xenia had told me was a powerful way of showing the world to people.
As I observed the scenes at Peter’s clinic, I wanted to be the person who put the patients’ stories into the world, into English. I wanted to explore the mix of dark humor and tragedy that was always present in the waiting room, the sense that everything here was somehow tainted by the history and geography of a place very far away. But these were stories that had a beginning, and a middle, but no real end, with the last line reading, “And then they lived with PTSD ever after.” Would anyone want to hear them? Secretly, I hoped Westerners’ eyes would be opened by what they learned from my writings; I could do something that might even be useful. At the same time, I was insecure enough to discourage myself before I even started. What could I say that would make any difference to anyone?
So I held back, and became a sort of reception-dwelling spy, someone who listened but didn’t comment, someone who observed but never felt qualified to outwardly sympathize like my mother. Hearing the details of war made me remember who I was and where I came from. And it reinforced that my Australian friends and I were different, and we always would be. If, at the start of my high school life, I’d been trying to fit in, to shut the door to my past, it would never work now. The door was ajar, and all sorts of voices were wafting through—some of them spoke of homemade brandy, some hummed folk songs, and others spoke of centuries of turmoil, the words “cock” and “your mother” thrown in every few sentences for good measure. This was my language. Yugoslavia had gripped me again.
• • •
Just as my interest in Yugoslavia was being rekindled, things took a new turn back home, the violence moving to the region of Kosovo, placing our troubled region on the world stage once again.
Since his rise to power, Milošević had reduced the autonomy of Kosovo, giving more power to Serbs. Kosovo Albanians had been subject to the shutdown of their Albanian-language media outlets, and were increasingly losing their jobs. A separatist Albanian movement was created with the aim of gaining independence from Serbia, and a paramilitary group calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) launched attacks against the Yugoslav army and police in Kosovo. The Serbian paramilitary was sent in, and people were being killed.
“We Serbs are a minority over there!” a Bosnian Serb who had been driven out of Bosnia said to no one in particular in Peter’s waiting room, “They want to drive us out of Kosovo, too!?” The Serbs dubbed the KLA terrorists, while Albanians saw them as freedom fighters. As for me, now that I was trying to form my own opinions separate from what I was told by my elders, I was torn. I was watching the Albanian deaths, watching the Serbs being painted as villains, and hearing the Serbs in Peter’s clinic citing our holy places in Kosovo, the monasteries that people held dear, saying that this was our mecca, our Jerusalem, a place that could not be taken.
• • •
Via executive order, U.S. President Bill Clinton declared a national emergency, stating that the actions of Serbia in “promoting ethnic conflict and human suffering, threaten to destabilize countries of the region . . . and therefore constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” When Serbian forces refused to withdraw from Kosovo, a U.S.-led NATO intervention was planned. “The Americans want to bomb us,” was how the Serbs in Peter’s clinic put it, another Yugo adding, “Clinton wants to take attention away from his blow job.” I couldn’t
help but wonder if this was all paranoia, or if Western politicians were in fact just as self-serving as those back in Yugoslavia.
Even though the NATO intervention had not gained approval from the UN Security Council, and was considered legally dubious by some, Australia was one of the many nations that supported military action, and Prime Minister John Howard announced to the press that: “History has told us if you sit by and do nothing, you pay a much greater price later on.” The Serbian patients in Peter’s waiting room pretended to spit at the TV—listing in true Yugo spirit all the places they’d like to fuck Howard’s mother. But Howard’s statement didn’t make me angry, it gave me a chill. The people in Peter’s waiting room didn’t spend all day with Aussies like I did. This was the same unpleasant feeling I got when friends’ parents expressed their opinions on the Yugoslavian wars, when I was in a taxi speaking Serbian with a friend and the taxi driver threatened to kick us out if we didn’t speak English. I was now living in a country that directly supported the bombing of Yugoslavia, and it made me feel personally attacked. I felt for the Albanian population of Kosovo, as we watched news reports of aggression against them, but mostly I felt for my friends and family, who were living in a place that would be bombed because of a leader they did not elect.
• • •
In March 1999, the NATO bombing campaign began. While NATO had hoped it would be quick, and that Milošević would capitulate and withdraw his troops, it would end up being nearly three months before the bombing was over. The bombs were aimed at military targets and mostly focused on the Kosovo region and other areas in rural Serbia, but there were also targets within Belgrade.
Watching the news, my mother, her friends, and I deliberated among ourselves why the U.S. couldn’t have sent someone to assassinate Milošević ten years earlier.
“He was the West’s ‘man,’ and now they feel like they’ve lost control, so they’re punishing the population who opposed him all along!” my mother’s friends said.
I wondered what my dad would think of all of it, remembering the protests he took me to—protests whose principal aim was preventing a war—all those years ago. He’d always been pro-West, teasing my mother for what he called her nationalism. What would be his take on this new situation, where the West was responsible for bombing Serbia?
As bombs fell, our family and friends had to take shelter in the basements of their apartment buildings. Most of the bombs were dropped directly on Kosovo, and NATO referred to the resulting deaths of civilians with the disturbing military term “collateral damage.”
The weekend after the bombing began, I went with my mother and sister to a protest in front of the U.S. consulate. The crowd of several hundred people comprised family friends, patients from Peter’s clinic, and others I didn’t know. One old man holding a sign that said “Stop NATO” kept repeating in a heavy accent, “Vorning vorning, bombs are folling!” and “Clinton killa!” through a megaphone. There were also thuggish-looking guys with nationalist tattoos, and when several news crews arrived, they were quick to point their cameras at these Serbian nationalists who were chanting and throwing rocks at the consulate, and an old lady with no teeth holding up a sign saying “Clinton is devil.”
“Of course they want to make us look like assholes,” my mother said, as a camera operator got right up in the face of some guy yelling “FUCK AMERICA AND FUCK AUSTRALIA!” One of my family friends who was peacefully protesting piped up, “Hey, why don’t you film us instead?” A motherly looking woman went up to the young thugs who were jumping up on one another’s back and shouting “SERBIA! SERBIA!”—purposely jostling the people around them. The woman tried to scold the young men, and one of them told her to fuck off, in English, in an Aussie-Serb accent, making me think he was one of those Serbian nationalists who had been born in Australia and had quite a lot to say about a place he’d never been to.
I silently judged these guys, who had likely grown up writing “wogs rule, skips pull” on the trains and who saw this as their chance to take a stab at the West, throwing stones in order to feel some power, when they were usually marginalized. I pictured them actually visiting the Serbia they’d romanticized, or heard about from their parents. When would they realize that they were deluded? That they didn’t even speak the language? When the local Serbian people laughed at them, and their ideas of what the country was like? I wished they would go to Serbia, and put their money where their mouths were—“You’d change your story soon enough,” I wanted to say, remembering my mother’s clients.
Even though we were all technically there to oppose the bombing of our country, the people gathered at the protests couldn’t quite get through the protest without snapping at one another. There’s a saying in our language “Two Serbs, three opinions,” meaning that we can never agree on anything. Our national slogan, “Samo Sloga Srbina Spašava,” means “Only Unity Can Save the Serbs,” as if our forefathers who coined the term knew that our Achilles’ heel would always be our self-destructive tendencies.
• • •
Alicia and I went to her boyfriend’s place that night, and we sat around smoking in his parents’ shed. A second-generation Turkish guy named Hass was there. When I first met him a few months earlier, Hass had said, “So, you’re Serbian. Have you got a bit of Turk in ya?”—and plenty of my people did, thanks to the five-hundred-year Ottoman occupation. (I once heard our neighbor in Belgrade say, “All of us would be blond and blue-eyed, if it wasn’t for the Turks,” and only as a teenager did I come to realize what he’d meant.)
“I don’t think so,” I’d said to Hass.
“Do you want a little bit of Turk in ya?” he’d asked, winking, and everyone had laughed, including me.
Now I mentioned to my friends that I’d been at the anti-NATO protests. Though I’d never heard him say anything political before, suddenly Hass said, “Your people are getting what they deserve. They’re fucked up, they don’t know how to rule themselves. They were better off when they were under us.”
By “us” he meant the Ottoman Empire. It occurred to me that just like when I’d learned from Ms. Danica about the Serbs being the “moral winners” against the oppressive Ottomans in Kosovo, I was pretty sure Hass was repeating a patriotic myth that had been passed to him by his elders. Hass was second generation and I was first, but both of us were swaddled in an ethnic identity we couldn’t shake: our last names and the way we spoke and looked set us apart and reminded us always of where we had come from.
I know now that we all drag around the prejudices and unfulfilled dreams of our elders, suffering the lot of migrants with tenuous links to home, wishing we were other than insignificant minorities getting lost in the vast world of the West. But when Hass said that my people were getting what they deserved, instead of laughing politely, or pretending not to be offended, I said “fuck you” and went home.
I was elated that I’d actually told someone to fuck off, but at the same time, I also felt shame, that old feeling of wanting to be liked, of wanting to toe the line. I thought about the Australians who publicly declared that immigrants should “go home.” Yet here I was, instead of just trying to “pass,” to not make noise, telling someone to fuck off. My confidence level had reached a new milestone and, for the first time, I thought: I don’t need to apologize for myself.
• • •
Every day after school, I boarded a train and traveled forty minutes to the city, then caught the tram to the U.S. consulate. I thought of the students in that book I’d bought about the anti-Milošević protests. So many times, I’d looked at their faces and imagined being among them: young, cool, passionate. I remembered going with my dad to nightly demonstrations as a kid, and as I stood in front of the U.S. consulate, I thought: This is in my blood. This is what Dad taught me to do.
The protests were smaller on weekdays as compared to the weekend, but I made sure I went to them all. I started hanging around with a group of young people who were a few years older than me, some
of them students who had come to Australia only in the last few years. Until now, my Yugo interactions had been restricted to family friends and their kids, but these young people were different. I’d met them not through my family, but on my own—at a protest just like the ones my friends went to in Belgrade.
There was a couple in their midtwenties who hosted a Yugo night at a club in the center of Melbourne, which I managed to get into, even though I was underage. The club attracted various young people from our community, from rockers, to guys with unbuttoned shirts in leather jackets, to women in tiny golden miniskirts.
Many of the conversations I had with my new friends were about how we wished we were back in Belgrade. We would talk about what a drag it was being in Australia. With my new friends, I was happy to renounce Australia and my love for its language, and to dream of the Belgrade that they described, which was somehow more sophisticated than the one I knew, full of fascinating people, while, the way we painted it, the Australia that we lived in was inhabited by barbarians and oppressors.
After the club that first time, at three in the morning, we went to Melbourne’s Little Italy, and sat in a restaurant open twenty-four-seven. It was a big group of us, all speaking in our language. Some in the group were recent refugees who barely spoke English. One classic example was when a Bosnian guy wanted ice in his drink and asked for “vater, brrrr” as he pretended to shiver. We only spoke in English when it was time to order, and suddenly my friends were rendered foreign, stilted, some of them mispronouncing certain words. Meanwhile I was accent-less, and when it was my turn, I ordered as quickly as possible. I felt like my English made me sound like “one of them,” meaning the oppressors.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 22
