Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  I had never felt more Serbian. My new friends and I shared stories we’d heard, some of them true, some rumors, about farmers who had taken down bombers by shooting at them; about young people who ignored the sirens that told them to go to their basements and instead sat on rooftops, drinking and watching the bombing like it was fireworks; about the animals in Belgrade Zoo who were traumatized by the bombs, including the lion that had taken to eating its own paws in distress. We found confidence by sticking together, by glorifying the place we’d come from. As we drank, we spoke loudly, daring passers-by to say something, so we could snap at them; roar like lions in a cage. But everyone left us alone, and to the other people on Lygon Street in the middle of the night, we might have seemed like any other group of drunk foreigners.

  • • •

  People continued to gather at our house to watch the news and discuss politics. As if they could hear us through the TV, we’d call the NATO pilots idiots when they used an old map and accidentally bombed the Chinese embassy thinking it was a military target. We worried for Aunt Mila, as it was rumored that Radio TV Serbia would be bombed. And one day, it was. The station had been deemed a legitimate military target, as it was spreading Milošević propaganda. Sixteen people died. My aunt hadn’t been on shift that night, but some people she’d worked with had died. “And they hadn’t been Milošević’s people,” Aunt Mila said.

  The NATO campaign was the first in which the brand-new stealth bombers were used, and when one of them was taken down by Serbian missiles, we celebrated, on our feet clapping and jeering at the TV, “How does that feel!?”

  I put on music that my new Yugo friends and I listened to, and my mother’s friends joined in singing—these Yugo rock songs had come out when they were young themselves, before Yugoslavia dissolved. A particular favorite was “Look Homeward, Angel” by the beloved Serbian singer Bora Čorba. The song’s title came from the Thomas Wolfe novel and was meant to highlight the poverty and political instability of Yugoslavia. As we all sang, I thought about all the damage the war had wrought over the last decade.

  And now, in the wake of the NATO bombs falling, we sang the end of the song with the West in mind: “May they feel poverty, fear, and pain on their own skins.” The last bit really stuck with me. I looked at the bald, privileged Australian prime minister, John Howard, and I looked at sleazy, privileged Bill Clinton, at Milošević with his underground bunker, and I hated them. I thought: the people who suffer will always be those who happen to be poor and weak, and the greedy, fortunate bullies will prosper. I thought about my mother’s clients, many of them apolitical, who were the victims of power-hungry leaders. I remembered the taxi driver who threatened to kick my friend and me out of the car for not speaking English even though we were teenagers and in the middle of nowhere, and I lumped him in with the rest of them: Clinton, Howard, Milošević, Australian taxi driver—I wanted them all to drop dead. May they feel it on their own skins, I thought.

  • • •

  Back in Serbia, anti-Western sentiment grew to an all-time high. The opposition movement, which had looked to the West for help in the past, now had trouble dealing with the fact that it was American-led NATO forces bombing them. It was hard to promote a Western-style democracy when you were being bombed by the West. Infighting among opposition groups did nothing to curb the popularity of Milošević, and just like we were annoyed at the Western news, we became annoyed at the opposition parties, who were bickering among themselves instead of uniting against Milošević. Milošević’s popularity blossomed again, as he commiserated with the people, appearing on television to renounce the Western attacks, and to use them as proof that he was right and his opponents were wrong: We were being threatened by foreign powers. We were the victims and the martyrs, as our national myths told us.

  That weekend, Harry had been hanging around my place, where we were meant to be studying for an English exam. Actually, we were eating nachos and watching a Coen brothers film, as I put the finishing touches on a handmade sign. It said “WHERE IS YOUR STEALTH?”—referring to the bomber that had recently been taken down by Serbian forces. “I understand that you don’t want your country to be bombed, but celebrating the death of a pilot isn’t nice,” he said.

  Harry’s point touched a nerve—the sign did go against my assertion that I was a pacifist. But instead of thinking about it some more, and working through my reaction, I pretended that Harry hadn’t said anything. Instead of engaging with his comment, I thought about my little cousin in Belgrade who hid behind the couch when he heard a truck or a helicopter, thinking it was a bomber flying overhead. I thought about my friends from kindergarten who had been denied visas to leave the country and who would be going to university soon just like me, except their degrees would be worth nothing because Yugoslavia was a shithole. That could have been me.

  And even though Harry knew me well, I decided that he didn’t understand me the way my Yugo friends understood me. Of course I would still hang out with him at school, and goof around like we always had, but I would not forget that he was an Aussie. If I’d looked more closely, I might have seen that Harry and I had many more things in common than I had with my Yugo friends, with whom I had just one thing in common: ex-Yugoslavia. Still, even though it was only a nonexistent land that bound me to the Yugos, that community was what I currently needed. So I ignored Harry, listened to Yugo rock on my headphones on the Melbourne tram to the consulate, and glared at anyone who looked over at me and my sign.

  • • •

  A few weeks into the bombing, I was dancing in the club with my friends, nodding my head and mouthing the words to the angsty Yugo rock song “What Am I Supposed to Do?” I lip-synced in the direction of my friend Jovana, who sang back. The song was from the Croatian new wave band Azra and had come out in 1979, but we listened to it as if it was still on the charts. When Yugoslavia started to crumble, Yugo rock crumbled with it, but we still held on, singing at the top of our voices in a Melbourne club, pretending like the culture and art in our country hadn’t come to a standstill twenty years earlier.

  Jovana drew my attention to a guy who was looking over at us, also singing along to Azra. He was tall and tanned and even though he was clearly “one of ours,” with his big nose and olive skin, for a second something about him reminded me of how I pictured Native American hero Winnetou from my favorite childhood book. He was handsome, and his look told me he was kind, confident, and wise. He and I locked eyes and sang the chorus.

  “He seems all right,” Jovana said, appraising the guy glancing at me. Her approval was based on his music taste, and the absence of thick gold chains and hair gel. He gave me a wide, sincere smile. “You dropped this,” he said, bringing over a bobby pin that may or may not have fallen out of my hair, which I’d pinned up in little twists. In my attempt to look casual, I forgot to take the bobby pin from him, and he held it between us like a strange little microphone. He was nineteen and his family was from Sarajevo, although they’d lived in Serbia for a few years before coming to Australia. That meant he was a refugee. His name was Blaža (the ž pronounced like the j in je m’appelle). He talked to me, relaxed, like he didn’t even notice my protective older friends looking over from the DJ booth. He also didn’t seem to care that his friends were looking over at us and nudging each other, as he stooped (he really was very tall) to hear me better, like he was hanging on my every word. Whereas I liked to roll my eyes, smirk, and make ironic comments, he seemed like a genuinely happy person. My heart leapt at being singled out like this, as Blaža ignored every other girl walking by and seemed delighted by everything I said. “What a weird guy,” I said to my friends afterward, playing it cool, as he kept looking over at us from where his friends stood.

  • • •

  After a seventy-eight-day campaign, NATO stopped bombing Serbia, when Milošević agreed to withdraw Yugoslavian forces from Kosovo, provided that Kosovo would be politically supervised by the United Nations and that there would be no in
dependence referendum for three years. Our daily protests against the bombing finally came to an end. The casualties of the yearlong war stood at over thirteen thousand people, most of them Kosovo Albanian civilians. Milošević declared victory, and in a way he had won; Kosovo was still Serbian, and he’d managed to gain back popular support during the bombing. Reports of civilian deaths from the bombing campaign varied widely, and have been estimated at between five hundred and twenty-five hundred. Yugoslavia reported that the damage sustained to the country amounted to $26 billion.

  The following week, I rushed home after school on a Friday to put on a lot of makeup and a floral maxi dress that I’d borrowed from Alicia, which I paired with a choker. Blaža picked me up for a date wearing a carefully ironed light blue shirt and black jeans. We drove to the city in his shiny new Subaru RX, which he’d just bought that day and was extremely proud of, but I didn’t notice, and he never mentioned it because he didn’t want to show off.

  We went to a tiny Italian restaurant that had been recommended to him by friends. There were little candles on the tables, and the whole thing resembled the kind of adult date scene I’d only seen in films. My family didn’t go to restaurants, and my friends and I stuck to cheap casual places. The lighting gave off a flattering orange glow, and I didn’t feel like saying something smart-ass about how clichéd it was. I didn’t feel like this was stupid; I felt like Blaža actually cared about me, and wanted to treat me to something lovely. And I found myself wanting to know all about him. We did not split some fries like I would have with my friends, but instead each of us ordered from the menu. And as we talked, a classic, old school romance seemed like just the thing I wanted, just like when I was a little girl watching romantic films, before I became my wizened seventeen-year-old self.

  I don’t remember what we talked about, except that I found out that Blaža worked with his dad as a builder and carpenter, but his dream was to be a photographer. When we finished eating, he insisted on getting the check, and the little bobby pin that had fallen out of my hair the night I met him fell out of his wallet. I went to pick it up, but he got it instead, tucking it back in his pocket, as if it was precious.

  On the way home, he made a showy U-turn without noticing a Melbourne tram, the same tram that had taken me to the consulate each day after school. The tram hit the back right corner of his brand-new car, and Blaža hid his distress well, pulling over and calmly talking to the tram driver, but privately wondering what his parents would say, as he’d been saving up for the car all year. We drove home happy, despite the damage, Blaža pointing out a huge spiral structure he and his dad had built in the Toyota showroom on the highway near my place. I made a note of it, so I could point it out to people in the future. Perhaps I’d say, “My boyfriend made that.”

  10

  Welcome Not-Home

  Blaža and I started dating as my last year of high school began. He came over when I wasn’t studying and took large black-and-white photos of me, lovingly approving of the dramatic dark lipstick and beret I wore for the occasion. The childhood Disney princess side of me stirred, and in our private time together I felt confident enough to coo at him, to be soppy and loving in a way my cynical, withdrawn self would not normally have allowed.

  I was excited about the next stage of my life, which meant focusing less on my new Yugo friends and nights out, and more on what was coming up. At school, I had my old gang: Harry, Jasmine, and Alicia. After school, I had a real boyfriend. And if I got a high enough score on my end-of-year exams, I’d be accepted into the prestigious University of Melbourne, my top college choice.

  Jasmine and I had become supernerds and were applying to take on a university subject to accelerate our studies. When we were accepted, we took the tram to the university once a week, quizzing ourselves for various upcoming exams as we went deeper into the city center and farther from the suburban life we would soon be able to transcend.

  Our tram stop was right near where my ex-Yugo friends and I had sat around late at night eating pizza after the club. But now I was not Yugo-me, who wore makeup and spoke another language with her friends, but a studious almost-adult, in my ugly McKinnon High School uniform and with my heavy backpack. Jasmine and I entered the University of Melbourne’s beautiful old campus, with its sandstone buildings, courtyards where students would sit reading or smoking, lawns where barefoot hippies played hacky sack. We sat proudly in the lecture hall with legitimate university students and listened to our professor talk about Caravaggio’s use of shadow and how it reflected his personal turmoil, or Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat and how it revealed the artist’s Jacobin politics.

  Our lecturer used words like “pastiche” and “avant-garde” and Jasmine and I pretended like this language was completely normal, like this was exactly where we belonged—rather than in our actual high school, where people expressed themselves in other ways, such as when a kid called Boris stole a car from his dad’s used car lot and drove it onto the back of the school football field.

  Jasmine and I breathed in the possibilities of this new world, dreaming about college-student life. Sitting there in the lectures, I often thought about the university in Belgrade where my parents had once studied, where fascinating young people chatted about politics and music, and I felt myself rising to their level.

  To complement the identity we were trying to assume, Jasmine and I started smoking thin, menthol cigarettes that I’d procured using a fake ID. The cigarettes were colorful, which I hoped would work to spark conversations with fellow students, rather than making us seem more childlike with our pink and turquoise cigarettes, in our school frocks, as we stood outside the campus after class, waiting for Blaža to pull up in his Subaru and take us home, all the way through the city and back to the burbs.

  While we waited, Jasmine and I buoyed each other’s feelings of self-importance. Many of our classmates intended to keep living in the suburbs after they grew up, but we felt sophisticated, bound for interesting lives in the city. Not only were we in an accelerated program at a university, but our ethnicity took on a new meaning here. I came from Europe, not far from where Caravaggio and David had painted their masterpieces, and Jasmine’s family had come from China—a place that our lecturer recognized for its rich cultural history. As we learned about art and revolution, we felt more significant than we normally did in our day-to-day immigrant lives.

  In Blaža’s car, Jasmine and I talked with the authority of experts about the concepts that had been introduced to us only hours before in class. Sometimes, he asked basic questions, and I became exasperated, lecturing him like I was suddenly an art history scholar, and he was a mere amateur photographer whom I had once been charmed by. And then I felt guilty afterward, and then I did it again, and the cycle would continue in an endless loop.

  • • •

  As I was becoming an “adult” over in Melbourne, Serbia was going through its own rite of passage. Though Milošević had enjoyed a surge in support after the NATO bombings, it was now waning, and a student group called Otpor, meaning “resistance,” was enjoying a popularity that previous opposition groups hadn’t managed to muster.

  The Otpor members were inspired by the writings of American political scientist Gene Sharp, who advocated for nonviolent resistance. Otpor’s activities were often aimed at degrading the government, and making Milošević seem small, powerless in the face of their youthful exuberance. Blaža and I delighted at news of their antics, at hearing how Otpor members from the town of Kragujevac broke into a poultry farm and attached white flowers to the heads of turkeys, in imitation of Mira Marković, Milošević’s wife and political collaborator, who wore a flower in her hair. They released the turkeys on the streets and the police ran around trying to catch them, to the joy of townspeople and journalists, who had been tipped off and were snapping photos of the absurd scene, which were then widely distributed. Resistance suddenly seemed attractive.

  Otpor seemed fresh, strong, and unit
ed. Their cheerful resistance was welcomed by the people of a depressed Serbia, where unemployment, poverty, and dissatisfaction were at an all-time high.

  The Serbian people had been humiliated and felt left behind by the world. Those who had previously been pro-Western were still smarting from being bombed by NATO. And now these energetic students decided they were going to fix it, from the inside, by themselves. The youth of Serbia felt capable of bringing about the changes that their parents had failed to enact, and their parents felt a surge of hope with the younger generation.

  The young people were empowered not just by their energy and their growing numbers, but also by their technological knowledge, which superseded that of Milošević’s aging government. It was 1999, and young people had the advantage of being savvy users of new technology. The students had built a bilingual website, they had a dedicated marketing team, they used cell phones and the internet to communicate with one another, and managed to avoid being shut down by the regime, which had a history of suppressing opposition. Suddenly, Milošević seemed like a parent trying to work the internet, while his kids laughed at his incompetence.

  As revolution stirred, Blaža and I were excited to learn that the tiger-owning paramilitary leader Arkan had been assassinated, by a cop with ties to the underworld. Politics back home were interesting again, and we couldn’t help but be drawn into the excitement. With Blaža, whose cheerfulness made him a favorite of my mother and sister, we sat at our place, chatting in our language, excitedly discussing rumors that Arkan had been killed by Milošević because he knew “too much,” as Milošević suspected that his reign was coming to an end. Some speculated that Arkan was working for the West, though I wasn’t sold on this theory, which had been applied to everyone over the years—Tito was said to be working for the West, as were Milošević’s opponents and Milošević himself.