On New Year’s Eve 1999, Otpor staged a huge outdoor concert in Belgrade. They spread rumors that the Red Hot Chili Peppers would be headlining, and tens of thousands of revelers showed up in their Chili Pepper T-shirts under heavy winter coats. As the clock counted down to the New Year, however, the crowd was presented with images on a massive projector: names and photographs of people who had been killed during Milošević’s wars. They were told that there would be no band. They had nothing to celebrate, as this had been another year of war and oppression. The people of Belgrade were told to go home. They’d been given something to think about, and like chided children, they left. The message was: “We must bring him down.”
• • •
In the spring of 2000, as I was preparing for my final exams, posing for my photographer boyfriend, and attending my weekly art history class at the university, Milošević called for an early election in the hopes that he still had enough support to secure power for another four years. Otpor, which now had seventy thousand members, took to the streets. They distributed nearly two million stickers, which simply said, “Gotov je” (“He’s finished”), and were plastered on cars, bathrooms, and walls across Yugoslavia.
As the election neared, the numerous political parties opposing Milošević were still split. Otpor exerted pressure on these groups, and eventually managed to achieve something unheard of: eighteen different political parties came together under one banner to form the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS), united in one mission—to topple Milošević.
The poor and exhausted people of Yugoslavia came out to vote in droves, most of them (according to polls) wearing shoes that were over ten years old. They shuffled to the polling booths, which were wallpapered with “He’s finished” stickers.
Back in Melbourne, we heard the news—DOS had won. The community gathered at our place, and I joined twelve-year-old Natalija in a crazy dance. It was the end of the bad news reports that had been with us our whole lives! We jumped around hugging and screaming, singing along to the song “All of Yugoslavia Is Dancing to Rock and Roll.”
Unwilling to accept defeat, Milošević asked for a second round of voting, and in response, DOS called for a general strike. And for the first time in ten years, the protestors in Belgrade gained a powerful ally—the workers. Forty thousand miners joined the strike, meaning the country’s thermoelectric power would come to a standstill. We cried and laughed at the thought of our country rumbling, finally rising up in a revolution. Milošević went on TV, trying a tactic that had worked for him in the past. He announced that his opponents were funded by the West, and that Otpor and the DOS would bring foreign troops into Serbia, insinuating that they were puppets of the NATO forces. But the miners didn’t budge. The people took to the streets of Belgrade. The police, who had been in secret talks with Otpor, took their posts, but agreed to not attack the protestors.
And then, the best part: from five directions, makeshift convoys converged on the capital. The fed-up people from the small towns, some of them riding actual tractors and bulldozers, made their way to Belgrade. Photos of farmers waving the Otpor flag and their fists in the air reached us and we shouted to no one in particular: “GOTOV JE! ” (“HE’S FINISHED!”) This was “the Bulldozer Revolution.”
The people of Serbia broke into parliament. Falsified votes for Milošević were found inside and tossed from the windows onto the streets. The DOS coalition took control of parliament, and Milošević was forced to concede defeat. After all the violence and unnecessary deaths that had plagued Yugoslavia over the last ten years, Milošević had been brought down through peaceful means. This was what my dad had dreamed of. I remembered when we used to light candles in the Belgrade park, calling for peace when the wars were just starting, and I pretended he was alive now, picturing him healthy and happy in Melbourne, celebrating the long-awaited peace with us.
My family and our ex-Yugo friends were delirious. Blaža brought over a bottle of champagne and my mother, twelve-year-old Natalija, and I drank it. Three months after the revolution, my mother’s college friend and doctor of philosophy Zoran Đinđić became the prime minister of Serbia. He was pro-Western and his idea was to make Serbia modern—to join the European Union and fix the damage that had been done over the decades. Slobodan Milošević—the reason we left Yugoslavia, the reason Blaža’s family had to flee Sarajevo—would soon be sent to the Hague. I only realized that a weight had come off my shoulders when it was no longer there. Milošević had been in our lives since I could remember, and now, he was gone.
• • •
In the last few weeks of 2000, I turned eighteen, finished high school, and had my wisdom teeth extracted. I felt tenderness around the removal sites in my mouth, which I constantly poked with my tongue.
Instead of waiting for December, when my exam scores would arrive, I used the small savings I’d gathered from working at Peter’s (and a substantial donation from my mother) to travel with Blaža to Europe. Thrilled by our upcoming adult adventure, we bought thermal underwear to keep us warm, and gifts for our friends and relatives in the form of little stuffed koalas.
A week before we left Melbourne, we received news that Marko, Dada’s son, the one I went out with in Beijing, had died from an overdose. I sat in the living room with my sobbing mother, stupidly thinking about how I’d made plans to see Marko in Belgrade the next week (his family had moved back there a few years earlier) and wondering if he’d thought about that the night he died. I’d last seen Marko when we had visited them in Beijing, and he was fourteen, drinking at the expat club. As he got older, Marko had developed a drug problem and had recently had an implant inserted under his skin, which was meant to stop him from consuming drugs and alcohol. But Marko had cut out the implant with a knife, gone out on a bender, and died the same night, after visiting all his favorite nightspots, dragging himself from one to another.
As I thought of Marko, the image of him in Beijing, wise beyond his years, cynical, eager to tell me how the world really worked, soon faded and was replaced by another memory, which was contained in an old videotape. I didn’t need to watch the video to remember what was on it—seeing “1986” in my dad’s handwriting on the video’s spine was enough to remind me of its contents, which I’d watched over and over as a kid. The video was shot when I was three and Marko was two, in his family’s courtyard on a sunny summer day in Belgrade, when Yugoslavia was still intact. Our mothers are wearing flowing dresses and smoking cigarettes, their voices so similar: they’d talked to each other every day since they were five, their mannerisms fusing. I’m wearing blue overalls, probably handed down from one of my boy cousins, and a red plastic headband with a plastic bow. Marko’s grandmother had taken him to a hairdresser that morning, and his long, shiny black hair was gone, replaced with a boyish haircut his mother hated. Marko puts my hair band on his freshly shorn head, and starts walking slowly up and down the courtyard, pausing every now and then to look at us like a catwalk model, our mothers making loud exclamations of admiration—“Look at you, Marko!” “You’re so beautiful!”—and he smiles winningly, batting his giant eyes.
He’d looked much the same when I’d seen him in Beijing; he was one of those people you could recognize from a baby picture, except when I saw him, his hair was long again, bangs flopped carelessly into his face. Last time I was in Belgrade, a friend had pointed out that in Serbia, if you take drugs you don’t have a drug of choice, like ecstasy or cocaine, you just take drugs, whatever you can get your hands on. That’s the difference, my friend said, between privileged people in the West taking drugs recreationally, and people taking drugs in a ruined, hopeless country.
• • •
I was still reeling from the news of Marko when Blaža and I arrived at our first stop, London, where everything was double the price we’d expected, and December was colder and wetter than we’d dreaded. On our first day, I bought two pairs of Doc Martens, a classic pair for me, and knowing that she still thought everythin
g I wore was cool, I also got a garishly green limited-edition pair for my sister, weighing down my suitcase. We lived off fries and premade sandwiches at Boots pharmacy, and by the time we left for Belgrade a few days later, I felt soggy and tired.
On the flight to my hometown, my jaw started ticking, like a watch, where my wisdom teeth used to be. Blaža noted that my face had swelled a little, and as we landed, the plane full of Yugos clapped and shouted “Bravo, majstore!” (“Bravo, maestro!”) to the pilot as they always did, but I felt like opening my mouth would be a mistake, so I sat there tight-lipped, like some Western traveler who didn’t know how to show appreciation for a smooth landing. We rode a taxi from Belgrade Airport to my aunt Mila’s house, my face ticking faster and more forcefully. I watched dirty, small Belgrade unfold, as I pressed my face to the cold window. I saw the remnants of the NATO bombings, buildings with holes in them, but Blaža saw other things. He squeezed my hand, excited about the young people gathering around kiosks and clubs, but all I could do was keep thinking I saw Marko among them, and then wonder if he’d been to these places the night he died.
We stayed with Aunt Mila, whose idiosyncratic habits I usually found charming (she drank tea at 10 a.m. every morning, from a pot, like an English person; she had a hot bath every night around midnight; she still used a typewriter for her work). She had separated from my uncle Tim, their sons were still abroad, and now that the apartment was just hers, she lived exactly as she liked. I had, however, forgotten about her insistence on keeping all the windows open, no matter the time of year. When we arrived and I told her the place was freezing, she said, “Oh, please,” and rolled her eyes. The only source of heat was the big radiator in the living room, and I leaned directly on it, letting my hands thaw on the ceramic tiles.
I decided to have a bath and ran the hot water, which produced an incredible cloud of steam, making the icicles around the open window start to melt and drip into the bath. I got in and let my body go red from the heat. When I came out, Aunt Mila looked at my face and said we needed to go see the dentist who lived down the street. Which was pretty convenient, as that was approximately as far as I could walk in my feverish state.
The dentist’s mother opened the door. “Is your son home?” my aunt asked.
“My god, what is wrong with the boy?” the old lady asked, looking at my disfigured visage, wrapped in a scarf.
I tried to say that I was a woman, but it came out as a whistling sound. The old lady led us to a basement-slash-homemade-dental-clinic, where her middle-aged son, slightly annoyed that we had interrupted his dinner, told me my wisdom teeth scars had become infected. He lanced something in my mouth, drained a lot of pus, gave me antibiotics, pocketed the cash we offered, and went back to his cabbage rolls, the smell of which pervaded the place. I went home with antibiotics and instructions on how to press my jaw in a way that would squeeze out the gathering infection.
• • •
On our second night there, Blaža and I wandered the streets past crowded bars, steam coming out of our mouths from the cold, surrounded once again by the sounds of our language. Blaža put his arm around me, and I imagined the sentiment was “Isn’t it great to be home?” but I didn’t feel at home. Was the reason I couldn’t enjoy myself because my mouth was so sore, or something else? Because the city had never been real to me as an adult, I was unaware of the good places to drink, unfamiliar with the city’s rhythms.
The vendors were selling ćevapčići, but I could only tolerate liquids, sipping juice from a straw, popping painkillers every few hours. In my exhausted, medicated state, Belgrade seemed strange and ugly in a new way, the horror of Marko’s death quashing any charm it once held. And the more cheerful Blaža was, the more annoyed I got at him, and the more frustrated with myself for being this way.
As we walked, it occurred to me that when I said I “missed” Belgrade, to Blaža or my friends, I wasn’t actually thinking of this place. I barely knew it. Instead, I missed a small cluster of memories from my early childhood. My Belgrade was a place from another time, where I lived with my young parents. The Belgrade I stood in now seemed like a lie. I’d expected it to welcome me, and hold me the way my parents had done when I was a child, and now I was disappointed. As we trudged along the streets, it became apparent that the place I missed was my life before anything bad ever happened.
• • •
Because I couldn’t eat solid foods for a week, I rapidly lost weight, and I soon found myself a less-glamorous pus-spitting version of the waifish girls of Belgrade’s streets, who still glided effortlessly about as I’d remembered them. I refused to go out at night, preferring to meet friends and family for coffees during the day, and only if I had to. I had never been angry at a place before, but I found myself hating Belgrade, transferring the blind hatred I’d once held for Milošević to the city itself.
I saw my kindergarten friend Milica briefly, and she watched as I dribbled coffee into my mouth, tilting my head from side to side, trying to avoid the sites of my infection. I imagined she was resentful of me when I talked about my exams and university plans, even though I hadn’t been accepted yet. The education system had been slowly eroded by Milošević’s regime and I knew I was an outsider. I hadn’t been present for the protests, I wasn’t a cool Otpor kid, I hadn’t fought for the right to be a student the way my friends had.
I would blame my infected mouth for the fact that I had no interest in going anywhere, the idea of Belgrade itself filling me with an unreasonable dread. Blaža and I didn’t talk much, and if he tried to, I pointed to my mouth and made an excuse, and felt myself withdrawing into myself, shrinking away from his touch, and becoming deaf to his chirpy take on life.
• • •
As my mouth recovered, my attention was taken by a pimple-like lump on my vagina. I found myself spending all my waking hours thinking about my genitals. Did I have a serious disease? After serving me relatively well for eighteen years, my body was apparently falling apart, in solidarity with Yugoslavia. Rather than wait a few weeks and see a doctor in Australia, I decided I needed this new problem seen to, pronto. However, I was convinced that if I went to a local doctor, it would somehow get back to my relatives, specifically my gastroenterologist aunt, whom we hadn’t spoken to since her fight with my mother, and who would now be able to accuse our family of not only being slobby, but also possessing diseased genitals. Instead of venturing into a hospital where my aunt might have colleagues with loose lips, I found an ad for a clinic on the outskirts of town, and took Blaža with me. The clinic was called Lady Medica, and there was a neon love-heart above the door. A casual woman about my mother’s age examined both me and Blaža and concluded that I had genital warts, while he was perfectly healthy. Before we could have an awkward conversation about how I alone could have contracted an STD, the doctor said that I’d probably got it from a hotel towel, and that it happens all the time. I scheduled an appointment for the following week to have the warts removed.
To my relief, Blaža went to visit friends in Bosnia while I stayed in Belgrade, free to watch films in Aunt Mila’s apartment, recover from my dental problems, and wait for my vaginal warts removal appointment without any pressure to have fun. I met up with Marko’s younger brother Alex, and we just stood around for a while.
“I don’t really know why we’ve met up, there’s nothing to talk about,” he muttered, looking at the ground. And really, there was nothing to talk about, so we said goodbye. He left me at the bookstore in the university’s faculty of philosophy. I had once loved this bookstore. Now I walked through it, running my hand over books, repeating to myself, “I don’t care.”
Without the pressure of Blaža, who wanted to go out and see the city and have a nice time, I was free to be a recluse. Our Australian cell phones didn’t work over here, and if he tried to call my aunt’s landline from Bosnia, I kept the conversations short; I was afraid if I stayed on the phone longer, I would start crying for no reason, or that I would snap at
him.
Every few days, I walked around the Red Star soccer stadium to get to my grandma Beba’s place. I’d been told to be careful, as a friend had been bitten on the butt by a stray dog near the stadium. The number of strays had increased in the last couple of years, and the rumor was that a lot of people had abandoned their pets because they couldn’t afford to keep them, including big purebreds like German shepherds and Dobermans, who had mated with the previously scrappy stray-dog gene pool, making strays bigger and more fierce than they’d been in the past. The bombing, other people said, had made the dogs crazy. But much as I imagined them in their mighty packs as I walked alone, I didn’t see any strays; there was just the wind whipping around the stadium and the sound of faraway voices.
Like a huge chunk of the population, Grandma Beba had become obsessed with Kassandra, a Venezuelan telenovela that had made its way onto the airwaves. Even though I was her beloved grandchild, when it came to Kassandra, I played second fiddle, though I was invited to sit with her on the couch to watch. “She is an orphan in a banana plantation,” Beba explained breathlessly, bringing me up to speed before the show started. Kassandra herself was beautiful and honest; two men wanted her—one the audience was rooting for, the other a scoundrel—but Kassandra didn’t know that. Kassandra had taken Serbia by storm, and my grandmothers weren’t the only ones who were addicted to it. It was the most popular show on television, and the obvious reason seemed to be that it provided people with an escape from their dreary lives in a country that was still, despite the new leadership, economically ruined. Those who had expected everything to be fixed by the fall of Milošević were disappointed, and the brightly colored world of Kassandra took them to a place far from gray Serbia.
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Page 24
