The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  All of which added up to pretty depressing situation, and the near-universal chain-smoking lent a morbid pall. But Nicola, a printer by trade whose father was a local politician, was one of those congenital optimists you find from time to time returning to their troubled hometowns after a cosmopolitan youth with big ideas about making them off-the-beaten-track hipster destinations. He convinced the city council to let him use the lobby of the old unused theater to open a bar and café with a small stage. (The restaurant next door was named, without explanation, Poughkeepsie N.Y. 12601.) He planned to refurbish the ruins of the theater for bigger shows. Maybe he’d even put on a festival by the river. He had lived in London for five years, studying drums and touring with an American jazz bassist. He’d even had plans to tour the United States with a band, but his visa hadn’t come through. Then his British visa expired, so he came home instead. “It’s OK,” he said. “The singer killed himself a week into the American tour anyway! . . . Have you met Miki?”

  Miki was another small-town type: the solitary hipster. A lugubrious Harry Dean Stanton lookalike, he was proud of his two-thousand-item vinyl library, meticulously collected over thirty-five years of pre-Internet, cross–Iron Curtain mail order (although the Coltrane and others were Soviet pressings of dubious authorization). “I have four Velvet Underground original pressings!”

  He lived in a farmhouse well outside town that he had inherited from his recently deceased mother. “He’s like a forty-six-year-old baby,” said another person at the café. “He always lived in that house with his mother, and she cooked for him and cleaned his clothes, and now he’s there alone and he doesn’t know how to do anything.” Miki told me he was farming corn and herbs in the plot behind the house. “Just enough to survive.” We stayed up late smoking weed and listening to the Incredible String Band.

  Serbia has two major highways: a north–south road, the M5/E75, that runs from Budapest to the Greek coast at Thessaloníki, and an east–west road, the A3/E70, from Zagreb to Belgrade. I was only on the latter—no traffic but for a few trucks—for forty-five minutes before turning onto village roads. Like many structurally challenged areas, such as Mongolia and Siberian Russia, the trash-disposal protocol left something to be desired, at least from the standpoint of presenting the best face to the gaze of the passing traveler. The town dump was a half-acre pile by the road, and thus the surrounding farmland was littered with windblown plastic bags. The only town center en route to Novi Sad was something called Irig, whose sole distinguishing architectural feature was a brick structure buttressed in all directions by two-by-fours. Garish nouveaux riche mansions separated themselves from subsistence garden plots with prefab metal fences. Homemade signs advertised MED—VINO—RAKIJA (honey, wine, moonshine). The color palette, like much of rural Eastern Europe, was pastel wash: pink, lime, lavender, goldenrod, beige.

  The GPS, for some geopolitical reason, knew only the two crosswise highways in Serbia, so I had to navigate the old-fashioned way—if by old-fashioned, we can agree to mean finding the route on my phone’s Google Maps app, then taking screenshots of zoomed-in chunks. The road went up into Fruška Gora National Park. These are the Frankish Hills, “which are called by that name,” said Rebecca West, “for a historical reason incapable of interesting anybody.”

  The Englishwoman West, described by Robert Kaplan as the “writer of twenty books, young mistress of H.G. Wells, social outcast, and sexual rebel,” is the spiritual guide of any Westerner traveling through the south Slavic countries. Her massive Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, based on a six-week trip through the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the midwar interregnum of 1937, is like a nut of a travel book wrapped in layers of encyclopedia, mythology, and psychological and sociological history, spiced with shiv-sharp feminist commentary. Its steely and principled opposition to encroaching fascism is undercut only in retrospect by faintly erotic paeans to Serbian militarism and masculinity—then, of course, a celebration of an underdog nation long harried between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires.

  West repeatedly compared the Fruška Gora (“the jewel of Serbia”) to Scotland, describing “the most entrancing rounded hills, clothed with woods now golden rather than green with springtime, which ran down to vast green and purple plains, patterned with shadows shed by a tremendous cloudscape.” She made of the mountains, and the ancient monasteries within that held the relics and mummies of the medieval Serbian empire, a symbol for the masochism and nostalgia of Serbian nationalism.

  It goes to show you the difference between seeing a place in the summer and the winter: I saw only low hills with sad, thin forests, like the Ozarks, without even a layer of underbrush. A line of trucks was doing about fifteen miles per hour, and cars began to pass them in the left lane, at first just one or two and then by the tens and dozens. As I joined them, I thought that everyone had just decided to cruise in the passing lane until they saw an oncoming car. In this part of the world, in which traffic laws are indistinguishable from anarchy, I wouldn’t be surprised. (Eventually, within the forest, the highway divided into opposing lanes—not that the change was marked.)

  On the far side of the mountains was the provincial center of Novi Sad, the longtime cultural center of Serbia. The club CK13 was a walled compound of progressive and activist sentiment. Like many similar institutions on the Danube periphery, it was quietly funded by virtuous German NGOs and foundations supporting antifascist organizations. It’s a peculiar irony of postwar German liberalism that its NGOs (or perhaps GOs—the level of state subsidy is unclear) underwrite the antiglobalization, antistatist, anarcho-syndicalist activism of these sorts of youth centers. It’s all in the name of combating bigotry—the rest just comes with the worldview of the young European left. In years of touring Germany, I’ve often bristled at the oppressive political consciousness and correctness of German punks.2 One explained to me recently that “because of our past, we have to go out of our way to be the ‘good’ country, and to take the high moral ground on every issue, and it can make us seem humorless because we are trying to all the time be a kind of policeman of ourselves and everyone to do the right thing.” (Former West German chancellor Willy Brandt said his country had to be “a nation of good neighbors, at home and abroad.”) It plays like a cultural descendant of a particularly moralistic Protestantism, reminiscent of the righteous reaction of postwar children that also led to leftist terrorism in the 1970s, and becomes a kind of authoritarianism of progressive ideals.3

  I remember being cornered, just before 9/11, by an intense German demanding the details of President Bush’s policy on Macedonian border disputes. I could only respond that not only did I not know the president’s position on that question, I was pretty sure the president didn’t know it either.

  I came to think of it as “Germansplaining”: that moment when a German kid starts explaining to me how the American political system works.

  My mother hen here was a soft-spoken, dark-haired elf named Ozren. He warmed up soup and pasta in the communal kitchen, showed me the bedroom over the bar, and then took me on a quick walking tour of the center of town. We recapped the relatively short but eventful history of Novi Sad. The second city of Serbia and the capital of the northern, Hungarianized region of Vojvodina, it was founded late and destroyed repeatedly. Like many historical divides in the Balkans, this one has to do with the complex interactions between ethnic settlement and the shifting Hapsburg/Ottoman border. West explained that after an ill-fated Serbian revolt against the Turks in 1689, the reigning Austrian emperor “offered [the Serbs] asylum on his territories, with full rights of religious worship and a certain degree of self-government. . . . The [Serbian] Patriarch accepted the offer and led across the Danube thirty thousand Serbian families, from all parts of the land, as far south as Macedonia and Old Serbia,” now known as Kosovo. This migration of refugees, combined with Serbs settled there in earlier times by the Ottomans, became the Vojvodina region and the city of Novi Sad. It was the largest Serbian city for the next two
centuries, until it was decimated by the Hungarians in 1848.

  “It’s a complicated history,” said Ozren. “Have you talked to anyone here about the bombing?” he asked me, referring to NATO’s 1999 air campaign.

  I hadn’t.

  “It was crazy. The bombs were so . . . accurate. They sent one to the parliament building and hit one specific office. The rest of the building was fine. . . . They would announce what they were targeting, so mostly people weren’t killed.”

  In a moment of absentmindedness, he’d thought the show was scheduled for April 25, not March 25, until our mutual friend Dejan called two weeks earlier and reminded him. “We canceled the movie screening,” he reassured me. I replied that I’d opened for stranger acts than a movie.

  We met Dejan at a beer bar. A charismatic, hyperverbal, big-boned booking agent for hardcore bands, he had an intense manner that set Ozren’s quiet and ironic demeanor in relief. I was under the impression that Dejan had put me in touch with some Bulgarian booking contacts and thanked him.

  “No way,” he said. “They have a real problem with right-wingers at hardcore shows in Bulgaria. People get their tires slashed and stuff, so I don’t book there.” 4

  This wariness of Bulgarian touring was echoed by Sasha, my promoter in Kyiv: “I don’t know any bands that go there. All the hardcore shows are full of Nazis.”

  It’s the second most common complaint I hear, and they followed it, like a script, with the most common: that the punk scene in Novi Sad, they agree, is not what it was a few years ago. “These things come in cycles,” said Dejan philosophically. “Five years on, and five years off.”

  I’d met Dejan the year before, when we stayed up drinking by the club’s courtyard fire pit with an effusive Hold Steady superfan and his friend, the singer of the local punk band the Bayonets. They had strong opinions: about Gogol Bordello, who they condemned for doing a Coke commercial, and about the Serbian director and musician Emir Kusturica, whom they accused of being a radical Serbian nationalist in a progressive globalist’s clothing. Kusturica converted from his Islamic roots to Orthodox Christianity, they said, and presents a face of inclusive “world music” while being a “state project” funded by the nationalist government. (Indeed, his film Underground, which won the Cannes Jury Prize, was partially funded by Yugoslav state-owned television, although that isn’t necessarily an unusual arrangement.) “He showed his true face” while on tour with Manu Chao, they said—he objected to a Manu Chao T-shirt listing concert dates that included Kosovo as a non-Serbian city.

  I’d fallen hard for the Kusturica mythos in the early 2000s, as did many in what became the New York “gypsy punk” scene. The colorful, gold-toothed Rabelasian fairy tales of his film Black Cat, White Cat and the Balkan rock of his band Zabranjeno Pušenje (later called the No Smoking Orchestra) fed a facile, romantic exoticism of a world of roguish present-day pirates and clowns. Zabranjeno Pušenje (“No Smoking”) was part of the 1980s generation of controversial, punk-influenced bands across the communist sphere who became associated with a wry, surrealist version of anti-establishment commentary. The best-known anecdote about the band involves a concert in Rijeka during which a band member announced, “The Marshall is dead . . . I mean, the amplifier.” This was widely understood as a pun referring to the late Yugoslav strongman Marshal Tito, and the band gained as much in countercultural credibility as they lost in the official clampdown on their music—concerts canceled, records banned from the radio—that followed.

  Kusturica was a late, minor member of Zabranjeno Pušenje, and the band broke up with the onset of the Yugoslav wars. After the war, Kusturica revived the name with a Belgrade-based rump organization called Emir Kusturica & the No Smoking Orchestra, with an “ethno-rock” sound barely related to that of the original group. (A competing, Sarajevo-based group using the name Zabranjeno Pušenje plays the original, garage-rock style.) Kusturica’s version of the group, while popular overseas, is controversial in a wholly different and less sympathetic way than the 1980s punk incarnation: he is widely seen as sympathetic to the violent Serbian nationalism of Slobodan Milošević; is a supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin (he was a guest at Putin’s third inauguration in 2012); and has written a song (“Wanted Man”) in support of the indicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić, with lyrics including “If you don’t like Dabic Raso”—a nickname for Karadžić—“You can suck our dicks.” Tilman Zülch, the German president of the NGO Society for Threatened Peoples, published an impassioned anti-Kusturica letter in 2009 that began “Stop the propaganda for war criminal Karadzic on the Munich concert stage!” and ended “P.S. It is unbelievable that Emir Kusturica is still Serbia’s UNICEF ambassador.” Once again, as in the cases of Letov and Limonov, an artist associated with anticommunist rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s made a latter-day turn into strident, even xenophobic nationalism. As Nietzsche once said, “Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind.”

  Both Ozren and Dejan were politely skeptical about the evening’s show. There might have been six people in the room for my first visit last year, and we decided, at Ozren’s strong suggestion, that I would perform acoustically on the floor. So when, back at the club, people started pouring in, I rushed to set up onstage. It was one of those shows that makes you think, against all evidence to the contrary, that sometimes the game still works like it’s supposed to, that if you just keep coming back to a place eventually you’ll break through. Drunk but articulate, the crowd was dominated by relentless, though good-natured, hecklers, and they kept me fresh and quick.

  I slept in the guest room upstairs, under the warm gaze of gay-tolerance propaganda posters featuring stylish butch lesbians. The shower was awkwardly located down the hall, in the bathroom of an active office. I say “shower,” but that’s not quite right: there was a hose screwed onto the sink, and a cloth mop and bucket to dry the floor when you were done. A towel around my waist, I nodded good morning to the arriving office workers.

  For three of the past four days, I had awoken to blizzard conditions, as the snow I outran the day before caught up with me in the morning. This morning, I pulled out my phone to call ahead and cancel the evening’s concert, but some vestigial showbiz reflex made me pause and give the show a chance to go on. The streets of Novi Sad weren’t, of course, plowed, but it was a heavy wet snow that turned quickly to slush and melted under my tires. I got out of the city, across the bridge over the Danube, and turned back up into the Fruška Gora hills, my wheels slipping ever so slightly.

  At the park’s entrance, two policemen were leaning into the window of a stopped car, and I thought the road was closed. They waved me through. I wound my way up to the ridge, crawling and slipping. At the peak sat a line of stopped cars. “Not again,” I thought, with visions of another night spent becalmed on a snowy foreign road. I had the impulse to pull a U-turn, head back to the city, and take the longer highway route through Belgrade.

  But Serbs are made of sterner stuff than the French—in West’s words, “they were certain in any circumstances to act vigorously”—and not five minutes of fidgety inaction passed before a dump truck the size of a small house lumbered forward from the back of the line of traffic and nudged its way to the front, and we began to creep forward in its wake. Once the line was moving, restless drivers chafed at the slow speed and began to pass the plow truck on the snowy downhill, and in this way we put the storm behind us.

  Assume what you might about potholed Serbian highways, but they had the benefit of being nearly deserted, and the gas stations had free Wi-Fi and toilets with proper seats, which is more than I can say for large portions of France. The road was steamy with fog and littered, on both sides of the Serbian–Croatian border, with the broken fluff of what must be the slowest, dumbest sparrows in creation. It’s hard to imagine what the birds were eating on the roads—worms can hardly crawl through asphalt—but they didn’t have the reflexes for such hazardous grazing. E
very mile or two, another startled bird thudded off my front bumper. One was a direct, bloody hit in the center of my windshield. A stubborn feather stuck to the glass for hours.

  I crossed the border alongside a convoy of vans and heavy machinery painted blue with a yellow stripe and labeled “Republika Slovenija Civilna Zaščita” (Republic of Slovenia Civil Defense). One flatbed hauled a four-wheel off-road vehicle; another was loaded with kayak paddles. As I passed Zagreb and approached the craggy Adriatic coast, the low hills and huddled hamlets gave way to frosted mountain tunnels and majestic elevated bridges over vast pine valleys. Some government organization had, for obscure reasons, erected bear silhouettes along the roadside, which caused me more than one adrenaline-shot double take.

  Once through the final tunnels to the littoral, I might as well have been in a different country. The sun—the sun!—was shining in a clear sky, and the pine had given way to sweeping, sail-shaped mountain peaks covered in threadbare deciduous forest. The beauty of the Dalmatian coastline is matched only by the exploitation of same—once for natural resources, now for favorable exchange rates and Caligulan vacations taken by British lugs. “The human animal is not competent. That is the meaning of the naked Dalmatian hills,” wrote West. Centuries of reckless logging, by Illyrians and Romans, Hungarians and Venetians, had treated the land with “the carelessness that egotistic people show in dealing with other people’s property. . . . After this wholesale denudation it was not easy to grow the trees again.” But over the hills is the blue vista of Rijeka and the sea, with accents of port crane. Like Dundee, or Duluth, the city climbs vertiginously from coast to cliff. Here the cliffs are scaled by weathered stone buildings and crumbling concrete housing projects, whose grotty and disintegrating functionalism stands in sharp contrast to the spectacular seaside.