Diary of Interrupted Days (3 page)

During the first few months after he retired, the General indeed took to reading, approaching it as if it were his new job. He got up at five in the morning, had a shower, shaved, and made his first coffee. Then he read the newspapers in the living room for an hour. After a breakfast and his second coffee, he went into his study, where he would sit at his desk with a book opened flat in front of him, his notebook positioned a little to the right, his golden fountain pen next to it. He would put his glasses on, and begin to read, and wouldn’t get up until one, when Boris’s mother called him for lunch.

Later, in Canada, when exile edited his list of new friends without regard for his personal prejudices, Boris for
the first time had the chance to spend more time with engineers of different kinds, and he saw the same need for precision in them.

It was so noticeable he wondered whether there were only two types of human brains in this world: that of an engineer (or soldier, or scientist) and that of an artist. Gender didn’t seem to influence the mindset, nor class, nor colour of skin or ethnicity. Engineers wanted to measure and polish everything until it was perfect, and then they wanted to preserve it in that final state. Artists wanted to make jazz of everything. Late, disorganized, insecure, sensitive to the point that they seemed mostly incapable of communicating in any language. If you could find a brilliant engineer and a brilliant artist of exactly the same IQ, same age, and same background, put them in the same room, and put only one object in front of them, they would each describe different things. Yet both moved the world: one in seconds, degrees, radians; the other in reflections, hints, wisps.

For months, his father read—but then cracks in his concrete schedule started to appear. He would come out of his room to fill his coffee cup or to make a telephone call. Then he stopped altogether. In the late fall of 1987, he began leaving the apartment as soon as he had finished his morning newspapers, always checking his watch before he left, as if he did not want to be late. Then he started holding sessions at home with some of his old soldier friends. They went into his study and stayed there for hours, talking in subdued voices. Then new faces started appearing at those meetings.

Boris was already at the door one day when the elevator opened and a tall man stepped out. He was a legendary theatre director, also the son of a general, whom Boris had met several times during his art studies. They had even talked one time about Boris designing one of his shows, but that had never happened.

Confused, Boris extended his hand. “Hello, Maestro. Are you looking for—?”

“You? Not this time. I’m meeting with some people in
IIB
—” He saw the number on the open door behind Boris, and added, “Oh, I guess I’m seeing your father, then.” He smiled a little awkwardly. Boris moved aside. “Have fun,” he said, and headed for the elevator. He was late for his own meeting at the Student Cultural Centre.

So his father had entered politics. The director had just become a member of the United Left, a new party made up of ex-communists. Everybody in Belgrade’s artistic circles talked about his betrayal: he had clashed with the communist regime all his life but now he had become one of the new apparatchiks.

An hour later, sitting at the brainstorming session for a new collective project that would ridicule both the famous director’s new party and Milosevic’s Socialists, Boris suddenly realized: his father and him—direct enemies now.

That project, titled “Giant Shadows of Little Men,” turned out to be difficult to execute and—for one reason or another—opened in the Happy Gallery on a Sunday in February 1989, several months late. The idea was to toy with genealogy, to ridicule the nationalists who claimed that Serbs were among the oldest peoples on earth. One
artist enlarged the image of a single amoeba and turned it into a passport photo. Another exhibited a broken fork—sculpted in stone—with the caption, “An early Serbian fork; 1200 BC.” Boris chose to manipulate pictures from his family album: in one collage, his grandfather was a priest with a large cross on his chest and a Hitler moustache; in another his mom was addressing a Communist Party congress, her fist raised, in full red regalia. The General was there, too, a child riding a white horse through the streets of liberated Belgrade at the end of World War II, the masses ecstatic, carnations falling on his head. The nationalist media immediately and satisfyingly attacked the exhibition, calling the artists either traitors or internationalists—equally bad in a country crossbreeding xenophobia with paranoia. Only one independent magazine published an affirmative review, and the author heaped kudos on Boris’s work. A couple of days later, Boris came home late to find an envelope leaning against the lamp on the desk in his room. Inside was a letter from his father:

Boris moved out that same night, a suitcase in one hand, a large black portfolio of his drawings in another. He stayed for a week with Johnny, then found a small studio, the first of several he would rent during the next few years. He was lucky that Johnny was not on tour the night he left home.
He was lucky that a few months earlier he had done a cover design for Johnny’s most successful album ever, and that Johnny and he had become friends. He was lucky to meet Johnny’s girlfriend, Sara, that night. Her face was familiar: she worked in the news department of Belgrade TV. She and Johnny had been together for three years already, but Boris had never met her until he turned up homeless on Johnny’s doorstep. Later he wondered why it was Johnny he had turned to. Some of his colleagues had studios—he could have crashed there, and stayed longer. Was it because Johnny had meant burning, and not slow release? Or because Boris had wanted to exit his world and step into an unknown? Or because he had known, only five minutes after he had first met Johnny, that the two of them would be best friends forever?

Several miles into Serbia, Miša pulled off the road to park behind a small white car. The car’s driver got out—he wore a large badge with a target on it—and opened his trunk, which was full of canisters of gasoline. He shook Miša’s hand then filled the minibus tank. As Miša and Boris drove away, the man waved at them.

“You can’t find gas anywhere except with guys like him,” Miša said. “I used to carry my own canisters, but I don’t want to ride on a bomb.”

Miša was not joking when he said that once inside Serbia he would drive as fast as he could. The old engine roared as they blasted along, occasionally swerving into the oncoming lane to avoid bumps. As the day grew older, the traffic slowed. The road was empty in both directions.

Miša had to yell over the revving engine. “I saw the demonstrations in Toronto on television when the bombing started. Were you there when they set the American consulate on fire?”

“I saw the man who did it,” Boris said. “He was masked, and had one of those Palestinian scarves around his head. He passed me in the crowd, holding something tight under his jacket. A minute later the fire broke out.”

“So who was he then, a provocateur?”

“I don’t know, but the Serb protesters never wore those headscarves.”

“The Americans deserved it.”

“What was the point? After that the cops put up concrete barricades and moved us to the other side of the street. And there were so many cameras on the roofs around us that I’m sure none of us will need a passport photo ever again.”

“Forty minutes to Novi Sad,” Miša said, pressing harder on the gas as the old minibus engine revved higher.

Like most women married to army officers, Boris’s mother was a homemaker in the truest sense of the word. She was halfway through her university studies—French language and literature—when she met the General. Soldiers attack head on, full force, and they were married six months later. The first few years were hard times. His father served in remote areas and was often posted from town to town. But he moved up the ranks quickly and, finally, they were able to settle in Belgrade in a large, sunny apartment in an old building confiscated from some industrialist after World War II.

His father’s friends were other officers who often visited with their wives. These women were all similar—handsome, but quiet and obedient—as if there were a prescribed type that a high-ranking officer was supposed to marry. None of them worked. Their husbands earned almost as much as the country’s political leaders and their power seemed limitless. When he had achieved his rank, Boris’s father had helped his relatives find jobs, get better apartments, get good loans from banks. Perhaps the only thing his father was never allowed to do was to travel abroad. Several times he went on business trips to Russia and Czechoslovakia, but the family spent their holidays on the Adriatic coast.

Boris started travelling without his parents when he was a teenager, always to the West. At first, he behaved like every other Yugoslav tourist, shopping relentlessly, returning with dozens of records, jeans, and new sneakers. Later, when he was studying fine arts, he spent most of his time in museums and galleries. His favourite one was the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. That’s where he was first hit by an El Greco.

When Boris turned eighteen, his father gave him a trip to Amsterdam as a present. On the highest shelf in a dusty bookstore run by an old Russian Jew near a canal in the red-light district, he found a rare edition of Solzhenitsyn’s
Gulag Archipelago
and thought that it would be a nice way of saying thank you. The book was bound in leather and it had obviously changed hands many times before ending here: the cover was creased and rough like a wise old face. He hid it in his luggage
when he returned to Belgrade because he wasn’t sure whether it was prohibited in Yugoslavia as it was in Russia—he believed it was.

His father took the package, unwrapped it, thanked him curtly and put the book on a shelf in the living room next to the romantic literature his mother kept on display for her friends. Compared to the books around it, which were neat and looked brand new, the Solzhenitsyn looked out of place. In poor taste.

When they sat together as a family for lunch—rarely, because Boris found myriad excuses not to take part—that book stared at him from the shelf. At first Boris thought his father put it there because the book was worn out and he loved his books untouched by anyone except himself. Once, when he was alone at home, he took it to the old bookbinder on the Boulevard of Revolution, to see if the cover could be fixed, or a new one made. The old man took the book in his hands, looked at it carefully from all sides, opened the cover, took one look from the top, and said, “This was done by a master. Keep it as it is, son.” Boris carried it home and put it back on the shelf.

Several months later he finally read the book, and it became clear to him why his father had segregated the
Gulag
from the rest of his books. The General wanted his Russia to remain virginal. The book with the wise face screamed of murder and rape and pillage, and threatened to fill his utopia with cadavers. After that, Boris purposely chose a place at the table so that the book was just behind him: This is me, and this is not your Gorky.

Even in the middle of the General’s reading fever, six
years later,
Gulag
remained intact on the same shelf, among the books that were never consumed.

“Look at these fields,” Miša said. “Look at the cherries, the apples. Everything is blooming unbelievably this year. Some old folks say it always happens in the war years here.”

The orchards on the left were covered in soft pink and white clouds. Cotton puffs full of powder from the woman in the sky.

Miša slowed down and reached for the pack of cigarettes that Boris had left on the dashboard.

“Do you mind?”

“No, go ahead,” Boris said.

“Honestly, that’s what keeps me here. This greenery around us. I keep staring at the trees, who tell me, ‘It will be okay. All will be good again.’”

“When you make the run to Budapest, do you ever think of not coming back?”

Miša answered very quickly, and by that speed Boris knew that he was lying.

Boris looked at his watch. Two-ten.

On the May Day weekend the year Boris turned thirteen, the General took him on an outing to a military training ground outside Belgrade. The General and several of his high-ranking colleagues and their sons were gathering for a party put on by the old friend who ran the garrison.

After meeting up in the Soldiers’ Club, they all climbed into a brand-new olive-green bus. A few of the older boys talked happily about the last such party, but Boris and the
other younger children were mostly silent, not knowing what to expect. Twenty minutes later, the bus stopped and they got out. The weather was beautiful, Boris remembered. His mother made him wear the new brown sweater she had bought for him from a woman who had smuggledit in from Italy. It was too warm, but he didn’t dare take it off, because everyone else was buttoned up. The father-officers led their sons towards a group of soldiers standing by wooden crates that held ammunition and rifles. In the field in front of them were targets, some concentric circles and others shaped like men. This was the rifle range. Boris started to perspire. That sweater.

Joking among themselves, the fathers each picked out new shiny rifles and went to the left side of the range. The soldiers, looking stern or maybe just a little nervous, distributed rifles to the boys and led them to the right, where they instructed the boys to lie down on the pieces of tarpaulin that were laid along the shallow trenches. Each boy was given instructions on how and when to shoot. The rifle was heavy, the stock was a little too big for Boris’s hand, but it still felt nice to hold it. Then a corporal raised a red flag, and the firing started. On the left side, the fathers let loose long, heavy bursts of fire, like a rowdy flock of woodpeckers. The wooden silhouettes split into pieces and new ones appeared in their place. Boris held his rifle tight, aimed, held his breath—he felt cold on his stomach through the tarpaulin—and fired. Again. And again.