In Europe (115 page)

In 1993, just before I left Novi Sad, I found a long letter waiting at the front desk of my hotel. It was from an acquaintance, a Croatian woman. She urged me to be careful, and finally she wrote: ‘I had a dream in which there was no war. I breathed the fresh air of Slovenian snow, I ate the bread of Croatia, I drank Bosnian wine, I sang songs from Serbia and I lay in the beautiful fields of Vojvodina. It was my country, it was my home. For twenty-eight years I lived in a beautiful country and now, after only two years, they're trying to tell me it was all my imagination, nonsense, illusions. Except: twenty-eight years is not an illusion to me.
My father was born in that imaginary land, and so was my grandfather. How can that be a fantasy?’

She had translated the letter into English with great difficulty, having to look up almost every word in the dictionary. I went to where she lived to say goodbye. She and her husband lived in a lovely house on the Danube, no one in those parts had ever cared whether you were a Serb or a Croatian. Then the war came. The rumbling of the battle at Vukovar carried across the river and into their home, like the sound of distant thunder, every night.

One morning, down by their neighbour's orchard, the body of a woman had floated up, her eyes wide open, staring at the sky. And when they tried to whitewash the gate of the fortress of Novi Sad – this all happened around the same time – snakes came crawling out of every nook and cranny, hundreds of snakes of a kind they had never seen before. ‘We want to leave here,’ she had written, ‘but we don't know how, with a four-year-old child, where can you find a new job and a house?’ She had no intention of going to Croatia. ‘If I must be a foreigner, then I'd rather be a foreigner in China.’

It is a clear December morning in 1999. The film director žZelimir Zilnić and I are taking a long walk beside the river. The words of György Konrád in Budapest still echo in my mind: ‘The sooner Miložsević and his gang are gone, the better. But no Hungarian, no Czech, no Bulgarian, no Rumanian would ever come up with the idea of bombing the bridges of Novi Sad to accomplish that. To think up something like that you have to be far, very far removed from our reality.’

And so there they lie. No attempt has been made to clear the rubble. The oldest bridge in particular is a dearly departed one. Atop the lanterns, partly under water now, a row of gulls is sitting in the sun. ‘The next morning, there were a lot of people standing on the banks, weeping,’ žZelimir told me. ‘On the far shore, the nationalists began singing their songs, that was horrible too.’ The traffic now hobbles across a makeshift pontoon bridge.

A friend of his had seen the last of the bridges collapse before his eyes. ‘It was 3 p.m., lovely weather, you could see the cruise missile come sailing in across the river.'A few other acquaintances had fought in Kosovo,
they had told him how to deflect cruise missiles from their course: a big sheet of cardboard or chipboard painted green, in the shape of a tank, with a hole in it. Behind the hole you lit an alcohol burner for the infrared, and even the smartest of warheads thought it was homing in on a tank. ‘It costs ten marks, and it will take out a missile that costs a million.’

We walk past the big gleaming headquarters of the NIS, Miložsević's state oil company, close to the bridge. It had not been scratched. In Shanga, however, a Gypsy neighbourhood, we end up by the ruins of a hovel that did take a direct hit. The woman next door is willing to talk to us, and invites us in. Her name is Dragica Dimić, she's twenty-three, she has two children and her world consists of a leaky roof, a dark room that measures three metres by four, two brown, lice-ridden beds, a wood stove and a little flickering TV. She has nothing in the world but herself, her intelligence and her unconditional love for her children and her husband. The only bright things in the room are a loaf of white bread and her eyes.

‘It was last June,’ she says. ‘Late in the evening, we were standing outside talking to the neighbours across the fence. They'll probably come after the refinery again, we told each other. We heard the planes coming, there was a bright light. We went inside. Suddenly there was this sound: ssssss. We were thrown against the wall, everything shuddered and burst. More explosions. We threw ourselves on top of the children, covered them with our bodies. Then we raced out of the house, it was all dust and smoke. Our youngest son was covered in blood. Water was spraying out of the pipes, power lines were hissing and popping. We ran out into the field. I could hear my neighbour screaming in the distance. Their house had been hit, her husband was bleeding to death. I was so frightened, I thought: they're going to start shooting at us with machine guns, from the air. Our house was in ruins. That week, it rained the whole time. We built it back up more or less by ourselves.’

We talk a little about her life, while the children nuzzle up to her. ‘Do you ever go out these days? To a wedding, or a name day, or something?’ žZelimir asks. ‘Sometimes I go out with my friends, to gather wood in the forest. Then we're gone for half the day. That's always a lot of fun.’ Her husband works on building sites, he earns just enough to buy a few
potatoes, a couple of kilos of fat and a carton of cigarettes. ‘I'll tell you the truth: I like this life, as long as the war stops. I'm happy that my children and I can sleep together again, the way we used to, please write that down.’

Ever since the early 1990s, a bus full of young people has left each night for Budapest: you save your hard-earned money for a ticket, you pack your bags and you go. After receiving their diplomas, students pick up their suitcases and walk straight to the bus. In a gallery along the street, beneath the words ‘We have left’, the wall is covered with passport pictures, thousands of them; politicians, journalists, professors, young people. All the stories of flight come down to the same thing: gather your wits, take a good look at the situation, save your money, buy a ticket, get out and then see what happens.

In a survey taken in those years, the Serbs were asked what they would prefer: a secure job and a fixed salary for the next twenty years, or four times the salary with a fifty-fifty chance of losing their jobs. Ninety-five per cent of them chose job security. ‘Every family here has gone through terrible things,’ someone tells me. ‘At this point there's only one thing the people want: stability. They have learned from bitter experience that every change brings with it huge risks. I'll tell you this much: poor people don't want a revolution, all they want is security. That's the first law of poverty, but they don't know anything about that in the West.’

Sarita's parents welcome me warmly to their home again. Father Matijević still believes whatever the Serbian television tells him. Our conversation always returns to talk of plots and spies. The Serbian war crimes never took place, and within an hour father and daughter are fighting like cats again. During the bombardments, Sarita's parents had worked together to build a new brick shed in the garden, they went on working no matter what, it was their way of making a stand.

After dinner, Sarita takes me to the beauty parlour down on the corner. It is already dark, almost closing time. Two girls are still sitting under the hairdryers. I ask all the women in the place what has been on their minds most this week. Marita, thirty-five, has a fifteen-year-old son who wants to go out tomorrow night, but she doesn't have a cent to give him.
Gordana, the thirty-three-year-old beautician, wants a new lover. ‘How else can I find the inspiration to go on?’ Mirjana simply wants to go away, far away.‘I was seventeen when this misery started, now I'm twenty-three. I've lost the best years of my life to this stupid war.’

Mirjana is dazzlingly beautiful, beside her I suddenly feel old and fat. She has an office job at the state oil company; it's Serbia in miniature, she says. ‘The idiots, the brown-noses, they take everything. The people who think about things and do their work well are the ones who get left behind.’ Gordana says: ‘Almost all my old friends have left. The ones who stayed are all crazy.’ She laughs, but she means it.

Her brother Goran, twenty-two, comes in and eagerly joins the discussion: ‘There were five of us, friends. Three of us have already left, and that's all we talk about now.’ Ten buses now leave Belgrade each night for Budapest, he tells me. ‘That's 500 people a day! If things keep on like this, the whole opposition will be living outside the country before long. And all our girls want is a husband with a mobile phone!’

Mirjana stares dreamily into space: ‘Canada, that might be nice, don't you think? Or Holland, maybe?’

‘They asked a colleague of mine, a playwright, whether what was happening to this country was a drama. He said: “No, this isn't material for a drama, it's material for a comedy.” And he was right. All the big countries of the world going to war against this weird little Yugoslavia. All the evil of the world suddenly gathered together in this poor country. The 100,000 Albanians the Western papers say were murdered by the Yugoslav Army … but now, suddenly, they can't find the graves. Of course, horrible, terrible things have happened. But in essence it's a comedy, not a tragedy.

‘Every poor man is a fool, you know. Simply because he's poor. His clothes don't fit, his hair isn't styled, he's dirty, foolish. And in that way we're fools as well. We are the village idiots of the world. We live in a ghetto, we don't have any contacts with anyone any more. We used to have excellent ties with France and Holland, for example. But the NATO planes which bombarded us came from those countries too. They're on
the other side now as well. Everyone's on the other side, except for us. That's not sad, that is, above all, foolish.

‘This can't be serious. You can't believe this is really happening. I still have the feeling that these things are not really going on, that it will be over tomorrow, like a head cold. But I'm afraid it's going to last a long time. Because there's no way out. We lost the war in Kosovo, we signed for our defeat, but everything has stayed the way it was. No politician can pull us out of this quagmire.

‘The bombardments were sort of like a comedy too. They bombed day and night, you got up with it and you went to bed with it, but you knew they didn't want to kill civilians, you could tell that from the targets they chose. So I wasn't afraid of a bomb falling on my house. Everything in the city kept on going, the cafés, the shops, even when the air-raid sirens were blasting. The farmers simply came into town to the market, the way they always had, and their prices weren't any higher. The run of the mill Yugoslavs weren't thinking about their role in history, mostly they were just flabbergasted.

‘When I was young, Novi Sad was more or less the same city it is now. Of course bits have been added, but life was the same, the mentality too. People here aren't interested in things that happen outside their own street. They're cool, and they're also a little dumb. The people who have put together these policies and caused all this trouble, they don't come from here. Radovan Karadžzić, Miložsević, Ratko Mladić, they're all mountain people. Those of us from the flatlands suffer under the things that happen, but we're not active in them.

‘This is a tolerant place, though: during this war there wasn't a single Albanian, Muslim, German or Dutchman harassed. But we're not cosmopolitan. We'd like to be, but no one is interested in us. We don't produce anything that's worth their while, no clothes, wine or meat. We don't have anything others want but don't have. We write books, okay, but that's for a tiny little group. Besides, as you know, people who read books don't make politics. They stay at home, they read and think about things.

‘Sure, a lot of intellectuals supported Miložsević. And now they support him even more; with his defeats, he has now become the symbol of this tormented nation. He has become a fool, they have become fools. He's no longer allowed to travel in Europe, they're no longer allowed to travel
in Europe. More and more, they're becoming just like Miložsević. We share the same fate now, because of this war, and because of our isolation.

‘Under Tito, the legends were forgotten. Tito wasn't a Serb, even though he was pro-Serbian. After he died, everything went wrong. The Serbs panicked and started fantasising about their past. Suddenly they remembered that there had once been this big empire, and that they'd had kings, things like that. The poverty, the country's disintegration, all those uncertainties created a reality in which it was almost impossible to live. And from that myths were born, the one more fantastic than the other. So that's an answer to a situation, but that's not how it begins. What else can we do but tell each other stories?

‘And that foolish poor man? He still believes in it, after all these years, and at the same time he doesn't believe in it any more. He needs those stories to comfort his soul, but he doesn't believe that they will save him. A resurrection of Serbia, dreams like that, no one believes in them any more. That poor man is in a state of shock.

‘I once had a dog named Jackie. One winter's day that dog ran away, along the Danube, and somehow he got out onto an ice floe. Some children from the neighbourhood came and got me. “Mr Tižsma, your dog is going to drown!” I ran down there, called to it, all the dog had to do was take one little step, but it just sat there as if it were paralysed. The animal was in a complete state of shock. Finally the children were able to get a hold of him, and everything turned out all right.