Read an Excerpt
“Dark Beginning:”
1.
I was born in the fifth decade of the twentieth century, for years after the end of the Second World War. I was born in Yugoslavia, in a small industrial town not far from Zagreb, the main city of the Republic of Croatia. Many children were born in those years. The country which had been devastated by war was rapidly building its future. According to my mother, in my second year I developed vitamin deficiency. However, in my fifth year I tasted my first orange and was given my first doll, which I myself remember quite clearly. From that first orange on, with each day life confirmed its unstoppable march into a better future.
2.
When I went to school, I learned that Yugoslavia was a country which consisted of six republics and two autonomous regions, six national communities and several national minorities. I learned that there were in Yugoslavia several linguistic communities, and that in addition to Slovene and Macedonian, and languages of national minorities – Albanian, Hungarian, Romany, Italian and others – there was Croato-Serbian or Serbo-Croatian, or just Croatian and Serbian, the language spoken, in different variants, in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia. I learned that Yugoslavia had three larger religious communities – Catholic, Otrhodox and Muslim – and a lot of smaller ones. I learned that Yugoslavia was a small, beautiful country in the hilly Balkans. I learned that I must preserve brotherhood and unity like the apple of my eye. This was some kind of slogan, whose true meaning I did not really understand. I was probably confused by the poetic image apple of my eye.
3.
When I was a little older, everything I had learned was shown to be true, especially the beaty of the country in the hilly Balkans. In my first documents, where I had to fill in ‘nationality’, I wrote ‘Yugoslav’. I grew up within an ideological framework which historians and political scientists call ‘Titoism’.
Titoism presupposed (false or real) internationalism (even when he, Tito, went travelling and we looked in wonder at the newspaper photographs of his distant travels). On the level of ordinary life, this ideological notion had such a powerful effect that my parents agreed to adopt two children from the Congo. I remember how impatiently I awaited the arrival from my ‘brothers’ from the Congo, who for some reason I no longer remember never arrived.
Then, Titoism meant (false or real) brotherhood and unity (that was the most popular Yugo-ideologeme), which resulted in a common Yugoslav cultural space. On the level of everyday life, things were far simpler: the first boy to kiss me was called Bobo, he came from Zaječar, and the kiss occurred on the bank of a river whose name I no longer remember, but it was in brotherly Serbia.
In addition, Titoism meant (real or false) anti-Stalinism, which on the level of culture meant a break with the in any case short-lived socialist-realism, and on the level of life and death for a time Goli Otok, the Yugoslav Gulag. On the level of daily life, things were simpler: my childhood culture consisted of Greek myths, stories about brave partisans and Hollywood films. My childhood idol was Audie Murphy, the hero of American Westerns. American films were the most effective and cheapest propaganda support for Tito’s famous NO to Stalin.
4.
I grew up in a culture that quickly adopted values: from Italian shoes to cult writers. Once I attended a literary evening where there was a well-known American writer. The collective complex of a small nation was immediately activated in the homebred audience. ‘Do you know Ivo Andrić, Miroslav Krleža, Danilo Kiš,’ my countrymen asked with the cordial politeness of good waiters. ‘No,’ said the American writer calmly. ‘What about Milan Kundera?’ asked someone in the audience hastily. ‘Of course,’ said the American writer. The audience sighed contentedly. At that moment they were all prepared to swear that Kundera was our writer. They were all ready to swear that our country was called Yugoslovakia, just so long as Kundera could be that. Our writer.
5.
I grew up in a culture that was proud of keeping step with the Western world, although – however unlikely it may sound to a Western reader, and to our own countrymen, suffering from collective amnesia – some things at home could be artistically more interesting than what was happening abroad. That is why I listened with the deep understanding of an ‘Easterner’ and the benign skepticism of a ‘Westerner’ to a Russian colleague who told me a few years ago with sincere ‘perestroika’ enthusiasm: ‘Come, you’ll see, we’ve got postmodernism till it’s coming out of our ears! It’s only soap we’re short of!’
6.
I grew up in a multinational, multicultural and monoideological community that had a future. I was not interested in politics. My parents taught me nothing about it. The words ‘religion’, ‘people’, ‘nationality’, or even ‘communism’ and ‘the party’ meant nothing to me. I only ever wrote one ‘political’ sentence (and I stole that from a child): ‘I love my country because it’s small and I feel sorry for it.’
7.
I lived surrounded by books and friends. I simply could not understand my mother who, about ten years ago, for some unknown reason, began sighing: ‘If only there isn’t a war, everything will be all right, if only there isn’t a war.’ I was irritated by that sighing without evident cause, I attributed her anxiety to old age. The only associations that the word ‘war’ could conjure up in my head were the popular children’s cartoons about Mirko and Slavko, boy-partisans. ‘Watch out, Mirko! There’s a bullet. Thanks, Slavko!’
8.
That is presumably why, in the autumn of 1991, when I first found myself in a bomb shelter, I felt like an extra in a war film. ‘What’s on television?’ my neighbour, a senile eighty-year-old asked her daughter. The daughter replied: ‘A war has started, mother.’ ‘Absurd, the film has started,’ said the old woman, settling herself comfortably in her chair.
