Song of Kosovo, page 8
Of course, the whole notion that peace can be bought with a signature is comical in itself. Peace cannot be achieved on its own, my dear. It’s elementary physics. It’s a sort of conceptual parasite, which can only exist in the absence of war. Peace pays what war wins — that’s another expression of ours. We are a philosophical people, my love, which comes in handy every now and then.
In any case, it was pleasant to see you again this morning, Counsellor, and I welcome the news you bring of the outside world. I do hope you’re right in your thinking, Nexhmije Gjinushi, and that NATO’s forces do have Slobo cornered. The copy of Blic was instructive, and I must admit that my heart skipped a beat when I saw the pictures of Ušće Tower burning in the nightscape. I could see the tower from my parents’ little flat in Beograd; I must have walked past it a thousand times, and I could only think of my poor mother, shaking in the darkness of the blackout, cursing the gods of America who would inflict such damage on her vista. It certainly makes sense that NATO would target this building, for not only is it the tallest skyscraper in the city (second only to the Avala Telecommunications Tower) but the tallest building of its kind in all the Balkans.
To see it in flames — what a powerful image for all Serbs! Although . . . perhaps the symbolic value was not all that NATO intended. Built in the Golden Years of Yugoslavia proper, it was headquarters for the Central Committee of the Savez Komunista Jugoslavije — the League of Communists. I remember visiting Beograd as a child and seeing the tower at night, interior light strategically left on to spell Tito’s name. After his demise, Slobo and his SPS boys took it over and turned it into a monument to their own glory. So for most of us, then, the Ušće Tower represents the recent past, and to see it burning, and the dreams of Soviet glory burning with it, was something of a victory for all of us. The greater victory — and this is NATO’s fatal mistake, I fear — is that despite being hit by twelve different Tomahawk missiles, it didn’t go down. In fact, there was barely a dent in it. Sure, a little fire here and there, some broken glass, but the mighty Serbic boar, the beast, did not collapse. Imagine what this means to a people obsessed with history — with the illusion of structure, Nexhmije Gjinushi. I wouldn’t count them out just yet!
Still, I appreciated the newspapers and thank you again for the letter, which I can only categorize as my own personal symbolic defeat. I had hoped that the numerous pieces of correspondence I created over the past months had found their way to Tristina. To get one back like this (Return to Sender: are there three sadder words in the world, Counsellor?) is one of those minor heartbreaks that have come to define my life. I hope that other letters made it through, but am no longer confident. I will, however, include this one in my testimony and will put it in its proper context for you, in an effort to bolster our argument.
In any case, you left in such a hurry this morning, Counsellor, you almost knocked over your tea. I understand that you must be a very busy person, and I hope everything is okay? I must say — and please don’t take this the wrong way, my dear — that I thought about you for a long time, until the memory of your perfume had completely dissolved. It’s funny; I realized that we have lived in such close proximity for centuries, your people and mine, and yet there remain cultural nuances and unspoken norms that are beyond our mutual comprehensions.
And before you ran off I was just about to tell you a story. A story first set down by — you guessed it! Our friend the Buddha. It concerns a certain guard who patrolled the border between two kingdoms. Every day he would see this same peasant leading his donkey across the border. He let it go at first, but after a while, he became suspicious. “Why is this fellow going back and forth, day after day?” the guard wondered. “Perhaps he is smuggling something?”
So, the guard determined that he would find out what the peasant was up to. That day, he searched the traveller and his donkey thoroughly, but came up empty-handed.
“You can pass,” he told the peasant, making a mental note to check the man again the following day.
Well, the next day came, Nexhmije Gjinushi, and the guard once again stopped the peasant to check him up and down. Still nothing.
So this went on day after day, the guard always searching the peasant and never finding anything out of order, not even a crumb that couldn’t be accounted for. Years passed, and the peasant slowly but surely became noticeably wealthier. He began to dress in more elegant clothes, silks and fine linens, and over time added assistants, so that eventually he would pass through the checkpoint in magnificent robes, with seven or eight boys in tow, each one leading his own donkey.
The guard would check, check, check. Nothing. But his suspicions never abated.
Ten years passed and then twenty and more, right up to the day that the guard retired. He left his station at the border and began living the life of the content pensioner, playing Pesë Katësh with his cronies and lazing in the bright cafés on the main street in town. One day, as the now former guard was sipping his morning coffee, he spots the peasant and his entourage parading up the street, making their daily journey to the border. So the guard runs up to the peasant and says, “I know you are up to something, friend, so please satisfy my curiosity and tell me, after all this years, what were you smuggling?”
The peasant smiled and put his arm on the guard’s shoulder and, realizing that his old nemesis was now retired and could no longer arrest him, answered with one simple word:
“Donkeys.”
See, my dear Counsellor, that is why I like the Buddha. He has a sense of humour! And not the so-called humour of the Christ — he calls Peter a “rock”; how the hell is that funny? — but a real jokester. Donkeys? That’s funny!
It’s also an apt description of our present conundrum, isn’t it? For we Balkanoids are always looking at one thing — History is a particular favourite — and seeing something else entirely. (My word — I am pedantic! What is ever to become of me, Nexhmije Gjinushi? Will I become one of those dull old men, with soup stains on the front of his shirt, boring the world to death? I certainly hope not, my little Kosovo Maid. Perhaps it is just the earliness of the hour, and I’ve yet to have my morning coffee.)
More so, consider that this story provides some insight into that subject which I believe is of great interest to you: my father. You see, Father is like the donkey; the more you look at him the more you’ll try to see. But no matter how hard you look, no matter what crevice you peer into, you’ll never find anything.
Let the record show that my family left Crnilo under cover of night and made our way directly to The White City, that refuge for a millennium of the Balkans’ lost and unwanted people. Beograd’s the oldest city in Europe, older (or as old at least) than venerable Athens itself. For seven thousand years men and women have lived and died here, fornicated and prayed, slaughtered one another, expelled their brothers, stolen from their mothers and fathers. For seven thousand years they have danced within these pale limestone walls. The Huns came and levelled it; the Sarmatians came and built it back up. For a century, the Goths and Avars sparred with one another and the Byzantine Empire for the control of this city, and for a thousand years the Bulgars, Hungarians, and Serbs scurried under the great shadow of Constantine’s kingdom, taking turns dancing with the White Lady until the Holy Romans took her back.
Nandor Alba. Alba Graeca. Castelbianco.
The names slip off the tongue like my father’s Sanskrit incantations, sweet nothings for the soul.
Griechisch Weissenburg. Nandor Fejervar.
So we offered our own little invasion, Brati, Djordje, Jovo. My mother and father and I. It was a difficult adjustment. Mother and Father had become quite adept in navigating the nuances of life in Serbia’s small towns and villages, but Beograd was almost too much for them to comprehend. We moved from flat to flat before settling into a small apartment building owned by Veselin Čajkanović, one of my father’s distinguished relatives. It was a drab, Stalinist-era building, modern in the classic sense, concrete, functional — as close to being autistic as a building could come. Located in Vidikovac, a neighbourhood some ten kilometres south of Beograd proper, our building was carbuncled to a hilltop, affording us a startling view of the city’s skyline framed by the conflux of the Sava and Danube rivers.
Even by our modest standards, the apartment complex left much to be desired. Filled with pensioners mostly, rotting like teeth in their damp rooms, or displaced families, as anonymous and ignoble as my own, bivouacked in their cramped quarters. The family directly across the hall, for example: nine in all, including a grandmother and a maiden aunt, living in a single-bedroom flat. The father, Fisnic Nikolić, had been a schoolteacher in Herzegovina. But the declining political climate and crumbling economy had led him to seek his fortune elsewhere. Now, he and his three oldest sons were gajtos in Potsdam, building roads to connect Germany’s former East with its former West. When Nikolić and his sons came home to visit, the family swelled to thirteen members, so many, in fact, that they had to sleep in shifts, with five or more bodies sardined into the lone bedroom.
We were not so badly off. Soon after we arrived in Beograd, Jovo left to study — to my Father’s surprise — at the Univerzitet U Novum Sadu Medincinski Fakultet, while Brati and Djordje had fallen in with those Arkan gangsters and were hardly ever around. With Beba Dobra sleeping with the wild dogs, there were really only the three of us. The flat was crowded enough, though.
Living in such cramped quarters my parents’ relationship declined. Their arguments grew to be as constant and as natural as breathing. Father spent his time circling the flat in his housecoat, orbiting Mother while offering domestic advice and advancing his opinions on the state of the world. At first Mother was stoic in her acceptance of Father’s intrusions, a real Kosovo Maiden. In time, though, she began a campaign of passive resistance, humming loudly to herself as he spoke or turning up the volume on Senka’zi Deca, her favourite television soap opera. Eventually, almost casually, she began to disagree with him — something I’d rarely seen before — and the trickle soon gave way to a flood. They came to argue constantly, about everything and anything, to the point where it became not a string of unique disagreements, but one single ceaseless antiphonal squabble, almost spiritual in its complexity and form.
Nothing was beyond dispute: the correct way to scrub a pot; the optimum heat setting for frying an egg; the most efficient bus route to Beograd Centrum; the operating hours of Muzej grada Beograda, the civic museum. In time, the net was cast further and further, as their life devolved into one endless philosophical/sociological/scientific/historical/cultural debate: the annual mean rainfall in central Kosovo; the relative health merits of pomegranates versus wild Serbian raspberries; asexual reproduction in seahorses; Plato’s allegory of the cave; the literary merits of Ayn Rand; oil production in fin de siècle Nantucket — no topic was too obscure or lacking in inherent controversy. Granted, Father’s arguments tended to be littered with questionable facts, dubiously notated, while Mother leaned toward contrary discourse (often simply disagreeing with her husband, no matter how mundane the topic) and blanket ad hominem attacks that sought to undermine Father’s arguments by casting aspersions on his intelligence, mental stability, or manhood (and often, all three at once).
Instinctively, I understood. We all had our way of coping. It was not the loss of his position at the mine — that wasn’t it at all. Father always lost his job. It was merely expected of him, and I suspect that we would have been secretly disappointed — Father more than any of us — with any other outcome. No. The real issue, the unspoken part, was the loss of Beba Dobra. It stung us, all of us, more than we could say.
We all blamed ourselves and everyone else, with mother assigning blame more than any of us. She blamed herself for not keeping a better eye on her youngest and most precious; how many times had she thought that the mines were no place for a boy, no place for anyone, really? She blamed me as well. Not overtly, perhaps not even consciously, but it was there, revealed in the way she held the knife when she sliced bread for my supper, the way she averted her eyes, just slightly, as she kissed my forehead. But most of all, she blamed Father. It was his mine, after all; how he could let it blow up and kill his own son? This was beyond my mother’s limited comprehension. And so, she wrapped herself in a cocoon of facts or, more accurately, disputed facts. She could not bring Beba Dobra back to life, but she could question this life and, specifically, the man who had brought her here.
Alone with my parents in the flat, I had little opportunity for escape. The option of hiding in my room, favoured by young men and women around the world, I suspect, was not open to me. My room was the living room: I slept on an ancient divan, once property of the niece of Dragutin Dimitrijević (her uncle, under the codename Apis, was mastermind behind the Black Hand’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand and Princess Sophie). The divan itself played no major part in world history. It was dusty and hard, its horsehair mattresses compressed by five generations of Serbian asses, its velveteen cushions, once a rich crimson like St. Sava’s blood, were by now faded and as brown as the river that bore the great martyr’s name. My parents spent their days in the living room and adjacent kitchen; the divan became the dull sun at the centre of their universe.
I did find some solace in the tiny lavatory and holed away in that room, growing more bored. To pass the time, I tried reading the labels on bottles of medicine and hair products, first silently to myself, then out loud, pretending to endorse various products, like the announcers on the commercials that had only recently begun to flood our TV screens.
Months went by and almost a year in Beograd and the world rumbled on, past the Bosnian Troubles and the Siege of Sarajevo (where my brother Brati, the Stammerer, spent seven months on the front line, impatiently — and vainly — waiting for the Bosnians to tire of NATO drippings and mercifully surrender), past the months of hyper-inflation, with prices doubling every sixteen hours and an inflation rate that at its peak reached a breathtaking five quadrillion — 5,000,000,000,000,000! — per cent per annum (people used 100-dinar bills, not to buy things, but to wipe their arses), past the heroic invasion of Kosovo, which saw my other brother, the ever-silent Djordje, lose the tip of his thumb in a cooking accident deep behind enemy lines, before inadvertently capturing (then quickly surrendering to) a klatch of confused Italian cadets — all this as Father, Mother, and I orbited the flat, driving one another nuts.
We eked out an existence on my parents’ dwindling savings and handouts from the farthest reaches of the Zanković clan, whose members, already humiliated by Father’s role in the Crnilo disaster, could not bear the disgrace of one of them living in destitution. Father, in the wake of his public dismantling, went from door to door seeking employment. He had nearly exhausted every familial and social contact when he finally, thanks to the intercessions of our landlord Veselin Čajkanović — who was keen to have his rent paid — landed a job with Nezavisne Banke od Ljudi Srbija. It was one of the numerous mercurial financial institutions that rose and fell in those days, offering the people, unfamiliar with the emerging market economy, an alternative to the poorly run state banks.
Father’s job was simple and well beneath his experience and education. He was a teller who stood behind a metal grate for up to ten hours at a time in the foyer of an impressive sandstone building, which had served, until the recent collapse of the Serbian infrastructure, as the offices of Pošta Srbije, the national postal service. Here, he collected hard currency — German deutschmarks, British pounds, U.S. dollars — from cautious depositors. As unreliable as father could be, he did have a way with people and a knack for getting them to part with their cash.
. . . I don’t blame you being wary, Gospođa Ninčić; I was wary too until I invested in it myself. You heard me right, Gospođa Ninčić, invested. Don’t think of it as a bank account, Little Dove; it’s more a savings club, an investment in your future . . . Twenty per cent interest, per month. That’s guaranteed, Gospođa Ninčić, and of course your entire investment is protected by the Narodna banka Srbije . . .
Alas, Father’s banking career did not last long. No, it wasn’t the result of that little incident on the Knez — perhaps you saw the pictures in the news? Father, dressed in nothing but a grimed T-shirt and piss-stained underwear, standing on the top balcony of the Srpska Kruna Hotel, pulling American dollar bills, purloined from the Nezavisne Banke od Ljudi Srbij’s vaults, from a burlap sack and tossing them to the crowd below like some great God sowing the Earth at the dawn of time. Instead of the golden boot that little piece of manic theatre earned father a raise — it was the best publicity Nezavisne Banke od Ljudi Srbij could have hoped for. They were literally giving money away! Investments immediately went up four hundred per cent.
No. Father lost his job when the bank itself collapsed. You see, dear Counsellor, there was a reason why the enormous interest rates seemed to be too good to be true. I’ll give you a clue: think donkeys! Had anyone looked at the bank’s dealings with an open mind, they would have noticed that beyond the usual Serbian holdings — an aggressive position in the heroin trade, some strategic holdings in arms-running futures — the Nezavisne Banke od Ljudi Srbij’s was essentially a pyramid scheme, with new depositors providing the capital to pay the interest to the old ones. As long as the bank was expanding exponentially, the whole thing worked swimmingly. But once Beograd’s ready supply of hard currency began to dry up — well, the lie has short legs, as we Serbs like to say. It cannot run very far.
The bank president, a former baker and pimp with close ties to organized crime and Slobo’s Radical Party, took a midnight flight to Paris with several suitcases full of hard currency. The bank’s most loyal customers burned him in effigy. And Father was once again out of work.
For my part, I wasn’t about to wait for the economy to catch up to my needs. I had by now started making forays into the black market. I had begun with the basics, moving jeans and sneakers, but those lines of products had already flooded the market and very much targeted a luxury demographic. I quickly realized that the bare necessities of life — food, drugs, sex, and other diversions — were where the money was. Given that the underground grocery trade was completely controlled by the government, I had to find more flexible products to move. I dealt in drugs, it’s true, soft ones mostly: weed, coke, a little “e.” Heroin, crack, PCP, meth — these were much harder to get your hands on and brought me in contact with more unsavoury clientele. I tended to avoid them if I could.
