Miss Ex-Yugoslavia Read online

  As my dad shoved his skinny bowlegs into old Levi’s, he stubbed his toe in the dark.

  “This fucking country!” he said, because of the darkness, because of his toe, because of his lack of a ready car to take his wife to the hospital, because of his dying Yugoslavia.

  “Why don’t you move to America if you hate it so much?” my mother said.

  • • •

  Even though she laughed at the unceasing “Brotherhood and Unity” propaganda of her own country, which had faded in luster over the decades, my mother was nevertheless a loyal child of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. She’d been brought up with free health and education under the authoritarian head of state, Marshal Tito, who was much better than what the Soviets had. In fact, my mother had always seen Tito as a sort of embarrassing uncle character. Yes, he said things like “You must guard Yugoslavia like the pupil of your own eye!” And he organized ludicrous parades of rural dancers in national costume. Yet still, when it came down to it, my mother’s life had been pretty good under his rule. She’d grown up counting her lucky stars that she wasn’t born in a country like Poland or Hungary, which had ended up behind the Iron Curtain. She’d take Tito over Stalin any day! Tito had resisted the Soviets and kept Yugoslavia relatively unscathed by all the other crazy dictators around the globe.

  And as for the other side—capitalist America? My mother would admit that there was some appeal to it. Sure, she liked watching Dynasty, with its juicy plots, great shoulder pads, and Americans scheming and bickering. But she’d never want to live in a place like where the women on her television lived, in their mansions and Jacuzzis, where they could be lulled into self-obsession, tortured boredom, and anti-intellectualism. Belgrade, for all its faults, was my mother’s home. And she couldn’t imagine her child being brought up anywhere else. Her husband, she was beginning to suspect, however, had been thinking increasingly about going west. At first it seemed like a joke, but recently he wouldn’t stop talking about how Yugoslavia was going to shit.

  And he was a fan of the West. While my mother was wary of those fat cats, Dad, on the other hand, thought: What’s the problem with becoming a self-made man? He was educated, he worked hard, he’d studied hard. Imagine if he was rewarded for that, rather than receiving his measly paycheck from the Mihailo Pupin Institute, where he developed software. It was work he could be paid ten times as much for in the West. He had tried his own little extra moneymaking ventures—as a student he’d worked as an usher in the cinema to fund vacations to Morocco and Italy, and there was something sweet about saving up money and watching it grow. He saw himself as an entrepreneurial thinker in a country that was built on an idealized concept of community. In a capitalist society, you could profit off your brain, your talents. Plenty of fellow engineers at his work talked of going west, and he’d join enthusiastically in the conversations, pretending for a second that his wife would ever agree to it.

  “Maybe I will,” he said, as my mother wobbled out the door. “Maybe I will move to America.” And he took the stairs, two by two, to find a neighbor with a car that kept opposite days to the Fiat. It would have to be Branko from the first floor, with his beat-up old Renault. Branko’s baby kept the household of 1C up regularly, so my dad hoped that tonight was no different, and that his knock on the door would be a welcome distraction from baby wails.

  My mother waited in the dark. She had grown up in this building, her grandparents looking after her while her parents worked (in the fifties her mother was a successful professional thanks to the equal opportunities offered by the socialist system), three generations living happily under one roof.

  She breathed the familiar smell of the building’s foyer. And as another contraction seized her, she said to herself that she could do this, readying herself to walk slowly down the stairs as soon as it passed.

  Minutes later, Branko from 1C was speeding my parents down their street: the Boulevard of Revolution. The boulevard, lined with tall buildings, plane trees, trash cans, and kiosks, was the longest street in the city. Trams dinged joyfully, despite the power outages all around. They passed the farmers’ market, where old ladies with scarves tied around their heads and old men with missing teeth would peddle their wares tomorrow, like they did every day. They brought produce from the countryside, and cheese, which they would slice and offer on the end of a knife, Belgrade customers nibbling at the soft “young” feta or the harder, sharper aged one. Now, at night, the market was dark, black puddles reflecting the moon, cats mewling—the market napping while the rest of the city stayed up. The radio blared news: “Unemployment is above 14 percent, while inflation is at 40 percent.”

  “I can’t listen to this shit!” my mother howled, and Branko switched to a station playing Bijelo Dugme, a band from Sarajevo. New wave and punk rock songs were becoming increasingly disgruntled, to match the attitude of the nation, and Branko and my parents, distracting themselves from the contractions that were becoming worse, sang along with the husky-voiced Bosnian singer Željko Bebek, who belted out, “I don’t have a dragon, a white horse, or a sword.” My dad and Branko nodded their heads to the beat, while my mother breathed to it, in and out. My dad sang along to the chorus, asking along with Bebek—how is a person supposed to be a hero, in these mangy times?

  Branko delivered my parents to the hospital. My mother was taken away by nurses. Not even fathers were allowed in the crowded maternity wards of Yugoslavia, and my dad, like many men of the 1980s, was happy to be excused from the bloody scene, and went to wait at his parents’ place.

  • • •

  In his shabby shoes and brown wool hat, my dad took the tram to his parents’ neighborhood, biting his fingernails as he looked out the window.

  Even in the small hours, Belgrade, as always, was buzzing. Drunk people spilled out of a kafana—a typical Yugoslavian tavern, where you could eat, drink plum brandy, smoke, and sing into the night. There were twenty-four-hour kiosks selling burek, and fresh bread with ćevapčići, delicious served with raw onion, cheese curd, and a spicy sauce called urnebes, which means “pandemonium.”

  Belgrade’s party scene was strong; young women with fluffy Joan Jett haircuts, young men in turtlenecks, singing, “I Love Rock and Roll” and “Billy Jean.” Cigarettes tucked behind ears, they stumbled along the streets with cracked pavements, buildings covered in graffiti, doorways smelling like piss.

  During the decades following the Second World War, Yugoslavia was a hub of arts and culture, a great transnational experiment. Though known to some as a dictator, Marshal Tito was also the country’s bodyguard, shielding his people from the escalating face-off that came to be called the Cold War. Tito ushered Yugoslavia away from the Soviet Union, but also away from the United States, and we became part of the Non-Aligned Movement, an informal organization that refused to become a puppet of either superpower. Joining Tito in its establishment were the leaders of India, Indonesia, Egypt, and Ghana. The idea was for these developing countries to stick together, in a spirit of non-aggression and mutual respect, and to take a middle ground between the Cold War giants. Because of our nonaligned status, and his generally light-touch dictatorship, Tito allowed influences from both the East and West to enter, and so we became the only socialist country not behind the Iron Curtain. This was our special place in the world; there was much to love about our distinct mixture of openness and peculiarity. We were the only socialist country to sell David Bowie records: young Russians traveled to Belgrade to stock up on their illicit copies of Ziggy Stardust and Diamond Dogs. The English came to enjoy our beaches, where liberated Yugoslavian women sunbathed topless. We were inexpensive, laid-back, built on hope.

  The tram reached the suburb of Dedinje, and my dad hopped out. From the tram stop, he took a shortcut, walking around the perimeter of Red Star soccer stadium. The cold felt stronger around the stadium. There were no tall buildings to protect him from the wind whipping around. The trees dropped their leaves, and it smelled like rain was com
ing.

  Dad walked uphill toward his childhood home. The electricity never got cut in his parents’ neighborhood, thanks to a handful of embassies nearby. Foreigners didn’t have to endure the things Yugoslavia’s citizens were expected to. He took a deep breath of the wet November air, and just as the rain started to fall, he rang the doorbell to apartment 2B to wake his parents up.

  His mother, Beba, opened the door in her pajamas, her face greasy with creams. Behind her was Milan, my grandfather, whom dad called “Gonzo” after the famous Muppet he resembled. (Though Gonzo wasn’t the only one with a big nose; my dad had one too, and the person being born at that moment—that’s me—would inherit it also). Gonzo shuffled into the living room in his neatly pressed pajamas and his old brown slippers, turning on the big radiator and the lamps, which cast light over the glittery, blinking rocks placed around the room: souvenirs from his mining engineer days.

  He settled into his chair, lit a cigarette, and flicked the television on. Tito had died in 1980, two years earlier, and they were replaying his funeral.

  “Do they play this every single night?!” Dad said. “I swear this was on yesterday!”

  “What else is there to do while we wait?” Gonzo said, and even though he hadn’t loved Tito with the fervor of some of Yugoslavia’s citizens, it was obvious he was proud of the grand funeral that put our country on the international stage. Tito’s death was still heralded as the most emotional moment in our recent history. He died during a football match between a Croatian team and a Serbian team, which was being broadcast across the whole of Yugoslavia. Officials walked onto the field to make the announcement, the cameras that were broadcasting the match nationwide continued to roll. Marshal Tito was dead. As the packed stadium gasped, and then began to weep, players on both sides fell to their knees. Football matches regularly provoked tears among Yugoslavians, so the groundwork had been laid for an outpouring of emotion, in the stadium and by the people watching at home.

  Now, the TV’s voice-over recited: “The funeral was attended by four kings, thirty-one presidents . . . Thatcher, Arafat, Brezhnev . . .”

  My dad shook his head, annoyed at the worshipful telecast. For my dad’s circle of educated friends, as he aged Tito had become a joke. His bombastic speeches were laughable. Dad rolled his eyes at all those parades, with villagers from different republics dancing ecstatically, holding hands, in a show of childlike unity. Tito’s supporters went on voluntary “working vacations” to build roads because the country was broke, yet they forgave Tito for everything. The country’s infrastructure was crumbling, and yet Tito enjoyed the opera, invited Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor to his residence, and wore fancy designer suits. Under Tito the country went further and further into debt and unemployment. And the balancing act that he’d managed to pull off for nearly forty years, the keeping of nationalism at bay through repression by his secret police, and the arrest of his political opponents, would, in the years following his death, prove to be a failure.

  Now the TV was showing crowds of mourners, in Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, all the republics of Yugoslavia. My dad watched Tito’s image, in military uniform, for the thousandth time, portraits held up by mourners, some of the bereaved kissing the image as they cried. There were identical squares, statues, streets dedicated to Tito all around Yugoslavia, as if, as this country became more and more divided, Tito was still trying to keep it together, if only with his name and image, repeated across the land—a ghost that wouldn’t quit. Yet the nationalism grew, and my dad claimed it would boil over into violence.

  “Why aren’t they talking about that on TV?” he asked of Gonzo, suddenly frustrated, thinking about the future of his growing family. “There’ll be a war here!”

  “Don’t say such things!” Gonzo said. “Haven’t we had enough wars in this country?”

  • • •

  Some of the fluorescent lights at the hospital were dead, but others flickered, still holding on as my mother prepared for birth. In a room crowded with other women at various stages of delivery, she got undressed and put on a gown, and then her vagina was shaved. My mother was born in 1953, in this same hospital. She wondered with horror if the ancient razor that the nurse was using was the same one that was used on her mother. She glanced with concern at an old heart-rate monitor, and listened to the squeak of cots threatening to collapse.

  My mother tried to distract herself from the pain of her contractions and the hospital smell of detergent masking bodily fluids. She thought about how as a teenager, she and her friends would take the train to Italy to buy jeans and eat gelato. Even if money was tight, my grandmother would slip my mother some change and tell her to buy a miniskirt. “When else are you going to wear one? When you’re fifty?”

  At that moment, my mother decided she would take the same attitude with her child. What would the fashions be when this baby was a teen? she thought. See-through clothing popped into her head as a viable option, and she decided: My child will have the latest transparent wear. Even if she had to fight her stingy, nerd husband all the way, she’d make sure her child felt special.

  The contractions were coming faster now, and my mother was moved to the delivery room.

  She pushed, and hours passed, as I had become stuck, having painstakingly tied my umbilical cord in a knot way back when I was a tiny fetus, adding an extra level of difficulty for the overworked hospital staff.

  Thanks to a group effort, I was finally drawn out, a slick, silent bundle. A midwife held me tightly, so I wouldn’t bounce back in on that short umbilical cord. I was alarmingly motionless until a midwife smacked my behind, and I let out a wail.

  However, thanks to the effort of a rough birth, I was hideous, with a chafed face and a blue head. Also, my head was mushroom-shaped, the top of it resembling a sassy beret. My mother looked at me dumbfounded, uncertain whether this bizarre blue creature might forgo the breast and request a baguette instead.

  “We’ll fix that!” the midwife said as she observed my unconventional head shape. As she massaged my soft, newborn skull into a more mainstream silhouette, she said, “much better,” admiring her work.

  There were no wheelchairs to take her to the recovery room, so my mother shuffled there. To make matters worse, every bed was taken, so she was made to share one with a woman named Yoka, who had traveled all the way to the hospital from the countryside just in time to give birth. They lay back-to-back, their recently vacated swollen stomachs teetering off either side of the bed. My mother cringed whenever Yoka’s calloused feet scratched her under the covers, and she eventually became so grossed out, despite the pain, that she snuck out of the room to observe me through the window to the nursery, where the newborns lay in rows. My mother found her daughter, the serious-faced bald one with the squishy skull, and she smoked as she looked lovingly through the glass, until the nurses, playing cards and smoking in their station, chased her away, and she had to crawl back into bed with Yoka’s sharp heels.

  When dawn had broken, my dad stood behind the hospital. Following my mother’s telephoned instructions to a T, he’d brought along a basket of food and a ball of twine. Guests weren’t allowed in the crowded maternity ward, for health and hygiene reasons, but my mother couldn’t stand the hospital food and she was starving. She was waiting at the open window for the gibanica; a feta cheese and phyllo pastry pie, and “reform torte,” a nutty, creamy dessert—both made by her mother, at her request. Dad spotted her and threw the ball of twine all the way up the gray building to the third floor. She didn’t catch it.

  “You didn’t throw it right!” she yelled down, falling easily back into the irritated tone she used with her husband.

  “You can’t catch!” he yelled up, glad to see she was recovering well enough to gripe.

  He threw it again and she caught it.

  “If you’d thrown it like that the first time, I would have caught it,” she said, hauling the basket up, eager to have the last word.

/>   Many of the women in the maternity ward communicated with their families from the window like this, and the nurses turned a blind eye, easily bribed with snacks and treats. My mother took out the stash and lowered the basket back down again, having placed in it a little sketch of me. She had always been talented at drawing, and my dad keenly looked at the image of his daughter: her bald head, eyes shut tight, puckered lips, and little fists balled up.

  • • •

  The following day, our sanctioned day on the roads, my father picked us up in the Fiat, and got to see me in all my real-life glory.

  My mother had wished for a boy, but Dad hoped for a girl; in this day and age women could do anything, and he would teach his daughter about computers, science, anything she wanted. In socialist Yugoslavia, women were called “comrade” just like men were, and they participated in the workforce, earning as much as their male counterparts. But the next generation, my dad thought, who knew what they had in store? Who knew what his child might invent, what exciting new world she would be a part of? The other good thing about girls was that they didn’t go to the army.

  That evening, family and friends came over in droves with hand-me-down gear and clothing from their older babies. Soon there was a crowd of people smoking and chatting over cake and alcohol to celebrate my arrival. I was passed from one grandparent to another. I was kissed by my mother’s friends from the university: philosophers, psychologists, eccentrics. And then by my father’s straightlaced friends: engineers, architects, mathematicians.

  The discussion turned toward my name. Right away my father had come up with nicknames for me: Piglet, Gooseberry, Boy, Churchill—because of my alert, bald-headed resemblance to the statesman. My real name, though, was still undecided.