Country of Red Azaleas

by Domnica Radulescu

  “Here is fruit from the garden, have some, girls. You must be thirsty after all that running around,” Marija’s grandmother Farah would say and tidy the colored scarf she always wore on her head, tied underneath her chin like a babushka. Marija and Biljana would burst out laughing because our stomachs were already full to the limit with the apricots, cherries, and gooseberries that we had stolen and eaten from every garden in that neighborhood facing the Muslim cemetery with its white stone columns and tombs. The house stood on a slanted narrow street like many on the hilly neighborhoods of Sarajevo, and I invariably experienced a sense of joy at the sight of the overlapping red tile roofs and the entanglements of fences and gardens that led to the house. My embarrassment knew no bounds once I was confronted with Farah’s hospitality. I was the only one who actually went ahead and had more apricots and more watermelon and cherries from Farah’s fruit bowl, only to become miserably sick in the next half hour. Marija and Biljana laughed in big gulps at my stoic fruit gorging and then kissed and tickled me. Farah would scold them and ask them to stop tormenting “the poor girl.” I loved Farah and my heart always melted with gratitude and self-pity every time I heard her call me “poor girl.” That was the best vindication from the shame of always lagging behind Marija and Biljana, of being too scared to steal as much fruit as they did, even though I still ate just as much only to keep up with them.

  Farah smelled like cinnamon and something else sweet and spicy that I could never figure out. I buried my head in her bosom when she hugged me and I wanted to be there for a long time smelling her and being called “poor girl.” To me that sounded almost like “beautiful girl with beautiful curls.” Kemal would get up from his chair with a slight bend of his back and walk across the room to look out the window and check on the sky and the weather. Then he took his pipe from the little table next to the window and smoked it, producing a fragrance that was to me at least as delicious as Farah’s spicy sweet smell. It never smelled like that in my parents’ apartment in Belgrade, it always smelled sour and heavy, like burnt cabbage, and then sometimes my mother’s heavy perfume got mixed in with the smells coming from the kitchen making the air even heavier to breathe. I always felt our Belgrade apartment was a temporary thing, something we would get over and move to our “real” habitation, some kind of a utopian spacious and luminous apartment in Sarajevo overlooking rolling hills, tile roofs and white stone houses.

  My return to Belgrade and to my parents’ apartment was wrought with a wrenching sense of yearning and a growing repulsion for the smells in our kitchen, the sounds of people fighting in the apartment next door, or of the folkloric music that our other neighbor felt compelled to play at its highest volume, filling me with a lifelong dislike of traditional Serbian music. The only thing worse than that was when my parents played the music from Doctor Zhivago on their reel-to-reel tape player for the millionth time, smiling knowingly and sometimes dancing with each other and shuffling their feet on the kitchen linoleum. I fantasized of Marija and me galloping across velvety fields sprinkled with blood-red poppies, the sight of snowcapped mountains looming in the distance, and a small castle built just for us out of white stone and red tiles on the exact top of the highest peak. At the height of my fantasy my mother would barge into my room to remind me to do my homework or write the letter to President Tito that we were supposed to write in our civic education class. Or my sister would burst in practicing her pointe walking and pirouettes to my mother’s great amazement and admiration. At least one of us was always admired by our parents and it wasn’t me. Biljana was going to ballet school and talked of little else but becoming the greatest dancer of the century. My mother was in awe at every one of her turns and agreed that one day she would become the Serbian Ginger Rogers. I didn’t care as long as I was admired by Marija. We wrote to each other daily letters in which we complained about the inanity of our school and the stupidity of our teachers and analyzed various characters from the films we had seen together the previous summer. Sometimes we mailed them to each other and at other times we exchanged them in school, or left them on each other’s side of the bench like a secret and sacred ritual. In our letters we counted the days and the weeks that were left until our next vacation when I would go back to Sarajevo and when life would start all over again in the cinnamon and cumin smells of Kemal and Farah’s kitchen and in the wild races for tart fruit from the orchards and gardens on the sloping alleys of my beloved city.

  All throughout my college years in Belgrade, throughout my later years on a different continent, throughout the years of the war and after the war, the image of us racing through the back alleys of Sarajevo with our mouths puckered from stolen fruit, our hearts booming out of our chests, the cupolas of the mosques glistening in the sunset, and the hills of Sarajevo sprinkled with white houses and red azalea bushes like a huge colorful and throbbing nest of life was always with me as a reminder that I had once held a corner of heaven in my hands. Even the afternoon, years later, when I saw Marija emerge from her red Corvette convertible, strangely and disturbingly beautiful, completely changed and yet still Marija, proud and desperate, touched by an indelible sorrow in front of the white hotel inundated in red azaleas on a sunny and quiet Los Angeles side street, that image of us running in the Sarajevo of my childhood flashed through my mind with dizzying vividness. It wasn’t like a memory but more like a persistent clip of our past that refused to be erased and that encrusted itself stubbornly into our present. It was a sliver of life that kept rolling through the years and the many wrecks of our lives. That sliver that I carried with me throughout the years emerged in my conscience at unexpected moments with clusters of scarlet flowers and a taste of apricots that shifted the past into the present.

  Belgrade Revolutions

  1989–1992

  In college, Marija studied world poetry, anthropology, politics, art, everything. She wore the darkest eyeliner in Belgrade around her green eyes, and big shiny jewelry. Not a lot of jewelry, just one striking pendant or a pair of long earrings, but it always looked like she gave new meaning and color to the piece of rock or metal wrapped around her neck or dangling from her ears. On some days she looked like an Indian deity or like Cleopatra. I had never stopped being in awe of her. When we were at the University of Belgrade in the late eighties and early nineties we competed with each other in every domain and even dated the same man for a while. I wasn’t half as versatile as Marija at juggling different fields, disciplines, and brooding lovers but I shone at the social sciences and became a better runner than I had ever been in my childhood. In the fall of 1989 when Communism fell throughout Eastern Europe and our country was breaking at the seams and dividing itself into its many ethnic constituencies, Marija and I both shaved our heads as a sign of protest. We wanted to believe that the object of our protest was Serbia’s growing nationalism against Albanians, Bosnians, Croats, everybody who was not Serbian Christian and sought their independence, but truly we just wanted to shave our heads and get attention in the restless atmosphere that was bubbling around us in those years. While everybody around us was deploring the breaking of the former “mother Yugoslavia,” Marija and I cheered for the dissenting regions and provinces that claimed their independence and asked for separation from that utopian national mother. Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been an untenable utopia of tying a nationalist ribbon around six different little nationalities and countries all crowded under the same flag and Party. Now they all squirmed and wrestled for their independence.

  While our neighbors throughout Eastern Europe were ablaze in their anti-Communist fervor and avid to play with Western values, commodities, and democracies, our country, once the freest and most liberal of those that had been placed under Soviet influence after World War II, was now relying on the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The speeches of the new Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his supporters, with their “Rally of Truth,” made us sick with fury and our heads glowingly bald. We were part of an
anti-nationalist minority at the university, as most Serbs supported the unity of the former Yugoslavia at all costs and thought Albanians were all “traitors.” Since the days of our fruit thieving Marija and I had always been on the side of so-called traitors: “traitors” to Communism, “traitors” to the slogans of “brotherhood and unity,” “traitors” to the notion of a “Greater Serbia.” We smoked foreign cigarettes, wore dark eyeliner, talked about postmodernism and feminism, listened to Dire Straits, watched American movies, and dated Milko Dubravic, a thin, feminine-looking student of philosophy who was made fun of by his more masculine Serbian colleagues because they all thought he was homosexual. This worked out well for Marija and me, because nobody imagined that Milko would actually have not one but two female lovers and that the two weirdest women in the university, with bald heads, freaky eyeliner, and secessionist ideas, were exactly those two lovers.

  Marija and I shared Milko in the most sisterly manner possible, without jealousy or rivalry, and called him “our brother.” We took turns spending the wee hours of the morning in Marija’s one-room apartment near the university and gorged on Swiss chocolates and Milko’s creamy body. We called the Milko period our “white velvet Revolution,” inspired by Czechoslovakia’s nonviolent anti-Communist revolution called the Velvet Revolution, because Milko’s body was so white and quite velvety to the touch and it was sort of radical to share the same man with such ease and comfort. Since Marija’s parents were mercifully back in Sarajevo at the time of our college revolutions, they didn’t have the fortune of seeing us in our bald countercultural glory. My parents, on the other hand, expressed profound signs of embarrassment, shame, and revolt all in alternating order whenever Marija and I visited them in the same three-room apartment that smelled like a vicious mixture of burnt cabbage and heavy Russian perfume. If a neighbor happened to be close by when my parents, Marija, and I entered the building or came out on the balcony, my father started talking about the weather, the most recent news, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the World Cup to draw their attention away from us. My mother became meek and embarrassed and acted in a sickeningly apologetic way, as if we had just been released from the local asylum and were still in some kind of recovery or as if she had no idea how those two strange-looking women ever landed in her apartment. Seeing the painful ways in which my parents dealt with my rebellious period, I stopped going home for a while and spent most of my days and nights with Marija, Milko, and the other handful of students of politics or philosophy who tried to be either Goths or simply off the mainstream of the patriotic Serbian youth populating our university.

  Marija wrote a brand of pornographic philosophical poetry that she pasted on the walls of the university hallways as another sign of protest. I thought her poetry was stunning, like the French surrealist poems, raw and disturbing, mixing body parts with political concepts and foods. She called it postmodern. Whenever we found ourselves in the most brooding and darkest of moods, out of sync with our surroundings, or whenever we became bored with our collection of Hollywood movies, poems, postmodern theory, and politics, Marija would pull out of her bag her leather-bound edition of Dante’s Inferno. We would jump into one of the Infernal circles at random, read it out loud, and then discuss at length the atrociousness of the punishment, which was our favorite and which we would have preferred in case we did happen to fall into a situation like one of those that Dante’s souls found themselves: Would we choose the howling winds that pushed the lustful mercilessly from place to place like Francesca da Rimini forever tied to her adulterous lover Paolo Malatesta or the deep muddy swamps of the sullen and keep gurgling in thick dark waters for eternity? Would we have preferred running on burning sands like the blasphemers and the sodomites or having our heads stuck inside burning tombs like the heretics; would we have chosen Ulysses’s cloak of fire or the frozen place of the traitors of kin whose tears froze in their eyes before even having the chance to be fully formed? Marija always chose the waters and the ice, I chose the fires and the burning sands. She said it was because of our natures, we each chose the opposite of what we were. That meant that I was ice and Marija was fire and therefore we each chose the opposite element. The punishment of the fortune-tellers and the diviners whose heads had been turned around so that they looked down at their asses always made us laugh for hours. Still, our favorite was the punishment of the suicides, who had all been turned into trees that bled if you broke off a twig. “I would commit suicide just to get that punishment after death, to become a bleeding tree,” Marija would say. And then I would see her face scrunch in mad laughter and she would say: “A good thing it is we don’t believe in the afterlife!” And then she would add with wicked irony: “Maybe the circle for sinners like us hasn’t yet been invented: lust, treason of country, blasphemy… Our circle would have to contain fire and ice in simultaneity with one another,” she would conclude proudly.

  Marija also had very definite ideas about the political confusion in our country, which in her view was not a random confusion but a very deliberate one to distract people from what was “really going on.” She said that the new Communism of Milosevic was a fascist Communism, which indeed was an oxymoron, yet it wasn’t like the old idealist Communism of Josip Broz Tito or the one of the chairmen of the presidency in the post-Tito period or even like the old-fashioned Soviet Communism. The nationalist and religious part was what made it fascist, she said in between cigarettes and shots of vodka late at night in a café in the old cobblestone area of Belgrade, the famous Skadarljia. Finally, we had gotten to the point of being nostalgic for the good old days of “real Communism,” she added laughing wholeheartedly, her eyes sparkling. We spent Saturday nights in a café, just the two of us, no Milko and no other underground elements from the university. We exchanged notes on Milko’s lovemaking abilities and laughed ourselves to death until one evening when Marija literally fell under the table because she was laughing so hard. The waiter had to come and ask us to leave because he thought we were too drunk to be in the café. Marija came back up from underneath the table with her eyes shining and her face dead serious and said they never threw out the men who got drunk to a pulp there every night and then pissed against the telephone poles across the street. The waiter left mumbling the words “goddamn bitches,” and Marija went ahead and ordered another set of shots from the next waiter. Marija had other lovers, and I only had Milko, so her notes were always longer. She had so many points of reference with which to compare Milko, while my points of reference were scarce and not much to brag about. Marija never fell in love with any one single man. She just glided through love affairs with short periods of infatuation after which she invariably became bored. “There’s got to be something better for me out there in this whole fucking world,” she would say casually, as if it didn’t really matter much. Strangely, she seemed more enamored of the feminine Milko than she had been of any of her dark-haired brooding knights from the different disciplines and departments of our university. Maybe it was because she and I shared Milko and that seemed to excite Marija more than just the simple affairs with the other men. It brought us closer together; she would say, “It’s the closest two women can ever be together, sharing the same man.” She dragged from her cigarette and through the smoke her eyes seemed teary and languorous as they smiled at me.

  During those years the old section of Belgrade was throbbing with Serbian music, accordion and fiddle, mostly for Western tourists eager to find out what that whole region behind the so-called Iron Curtain was all about: Were we really human, were we primitive or Old World sophisticated, did all the women wear “babushkas” on their heads and the men exude that Old World masculine charm as they gallantly kissed a woman’s hand? The Serbian musicians gave them what they wanted: hot-paced music and wide flirtatious smiles sprinkled with loud “oopas” and impertinent winks to the women. French women in particular couldn’t get enough of that stuff and often they got up and danced in the middle of the restaurant some kind of imagined Serbia
n or Gypsy dance they must have seen in a Kusturica movie. Marija sometimes spoke to the tourists, seeming to know all their languages. French, English, Italian, German, glided off her tongue effortlessly.

  One Saturday at the very beginning of April 1992, an American woman by the name of Sally Bryant sat down next to us and Marija started talking to her as if she had known her forever. My English was pretty good, too, so I joined in the conversation. The three of us got entangled in endless debates about nationalism, racism, the role of women in the world’s governments and leadership, violence and political activism. The American psychologist Sally had a certain smoothness and intellectual sharpness about her that both Marija and I fell immediately in love with. She had come to Serbia to see her boyfriend. He had told her he was single and eagerly waiting for her to visit him at his summer house in the country, yet when she got to Belgrade he said he first had to square out his vacation plans with his wife and kids. Marija said that was the norm for many of “our men” to have a wife and lovers, “no big deal,” she laughed sarcastically. “You should feel flattered, he wanted to go on vacation with you.” Sally didn’t seem particularly upset about the boyfriend episode and said it turned out to be a great experience anyway: “I got to meet so many interesting people, and now the two of you. I have the feeling this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” she said with a quick laugh, quoting the last line from the movie Casablanca, which left both Marija and me speechless for a few moments, as that happened to be our favorite American movie. She lived in California, in Santa Barbara, and worked with victims of sexual and domestic violence. Santa Barbara sounded like the planet heaven. “What are the rates of sexual and domestic violence in your country?” she asked us as if we were up for an interview. Marija and I looked at each other with a grin. “From our having grown up in this blessed country of ours,” Marija said between shots of vodka. “We know that indeed some men beat and rape and generally abuse their wives and children but not much is done about it, there are no shelters for the women, and the law doesn’t offer the proper protection to the victims of such abuse. It’s just how things are around here, the fucking culture, the macho-masculinist-nationalist, patriarchal bullshit society,” Marija blurted out after her fifth shot of vodka. Then Sally wanted to know about the conflicts starting to emerge among Albanians and Serbians, Croats, Bosnians, what did we think about it? “We think it’s all fucking bullshit nationalist crap, that’s what we think about it,” we said in an uproar of laughter around two in the morning after even more shots of vodka than we could remember. Sally gave both of us her business card when we parted at three in the morning and told us to look her up if we ever came to California. She asked for our addresses and phone numbers in case she came back to Belgrade. We staggered out of the restaurant and into the cobblestone street laughing loudly and kissing each other good-bye. An air of ease and lightness trailed after Sally as she silently disappeared into the Belgrade night. Marija and I looked at each other puzzled, wondering whether we shouldn’t have held on to Sally, asked her to come stay with us at one of our studio apartments, gotten to know her better, developed a lasting relationship with that American from California who didn’t seem to mind having come all the way to Belgrade only to be heartbroken and deceived. In our early-morning drunken stupor we elaborated out loud on visions of the two of us visiting Sally in Santa Barbara, which was close to Los Angeles, and being discovered by a talent and beauty scout from Hollywood who was interested in stories from the “newly freed” Eastern European states. We would become overnight stars, our stories and our personae the rave in Hollywood; we would make millions, order the assassination of Milosevic and all the nationalist pigs who wanted to start a war, and bring everlasting peace and independence for Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, everybody. We became international heroines and revolutionaries and the title characters of our own show that was broadcast all over the world and even in our country, dubbed from English into Serbian: Lara and Marija—our faces hanging on huge billboards above American highways and on small posters in Belgrade taverns.