Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  Oh.

  Again, I was faced with just how much I didn’t really understand. My brain was full of contradictory feelings as I again tried to sort out the good people from the bad, to work out who were the ones we mourned and who were the ones whose deaths we quietly ignored.

  So we were still friends with Mira’s parents who supported Milošević, but we couldn’t go to the funeral of a paramilitary “Tiger”?

  “That’s right,” Dad said, adding that there was a difference between conscripts, like my cousins would have been, and the volunteer nationalists, who put their hands up to go to war. “Those are the people who we cannot support.” Were we happy Nikola’s dad had died? I ventured. “No,” Dad said, and my mother added, “Imagine what it’s like for poor Nikola losing a father.” “We support peace,” Dad added. “We don’t think anyone should die.” “Even assholes,” my mother threw in.

  “As I said,” I wrote in my diary later that night, “I’ve never been to a funeral before, and it’s not something I want to do anyway.” I didn’t write about how guilty I now felt for having enjoyed Nikola’s humping, when the whole time he had actually been the enemy.

  • • •

  As 1991 came to a close, Yugoslavia was officially at war. The Croatian War of Independence had begun. The thing my dad had feared three years earlier was finally happening. People were dying in Croatia, and the effects of the conflict were starting to touch Belgrade in different ways.

  On a freezing day in January 1992, my parents were walking to the grocery store, discussing the political situation and the rising death count in Croatia. In eastern Croatia, ethnic cleansings had begun: whole populations of Croats were being driven out of some areas by Serbian nationalists, and Serbs were being driven out of others by Croats. At that point in time, things were going better for Milošević than for Croatia’s Tuđman. The Serbian forces had taken Vukovar, and now controlled a third of Croatia.

  Everyone was becoming poorer. My mother threw out her moth-eaten winter coat in the trash can in front of our building, only to see an older, respectable-looking lady wearing it on the street the next day. Hyperinflation was beginning, and whispering men in long coats sold deutsche marks to passersby in exchange for their quickly devaluing dinars. One day, my neighbor Mira and I bought a chocolate bar along with the milk her grandma sent us to buy, and when we returned home with it, she screamed at us that we were wasting money—and we felt ashamed and confused, having never been scolded for buying ourselves a cheap treat before.

  Contemplating the situation as they walked, my parents paused in front of a store that sold luggage. “Our big red suitcase is broken,” Dad ventured. He and my mother looked at each other, and without an argument, without a word, went in and bought a new suitcase. It was time to go, again.

  Not long after, the army would start conscripting men my father’s age, and some of them would still attempt to flee at the last minute, like our friend Boris, who walked out the back door as his army summons was delivered at the front, running to the neighbor’s place in his slippers and getting a lift straight to the airport. Money soon became worthless. It got to the point where people would pass by trash containers full of dinars, and then eventually, the ridiculous 500-billion-dinar note was printed, and with it, you could buy a bundle of nothing. But we would be gone by then.

  • • •

  When I found out that we were returning to Australia, I wrote a series of full caps entries in my diary, hoping the large letters would help to emphasize my nine-year-old panic. As usual these days, I wrote in Serbian.

  MY SISTER HAS AN EAR INFECTION (THE THIRD ONE SINCE WE CAME TO YUG). WE ARE GOING BACK TO AUSTRALIA (BECAUSE OF THE SITUATION NOT HER EAR).

  My next diary entry says:

  IN AUSTRALIA WE WILL BUY A HOUSE AND A DOG.

  The house-and-dog scenario features prominently in the diary, in which I explain that if we manage to sell our apartment in Belgrade, we will likely be able to afford a two-story house in Melbourne (this was a fantasy that I firmly believed, choosing to remember Australia as even bigger and more luxurious than it was). The pages following the entry are full of maniacal drawings of houses (with neat scales of 1000:1 written beside them, as I’d been taught in my geography class with Ms. Danica), as well as drawings of various breeds of dogs. In the Cyrillic I’d spent so long learning and that I would soon have no use for anymore, I wrote:

  I AM SO HAPPY AND ALSO NOT HAPPY TO GO TO AUSTRALIA. I AUSTRALIA AND I YUGOSLAVIA, BUT FOR DIFFERENT REASONS. I LOVE AUSTRALIA BECAUSE IT IS BASICALLY A HEAVEN-COUNTRY. THERE IS A LOT OF GREENERY, THE RELAXED SCHOOLING SYSTEM IS SUPER AND I AM HARDLY EVER BORED THERE.

  I LOVE YUGOSLAVIA BECAUSE MY FAMILY IS HERE, MY FRIENDS AND BECAUSE THIS IS WHERE I WAS BORN, AND I AM SAD IF WE LEAVE AND THERE IS WAR. I WILL BE SAD FOR ALL OF THE PEOPLE HERE, “MY” PEOPLE.

  My dad’s workplace was experiencing mass resignations. The bosses snapped up the coveted visas to America, which were harder to get. The younger employees grabbed visas to Australia or Canada. For those going to Melbourne, my dad said, “I’ll see you there,” except we had to jump a few hurdles before we could return.

  In order to get his old job back, my dad was told he’d have to do some time in the town of Whyalla, where his employer BHP’s mine was situated and the computer systems needed updating. So in February 1992, my dad got on a plane bound for South Australia, where his Driza-Bone coat and his Akubra hat would be more at home than in Belgrade or even in Melbourne. He would find us a place, and we would follow, just like before.

  The day after he left, as I trudged to the tram stop in the snow, a kid on the street said, “Hey, are you in that TV show, Broom Without a Handle?” I was too flabbergasted to utter a casual “Yeah, that’s me,” as I had practiced a million times, so I just squeaked “It is me,” thinking it was just my luck to be leaving right as my glory days were starting.

  • • •

  A few weeks later, it was the three of us off to the airport again: my mother, Natalija, and me. Four years earlier, we had sat in a taxi crying, and now we were sitting in a taxi crying again. Natalija, who had just turned four, was too little to understand what was going on, but she cried nonetheless, in sympathy with my mother and me. I clutched my backpack, which contained letters from my friends at school decorated with stickers and drawings of koalas and full of promises that we’d stay close forever, with multiple, earnest exclamation marks. Goodbye my friends, I thought, trying not to cry, but to smile gently and beatifically, channeling the scene in which my beloved fictional Winnetou, the Apache chief, is dying, when he remains calm and strong. Also in my backpack was an English-language copy of Wuthering Heights, from my aunt and uncle, a reminder of their home where I’d felt so comfortable, a grown-up story from their bookshelf that I could take with me. It was back to the English-speaking world for us. My English will be a little shaky after two years away, I thought. And then I wondered if my Serbian would start to suffer if I would only be speaking it to my family. I promised to myself that I would keep writing in Cyrillic in my diary, and I now wished my uncle and aunt had given me the Serbian translation of Wuthering Heights. “I won’t forget you,” I whispered to my city, as I looked outside at the gray streets.

  I opened the window and stuck my head out into the freezing cold, like a woman I’d seen on TV. I imagined my hair wildly flying out the side of the car, the people behind us getting a glimpse of my departing form. “Goodbye, Belgrade, my home,” I wanted to say, with my hair whipping out the window like a flag. My mother stopped crying to tell me that I must always ask the driver if I want to open the window, and embarrassed, I retracted my head and rolled the window up.

  On the plane, we continued crying. We were going to be migrants again, stretching ourselves painfully across continents once more. Separated from our loved ones by oceans and the prohibitive cost of a plane ticket, we would be left to face our tragedies alone, and we would leave our loved ones to face theirs. My mother ha
d pushed for a return to Belgrade but she’d seen for herself that it wasn’t a place she wanted to bring up her kids. Her husband, she could now admit, was right. She would say to her friends later that leaving Belgrade for the second time felt like having a cold breath on our necks—because she felt the chill of the horrors to come.

  We took off, leaving the fading lights of the city. Natalija read her little books and complained about her ear pain, while I read the letters from my friends and examined each of the precious stickers they’d decorated the pages with. I rubbed the stickers anxiously, worried they’d peel off, and tried not to think about the prospect of having to make new friends again. We were off to Whyalla: another unknown, where the only familiar sight would be my dad’s open arms.

  5

  The Asshole’s Asshole

  As we would soon discover, if Australia was the asshole of the world, Whyalla, South Australia, was the asshole’s asshole. The state of South Australia is largely empty of people—and two thirds of the small population lives in the state capital, Adelaide. “This place,” as one of my dad’s work colleagues put it on his first day, “is a hole.”

  A full four hours’ drive from Adelaide, our new home was a town known for its steel factory, which was owned by my dad’s employer, BHP. And that’s where his bosses sent him now, as “punishment,” he said, for having quit the first time to take us back to Yugoslavia. He could get his old Melbourne job back—in about a year, just as soon as he finished the software project at the factory in the middle of nowhere.

  I imagined my dad as Cinderella, scrubbing floors so he could go to the ball. But actually, instead of scrubbing floors, he drove down a highway, where every now and then he saw the carcass of a kangaroo that had been hit by a car, or glanced at the feral camels—creatures that had been brought to Australia by Afghan traders back before there was a railway system. The camels, now wild, roamed the outback, eating precious plants and making a nuisance of themselves, one of the only species able to survive the climate.

  My dad drew inspiration from their survival against the inhospitable environment, thinking that if they could manage, we could, too. As he pulled up at the factory, my dad remembered his birthplace, the mining town of Bor, and considered how strange it was that he had ended up here, in regional Australia. He went into the factory, walking past the steelworkers and into an air-conditioned office. Thankfully, the reality was that he could work as a programmer anywhere in the world, and soon he’d be gone from Whyalla, unlike the laborers who toiled around him. He counted his lucky stars, thinking about the hard life he might have faced if he hadn’t gone to school, and about the war he’d be fighting in now had he not scrambled across the world on the back of his degree.

  My mother had criticized Melbourne’s suburbs for being dead, and as she looked at our new place, she was too dumbfounded to even make a scathing comment. Our new house was at the end of a bare street, sparsely populated with other flimsy, low-roofed homes, and beyond it was “the bush”—essentially, scrub. Dad had warned us the house was “kind of crappy,” and I had already prepared what I was going to say when we arrived, using a line stolen from a Baby-Sitters Club scene where the heroines find themselves in a shitty place and make the best of it. When my mother, sister, and I walked up the creaky porch steps and into the house, a linoleum-floored, moist-smelling, flimsy shack, I put my hands on my hips, looking around. “It’s small,” I said as planned, “small—but cute.” I’d hoped my parents would be cheered by my rehearsed enthusiasm, but they weren’t paying attention. My mother was saying “oh my god” and walking around the house in disbelief, the linoleum emitting loud hollow sounds with each of her steps, as if she were a giant making the earth quake.

  Meanwhile, Dad led us to the Formica kitchen table, in the middle of which sat a little house made of chocolate. A guy at his work built chocolate structures as a hobby, and Dad had commissioned this especially, to greet us in our new home. The chocolate house had a large slanted roof, and big square windows, unlike the house we were in, which was flat-roofed, small-windowed, and dark. At Dad’s encouragement, I carefully snapped off the door and put it in my mouth. The chocolate was rock-hard, and when I managed to get my teeth through it, it was chalky, but I told him it was delicious.

  Even when the rest of the family gave up on the chocolate, agreeing it was disgusting, I stuck to my story, determined to eat it. I couldn’t handle the thought of Dad’s gift going in the trash. To see him smile proudly, I would have eaten the whole house in one sitting, but my mother took it away before I could choke down even half of the roof.

  The ground around our place was a red-brown, pebbled terrain, with only the most resilient spiky grass and bushes jutting out of it, tough plants that could live with barely any water and heat that got up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. The street was sparsely populated, with replicas of our low-ceilinged, wooden house painted in a thick, matte reddish-brown, as if to blend into the desolate surrounds. The window in the room Natalija and I shared looked onto the backyard, which was a patch of red earth. There were anthills rising up all over it like pimples, and in the middle of the ant kingdom was a large water tank. Nature was closer to us than ever before, and came in the form of giant, biting ants that attacked anyone who set foot in the backyard, sinking their pincers into exposed toes or feasting on bare legs. Mrs. Melville, my barefoot teacher from Melbourne, would not do well here, I thought to myself.

  In our kitchen, we discovered a redback spider, which could muster enough venom to kill a small child. Once the spider was dead, courtesy of my mother’s shoe, I thought of poor Natalija, who, in my opinion, had dodged yet another bullet. Yes, she had survived Belgrade without being kidnapped, but now, here she was, four years old and just the right weight to be killed by a redback, or a brown snake—one of the most dangerous serpents in the world, which also called South Australia home.

  On our first night in Whyalla, Natalija was not contemplating the potential of her untimely end, as I was. Instead, she pointed through the small window of our new bedroom and shouted, “Look, it’s the moon—my friend!” I was touched by my sister’s optimism, her willingness to count a celestial body as a personal friend. Older and wiser, I knew that a moon was no help when you were the weird new kid, and soon I’d be starting at the local school.

  My mood was lifted that night by the novelty of our new bunk beds, and I climbed up the ladder, turned on the lamp Dad had got me, and took out Wuthering Heights, forgetting for a moment the loneliness that was to come. Jet-lagged, I read for hours, wondering if I could ever love the creepy landscape outside my own window in the way Heathcliff and Catherine loved the moors. Probably not, I decided, as I climbed down the ladder to go to the bathroom, creaking along the flimsy floor, the eerie light of the moon filling this uncanny new house full of our familiar things, yet completely alien.

  • • •

  Whyalla was a workers’ town; cheap to live in, and ethnically diverse: our neighbors were Indian, German, and Turkish. We were, though, the only Yugoslavians in town. Now we were isolated from our family in Yugoslavia, where the political situation was getting worse, and far from Melbourne, where we at least had some friends. I was far from the day-to-day routines of Belgrade, which were occurring without me, and I felt in some ways like I was dead—obliterated from that place without a trace. Aunt Mila would still watch films, Nemanja would carry on being handsome, Jasna would continue to be the most popular girl, Nikola would mourn the death of his father, the people would go to protests, kids would play—I just wouldn’t be there anymore. Right now, as South Australia sweltered, the snow was melting in Belgrade, in the yard where my dad had helped me build a snowman (whose breasts I’d carefully molded, eager to show that not all snowmen were men)—she was now slush, and we weren’t even there to mourn her passing.

  Would my school friends talk about me, and remember me as that girl who was here for a while and then left again? Would Natalija and I be reduced to those fra
med images in our grandmas’ apartments, to short sentences describing us—“Sofija likes to read,” “Natalija has a sunny personality”? Would our idiosyncrasies fade, leaving us to become “the granddaughters from Australia” once again, frozen in the fake smiles we put on for photos, when really we were still living and breathing in Whyalla, like some desert ghosts?

  I would have to make friends here, and the prospect of being new again sat heavy in my stomach. As for my Melbourne friends, whom I would see as soon as we escaped Whyalla—did we even have anything in common anymore? Alicia and I had spent most of our time together doing little-girl things—jumping on her trampoline, tracing pictures of lions from books because they were Alicia’s favorite animal and she never wanted to draw dogs like I did. Alicia knew the old me—before I’d read many books, before I could write in Cyrillic, before I liked to think of myself as a peace activist, before my Australian accent got warped by my uncle’s British English. She wouldn’t know the names of Serbia’s opposition leaders, or about Smoki peanut snacks, about war, or even about snow. The only people who somewhat understood what it was like to be me at this particular moment were my parents and Natalija. But there were vast chasms between us too, each of us preoccupied with our own issues.

  For my part, I was concerned with the freakish things my body was starting to do, ahead of most kids my age. Like the stretch marks that appeared on my thighs and the little fat boobs that were starting to show on my nine-year-old body. One day, I noticed a dark hair growing between my legs. I knew what this meant thanks to the well-thumbed Serbian translation of the classic sex-ed book What’s Happening to Me? which I had frequently consulted: I was going through puberty. I felt sad for my parents, who, I imagined, would be distressed. Dad would wipe a tear from his eye and say, “My little girl’s growing up,” like a TV dad. If he said this, I decided I’d put my arm around him and say, “I’m still your little girl,” though technically, I believed that the pube had opened a gateway to adulthood, romance, and sophistication.