Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  There was blood being shed, but for me, Dad trumped all those other people. It became apparent to me that there was a hierarchy to valuing life, just like my parents had turned the volume up when Yugoslavia was on the news and turned it down when Afghanistan was on. We cared about Yugoslavia more than we cared about the rest of the world, and we cared about our immediate family more than we cared about the rest of Yugoslavia. Every war in history has been driven by this hierarchy of life and death, the killing of others justified by our own unavoidable, subjective scales of human value. When Dad was lying in his bed, too feeble to speak, if someone had asked me if I would swap the lives of Bosnian villagers for Dad’s, I would have immediately agreed. If I’d had the power, I would have sacrificed another kid’s dad to die instead. Or any of my teachers, acquaintances, or family friends.

  As my dad became sicker, I grew jealous of my friends with healthy parents and resentful of old people, who deserved their health less than my dad. If someone’s grandparent died, I rolled my eyes. So what? I thought. They’ve already lived their lives, my dad isn’t even forty. What floored me most was the moral injustice: Why did this happen to my dad, who was universally known for being a nice person? What was the point of trying to be a decent person if this was what could happen to you, to your family?

  I began to weigh different types of dying against each other. The difference between dying in war versus dying from an illness; the difference between dying lucid or dying confused. Which would be worse? What would be the best way to extinguish a life? With a bullet? In a concentration camp in Croatia or Bosnia? From a long illness or a short one? How did different types of death affect the dying person, and their families? If I got distracted in class and a teacher snapped me out of it, it wasn’t that I’d been daydreaming about pashing, like a normal person; more often than not, I’d been mentally rearranging my hypothetical death ranking, like a weirdo.

  • • •

  I felt increasingly isolated from my school friends. The Tempest crew had split up, all the students returning to their normal lives, and because of Dad’s illness I missed a lot of the “gatherings” that were happening. There were people dating, splitting up, and partying more than ever and I was missing it all, but most of the time, I didn’t feel like participating. They were experiencing something I didn’t have the capacity for; I was always weighed down by my home situation, and it made my laugh shorter, my desire to join in minimal. I stayed at home, looking after Natalija or sitting in Dad’s room as he lay there.

  At night I still often spoke to Harry about dumb everyday school stuff. I chatted on our brand-new phone, a part of Dad’s very sudden departure from his usual thrifty self. Dad had insisted on recording the answering machine message himself: “You have reached the Stefanović household, please . . . leave a message” he said stiltedly, in his shaky accented voice, sounding so sick that I was embarrassed for people to hear it. Did he not know he sounded like that? Why couldn’t I do the recording, as I’d offered to do? Was this my dad’s way of saying, “I’m the parent, I can still talk, I can do it myself!”? Or was it his way of leaving a mark in the world when he knew he couldn’t be in it for much longer? I kept the phone by me all the time, picking up on the first ring, so people wouldn’t have to hear him like that. I’d put it on the floor of the dining room, which we now called the “Nintendo room,” where my sister and I spent most of our time, as Dad lay in the next room, listening to the sounds of Donkey Kong.

  When his liver became too weak, Dad had to get a tube that drained the bile out of his body and into a sack that hung by his hip. It was around about this time that my school friends started saying “yak bile” to each other, as a kind of joke. There was no reason for it, and no meaning behind it. It was just like when we found the word “urban” hilarious for about a month, unable to explain what was so funny, it just was. I didn’t know where the term “yak bile” came from, but my friends would say it in funny voices to one another, and then crack up laughing. I knew that it wasn’t related to me or my family, but it made me angry. It made me feel like my friends, healthy and stupid, were attacking my dad, who was by this point like some little, suffering animal. I was jealous that they probably didn’t even know what bile was, how horrible it smelled, how it could make a person’s skin and eyes yellow.

  • • •

  From the medications he was being fed, Dad started hallucinating again. His mother, Grandma Beba, came to Australia to look after him while our mother was at work. Meanwhile Dad, whose mind was going, would call out from his room. Once, he insisted there was a possum in there, and Grandma Beba, who didn’t know what a possum was, knew that a poskok was a type of snake in our language. In a scene worthy of a Kusturica black comedy, she ran around with a broom, searching for a snake while Dad muttered senselessly. Grandma Beba was known not only for being easily suggestible but also for her ability for unintentional zingers. For example, she’d say things like: “When he was a child, Lola loved horses. All he talked about was horses, and he looked so much like . . .” (cue everyone thinking she’s going to say “a horse”) “. . . his father!” Now Dad came around and saw Grandma Beba searching for snakes and he said, “Oh my god, I must have been talking nonsense. Now I know what it’s like to be you, Ma,” to which my grandmother chuckled good-naturedly, happy to have her son back for a brief moment, even if he was being mean.

  • • •

  During this time, while we were embroiled in our personal drama, the Americans, under Bill Clinton, managed to engage the leadership of ex-Yugoslavia in Bosnian peace talks. Slobodan Milošević attended on behalf of the Bosnian Serb leaders, who had previously pushed him out. Now the Bosnian Serbs were exhausted, as were the other parties in this long, bloody war. Franjo Tuđman of Croatia was there, to negotiate on behalf of Croatian interests in Bosnia, as was Alija Izetbegović, the Bosnian Muslim leader.

  These negotiations were filmed, and there is a scene in the BBC documentary The Death of Yugoslavia in which the Americans look for the first time at satellite footage of an area that Milošević and Izetbegović have been negotiating over for weeks. One of the American negotiators is confused—this area seems to be just rock: no houses, no people. The Serb and the Muslim look at the American, incredulous. “That’s what most of Bosnia looks like,” they say, as if he’s the crazy one. The American puts his head in his hands, as if to say, “This is what you’ve been fighting over?”—and the ex-Yugoslavians continue doing what they do best, arguing.

  Finally, after weeks of negotiations, the peace agreement was signed and the war in Bosnia came to an end. There were over one hundred thousand dead, and two million displaced. Cynics immediately claimed that the peace was temporary, that the war was bound to recur in about fifty years. Some said that Serbia would be at war again before we knew it, this time in Kosovo. Some used the old Yugo saying that is often applied to the Balkans: “If you build your house in the road, don’t be surprised when it’s knocked down.” “War is over,” some people rejoiced. “For now,” others added.

  As for us, we barely noticed.

  • • •

  As Dad grew sicker, our roof was invaded by rats. My parents were too preoccupied to deal with it, though, so the rats became my responsibility. Each day, I placed a ladder beneath a hatch leading to the roof. I went up with a box of rat poison, careful not to spill it on the ground where Dante might eat it and die (being himself only slightly larger than a big rat). I’d open the hatch, and nearly fall off the ladder, ducking or weaving, because I thought dead, or half-dead, rats would come tumbling onto my head. I put my hand in the roof, feeling around where I couldn’t see, until I found a little bowl, which had been emptied of poison by the rats, and I’d refill it with new poison pellets. I held my breath, my heart pounding, as if I were the one who was in lethal danger, not the rats above us or my dad in the next room. I began dreaming of rats: chasing me, climbing all over me. Rats became intertwined with illness and death in my subconscious,
destined to haunt me for decades. Had my mother been concentrating on me, she would’ve had a psychologist’s field day.

  Natalija and I now avoided Dad, not just because of the smell of bile, but because he was often mean. One time when I was sitting with him, he fixed his yellow eyes on me and shouted, “Why did you dye your hair!? You look like an idiot! Who do you think you are?!” I hadn’t dyed my hair, and I wasn’t sure he even recognized who I was.

  Later, when I was crying, my mother told me that that wasn’t him talking, it was the illness, and all the medications that were poisoning his blood and mind. I tried to comfort myself: this wasn’t my dad. This was the guy who hallucinated, who kicked Dante, who couldn’t argue with my mother as her equal, but who yelled at her nonsensically in a hollow childish voice that inspired pity. My mother said: “Just imagine this situation we’re in is a massive black cloud falling from the sky, and then be like a net. Allow it to pass through you.” I pictured a net through which a black cloud is squeezed, dispersing into many pieces. I imagined holding my breath as it passed, careful not to catch the noxious substance myself.

  I found myself often holding my breath, to protect myself from the things that could destroy me. I didn’t want to talk about being sad, and when I saw groups of kids at school gather to comfort a girl who had been broken up with, or who’d got a bad test score, I never wished they were cooing at me. I felt beyond consolation. I had no desire to cry in front of other people, and the part of me that had dreamed about spilling forth emotionally as an actress now felt stupid. My creative energy and desire to connect with others had been silenced by sadness. I just wanted to hold my breath until everything passed.

  • • •

  As the weeks went on, Dad started preparing for death, in his cloudy state. He tried to put on a leather belt over his saggy pajamas, demanding, in an annoyed voice, that he had an appointment. The “appointment” that his hazy mind was reminding him of, it seems, was death.

  People who weren’t even close friends started calling up and insisting on speaking to Dad, telling him about dreams they’d had about him, or getting off their chests things they’d always wanted to say, even if those things had nothing to do with my dad. Some talked about their own near-death experiences, or how they needed to appreciate their families more, live life to the fullest. After a while, my mother banned these calls. She was sick of watching him lie there helpless, weak, and listening to someone unburdening themselves. When he was up to it, the two of them talked, their old arguments irrelevant now that everything was coming to an end. When she asked him if he had any wishes as far as their children were concerned, about education, or things he wanted her to impart, he said that he trusted her. He looked at her and said, “How will I get by without you?” and she didn’t correct him. She didn’t say that he was the one who was leaving—and that she would be left to get by.

  • • •

  Without telling anyone, while my dad could still get out of bed, my parents had chosen a plot at the cemetery. When they hobbled over to look at it, they found that the graveyard was divided into parts. There was an Italian Catholic part, with large, marble crypts, busts of long-dead people, and photos of nonnas and nonnos. There was a small section that was labeled Serbian Orthodox, but it was at a low-lying part of the cemetery, where it was damp and dark. My parents chose a sunny part that was nondenominational—Dad didn’t want to be remembered just as a Serb; even if his ethnicity stood out here thanks to his accent and immigrant status. There were so many things he had dreamed of for himself that had nothing to do with his nationality. He had once played Romeo, he’d inhabited so many worlds of fiction, he had wanted to study literature, and he’d only just make it to forty—so many things left unexplored.

  Natalija and I didn’t know the death plans were under way. When our mother took us to Buci boutique, the fanciest store on our local shopping strip, and declared, “You will each buy a nice outfit,” I thought she’d lost her mind. We already had a new car: a Mitsubishi Magna, burgundy-colored and sleek, only a year old when we got it. When my mother dropped me off at school in it, I wondered if kids looked over and thought we were rich. Dad had insisted on the new car, doing everything in his power to make sure we were “taken care of” when he was gone. We had driven in the new car to Centre Road, and I was trying on a pair of black-and-white herringbone pants that my mother had picked out, like we were in some film about rich American teens who go to the mall with their mother to get spoiled. The pants ballooned at the front, and I stood in front of the mirror confused.

  “You’ve got them on back to front,” the shop assistant explained, and embarrassed, I got changed again, reemerging with the pants on the right way. I had never had pants that zipped in the back, and the notion of a zip following the line of one’s butt crack seemed suddenly very sophisticated. On top, I tried a shaggy black sweater with tiny threads coming off it, making me look like an elegant Muppet. Natalija got a navy-colored dress. It was only when we were in the car on the way home, our new purchases sitting in a bag by our legs, that it hit me: these were our funeral clothes.

  Dad wanted to stay at home as long as possible, but when he could no longer sit up, or pee, an ambulance was called. Dante didn’t even bark at the paramedics but watched with us kids, as the strangers came in with a stretcher for Dad, and he left our house for the last time, lifting his arm slightly, in a half wave.

  My mother was with him at the hospital later that night, when Dad fell into a hepatic coma. He didn’t feel pain, and then, he was gone. My mother sat there for a while, suddenly by herself. Then, she rang a friend who had offered to be on call in this situation to drive her home. As she was getting ready to catch her ride, she realized she’d left her house keys at home. But then she remembered: Who was the person who had never, ever left home without a key? Who had always annoyed her with his preciousness? She fished around in Dad’s coat and found the key.

  At dawn, our mother woke us up. Natalija and I had been sleeping on the fold-out couch in the Nintendo room, having fallen asleep mid-game. Grandma Beba was crying somewhere in the house. Our mother gave us a Valium each and told us the news. We all lay on the squeaky fold-out bed, with little Dante curled up at our feet.

  • • •

  A couple of days later, on the morning of the funeral, Natalija and I dressed in our new clothes. As the car inched through Melbourne’s city streets during rush hour, on our way to the Serbian Orthodox church, a man thumped his fist against the roof. He was angry because we’d blocked his path, but the sound of the thump made us all gasp; imagining we’d hit a pedestrian, that there was another person dead, just like that. As we neared the church, I saw an actress from the long-running Australian TV show Neighbours out the window. I didn’t point her out, because I didn’t want our memories of Dad’s funeral to feature Libby from Neighbours. But so many years later, she is still clear in my mind, ponytailed at the crossing.

  The Serbian Orthodox church where Dad’s service was held is in the inner-city suburb of Brunswick. When we arrived, all I could think about was when my mother had dragged us all to the church one Easter at the height of the war and we’d stood behind a woman in a nationalist T-shirt that said “Greater Serbia” on the back of it, and how my dad had muttered that she should have put the stupid slogan lower, on her butt, where it belonged.

  The ex-Yugoslavian diaspora turned out in droves for Dad’s funeral. It was a Tuesday morning, and these people had all taken time off work to attend. Among them, I noticed Harry’s dad and Alicia’s dad, and I was touched that my friends had told their parents, and that they’d decided to come, even though they’d only met my dad a few times. As people filed out after the service, paying their respects, one of our family friends gripped my shoulders and shook me.

  “Be strong!” he said. “You need to be strong!” like someone in a movie would say. If I hadn’t been crying, I would have rolled my eyes, and if I had been braver, I would have said, “Fuck off, you don’
t even know me.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from crying, wishing I wasn’t surrounded by all these people. Everything happening around me seemed like a melodramatic film. I didn’t want anyone to squeeze my arm, like people squeezed grieving people’s arms. I didn’t want people to say “it’ll pass” or to start sentences with “your dad was so . . .” All of it made me sick. Everyone else’s emotions seemed phony, and hypocritical, and everything they said or did was contrived and distasteful. I could think of nothing worse than being here, on what seemed like a stage, raw and helpless, with people gaping. I didn’t want my mother to hug me; I didn’t want my sister or grandmother to, either. All I wanted was to be away from every person I knew. I’d been yearning to be in the spotlight for so long, but now it was being delivered to me all wrong, in the form of a nightmare rather than a dream.

  • • •

  At the cemetery I overheard two old men we’d never met speculating about why my dad wasn’t being buried in the Serbian part of the cemetery, eventually coming to the (incorrect) conclusion that he was a Freemason. My mother turned and glared at them. My sister stood next to me in her new navy-colored dress, scuffing her shoe over and over on the concrete. “Not a single one of them brought their child,” my mother whispered, looking at all her acquaintances. “They didn’t want to expose their children to a funeral, but what about my children?” she said, looking at lonely Natalija, her voice rising. And right then, as my mother sent death glares at her friends, Davorka, the Croatian doctor my mother had made friends with when we first came to Australia, arrived with her son, Ivan. Natalija and Ivan ran around the cemetery shouting, and my mother wouldn’t let anyone tell them to stop.

  After the service, I noticed a cluster of Aussies in business clothes and knew they were Dad’s friends from work. I realized that they probably hadn’t understood a word of the funeral so far, so I walked over to them, feeling obliged to play host, for Dad’s sake. They must feel uncomfortable among all these weeping ethnic people, I thought. Grandma Beba had even thrown herself on the coffin before Dad was lowered into the ground. Everyone had just stood there watching, as she lay on it, weeping. “Will someone help this woman, please?” my mother had said, annoyed at my grandmother’s play for attention, which Dad would’ve found excessive and uncivilized.