Miss Ex-Yugoslavia

by Sofija Stefanovic

  One afternoon, we were supposed to watch with my great-uncle Alek, who was visiting from eastern Serbia, and as we waited for him to arrive I thought about the tragedy that had befallen their family. His son, my first cousin Bojan, had killed himself the previous year. It turned out that Bojan’s boss—the one who owned the recreation center—was part of the mafia, as we had suspected. Bojan had been tasked with driving a van full of alcohol from Romania into Serbia. He was caught at the border and the smuggled liquor was confiscated. Bojan was held responsible by his boss, whose cronies had been forcing him to personally pay back the money for the lost alcohol. Bojan’s family knew he was in trouble, but he never told them the full story, or how desperate he was becoming. He’d sold everything he owned, and when he ran out of options and the pressure and threats didn’t stop, he hanged himself. On the day of his funeral, his parents got a call from the mafia, saying the family had inherited Bojan’s debt. Now Bojan’s elderly father was in Belgrade to sell his coin collection.

  The doorbell rang just as the show was about to begin, and my grandmother ushered my great-uncle in. I hardly had time to offer my condolences before the credits started rolling and my two elderly relatives became entranced. I remembered Bojan’s beautiful wife Anita and their young son playing on the linoleum floor of their old house and wondered what they would do now.

  When the commercials came on, we had a chance to catch up a little, and I asked how my great-uncle and my great-aunt Rose were doing. “We’re the saddest family in this country,” he told me, as my grandmother opened a tin of vanilice, a shortbread-jam cookie she had made. I started thinking about that phrasing, “the saddest family in this country,” as if it was something measurable, like it was possible to measure my relatives’ sadness compared to that of Marko’s parents, or all the people who were still miserable, whose situation had barely changed since the fall of Milošević. Why had I thought a revolution was like a magic wand? As if a democratic government could wipe out the mafia just like that. As if it could erase the lingering problems of the depressed people.

  The show came back on. As Kassandra argued with the evil man who was trying to seduce her, and my elderly relatives watched rapt, my mind drifted from the banana plantation to the genital wart operation I was going to have that night, which I hadn’t mentioned to my family.

  • • •

  In the taxi to the clinic, I started looking for my seat belt, then stopped, remembering that no one wore seat belts here. In the scathing tone my ex-Yugo friends and I used to complain about Australians, I said: “I live in Australia, where we pay ridiculous fines for not wearing seat belts.”

  “Well, here in Serbia, we pay with our lives,” the driver responded. I thought about how people who live in poor countries have shorter life expectancies, and my eyes started filling with tears again, thinking about all the years Marko and Bojan had taken off theirs.

  When I arrived at the clinic, the neon love-heart above the entrance flickered and then went out, like in a horror film. I walked in to find the doctor and her young assistant illuminated by flashlights they held under their faces like members of the Baby-Sitters Club preparing to tell spooky stories around a campfire.

  The doctor assured me there was no need to call a taxi, and that she could operate just fine despite the electricity having been cut, and she took all the cash I had left for this vacation and led me by the hand into the pitch-black operating room. I had a brief flashback to Madame Marie’s story of the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

  In the freezing cold, I was instructed to strip and lie on a table with my legs spread, as the assistant spotlighted my vagina with her flashlight. She made me feel simultaneously uncomfortable and at home: she eyeballed my vagina impassively, and even rested her cheek on my thigh at one point sleepily. The doctor explained that she wasn’t able to use her “usual” instruments because of the power outage, but her confident tone made me think this wasn’t the first time she was required to use tools from preelectrical times.

  I lay there limp as the doctor injected me with a couple of local anesthetics and then got to work with tools that made scraping and cutting sounds. But instead of thinking about the medieval circumstances, I cried, as I had done every day in Belgrade, not from the pain, but because lying in that cold dark place, everything felt hopeless. The doctor, assuming I was crying because of my wart removal, tried to cheer me up.

  “Sister, this is nothing,” she said. “These warts are tiny. You should see when we get women from the country coming here to give birth. They’ve never even been to a gynecologist. I find warts the size of grapes and have to remove them during labor, ’cause they can’t even give birth!” She laughed heartily, and her assistant joined in.

  I was sent home with some vaginal suppositories, and another round of antibiotics. A few weeks later, when I saw my gynecologist back in Melbourne, I was told that I hadn’t had warts, and that the lumps that had been removed by torchlight were probably just cosmetic blemishes, the equivalent of pimples. I was told that I was duped by the doctor, who was trying to make a buck. But in the moment, ignorant to all of this, I hobbled to a taxi believing myself to be STD-free and went back to my aunt’s apartment so I could go to bed at 8 p.m., and the next morning cross off another day on the calendar, counting down the time I had left in Belgrade.

  “Did you have a nice time with your friends?” Aunt Mila asked.

  “Oh yes,” I said, imitating the gusto of a person who had been guzzling cocktails, rather than someone with an antibacterial tablet fizzing inside her.

  While I was gone, my mother had called to let us know the letter had arrived. I’d aced my exams, and in a few months, I’d be going to my first-choice college.

  A few days later, healing from two infections, I left my diseased homeland and got on a plane, eager for once to fly far away, back to Melbourne, which seemed full of hope. And as we flew toward Australia and away from my birthplace, I felt like I was coming home.

  11

  The School of Life

  I was about to start university, and after a year of dating, the comfortable relationship I had with Blaža felt increasingly stifling. I didn’t want to speculate about how many kids we might have, and whenever Blaža dreamed aloud about our future, I was silent. I wanted to immerse myself in college, to live the idealized life I’d dreamed about with Jasmine. I wanted to be someone new, who was not tied to a Yugo boyfriend, or confined to the Yugo diaspora. The weight of his arm around me felt suddenly heavy, and his text messages became annoying. On my sister’s birthday, Blaža gave her a beautiful spiral bookcase he’d made based on a design we’d seen in London. The night after, I finally ended it. Once he left, I cried, running my hand over the carefully crafted, meticulously painted bookshelf, and I wondered if I would ever find someone as kind again.

  • • •

  In March, I started university. I still lived at my mother’s place, and each morning I got in my new-to-me Toyota and drove an hour into the city, blasting music. As a first-year arts student at the University of Melbourne, I had the freedom to take courses in subjects as varied and impractical as I wanted. I took a course entirely dedicated to Hong Kong cinema prereunification with China and one called “The European Spectacle” in which we learned about the abject theater of the absurd. I took “Art, Pornography, Blasphemy, Propaganda,” which explored how those categories blurred into one another in literature and in the sordid lives of authors. I continued to study French, which I’d kept up through high school, and in class I sat next to a blond Aussie named Laurence who loved riding bicycles, smoking weed, and had excellent conversational French.

  My favorite was a linguistics class in which we learned about Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist who writes about how translation can cause cultural clashes. She believes it is difficult to translate certain emotions from one culture to another, when words don’t have an exact equivalent, and we try to squash them into a definition that doesn’t fit. This can lead to cultural misund
erstandings, and to people feeling like they haven’t been heard.

  How often had I misunderstood people, or been misunderstood thanks to the clumsiness of language, and the dominance that one language, like English, exercised over others? What about kids whose immigrant parents failed to communicate with them because they had been raised on different languages that could never quite meet? I jotted down Serbian phrases I had always regretted not being able to translate properly. There were songs, of course, so poetic in the original, that always sounded not quite right in English. It was also hard to translate terms of endearment. In English, people used terms like “honey” and “dear,” but we called our loved ones “my sun” or “my soul,” neither of which translated well, especially as calling a lover “my sun” sounds creepy when you say it out loud. There were also diminutives and augmentatives, which made expressions so much more colorful. In English, if we are talking about a child’s hand we might call it a “little hand,” while in my language we just add a suffix to hand, making it something like a handlet, or handsie, handkin. There are diminutive dogs, diminutive bridges, diminutive books. Blaža had used diminutive pet names when talking to me; instead of having a button on my coat, I had a little button—in English what would you call that? A buttonette?

  I had massive folders full of materials I was supposed to read for my courses, and I discovered it took me a long time to grasp certain academic language, or intentionally complicated literature, to get to the point. In high school, I had never had problems with reading assignments, though I would often read a sentence over several times to make sure I got the gist. Now I was reading sentences three times over, blaming myself for being an ethnic and struggling with English somehow, still. Everything would take me three times as long as it took everyone else, I insisted to myself, calculating the disadvantage I had.

  But then, I knew that if these readings were in Serbian, they would take me even longer. So which was it? Was I a jack-of-all-trades, or a master of none, unable to wrap my head completely around my second language because my first one stubbornly forbade it? Why couldn’t people write in a way that was easy to understand? Surely, it’s less taxing to write a simple sentence than a complex one. It was deliberate, I told myself, a way of pushing out a certain part of the population from the world of intellectual pursuits.

  • • •

  The first few months of university were sunny and exciting—Jasmine and I sat with our new friends in a courtyard under a gigantic oak tree rolling cigarettes. Or we hung out at another place on campus that served sushi and good, strong coffee. Sushi was only just becoming popular then, and I will never forget the exotic smell of the café—pickled ginger mixed with freshly roasted coffee beans. We sat on the grungy couches, ate our salmon rolls, and talked about our new lives, brimming with new people and stimulating ideas. Jasmine took a performance art class with a guy who, in the name of art, put ice blocks into his butt while lying on a sheet of ice. The point of the piece was unclear to us, but we respected his dedication. Some of my classmates had parents who were lawyers, or composers, or poets, or who owned apartments in London. There were international students from Singapore in my journalism classes, and we rolled our eyes at one another because our professors were too old-fashioned to teach us about online journalism.

  One bright day when the air smelled like leaves and coffee, my new friend Laurence and I walked toward our French class, as our professor came down the hall from the other direction. Out the window, we saw students sprawled on the lawn, and in a late-teenaged silly rebel kind of way, Laurence and I decided to ditch class and enjoy the freedom outside.

  In our excitement, we ran all the way out the building and onto Lygon Street with its Italian restaurants, and as we ran, I thought about all the things we could suddenly do now that the world was open to us: we could have a beer at one of the pubs, grab a hazelnut ice cream from New Zealand Natural, a cannoli from Brunetti’s Italian patisserie, or eat takeout Indian sitting on the grass under the tree. And at that moment, not paying attention to where we were going, we crashed directly into Blaža, who immediately dropped the hand of the young woman he was walking with.

  Confused, I said hello in our language, then switched to English, introducing Laurence, who wiped sweat from his brow, not realizing this was an important moment. I looked at Blaža and his new girlfriend, who looked exactly like a Yugo Cameron Diaz. Had I made the wrong decision in breaking up with him? As Cameron Diaz tried to absorb how she’d found herself with her hand suddenly unheld, I wondered if by ending my relationship and taking a step back from my ex-Yugo friends I’d shut the door to my culture, leaving myself lonely.

  Later, as Laurence perused the books on the bargain table in Readings bookstore, I pretended to do the same, but instead I thought about Blaža and his new girlfriend, and also about our last trip to ex-Yugoslavia. The Yugos aren’t my people, I told myself, at the same time remembering that I never felt like an Aussie either. I considered whether I could get away with calling myself “a citizen of the world” should anyone ask.

  • • •

  The following two years of undergraduate study passed in a blur of learning, parties, and short romances. Student life was luxurious. We were expected to sit for hours reading and pontificating, and I cherished the fact that I only worked at Peter’s a couple of shifts a week, not having to worry about rent. In my life as a student, I was able to reinvent myself, or to exist just like everyone else did, and the campus was an eclectic mix of kids from all over the place. My creative writing and journalism classes became my favorites, and in August I got tickets to the Melbourne International Film Festival, where I was entranced by the documentaries from all over the world and reminded of how much I loved film.

  When I finished my undergraduate degree, I was accepted to the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), where I was one of nine students chosen to study documentary film on a graduate level.

  • • •

  Nearing the end of my first semester at VCA, we were supposed to be working on a short film project leading up to our end-of-year assessment. My classmates had pursued their specific interests: a former social worker was filming someone struggling with depression, another student who loved walking was filming a spiritual trek.

  I still didn’t have a topic, and I drove to the airport a couple of times a week, trying to find inspiration for my film. I loved driving, and I had time on my hands, as well as a semilegitimate excuse to observe strangers, so I would go there to watch people reuniting, their emotions raw in that white-tiled space, and I’d hold back tears as I spied, pretending to be waiting for someone, too. Once, lurking at arrivals near midnight, I spotted a friend from high school waiting for someone. Her Israeli boyfriend appeared and they fell into each other’s arms, kissing passionately, as I withdrew behind a large post, embarrassed by the fact that I had no good reason for being there. If they saw me, what would I say? “No, I’m not waiting for anyone, I am actually a big baby who likes observing strangers’ bodies smooshing together at an international terminal.” Or would I admit to them and myself that being there reminded me of the happiest times in my life, hugging loved ones tightly in the fluorescent light, breathing in the stale scent of airplane and unbrushed teeth? Would I explain that, for me, this chaotic, badly lit terminal represented a Disney-grade happy ending?

  Often, I stood in the arrivals hall, thinking: Why can’t I be little again?—remembering each of my parents holding my hand and saying “fly, fly, fly” as I swung in between them—down Knez Mihailova Street, where we could smell the chestnuts roasting. I wanted to live in places that no longer existed, with people who were gone. My grandma Xenia, who had died at ninety-one, was vivid in my mind whenever I got a face-full of cigarette smoke, and my dad was a little voice in my head that said: Try to remember everything we ever did, or those moments will be lost. I imagined him watching me from some other-world, or perhaps he was a star in the sky, or dust particles the air that surrounded me. Or
—for all I knew about the afterlife—he was reincarnated as some mysterious, glowing deep-sea creature, who had no idea what Yugoslavia was, what a daughter was, how to code on a computer. I let my imagination run, picturing this bizarre version of my father obsessed only with plankton, gathering it by using a light at the end of his unusual head, chomping on it with some spiky teeth so unlike my dad’s.

  “You know the famous line from Casablanca?” my dad said once when I was nine and we were coming back from lighting candles in the park. Casablanca was his favorite film. “There’s a line: ‘He’s looking at you, kid.’ When Humphrey Bogart says that to Ingrid Bergman, he means: ‘God is looking over you, kid.’ ” It was the only time I remembered my dad talking about God; it was out of character for him, and out of character for Humphrey Bogart’s fast-talking, worldly Rick.

  Later, after it was too late to tell my dad, I found out the line is actually: “Here’s looking at you, kid,” a grammatically incorrect shortening by Bogart, who should have said: “Here’s to looking at you.” In the world of Casablanca, when everyone was about to flee Paris and become displaced thanks to Nazi occupation, Rick didn’t tell Ilsa that God was looking at her. Rather, he wanted to toast the idea of them staying alive and together as the world fell apart. “I hope I get to continue looking at you,” is what he meant. Bogart’s line was grammatically incorrect, and so my dad had misunderstood it. This was exactly the sort of thing that irked him, people bending the rules of language like it was nothing.

  But, as I found out in my linguistics class, language is ever-changing, and like people, it shifts over the years, incorporating new words and grammatical structures. It is actually less rigid and scary than it seems at first. It is even possible that one day “havaya” will become a legitimate greeting in the West, incorporated into the lexicon thanks to ethnics like us misunderstanding “how are you” and creating a whole new greeting of our own.