Milka watched the tormented gathering, all of whom had their eyes closed, and beneath the eyelids, she could see how the eyeballs moved and twitched. There were Hungarian and Croatian natives of Novi Sad, but most of them were Serbs from Croatia, as was she. They used to gather to pray for safe conditions to return to Croatia.
EVEN BEFORE THE WAR in Croatia started in 1991, the Zivkovics’ three sons had joined the Serb paramilitary forces to the chagrin of their pacifist parents. The sons had given up the Baptist church a long while back, and to compensate for their turn-the-other-cheek kind of upbringing, they became brawling barflies, or more accurately, hornets, who secured no profession, relying instead on the idea that they could take over their father’s carpentry business, but in Yugoslavia’s recent economic decline, hardly anybody ordered furniture to be custom-made. Like most Krajina Serbs, the Zivkovics had signed the Referendum, the secret plan to annex former Austrian Military Borders, Krajina of Croatia, directly to Serbia. The Referendum was to be a pretext for Milosevic to occupy Croatia “by popular request.”
In Bukovo all the signs were exclusively in the Cyrillic alphabet, something that you wouldn’t see even in Serbia. At night, in the late summer, songs in broken voices came from the taverns: Dajte nam salate, bice mesa klacemo Hrvate. “Give us salad with a lot of chives, we’ll be slicing Croats with knives.”
At first when the skirmishes between the Croatian militiamen and Serbian paramilitary backed by the Yugoslav army came, the Zivkovics hid in the basement, praying for Serbian victory. The Yugoslav forces took over the town and Serb paramilitary filled the Catholic church with explosives. The steeple blew open, and the belfry tilted sideways, with the bell hanging out the window. There were rumors of mass executions and graves in the mountains, but nobody dared to go there for fear of mines, and the Zivkovics did not believe the rumors, taking them to be a result of the Balkan fervid imagination, such as had bred oral tradition with blood epic poetry. But in the winter, Milka tiptoed into the woods to gather kindling wood, and as she pulled at a thick branch, she realized that its loose bark was the frozen fabric of a pair of jeans; the fabric gave and her hands gripped a sheathed and footless human leg, sticking out of the elevated soil. In horror, she ran home, and didn’t dare to mention what she had seen, not even to Drago. She often had the nightmare of seizing the shin wrapped in frozen jeans and after a while she wasn’t sure whether she had indeed seen the leg; however, in the spring, with putrid smells coming out of the woods, she could not doubt it. Soon the smells disappeared; the maggots and wolves did their job. From then on she knew that evil festered in the soil, and that only worse things were to come.
Supposedly, Krajina would become Serbia, and soon there would be tourism, mountain inns, hunting. Instead of the prosperity promised by demagogues, poverty resulted. Belgrade had enough difficulty keeping a modicum of Serb economy going under the sanctions. Quite a few Serbs, unable to take the ever worsening poverty in the region, sought exile in Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, and many moved to Belgrade. There were rows of bunkers, underground tunnels and ammunition storage spaces, and several hundred tanks, which created an impression of invincibility at first, but after soldiers had not seen salary in a long time, their morale slackened. Many troops went into Bosnia to burn Bihac and help hold the town under siege until the inhabitants starved to death. While the troops were so diverted (they couldn’t reoccupy their former defensive positions effectively), the Croatian army attacked in August 1995 and overtook the depressed Krajina in three days. Now, Serbs ran out of their homes; many of them feared revenge; most had relatives in the army. Even retreating Serb soldiers urged the civilians to flee for their lives. Croatian soldiers provided free gasoline and cans of food for the departing ones, an act of dubious generosity.
And at night, Milka and Drago heard broken and hoarse voices sing in the tavern, “Give us sweet herbs, we will broil bitter Serbs.”
Empty villages and towns had lost their people and were filled with ghosts, and many people from the valleys claimed that they could hear ghosts fighting with scythes, with much clanking and howling. And there was howling of wolves, among the last wolves of Europe, who now increased in population; because of mines, people no longer hunted, and the population of deer, partridge, and rabbits went up. Wolves grew to be so numerous—and they had become used to eating human remains—that they threatened anybody alive in remote villages.
Milka and Drago were among the last inhabitants to leave their little town, and soon they caught up with the columns of refugees, becoming a part of this exodus on a biblical scale. As they passed through Karlovac, and on to the Autoput, they were pelted by jeering crowds of Croats, with eggs, tomatoes, melons.
The exiled Croatian Serbs hoped for a martyrs’ welcome in Serbia. Instead, they were shunned as peasants; their speech was corrected in shops because it was ijekavica (biyelo, for white), the Croatian way of pronouncing, rather than ekavica (belo).
Many Croatian Serbs quickly changed to ekavica, but the elderly, and among them the Zivkovics, claimed that it was too late for such changes—the way they grew up speaking, that way they would die.
In Novi Sad, administrators assigned them to move into a small whitewashed house with mossy tiles from which a Croatian family was presently being evicted into Croatia. Because of overpopulation, three families moved into the three-bedroom house; they all shared one little kitchen with a wood stove according to a schedule, and one leaky bathroom. One of their neighbors was a wizened man who groaned, afflicted with stomach cancer, while his wife helped him and swore colorfully; she seemed to spend more time tending a couple of white goats next to the grassy ditch in front of the house. General poverty had made goatherding common even in the cities. Another neighbor, a teenaged mother with a toddler, spent several hours every night gasping and crying out in faked and unfaked orgasms; a stream of men visited her, and every morning, her pimp, on his way to the tennis club, stopped by in a yellow BMW, which had probably been stolen in Bosnia. He shouted at her that she should be ashamed to be worth so little—couldn’t she fetch a better fee? He banged her head against empty cupboards, which drummed like timpani. The rest of the morning, the toddler cried. So between the sounds of pain from one quarters and pleasure and pain from another, the Zivkovics suffered from insomnia, and they slept usually only in the afternoon when the house could be quiet for a couple of hours. Since they had no employment, in a way it didn’t matter when they slept, but, still, they found the atmosphere in which they lived sorrowful.
The beauty of the promenade along the Danube and over the Petrovaradin bridge was one of the few consolations they could find. Thousands of people would go out to walk, na korzo. You could not tell there was trouble in the world if you walked here—you’d see sharply dressed young men talking on cell phones, and slim young women in provocative miniskirts; in the meanwhile, two million displaced persons roamed in the former Yugoslavia, from forests to refugee camp tents, to distant relatives, to overcrowded quarters. Serb police went from house to house in Kosovo, confiscating guns and beating the civilians, and prohibited Albanian Kosovars from attending schools. No, you could not tell that any of that was going on, and that many refugees were in Novi Sad as well, nor did those refugees who visited the korzo in the evening want to think about that; they, too, enjoyed the breezes and the sensation that the world could be and should be a carefree place, where one could look elegant. And indeed, even in their late fifties, Milka and Drago looked fine. She had black hair and strikingly light hazel eyes, so that warm light seemed to be coming from her; her complexion was smooth, assisted by a touch of plumpness. She walked erect; it was because of chronic pains that she could not tilt forward. She wore Russian river pearls, which, because of irregular sizes, sparkled most unexpectedly, in purple, green, and white hues, playing with the light from her eyes, and adding to it.
Drago still had all his brown hair, gray only slightly on the sides; his black mustache shone. Occa
sionally he flashed his natural teeth in a smile. He brushed them thoroughly three times a day. He did twenty push-ups every morning, and when he stood, his abdomen lined up with his chest and thighs; he frequently irritated other men by petting them patronizingly on their stomachs. They both sang in the choir: she a sonorous soprano, and he, a warm bass. In short, no matter what the circumstances, they kept their physical pride, and the bridge korzo helped them. Milka sensed that Drago looked at the young women—and it did not bother her: it was good that he, nearly sixty years old, had such youthful zest in him. She drew satisfaction from seeing the young and the superficial; and she wished that she could keep enjoying the surfaces—but under the surfaces of good looks, vice lurked, just as under the sheen of the river during sunset, perch-pike tore other fish. Yes, worries would soon come back, and she’d think about her sons. She heard rumors that they were massacred by Muslims and Croats outside of Prijedor, or that they joined Arkan’s forces and grew rich on looting, and now didn’t care to remember their poor parents.
The parents often prayed for their children. They prayed even like this, “Lord, please let that not be true that our sons perished in Prijedor last September”—expecting that God would revisit the past, and in case the sons were killed indeed, perhaps resurrect them even before the second coming of Christ, and let them in the new version of the past and present, come to Novi Sad and receive the word of the Lord. In this cosmology, anything could happen in the future and in the past; the two were of the same fluid that could go backward and forward, the way water in the oceans can flow in different streams, north and south, at the same time, depending on the depth and warmth—and some water even goes up into the sky, while other water falls down and sinks underground to surface and evaporate again, and just so perhaps the blood of the murdered sons could rise out of the dust and envelop the bones to become the living flesh. In an evangelical vision, time travel could be even swifter than in the theory of relativity, and death and life become nearly interchangeable concepts. Nobody is dead for long, and nobody is alive for long.
Naturally, such cosmology could be stressful too, and it was the bridge promenade that could relieve them. But even before the bridge went down, the evening korzo closed because of American threats of bombing. People stayed at home in fear, chagrin, and boredom.
THE MORNING AFTER the bridge was downed, the two tormented souls stumbled in the blue light of dawn. Pink light in the clouds brought little relief, and people lined up along the river and wept for the old bridge as though it had been a living soul that now lay broken, slain and sunk. Elderly people remembered the lives of the bridge, for Germans had destroyed it in World War II as well, and at the end of the war, whipped German prisoners rebuilt it, and perhaps it was the POWs’ sins and hatred and millions of hissed swearwords that had doomed the bridge.
Winds blew from the northwest plains, chilling the sleepless crowds. A bald man rafted people, like Charon, for a small fee, to the western side of the Danube. He was gloomy, as though indeed he were rafting across the River Styx, but there was no need for that, except for a certain theatrical expression of pathos. The Zivkovics went to Most Slobode (Freedom Bridge) up the river, walked across, and they continued on the west bank for two more miles, past the Staro Sajmiste dormitories surrounded with piles of papers and garbage, and past the medical school on Hajduk Veljkova. The glass entrance to the medical school lay shattered, perhaps not from any direct hits but from the powerful explosions to selected targets, after which waves of sounds and wind—intermingled with waves of vacuum—had rattled the glass so much that it crashed all over the marble staircase. They trudged past old socialist project buildings near the train station. Usually, there were smells of diesel fuel wafting, but not now. The rail tracks had been blasted in many places, and the traffic was close to nil. NATO wouldn’t bomb the train station with people sleeping in it; on the side tracks, the refugees—Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia and lately, Kosovo—formed their wagon villages.
That night the Zivkovics listened to the BBC and Croatian reports on the shortwave—nearly a million Albanians languished in the squalor of makeshift camps. Stewardesses on the planes transporting Kosovars from Macedonia to Turkey wore gas masks so they would not breathe in Kosovars’ germs. The Albanians were handled as untouchables.
“Do you believe all that?” Drago asked.
“Why wouldn’t I? I think that at this point everything is true.” She closed her eyes, and she could still see the afterimage outline on her eyelids—the massacred man’s leg sticking out of the land. “Yes, all the evil is true.” Her hand twitched as though she were still touching the dead purple leg.
“In 1990, newspapers lied to us that Croats were slaughtering us when nothing was going on.”
“Yes,” she conceded, “it started with lies, but the lies became the truth.”
“This Albanian thing could be Western propaganda so they’d have an excuse to bomb us.”
“Oh, leave politics to politicians.”
“The Bible says, Give to Caesar Caesar’s. You can’t really paraphrase this as Give to Milosevic Milosevic’s, or to Tudjman Tudjman’s. They have stolen everything from us, so why should we give them anything?”
“You think Caesar was any better?”
“Yes, they fought wars heroically back then. Armies met in open fields, and whichever side won, won.”
“I don’t believe that. I think even then, armies avoided each other, and went from village to village, burning, plundering, raping, and murdering. And then they wrote something else on the walls and in books.”
Exhausted, she grew bored with the conversation, and while he recounted some ancient battle or another, she lost track and slumbered. Despite weakened ears she woke up to sounds of orgasmic crying from next door—with a note of sinking helplessness in the woman’s voice. She held her breath. Drago was breathing quickly; he cleared his throat, which had gone dry. He touched her breasts, but she rolled away from him. Is it possible, that he was excited by another woman’s sounds? And now he’d want to make love to her to those sounds, perhaps imagining the neighbor? No, those terms of lovemaking did not charm her. She rolled away even though the wooden bed frame edge cut into her arms and legs. She fell asleep, and when she woke up, she walked barefoot to the bathroom, quietly tiptoeing so as not to disturb anyone, and on the way, she was startled to see Drago kneeling—not in prayer, as she had sometimes seen him, but in front of the keyhole, peeping into the young woman’s bedroom, where the bed squeaked.
“Ah so, you old swine!” she whispered loudly.
Drago leaped up, and walked back into their room, attempting to hide his erection.
She followed him.
“Aren’t you ashamed? At your age? At any age? Is that the way to behave?”
“I was curious from all that noise.”
“You were more than curious.”
“But we haven’t had sex in a month….”
“Why would we? There’s too much trouble to worry about it.”
“Well, my body….”
“Oh, shut up, you pig. Go to her! You want her, go to her, get her diseases, wallow in filth, die in pus!”
She turned away from him in disgust. After all the tragedy to suffer such a base indignity! That was worse than…than what? Well, the hell with it, she thought, let me sleep. Let it all go to hell. But how dare I think so blasphemously?
She couldn’t fall asleep, while Drago apparently did, and who knows what he was dreaming; he kept gritting his teeth. Watching him in the blue moonlight, she thought, And he dares to quote, Fear not those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Some demons may have infected his soul with base lust. Where? At the Petrovaradin bridge korzo? Or have those murderers on all sides singing their blood ballads darkened his mind? Now she grew afraid for him, for his soul. Should she pray for him?
In the morning, sleepless, Milka walked to the bathroom where she had forgotten to go before, and out walked the pimp, with a blac
k eye, smiling sheepishly, and lifting a bottle of champagne. “Wish me well,” he said, “I just got engaged!”
“Sure, I wish you well,” she muttered.
When she walked out of the bathroom, the old man—all bluish-white, even his eyebrows and eyes, ringed with cataracts, were bluish-white—crawled on the mud floor toward the bathroom, groaning.
Milka wondered where the old man’s wife was; wasn’t she taking care of him? She looked outside, but there was no wife and no goats there.
Milka helped him, and lifted him. He was incredibly light, hollowed by his disease, and he kept burping. She seated him on the stool, and afterward she carried him to his room, and she washed him. The old man cried, without strength of breath in his voice. In his agony, the blue old man struck her as saintly, and she wept for him in deep sorrow, and her tears mixed on his caved-in chest with the warm water that foamed out of the sponge. She prepared him chamomile tea, but he begged her for sharp Slavonian sausage.
“Why, that will hurt you!”
“Oh, I am beyond being hurt. I will die soon, and all I can think of is kulen. Who cares if I can’t digest it. I can’t digest anything. I want the taste, and then I can die.”
She went into the pantry, where she hid sausages and kulen, and gave the peppered crimson kulen to him to eat, and the old man chewed slowly, his eyes watering, and tears, perhaps of joy, flowing down his sunken cheeks.
She made thin slices for him, and he chewed, and chewed, and fell asleep with a smile of peace on his face.
TWO DAYS LATER, on the first Sunday after the destruction of the bridge, Milka dressed for church and placed the river-pearl necklace over her green velvet dress, but Drago lingered in bed, with bags under his eyes swollen, and his eyes small, as though bees had stung him. “What are you waiting for?” she said. “You better go to church and repent. I expect to hear a prayer from you. Your brain needs to be cleansed in the blood of the Savior.”
Infidelities Page 16