‘Yeah, yeah!’
I felt like going down and telling them that I was Bosnian too, but I hesitated. Samir got up and jumped into the water. He and his brother started to swim away from the pier, and only then did I notice that they were not alone. There were two girls and a boy swimming with them. One of the girls smacked her palm against the surface of the water and sprayed water over Samir.
I returned to the shade of the path and continued ahead. At the other end of the camp there were two tennis courts, five or six abandoned bungalows and a vandalised basketball pole with no net.
Neno was really good at basketball. Best in the neighbourhood. I threw an imaginary ball towards the basket as I walked past. Nothing but net.
The gate to the camp was wide open. I went for a long walk, stared at the large villas in Majbule and thought back to our departure with Uncle this morning. Sometimes when I thought of Neno, I thought of Uncle too. He and Dad were so different. They were constantly wittering on about war and politics. And about how the Slovenians got off far too lightly with their one-and-a-half-week war. About the fragile ceasefire in Croatia. About Bosnia, which according to Dad had drawn the short straw.
They disagreed about most things. The night before we left, they discussed whether or not the West would intervene.
‘Divide and conquer,’ Dad said. ‘That’s their tactic. The Russians support Milošević, and the Germans and everyone else support Tudjman. Just like in the last war. The Chetniks and the Ustashe want to …’
‘Come off it,’ Uncle interrupted him. ‘This isn’t the forties any more! The West is only trying to help.’
‘It’s all exactly like it was back then. The Serbs and the Croats want to divide Bosnia! Now the only thing we’re missing is the German and Russian ground forces.’
‘No,’ Uncle said shaking his head. ‘You’re confusing things. The UN is different.’
I returned along the same route the bus had taken earlier that day.
Dad was on his back in a half-prone position when I entered the room. His chin was pressed against his chest, and it looked like he had no neck. Our red cassette player was resting on his shoulder, repeating the same phrases like a unicoloured parrot:
‘Fierce battles … heroic resistance … heavy enemy losses …’
‘Mind the cassette player doesn’t attach itself to your ear,’ I said while I loosened my shoelaces. ‘You haven’t moved an inch since I left.’
‘Quiet, son. This is important.’
Mum sat out on the balcony staring into space.
I slipped off my shoes.
This place is all right, I thought. There’s that guy Samir and his brother. Girls on the beach. It has possibilities.
NOTHING
Dad was not a big fan of Tudjman – Dr Fanjo Tudjman, the Croatian president. Not a single news report was broadcast without his mug appearing on the TV screen. He spoke proudly and at length, and when he was not speaking, he was being quoted. He loved Croatia. The Serbs and us Bosnians, now referred to as Bosniaks though the president still called us Muslims, were not discussed much on TV. When it happened, it was best to be as far from the TV room as possible. The flickering screen was on twenty-four-seven. When there was no news, you could watch videos with patriotic songs, films with big explosions, and programs with wild animals devouring one another.
The day started and ended by the playing of ‘Our Beautiful Homeland’. While listening to the familiar melody for the umpteenth time, the silk fabric of the coat of arms with its red-and-white chessboard fluttered in the wind, attached to a sturdy flagpole. No matter where you looked, you were reminded of the fact that you lived in the independent and sovereign republic of Croatia. That this young country had three hundred and sixty-five national days a year.
The radio was not quite so bad. Between the news and the lengthy front-line reports, which kept us up to date with the number of killed, wounded, raped and persecuted, there was room for the latests hits. ‘Winds of Change’ by the Scorpions for example. I wondered what the song was about. Did it have something to do with life changing? Something about the children of the future, dreaming of this wind?
When the radio hummed about ‘those fleeing’ and ‘those displaced’ both Dad and I hissed. There was a distinction of roles in the two terms: Bosnians fled, Croats from Croatia were displaced. There were constant reminders of that fact.
Croats from Bosnia got far better press than us and the Serbs, but still they did not enjoy the same sunshine as Croats from Croatia. Even though they were Croats, they were also referred to as ‘those fleeing.’
Dad grumbled about the fact that they looked after their own first. By ‘they’ he meant the Croatian authorities, but also the companies, whose lorries and buses occasionally stopped in the car park in front of reception. Most people in the camp called the car park the Muscle Market. It was because many of the men from the camp stood out there waiting from the crack of dawn. Even before the bus arrived to pick people up in the morning, they stood out by the market, rocking back and forth like a sloth of impatient bears. They sniffled, coughed, and lit their first cigarettes of the day while looking up towards the bend in the road. For that is where the owners of the villas, vineyards and farms would appear in their cars.
They hoped they would be picked up.
They cut grass, weeded gardens, emptied septic tanks, picked cobs of corn, made mortar, chopped firewood, welded gates, plastered walls, felled trees, tore down old walls.
When they were driven back to the camp they were a few kunas richer.
The old man usually returned from the market crestfallen. He closed the door behind him and said:
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’ Mum asked.
‘Nothing,’ he repeated.
‘Maybe there will be something tomorrow. At least you’re on the list.’
‘There are a lot more of them than there are us,’ he said. ‘That’s the problem. They have too many of their own on the list!’
‘Maybe someone from one of the smaller farms will come by tomorrow. The vineyard is not the only work.’
‘Yes, but in spite of everything it does offer something more fixed. I’m bloody tired of standing out there every day! It’s embarrassing at my age.’
‘We should speak to Ivka,’ Mum said. ‘She knows someone who needs both women and men. They gather hay, pick corn and dig up potatoes.’
‘Oh, God no!’ Dad shouted. ‘I became a welder to get away from hay, cow shit and pitchforks. And now they’re running after me. Forty years later!’
The following day he was back out there but was seldom picked up. He once earned forty kunas in a day. He drank most of it and spent the rest on a bag of clementines.
HOW’S YOUR ENGLISH?
Tudjman had a lot of fans in the camp. Bald Mirko from the ground floor of D1 was without a doubt his biggest. As soon as the president appeared on screen, Mirko raised two fingers high in the air. These two fingers, which formed the letter V, he held high above his head the entire time Tudjman’s faced filled the screen. Occasionally the news bulletin dragged on for so long that Mirko had to use his left arm as a kind of crutch for his right arm. When the report ended and the newsreader appeared again, he lowered his arm and waited patiently for President Dr Franjo Tudjman to appear again.
Mirko was a queer fish. He was over forty and had never been married. He claimed to suffer from a range of serious ailments, which he combatted in a number of ways. He constantly went on about plants, preparations and tea; nobody in the entire camp was as trying as Mirko Parasite. He was the kind of guy who would always ask people to do something for him. At the restaurant he always ate alone, and he had his laundry done by the older women in the camp, who sooner or later would take pity on him.
Mirko claimed that he had been physically disabled for some time, and for that reason he wore special shoes, which he had received as a gift from a large Italian company via Caritas. But it was one big perpetual lie
! Already on my first evening at the camp I saw him in an entirely different light.
I was sitting on our balcony, staring at the stars, when suddenly I heard an inarticulate screaming and shouting from the TV room. It was located right by the entrance to D2, and since the terrace was well lit, I saw plain as day how Mirko Parasite, moving at an admirable pace, sprinted across the terrace towards the entrance to our building.
A down-at-heel clog went flying after him, but missed.
The next day I discovered that he had got into an argument with Igor, a professional Croatian soldier who had just returned from the front. It was Igor’s first day of leave in a long time. He had entered the TV room carrying a VCR and a couple of old porn flicks. Seeing as it was quite late, Igor had not expected to see anyone in the TV room. But the grimy remote was lodged in Mirko’s hand, and being the devout Catholic that he was, he did not want to miss out on some random programme about some random church in some random location in Croatia. So it ended in an argument, with harsh words and footwear of a rather large calibre flying through the air in Mirko’s direction.
Igor told me the story himself. He had turned twenty that summer and spent most of his time at the front lines in Croatia – Bosnia too, he was quick to add. Whether that was the cause of his constant blinking and nervous twitches, he never mentioned.
I met him after lunch the day after his failed attempt to thump Mirko Parasite with a clog. My stomach was filled with macaroni. It was hot. On the terrace in front of the restaurant, Igor came dawdling towards me wearing tight Speedos. He burped, and without asking who I was or what my name was, he said:
‘Do you want to go out to the end of the peninsula?’
‘To the end of the peninsula?’
‘Yes, the peninsula. How’s your English?’
‘Not bad.’
‘Good. Come with me!’
We did not take the well-travelled path through the woods, but struggled across the red-hot rocks along the water. That was Igor’s idea, or rather his command.
I soon discovered why I needed to fry off the soles of my feet. Halfway to an abandoned concrete bunker that dated from the previous war, Igor spotted a topless babe lying on her back, lapping up the sun.
At Igor’s command, we sat down and took a break. We observed her carefully. Igor, I must admit, a little more discreetly than me.
Then he made me a quick and determined signal with his hand:
‘Come with me and translate!’
We reached the spot near the water where the girl was lying. She was wearing sunglasses. She was listening to a Walkman and smelt of sun cream.
‘Tell her I’d like to speak to her! Now! Tell her!’
I opened my mouth, and the poor girl jerked like she had been stung by a jellyfish. She switched off her Walkman and raised her sunglasses.
‘Excuse me. This man want talk to you,’ I said with my elegant English accent.
‘Oh?’
Unabashed, she sat up. Oh, my God! Only then could we see the true breadth of her … her … Yes, what do you call them?
‘So? I’m listening.’
I looked at Igor. Igor looked at her. And blinked.
‘What should I say?’
‘Ask her … Ask her what music she’s listening to!’
‘What music you hear?’
‘Music? Why?’
‘He will know.’
‘Well … It’s quite different … Let me see … Duran Duran, The Cure, Pet Shop Boys … and so on. But … why?’
‘I listen to Filthy Theatre and Gold Coins. Tell her!’
I translated. As best I could.
‘Golden Money?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Never heard of it.’
Soon we were sitting next to her, and Igor was well on his way to asking her rather more personal questions. About where she came from, did she like the sea, the climate, and so on. It turned out that she was from Germany, from a city Igor and I had never heard of. She had been here for nearly two weeks, and the following day she was returning home. Igor started to describe his hometown and his childhood, and the entire scene dragged on, until the babe moved her sunglasses down over her eyes again and lay down on her back in the middle of one of his long, meandering sentences.
On the way back to the camp we were both silent, and when we reached the restaurant, Igor turned back to the peninsula and said thoughtfully:
‘Damn! I’m sitting there looking at her while you translate, and I get such an urge to fondle her jades. But then I thought: What do I know, maybe she’ll get upset! I mean … you never know.’
THE FENCE
Igor drank a lot and talked a lot, and he talked even more when he drank. For whatever reason he selected me as his regular listener. Maybe because I would never dream of interrupting people or getting up from the table in the middle of a sentence. But Igor’s sentences were very long. It was difficult to leave without interrupting one of them. They merged together and branched out in every possible direction.
The first time I got drunk with Igor – or rather the first time Igor got me drunk – was immediately after he received a monster of a rejection down on the beach. This time, the girl was a local. We had not even made it through the introductory stage when she cut us off:
‘Do you see that muscly guy down by the water?’
A tanned bodybuilder with a tiny head stood hugging a towel. His muscles filled a large proportion of the landscape, so his answer was ‘Yeah, sure.’
‘That’s my husband.’
‘A handsome fellow,’ Igor commented, and we strolled off under the setting sun.
We headed to Wicky, the only bar in Majbule open year-round, which Igor ascribed many superlatives to. On the way, he rambled on about his unassuming physique. It was of great benefit to him on the front line, in his opinion.
‘A big hulk like that, that iron-pumping moron just now. It’s difficult to miss him!’
‘Hmm.’
‘There was one guy … man, I’m telling you! Those are the guys that scream the most when they get hit … Hey, have you ever shot a rifle?’
‘No.’
‘A pistol?’
‘No.’
‘Tank?’
‘No, jeez! I was the target.’
‘Target? Hmm. Who was shooting?’
‘Our side. Plus Serbian artillery. She had nice legs, that chick on the beach. Firm!’
‘How could that happen, your own people shooting at you?’
‘Long story. Did you see how …?’
‘What did they fire at you?’
‘Shells. All sorts.’
‘What kind of shells?’
‘No idea. Is there more than one kind?’
‘Of course! Bloody hell, kid! Have you never seen a shell?’
‘No, only fragments. I’ve never seen a whole one.’
‘Some of them are pretty impressive,’ Igor said and blinked. ‘Almost like tits.’
The road up to Wicky was long and winding. So at Igor’s command, we hopped over a newly erected fence.
Before us was the well-travelled path that led up the hill.
‘HEY!’ someone suddenly shouted behind us. ‘WHERE DO YOU TWO THINK YOU’RE GOING? EH?’
We turned around. Standing by the fence was a bearded gnome who looked to be at least sixty. Wearing an unbuttoned shirt and long trousers with holes in them. His two goats were munching on something in the shade of a shrub. He was holding a cane in his hand, demanding an answer.
‘We’re going up to Wicky,’ Igor said.
‘Can’t you see that this is private property? Didn’t you see the fence?’
‘Yes.’
‘They why the hell did you climb over the fence? I just finished building it!’
‘It’s a shortcut,’ Igor said. ‘Everyone goes this way.’
‘Everyone went this way,’ the man said. ‘I want to see you gone! Pronto!’
‘I didn’t fancy arguing with him,’ Igor later explained on ou
r detour. ‘That old fool! Moron! I’ll pummel him next time.’
Then he started to talk about his military service in the YPA and the difference between the uniforms now and then. I was thinking more and more about the man in the unbuttoned shirt, about my first detour, and about Bobi, the first idiot I had ever run into. Igor’s voice slowly faded out. Soon all my thoughts led back to the time before Mister No disappeared.
BACK THEN
It was 1984. Bobi was eight, I was six. His house was on the way to Adi’s place. I could see the roof of Adi’s house when Bobi hopped over his garden gate. He stood in front of me:
‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘To Adi’s place.’
‘You’re not going past my house! Go a different way.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I said so. Scram!’
I tried to go around him. Took two steps to the left. But he took two steps in the same direction.
‘When I tell you to scram, scram!’
‘Leave me alone!’
‘Beat it!’
I looked around and hurried across the street. Bobi followed me at the same speed. He spread his arms out.
‘What’s that in your pockets?’
‘Packs.’
‘And inside the packs?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No way. Let me see!’
‘No!’
‘Give them to me and I’ll let you past.’
‘They’re mine.’
‘Then get lost and find a different way to Adi’s with your crappy boxes, man! You’re never getting past my house again, ever! Beat it!’
I turned around and took a long detour to Adi’s place. Was certainly not looking forward to starting school. I would have to go past Bobi’s house.
School. That was where Mister No came home carrying his heavy bag. He ate in the kitchen, drank some water and went into his room. Then I heard music inside. Voices, sometimes. Girls’ voices, boys’ voices. Sudden sniggers. The girls laughed the loudest. Practically shrieked.
When Mum and Dad were out, he smoked cigarettes in his room. I could smell them from out in the hall.
Ukulele Jam Page 2