On that clear summer night, the white moon smiled down on us, Amar’s only birthday balloon. Igor was sitting in a trench somewhere on the Slavonic fields, while Marina’s left breast filled my entire right hand. Her hard and protruding nipple reminded me of a puppy’s nose. For that reason I did not give Igor or Neno much thought for some time.
Not until my arm started to fall asleep and my hand was rather clammy did I think of Igor’s legendary words, ‘What do I know, maybe she’ll get upset.’ I tried to let go of her breast, but my moist hand was stuck to it.
I waited. Marina said nothing. She continued kissing, drooling as usual. Then she moved my hand to her neighbouring breast.
We’re together again, I thought. That’s the only thing this could mean.
‘If you tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you!’ she said when we walked back to join the others.
‘Don’t worry. I won’t say a damn thing. What would I tell them anyway?’
‘That you were groping my … you know.’
‘Groping? Groping what?’
‘My breasts, dammit! It wasn’t my elbows, was it!’
‘Oh, that!’ I exclaimed, feigning surprise. ‘That was nothing special.’
‘I was drunk! Do you understand? Drunk! And I still am. Don’t go thinking that we’re …’
‘That we’re what?’
‘That we’re … I’d rather not have a boyfriend! Do you understand?’
I reflected for a moment.
‘No, actually, I don’t understand! Why not? And what do you mean by “rather not?”’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But if you don’t know what you want, or what you mean, then that might actually mean … that you don’t actually know … you know … what you want!’
It sounded perfectly sensible in my head.
‘Maybe we should just … not think about things and just …’
‘And just what?’ she asked.
‘Be together! You know … properly.’
She continued forward silently. I waited.
In a moment we’ll be together again, I thought. Come on. Say it!
‘No,’ she said. ‘I just think we should be friends.’
FIFTEEN
The lump in my throat made a comeback near the end of August. Once again I grew heavy as a horse. At night, before I went to sleep, I saw his face in front of me, and my heart pounded under the duvet. I was terrified that I would never see him again. Terrified of forgetting what he looked like.
There was less and less news about prisoner exchanges. Soldiers were exchanged sooner than civilians, and he had the disadvantage of being taken captive as a civilian. The powerful Western leaders with their grave expressions and raised index fingers reminded the Bosnian Serbs – and the Croats for that matter – that what they were doing was unacceptable. That it was about time to sit around the negotiating table and find a solution to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia through peaceful means. They continued to explain to us Bosnian Muslims, now called Bosniaks, who kept banging on about military intervention, that we should not entertain any hope that the West would get involved in our conflict. There were ten global hotspots where the situation was far worse. Somalia, for example, was not all roses either, and even if it were – who was going to pick them?
Mum and Dad rarely talked about him in my presence. Still I knew they thought about him all the time. They had both found new friends in the camp. They went to visit them, drained pot after pot of coffee and followed the news. Waiting for something good to happen. For the war to die down so that we could return home. But nothing good happened. Home grew more distant with every day that passed. Our hometown was now deep inside Serbian territory, and nobody was fighting to liberate it. When they evacuated us, practically everything was taken from us. We had virtually no money, and there was no hope of earning any. Not for the local population and not for those driven out of Croatia, there were no jobs, not to mention those fleeing from Bosnia.
I wore my only pair of Adidas trainers, long since worn-out. The stitching on one side kept bursting. Dad stitched them together with a thick thread, for all the good it did. The process of deterioration continued, and it drove both of us batty. Mum washed our clothes by hand. I only had two long-sleeved tops and two pairs of trousers, one of which was from the Red Cross. The trousers had once been blue, but they were so washed out now that they were nearer grey.
I was embarrassed. Especially in front of the girls. Most of the others had escaped within days of the first shot being fired. They had managed to bring their Levis with them.
To make matters worse, five or six of us had birthdays that summer. Mine was the last in line, and since I went to all the parties, it only made sense that I should have one too. The birthday boy had to provide a case of beer, bags of crisps, peanuts and stuff like that, while the guests brought small, symbolic gifts.
I was already sweating at the thought of my birthday. I knew that Mum and Dad still had the hundred mark note that Uncle had given them, but was afraid they would not agree to break it up under any circumstance. They always said that they would set it aside for ‘the bad times.’
I had to get down on my knees.
‘But, Emir,’ Mum whimpered, ‘that’s a lot of money. You know we can’t even afford to buy fruit now. Even that’s a luxury.’
‘But how can you not understand? Am I supposed to die of shame? Everyone has celebrated their birthday, everyone! And I have been to every single party, every single one! How the hell am I supposed to explain to them now that I can’t afford to buy drinks once a year? How?’
I started to cry. The tears dripped down my chin. I felt terrible and felt guilty that I was the cause of yet another problem for them.
Mum sat at my side and tried to comfort me. She kept telling me not to cry, that it would be all right, and tears ran down her cheeks too. Dad was tapping his foot restlessly. His brown socks merged with the carpet, the room and my tears.
Saturday was Ismar’s birthday, and I was supposed to have mine the following Friday. I walked around the camp despondently. I was ashamed to go to his party. If I could have run away, I would have done so without batting an eyelid. Straight away. Wherever that might be.
In the end I sat down with Dad on the terrace between D1 and D2. Amar and Ismar walked past. They were carrying a case of beer between them. Stacked on top of the beer were bags of crisps, pretzels and peanuts.
The sight almost made me dizzy.
Then Dad suddenly put his arm around my shoulder and whispered into my ear:
‘We’ll find a way to make that party of yours happen, even if it ruins us!’
SMOKE
We sat around the fire facing one another. The rekindled fire crackled between us, while a bottle of cheap, acidic red wine went from hand to hand. Samir’s Philips boombox was somewhere in the darkness behind me. It had stereo sound and was twice as heavy and twice as big as mine. The sound was enough to drive the neighbours living across, above, and below his flat up the wall, in contrast to my Japanese mono-lightweight that could barely be heard out on the balcony.
Damir was sat next to Samir, and past them were Amar and Ismar. I had also invited Vlado and Robi, who were from Vukovar. Vlado’s dad had been the victim of a civilian execution in the early days of the war. Robi’s dad was a first lieutenant in the Croatian army and still out there somewhere on the Slavonic battlefields. Officially, a ceasefire held in this part of the country, but occasionally a death notice was posted on the windowpane of reception: ‘It is with deep sorrow and great pain that we must announce...’
Amar and Elvis were discussing the war. They had both escaped before it got too bad, and for that reason they talked mostly about what they saw on TV. I had to turn up the music. Metallica. ‘Nothing Else Matters.’ Guitar solo. Samir had given me the tape as a present.
It felt strange that evening. My first birthday away from home, the first one without Neno calling to wish me a happy bi
rthday, and the first one where something other than fizzy drinks were served. All day I had been asking myself whether Neno even knew what day it was. Whether he thought about me on my big day.
I sat observing the four brothers on the other side of the fire. I felt like I had done in the spring during the war, when I looked across the river and wished our house was far away on the other side of the river. Why did our side have to be occupied by the Serbs? Of all the places, why did the front line have to pass along that particular embankment, behind Zaim’s garage – fifty metres from our house? Why was Neno not sitting beside me on this night?
Earlier that day, on my way to the marina on the other side of the peninsula, Samir managed to cheer me up a little. He gave me a ninety-minute Samsung cassette packed with heavy and thrash metal. He had chosen the playlist and written MIKI’S BIRTHDAY MIX at the top of the tape. In brackets he added: To Miki from Sama. Majbule, 4.9.92. This tape would eventually set the scene for my ultimate Iron Maiden trip.
We bought two kilos of sardines from a fisherman for next to nothing and took a little extra bread from the restaurant on the sly. After dinner we lugged beer, wine and Coke through the woods out to the peninsula. There was nothing to burn but pine and cypress. The branches we collected were damp. They gave off loads of smoke and gave the fish an unexpected aroma. The barbecue smelled like my Dad’s aftershave.
‘Was it bad where you lived?’ Amar asked when I handed him another lager.
‘I dunno … We had a lot of barbecues in the beginning … No fish though.’
‘Why’s that?’
I hesitated and snapped a branch.
‘The first thing the Serbs did was shut off the power. Within twenty-four hours all the freezers were defrosted. In the entire town.’
‘And?’
‘And, all the meat defrosted.’
‘Ah, so you had to barbecue! Or what?’
‘Right. There was smoke everywhere. One big party. People passing steaks, ćevapčići and bread over the fence.’
I tossed the broken branch onto the fire:
‘Everything had to be eaten before it went off. It didn’t matter whose it was. Everything was shared.’
‘And later?’
‘Later it was crap.’
‘Not so festive?’
‘Nope.’
‘Cheers!’
‘Cheers!’
I quickly moved over with Sanela and Katarina, who were trying to teach each other to blow smoke rings. They were equally bad.
‘That’s not a ring, man,' I scoffed. ‘That’s a spiral! A question mark!’
‘Wow, you’re so poetic!’
Katarina’s dad was Serbian. He had stayed home – fought on the other side. That was not looked upon favourably by those at the camp.
‘He was forced to,’ she told me that night.
I remained silent. Did not comment. Instead I dropped a brick, with a theory that names ending with ‘-ina’ were the most feminine and ‘hand on heart’ – the sexiest.
‘You mean, hand on dick?’ Amar corrected me, probably trying to mark his territory. He had still not given up, and my interest in the Nina-Marina-Katarina hat trick was far too obvious.
Soon I abandoned my ulterior motives. Katarina and I were talking names. She wished she had a more neutral name.
‘Katarina is not that Serbian,’ I said.
‘Katarina Jovanović! As soon as they hear that they know exactly what I am. Why don’t you just call me Kaća? Or Ka?’
‘Ka? That’s weird. Why not Kata?’
‘It’s too common! Just call me Kaća, okay?’
‘Fine by me. I’m not really bothered. My name is insanely Muslim!’
The wine bottles were empty. The final scraps of grilled sardines had long since been eaten, and now beer and smokes were passed around the fire. There was plenty for everyone, and everyone said it was the most luxurious party yet.
‘And it’s not even over yet!’ I stressed, not without some pride.
There was one thing that could have been better, everyone agreed: the wine!
‘We fucked up,’ Samir said. ‘Wrong vineyard.’
‘You’re supposed to mix it with Coke,’ Elvis said. ‘That’s what the locals do.’
‘Yeah, they call it bambus,’ Vlado added. ‘They also mix white wine and Fanta.’
‘Ew!’
‘Yuck!’
‘I don’t get why they don’t just make better wine,’ Kaća said.
‘I don’t get it either.’
‘But don’t you see the point?’ Elvis broke in. ‘The wine is homemade. The owner of the vineyard, that old witch, she makes the wine. She sells it in her shop. It’s in her best interest for people to buy wine and fizzy drinks. She sells cheap wine and then makes it trendy to mix it. Just so she can make a packet.’
‘Yeah, Elvis is right,’ Samir laughed. ‘We’re not buying it. We’ll keep drinking it straight. Even if it tastes like piss!’
‘Yeah!’ shouted Elvis, who took Samir’s joke seriously. ‘She can stick her fizzy drinks you know where, man! And her fizzy drinks!’
We had a hard time keeping the fire lit. We crumpled up newspapers, shook lighters, kneeled down, lit and blew. In the end the flame went out, and we sat in the darkness beneath a silent colony of stars and an egg-shaped moon. The light on the boombox continued to glow. The music kept playing. When the final cigarette was passed around, we were wasted, belting out some good old songs and some good new ones for that matter. I knew all the oldies by heart. I impressed Samir by reciting Balašević’s ‘The Boy Boža’ from start to finish. It was the longest song I knew by heart, and I was happy to discover that even though my records and tapes were gone, the lyrics and the tunes were tucked away safely in my memory. I sang, almost rapping, standing in the moonlight, more drunk than sober, and still I remembered every single word. The verse, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, he disappeared without a trace, and that gives the entire story a curious ring’ stung me a little. The song was from one of Neno’s records.
‘Why are you always singing Serbian songs?’ Robi muttered, when I was finished.
It sounded more like a complaint than criticism. I shrugged and said:
‘Balašević opposes the war, and …’
It’s one of my favourite records. He probably writes the best lyrics in the entire world. And he is not a nationalist. That record was one of the first ones I listened to in Neno’s room after he moved to Sarajevo.
I felt like telling him all of that. But I was confused by the unexpected question, noticed Vlado and fell silent. Vlado was sitting right next to Robi, and it gave me pause. Would he get offended? Was he sitting there thinking about his murdered father? Was that who Robi meant I should take into consideration, or was he referring to something entirely different?
‘Balašević is half Croatian,’ Sanela chimed in.
‘Is he?’
I did not know that.
‘Yes, him mum is Croatian.’
‘And his dad is Hungarian,’ Damir added. ‘A little. I think. Not Serbian.’
‘I don’t care what he is,’ Robi said monotonously. ‘Can’t you sing something else?’
‘Sure.’
‘Cool.’
‘It was just a funny song.’
‘Enough with the Ekavian!’
‘Okay!’
The Ekavian pronunciation was completely taboo, even though a lot of people from Slavonia had spoken it before the war. From the shelves of the library, books in Cyrillic disappeared without a trace, and a number of comical words from the Croatian Middle Ages replaced Serbian synonyms. They appeared in the newspaper, on the radio and on TV, and the newsreaders had to make an effort not to stumble over them. Even before my arrival at the camp I had started to say tisuća instead of hiljada, for thousand, and zrak instead of vazduh, for air, when I spoke to people other than Uncle, Mum and Dad. Just to avoid furrowed brows and smart-arsed comments. At a market stall in Split, a greengrocer pla
yed dumb when Dad asked him how much the paradajz, tomatoes, cost. From the heights of Mount Everest he replied, ‘that’ was not something he sold, but rajćice, on the other hand, cost such and such.
I was certain Dad would call him an idiot. Or tell him to relax a little. That’s what he would have done back home. He would not be browbeaten by a moron like that. But Dad did not say a word. Not so much as a syllable, until we left the market and the crowds. He was thinking out loud as he muttered into his beard:
‘Dear Tito, you’ve fucked yourself …’
Cassette 3
THRASH & HEAVY
A GOOD COMRADE
The year was 1984. The woman in front of me had a long, pointed nose and a high, wrinkled brow. She had a deep voice and smelt of something that I could not place. She asked me a lot of questions:
‘What colour is this?’
‘Blue.’
‘And this?’
‘Red.’
‘And this?’
‘White.’
‘And this?’
‘Yellow.’
‘And this?’
‘Green.’
‘And this?’
There was a pack of plasticine on the table. At the bottom of the pack the colours were represented with a series of broad lines.
‘He doesn’t know,’ Neno said.
She looked at him.
‘Brown,’ I said.
‘No.’
‘Grey.’
‘Purple,’ she said and returned the pack to a drawer. ‘But that was good.’
I looked at Neno. He gave a grimace that said, ‘I’m sure it’ll be fine,’ ‘I’m sure it’ll turn out all right,’ and the woman with the nose asked:
‘Can you draw?’
‘Yes.’
‘What can you draw?’
Ukulele Jam Page 6