The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  Damir liked wandering the cemetery because he could trace the city’s complicated history in the mélange of names and dates and varied fashions of memorial design. Here were mausoleums that provided cover for junkies and crosses molded to look like they were made from chunks of firewood. Here were gravestones with black-and-white photo vignettes of the deceased, pressed behind ovals of glass for a hundred years. If the relatives of the long-dead, separated by decades of war, stopped paying rent on the plots, the remains were moved to the—“What do you call it? The skull chamber?”—ossuary. The exception was the Jewish section, whose gravestones lie flat to the ground, covered in piles of white pebbles. Their rent is waived in perpetuity as a kind of reparations. The families that might have paid for the upkeep had vanished in the wars.

  Here was the plot of the evocatively named Famiglia Skull, and here a soldier whose name, Vincenzo Petrovich, perfectly encapsulated the Italo-Slav nature of Fiume-Rijeka. We skirted a funeral that spilled out from the main gate. Just uphill was an Art Deco church, in disrepair but still angular and surreal—dirty white stone with mauve and green oxidized-copper accents, featuring a memorial to dead Italian soldiers. This was a Fascist church—a combination not necessarily unique to Italy, a country where religion and authoritarianism had been synonymous for millennia, but still striking.

  I asked Damir if he thought people were moving on from the wars of the 1990s.

  “I don’t think so. I was at home in 1991, and it was a trauma for me.” Damir grew up in the suburbs of Rijeka. “There were no casualties in my family, but we didn’t go to school for months, were in the apartment, eating German milk, and always hearing the bombing.” He said that not long ago, “I went home and hung out with my friends from high school. I played them a band, a good band, from Belgrade, and they said, ‘Of all the bands, you have to like a Serbian one?’” There was a Serbia-Croatia football game in Zagreb recently, and Croatians chanted slogans from the World War II–era Croat-led fascist puppet government. “In Zagreb!” he exclaimed, shaking his head. “Which is like a little Vienna!”

  There was no one on the highway from Rijeka to Ljubljana, which was a bad sign—a slow crossing means bored guards. This was the EU border to boot,10 and sure enough, they waved me over. I was to pull out and count the T-shirts and CDs (the trick to avoiding customs duties is usually to keep the count under a hundred). They opened the trunk compartments and asked if I was bringing in cheap cigarettes from Serbia; when I said no, they asked again. They brought me inside the shack and emptied my pockets.

  In 2015, this border would be reinforced with razor wire to keep Syrian refugees from crossing.

  “Where are drugs?”

  “No drugs. I’m not stupid.”

  “No drugs? But you are musician!”

  They called in the captain, and he asked again about smuggling cigarettes from Serbia—so this must be the real issue. Finally they waved me on, warning, “Probably they’ll give you trouble” at the Slovenian entrance border a hundred meters away. They didn’t.

  So what do we know about Slovenia? And what do we think we know about Slovenia that is actually about Slovakia (also rural and forested) or Slavonia (the eastern wing of Croatia)? Even in books that are nominally concerned with the Slavs of Europe, you’ll find nary a mention of the Slovenes. They are the mountain Slavs, tucked in between Italy, Austria, and Croatia, who enjoyed an unusually uncomplicated relationship with the Austrian world. West mentions these forgotten central Slavs as “the unhappy Slovenes, who were incorporated into Italy” after World War I. “These six hundred thousand people are the worst-treated minority in Europe.” In the 1930s, West reports, the fascist Italian newspaper Popolo d’Italia asked, “Have bugs a nationality when they infest a dwelling? That is the historical and moral position of the Slovenes living within our borders.”

  Slovenia didn’t exist as a state until the 1918 founding of the federated Kingdom of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs that predated Yugoslavia, and it didn’t become an independent state until 1991. The Catholic Slovenes were something of an afterthought in the Kingdom, whose King Alexander I intended it more as a Greater Serbia of Orthodox Slavs than as an ethnic federation. “A sensible and unexcitable people,” says West, who “had had better opportunities than their compatriots to live at peace,” since the difference of their language from Serbo-Croatian encouraged officials in Belgrade to leave them to their own devices. Spared the history of Turkish battle and religious schism that had split their southern neighbors, they were “experienced in discomfort but not in tragedy.”

  Slovenia also avoided the melodrama of the post-Yugoslav wars and slipped comparatively peacefully into democracy, NATO, the EU, and the euro. Its only major city is Ljubljana, better known by its German name, Laibach (namesake of the infamous Slovenian band), and almost the entire rest of the country is thick-forested mountains. Virtually every kingdom and tribe in European history overran its territory, from the Celts and Illyrians to the Romans, Magyars, Franks, Hapsburgs, Napoleonic France, Turks, and fascist Italy. One theory for their isolation from the complexities of Yugoslav politics is that the Magyar invasions cut Slovenians off from their fellow South Slavs. There was a massive (one in six) emigration around the turn of the twentieth century. The impression is of an educated, marginal people with something of a historical inclination toward democratic governance and political stability, whose sense of nationality coalesced slowly and almost without their conscious attention.

  “Slovenians are a different temperament than the rest of Balkans,” Ray said. “Colder.” Their revolution and independence predated the rest of Eastern Europe’s, after a “Ten-Day War” with the Yugoslav army in 1991, but, Damir explained, “ultimately [the Yugoslavs] didn’t care” if Slovenia left “because there weren’t any Serbs there.” How did they avoid the wars of the 1990s? I asked. “Maybe they are smarter than us,” Ray replied with her usual glum cynicism. “They don’t have the coastline”—like Croatia, she meant—“and that’s what the Serbs wanted.” Both claimed to find Slovenian, nominally related to Serbo-Croatian, unintelligible. Damir said, “If I concentrate, it’s like the Zagreb dialect,” while Ray simply said, “I find it hard to listen to.”

  The country has a population of only 2 million, a quarter of them in Ljubljana. Since its independence was relatively painless, industry remained socialized until recently. As a result, it didn’t see the mass unemployment and societal upset that befell other postsocialist countries. When the last prime minister, a proponent of privatization and, it turned out, corruption, decided to sell off Slovenia’s sole port, he was duly driven out by mass protests in Ljubljana—“five or ten thousand people every day in the square,” Damir said.

  The northbound road toward Ljubljana was at first lined with ads offering to change Croatian kuna to euros, and then passed through a series of farming hamlets and snowy mountains, each town capped by a single-spired church that was its tallest structure. It looked more like Austria than the Balkans. The only splash of color was a Roma caravan, painted in loud checkers, parked in a pull-off just past the border. Each highway sign was written in four languages.

  Ljubljana is low and drab, except for two bizarre housing projects. One looks like it was designed by the architects of the Death Star, and the other might have been inspired by the mobile staircases used to board airplanes. It’s basically Missoula, Montana—a nondescript city in picturesque natural surroundings—with a castle. The castle itself is heavily renovated, if not completely rebuilt: more like a museum in the shape of a castle than a vintage structure. From the top of the castle’s watchtower, the pencil-yellow and umber color scheme of the old city is distinctive, and the greater urban area was bigger than I would have thought, but it seemed less a city than a swollen town.

  The venue in Ljubljana was Metelkova, a self-proclaimed “autonomous zone” in a former Austro-Hungarian army barracks. Squatted since 1993, it is modeled on Copenhagen’s infamous Christiana neighborhood. I thought
I had been here with my old band World/Inferno in 2005, but to my surprise that was a different walled squat complex, in Nova Gorica, south of Ljubljana on the road toward Trieste. The European squat experience feels as formulaic at this point as the black-painted rock bars of America or the British toilet circuit: technically accomplished graffiti, welded-iron trash sculpture, banners with solidarity or antifascist slogans, surly and monosyllabic residents, brutal crust punk and metal playing on the PA. The little bar on premises did have a Christmas tree growing from the roof and a calming iron woodstove.

  The night was an object lesson in how squats can be bullshit. No one was in charge or knew what they were doing, no one had communicated anything to anyone else, and nothing worked. The sound guy had one semifunctional mic, and took three hours to figure that out. (In the end, I abandoned the broken PA and played acoustic.) The hostel room cost thirty-five euros for what was essentially a frat house (drinks with curly straws in the lobby). My dinner was a “burrito” (grilled zucchini and cheese sauce in a tortilla) that cost six euros. The money? “We can’t afford more to pay you more than fifty euros because we never charge entrance.” Then, after two encores and “Man, you’re a legend,” five euros in merch sales. This was a Disneyland squat. It looked like a cynical and businesslike exploitation of an outlaw aura, but at the end of the day it was just an overpriced hostel with Axe in the showers and visitors who got to ignore the liquor laws.

  As I packed the car, a guy with a skateboard, mismatched Converses, and wraparound sunglasses said, “You leaving?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why? All weekend is going to be fucking awesome party.”

  “I . . . got stuff to do.”

  “OK.” He shrugged—my loss, clearly. “Ciao.”

  I returned to Zagreb and saw a sign for the Museum of Broken Relationships—irresistible. On a hill, past a panoramic promenade where teenagers came to drink beer and straddle one another on park benches, was a small gallery with a unique collection: exhibits of the debris, some personal, some mundane, left behind by one person leaving another. There was a love letter written on glass, then shattered; an ax used to demolish shared furniture; a small deer woven from bamboo; and a breakup letter from the head of the Croatian Roma Forum to the prime minister. Their gift shop sold clever, if twee, items such as a “bad memories eraser” and T-shirts with a tear or a Band-Aid over the heart. Naturally, the Smiths were on the stereo.

  The venue, Medika, was another cookie-cutter walled squat complex, cold, black, and covered in graffiti.

  “You’re staying there?” Damir had asked me.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Good, I was there—I remember they don’t have heat.”

  I huddled with some others around a woodstove while we waited for the venue to open. Medika had been in existence only five or six years, and so the punks running the place were still idealistic; cynicism was at a minimum.

  “Do you live here?” I asked Josip, the promoter.

  “No! I am, how do you call, bacteriaphobe.”

  We were waiting for the New York punk band Morning Glory. In a triumph of wrong-minded routing, they would arrive after an overnight drive from Berlin, which would take eleven hours under ideal circumstances. As it happens, they left Berlin at about five a.m., and arrived just as the show was starting, about nine that night. I didn’t recognize anyone in the group besides the frontman, Ezra, from the last time I’d seen them, though I’d played a show with the rhythm section when they were in my ex-bandmate Lucky’s short-lived thrash outfit Devastation Wagon.

  Ezra sported a gentle beard and seemed shell-shocked by the drive. The band was tight but tired. My expectations were high: I’d seen a version of the band in 2005, at the Hook in Brooklyn, play what I still remember as one of the greatest punk sets I’ve ever seen, and Ezra is a kind of musical savant. This, though, was a sober, professional group with a testosterone vibe and branded thongs and panties (appropriately labeled “For Reals?!”) on their merch table.

  “My friend said he started reading your tour diary”—which I’d been posting on my website—“and fell asleep halfway through,” a guy told me as he flipped through my records. “It was so long.”

  “Imagine how it felt to live it,” I replied.

  Among the axes and borders that define the Balkans, the historical gulf between Serbia and Croatia is particularly deep: Serbia was occupied by the Turks, while the Croats were enthusiastic Austrian allies. Like the Russians who paid tribute to the Mongols for five hundred years, the Serbs became tough and ruthless, and they ridiculed the Croats as effete lawyers and intellectuals. The Croats, in turn, found the Serbs brutish: in Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan quoted a Croat calling Serbs “weird, irrational, like Gypsies. They actually liked the army. How can anyone like the army! . . . Belgrade’s the Third World. I feel much closer to Vienna.”

  “There is a real imbalance in this country between Belgrade and the rest,” Ozren from Novi Sad told me. “All the money goes to Belgrade.”

  “Do you know Rebecca West?” I asked. He didn’t. “It’s funny, people were making the same complaint in 1933, and probably 1333.”

  West sat with a table of Dalmatian Croatians who exclaimed, “Belgrade! The Government does nothing for us, but they take our taxes and spend them in Belgrade. . . . Is that fair, when down here we lack bread? It was a wretched little village before the [First World] war . . . a pig-town. . . . But now they are turning it into a place like Geneva, with public buildings six and seven stories high, all at our expense. I know there is corruption and graft in American politics, but you have no idea what it is like here. The trouble is not only that . . . the money goes to Belgrade, it’s what happens to it when it gets there. It sticks to people’s palms in the most disgusting way.”

  Belgrade happens abruptly: one minute I was driving through miles more of table-flat farmland and huddled village houses, then around the corner was a dystopian, double-barreled skyscraper and some irredentist socialist housing projects. The air conditioners and laundry hanging from half-open windows made the buildings look flaking and scaly.

  I was almost immediately exhausted. There was a hectic, dangerous energy to the traffic, and the city was dirty, loud, frantic, and disreputable. Belgrade has been completely destroyed and rebuilt innumerable times, and perhaps it has acquired the habit of building quickly, without the expectation that the buildings will enjoy a long lifespan. Eventually I found the venue, down by the rubble-strewn bank of the Danube on the way out of town. It was another cold, graffiti-plastered squat of what looked like an old public school. The doors were open, but no one was around. I headed back toward the town center.

  What Belgrade doesn’t have is the acres-wide plaza that I expect from a postsocialist capital, the kind usually named “Revolution Square” or “Plaza of the Heroes” and ringed with columns and concrete. Belgrade’s “Park of the Pioneers” is cramped and grassy, flanked by two unprepossessing palaces and a rather attractive (if judged on a sliding scale) parliament building. It does have a truly monumental post office (which also houses the Ministry of the Economy, and probably more) that would be right at home in Moscow and a lovely legal-pad-yellow train station.

  It was when I stepped inside the rebuilt, beehive-like St. Mark’s Church, though, that I felt true relief. The stench of diesel was replaced by incense; the frantic activity of the city center gave way to a pair of old ladies in headscarves praying and lighting candles. The stone floor was covered in a thick carpet. The tiny tomb of the fourteenth-century tsar Stefan Dušan, whose reign marked the high-water mark of the medieval Serbian empire, had a single candle burning before it. I just wanted to sit there for a while and give myself over to the velvet comforts of an Orthodox church.

  Tonight’s squat had an unusual pedigree. It had housed some sort of film production company, then was bought as an investment property by a “tycoon”—that’s what the promoter, Nikolai, called him—who used the property as bank coll
ateral for another loan and so wouldn’t be developing it while it was thus engaged. The squatter collective went to the “tycoon” and asked if they could use it in the meantime, and he said, “Why not?”

  Fresh and legitimized, these were the happiest squatters in Europe, thrilled to be alive. They were serving a godless concoction of vodka, soy milk, and peach juice, shaken in a plastic sandwich bag tied around a straw. Just a bunch of cool kids who wanted to get drunk in a freezing hovel. Nothing wrong with that.

  “The country is all fucked up,” said one. “But so you can do whatever you want.”

  “You playing Budapest?” said another. “A lot of Americans are living in Budapest.”

  “And Belgrade,” a friend added.

  “Well, in Belgrade it’s cheap to live.”

  “And cheap to die.”

  Drunk nihilists make a good audience, and this was my biggest of the tour. Exhausted and cold, I let one of the organizers know that I was ready to leave whenever she was, but my show, it was clear, was just the beginning of the party. This was a Belgrade squat on a Friday night, and no one had any plans to wrap it up. I found a back room and fell asleep by the woodstove. At some point, a kind woman with bleached hair covered me with quilts. Around four in the morning, Nikolai and his girlfriend roused me and filled me in on what I’d missed.

  “While you were asleep at the show, somebody broke a window from outside. And we thought it might be Nazis, so we got in two cars and chased them, and we caught them! They were so scared, they didn’t think anyone would chase them. So we didn’t beat them.”

  I got in my car and followed them for twenty minutes to the city’s outskirts and to their surprisingly nice apartment.

  “Hey, Nicolay,” said Nikolai, “I’m going to the store in the morning, you need anything?”

  “Oh no, I’m OK.”