by Mary Byrne
Over the years she became friendly with her social worker—for the French system requires that someone in Zorica’s position throw herself on its mercy. The social worker was black, married to a white man, their children a pale chocolate color. ‘She showed me photos,’ Zorica laughs, ‘I said, “What are you showing me these for? They can’t be yours!”’
The day she reached retirement age, we celebrated with iced tea and bad wine. At last, she has a tiny pension. The social worker came, took a shot of wine, winced and explained that her role was finished. From here on, Zorica was on her own.
When NATO finally decided to bomb the Serbs, Zorica prefaced comments with a placatory, ‘I know I live in France,’ then continued, ‘but they didn’t have to bomb the place to bits.’ She became very annoyed when a Romanian friend said, ‘Kossovo’s early gone. Next thing we’ll take your region back too.’ Zorica put her out, and hasn’t spoken to her since. She becomes more impatient with all and sundry. When she is disturbed late one night by young people looking for her neighbor— ‘Fabien won’t answer the doorbell,’ they tell her, ‘he must be asleep.’ She gives them a long, vicious look: ‘And I don’t sleep at all, I suppose?’
She is a great-grandmother now—photos of the recently-arrived and dark-eyed twins Nikodje and Tatiana are produced and pored over. She stays on in the little room watching soaps and waiting for phone calls, dozing more often.
When the war was all over, she wondered why the opposition didn’t immediately make moves to replace Milosevic, although she reckoned some of them weren’t much better, since they were responsible for the loss of Bosnia. All she could do was watch and wait. When Clinton came up with the idea of putting a price on the head of Milosevic, she threw up her hands in despair: ‘They’d all be surprised if someone put a price on Clinton. Yet he behaves like an ayatollah and nobody says a word….’
There is a census down home. Family members have to say whether they are Serb, Croat, Albanian or Romanian.
‘So what did they put?’ I ask.
‘Serb, of course,’ she replies with a little smirk that I do not understand.
When at last Milosevic is ousted, something changes in Zorica. She opens up and tells jokes about him that were current during the war and the elections, but which she never told before, in which Milosevic is a farmer who gets his pigs out to vote for him at election time.
She is going great guns until the dragon comes to life again: a minor administrative incident gets blown out of all proportions and she gets so worried that she cannot sleep. Her blood pressure soars. In the quarter, she has seen too many people shunted out of their modest rooms by unscrupulous building managers, for the minuscule sum of their overdue monthly charges. She recounts that one room was purchased for the equivalent of one thousand Euros, then sold on to a speculator. She refuses to believe that things have changed much, and she may not necessarily be wrong. She and many of her fellow countrymen confuse the ill-pronounced French name for building manager (Syndic) with the word for the organism that pays the dole (Assedic), lumping public and private French administration into one giant monster.
Whatever the case, change is in the air. More and more property changes hands in the quarter. Drilling and hammering are frequently heard. French bobo-lilies (young bohemian liberals) are moving in. The building manager has produced improvement estimates for a fortune, and if the other owners agree, Zorica would be obliged to cough up too. Public money may be available, but it’s all too vague just yet. The situation escapes her. She can’t keep up with the bills, and builds herself into a frenzy of worry.
After days of storming at the dragon, roaring at people in offices all over the quarter and even visiting her lawyer, it emerges that she had misunderstood a letter received during my absence. In her world, honest people are bigger to begin with, and when they fall, they fall hard and forever. Dishonest people are huge evil beings, dragons before which poor small people like her can only huff and puff and threaten with heroic language, or a magic sword.
Non et non et non. Je dis NON.
She doesn’t lose the fight, but she doesn’t win it either. Something is broken in her, and she decides she must go home. It is not said that this will be final, but it is unlikely that she will ever return.
The night before she leaves there is a film on television, set among east European gypsies. I phone her to switch over to it. She says ‘Come on over and we’ll watch it together.’
It is here, among heavily-laden luggage which she has been packing for days, that I make a final step towards the real Zorica. She understands some of the language in the film. I have missed the start, and ask her where it is set.
‘Moldova,’ she says firmly, ‘where all the gypsies come from.’
There are several gypsy languages in Yugoslavia, she says. Her grandchildren can speak them, from playing music all over the country.
Then she looks at me as if she has made a decision.
‘My people speak Vlah,’ she says. ‘We are Vlah.’
‘So what language is taught at school?’
‘The children are all taught Serb at school.’ Srb. She pronounces it with a rolling ‘r’ and no vowel. It seems to me she says it with something of contempt. Srb. No one in her family can write Vlah, but she is the only one who cannot read and write Serb. Her son’s generation was forbidden to speak Vlah at school. The Vlah minority in another region, Voivodine, got some minimal rights, but her own region is smaller, its minority dangerous because next door to both Bulgaria and Romania. ‘They’re afraid the neighbors might want it back!’ she laughs.
I see in a new light her defense of the Serbs during the war, and her comments on Croats and Albanians.
‘Bed-time,’ she announces. ‘We’ll be loaded up like bourricots in the morning.’ She giggles.
We await her bus on the broad boulevard, surrounded by bags overflowing with disposable nappies, sunflower oil, fine white flour and sugar. Her son has paid for the ticket at the other end—half a month’s pension for her—and tipped the bus driver to look after her. Occasionally Zorica fiddles with the contents of several open shopping bags, fretting over them, transferring contents between them, occupying herself until the bus arrives. Cakes that Proust would have known as madeleines jostle with bottles of water, and a long naked doll in plastic molding peeks from under a towel. The trip home means she will see the new great-grandtwins.
It is bright and early July, the start of paid holidays for the great majority, a day when those whose holidays are over will head north from the beaches of the Mediterranean and most of the others who can afford to will leave Paris to take their places. French TV has warned everyone who can to stay off the roads. Here, for the moment, all is quiet save for small knots of preoccupied-looking people—mostly elderly and middle-aged—surrounded by gigantic suitcases and reinforced plastic bags. A few locked buses stand by, some with trailers. There is little traffic. Paris is still asleep.
Zorica pushes her way into most of the groups, asking questions, before electing to settle with one, which includes several middle-aged women of enormous size. It is a question of the name of the company as well as the destination of the bus, she explains. All the buses will head east out of France before crossing Bavaria, Austria, Hungary and branching off to their various destinations in the former Yugoslavia. The journey will take two days and a night. The group she eventually chooses is from the same region as hers, across the mountains and looking east into Romania and the sweep of the Carpathian plain, its back turned to Yugoslavia proper.
‘You see,’ her gesture envelopes the others, ‘we’re all Vlah, we don’t even speak Serb.’ Then she adds loudly, in case I haven’t got it, ‘Not Serbs.’
The others smile broadly.
She begins to fret again, nervous about the quality of the bus. She complains of someone who’d come the day before looking for stomach tablets for the journe
y, the same ones she gave them last year.
‘Nothing would do them only eat at the first restaurant when we crossed the border,’ she explained, ‘so they were all sick and I had to give them tablets. Restaurants. Pah!’They should eat what they brought with them, like everyone else. ‘Tablets, indeed. You don’t waste precious tablets on idiocies like that.’
The crowds begin to gather now; vans, taxis and even minibuses have been hired to bring the passengers and their gigantic cargoes to the impromptu bus terminus. Drivers double-park at random then head off to smoke and chat with friends and acquaintances. Cries of ‘Ho!’ ring out. Shoulders are thumped and jokes abound, mostly among the men. The women just watch. By now my Vlah are lost among the Serb-speakers. People address me in languages I do not recognize, and I remember how lost I was when travelling in countries like theirs, where I could make a shot at none of the languages or dialects, where I was as lost linguistically as Zorica is alphabetically in France.
The sun grows warmer. Swarthy men with long hair and vivid red string vests jump out of a Renault and unload fat women and very pretty children. A young man with a clipboard comes by, but knows less than Zorica about when their particular bus will arrive, or where. More and more people wander from group to group in search of their bus. The few young people around openly show their dislike of the whole mess. One young man mutters that it is a circus.
By eight a.m. the drivers have congregated in a circle, smoking cigarettes, comparing notes and laughing. Many of them carry cartons of Gauloises cigarettes. Most of them are Yugoslav, but are speaking excellent French with a short Moroccan driver who regales them with stories of his last trip through. The Austrians were the worst. He mimics himself walking from one uniformed man to another: ‘I go another few yards and it’s “Pass bitte!”’ again.’
‘Just how many times do you want to see it?’ he says, in patient imitation of Austrian precision. He seems rather proud of just being able to cross all those borders with impunity, odd man out and brown to boot.
More people with clipboards appear. Traffic builds up as the newest arrivals triple park. Fresh buses wait for the drop-off vehicles to leave—or even for their drivers to re-appear—so they can park. French drivers on their way to work become impatient and irate, but nothing can kill the good humor of these people on their way home. Three policemen, obviously pressed into service for the occasion, take one look at the chaos and walk quickly by.
By the time the buses are due to leave, the drivers have unlocked the baggage compartments and the men with the clipboards begin to call the names of villages and passengers. Baggage is loaded in some kind of geographical order. Zorica’s bus turns out to be an aged red and black affair with matching faded window curtains.
Her baggage carefully stowed, she embraces me and goes on board. A man in a flashy blazer with brass buttons, watching the chaos benevolently, breaks into chat with me. Speaking good French, he is obviously an intermediary, the man who oils real and figurative wheels at borders. The buses don’t travel together, he says, but they try to meet up regularly. In spite of having several drivers per bus, frequent stopping is obligatory, something he seems to regret. The Austrians are sticklers for paperwork, he confirms, but the Hungarians are worse—they just say, ‘Why should we put up with you lot going through here?’ and demand cigarettes and baksheesh at every turn. You got used to it. Sometimes three Euros was enough. Then it would be into Yugoslavia and home.
‘First thing they all want to do is stop and have a meal, so we usually stop at a big service station just across the border.’
‘What are the roads like?’ I ask politely, noting that Zorica has already changed seats three times.
‘They’ve rebuilt the bridge just over the border,’ he says. He seems sure I must know the bridge in question, the one on stilts. ‘Completely rebuilt with a new monument to those dead in the war.’ All the bridges are rebuilt, he said. They started building them the day after the bombing stopped. ‘They thought they could bomb us out of existence—it took them two months—oh sure, they killed people, they damaged buildings and tactical places, but they didn’t put us out of action.’
I reflect on the audacity of it, and recall Milosevic announcing they would rebuild the country on their own, without any western aid, thank you very much. The man in the blazer shifts his shoulders and moves from one foot to the other.
‘I wasn’t for Milosevic,’ he said. ‘Before the war started, I only kept half an eye on what was going on down there. But now, I realize what he did for the country. No outsider should come into a fight between neighbors. They’re all afraid of civil war now. Before, the government supplied diesel for our tractors, but now there’s either none at all or it’s the same price as in France—in a country where salaries are six times lower!’
He became quiet again.
‘It’s okay now, but it’s not okay, know what I mean? I have a neighbor whose twin sons, soldiers, were killed in Kossovo: one in the morning, one in the afternoon. When the Americans and English were supposed to be “negotiating” in Rambouillet, they already knew they were going to start bombing a few days later. It was decided already.’ He suddenly became animated. ‘And why do you think the Americans moved in? Because they wanted the ports, for the day they turn against Russia again. Now they’re in, but Russia is penniless, for the moment. And Russia never liked Yugoslavia too much anyway. But just wait till they have some money!’
‘What a waste of time and energy,’ he says finally, ‘and what a fool that Slobo is—he could have retired years ago and be fishing now.’
He calms down again and smiles indulgently at the efforts of helpers to pack in the gigantic bags. ‘We ask them to say how many bags they’ll have,’ he says, ‘and they do. But nobody ever mentions the size.’ You could get everything in Yugoslavia, he adds, but they liked to bring stuff home anyway. A new passenger arrives with a barrel of cooking oil. ‘There is a shortage of sunflower oil,’ he admits.
Finally Zorica settles for a seat beside a lady of her own age, and I see that she is already gone from us, wrapped into another world.
The Moroccan gets into the driver’s seat of the red and black bus. At last bus engines fire to life. The watching crowd reels backwards from the smoke that belches from the rear, laughing. The Moroccan tries valiantly to put it into reverse, without success. After some trilingual discussions, the man in the blazer sends for a driver from another bus. A thin elderly grey-haired man in an old-fashioned suit appears. Looking more like a bank manager or Samuel Beckett than a bus-driver, he is obviously the expert on either this bus or reverse gear, or both. He slips the gears into reverse without too much trouble. The Moroccan takes his place again, puts it into forward gear, moves out a bit, has several tries at reverse again without success.
It is hot work, before a crowd of onlookers, and there is no power steering. The grey-haired man takes over and demonstrates again, his face a mask of concentration. He explains the problem to the Moroccan, in French. This goes on for some time.
Finally the Moroccan jumps out of the bus and makes a long gesticulatory speech that there is no way he is going to drive this red and black heap all the way to Yugoslavia. A conference of drivers is held, and the grey-haired Beckett is commandeered. He noses the bus out. Then the Moroccan takes the wheel again. Now that traffic is moving again, the three policemen reappear and begin to direct it. Zorica blows kisses and mouths ‘Au revoir’ through the window. Her new bus friend smiles and waves too. With great difficulty the bus finally moves out into the holiday traffic around ten a.m.
I wonder what will become of the two sewing machines she left behind, and guess that a relative will come, dismantle and transport them home, coping somehow with the difficulties presented by the various customs dragons.
For the moment, Zorica has broken with one dragon, the French one. She leaves for home riding on another. I watch the red and black mo
nster, with its forward and reverse drivers, limp off eastwards with its wake of black smoke.
As she said, its passengers are neither Serbs nor Romanians, they are Vlah, but above all emigrants and, like all emigrants, they are a generation sacrificed, returning home to what some like to call Greater Serbia.
After walking about for a while I have lunch and wander back to the quarter. It is late afternoon. Fitful showers hiss in the evening heat, mixed with a whiff of blocked drains. Some Polish builders have finished up a job and are piling their gear into the back of a van before heading for the Périphérique and home to Poland, enough money in their pockets to finance six months’ living, or the purchase of a new truck. People who can’t afford holidays sit watching the trendy young on the cafe terraces. A bicycle hangs neatly from a fourth floor window, out of thieves’ range. The Asiatic evangelical meetinghouse on the corner disgorges the post-homily and post-prandial homeless. A few tramps congregate on a bench around a cheap bottle from the supermarket. Concierges wheel out overfilled green bins that are quickly and surreptitiously joined by piles of building rubble and sacks of offcuts from the sweatshops.
As I arrive at our building I find our concierge’s husband, Mr Dafonseca, sweeping the yard cobbles listlessly with a broom. He nods to me and indicates the mountains of rubbish. ‘Now there’s a nice neighborhood for you,’ he says, with all the irony his pencil moustache can muster. His son’s wife, an illegally-resident Algerian, wheels their new baby Augusto out for a ride in his buggy. The unemployed young men, including Dafonseca fils, play around with Mr Dafonseca’s Rottweiler and prepare to sell hashish for the evening. They upbraid the younger kids for letting off firecrackers at their feet: ‘Nique ta mère!’ ‘Dégage!’ ‘Connard!’ The kids are delighted.
The firecrackers mean it will soon be July 14, when the quarter comes alive in an uncharacteristic celebration of French feeling. Mr Dafonseca’s daughter-in-law will salsa up the street in a red djellabah like the Pied Piper, ahead of a Batuk band and a dancing crowd of all ages. People will throw confetti from upstairs windows. Cameras will flash. Mr Dafonseca and his wife will lie in bed listening to the band, one ear out in case the young Augusto is disturbed by the noise of the throng. Upstairs, the Tunisians will rattle their backgammon board, smoke and chat. An elderly pied-noir Frenchman will belly-dance on a street enveloped in the whirling smoke of barbecuing merguez. A Serb will pass around a bottle of home-made rakia. Young North Africans will sell cheap cans of beer from buckets of iced water. Black tots in ribboned plaits will shake to the rhythms of an Italian band. The band will finish up an electric selection of folk tunes with an Italian anti-fascist song that goes, ‘We’re drunk, but we’re coping!’