Belgrade Revolutions

1989–1992

In college, Marija studied world poetry, anthropology, politics, art, everything. She wore the darkest eyeliner in Belgrade around her green eyes, and big shiny jewelry. Not a lot of jewelry, just one striking pendant or a pair of long earrings, but it always looked like she gave new meaning and color to the piece of rock or metal wrapped around her neck or dangling from her ears. On some days she looked like an Indian deity or like Cleopatra. I had never stopped being in awe of her. When we were at the University of Belgrade in the late eighties and early nineties we competed with each other in every domain and even dated the same man for a while. I wasn’t half as versatile as Marija at juggling different fields, disciplines, and brooding lovers but I shone at the social sciences and became a better runner than I had ever been in my childhood. In the fall of 1989 when Communism fell throughout Eastern Europe and our country was breaking at the seams and dividing itself into its many ethnic constituencies, Marija and I both shaved our heads as a sign of protest. We wanted to believe that the object of our protest was Serbia’s growing nationalism against Albanians, Bosnians, Croats, everybody who was not Serbian Christian and sought their independence, but truly we just wanted to shave our heads and get attention in the restless atmosphere that was bubbling around us in those years. While everybody around us was deploring the breaking of the former “mother Yugoslavia,” Marija and I cheered for the dissenting regions and provinces that claimed their independence and asked for separation from that utopian national mother. Tito’s Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia had been an untenable utopia of tying a nationalist ribbon around six different little nationalities and countries all crowded under the same flag and Party. Now they all squirmed and wrestled for their independence.

While our neighbors throughout Eastern Europe were ablaze in their anti-Communist fervor and avid to play with Western values, commodities, and democracies, our country, once the freest and most liberal of those that had been placed under Soviet influence after World War II, was now relying on the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The speeches of the new Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his supporters, with their “Rally of Truth,” made us sick with fury and our heads glowingly bald. We were part of an anti-nationalist minority at the university, as most Serbs supported the unity of the former Yugoslavia at all costs and thought Albanians were all “traitors.” Since the days of our fruit thieving Marija and I had always been on the side of so-called traitors: “traitors” to Communism, “traitors” to the slogans of “brotherhood and unity,” “traitors” to the notion of a “Greater Serbia.” We smoked foreign cigarettes, wore dark eyeliner, talked about postmodernism and feminism, listened to Dire Straits, watched American movies, and dated Milko Dubravic, a thin, feminine-looking student of philosophy who was made fun of by his more masculine Serbian colleagues because they all thought he was homosexual. This worked out well for Marija and me, because nobody imagined that Milko would actually have not one but two female lovers and that the two weirdest women in the university, with bald heads, freaky eyeliner, and secessionist ideas, were exactly those two lovers.

Marija and I shared Milko in the most sisterly manner possible, without jealousy or rivalry, and called him “our brother.” We took turns spending the wee hours of the morning in Marija’s one-room apartment near the university and gorged on Swiss chocolates and Milko’s creamy body. We called the Milko period our “white velvet Revolution,” inspired by Czechoslovakia’s nonviolent anti-Communist revolution called the Velvet Revolution, because Milko’s body was so white and quite velvety to the touch and it was sort of radical to share the same man with such ease and comfort. Since Marija’s parents were mercifully back in Sarajevo at the time of our college revolutions, they didn’t have the fortune of seeing us in our bald countercultural glory. My parents, on the other hand, expressed profound signs of embarrassment, shame, and revolt all in alternating order whenever Marija and I visited them in the same three-room apartment that smelled like a vicious mixture of burnt cabbage and heavy Russian perfume. If a neighbor happened to be close by when my parents, Marija, and I entered the building or came out on the balcony, my father started talking about the weather, the most recent news, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the World Cup to draw their attention away from us. My mother became meek and embarrassed and acted in a sickeningly apologetic way, as if we had just been released from the local asylum and were still in some kind of recovery or as if she had no idea how those two strange-looking women ever landed in her apartment. Seeing the painful ways in which my parents dealt with my rebellious period, I stopped going home for a while and spent most of my days and nights with Marija, Milko, and the other handful of students of politics or philosophy who tried to be either Goths or simply off the mainstream of the patriotic Serbian youth populating our university.

Marija wrote a brand of pornographic philosophical poetry that she pasted on the walls of the university hallways as another sign of protest. I thought her poetry was stunning, like the French surrealist poems, raw and disturbing, mixing body parts with political concepts and foods. She called it postmodern. Whenever we found ourselves in the most brooding and darkest of moods, out of sync with our surroundings, or whenever we became bored with our collection of Hollywood movies, poems, postmodern theory, and politics, Marija would pull out of her bag her leather-bound edition of Dante’s Inferno. We would jump into one of the Infernal circles at random, read it out loud, and then discuss at length the atrociousness of the punishment, which was our favorite and which we would have preferred in case we did happen to fall into a situation like one of those that Dante’s souls found themselves: Would we choose the howling winds that pushed the lustful mercilessly from place to place like Francesca da Rimini forever tied to her adulterous lover Paolo Malatesta or the deep muddy swamps of the sullen and keep gurgling in thick dark waters for eternity? Would we have preferred running on burning sands like the blasphemers and the sodomites or having our heads stuck inside burning tombs like the heretics; would we have chosen Ulysses’s cloak of fire or the frozen place of the traitors of kin whose tears froze in their eyes before even having the chance to be fully formed? Marija always chose the waters and the ice, I chose the fires and the burning sands. She said it was because of our natures, we each chose the opposite of what we were. That meant that I was ice and Marija was fire and therefore we each chose the opposite element. The punishment of the fortune-tellers and the diviners whose heads had been turned around so that they looked down at their asses always made us laugh for hours. Still, our favorite was the punishment of the suicides, who had all been turned into trees that bled if you broke off a twig. “I would commit suicide just to get that punishment after death, to become a bleeding tree,” Marija would say. And then I would see her face scrunch in mad laughter and she would say: “A good thing it is we don’t believe in the afterlife!” And then she would add with wicked irony: “Maybe the circle for sinners like us hasn’t yet been invented: lust, treason of country, blasphemy… Our circle would have to contain fire and ice in simultaneity with one another,” she would conclude proudly.

Marija also had very definite ideas about the political confusion in our country, which in her view was not a random confusion but a very deliberate one to distract people from what was “really going on.” She said that the new Communism of Milosevic was a fascist Communism, which indeed was an oxymoron, yet it wasn’t like the old idealist Communism of Josip Broz Tito or the one of the chairmen of the presidency in the post-Tito period or even like the old-fashioned Soviet Communism. The nationalist and religious part was what made it fascist, she said in between cigarettes and shots of vodka late at night in a café in the old cobblestone area of Belgrade, the famous Skadarljia. Finally, we had gotten to the point of being nostalgic for the good old days of “real Communism,” she added laughing wholeheartedly, her eyes sparkling. We spent Saturday nights in a café, just the two of us, no Milko and no other underground elements from the university. We exchanged notes on Milko’s lovemaking abilities and laughed ourselves to death until one evening when Marija literally fell under the table because she was laughing so hard. The waiter had to come and ask us to leave because he thought we were too drunk to be in the café. Marija came back up from underneath the table with her eyes shining and her face dead serious and said they never threw out the men who got drunk to a pulp there every night and then pissed against the telephone poles across the street. The waiter left mumbling the words “goddamn bitches,” and Marija went ahead and ordered another set of shots from the next waiter. Marija had other lovers, and I only had Milko, so her notes were always longer. She had so many points of reference with which to compare Milko, while my points of reference were scarce and not much to brag about. Marija never fell in love with any one single man. She just glided through love affairs with short periods of infatuation after which she invariably became bored. “There’s got to be something better for me out there in this whole fucking world,” she would say casually, as if it didn’t really matter much. Strangely, she seemed more enamored of the feminine Milko than she had been of any of her dark-haired brooding knights from the different disciplines and departments of our university. Maybe it was because she and I shared Milko and that seemed to excite Marija more than just the simple affairs with the other men. It brought us closer together; she would say, “It’s the closest two women can ever be together, sharing the same man.” She dragged from her cigarette and through the smoke her eyes seemed teary and languorous as they smiled at me.

During those years the old section of Belgrade was throbbing with Serbian music, accordion and fiddle, mostly for Western tourists eager to find out what that whole region behind the so-called Iron Curtain was all about: Were we really human, were we primitive or Old World sophisticated, did all the women wear “babushkas” on their heads and the men exude that Old World masculine charm as they gallantly kissed a woman’s hand? The Serbian musicians gave them what they wanted: hot-paced music and wide flirtatious smiles sprinkled with loud “oopas” and impertinent winks to the women. French women in particular couldn’t get enough of that stuff and often they got up and danced in the middle of the restaurant some kind of imagined Serbian or Gypsy dance they must have seen in a Kusturica movie. Marija sometimes spoke to the tourists, seeming to know all their languages. French, English, Italian, German, glided off her tongue effortlessly.

One Saturday at the very beginning of April 1992, an American woman by the name of Sally Bryant sat down next to us and Marija started talking to her as if she had known her forever. My English was pretty good, too, so I joined in the conversation. The three of us got entangled in endless debates about nationalism, racism, the role of women in the world’s governments and leadership, violence and political activism. The American psychologist Sally had a certain smoothness and intellectual sharpness about her that both Marija and I fell immediately in love with. She had come to Serbia to see her boyfriend. He had told her he was single and eagerly waiting for her to visit him at his summer house in the country, yet when she got to Belgrade he said he first had to square out his vacation plans with his wife and kids. Marija said that was the norm for many of “our men” to have a wife and lovers, “no big deal,” she laughed sarcastically. “You should feel flattered, he wanted to go on vacation with you.” Sally didn’t seem particularly upset about the boyfriend episode and said it turned out to be a great experience anyway: “I got to meet so many interesting people, and now the two of you. I have the feeling this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” she said with a quick laugh, quoting the last line from the movie Casablanca, which left both Marija and me speechless for a few moments, as that happened to be our favorite American movie. She lived in California, in Santa Barbara, and worked with victims of sexual and domestic violence. Santa Barbara sounded like the planet heaven. “What are the rates of sexual and domestic violence in your country?” she asked us as if we were up for an interview. Marija and I looked at each other with a grin. “From our having grown up in this blessed country of ours,” Marija said between shots of vodka. “We know that indeed some men beat and rape and generally abuse their wives and children but not much is done about it, there are no shelters for the women, and the law doesn’t offer the proper protection to the victims of such abuse. It’s just how things are around here, the fucking culture, the macho-masculinist-nationalist, patriarchal bullshit society,” Marija blurted out after her fifth shot of vodka. Then Sally wanted to know about the conflicts starting to emerge among Albanians and Serbians, Croats, Bosnians, what did we think about it? “We think it’s all fucking bullshit nationalist crap, that’s what we think about it,” we said in an uproar of laughter around two in the morning after even more shots of vodka than we could remember. Sally gave both of us her business card when we parted at three in the morning and told us to look her up if we ever came to California. She asked for our addresses and phone numbers in case she came back to Belgrade. We staggered out of the restaurant and into the cobblestone street laughing loudly and kissing each other good-bye. An air of ease and lightness trailed after Sally as she silently disappeared into the Belgrade night. Marija and I looked at each other puzzled, wondering whether we shouldn’t have held on to Sally, asked her to come stay with us at one of our studio apartments, gotten to know her better, developed a lasting relationship with that American from California who didn’t seem to mind having come all the way to Belgrade only to be heartbroken and deceived. In our early-morning drunken stupor we elaborated out loud on visions of the two of us visiting Sally in Santa Barbara, which was close to Los Angeles, and being discovered by a talent and beauty scout from Hollywood who was interested in stories from the “newly freed” Eastern European states. We would become overnight stars, our stories and our personae the rave in Hollywood; we would make millions, order the assassination of Milosevic and all the nationalist pigs who wanted to start a war, and bring everlasting peace and independence for Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Kosovo, everybody. We became international heroines and revolutionaries and the title characters of our own show that was broadcast all over the world and even in our country, dubbed from English into Serbian: Lara and Marija—our faces hanging on huge billboards above American highways and on small posters in Belgrade taverns.

That night Marija and I slept in her room in the same bed. The forsythias were in bloom and it smelled like jasmine. The air that came through the half-open window felt fresh and hopeful. Who could start a war on a beautiful fragrant spring day? I thought as I was coming out of my inebriation. In the morning we had a vague memory of the American Sally and were surprised to each find her card in our pockets. That morning Marija made the strongest coffee I had ever tasted to jolt us out of our hangover and when she turned on the radio in her tiny kitchen we found out the war had started. Sarajevo was under siege. Two women had been killed by snipers in the street—the first victims of the war. Marija was beside herself, she cursed at everybody and even got short with me when I told her there was nothing she could do right now. That was not something Marija could stand hearing: that there was nothing she could do. She wished she were there in Sarajevo taking part in the peace march with the other tens of thousands of Bosnians; she worried about her parents and grandparents and her native Sarajevo and about the world in general. Marija was the only person I knew who literally suffered deeply about the world and its miseries, who screamed in pain whenever she heard of atrocities and violence across the globe. Then she would start a political group, a literary circle, a discussion session, write letters to the student newspapers and to every paper in town, start chains of letters to help victims of earthquakes or of genocides, Rwandan women or Palestinian children. Her writing flared in quick colorful but precise sentences that woke you up from whatever state of moral turpitude you might have found yourself in on that particular day. When the news on one radio station referred to the Serbian armies claiming their rights to the territories of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Marija and I stared at each other: She and I were now part of enemy ethnic groups. It was the first time ever in our lives that we thought of each other as part of two separate ethnic identities. We had never even considered our Serbianness or Bosnianness other than she was born in Sarajevo and I was born in Belgrade. Struggling with our excruciating hangovers that morning, putting on makeup in the tiny mirror hanging above the sink in the half bathroom of her apartment and trying to cover up the deathly-looking circles around our eyes, Marija and I burst into tears and held each other for a long time. Our makeup ran down our faces, making us look even scarier, and we vowed we would never let any ethnic, political, nationalistic, or ideological powers come between us. “You know what? I am Bosnian, too, Marija, and I will forever be Bosnian, for as long as your people, that is our people, are under attack,” I said between sobs. “We shouldn’t even think in terms of our people or their people, that is part of the problem. You know what?” she said wiping her tears with the back of her hand. “I’m fucking American, that’s what I am.” We laughed and I said I was “fucking American, too,” and we would eventually join Sally in her Santa Barbara Pacific heaven one day. Only now there was work to be done, Marija said. She was going to Sarajevo soon, immediately after exams. She wanted to get her diploma and work as a journalist in Sarajevo. “I would move with you to Sarajevo in a minute, Marija,” I said breathlessly. “No, you can’t, you need to stay here and act against the war from the inside,” she said as if she was already planning an antiwar underground movement. Although that statement left me aghast with confusion, for I had no idea how I was supposed to work from the inside, I told her that yes, I would do just that, stay in Belgrade and engage in some kind of antiwar activism.

That night and the nights that followed, Marija and I did the rounds of the best-known student hangout places, taverns and seedy cafés, distributed antiwar leaflets, and engaged in fierce debates with our compatriots over the state of our country, region, and people. As I watched Marija unfold in all her physical and intellectual brilliance I thought she could be the president of Serbia, Bosnia, of the whole world. Why did we just have fat, old, obtuse, fanatic, and not very smart presidents in that wretched world of ours, for centuries? I thought that even war was really fun next to Marija. So apparently did hundreds of Serbian, Croat, Bosnian men who swarmed around her and brought her one drink after another even when they totally disagreed with her political views. Milko accompanied us at some of those political drinking bouts around Belgrade and faithfully stood by us, until one evening when a stout Serbian patriot and soccer player called him a faggot and punched him in the face. He fell on the floor unconscious in a puddle of his own blood. Marija and I had to drag him out of the tavern at midnight, and had him transported to the nearest hospital. We stayed with Milko until we were certain he was all right and walked to my parents’ apartment.

Surprisingly my parents were genuinely happy to see us even at that ungodly hour of the night, and made no comment about our disheveled appearance, alcohol stench, and clothes stained with blood from Milko’s injuries. My mother quickly made the bed in my old room and asked if she needed to pump the inflatable bed or if we were fine sharing my bed. If only my mother had known we were sharing not just one bed but the same lover, I thought. Marija smiled and I knew she thought the same thing. Biljana came out of her room curious about what was going on and eager to tell us about the dance show she had been cast in at the high school—she was going to be Maria in West Side Story and twirled around the apartment singing “I feel pretty, oh so pretty.” Who said we weren’t Westernized in old mother Yugoslavia? Biljana was wearing as always bunches of ribbons in her hair and scarves not just around her neck but also on her thighs and waist; she was a flowing nymph with irrepressible red hair flying in all directions. Biljana and Marija always got into friendly arguments the second they saw each other in a way that seemed sisterly and familiar. Marija made fun of the overly romantic tale in West Side Story and Biljana came right back telling her that was overbearing feminist crap, it was a beautiful story, it was the Romeo and Juliet story after all, what was wrong with Marija, why was she always so bitter about everything that involved romantic love? Marija laughed and said joyously: “I just don’t believe in romantic love, it’s beautiful in the movies, but in reality it is overrated and hardly ever lasts, but I’m sure you are going to shine in your role as Maria. Could you get me a ticket to the show, Billjie?” While my mother was preparing one of her unpleasant-smelling meals for us in the kitchen, the three of us chatted and teased each other and felt like three sisters. For that short period the war that had just started seemed inexistent, impossible, and immaterial. Only our girlish chatter mattered.

My father came into the room looking exhausted and unwell. Something heavy fell amid us like a thud: the news of the war. He had been asked to retire from his position as diplomat at the Greek embassy because he had expressed antiwar sentiments at work. Apparently the Serbians were interfering with the affairs of the Greeks and the latter gave in just to avoid any trouble. The news was shocking to me but apparently not so shocking for Marija. She was expecting all that. My mother came in with a questionable-looking mixture-pudding of sorts, and Marija and I tasted out of politeness and because we were curious to hear more. My mother, too, had been reprimanded at the glass factory where she worked as a chemist because she had expressed an indignant stance against the beginning of the war. “Who starts a war in the middle of Europe in this day and age, less than fifty years after the horrors of the last war? Can our people be such idiots?” asked my father, puzzled. His usual show of manliness and effervescent spirit were drained. I felt sorry for my parents and apparently so did Marija because she tried to comfort them for their recent blows and she praised their courage to stand up to the shows of nationalism and to the new war.

“There isn’t going to be much dissent allowed,” said my father, “mark my words, we’ll be going backward, we’ll be thinking nostalgically of the Tito years and of Communism.” It was exactly what Marija had said to me earlier and now the gloom of it all fell on us with that same threatening thud again and again. We sat around the table in the heavy-smelling apartment at an ungodly hour of the morning as Biljana swirled around the room in a cavalcade of ribbons and scarves and humming the tune of “I feel pretty.” We did our best to process my mother’s attempt at a rice pudding and the new political developments rushing at us from all directions. My father was wondering if Marija was going to leave for Sarajevo right away and my mother shushed him saying she would go when she felt the moment was right. “Maybe you should wait a bit longer, isn’t it dangerous with the siege that just started?” asked my father, showing genuine concern. “If my parents can take the danger, so can I,” she said abruptly. Who knew when she would be back again? Marija spoke as if she had already gone through several wars and was a pro at dealing with war situations. But the truth was that she was always a pro at dealing with a variety of mind-boggling circumstances from messy love affairs, to the politics of student organizations, to the beginning of a terrifying war. Yet there seemed to be another reason why Marija was delaying her departure, and the exams somehow didn’t seem strong enough. There was a mysterious shadow moving back and forth on her face. When I looked at her straight she seemed to have a forced smile, as if trying to say she was all right, don’t any of us worry about her. My mother mustered enough courage to ask the reason for our late-night appearance in bloody clothes. Marija and I stumbled in our explanations and then told my parents that a friend of ours from the department of philosophy got beaten up in a bar because of expressing antiwar sentiments.

That night Marija and I stayed up in my bed talking about everything from the men we’d known to the state of the world, to our future with the war in it, to our careers, to our favorite movies, and fell asleep on memories of our childhood in Sarajevo and in Farah and Kemal’s sweet-smelling house. It felt like a farewell night but neither Marija nor I said anything about a parting of any kind. We delved into the delicious illusion that we would be together forever like one delves into the illusion created by a Hollywood movie on that magical silver screen. Even as personal destinies were crushed by wars and irrevocable separations, the characters in those movies that Marija and I had watched wide-eyed in our early teenage years all seemed unperturbed, glossy and immortal, elegant and witty under the worst and most painful circumstances. A quick glance as a plane was getting ready to leave, a faraway war whose din had made itself heard nearby, the brim of a hat turned just right for us to see the soulful teary eyes of the heroine, all perfectly contoured and timed. I thought Marija fell asleep before I did. I remembered thinking that she must have been so tired since her breathing was inaudible. Just something in the way her head shifted off the pillow and her hair fell on her face made me think she had fallen into a deep sleep. I almost felt like I could hear hoarse whispers from the dark dreams that Marija was struggling with. Before falling asleep I had a sharp pang of fear for her, not knowing what the future would bring in that war zone she prepared to launch herself into as soon as exams were over. I felt a need to protect her and to tell her she could always count on me. But the heavy and precipitated events of the day must have weighed on my psyche, too, and sleep lulled me before my own dreams of empty labyrinthine streets pushed their way into my subconscious. Danger lurked at every corner in my dreams but despite the sense that people with guns and grenades were swarming all around the vicinity, everything was maddeningly quiet. Milko appeared in the middle of the street wearing a white hospital gown and with a deep gash in his forehead. He was offering Marija and me a pot of azaleas. Marija told me not to take them because they were dangerous, they were evil dangerous flowers, not all that looked pretty and fuchsia was safe, she said. Still, I so much wanted the pot of azaleas and I did not listen to Marija. I took the pot of azaleas from Milko and in that same second everything blew up. We woke up to the sounds of snipers and explosions on the TV in my parents’ living room. The war was getting on and people and buildings were being blown to bloody shreds and it was not a dream and it was not a Hollywood movie.

Several days after the ruthless beginning of the war in April 1992 I met Mark Lundberg, a suave American intellectual pursuing a combined journalism and English literature doctorate at Harvard who had a touch of Gary Cooper and Marlboro Man combined. Even before completing his doctoral dissertation he had landed a teaching job at a university in Washington, DC, and for now he was going back and forth between Boston and Washington, he said with a smile that tried to be shy and unassuming. He had come to Belgrade to gather material for a humanitarian journalistic project back home, and miraculously dropped into the middle of a seedy Belgrade tavern at the shocking start of a war of nationalistic aggression. The word humanitarian sounded sexy on his lips and I wanted to hear more. His commutes between the two formidable American cities sounded glamorous beyond my imagination.

Marija and I spent hours every day in cafés and taverns, arguing, spreading antiwar leaflets, rousing heated debates between the arrogant majority of nationalists and the slim but fierce minority of pacifists. One evening Marija was surrounded by a crowd of men who drank every syllable that dripped off her luscious lips whether they agreed with her or not while I was handing out the pamphlets that she and I had worked on the previous night. I had already had a couple of drinks and for some reason in response to Marija’s sparkling mini lectures I started elaborating on the connections between patriarchy and nationalism, sexuality and wars of aggression. Something I had once read about nationalistic libido, a new concept for everyone including myself, erupted in my slightly inebriated head and I had to share it with everyone. A tall handsome man who looked American joined the group and I became bolder and offered to buy him a drink. “Vodka on the rocks for the American gentleman here,” I said to the bartender and handed the vodka glass to the handsome American with great aplomb. He smiled and asked: “How did you know I was American?” “It’s not very hard to guess, you know; your trusting smile I suppose,” I said and left the group of students with Marija in the center to join him at a table at the far end of the bar. Behind my back some of the guys in Marija’s group called me a traitor and “fraternizer with Western elements.” I heard that and turned back yelling halfway across the bar: “Really? Look at you boys—what are you wearing? Levi’s jeans. What are you listening to? Michael Jackson. And those of you who are not drinking vodka, what are you drinking? Is it not whiskey? Who’s the fraternizer?” I felt powerful and light, as if I could take on the world. I looked back at Marija and she was smiling like a proud mother. The American started talking and before I knew it, we were drinking shots of vodka together. Even though I was used to having vodka shots from the practice I had had with Marija during our college years, for some reason after the third shot in the company of the American tourist with a penchant for humanitarian activism, everything became blurry and confused. The sound of an accordion playing a heated Hora, Marija’s eyes moving from the crowd around her to me with the expression of a wildcat ready to pounce, the American brushing his long fingers against my cheeks and then kissing me on the mouth right there at the table in the corner of the tavern, antiwar leaflets spread on the floor and flying in the smoke-filled air, his invitation to join him at the studio apartment he was renting, my counteroffer that he join me at my studio apartment. It all ballooned into one never-ending night that stretched out into another day and another night, which all led to my moving into his apartment only a week later, which then stretched across the summer and into the fall when it ended with our wedding in an Orthodox church and my leaving for America as his bride.

In his tiny furnished studio apartment in the livelier part of the Dorćol area adorned with Serbian traditional rugs and wall hangings, Mark Lundberg acted shy and reserved on the night of our first encounter. He showed me his collection of Serbian rock and pop albums among which was the popular Ekatarina Velika band and their famous Ljubav, Love, and asked me if I wanted him to play them for me. I hated all Serbian rock as I did most traditional Serbian music and asked him if he had any American music instead. He looked slightly taken aback, as he had thought his knowledge and appreciation of the music of my country was going to impress me. But he quickly recovered and pulled out from the collection stacked up on his desk several American CDs—Frank Sinatra, the Doors, Aerosmith, Dire Straits, the music Marija and I listened and danced to during our college years and in particular during our bald-headed fiercely countercultural period. “Take your pick,” he said regaining his full confidence, with a smile so alluring that it seemed to combine the best and sexiest of the Marlboro Man, Gary Cooper, and humanitarian principles all in one. I chose the Doors, and he asked me to dance holding out his hand as if we were at a grand ball. He was as smooth a dancer as I had ever imagined someone could be, swirling me around the tiny apartment this way and that way, one minute in a tight embrace the next in savvy swing turns, in perfect control and yet making me feel I was the one leading the dance. His apartment was small but we never bumped into furniture the way my parents always did whenever dancing to the sugary “Somewhere My Love.” We danced for what seemed like the whole night, in slow motion, in rapid steps and dizzying turns, his legs knowingly coming between mine for the quick turns, his hands warm and steady on my back. At some point our dance moves morphed into kissing, caressing, undressing, as if it were all part of the same ritual. First we were swinging, and next we were entangled in his bed feeling each other’s sweaty bodies, skin-to-skin, like it was the most normal thing in the world. I fell asleep thinking that I had finally had adult sex, all the rest had been just fooling around, even Milko. In Mark’s strong knowing arms, everything before seemed childish and inexperienced. This was the real thing, the American thing: rock music, freedom, humanitarianism, Jim Morrison’s lyrics, Mark’s savvy caresses, the smell of American cologne, all wrapped up in the spring breeze and night sounds that rushed into the room from my Serbian native city. I had entered a foreign country while still on native land. When I first came to consciousness in the morning, I had no idea where I was, and for a split second I wondered whose arm was folded delicately around my breasts. Mark kissed the nape of my neck and asked me what I wanted to have for breakfast. I felt mature and glamorous like an American movie star.

During the following days the minute amount of national pride that must have resided lost and forgotten at the bottom of my psyche was awakened by Mark’s genuine interest in my native city. I played the tourist guide, showing him around quaint alleys unknown by regular tourists, old Orthodox churches with golden icons and infused with the smell of burning candles and incense, parks, ruins, the Danube, the Sava, the place where the Danube and the Sava mix with each other, old districts, new districts, he took it all in stride with curiosity and a winning smile. During those same days right at the beginning of the war in April, I continued to meet Marija in bars and at street corners, at her apartment or even at my parents’ apartment, feeling almost delinquent as if I was hiding something. Somehow I managed to meet Marija and Mark at different times of the day and fill every moment with either playing the tourist guide, American dancing and sex with Mark, or in political discussions, writing and distributing antiwar manifestos, and drinking in bars with Marija. My days seemed endless and demented, sexy, humanitarian, both painful and hopeful, large-winged above Belgrade. After Marija left for Sarajevo part of me turned numb, while another part of me was more alive than ever. I had been careful to keep Marija and Mark separate and distribute myself to each of them in what seemed like two different lives that barely brushed by each other and managed to keep them from ever crossing paths.

From that single night when I met Mark in the Belgrade tavern, events crowded and rushed and tumbled their noisy clamor into my life with the speed of a derailing train. The war catapulted everything into a mad series of occurrences that ironically weren’t going to stop until I landed on American soil. It was as if I went to America to calm down and find peace, to rest and slow down the unstoppable rumble of happenings running me over in my native country. In the middle of that turbulent period of the beginning of the war there was one particular day that kept its clear and painful contours. It was the day when Marija and I said good-bye in her apartment, the same day that she was leaving for Sarajevo and I was moving in with Mark in Belgrade. It had all the weight and slowness of defining days that slice your life through the center and you have to leap across an abyss to be able to start the other half. It was a cruel spring day with blooming chestnut trees and forsythias and news of rampant killings of Bosnians by nationalist Serbs in Sarajevo. It was the day when Marija and I said good-bye on the threshold of her apartment with mascara running down our cheeks and agonizing fears weighing in our hearts. A slow, heavy-laden day carved with all the markings of grief, regrets, and apprehensions. It smelled raw and bloody, and the blooming trees appeared like a huge cosmic mistake. We sat in silence for a while at the table in Marija’s minuscule kitchen. There was a spring breeze coming through the window and an eerie light. The world seemed to quiver. The fragrances were painful. Although I hadn’t closed an eye all night, I felt light and luminous. I was wearing the blue silk dress I had worn the night I met Mark, and my grandmother’s turquoise necklace. Looking at Marija’s brooding eyes and exquisitely carved features I impulsively took off the necklace and handed it to her: “Marija, keep this, it would look beautiful on you. I want you to have it.” Then I took out the antique edition of Plato’s Dialogues that we had studied so often during our college years and handed it to her, too. “And this, I want you to have this, too,” I said feeling my eyes overflow with tears.

“Why are you giving me all this?” Marija asked almost teasing me. “You are not dying or anything, you are just moving in with a goddamn American.”

“I know, isn’t that sort of like dying?” I said.

Something shifted and quivered again in the room, the city, the world.

“You can have Milko, too,” I said wickedly and we both laughed hard, until our laughter turned to tears. We held hands for what seemed like a long time. I had a feeling of heartbreak, like literally something inside me was cracking in two.

“What are you going to do in Sarajevo?” I asked.

“I don’t know, what are you going to do in Belgrade? Maybe I’ll become a full-fledged journalist. Journalists are always needed in times of war, you know. Time to do something useful for once,” Marija said, brushing away the waves of dark hair falling on her forehead.

“You already are a journalist, Marija, and a brilliant one. And you’ve always done useful things. They need you in Sarajevo. Who knows how long this war is going to last? Not long I hope. The UN, NATO, America, they’ve got to do something, they can’t just let civilians get shot like that every day by an army of nationalistic fascists,” I went on, feeling an uncontrolled agitation rise up inside me.

“Yes, of course they can, my dear, America and NATO and the UN never intervene promptly when it comes to just saving human lives,” she said cynically. “Something else has to be at stake, some important resources like oil or nuclear power or huge international interests of power and money.” Then Marija shifted to the topic that must have been on her mind more than the war: “Do you think you’ll ever go to America with Mark?” I kept quiet and averted my eyes from Marija. I realized that not only was I thinking of it, but I was really wishing for it. What was there for me to do in Belgrade anyway but put myself in danger with revolutionary pacifist ideas preaching to a bunch of fanatic nationalists? “You know, this turquoise necklace doesn’t look as good on me as it looks on you, Lara, with your blue eyes. It will clash with my green eyes,” Marija said suddenly, as if embarrassed about her question.

“A string of twine would look good on you,” I said with conviction, “and blue and green do match, despite what is conventionally thought. Do the sky and the grass ever clash with each other?” I then told Marija that she, too, should try to get to Santa Barbara and work with Sally. As if acquiescing that indeed I was going to go to America with Mark. Marija straightened her back the way she did sometimes when something bothered her and said in an almost harsh tone: “When someone you love is in danger and in pain, that’s when you love them the most. There is no way I am staying far from my Sarajevo for any length of time.” I knew it all but somehow wanted to justify my own intentions of leaving the country by tempting Marija to do it, too. She assured me that I had her blessings to go to America, and that she hoped I would. We spoke such serious stuff, and also banalities and niceties, heavy painful things and frivolous girlish things, until a deep silence fell between us. We were dried up of words. Words were failing us. Words became irrelevant. We held hands again. We thought of the movie Casablanca that she and I had watched so many times. We didn’t say it, but I knew we thought of it together, because just when I was about to leave the room Marija asked: “What about us?” We held each other in the doorway for a long time. She asked me to write to her parents’ address, and then she asked me to take care of myself. I told her she was the one who needed to take care more than me because she was the one going into a war zone. War sounded almost childish, unreal, like we were just pretending and we could have said rain or snow instead of war. I ran down the stairs of the apartment building and I knew Marija stood in the doorway listening to my steps. I went out into the street and started running and crying. I felt Marija watching me from her window but did not look back at her. If I had looked back I would never have continued on to Mark’s place. I disappeared into the crowd and ran all the way to Mark’s apartment.

After Marija and I parted I decided to patch the two parts of me into one whole unit and I threw myself into Mark’s arms and charms with a vengeance. Sometimes we talked and danced until late into the night in his apartment and fell asleep in our clothes like two roommates. At other times we made love in the morning before breakfast and just as the first night I always felt mature and sultry, glamorous and grown-up, ready to take on the world. Mark made me feel all those things. I couldn’t quite figure out whether it was because he was American and his ways were so different from any of the Serbian men I had been with, or whether it was because I was confused with the beginning of the war, missing Marija and eager to leave Belgrade and start something new far away from news of war and the atrociously nationalistic atmosphere. Late in the summer, with the war raging in Bosnia, horrifying news of snipers shooting from the hills surrounding Sarajevo and shell bombings all over my beloved childhood city, Mark and I had the life of a couple and were making marriage and immigration plans. I thought it was time to introduce him to my parents.

On a sweltering late-August afternoon, Mark and I dressed up for dinner with my parents. Mark was genuinely nervous, as if worried about the “marriage proposal” he was going to present to my father. I laughed out loud hearing him talk like a fiancé in an old-fashioned movie and thought maybe he was joking. He wore a light-blue shirt and a red-and-yellow paisley silk tie and despite the heat, he even put on his best navy-blue blazer. I knew my mother would appreciate his elegance. She was always one to make snide remarks about the “ghastly” way my friends dressed, except for Marija, that is, whom she thought was a little too flamboyant but at least had a sense of style. Right before leaving the apartment, as I was trying to impress a semblance of smoothness to my unruly hair that was flying in all directions, knowing that it was going to be the first object of my mother’s criticism, Mark held me gently at arm’s length as if to steady me and looked me straight in the eyes. He produced a red velvet box from the top pocket of his navy-blue blazer and opened it to reveal a diamond mounted in a circle of pearls. “Lara, will you marry me?” he asked me in the most classic way. I thought it was the funniest thing in the world, almost unreal, like he was truly trying to imitate a hero in an American movie, so I burst out laughing. Besides, we had already been making marriage plans so the official proposal felt amusingly redundant. When his face became red with embarrassment and his eyes filled with sadness I regretted my callous laughter and realized he was as serious as anybody had ever been with me. I said: “Yes, of course, I’d love to marry you, Mark.” He gently placed the ring on my finger and it fit to perfection. Good sign, I thought, it must be a good match. He kissed me on the mouth and I couldn’t help thinking to myself with a mischievous smile that it was just like in the movies.

The evening with my parents turned out to be a bottomless box of surprises. Mark used every single one of the Serbian words and idiomatic expressions he had acquired from his “learn Serbian in a month” audiotape. My parents couldn’t get enough of hearing him talk Serbian, my mother laughed and hugged him incessantly, while my father slapped him on the back with great affection and frequency, and then he tried out his English, mixing it with some French and German. I’m not sure how, but in the mixture of Slavic, Romance, and Germanic languages, exaggerated gestures, and body language, my parents and Mark managed to exchange a stunning amount of information and opinions, ranging from my childhood food aversions and school pranks to Yugoslavia under Tito. “It was good with Tito,” my father said in his barely understandable English. They talked about the growing Serbian nationalism, my father’s diplomatic missions in Greece, and went on to cover the majesty of the Parthenon, the corruption of Milosevic, and the new war, “this is bad war, more worse than ever before.” And the conversation naturally concluded with my mother’s reminiscing about scenes from Hollywood movies and, what else, Doctor Zhivago. “You know scene when Lara and Zhivago hidden in country house in winter, make love and poetry, so beautiful,” I heard my mother say to Mark. “Best film in the world, no?” Then she ran to the record player to play the song “Somewhere My Love.”

Sometime during the evening my sister had burst in from one of her dance rehearsals, all flushed, in her workout tights, gauzy clothing and colorful ribbons covering her from head to toes and giggling like a teenager. Mark made his marriage proposal to my father in a ceremonious way in a perfect Serbian sentence he had learned by heart, and my father took out his best aged slivovitz of which they both had several shots. Mark asked my mother to dance to the Zhivago tune and swirled with her between our dining room table and the overabundant lacquered furniture with the grace and smoothness I had gotten to know so well throughout that long Belgrade summer. By the end of the evening I was in awe of my future husband, his incredible social skills and savvy, his charm that transcended language and culture barriers. And miracle of all miracles, he even managed to make me feel proud of my family. The cabbage and beef stew that my mother had prepared didn’t seem as bad as it used to, the dessert pudding for the first time seemed almost tasty, and my parents’ agitated and chaotic way of communicating and mixing languages, politics, cuisine, and issues of national identity seemed almost endearing. By the end of the evening, my mother followed me into the bathroom and radiating with joy told me I was a lucky girl, Mark was the ideal man and husband, “Take good care of him, will you!” She told me also to try to leave for America as soon as I could: “Things are only going to get worse by the minute in this damn country and in this city.” She had tears in her eyes and she hugged me with a warmth I hadn’t seen since I was a little girl. I hugged her back and the warmth of my mother’s embrace filled me with confidence. It took a sexy American to bring a new sense of harmony and understanding in my family.

When we were about to leave my mother took Mark aside in the hallway and she whispered something in his ear. Mark blushed and smiled a big happy smile as if he had just hit the biggest jackpot of his life. He told my mother he was going to send her a new and better-quality videotape of the Doctor Zhivago movie from America. He told my father he admired his courageous attitude of resistance toward the war and the growing nationalism, and also added that he was the happiest groom in the world. He told my sister he would send her the tape of the West Side Story movie with Natalie Wood. In a moment of dizziness, I stumbled over the threshold of the entrance to the apartment, wishing to find myself in the evening open air. But in the stairwell there was just the same heavy smell as always, of the neighbors cooking their Serbian evening meals, the heavy meats and cabbages, potatoes, sausage.

Mark and I walked down the stairs holding hands, and I was overwhelmed by a profound feeling of loneliness. Memories of my childhood and teenage years swept through me. I saw myself running up the stairs back from school, breathless, eager to share with my father news of a new stupidity that the history teacher had uttered. I saw Marija and me running up those same stairs after school and my mother making us hot chocolate on a cold winter afternoon. And I clearly remembered the last time Marija and I visited my parents, only weeks earlier, the day before the war started, when we had gone down those same stairs together. Marija and I had held hands, just like Mark and I were now. I knew I was leaving to that coveted America for good, and everything around me suddenly seemed more precious and dear. The heavy smells and folkloric sounds suddenly felt familiar and cozy, part of who I was, whether I liked it or not. In the street Mark stopped under a streetlight and kissed me for a long time, slowly and methodically, almost as if we were going to part as well. The air was heavy with a metallic feel of war and separation. The large boulevards lined with chestnut and linden trees, and even the street with Communist buildings in the center where my parents lived, all shone. After the long kiss Mark whispered in my ear that he was kidnapping me to America and grinned mischievously. I said I was a willing hostage and we both laughed in the sweltering night. I felt a tinge of unease like a beautiful shoe that didn’t quite fit. But the ring fits perfectly, I reminded myself, trying to eliminate any trace of doubt in the warm glow of magical thinking. When I looked up at Mark as we walked late at night to his apartment in the fancy part of the Dorćol neighborhood, his handsome profile stunned me. He looked back at me and smiled his most winning smile. I had no reason to worry, I told myself. I was going to start a new and exciting life at the side of a brilliant sexy humanitarian American.

We chose to get married in Saint Mark’s majestic Orthodox church, or rather Mark chose it not just because it carried his name but because he wanted me to experience my own tradition for the wedding. I could not have cared less and a justice of the peace would have been fine, but I thought it was cute and thoughtful of him to want to go through the exhausting ceremony for my sake. While I was standing in my poufy white dress next to Mark all stiff and handsome in his tuxedo, and I was about to faint from the heat, the tight shoes, the nonstop incense that the priest kept throwing around with his incense burner, I had a feeling that there was something overdone, ridiculous, and unattainable about the whole thing. In order not to faint I went through the philosophers’ alphabet, finding a name for each letter from A as in Aristotle to Z as in Zeno, passing through Locke, Montaigne, Russell, Wittgenstein, Young. I was happy I could even find one for Q, Quintilian the Latin orator. The priest pronounced us “man and wife” when I reached X for Xenophon, the soldier-philosopher who marched through deserts and over snow-covered mountainous chains until he reached Trebizond by the Black Sea. I felt great relief that the ceremony was over and I had managed to cover each letter of the entire alphabet with a philosopher’s name.

The remaining months in Belgrade with the preparations and the paperwork for my departure to America seemed a few steps removed from my own life. I went through everything with precision and attention to detail but with my mind elsewhere. The affection I had experienced for my native home and city the night Mark made his glorious wedding proposal and met my parents in a swirl of languages, sentimental music, and shots of slivovitz wore off and was replaced by a feeling of estrangement and weariness. Belgrade without Marija seemed like a lifeless city and I might as well leave it for good. The news of the war and the siege of Sarajevo, the nationalistic discourse on the radio and television in which it sounded like it was still the Serbian armies and people who were the victims of the war they had waged against their neighbors, gave me a sense of bitter satisfaction about my impending expatriation. Packing for my next life, saying last good-byes, obtaining all the necessary documents from my university as proof I had actually received a degree there, organizing the church wedding ceremony for my parents’ sake and Mark’s delectation in ethnic traditions, talking to Marija on the phone once a day to find news of the war from her side and just to hear her voice, it all filled my days and months until it was time to embark on my grand adventure, to get on the plane to my new and mythic country. My family accompanied Mark and me to the airport wearing dark-colored clothes as if for a funeral. My mother was wiping tears that she said were for happiness at my good fortune, my father was smoking incessantly saying the country was going to be destroyed and a good thing it was that I was getting the hell out of there, and my sister sobbing with hiccups and asking me to write to her often and not forget them in that big America. As cool as I tried to be when we said our last good-byes I felt hot tears streaming down my cheeks and smearing the mascara I had carefully applied an hour before just to look at my very best when I landed in Washington, DC. I knew once I got on that plane I would forever be a different person, a different category of individual: an immigrant, an expatriate, someone without a country. It felt bitter and satisfying, painful and thrilling. I picked up my carry-on suitcase and walked toward the gate on Mark’s arm without looking back.