There is a bleakness to Belgrade in the winter months, when snow instantly turns gray from the soot-filled air. So even on a clear day like that day in January 1961, everything seemed to have a dirty dampness to it.
The school bus that took me to and from the International School of Belgrade was a two-tone, pale blue and white VW Microbus with gray vinyl benches. Along with its dirt and grime and black ice clinging to its undercarriage, it fit in well with the winter landscape. The best part of the bus was the turn indicators. Incredibly, whenever the driver flipped the turn signal next to the steering wheel, an eight-inch, ruler-shaped stick would obediently snap to attention, flipping up and out from its hidden perch in the pillar just behind the front doors on whichever side the vehicle was to turn. I never tired of seeing that mechanical turn signal operate. As soon as Mrs. Brasich’s class was over, I would race outside from the huge, old stone mansion that served as the school for children of diplomats to find the bus in the driveway and secure my seat behind the driver to have the best view of the indicator. The driver, Raday, a small man who was usually, though not always, in a good mood, sometimes would let me inspect the flipper up close while he would operate it from inside. One time the driver’s side flipper wouldn’t work and Raday started to pull it with his hand. “My dad,” I said, “always tells me never to force something. If it isn’t working, there’s a reason.” Raday, who by this time was pounding the side of the vehicle, didn’t seem to appreciate the advice coming from an eight-year-old. I don’t know if Raday ever remembered my dad’s advice, but it stuck with me the rest of my life. Things work or don’t work because of something else, so try to find out, if possible, what that something else is.
The school bus drive to my home from the International School was fifteen minutes at most. When we turned from Topcidarsko Brdo Circle onto Tostoljevska Street, I gathered up my books and papers, knowing I was only a minute away from home. Our house was located on a small cul-de-sac, Krajiska Street, opposite a wooded area. But that afternoon, as Raday turned to pull the microbus off the road and into the small woods on the left, I could see that everything was not quite right. As I got out and Raday began the careful exercise of backing the vehicle into Tostoljevska, I saw immediately that the sidewalk and high fence surrounding my house were covered with graffiti that included (in English) “Yankee go home” and “Lumumba,” and something that ended with “CIA.” I looked around, a little confused and concerned, as Raday drove the vehicle off, evidently not noticing what I had seen, because he presumably was focusing all his energies on backing out into the busy Tostoljevska Street. Two policemen in their long gray coats were talking to each other nearby, not an unusual sight for this area of town that housed many senior Communist Party functionaries. I hurried over to the rusted iron gate and pressed the doorbell, anxious to get inside to something more familiar and out of the January cold. But as I stepped back from the gate I could see the front of the house, the main floor of which sat up like a second floor with the basement and garage level underneath. Most of the front of the house—my house!—had almost all its windows broken, as if it were abandoned and no one was living there anymore.
When nobody came out, I shoved the gate with my shoulder and despite its rusty resistance it somehow opened. I stood there and stared into the cobblestone driveway below the house. I could see shattered glass everywhere. Instead of turning to my left to make my way up the stone staircase to the main entrance, I walked farther along the driveway and could see that not just some, but almost all the windows on the right side of the house were broken and the driveway littered with rocks that had bounced back off the stone siding of the house. Now far more scared than surprised, I ran up the stone stairs to the big, wooden front door and pounded on it to get inside. My mother, holding one of my two-year-old twin brothers in one arm, opened the door with the other. “What happened here?” I asked. And she responded calmly: “Chris, you won’t be playing outdoors today.”
What had happened on that day in January 1961 was that the Congolese leftist leader Patrice Lumumba had been killed at the hands of the CIA—a suspected targeted assassination that was finally confirmed as such years later. His assassination was a cause célèbre throughout the world, especially in communist countries, where he was seen as the vanguard of a new wave of communist expansion in sub-Saharan Africa. And what happened at 2 Krajiska Street in that heavily wooded suburb of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where my father, the embassy’s political officer, lived with his wife and five children was that an angry Yugoslav student mob, presumably with the knowledge of the Yugoslav communist government under Tito, had marched to a house they (somehow) knew to be occupied by an American diplomatic family, chanted epithets, scrawled chalk slogans, and threw rocks until the police, who had apparently stood by, finally chased them away.
But what did not happen was any sense of panic in the Hill household that afternoon. My father came home to see how we were doing. As if to explain that nothing much had really happened at our house, he told me what had been going on at the Belgian embassy that day. A mob broke into the Belgian compound, located just a few blocks down from the American Embassy, and threatened to come up the main stairway inside the building before the Belgian ambassador, wielding a pistol, yelled to the crowd from the top of the stairs: “Ça suffit!” That’s enough! They left. My father enjoyed telling that story that night as he sat in the living room next to the fire, making his way through his usual evening pack of cigarettes. I’d often sit with my parents at night, getting my dad to tell me about the embassy while they both had their martinis, and I wondered how anyone could drink such a thing (though I did always lay claim to the olives).
My father had a special affinity for Belgians, having served his first assignment in Antwerp immediately after World War II, and admired them for the suffering they had endured in that conflict. Dad explained to me who Lumumba was, and why the connection with the Belgians, and for that matter the connection with Tito’s nonaligned Yugoslavia. “Everything has a reason,” he always explained. “Our task is at least to try to understand what that reason is, even if we don’t agree with it.” I couldn’t understand why a Yugoslav mob was attacking our home over something we obviously had nothing to do with. “Well, not everything has an easy explanation,” he said, as if to negate what he had just explained. “We’d probably have to talk to them.”
“Talk to them?”
“Of course. How else would you find out what they are thinking?”
I don’t remember my father ever telling the story about the pistol-wielding Belgian ambassador again. It just wasn’t that big a deal. Stories like that had a short life span in the Hill household. We would get on to the next issue quickly.
Late that afternoon my mother was still dealing with some remaining shards of glass that had become stuck in her hair-sprayed hair when she had dropped to the glass- and stone-littered floor of the living room to shield Jonny and Nick. Embassy carpenters came the next afternoon to repair the windows (with my assistance in the form of passing them their cigarettes). Apart from those two policemen, who had seemed more interested in their own cigarettes than in protecting our home, there was no additional security and no routines altered or created. My father went to work the next day. I went to school, after the usual argument with my mother about what to wear to my third-grade classroom. I do not remember my parents ever talking about the incident again. It never became part of family lore. I talked to them years later, but it fell to me to jog their memories with my own.
Just two and a half years later, in May 1963, the seven Hills were living in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. François Duvalier had just declared himself president for life, and from our second-floor porch, which had a view overlooking much of the city, I could see fires and hear gunshots. As luck would have it, my dad, the embassy’s economic officer, was the duty officer that week, meaning that he would make frequent trips to the embassy in the dead of night to check on telegram traffic that required immediate attention. This night he had gone to the embassy at 11 P.M., but now at 1 A.M. had still not returned. My mother radioed the marine guard (there were no phones) and was told he had left an hour earlier to make the twenty-minute drive home in an embassy car. She woke up my older sister, Prudy, and me to explain the situation, and we sat on the upstairs porch, our mother with her cigarette, and I with my worries.
He soon returned, to our great relief. He explained that he had been ordered out of the car at gunpoint by Duvalier’s not-so-secret police, the dreaded Ton Ton Macoutes, and held there for some thirty minutes while the TTMs decided what to do with him and his embassy driver. The next evening Mother and Dad told me the situation was deteriorating, that we all might be evacuated, but wanted me—I was ten years old—to know that we had a revolver (with five shots) in the event it was needed. Dad showed me how to aim and fire, while I focused on the fact it had only five chambers and not the six that I assumed every revolver had. “Don’t use it unless you have to,” my mother helpfully told me.
Just a day later my dad came home to tell us that all families were being evacuated and that we needed to pack. “Where are you going to be?” I asked him anxiously. “I’ll be fine,” he told us.
The next morning we were at the airport, boarding a chartered Pan Am flight bound for Miami. My dad, and other Foreign Service dads, stood on the tarmac as we made our way up the stairs. He was waving at us, telling us all to take care of our mother, who was holding on to Nick and Jonny, now four years old, while my two sisters, Prudence and Elizabeth, and I followed. He was still waving at us when the plane pulled away. I was so struck by the fact that if he was worried about anything, he sure didn’t show it.