At that moment, as I looked at them clustered around talking to each other, the survivors of Vukovar seemed to me to have lost yet another battle in this square where the President was taking his coffee, humiliated by the fact that he didn’t want to be disturbed by some protest meeting, that he didn’t want to hear about Vukovar any longer. At least not now, not today, Saturday 22 February. On this day he had other, more important things on his mind. They were invisible for him, nonexistent from where he sat, from the broad historical perspective he clearly had in view: the independence of Croatia recognized by the European Community just a couple of days ago, the realization of a thousand-year-old dream of the Croatian people, diplomacy, big powers, the enemy. Who could blame him for not noticing a few hundred people in Jelacic Square?
It was at five minutes to two when the President left the square. A small incident was over, the case of Vukovar publicly closed, the war almost over, or so he thought at the time. This was the first time I saw the new Croatian President Franjo Tudjman.
16
THE WOMAN WHO STOLE AN APARTMENT
I would have never had thought that a timid, fragile girl like her was capable of stealing anything, much less a whole five bedroom apartment. Probably she didn’t consider herself a thief either, which is precisely the problem. But nevertheless, this is what she tried to do.
Ana – although of course this is not her real name – is twenty-six years old and already an accomplished young journalist. She started to write while still at high school. In a way, she was forced to support herself. Once she told me that she was from a poor farming family, from a village about forty miles from Zagreb. When she came here to secondary school, her parents didn’t have money to pay for her schooling in a big city, so seeing no future for herself in the place where she was born, she had to find a way to survive in Zagreb. She started to write for a youth magazine. Modest as she was, she needed only a little money and that was an ideal place to earn it and to learn a profession too. Curiously – curious, that is, only in the light of what she did later – she was interested above all in writing about social issues. It was a very unpopular subject among young reporters who preferred to hang around the city and have fun. If they had a sharp tongue, and could write with wit and humour about movies, books, the theatre or culture in general, they even stood a good chance of making a name.
This is why Ana’s choice was unusual and welcomed by the editorial board of permanent ‘students’ in their thirties who were only waiting to grab an opportunity to start work on a ‘big’, real paper. On the other hand, for anyone who knew her it wasn’t such a strange choice. The first thing that struck you about Ana was her seriousness. Perhaps that’s why she gave an impression of being older than she was. Even if her face framed with limp blonde hair looked childish, its expression was tense and stern and her whole attitude quiet and withdrawn. If she lacked one thing, it was a sense of humour. One always had the feeling that Ana was very dutiful – towards her parents, at school (she was an excellent student), at her job. If her writing lacked style, she compensated for it with accuracy and reliability and she had a feeling for a good story as well. I remember her articles on tramps, beggars, prostitutes, public kitchens and numerous other social injustices that the communist government would have preferred to brush under the carpet. However, the overall impression was that of diligence, of the dutiful pupil.
As soon as she finished her journalistic studies at the faculty of political sciences she started to free-lance for a big political weekly and soon became a staff writer following the same kind of stories there. She was the youngest member of staff and everyone liked her. This was when I came to know her better. I even considered her something of my own ‘child’, someone I especially cared about. I was impressed by the fact that she, only two years older than my daughter, was working for a serious magazine. The other thing that struck me about her was that she had supported herself all through her school and university years.
One day Ana came to me crying. I’d never seen her in that state, usually she was able to control herself and to handle her problems without help. But this time she was desperate: she had to leave a rented apartment she lived in and didn’t have anywhere to move to. It was the beginning of the school year in 1990 and the city was full of students searching for apartments, the worst possible time to be thrown out. By coincidence, my friend – let’s call her Marta – had just moved out of her apartment to join her husband in Belgrade. Although she could have got good money renting it to a foreign businessman for example, she didn’t want to let it but instead was looking for someone to stay there to take care of her valuable collection of paintings. When she asked me if I could recommend someone I told her about Ana. In my view, she was an ideal candidate, young, responsible and without money. I put them in touch and Marta was happy to entrust her apartment to her. Suddenly relieved of the need to search further and with the prospect of staying there for a couple of years at least, Ana was overjoyed.
In the following months the situation on our magazine changed considerably for the worse and Ana left for what she thought would be a better paid job in a new daily newspaper which went down after just two months of publishing. Shortly afterwards, she started to work for another new magazine, a sensational political tabloid, a particular kind of publication characteristic of all ex-communist countries after 1989. I would never have thought she would have been willing to work for such a paper, but I didn’t want to blame her too much because, to tell the truth, there was not much choice.
In the meantime, war had broken out in Croatia and I spoke to her a few times on the telephone. She sounded saturated with emotion, confused and unable to analyse the new political situation, succumbing more and more to the phenomenon of total national homogenization. It was not hard for this to happen to her because, like the rest of her generation, she was not only completely depoliticized (which actually meant a refusal to discuss or understand politics, as a form of rebellion against the then apparently immutable communist regime) but also lacked the education, the intellectual means for analysis of this kind.
During that time Marta was commuting between the two cities of Belgrade, where her husband lived, and Zagreb where she was a professor at the university. When in Zagreb, she stayed in her brother’s apartment. Her brother was a diplomat in one of the African countries, diplomacy happening to be a family tradition. Their late father, a well-known and highly placed party leader in post-war Yugoslavia, served first in the government and then as ambassador to many countries in the West; as a result Marta had spent half her life in Berlin, Rome, Paris, Geneva and so on. In fact, she had never lived for a long period of time either in Zagreb or anywhere else in her own country. She was more of a cosmopolitan orientation, spoke at least four languages fluently and had a lot of excellent connections abroad – a common curriculum vitae for the children of the ‘red bourgeoisie’. There is no doubt that she – as opposed to Ana – was a member of Yugoslavia’s communist elite and so she never suffered from any lack of apartments, foreign travel, books or the company of interesting people. After all, she herself was a philosopher and the author of a number of books, in short a respected intellectual in her own right.