When the war approached Zagreb with the air-raid alarms of mid-September 1991, she wrote about her experiences for Belgrade’s leading liberal opposition paper. Describing the atmosphere of growing fear, suspicion and danger, she wrote:
This is such a narrowing of the human horizon as I could never have imagined before. A person is reduced to one dimension only, that of the nation; a culture is reduced to limited and hastily invented national symbols; we all become shortsighted. They have enclosed us within narrow borders we never knew existed and now we are culturally suffocating – not to mention the physical suffering of countless dead and wounded. We are all going to choke like mice. We are never going to get out of this nationalist discourse, Croatian or Serbian alike. We’ll never be able to build our future on that, we’ll be thrown back perpetually into the past, far back into the past.
She goes on to describe her neighbours turning into self-appointed policemen, dirty cellars sheltering people far too ready to collaborate with the war, the way one becomes an enemy. She concludes:
This is not my state and my city. I wasn’t born here.
The reaction to her article was as vehement as it was unexpected. It wasn’t the fact that she wrote for a magazine in what was already the enemy state of Serbia, because it was well known for taking a pro-Croatian position anyway. It was more that it was a clear sign that she’d gone ‘too far’ in expressing her individualism, her unwillingness to participate in what she called ‘war games’. However, she had chosen perhaps the most unhappy moment of the war in Croatia: Osijek was being shelled every day, Vukovar had been surrounded and was systematically being destroyed, the blockade of Dubrovnik had just begun, many Croat villages had been burned down and a river of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the occupied territory was flooding Zagreb. Young boys, her students, were getting killed. Yet she had written of feeling imprisoned in the city, as if it were a jail, as if she were displeased with what was going on.
The letters that appeared in the press were bitter: she was accused of cynicism and lack of empathy, but most of all, for equating the victim with the executioner. In the eyes of the public, she had become a traitor, a ‘fifth columnist’. This Marta couldn’t understand, she couldn’t understand that every occasion for public discussion, for intellectual nuances or plain differences of opinion had suddenly been poisoned, usurped, swept away by the war. Under the everyday threat of shelling (between 15 September and 4 November there were forty air-raid alarms in Zagreb, the front line was less than twenty miles away, the presidential palace in the middle of the old city was hit as well as villages on the outskirts of Zagreb) things became black and white. Moreover, she was perceived as a person who wrote from Olympian heights, as someone who had other options, who could go somewhere else if she wanted, while the majority couldn’t even think of an alternative. So the message against her in the media was: Go! Get out of this city and don’t come back!
It was hard to find a single person to defend her position even among the people who knew her. ‘You agree that her apartment should be taken away from her, don’t you?’ I heard one of her acquaintances saying. In fact this was not the first time that her apartment had been mentioned; one of the hate-letters published in a magazine mentioned that she lived in a ‘big, luxurious apartment in the very centre of the city’, as if by living there she’d committed a crime in itself, or as if, having been proclaimed as ‘enemy of the people’, she didn’t ‘deserve’ such an apartment at all.
Now, the story of her apartment is the story of the majority of apartments in this country: they were communal property, state owned. But because the party ruled in the name of the people, it also meant they were, in a broader sense, owned by the people – nominally, at least. In short, these apartments were rented through state-owned companies and in reality no one could take them from a person who had a certain type of contract. One’s children too were entitled to the same rights. Marta, in fact, had inherited the apartment from her father. The proposal I heard from her acquaintance was thus by no means illogicaclass="underline" she was only talking about the typical bolshevik method of stripping her of the right to live there, similar to the method of nationalization or confiscation of property belonging to ‘enemies of the state’ after World War II and the communist revolution in Yugoslavia. This was the mood of the people about her ‘case’.
Confronted by such a violent onslaught Marta was frightened. She finally understood that the war was not happening simply to others, but to her as well and that this was the way she was experiencing it. Words too, she learned, could become a dangerous weapon. As she had already received a six-month grant to teach in France, she left soon after for Paris.
Time passed but ‘Marta’s case’ didn’t disappear under the welter of troubles that now hit Croatia. Periodically her name would pop up here and there in articles discussing, listing or enumerating traitors, dissidents, enemies, cowards and so on. Obviously, this purge of ‘internal enemies’ was an aspect of the war in the city and it was related to something which no one would admit to in words – revenge. Many apartments left by such people were broken into, especially those left behind by Federal Army officers, but not only by countless refugees, but by ordinary, self-righteous individuals who saw a way to solve the problems of their own inadequate living conditions and didn’t see anything wrong in usurping the apartment of an ‘enemy’.
A couple of months after she left, an article by a popular woman columnist appeared discussing the matter of Marta’s apartment. ‘I am very concerned,’ she wrote sarcastically, ‘that poor Marta – so disgusted by Croatia that she had to leave for Paris – might now be permitted to buy a communal apartment from that same disgusting republic. As an ambassador’s daughter, ambassador’s wife and ambassador’s sister, Marta was used to getting everything from Yugoslavia for free. Perhaps it would be good therefore to give her the apartment for free too, so she doesn’t report us to the Helsinki Tribunal.’ The columnist (who knew her personally) concluded that greedy Marta had acquired the apartment at the people’s expense.
Reading this, I realized that the information about Marta’s attempt to buy off the apartment from the state had come from Ana. Not only did Ana live in Marta’s apartment, so she was bound to know about it, but she also worked for the newspaper in which the article had appeared. However, it was very hard to believe that Ana had any reason to give away this type of information, that she would have any reason to do it at all. I then asked around and discovered that Marta had come back from Paris during the Easter holidays to arrange to buy the apartment when the new law permitting that possibility was passed. After living in her apartment for more than a year free and because Ana and her boyfriend were now making decent money as journalists, Marta had asked them if they’d be willing to pay a rent by monthly installments according to the new economic prices set by the government, which wouldn’t cost them more than renting another apartment.
On the telephone, Ana didn’t say a word. But the first thing next morning she went to the special commission of the Croatian Parliament (the official owner of the apartment) denouncing Marta for not even living in the apartment she was attempting to buy, suggesting that she should be denied the right to buy it because she was a war profiteer of a kind and that the apartment should in fact be taken from her. Perhaps Marta should be given a smaller apartment to buy, she added, not the big one she inherited from her father. As for herself, Ana didn’t claim the right to the apartment directly, but she did think she and her boyfriend deserved something. I don’t know if Ana mentioned the word ‘reward’ but this is what she meant.