I still think about the sound that you uttered that afternoon. I couldn’t recognize it as my child’s voice. Because it wasn’t a voice, not even a scream of utter fear. It was the sound of someone falling apart, of disintegration. I didn’t recognize you because I was losing you. I sat at the end of a telephone line, my whole body weak, lifeless, collapsed. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced such helplessness. Suddenly, an old image came back to me – of the two of us travelling on a train. You were two years old and had fallen asleep in my arms. I looked at your face, your eyelids almost transparent, half-open mouth and forehead with tiny little drops of sweat. You looked so small and vulnerable as if anything in this world could hurt you. I felt such an urge to protect you, like a sharp pain deep in the chest. The very same pain I felt sitting there and waiting to hear your voice again – only now I wasn’t there to protect you. If only I was there, I thought, forgetting for a moment that you were grown up, you had to protect yourself and I could only help. When Andrej came to the phone, he said it was probably a drunken soldier, nothing more. I should not worry, he said. But worry was not the right word. I was calm. At that moment I knew that if you didn’t get out of there I’d lose you. Not from a bullet or shelling, but your mind would crack and you would enter a void where no one could reach you any longer. I know you well, I know how much you can take and I can recognize the signs when you reach the edge. The day after, your voice still broken, different, you told me that almost all of your hair had turned grey. Ever since that day, I thank God that you are not a man, that I am the mother of a woman. To have a son in wartime is the worst curse that can befall a mother, no matter what anyone says.
You could not imagine how lonely I get sitting in your room, a kind of clutching feeling in my breast, a choking knot in my throat. Don’t worry, I don’t cry, I know you wouldn’t like it. I just think of what this war is doing to us, breaking our lives in two, into before and after. I know that you are all right, as much as you could be living in a foreign country. The most important thing is that you are safe, that you are holding up. Living in a country at war, I try to convince myself that what happened to the two of us is nothing, we are just separated, that’s all, we’d have had to face that anyway. It couldn’t be compared to what other people have had to go through, loss of lives, of homes, of everything. But in suffering there are no comparisons, I cannot suffer less because someone else is suffering more, any more than I can take someone else’s burden of pain. I have my own, as little as it may seem from outside. Our emotions are not based on the objective truth anyway so why should I bother with justifying my feelings? Nonetheless, I do feel guilty in another way.
There are two photos of you that I like best and, as you can imagine, I put them on the wall (yes, I know, you hate it but you have to understand that I need this): one as a girl of three dressed in jeans, with curly hair and traces of chocolate around her mouth. The other one is of a sophisticated young lady holding a cigarette (much as I disapprove of it!) taken when you were seventeen. Is it that cigarette, or rather, the way you hold it, the way you inhale and puff away the smoke, that broad gesture that reminds me of your father. I wonder what he thinks about what is going on here, sitting in Toronto. Have you heard from him recently? We married when I was eighteen and he was nineteen. I was aware that he was from a Serbian family while I was from a Croatian one, but it didn’t mean anything to me, one way or the other. World War II was long over when the two of us were born and throughout my life it seemed to me that everyone was trying to escape its shadow, to forget and just live their lives. Your father and I never even discussed the different nationality of our families. Not because it was forbidden, but because it was unimportant to the majority of our generation. It wasn’t an issue. Maybe it was a consequence of the repression of the communist regime, of the brainwashing of our education system, the plan to create an artificial ‘Yugoslav’ nation – the fact is that in the 1980 census 1.5 million declared themselves Yugoslav, people of a non-existent nation, and interestingly enough, they were all born after the War and approximately thirty years old. Or maybe it was just the natural course of things, I don’t know. I just know that we were not interested in the past, in who killed whom and why, but in our own lives. The tragedy and the paradox of this situation now is that you will have to decide, to take his or my side, to become Croat or Serb, to take on and suffer his and my ‘guilt’ of marrying the ‘wrong’ nationality. In the war there is no middle position. All of a sudden, you as Croat or Serb become responsible for what all other Croats or Serbs are doing. You are reduced to a single nationality – almost sentenced to it, since nationality in the war brings a danger of getting killed just because of it. I am not talking about who is wrong or who is right in this war, the facts are known by now. I am telling you about the situation when you are forced to choose, to identify with something that has been unknown to you, a total abstraction. But you know it all. ‘I am from Zagreb,’ you said and perhaps it is the only right answer, to be a Citizen. But not now. Not here.
This war happened nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita so if anything, I should be old enough to try to understand where it comes from and how it started. In fact I could see it coming closer and closer with each passing year, then month, then day. One could detect the gradual return to the past long before 1989 with Milosevic’s invocation of Serbian nationalist feelings and hatred, first towards Albanians from Kosovo, then towards non-Serbians throughout the whole country – remember how far from us it all looked, how ready we were to deny the coming danger? There were other signs – the tallying up of war victims, justification of war criminals, the resuscitating of old national myths, the revival of religion on both the Catholic and Orthodox sides. But one could still attempt to see it as a reinterpretation of history, a necessary purge of post-war myths about the communist revolution if only it hadn’t been aimed at an entirely different purpose: at national homogenization and the growing antagonism between the nations. Long before the real war, we had a media war, Serbian and Croatian journalists attacking the political leaders from the opposite republic as well as each other as if in some kind of dress rehearsal. So I could see a spiral of hatred descending upon us, but until the first bloodshed it seemed to operate on the level of a power struggle that had nothing to do with the common people. When the first houses were burned down on Croatian territory, when neighbours of a different nationality in the mixed villages started to kill each other, then it became our war too, of your generation and mine. Not out of ideology, but for the simple reason that it changed our whole life. Yours more than mine, because men from my generation are almost too old – with their grey hair and pot bellies, they’d look pretty silly in those camouflage uniforms. How many of your friends will survive? But what did you and your generation born in 1968 know of that past, of the hatred that is haunting us now?
After all, it was your grandfathers who fought in World War II. They had fought as Tito’s Partisans, Ustashas or Chetniks. Afterwards, hoping for a brighter future they rebuilt the devastated country according to bolshevik principles, ruled by the Communist Party as the vanguard of the people. All of them lived long enough to see the party become corrupt and repressive, but only some of them lived to see the communist regime begin to fall apart in 1989. Yet, none of them believed that history could repeat itself. It was my generation that grew up in times of scarcity when milk and butter, meat and clothes were rationed (you know what my spine looks like because I still suffer from the consequences of rickets). Sometimes we tasted powdered milk from UNRRA packages – it was so sweet that we licked it from our palms like some special kind of sweet. Or we’d eat yellow Cheddar cheese from the cans, or margarine, or ‘Truman’s eggs’ as we called powdered eggs. People moved to the cities to help build up heavy industry; we all went to schools, education was a big thing then. Married, we tried different combinations to escape living in crowded communal apartments shared by two or three families. We enrolled in the Communist Party as our fathers did, but only because it was so much easier to get jobs and promotion if you did.