The consequences of behaving in accordance with the given code are as one might expect. Yugozone residents frequently elect doctors to represent them, and on a regular basis these doctors drag them into armed conflicts and other sundry financial and moral dead ends. And so the circle remains unbroken. It explains why in everyday life, for example, our “Yugozonian” will always stop the first passerby to ask for the street he’s after. It wouldn’t cross an American, German, or Englishman’s mind — he’s got his map, his guide, his iPhone. And I’m sure about all this, right? Absolutely! I myself am an exemplar of “transition,” I’ve got my maps, guides, and iPhone, but I still prefer stopping the first passersby in the street. What’s more, I get a vague sense of satisfaction in doing so, like I’ve outfoxed all the crap “other dumbasses” use.
Don’t Yugozone residents, the men in particular, behave like children? For chrissakes, no way, that’d be an inadmissible colonial prejudice in our postcolonial time, a politically incorrect claim in these politically correct times. But the thing is, any observer, any Freudian amateur, might well hit upon the thought that Yugozone residents, particularly the men, are stuck in the cozy anal phase. What’s more, it might occur to such an observer that Yugozone men don’t want to grow up, which perhaps explains why they give their all to reduce those who have to their own height.
It was wise of Angelina Jolie to not linger longer in the Yugozone. Why? Because if she had hung around, the Yugozonians would’ve gnashed their teeth and bared their fangs. Naturally, they’ve got the softening-the-foreigner-up act down to a fine art. First of all you drown him in local wine (which is of course the best in the world), and then you stuff him with local food (also incidentally the best in the world). In the process you invent tribal customs (guests aren’t allowed to refuse food or drink lest the host take offence), whistle local songs, pluck your tamburica, and wander around showing the alienated foreigner your region’s natural beauty and miraculously weed-free local ruins. Finally you adopt and domesticate him: You turn Jeroen into Janko, John into Ivica, Angelina into Angie.
The Yugozonians will indulge in hearty backslaps with our foreigner, con him into partaking of imaginary local customs (we kiss five times here!), all until his muscles relent and soften, until he’s pliable. And when they’ve finally reduced the foreigner to their own height, when they’ve got the foreigner well-marinated in their toxic slime (and Angelina’s become Angie), it’s only then that the symbolic mastication begins. Yugozonians hate everything foreign, they down only what’s theirs, and if they do manage to get something new past their tonsils, then oh boy do they give it a mauling first. Albert Einstein, for example, to them he’s just “our Bert,” the guy who had a Serbian mother-in-law. That’s the only way they can take him.
Yugozone residents, the men mainly, hate pretty much everything and everyone, yet stubbornly and irrationally insist that others love them. To the common sense question of why anyone might thus love them, and whatever happened to reciprocity in matters of the heart, oh don’t worry, they’re not lost for words, they’ve got a ready answer. They remember well those moments of unconditional love. They remember their mothers burbling—“Who did a big poo for Mummy? Who did a big poo for Mummy?” They remember their joyous kicking little feet and gurgling confession—“Gu-gu-gu-I-did-a-poo.” The magnificence of this moment is forever fixed in their memory. And consequently, they delight in dumping everywhere for as long as they might live.
1The Yugozone is my coinage for the region encompassing the disintegrated and disappeared former Yugoslavia. Someone recently came up with the term “Yugosphere,” and although the meaning is the same, I still prefer Yugozone.
THE DREAM OF DORIAN GRAY
SHE SHOWS ME a photograph. In the photo are children from her class, the image taken at the end of the school year. She points to a sweet little face.
“Dora’s the prettiest in the class,” she says.
Dora’s a little girl with long blond hair. My eight-year-old niece has short brown hair. She’s staring at the photo, but she’s all ears. I wonder what I should tell her. I know that responding with questions like “but is Dora smart?” or “is she a nice person?” won’t help any in getting my message across. It won’t help if I say, “no, I think you’re the prettiest.” There’s some kind of consensus in her class that Dora is the prettiest and there’s no disabusing her of this. The virus of insecurity has already wormed its way inside her.
“You’re right, Dora’s got pretty ears,” I reply, though you can’t see her ears in the photo.
Lookism is a widespread and devastatingly powerful prejudice based on a person’s physical appearance. There have been attempts, unsuccessful of course, to have it placed in the same category as racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and ageism. It’s a word with plenty of synonyms — aestheticism, physicalism, appearance discrimination — all signifying the same discriminatory practice: Fat people, short men, tall women, the elderly, the “ugly,” are to be rounded up and herded into one of life’s dark corners.
When I was my niece’s age other little girls seemed more beautiful to me, too. Lidija had auburn hair and bushy eyebrows. Zlatica a light, translucent complexion, with tiny bluish veins below the surface. Jasminka full lips and oval baby teeth, shiny like silky candies. It was back then, in elementary school, that we all got it into our heads that the prettiest girl in the class was also the best little girl. With time the grind of everyday life bumped the painful subject of physical appearance from our list of priorities. The dream about the frog that turns into a princess, and those thousands of before-and-after photos that we absorbed like thirsty sponges, they worked in parallel, shunting our unconsciousness toward a hazy future in which we’d leave the miserable before far behind, and the desired after would last forever.
In the meanwhile, small women’s sizes have become smaller, skinny women skinnier, cosmetic surgery more popular, and clothes for the fuller figure both harder to find and more expensive. If the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen, luxury Italian fashion designer Marina Rinaldi would’ve had to shut up shop. Today her clothes are all the rage with Europe’s “Easterners,” women whose husbands have made a quick mint in the intervening years. Rinaldi has boutiques all over Eastern Europe, even in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital, where Russian women shop on their summer vacations, alongside the odd solvent, and more corpulent, Montenegrin woman. Weight is a class marker. Only poor people are fat. Fat is ugly because poverty is ugly. While the poor pack on the pounds, the wealthy remain elegantly hungry. Research suggests that every second American man would have no qualms about divorcing a fat wife. There’s no mercy anywhere for the fat. Bloomingdale’s in New York recently amalgamated their clothing section for plus-sized women with the one for baby clothing: Fat women are either pregnant, or losers who don’t manage to wiggle into size Victoria Beckham the day they waddle out of the maternity ward. Saks Fifth Avenue is closing its plus size section Salon Z, formerly a temple of solace for the well-to-do fuller-figured woman. The message is clear: Being fat — right there next to being a smoker — is an intolerable social evil. Sometimes you see the fatal fusion on New York streets. The smoker will be the fat girl.
Let’s be straight with one another now, ever since beauty stopped lying in the eye of the beholder and the marketplace began enforcing its own normative standards, the world has become a boring place. There are fewer and fewer unique faces around, all the interesting “honkers,” “beaks,” and other factory defects have pretty much disappeared. Gone are the men who stink of cigarettes, garlic, and sweat; hairy chests, beer bellies, and black vodka bags under the eyes have gone the same way. It’s enough to cast a cursory glance over the gallery of new Russians making waves at home and abroad. Former KGB man, Alexander Lebedev, an oligarch who in 2010 bought the English Independent newspaper, is a well-read gentleman with stylish thin frame glasses on his nose. He looks more like an intellectual than an ex-spy. Punching a fellow guest on a Russian talk show and declaring that anyone who doesn’t have a million dollars deserves to burn in hell hasn’t harmed Lebedev’s domestic or international reputation in the least. Alexander Mamut, a former Yeltsin adviser who not so long ago bought the bookstore chain Waterstones, well he looks like a learned post-perestroika man of letters. Vladimir Doronin (Naomi Campbell’s boyfriend), Roman Abramovich, even Mikhail Gorbachev, once the brains behind perestroika and today mascot for Louis Vuitton travel bags — these guys have all repositioned themselves. Not one of them looks how we might expect. Dorian Gray can rest easy; his dream has been realized. Even Mikhail Khodorkovsky, another Russian oligarch (albeit one who’s languishing in jail for apparently no reason), has a pretty face adorned by thin frame glasses. He’s become such an inspiration and icon of compassionate capitalism that celebrated Russian writer Lyudmila Ulitskaya has published a book of correspondences with this most capitalist of all martyrs, a fledgling saint. An Estonian composer has even composed a symphony dedicated to this most innocent of oligarchs. A Croatian taxi driver, a former Gastarbeiter, returned to his homeland, fiddled his way to an overnight million, managed to usurp public space for a private parking lot, killed three people (one with a car, two with a yacht), and yet still walks the streets a free man. He’s svelte, has a permatan, and wears those smart glasses on his nose, too.