The headline of the interview with the professor also reads like it came out the end of a “broken telephone.” It says: “Dubravka Ugrešić Wasn’t Chased Away.” But what’s my name doing there? And what’s with the verb phrase “chased away”? (My first association: to chase away pigeons. .) While the old man is thumbing his ears at me (shoo, shoo, shoo!), the headline is telling me the exact opposite, that I wasn’t chased away. What kind of nightmare is this?!
I feel as if someone has forcibly catapulted me from my current safe distance in space and time in Amsterdam, January 2010, back into another space and time, to the years 1991, 1992, 1993. .
4. Why I Leave the House without an Umbrella
I don’t know whether everyone has his or her own personal “inadequacy,” but I certainly have mine. I carry it like a birthmark. I’m not even sure that inadequacy is the right word; it’s more a question of perspective, a way of seeing. Perhaps that colleague, a fellow writer, who long ago brought my “optical deformation” to the attention of the Croatian public, was right. We’re inclined to interpret this type of internal failing as the assembly of a conspiracy of details against us; details which over the course of our lives coalesce like little magnetic puzzle pieces, forming our secret parallel biography, an illegible psychogram, an internal map which — in our minds at least — doesn’t bear any resemblance to our actual paths in life. This hidden, parallel biography consists of several ambiguous, yet inevitably similar, frustrations or fascinations — a hard-to-trace unease brought on by the same situation and same people; a glow induced by the same gesture or smile; the same small mistakes, obstinacies, and fears. . As a I child I was always afraid of stairs. Going up wasn’t a problem, but I never knew how to go down. Of course I’ve learned since then, but whenever I look down that childhood fear is always there, lurking somewhere inside me. Little niggling details, nothing too much. Why do I always take the same circuitous route to a particular point in the city? Why is it that this route and not some other remains so stubbornly stuck in my head? Why is it that when I recall certain people I consistently forget their names yet remember details: the way they bow their head, how they worriedly raise their left eyebrow, which gesture follows which particular expression? Why do I persist in going out without an umbrella when it’s perfectly obvious that it’s going to rain?
5. The ABCs of War
At the beginning of September 1991, my neighbors and I would head down to the cellar of our five-story Zagreb building as the air-raid sirens resounded above. Unlike my neighbors, I didn’t take the alarms too seriously. Today I wonder where this “lapse” came from, this arrogance that doesn’t take danger “too seriously”?[2]
At the time I firmly believed that the majority of people wouldn’t follow their caricature-like leaders, wouldn’t destroy everything they’d spent years building together, and wouldn’t cast their childrens’ futures to the wind. Maybe this belief was to blame for my “lapse.” I refused to believe what my impaired vision had witnessed over the preceding few years. And so it was that in September 1991 I refused to believe the evidence that was right in front of me. Maybe it was actually down there in the cellar, with a small human sample for company, that I should have allowed the dirty little thought to sink in: that many people were actually turned on by the war. New, sudden thrills filled the vacuity of their lives; overnight, personal frustrations found an outlet, personal losses could be made good, personal intolerances hung out to air. There, in the cellar, an older neighbor with rat-like features scurried into my “deformed” field of vision. People said he had illegally moved into the five-bedroom apartment of an old woman who died soon afterwards. The square meters of the apartment thus became his. That very first day in the cellar, he appeared wearing a red armband, a pistol buried in his back pocket. Nobody asked him about the armband or what it meant, or where he got the pistol; we listened intently to his garbled instructions. The very next day the neighbor had a deputy, complete with matching red armband and pocket pistol. The young deputy was unemployed and married to a diligent and hard-working neighbor. At some point her biological clock had started ticking, so she found the young man and bore him three children, after which he’d served and exhausted his purpose. The armband and the revolver gave the jerk his dignity back. Until then, he didn’t even know what dignity was.
Switching the volume off, I looked at my neighbors. Then in some small recess of my brain, thanks to my deformed vision, the near future flashed before me: I felt I knew who would be first to sink his teeth into the enemy’s throat, who would spend the war in front of the TV, who would rush to denounce his or her neighbor, who would tend the wounds of the inevitable injured, who would lose themselves to depression, who would rouse the rabble, and who would find their way to the money that was to be made. Maybe it was there, in the cellar, that one should have learned the ABCs of war. I, however, threw my fleeting apparitions to the wind like cancelled banknotes.
6. American Fictionary
At the end of September 1991, I hopped on a train for Amsterdam. There I obtained an American visa and headed off to the States to take up a guest lectureship. Getting the visa in Amsterdam proved fortuitous. In Zagreb the embassies, banks, and airport were closed. In New York the realization that my disintegrating country was at war hit home for the first time. For this new misstep, my “deformed vision” was again to blame: what was at that moment so far away suddenly came unbearably close, and I had trouble making out what was right in front of my nose. I was struck down by “cognitive fever,” and I exorcised my fears (completely inappropriately) by watching hours of horror films on TV in the small New York apartment where an acquaintance had let me stay. Whenever I actually did venture out of my New York “shelter,” I assuaged my fears by meeting up with my fellow countrymen. Most of us were middle-aged, some had come to stay forever, and others, like me, were just passing through. It was a powerful after-life experience: there we were on the other side of the world, as if in some nightmarish Mad Hatter’s tea party. Actually, not one of us knew for sure what we were going to do with ourselves.
American Fictionary,[3] the book that emerged in those few months, was born of my “impaired vision,” a series of columns about the American everyday written for a Dutch newspaper.
I didn’t ask myself too many questions about what a Dutch reader might make of it all. The authorial situation in which I found myself was at any rate doomed to be a fiasco from the outset. The essays were written in a nervous internal double-voice — one contradicted the other, one supplemented the other, and one bled into the other. In any case, it seems that at least for a moment my faulty vision helped me put things in their right place.
I returned to Zagreb in June 1992. My feeling of internal “inadequacy” became acute. I again saw everything in duplicate, triplicate, as a copy and in the original. Nothing fit anymore. Titles didn’t correspond to images, and the sound was out of synch too. It was no different in the surrounding reality. Familiar streets now had unfamiliar names, familiar faces no longer spoke the same language. People who had been friends until recently contorted their mouths into the strange smile of an unknown other.