At the beginning of September I returned to my regular place of work at the Institute for Literary Theory, which was part of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zagreb. At first, nothing seemed different, but threatening cracks soon appeared in collegial relations. My colleagues seemed like extras to me, as if they were playing returnees from the front in a third-rate theatre show.
“Leave them, it’ll all pass. .” said a female colleague who had been in America at the same time as me. “You know, they’ve suffered, we haven’t.”
I agreed, although the word “suffered” rung a little hollow, like the fall of a plastic coin on a plastic surface. I chalked that hollowness of tone up to my “aural deformation.”
Over the summer I wrote a short essay entitled “Clean Croatian Air.”[4] At the time souvenir tin cans could be bought at Zagreb souvenir stands, and this became the essay’s central metaphor. The cans bore the Croatian coat of arms and the slogan: Clean Croatian Air. I made a tally of what and who in Croatia had been cleaned up by the can’s fastidious spirit — Mr. Clean, or Meister Proper. With the title “Saubere Kroatische Luft,” the essay appeared in the October 23rd edition of the German newspaper Die Zeit, and a short while later as “The Dirty Tyranny of Mr. Clean” in the English Independent on Sunday. It never occurred to me that this short essay, which I thought had about as much explosive force as a New-Year firecracker, would actually explode like a bomb in Croatian public life, or that the tin can metaphor would tighten the noose around my neck.
7. Croatian Fictionary
In front of me sits a bulging file containing a mass of Croatian newspaper cuttings from the early 1990s. The newsprint has yellowed a little, the paper become thin. In one breath, it seems this indifferent heap of newsprint has absolutely nothing to do with me; in the next, the old paper cuts like a razor. For a moment (just a moment), fresh blood runs from the wound. Then I get the feeling that I’m reading the obituaries, seeing the faces of so many who are no longer among the living. I’m amazed that others are still alive; some people are like tinned goods with no expiration dates, I think. I wonder whether I exist myself, and who’s observing whom here: they me or me them. Then, like an uncoiled spring, a detail I’d never noticed before jumps out at me. With a confidence seemingly backed by hard science, some of the stories point the finger at my ethnic background, others hysterically demand that I finally declare it myself. Then my focus switches to dates, and the dates get to me. What at the time seemed like a spontaneous eruption of journalistic vilification of my person now merges into a more consistent story. I bang my head against the paradox as if against a walclass="underline" the more consistent the story becomes, the more difficult it is to tell.
My vigilant fellow citizens quickly “cracked” the essay published in Die Zeit. The first to denounce me was a journalist employed in the ruling party’s “deratization” task force (she later spent many years as the chief editor of Croatian national television), who declared me a denouncer of the homeland. A mere two days after my media promotion to “traitor to the homeland” came an attack from the pen of a well-known Croatian writer. My fellow writer not only produced a raft of accusations and general derision aimed in my direction, but also a type of open-ended indictment, suggesting that I was an internal enemy of the young Croatian state. With varying degrees of personal creativity, my future media executors would later duly complete it.
Soon after my fellow writer’s attack, the president of the Croatian PEN association sent an angry fax from Rio de Janeiro, where the World PEN Conference was being held. The president had gone to Rio on a crusade, the aim of which was to convince the International PEN committee to nominate Dubrovnik as the venue for the following year’s conference. I can only assume that someone there pointed out that it might not be the smartest of ideas to hold the congress in a war zone, but for the audience back home the affronted president decided to translate this detail a little more dramatically. An American writer had apparently raised the question of freedom of the press in Croatia and, again apparently, had also expressed concern about the fate of five (female) “journalists.” The very same day, an article entitled “Lobbyists Lose their Voices”[5] appeared (whose author is today the editor of a prominent cultural program on Croatian television), in which five women were accused of conspiracy against Croatia, of attempting to “mine” the future Dubrovnik World PEN Congress, and of deliberately concealing Serbian war crimes, specifically, the rape of Muslim and Croatian women. The World PEN Congress was held in Dubrovnik the following year, and the name of the concerned American writer was never revealed. Why? Because the concerned American writer never existed. He or she was a product of the zealous imagination of the president of the Croatian PEN association and his assistants.
The avalanche was triggered. The “case” was crowned by an article in the influential Globus weekly, the article being attributed to “the Globus investigative team.” Five women — Slavenka Drakulić, Rada Iveković, Vesna Kesić, Jelena Lovrić, and I — were declared “the Witches of Rio.” In addition to the story, a table was published containing our dates and places of birth, our educational backgrounds, our ethnicities, our professions, our marital,[6] familial, and employment statuses, details of the real estate we owned, periods we’d spent abroad during the war, “anti-Croatian” quotes taken from our publications, and evidence (or lack thereof) of our membership in the Yugoslav Communist Party.
Although the Globus media fabrication was an incomparably stupid and amateurish piece of work (real experts would have nailed it!), it nonetheless achieved its goal.
When the media lynching had reached its most vicious height, a neighbor stopped me and asked:
“Well then, neighbor, when are you getting out?”
The “out,” I assumed, referred to when I was getting out of Croatia.
“Why should I be getting out?” I asked.
“Well, you keep writing those lies about us.”
“And you’ve read what I write?”
“Why would I? Are you saying that everyone else is lying!?”
And there was nothing you could do about it. Every call to reason led to a more violent madness. In response to the media barrage, I published an essay entitled “Goodnight Croatian Writers,”[7] in Croatian, and in Croatian newspapers. Nobody commented, but two weeks later, like in a game of “broken telephone,” the Globus investigative team sent the collective response. The confederacy of dunces poked out its tongue and thumbed its monkey ears at me.
My sensitive literary nature can’t resist exhibiting a selection of the insults (which refer both to me and the witch’s cell) proffered by Croatian journalists, writers, and critics, the literati among the literate. I recognize that any psychoanalyst could here accuse me of taking exhibitionist pleasure in the repeated — and this time voluntary — exposition of public insults. But you know what? “Victims” also have a right to narrative pleasure — particularly so if narration is their profession. All in all, in my fellow writers’ scribblings I am described as: