10. The Fairytale of the Small-town Croatian Patriot
The objection of my colleague, the well-known Croatian writer, that I could have shown more understanding for a people celebrating their own state and freedom of speech really doesn’t stack up. At that moment I understood the so-called “people” better than I understood myself. I know the biographies of dozens of “small-town” Croatian patriots; I’m intimately familiar with the psychogram that creates yes-men. I’ve learned when, why, and who will make a grab for the flag, who’ll be first to scramble off in defense of their country, defending it as if their personal dignity were at stake. Because for many people, the homeland is a synonym for personal dignity; particularly for those who have nothing else.
I knew Ivica (let’s give him a common Croatian name) from high school. He was two or three years older than me, and had he not suddenly re-entered my life, I would have completely forgotten him. Who knows, maybe back in high school I accidentally stepped on his toes. Ivica fell into that category of losers who everyone gave a clip around the ears.
Ivica later studied History at the University of Zagreb, eventually finding work as a secondary school teacher. When I happened to run into him many years later, my heart ached. His status obviously hadn’t changed much. Scruffy, with a wispy beard (completely unfashionable at the time), wearing a suit that was several sizes too big, hair thinning despite only being in his thirties, a black public servant’s briefcase in hand, Ivica perfectly fit the stereotype of the teacher whose pupils stick funny notes on his back. At the time he was living in a rented apartment and whined about his measly pay and rowdy pupils.
But then, at an international history seminar, he met the woman of his dreams, the beautiful daughter of a pair of doctors from an Eastern European capital. Blonde, translucent, pale, with dark rings under her big green eyes, she looked like she’d grown up on cocaine, not kefir. Ivica, like a hero from a Russian fairytale, crossed seven state borders and seven bureaucratic valleys, before finally bringing his blonde-haired beauty back to Zagreb. Fortune had smiled on him, his school came to the party and gave him an apartment, a child was on the way, and even the rowdy kids at school learned a few manners. But when the child was born, his wife filed for divorce. Ivica, it seems, was for her but a first step on the stairway of her life’s aspirations. So Ivica exited his recently-acquired familial bliss and returned to the lonely life of a tenant.
And then, like a surprising burst of sunshine after the rain, like hitting the lottery jackpot, She, the Homeland, appeared. And Ivica promptly signed up, stood in the first rows, bowed to the great leader of the Croatian people, and hustled his way into parliament. Along the way he publicly lobbed several gobs of spit at me. Here, with all my heart, I offer him my forgiveness. What’s more, for his personal happiness, I am also ready to turn the other cheek.
The Homeland gave him a new, spacious apartment, and — people say — a personal chauffeur, although it’s possible the chauffeur is simply a product of my empathetic imagination. He had everything now. He just didn’t have a wife, and for a Croatian politican and a Catholic, this was a not insignificant obstacle to a more serious career. So Ivica (I mean, what else could he do?) proposed to his “cocaine blonde” for a second time, and there you go, the smart woman accepted. From then on we saw her on television every time an Eastern European delegation was in town, serving as President Tuđman’s personal translator.
And then Ivica’s numbers again came up in the Homeland lottery, and he was awarded an ambassadorial posting in — oh, what a surprise — his wife’s Eastern European capital. I imagine his first ambassadorial reception: Ivica, the child of a Croatian peasant, being welcomed by his father and mother-in-law, the doctors. I imagine how all those bumps and bruises vanished in the air. I imagine the in-laws, the doctors, diplomatically bowing and curtsying to their son-in-law. Instead of snotty wee Ivica, a weedy Croatian peasant from the backwoods, they were being received by the Croatian ambassador. The pauper, to whom they had so clumsily abandoned the one-and-only apple of their eye, had become a prince!
I don’t know how things ended up, but it seems that Ivica is no longer an ambassador. Maybe he is still warming a chair somewhere, but in any case the TV cameras have moved on. The Croatian state apparatus is slowly ridding itself of its storm troopers. Storm troopers, they say, destroy the image of Croatia as it seeks to enter the European Union. Ivica is an almost textbook case of an ur-fascist psychogram. And people with these kinds of “valuable” psychograms are never put out to pasture; they’re just put on ice.
11. Mom
I resigned from the Faculty of Arts in June 1993 and spent the autumn in southern Germany. The following year I was to take up a scholarship in Berlin, but what I’d do and where I’d go after that, I had no idea. .
Although I had left Croatia, Croatia had difficulty leaving me. It kept boomeranging back, hysterically reminding me of the fact that I belonged to her, meaning that I would always belong to her, and that it was up to her to decide whether she would ravish me or lavish me. All over Europe the tribe shuffled along behind me, sitting in on my literary readings, bickering and squabbling, hurling caustic remarks, crudely interrupting my appearances with the same accusatory repertoire. The tribe would appear in the guise of a grey-haired old man in Vienna, scribbling in a notebook like an old-school police informant; as a highly-strung woman in Copenhagen, who waved an invisible thermometer tkaing the temperature of my patriotic commitment; as a young teacher of Croatian in Bonn, who (having first proudly declared that she hadn’t read a single one of my books) accused me of using too many Serbian words in my writings; as the haughty representative of the Croatian Catholic community in Berlin, who at (my!) literary readings accused me of destroying the Croatian tourism industry. Of course, none of these people ever gave their first or last name. The tribe introduced itself with the pronoun “we.”
Sometimes Croatia would perfidiously follow me around in the form of nasty gossip, as a wave of letters to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from Swiss Croats, who, encouraged by the slippery Croatian cultural attaché in Zurich, vented their rage every time I published an article. Sometimes Croatia would show its institutional face, such as when the Croatian embassy in Sofia approached my Bulgarian publisher with an offer to buy the entire print run of The Culture of Lies. At the time the Croatian ambassador to Sofia was a fellow writer, a poet; he knew best what my book was about. Sometimes Croatia would appear at a book fair, where they, Croatian writers, would stand on one side and me on the other. My colleagues would perform their complicated pantomime, walking past as if they didn’t see me, while at the same time letting me know that they didn’t see me.