The dynamics of the Balkans and the war in Yugoslavia scared and pained me. Yugoslav politicians, especially President Slobodan Milosevic, were spreading ethnic animosities through the media that year, a time of economic decline and political shifts. The phenomenon of extreme cruelty, the rapes and violence against women during the Yugoslav war, the “ethnic cleansing” and pitting of Muslims against Christians, the resemblance to Nazism in this small European country—all that was dominating world news.
Yet I was pulled to Russia to travel and work, not to Yugoslavia. My mother, a devout Catholic, once said I must have been Russian in another life. Maybe Yugoslavia was just too close to home. My parents had fought about everything from politics and culture to their languages and religions and historical hurts during World War II. Those arguments echoed in my heart.
I was the only child out of us four siblings who took an interest in my parents’ culture. I not only continued to speak Serbo-Croatian but went on to study Russian and Russian literature in college. No one knew or cared about Yugoslavia in my youth, except those specializing in it at the university. It was the civil war in the 1990s that rallied the world’s attention. In a small Russian bygone village, far from war, close to the earth and my feelings, I met a woman who reminded me of my father’s family in Serbia.
Auntie Nyura, as Vera called her, burst into our small one-room bungalow, her two metal front teeth shining in a bright red face. “I had to come by tonight! I missed you two today!” she exclaimed.
She rushed over to me as I sat on the bed reading, took my face in her strong hands, and kissed me soundly on the cheek. Vera beamed in the background, then left us alone. Nyura smelled like earth, milk, her cow—she hadn’t washed for days. I was smiling by the time she sat down beside me on the bed, like we were old friends and had a lot to talk about. She was in her mid-sixties yet spry and energetic. After a brief exchange, she jumped up impulsively and sat in the chair across from me with her hands firmly on her lap, watching me from a distance.
I asked her if she had heard what happened today. She stared at me, her eyes peering and her mouth pursed, a light blue kerchief tied crookedly around her head. I never saw her without a kerchief. I felt my eyebrows go up with the excitement of what I was trying to convey. I knew the value these village people placed on good potatoes, mushrooms, and rich dark bread. I had big news!
“What?” She moved forward.
“Vera found so many mushrooms this morning.”
“How many?” Nyura looked like a kid, as she squared her shoulders in a challenge.
“About fifty, maybe more,” I bragged.
“I beat her. I got even more.” she thrust her chin forward.
“So you went out today too?” I asked amicably.
“Yes, I did. You know I can’t see very well but I can smell them. And I found a lot. I also mowed and weeded in the field. And I’m tired!” She turned her earth-lined hands over on her lap and glanced out the window. “But I have to go now, my cow is wandering down the road. I’ll see you tomorrow.” She was off.
A highlight of my friendship with Nyura was seeing her needlepoint artistry, which I did one day when she invited us to the house she shared with her husband, a gray, disheveled, bearded man, hunched and silent, almost a nonentity in her regard, it seemed. It was a small thatched hut with animals in the yard. She led us into her sitting room/dining area and offered tea and sweet bread and dried fish. Proudly she showed me all the dried fish she had hanging in her shed, and Vera explained that she used the fish to barter for other food and supplies for the winter months. That was what the villagers did. It was their way of life.
Nyura told me that as a child she wanted to be an artist but it was impossible to do that, in the small kolkhoz (collective farm) village of Lipovka. The kolkhoz had been the basis of Soviet agriculture. I wondered if things had changed since perestroika and the demise of the Soviet Union.
“When I was small they took me to a school across the bridge. I drew something. The teacher said, ‘What a beautiful horse.’ I could see a horse, and there on the paper was a very realistic looking horse.”
“Then what happened?”
“It was only for a few years that I went to the school, and not very much. Mostly I stayed in Lipovka.” She shrugged. Farming here was her destiny, and she worked at it very hard.
We sat there in her main room, surrounded by her embroidery work. It was dazzling. Smiling broadly, cheeks rising and teeth protruding, she watched me as I perused the room in awe. Her pieces hung on every available space—it looked the Hermitage when I first saw it in the early 1990s, paintings draping the walls every which way. With so many great works, it was hard to focus on one in particular. Colorful flowers in fine stitching bloomed among houses, fields, and animals in broader stitching. The overall effect was of elaborate lightness and adornment. The pieces were a patchwork, many hanging off-kilter, but I felt their hominess and brightness. When I oohed and ahhed, she nodded: “I did all that.”
After all my admiration of her artwork, Nyura was more interested in having me try her dried fish which had a stronger smell than anchovies. She dismissed talk of her art, survival was her focus.
I was nineteen, in 1971 and freshly married to Tom, an NYU physics professor, when he and I traveled for the first time to the land of my father. I wanted to meet the Franeta side of my family. People often say that the name Franeta sounds Italian. Some mystery surrounds the origin of the name. Relatives say it was changed or obscured for political or ethnic reasons. Was there Albanian or Turkish or some other heritage in our background? All we knew was my father’s family, originally from Budva, a beautiful Adriatic city close to the border of Albania, moved at some point to Aleksinac (pronounced Aleksinats), a village in Serbia south of the capital city, Belgrade. My grandfather wanted to farm, and the rocky dryness of Budva was not a place for that. My grandparents had ten children, only five of whom survived to adulthood.
One of them was my Aunt Angie. I was very drawn to her even before I meeting her on that 1971 trip to Aleksinac, where she and my father and two other surviving siblings grew up. My father once told a story about teenage Angie climbing up a tree to escape her wedding night. He laughed, but the story made me curious about my rebellious aunt. I often studied the photo my father had of his family: eight people and a baby lined up in two rows, the younger ones standing at attention, with my grandparents and the married brother Vukale (pronounced Vukaleh) and his wife and child seated, unsmiling. Aunt Angie has short hair, framing a beautiful face, her hand draped over her brother Vukale seated in front of her. She is slender in a light dress, her eyes piercing under dark eyebrows.
When Tom and I arrived in Aleksinac, it was hot. We drove down a dusty dirt road and asked some people where the Franetas lived. They pointed up another road and asked if we were Americans. I said yes, wondering how they had heard about us so quickly. We drove on with giggling children running after us, shouting and pointing: “There! There!” Some people were walking down the road toward us. We parked and got out of the car.
I stood in the middle of the road when a tall, commanding woman in a white kerchief, her face reddish and teeth protruding slightly, approached with the group. She seemed different from the photograph. Her loose dress swayed as her bare feet strode firmly on the pebbly dirt.