Returning to the apartment I remembered that I needed to have my shoes repaired, but I didn’t know where to find a shoemender, I hadn’t passed one. I will have to ask, I thought, seeing that by then I had a new kind of need already and I was not prepared for that. This was not the need of an ordinary visitor, but of a person trying to adapt to a city as one gets used to someone else’s coat or shoes as protection from the cold even if they are not comfortable enough. Or as if I had to learn to walk again, only this time forgetting churches and monuments and seeking out instead shoemenders, pharmacies, libraries, discount stores. Perhaps then I realized that I would have to start establishing my life there, or go back home. Soon.
It was on Sunday morning when I finally understood what it would mean to become an exile. I was not yet fully awake when the smell of coffee entered the apartment and gently stirred my nostrils. It was the smell of freshly brewed coffee made in an espresso machine, strong and short, the Italian way. This was just as I used to make it on lazy Sunday mornings, drinking it wrapped in an old pullover over pyjamas while tufts of a milky smog still hung on the hortensias in the garden. Then I heard voices, the voice of a small child asking something and a woman’s voice, answering quietly and patiently. Someone turned on a radio, there were more voices, the window above me opened and I saw hands hanging out wet socks, towels and sheets on a clothes line. A penetrating smell of roasted meat and chocolate cake, a sound of cartoons and children laughing. I looked around ‘my’ apartment: except there was not one thing there that was mine. Only a suitcase not yet emptied and my winter coat hanging in the closet with my friend’s summer clothes (she took winter clothes with her too), which I had put there hesitatingly, hoping I wouldn’t be there in time to wear it because I’d leave before winter, definitely I would. This was not my home, there were no pictures and posters on the walls which I had put there, no books I had bought. There were no dusty book shelves that I was promising myself I’d clean as soon as I had time, nor my daughter occupying the bathroom so I’d have to quarrel with her to let me in. There was no nervous phone ringing together with the sound of a washing machine and a student radio station weaving a fabric of sounds into which I can sink comfortably, because I know it, it is the sound of my own life.
That first Sunday in Ljubljana was empty and white like a sheet of paper waiting for me to write something on it: new words, a new beginning. But I couldn’t. My hands were shaking and I didn’t know what to write. Living in uncertainty, in constant expectancy of what would come next, I knew I had been deprived of the future, but I could bear it. But until that moment I wasn’t aware that I had been deprived of the past too. Of my past I had only memories and I knew they would acquire the sepia colour of a distant, undistinguished event, then slowly dissolve, disappear in the soft forgetfulness that time would bring as a relief, leading me to doubt that I had ever lived that part of my life. The way sun enters my living room in Zagreb, shining on the porcelain cups on the table, the marmalade jar, the butter, the rye bread. The feeling of a wooden staircase under bare feet. The cracking sound in the wall before I fall asleep. My daughter’s rhythmic breathing upstairs, a dog scratching in his basket. Security. Suddenly, in the Ljubljana apartment, I felt as if I had woken up with my hands and legs amputated. Or worse still, as if I was standing naked in the middle of the room, my skin peeled off, stripped of everything meaningful, of sense itself. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do about it, I just didn’t know.
That evening as I walked along the river an old man passed me by, then returned. ‘I saw you coming with your suitcase the other day, I live in the building opposite yours. Where are you from?’ he asked me. When I told him I was from Croatia his tone of voice changed instantly. ‘I’ve read in the newspapers that you refugees are getting more money per month from the state than we retired people do, and I worked hard for forty years as a university professor for my pension. Aren’t we Slovenes nice to you?’ The irony in his voice was already triggering a surge of anger in me. I felt an almost physical need to explain my position to him, that I am not ‘we’ and that ‘we’ are not getting money anyway. I think I have never experienced such a terrible urge to distinguish myself from others, to show this man that I was an individual with a name and not an anonymous exile stealing his money. I started to explain to him that I was not what he thought I was, but then I stopped mid-sentence, my anger hanging in the air for the moment, then descending to the wet grass below. That dialogue on the bank of the river had nothing to do with us – him, a university professor from Ljubljana, me, a writer from Zagreb. It was the war speaking through our mouths, accusing us, reducing us to two opposing sides, forcing us to justify ourselves. I walked away. But his two sentences were enough to strip me of my individuality, the most precious property I had accumulated during the forty years of my life. I – no longer me – went to ‘my home’ that was not mine.
The night was chilly, the river under the three white stone bridges dark and silent. As I stood there, I realized I was in a no man’s land: not in Croatia any more, nor yet in Slovenia. With no firm ground beneath my feet I stood at the centre of the city realizing that this was what being a refugee meant, seeing the content of your life slowly leaking out, as if from a broken vessel. I was grateful that the stone under my fingers was cool and rough, that I breathed fresh air and I was no longer terrorized by fear. But at that moment, at the thought of becoming an exile, I understood that it would take me another lifetime to find my place in a foreign world and that I simply didn’t have one to spare.
6
THE BALKAN EXPRESS
Early Sunday morning a mist hovered over the Vienna streets like whipped cream, but the sunshine piercing the lead-grey clouds promised a beautiful autumn day, a day for leafing through magazines at the Museum Kaffe, for taking a leisurely walk along the Prater park and enjoying an easy family lunch. Then perhaps a movie or the theatre – several films were premiering.
But when I entered the Südbanhof, the South Station, the milky Viennese world redolent with cafe au lait, fresh rolls and butter or apple strudel and the neat life of the ordinary Viennese citizens was far behind me. As soon as I stepped into the building I found myself in another world; a group of men cursed someone’s mother in Serbian, their greasy, sodden words tumbling to the floor by their feet, and a familiar slightly sour odour, a mixture of urine, beer and plastic-covered seats in second-class rail compartments, wafted through the stale air of the station. Here in the heart of Vienna I felt as if I were already on territory occupied by another sort of people, a people now second class. Not only because they had come from a poor socialist country, at least not any more. Now they were second-class because they had come from a country collapsing under the ravages of war. War is what made them distinct from the sleepy Viennese, war was turning these people into ghosts of the past – ghosts whom the Viennese are trying hard to ignore. They’d rather forget the past, they cannot believe that history is repeating itself, that such a thing is possible: bloodshed in the Balkans, TV images of burning buildings and beheaded corpses, a stench of fear spreading from the south and east through the streets, a stench brought here by refugees. War is like a brand on the brows of Serbs who curse Croat mothers, but it is also a brand on the faces of Croats leaving a country where all they had is gone. The first are branded by hatred, the second by the horror that here in Vienna no one really understands them. Every day more and more refugees arrive from Croatia. Vienna is beginning to feel the pressure from the Südbanhof and is getting worried. Tormented by days spent in bomb shelters, by their arduous journey and the destruction they have left behind, the exiles are disembarking – those who have the courage and the money to come so far – stepping first into the vast hall of the warehouse-like station. From there they continue out into the street, but once in the street they stop and stare at the fortress-like buildings, at the bolted doors and the doormen. They stand there staring at this metropolis, this outpost of Western Europe, helplessly looking on as Europe turns its back on them indifferently behind the safety of closed doors. The exiles feel a new fear now: Europe is the enemy, the cold, rational, polite and fortified enemy who still believes that the war in Croatia is far away, that it can be banished from sight, that the madness and death will stop across the border.