Isidora, whose apartment was searched, all her papers taken by State Security, fled with her family to Belgrade and never came back. A few of us who stayed pooled our realities together. Goga had her appendix taken out, and was in the hospital, where nurses scoffed at her, and Guša, Veba, and I became closer than ever. We attended the spontaneous meetings, all in the vain hope that somehow our presence there would provide some sense of reality, that we could explain that it was all a bad performance/joke gone wrong, or that, in the end, it was nobody’s business what we did at a private party. Various patriots and believers in socialist values at those meetings replayed the same good cop, bad cop games. At a Communist Party meeting I crashed at my college, as I had never been and would never be a Party member, a guy named Tihomir (the name could be translated as Quietpeace) was the bad cop. He kept yelling at me “You spat at my grandfather’s bones!” and kept moaning in disbelief whenever I suggested that this was all just ridiculous, while the Party secretary, a nice young woman, kept unsuccessfully trying to placate him.
The Party, however, was now watching how we behaved. Or so I was told by a man who came to our home, sent by the County Committee of the Party, to check up on us. “Be careful,” he said in an avuncular voice, “they are watching you very closely,” whereupon I understood Kafka in a flash. (Only a few years later, the same man would come to our house to buy some honey from my father, who was dealing it out of our home. The man wouldn’t talk about the events regarding the birthday party, except for saying “Such were the times.” He would tell me that his ten-year-old daughter wanted to be a writer, and would show me a poem that she wrote, which he proudly carried in his wallet. The poem would look to me like a first draft of a suicide note, as the first line read: “I do not want to live, as nobody loves me.” He would tell me that she was too shy to show him her poems — she would drop them, as if accidentally, so he could find them. I remember him walking away burdened with buckets of Hemon’s honey. I hope his daughter is still alive.)
Eventually, the scandal noise fizzled out. On the one hand, a lot of people realized that the level of the hullabaloo was inversely proportional to the true significance of the whole thing. We were scapegoated, as the Bosnian Communists wanted to show that they would nip in the bud any attempt by young people to question the sacredness of socialist values. On the other hand, larger, far more serious scandals were to beset the hapless Communist regime. Within a few months, the government was unable to quell rumors about the collapse of the state company Agrokomerc, whose head was good friends with Central Committee big shots and created his mini-empire on nonexistent bonds, or the socialist version thereof. And there were people who were being arrested and publicly castigated for thinking and saying things that seriously questioned the undemocratic Communist rule and the pseudoreligious cult of Tito. Unlike ourselves, those people knew what they were talking about: they had developed ideas, they spoke from defined intellectual and political positions, their principles were a category different from confused late-adolescent feelings. Only later would I understand that we were our own stray dogs with flashlights, and then animal control arrived, and the only thing anyone would remember was the dog shit left behind.
For years afterward, I’d run into people who were still convinced that the birthday party was a fascist meeting, and they were as ready as ever to send us to the gallows. Understandably, I didn’t always volunteer information about my involvement. Once, up in the wilderness of a mountain near Sarajevo, while called up in the army reserve, I shared the warmth of a campfire with drunken reservists who all thought that the birthday-party people should have been at least severely beaten. And I wholeheartedly agreed — indeed I claimed, perversely, that they should’ve been strung up, and got all excited about it. Such people, I said, should be tortured at length, and my distant-cousins-in-arms nodded in bloodthirsty agreement. I became someone else at that moment. I inhabited my enemy for a short time, and it felt both frightening and liberating. Let’s drink to that, the reservists said, and we did.
The doubts about the reality of the whole thing kept nagging at me for a long time. It didn’t help matters that Isidora, now in Belgrade, did eventually become a downright, unabashed fascist. Belgrade in the nineties was fertile ground for the most virulent fascism, and she was at home there. She had public performances that celebrated the rich tradition of Serbian fascism. She dated a guy who would become a leader of a group of Serbian volunteers, cutthroats, and rapists known as the White Eagles, operating in Croatia and Bosnia at the time of the war. Later, she would write a memoir entitled The Fiancée of a War Criminal. Our friendship had long ceased, but I could not help questioning what had happened — maybe the fascist party had been concocted by her fascist part, obscure to me. Maybe I hadn’t seen, blinded by the endless possibilities of Irrelevant Poetry, what she had seen; maybe I had been a pawn in her chess musical. Maybe my life had been like one of those Virgin Marys that show up in the frozen-food section of a supermarket in New Mexico or some such place — visible only to believers, ludicrous to everyone else.
In 1987, in the wake of the birthday-party fiasco, I started working at a Sarajevo radio station, on a program geared toward younger urban people. It was called Omladinski program (The Youth Program), and everyone there was very young indeed, with very little or no radio experience. I failed the first, spring audition as the noise from the party still echoed in the radio studios, but was accepted in the fall, despite my mumbling, distinctly unradiophonic voice. The program was given some expression leeway by the radio heads, as the times were politically changing, but also because as young nobodies we could still take a fall if need be. I reported on cultural affairs, occasionally writing invectives against government idiocy and general stupidity, then reading them on the air. Soon I moved on to producing haughty film and book reviews in a voice of unquestionable (and unfounded) expertise.
All along, I was writing very short fiction. At some point I demanded and was given three or four minutes a week, which I used to air my stories on my friends Zoka and Neven’s (now in Brno and London, respectively) pretty popular show. The time slot was called “Sasha Hemon Tells You True and Untrue Stories” (SHTYTUS). Some of the fiction embarrassed my family — already thoroughly embarrassed by the whole birthday-party debacle — because I had a series of stories about my cousin, a Ukrainian, in which he, for example, somehow lost all his limbs and lived a miserable life, until he got a job in a circus, where, night in, night out, elephants rolled him around the ring like a ball.
Around that time, I wrote the story “The Life and Work of Alphonse Kauders.” It was evident to me that it would be hard to publish, as it made fun of Tito, contained a lot of lofty farts and low sex, and involved the characters of Hitler and Goebbels and such. Moreover, most of the literary magazines in Yugoslavia were at that time busily uncovering this or that national heritage, rediscovering writers whose poetry and prose could have easily fit in any anthology of irrelevant literature, but who would later be extremely busy warmongering. So I broke up the story into seven installments, each of which could fit into the three minutes of “SHTYTUS,” and then wrote an introductory note for each of them — all insisting in the voice of unimpeachable expertise that I was a historian and that Alphonse Kauders was a historical figure and the subject of my extensive research. One of the introductory notes welcomed me upon my return from the archives of the USSR, where I had dug up revealing documents about Kauders. Another informed the listeners that I had just come back from Italy, where I was a guest at the convention of the Transnational Pornographic Party, whose platform was based on the teachings of the great Alphonse Kauders. Another one quoted letters from nonexistent listeners who praised me for exhibiting the courage necessary for a historian, and proposed that I be appointed head of the radio station. Most of the time, I felt that nobody knew what I was doing, as nobody listened to “SHTYTUS,” apart from my friends who generously gave me the airtime and the listeners who had no opportunity to change the station, as the whole thing was just too short. (One of the installments was twenty-seven seconds long, shorter than the jingle for “SHTYTUS.”) I didn’t mind, as I wasn’t all that eager to upset either the good cop or the bad cop.