Isidora’s twentieth birthday was coming up, and she — ever disinclined to do it the normal way — did not want it to have the canapés-booze-somebody-fucking-in-the-bathroom format. She thought that it should have the form of an art performance. She couldn’t decide whether it should be modeled on a “Fourrieristic orgy” (the idea I favored) or a Nazi cocktail reception, the template for which could be found in the patriotically proper movies of socialist Yugoslavia: the Germans, all haughty, decadent bastards in impeccable uniforms, throwing a lavish party, in 1943 or so, while local whores and “domestic traitors” lick their tall, shining boots, except for a young Communist spy who has managed to infiltrate the inner circle and who will make them pay in the end. For some unfortunate reason, the orgy lost out to the Nazi party.
The birthday party took place on December 13, 1986. The young men donned black shirts and had oil in their hair. The young women wore dresses that reasonably approximated gowns, except for my teenage sister, who was cast as a young Communist girl, so she wore a girly Communist dress. The party was supposed to be taking place sometime in the early forties, right after the beginning of the German occupation. The narrative featured all the implicit decadence seen in the movies, and then some pseudonihilistic whimsy. There were mayo swastikas on the canapés; there was a sign on the wall saying “In Cock We Trust”; there was a ritual burning of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo in the toilet; my sister was detained as a young Communist in one of the rooms, designated as a makeshift prison; Guša and I fought over a bullwhip; Veba (who lives in Montreal now) and I sang pretty, sad Communist songs about fallen strikers, which we liked to do at every party; I drank vodka out of a cup and wore tall boots, as I was cast as a Ukrainian collaborator. In the kitchen (you can always find me in the kitchen at parties) we discussed the abolishment of the Tito cult and the related state rituals, still running strong. We entertained the idea of organizing demonstrations: I would be looking forward, I said, to smashing some store windows, as some of them were ugly and I liked glass shards. There were people at the party and in the kitchen whom I didn’t know, and they listened very carefully. The morning after, I woke up with a sense of shame that always goes with getting too drunk, usually remedied by a lot of citric acid and sleep. Yet the sense of shame wouldn’t go away for a while. Indeed, it is still around.
The following week I was cordially invited over the phone to visit the State Security offices — a kind of invitation you cannot decline. They interrogated me for thirteen hours straight, in the course of which I discovered that all the other people who attended the party had visited or were going to visit the warm State Security offices. Let me not bore you with the details — let’s just say that the good cop, bad cop routine is a transcultural cliché, that both of the cops knew everything (the kitchen listeners listened well), and that they had a big, very big problem with the Nazi cocktail reception framework. Naïvely, I assumed that if I explained to them that it was really just a performance, a bad joke at worst, and if I elided the kitchen demonstration fantasies, they would just slap our wrists, tell our parents to whup our asses, and let us go home, to our comfy nihilistic quarters. The “good” cop solicited my opinion on the rise of fascism among the youth of Yugoslavia. I had no idea what he was talking about, but I strenuously objected to such tendencies. He didn’t seem too convinced. As I was sick with flu, I frequently went to the bathroom — no keys on the inside, bars on the window — while the good cop was waiting outside, lest I cut my wrist or bang my head on the toilet bowl. I looked at myself in the mirror (which I could have broken to slit my throat) and thought: “Look at this dim, pimply face, the woozy eyes — who can possibly think I am dangerous, let alone a Nazi?” They let us all go, eventually, our wrists swollen from slapping. My mother was out of town visiting family, my father was in Ethiopia (“We send him to Ethiopia,” the bad cop said to me, “and this is how you thank us?”), and I refrained from informing them that I had been detained by State Security, thinking it would all just go away.
But away it did not go. A few weeks later, the Sarajevo correspondent of the Belgrade daily Politika—which was on its way to becoming the hysterical nationalist voice of the Slobodan Milošević regime — received an anonymous letter describing a birthday party at the residence of a prominent Sarajevo family, where Nazi symbols were exhibited and values belonging to the darkest recesses of history were extolled in violation of everything our society held sacred. Rumors started spreading around Sarajevo, the world capital of gossip, speculating about who might have been at the party and at whose home it had taken place. The Bosnian Communist authorities, often jitterbugging to the tunes from Belgrade, confidentially briefed their members at closed Party meetings, one of which was attended by my mother, where, without naming anybody, they described what happened at the party, with many details made available by the good services of State Security. She nearly had a heart attack when she recalled my wearing the borrowed tall boots on the way to the party (the concept of which I had not bothered to explain to her), thus realizing that both of her children were there. She came back home shaken, and I offered a full confession, worrying all along that she might simply collapse. My mother’s hair became all gray early and I am afraid much of it was due to my adventures.
In no time letters started pouring in to the Sarajevo press, coming from concerned citizens, some of whom were doubtless part-time employees of State Security. Many unanimously demanded that the names of the people involved in organizing a Nazi meeting in Sarajevo be released to the angry public, so that the cancerous outgrowth on the body of socialism could be dealt with immediately and mercilessly. Due to pressure by the obedient public, the names of the “Nazi Nineteen” were happily announced in January 1987: there was a TV and radio-broadcast roll call, and the list was published in the papers the next day, for those who missed it the night before. Citizens started organizing spontaneous meetings, which produced a slew of demands for severe punishment; university students had spontaneous meetings, some recalling the decadent performances at Club Volens-Nolens, concluding with whither-our-youth questions and demands for severe punishment as answers to those questions; Liberation War veterans had spontaneous meetings, whereby they expressed their firm belief that work had no value in our families, and they also demanded severe punishment. My neighbors turned their heads away, passing me by; my fellow students boycotted an English-language class because I attended it, while the teacher quietly wept in the corner. Friends were banned by their parents from seeing us. The whole thing felt to me like reading a novel in which one of the characters — a feckless nihilistic prick — had my name. His life and my life intersected, indeed dramatically overlapped. At some point I started doubting the truth of my being. What if my reality was someone else’s fiction? What if, I thought, I was the only one not seeing what the world was really like? What if I was the dead end of my own perception? What if I was just plain stupid?