For the most part I adjusted my pulse to the pulse of the city and went on with my life. I went to the market, bought fish, fruit, and vegetables and sampled the myriad varieties of Dutch cheese; I kept up with the latest films; I people-watched in cafés; I went to galleries and museums. And life seemed its normal, laid-back self again. I lived in the heart of Amsterdam, which, or so it sometimes seemed to me, pumped more cotton candy than blood. Though maybe my own heart was broken and my view distorted. Maybe the instinct of self-preservation was the glue that held my heart together and made me believe that everything was “normal.”
CHAPTER 11
We are Pioneers,
Soldiers brave and true.
Every day we sprout
Like the grass anew.
I kept thinking we had time to burn, but the first semester was over before I knew it. And since the end of the semester coincided with my birthday, I proposed that we all go out and celebrate the two together. I had a plane ticket to Zagreb, where I would spend a week before coming back to prepare for the second semester.
The kids chose an old Dutch pub near the main railway station. One of them knew the owner. It was nearly empty: there were no more than three or four regulars at the bar, the local drunks.
“Look,” said Darko, “we’ve got it to ourselves.”
Meliha had brought a box of genuine Bosnian urmašice her mother had baked. Igor, Nevena, and Selim, all of whom worked at the “Ministry,” brought me artifacts they had gathered at work: Igor a pair of handcuffs concealed in a bouquet of yellow roses, Selim a leather collar with metal spikes, and Nevena a black whip wrapped in purple paper and a red ribbon.
“Many happy returns of the day, Comrade Makarenko!” said Igor, kissing my hand. “Now you’ve got everything you need.”
I asked him where in the world he’d dug up Makarenko, whose account of his work with Soviet juvenile delinquents, The Road to Life, or A Pedagogical Poem, had been long forgotten even in its country of origin.
Johanneke had gone to the Bosnian delicatessen in Rotterdam to buy spicy Macedonian ajvar, chocolate napolitanka-filling, and a package of Minas coffee, all of which she then packed in a box labeled “FIRST-AID KIT FOR YUGONOSTALGITIS.” Ante gave me a rosemary plant, Ana a photocopy of the first postwar Yugoslav primer. I wondered what lengths she had gone to get that photocopy to Amsterdam.
Mario, Boban, Darko, and Uroš came, too. Even Amra — the young mother, who almost never came to class — put in a brief appearance. Zole, the guy who had claimed he was living with a gay partner to keep from being thrown out of the country, looked in for a while, as did Laki, whom I had completely forgotten about.
Ante had brought his accordion, and while the first mugs of beer were emptied and refilled with alarming alacrity, he started in on his prodigious repertory of partisan songs, urban folk songs, Bosnian love songs, Serbian and Macedonian kolo dances, Medjimurian ditties, Dalmatian glees, Slovenian polkas, with some Hungarian and Gypsy tunes thrown in for good measure. He knew all the old favorites: “Emina,” “Biljana Bleaches the Linen,” “What Jet Black Hair You Have, My Sweet,” “I Was a Rose,” “My Father Has Two Little Horses,” “The Girl from Bile
a,” “From Vardar All the Way to Triglav”…Once the music had set their memories in motion, line led to line, chorus to chorus, and soon they were competing to see who could remember the most. It was like a crash course in the history of the Yugoslav popular song. We went through the Opatija Festivals year by year: Zdenka Vuckovi, Ivo Robi, Lola Novakovi, Lado Leskovar, Zvonko špiši, Djordje Marjanovi, Ljupka Dimitrovska…We took great pleasure in merely pronouncing the names as a group.
“Remember when Lola Novakovi sang ‘You Never Came to Offer Me Your Hand,’ and all Yugoslavia cried along with her, because of course everybody knew who hadn’t come.”
“I didn’t know. Who was it?”
“Why, Cune Gojkovic, you idiot!”
“But how do you know?” I asked, breaking in on them. “Most of you weren’t even born yet.”
“We’ve got Yugogenes, Comrade, remember?” they replied in a raucous chorus. “They take care of it.”
Ante kept feeding them songs, and they kept begging for more: “Good for you, Ante! Hey, Ante, how about…”
They eventually got to Djordje Balaševi, whose bittersweet songs were calculated to reduce all former Yugos to hopeless melancholy, and moved on to the classics of Yugoslav rock: the Indexes, White Button, Azra. During one of Ante’s breaks we pieced together the wording of the Pioneer vow (“I solemnly promise to uphold the achievements of our homeland…”) and the Yugoslav national anthem (“Hark, fellow Slavs! The word of our forefathers lives as long as their sons’ hearts beat strong…”), which we recited in an updated rap rhythm. We made a list of all the composers of the commercialized pseudo — folk music so popular in the seventies and of the turbo-folk that succeeded it. We roared with laughter over the silliest of doggereclass="underline"
Buy me a car, Papa. Oranges too.
Or buy me a teddy bear straight from the zoo.
Buy me a bunny, some sweets, or a ball.
No, buy me everything. I want them all.
And by the time we got to “The Bunny and the Brook,” we were in our second childhood, Nevena shedding a tear at the line “And now poor bunny weeps and weeps…” On we went to Yugoslav television, chronicling first the children’s programs Letter by Letter, Mendo and Slavica, Neven, The Smog Dwellers, then the first American series—Peyton Place, Dynasty, Dallas—the Polish Captain Klos and the Soviet Captain Shtirlits, the Czech series Hospital on the Outskirts. From there we moved back in time to Radmila Karaklaji, who could have been our mother or grandmother, and her “Zumba, Zumba, Salted Codfish.” We went through all the ethnic jokes: the Bosnian ones (about Meho and Mujo, Fata and Suljo) and the Vojvodina ones (about Lala) and the Slovenian ones (about Janez) and the Montenegrin and Dalmatian and Macedonian ones. We imitated the way Kosovo Albanians speak “our language” (“When I love I kiss, and when I don’t I kill”) and all kinds of regional accents. No one could finish a sentence without someone else jumping in. It was one long rat-tat-tat of quotations from life in Yugoslavia. I kept worrying that our plastic bag — the one with the red, white, and blue stripes — would burst and with it the newly established foundation for our imaginary museum of Yugoslav daily life.
Nor did they steer clear of the war.
“There’s something fundamentally fucking wrong with a language that instead of saying ‘The child is sleeping soundly’ or ‘sleeping deeply’ says ‘sleeping the sleep of the butchered.’”
“That’s what brought the war on.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you think your kid’s about to be butchered, you pack a gun and fire at the drop of a hat.”
My kids didn’t know that I’d heard the same thing from any number of Yugoslav émigrés. They even cited it as their main reason for having left the country. (“Why did I go? Because in other languages children sleep the sleep of the just and in mine they sleep the sleep of the butchered.”)