I was amazed at the regularity with which the protagonists’ common features returned. I felt I was reading genetics rather than literature. It was like discovering something one had always been vaguely aware of but never considered important, like finding a mole at the same spot on one’s skin as on the skin of one’s parents or children or grandchildren. I often felt I was reading installments of a soap opera that had dragged on for more than a century (though I would never have admitted it in public).
We read two novels by K. š. Gjalski, Janko Borislavi
and Radmilovi, both of whose protagonists have gone mad by the end of their lives; we read Vjenceslav Novak’s Two Worlds and Tito Dorci and M. C. Nehajev’s Escape, all three of whose protagonists commit suicide; we read Krleža’s much acclaimed Return of Filip Latinowicz, which like the others deals with the theme of exile. And while the protagonists in all the works feel isolated abroad, it is their inability to adjust to the return home that triggers their tragic deaths.
“But what would really grab us,” said Meliha, “is a novel about the Gastarbeiter, about our fathers and grandfathers who trudged off to Germany and Sweden and France and Holland and slaved away for years only to come back and pour their hard-earned nest eggs into huge houses — something solid to leave behind, to make them die happy — that then stood empty like memorials to the utopia of carefree retirement, like pyramids, like tombs. Because the war came and everything went up in smoke.”
“Maybe,” said Ana uneasily, “but is that really our story?”
“You bet it is, sister, if your parents spent half their lives in Germany and you’re living abroad without a penny to your name. Ask my friend Alda. She’ll tell you. Her parents retired after thirty years. Put every penny they’d saved into a bank in Sarajevo. Thought they’d build a house and settle down. And where are they now? Back in Cologne! That’s how it is with us: every generation starts with nothing and ends with nothing. My grandmother and grandfather — and my parents after them — they had to start from scratch after the Second World War, and this new war put them right back where they’d started from. And now here I am, starting from scratch, with nothing, zilch, zero.”
Nobody said a word. Meliha’s zero was dangling above our heads like a noose.
Anthropologists studying migration have taken over the term “sleeper” from popular spy novels. Sleepers are emigrants who make “normal” lives for themselves in their new environment: they learn its language, adapt to its ways, seem fully integrated — and suddenly they have an epiphany. The fantasy of a “return to the motherland” takes over with such a vengeance that it makes them into robots. They sell everything they have acquired and move back. And when they realize the mistake they have made (as most do) they go back to the land where they had “slept” for twenty or however many years, forced to relive (as they would on a psychiatrist’s couch) the years of adjustment until — twice broken, yet twice restored — they make peace with their lot. Many live a parallel life: they project the image of their motherland on the neutral walls of the land where they are living “only temporarily” and experience the projected image as their “real” life.
My students were far from being “sleepers,” nor could they ever dream of becoming them. They belonged neither here nor there. They were busy building castles in the air and peering down to decide which place suited them better. Of course I was up there with them. I too belonged neither here nor there. The only difference was that I couldn’t bear to look down. I had vertigo.
CHAPTER 7
I couldn’t quite pinpoint what had brought it on. There were times when I found myself stopping in the middle of the street because I’d forgotten where I was going. I’d just stand there like a child afraid to be thrown out of a game if he moves a muscle. “And out goes Y-O-U!” Maybe the confusion came from the fact that it didn’t really matter where I was going, that I could just as easily have been standing on a street in another city, that my very presence in the city was a matter of chance, that, when all was said and done, everything was a matter of chance. Many of us had ended up in places we’d never dreamed of seeing no less inhabiting. And it would happen from one day to the next. It was like going to sleep in one life and waking up in another.
Sometimes my sleep was interrupted by an oppressive but nondescript pain, a painless pain. I would get out of bed and make my way to the bathroom, switch on the light, let the water run for a while and take a series of small gulps, trying to quench a thirst I seemed to have had for ages. Then I’d lean my forehead against the mirror of the medicine cabinet and watch the mist of my breath spread gently over the surface.
“O my wound, O my soul. The autumn has come, O my wound. Woe is me, O my wound, my festering wound…” Wounds are intimates in my country; they are our sons and daughters, our sweethearts. Wounds are love; love is pain. Goran and I once heard a turbo-folk rendition of “O My Wound” blaring out over a Berlin street. The street vendor showed us a cheap cassette with Ach, meine Wunde on the cover. As Goran handed over the money, he said to me with a smile, “Our wounds are our hottest export.”
“O Germany, O stranger. I gave you my lover, I gave you my brother,” they wail, as they have wailed, keened, and howled for decades over migrant workers, refugees, émigrés, exiles, Gastarbeiter, adventurers, conmen, crooks, deserters…“O Australia, O stranger,” “O America, O stranger,” “O Canada, O stranger.”
I could never understand the point of the cheap, patriotic video clips — half travel commercial, half political campaign — of swarthy, mustachioed men recently back from stints abroad expounding on the magnetic pull of the motherland. With crammed suitcase in each hand and gold chains and crosses on their hairy chests, they tramp the hills and vales leading to their native villages, where mustachioed crones in black await them by sooty hearths. “My Moootherland! My naaative soil!” my musical compatriots bellow, gazing into the beautiful distance, which is usually the sole beautiful thing they have to gaze into. Maybe all émigrés are character actors condemned to endless soaps; maybe the very genre of exile keeps them from transforming what they do and how they feel.
Whenever I found myself in the subgenre of émigré insomnia, I would wrack my brains over how things would be were they not as they are. Hoping to make a warm spot for myself, I would shuffle together everyone I know as if they were packs of cards. I would think of Goran cuddling up to his Hito. They have an orderly way of sleeping, nestled together like spoons. He groans; she awakens. Anything wrong? she asks. The groaning ceases; the breathing goes back to normal; Hito goes back to sleep. I would think of Goran’s mother going to the kitchen for a glass of milk. She takes a cookie out of the canister with “Danish Cookies” written on it, then changes her mind and takes out another two. And one more. She dips them in the milk, then pushes them all the way down with one finger, then eats them with a spoon. The sweet mush calms her nerves. “I don’t understand it. I can’t stop eating,” she laments. “Especially at night.” I would think of myself curled up in the bed in Mother’s “guest room” and hear the shuffle of slippers, the scrape of a door, and the tinkle of urine in the toilet bowclass="underline" my mother is urinating in the toilet next to my room. The room swells like a sound box with the noise. Then it stops and she shuffles back to bed. And as she falls asleep, she decorates her past like an Easter egg. Deliberately. Complacently.