We fled from wherever we could to wherever we could. The price paid depended on the circumstances. Some thought only about their own, some about their own and others’, and some never bothered to ask who was who. Some Bosnian Muslims went to Turkey, Iran, Iraq, even as far as Pakistan; many rued the day. Some Bosnian Jews went to Israel; many of them rued the day. People changed their names, given and sur; they bought cheap passports when they could. What had till recently meant everything to them — their faith, their nationality — was suddenly worthless currency. Survival took over. And once survival was assured, once they had landed on a safe shore, heaved a sigh and pinched themselves to make certain they were alive, many of them again hung out their flags, put up their icons and escutcheons, and lit their candles.
We were everywhere. Those who scrambled got the best places: America, Canada; others hesitated and were lost, relegated to whatever was left open to them with tourist visas for a month, for two months, then returning home and gearing up to start again. In the general confusion many used rumors as their sole compass, rumors about where you could go without papers and where you could not, where life was better and where life was worse, where they were welcome and where they were not. Some found themselves in countries they would otherwise never have seen. Passports from the first two breakaway countries of Slovenia and Croatia quickly soared in value. A Croatian passport could get you to Great Britain for a while — until the Brits caught on and shut the gate. A few of the more naive fell for obsolete rumors — like the open arms with which whites were greeted in South Africa — and followed suit. The Serbs were a pushover for Greece, as tourists and prostitutes, as war profiteers, launderers of dirty money, and thieves. Some acquired three passports — Croatian, Bosnian, and “Yugoslav”—in the hope of hitting the jackpot with at least one; others decided to wait, following the war as if it were a tempest about to die down. And people with children were more concerned for the children than themselves: it was the children’s safety that mattered.
Europe was teeming with former Yugos. The wave of war émigrés numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands of recorded names, names of people with legal refugee status. Sweden had accepted some seventy thousand, Germany three hundred thousand, Holland fifty thousand. As for the illegals, their number was legion. We were everywhere. And nobody’s story was personal enough or shattering enough. Because death itself had lost its power to shatter. There had been too many deaths.
I soon learned to pick out my fellow countrymen in a crowd. The men, especially the older men, stood out the most. The main railway stations and the flea markets were their cult gathering places. They would appear in formations of three or four, like dolphins, wearing windbreakers, leather by preference, their hands thrust into their pockets. They would stand together for a while — shifting from one foot to the other, exhaling cigarette smoke, exorcising their fear — and disperse.
In the Berlin neighborhood where Goran and I had lived, I would stop in front of the large window of a refugee “club.” Through the glass I could see “our people” mutely playing cards, staring at the television screen and taking occasional swigs of beer straight from the bottle. The hand-drawn map on the wall was festooned with postcards. It had a geography all its own. The places they came from — Br
ko or Bijeljina — stood at the center of the world: they were the only country the men had left. Surrounded by smoke rings, they looked as “former” as their onetime nationality; they looked like corpses that had risen from the grave for a bottle of beer and a round of cards but ended up in the wrong place.
On the street I often caught snatches of their language. It was all numbers. They couldn’t stop talking numbers. Marks, five hundred marks, three hundred marks, a thousand marks…. Here in Amsterdam it was gu
e, this or that number of gue…. They would draw out their vowels as if babbling, and it was in fact more babble than talk, their endless computations of existing or imaginary funds.
They all had derogatory terms for the inhabitants of the countries where they had landed: švabo for the Germans, Daer for the Dutch, šved for the Swedes. It made them feel important. They peppered their conversations with “Like I say” and “Take it from me,” emphasizing their role in the matter at hand, as insignificant as the matter was and as piddling as their role was in it. Sticking to your guns was all. “I can make it from Oostdorp to the Leidseplein in eleven minutes.” “How can you make it in eleven minutes? It takes fifteen at the very least. Have you timed it? Well, I have, man. Fifteen minutes on the nose. From the second you get on the tram.” They totally did the men in, those conversations. Each word was calculated to postpone the encounter with humiliation, to exorcise the fear.
The manner in which they moved and the places where they came together betrayed their loss of personal space: the bench in front of the house, where they could watch the world pass by, or on the waterfront, where they could see what ships came in and who came down the gangplank; the town square, where they could walk with their friends; the café, where they could sit at their table and have their drink. In the cities of Europe they vainly sought the coordinates of space they had left behind them, their spatial coordinates.
They also sought human coordinates. Goran was often prey to Yugonostalgia, and when it was on him he was wont to pick up the first “compatriot” he ran across and drag him home for a drink. I’d soon heard my fill of stories about German refugee centers and their experiences there. “Our people” would stick like glue to every Russian, Ukrainian, Pole, or Bulgarian they met, feeling an our-like bond with them. A Bosnian told us the story of some Polish women who would come to Berlin on one-day bus tours to give “our people” good prices on Polish cheese and sausages and occasionally on a “roll in the hay.” With the money thus earned they’d do their Berlin shopping for the week and take the bus back home. They could always sniff out one another on the street: it was their common misfortune that did the trick. The same Bosnian told us about a Berlin brothel (he used the German slang word Puff) where he spent all his refugee allowance. The girl he went there for, Masha by name, would “take him for all he was worth” and “give him zilch in return,” but that was fine with him. “Because she’s a Russian, one of us. I wouldn’t throw my dough away on a German girl. Those German girls have no soul. Not like ours.” And by “ours” he meant his Russian Masha.
The men complained more than anyone; they were eternally complaining: about the weather, about the war, about their fate and the injustices done them. They complained about conditions in the camps if they lived in one; they complained about conditions in the camps if they didn’t. They complained about welfare; they complained about the humiliation of having to accept welfare; they complained about not receiving welfare. They complained all the time and about everything with the same intensity. It was as if life itself were a punishment: everything chafed, everything itched, everything pinched; nothing was enough for them and everything much too much.
Women were much less visible than men. They remained in the background, but kept life going: they darned the holes to stop it from flowing out; they took it on as a daily assignment. Men seemed to have no assignments; for them being a refugee was like being an invalid.
Here in Amsterdam I occasionally looked in on a Bosnian café called Bella, the hangout for a gloomy, tight-lipped crew of card-players and TV watchers. Each time I entered, I’d be met by long looks expressing nothing — not even surprise or indignation — at the sight of a female invading male space. I’d take a seat at the bar, order “our” (Turkish) coffee and sit there for a while, as if doing penance, instinctively drooping my shoulders a bit to fit in. I felt the invisible slap on their faces invading my own. I had no idea what I went there for. Out of an obscure desire to sniff out my “herd,” perhaps, not that I was ever certain it was mine — or ever had been, for that matter.