Yugoslavia, My Fatherland. Goran Vojnović

and I found myself in a place that proudly called itself ‘the first cybercafé in Brčko.’

      ‘What do you need Internet for?’

      I didn’t understand the question but, luckily, the guy realized that we were dealing with a foreigner.

      ‘This computer here has a camera, but its keyboard is a little fucked up. L, M and K are a real mess. If you’re gonna write emails, the computer over there is better.’

      ‘I just need to look up something online.’

      ‘Go for it then. Sit wherever you want. Mice are as good as new.’

      I sat at the computer without the camera. I clicked the icon and typed Loza’s name into the browser.

      6

      ‘Don’t worry, Loza’s gonna take care of everything,’ my father said to my mother after we had been waiting a good fifteen minutes at the reception desk of Belgrade’s Bristol Hotel, because when we turned up, no one knew who my father was, or who to call to sort out our accommodation. Yawning hotel staff eventually heard something from someone somewhere about a directive for officers’ families to be settled on the third floor, but none of them were doing anything about it. Their hesitation might also have been moral: no one was in a rush to serve the army of a country about to break into pieces. We weren’t the only family there: a few more families waited on the good will of the receptionists. What made the situation worse was the realization, on all our parts, that this current situation was extraordinary in all respects, and this call to duty differed in its feel from all previous ones.

      ‘Normally, such things don’t just happen overnight,’ a lady with a fresh perm moaned, the wife of a colonel from Zadar who must’ve been two metres tall. Meanwhile a skinny pale-faced daughter of a tight-lipped colonel from Karlovac added how strange it was that the family should likewise be ordered to move immediately.

      ‘Normally, there would be apartments on the boulevard waiting for us,’ added the lady with the perm. ‘Normally, hotel staff would treat us with more respect.’ She raised the volume of her last statement, hoping to be overheard by the current masters of our fate. But they were obviously members of this new, abnormal generation, and acted accordingly.

      My father, visibly nervous and withdrawn from the rest, paced back and forth, sometimes striding past my mother and me, repeating his only response to the scene: ‘Don’t worry, Loza’s gonna take care of everything.’ That was my parents’ nickname for Emir, Captain Muzirović, who had meanwhile been promoted to colonel. He was called Loza, after all the lozovača grape schnapps that he used to drink on account of a broken heart. He wasn’t married, he didn’t have kids and his life was dedicated to the Yugoslav People’s Army. The only reason he was never promoted to general was that his superiors dreaded him.

      Uncle Emir was half a head taller than my father, and owned the broadest shoulders in the Balkans. When he walked around Pula looking morose, people crossed to the other side of the road, just to be on the safe side. When he came to visit us, my friends loitering in front of the apartment building immediately went silent and waited for him to pass. In our apartment, he would always sit in the same chair, the fourth one in around the dining table, for there he was the ‘good uncle.’ After a few glasses of plum brandy, he’d persuade my father to sing ‘that song of his’ along with him, and I can’t recall any of his visits that did not feature the double-act of Colonels Borojević and Muzirović singing, arms around each other’s shoulders.

      Emir was the only one who knew the truth. After all these years, Emir never really opened up to anyone, remaining a mysterious intro­vert, even to my father. Dusha, who couldn’t stand introverts, overlooked this characteristic only because Emir loved her husband so much and, in moments of brimming intoxication, liked to say that Nedelko Borojević, his beautiful Dusha and sweet Vladan were the only real family he had, and he would do for them what he wouldn’t do even for his own brother, if he still had one. My mother and I never learned what my father had done to make this brooding man love us so, to visit us so often and drink schnapps and sing love songs into the small hours. I only know that in the end my mother grew tired of his visits.

      

      ‘Don’t worry, Loza’s going to... ’ My father began for the third time, but this time my mother interrupted him with a stare that could petrify and promised painful consequences. By then it was probably clear that Loza wasn’t going to take care of anything, that the situation was beyond even his formidable powers, more serious than the time he had intervened so we hadn’t had to move to Bitola. Whether father believed his own words, and in Loza’s assistance, I never knew, but I don’t think he could really have been so naïve as to always believe what his superiors told him. He liked to wait for orders and act on them, without giving it too much thought, because that was how the system had raised him, and the grateful Colonel Borojević respected it and took for granted whatever the system fed him. He didn’t really need to believe in Loza, per se, but that everything would be all right because nothing could be otherwise in this world of uniforms. If he was worried about anything, it was the uniform-less presence of my mother and me, and his silent fear of how we would cope with this rapid, significant change.

      We were still sitting there in the crowded hotel lobby when a military transport stopped in front of the hotel, and a young soldier informed officers Borojević, Lukovac, Marković and Grabić that their lift to barracks had arrived. Marković complained that it would be more appropriate for officers of the Yugoslav Army to first see their families comfortably accommodated at the hotel, while Grbić and Lukovac immediately headed to the transport. My father stopped himself before he referenced the almighty Loza once more, instead hugging my mother and whispering ‘Everything’s gonna be fine.’ But all she replied, with a cold, forged smile, was ‘Fuck you all.’

      

      So my mother and I stayed behind at the Bristol Hotel. She returned to her withdrawn inner world, but I was initially excited about the fact that, in June 1991, I was at a hotel in Belgrade instead of on the beach in Pula. I used to spend all my summer vacations in our boring old apartment, and was envious every summer of all the tourists who filled the hotels and swam in the hotel pools where we local children weren’t allowed. To me, a hotel room with a big, new TV you could watch while in a bed someone else had made was like an amusement park. I was captivated by the carpets, the spacious bathrooms without visible boilers or heaps of dirty laundry, the shower cubicles instead of bathtubs, balconies, decorative armchairs and coffee tables. I lost track of the moments in my childhood when I’d wished, more than anything, for the three of us to go to a hotel, a giant clean hotel room, to swim in the indoor pool at the Brioni Hotel all week, instead of being stuck on the beach below the lighthouse, playing ‘all you can eat’ every morning. The Bristol Hotel didn’t have an indoor pool, and the room in which my mother and I were finally settled wasn’t exactly like the rooms I’d seen on posters, that drew tourists from around the world to Pula. Even the more modest holiday apartments there, which I’d sneak peeks at on my way to the beach, were luxurious in comparison to our room 211. This room had just two beds pressed against the wall, covered with grey woollen blankets, one tiny television, a miniature, untidy bathroom, a door that had seen better days and which rubbed against the floor and walls which could’ve used a fresh layer of paint.

      Understandably, my mother didn’t feel like being stuck in this stuffy room, and I didn’t feel like sightseeing around Belgrade. So she left me in the room and went out to get some air, while I settled in to one of the longest evenings of my life, sitting on the edge of the bed, switching between three rustling programs, in search of cartoons, before deciding that the TV news was the best option on offer.

      

      The next morning, out of sheer boredom, I agreed to go for a walk with my mother around the city. We walked along in silence from one boring, identical Belgrade street to another, past smoggy Belgrade houses, through a pale green park and then for a long time along a sidewalk by a wide street along which slid tramcars. I never asked where we were headed, and I wasn’t really interested. After more than an hour, mother finally stopped before a red brick socialist apartment building,