Yugoslavia, My Fatherland. Goran Vojnović

over twenty minutes, I tried without success to return to the state of clinical mental lethargy; to that beloved indifference that had protected me for all these years, against the siege engines of emotion. But I couldn’t move, not an inch. My father, until recently deceased, assailed me now, sixteen years after his death, with an immortality so relentless that I could physically feel the sense of horror that grew inside me, nailing my feet to the ground.

      Everything was flooding back: Pula and its graffiti, the Bristol Hotel in Belgrade, the unbearable humidity of Novi Sad. The image of Ljubljana was also coming back: the Ljubljana that once was. My mother, too, came back to me, as she was when she was still my mother. The festival of memories in my head played to its climax, and the great fireworks were about to begin. I gasped for air but couldn’t breathe; feeling I would surely faint.

      At that point it seemed that the innocent white lie I’d unspooled to my boss, which had rewarded me with a week’s sick leave, was beco­ming an unwanted reality. The coffee vending machines that relied on my healing hands were surely missing me.

      I made every effort to concentrate on trying to recall which CD Nadia had asked me to bring in from the car. I shifted my gaze to the corner of the garage and, to distract myself, I tried to remember what was hidden in the dog-eared cardboard boxes piled there, forlornly. Who had put them there in the first place, and why had the corner of the garage been made to look like a rubbish dump? I started the ignition. She resisted, the old mare, but started eventually, on the first elongated attempt, for which I was grateful. Without consciously deciding to do so, I pushed down on the gas pedal and slowly reversed. It was at that point, that I heard the loud scratching sound. I saw the open door scrape against the garage wall and pulled up the handbrake at the last minute, just before the car door hit the frame of the garage door and my window shattered into a thousand shrapnel shards. I turned the engine back off.

      

      ‘When are you leaving?’

      ‘I don’t know.’

      ‘When will you need the car?’

      ‘As soon as possible. Tomorrow, if that’s possible.’

      ‘And where will you go?’

      ‘I don’t know... yet.’

      ‘Listen to yourself. You don’t know... yet. You sound like my cousin. He knows he’s going to get laid someday, because he’s a young stud, he just doesn’t know when and who the lucky lady will be.’

      Enes had this routine he’d dance through before he took the keys from me; then he muttered that he’d call when the car was good to go. He was finally the boss, after years of slaving for other morons just like himself, and so he enjoyed airing his valves and exhausts, so to speak. His partially legal workshop was called Dino, named after his first son, and located by the railroad opposite the old Ljubljana stadium. ‘It’s so well hidden that even the Albanians never sold ice cream here,’ he had once described his black hole to every poor devil who wandered into it. Now I was the poor devil in question. After what felt like ages, Enes stuck his head under my hood.

      ‘Who replaced your fan?’

      ‘Nadia was driving...’

      ‘Why didn’t you bring it to me?’

      ‘The car stopped in the middle of the road.’

      ‘And where did she take it?’

      ‘To Dolgi Most.’

      ‘To Dolgi Most. And how much did the thugs in that neighbourhood charge for this?’

      ‘I can’t remember.’

      ‘Well, well, well... Why didn’t she call you and then you could’ve called me?’

      ‘That’s not how Slovenians do this.’

      This magical argument satisfied him completely.

      ‘Not that it matters. We’ll take care of it.’

      For some reason I always spent at least half an hour at Enes’ for no good reason. It crossed my mind that I ought to get some discount in this asshole part of the city, especially if he thought I was one of ‘his guys.’ It never crossed my mind to explain to every vocal instrumentalist from middle Bosnia that I’d never felt like one of ‘their guys,’ nor did I want to. It was easier, and often cheaper, to put up with the good old-boy chatter, always conducted in ‘our language,’ and amuse myself by guessing what discount I would get if I were a Slovene.

      ‘You know, I don’t ask you where you’re going for no reason. I mean, I don’t give a rat’s ass, go where you like. The main question is whether you’re going up or down.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Well, if you go up, the roads are great. No holes. Just fire it up and off you go. But if you’re headed down... You know how it is.’

      I had no idea. I hadn’t been south of the Kolpa River in recent memory.

      ‘I’m going down.’

      ‘Cuz! Come here and fix this car up, and I want it flawless. This guy here is one of ours. Bosnian.’

      ‘Aren’t they all?’ he replied.

      ‘Don’t be stupid.’

      Enes’ cousin grabbed the keys with his grime-black hands and stepped into the car. This time the old wreck started at only the third twist of the keys.

      ‘What are you laughing at, motherfucker?’ Enes inquired. ‘In ex-Yugoslavia we Bosnians fucked, while all the others brought up children. The two of you are young and don’t even realize that half of these Slovenians, Croatians and Serbians jerking their way around the Balkans were fathered by Bosnian Toms, Dicks and Harrys.’

      Enes was a happy man. He had a captive audience who didn’t object to him, which was all he ever wanted.

      ‘Back in the day, Bosnians could fuck anyone they wanted, but women didn’t want to marry us. Yugoslav women didn’t want their kids to be given some Muslim name. Or even Enes. There’s brotherhood and unity for you. No wonder it ended like it did.’

      

      As I marched from the Dino mechanics shop toward the civilized centre of Ljubljana, my well-being was suffering a crisis of such extent, that even the Slovenian cab drivers couldn’t make me feel worse. I climbed into a blue Opel Vectra and made the conscious decision to set an over-high price of ten euros, rather than watch the driver press the taximeter and stare at it the whole while as it turned at the speed of three euros per minute, while he drove me on an elongated route. I felt even less like talking. I didn’t have the energy for cab debates, so I simply stared out the window while the rundown Opel ran down towards the city centre in blissful silence.

      ‘Is here okay?’

      He stopped at the bus station. To my pleasant surprise, the taximeter showed six euros and fifty cents. I got out, crossed the street and found myself at the main entrance to the Polyclinic hospital, not knowing precisely what I wanted to do there. The thought that I’d have to wait there for quite some time, observing the mixed procession of the nearly-­dead, people with broken bones and hypochondria, didn’t exactly appeal, but I had this feeling that I’d already been sitting in a socialist dentist’s waiting room for three days, so what would the difference be? Yet still I wasn’t mentally prepared to enter the building, to make the first move in this winner-takes-all battle.

      Passive-aggression suited my current mind-set much more. I leaned against a pillar and prepared myself to spend an indefinite amount of time scanning patients as they passed by, without giving them the impression that they were being scanned; remembering that my mother had taught me that staring wasn’t polite. Dusha, after years of working at the hospital, knew all about that.

      

      ‘I don’t need anything. I’ll just have a smoke.’

      A lady