Yugoslavia, My Fatherland. Goran Vojnović

me tight and said, ‘My dear, my sweet child,’ and began crying even harder than mother.

      The truck eventually rolled up and Shkeliqim, the driver, saluted us and began to load our suitcases and boxes into the back. My mother had to step off her suitcase, and she went to hug Enisa, so that they both watched Shkeliqim through teary eyes, as my father calmly passed him one piece of luggage after another. When the last backpack was loaded, and Shkeliqim was tightening the tarpaulin, I felt a sting in my own heart, and nearly joined in the crying. I had this sinister premonition that my summer had come to an end even before it had started. That father would never again take me to the Golden Rocks beach after lunch, so I could jump into the sea from the incremental boulders.

      When we turned out of our street, Shkeliqim said that we needn’t stay awake on his account, and that we were welcome to go to sleep, because the drive would be long and tiring. He was suspiciously happy, talking a lot, laughing even more, while we silently stared out at our last journey past the theatre, the Golden Gate, the Arena. Soon my birthplace receded into nothing more than those clusters of distant fireflies on the black horizon that mother always loved, but now she intentionally turned her back on them, so she wouldn’t have to see them dance.

      

      Years before, my mother – then a young pedagogy student from Ljub­ljana – had arrived in the city of Pula just before ten in the evening. Her head was glued to the window of the little green train, watching with increasing excitement as the thousands of lights that first glittered in the distance, grew larger and closer and then morphed into shapes. She knew that, somewhere in the midst of those lights, on Platform 2 of the Pula train station, Lieutenant Borojević awaited her, dressed in his army uniform and carrying a single red rose, which he tossed nervously from one hand to the other, leaving tiny thorn-tracks in his palms. It was like this every time, and part of her felt that it would be better if he didn’t bring her a rose – after all, it cost enough to earn her love: Lieutenant Borojević had to buy time off-duty with a litre of grape schnapps for Captain Muzirović, so he could remain with her until 4am, when the green train returned to Ljubljana. But Borojević was a gentleman, and thought it only appropriate that an officer of the Yugoslav People’s Army welcome his ‘Slovenian girl’ with a rose, and then take her to the ‘Hungarian café’ for cake and lemonade, hold her hand as they walked along First of May Street and across the forum, kiss her cheeks at half past three and wish her a safe journey home. Who knows how much grape schnapps Captain Muzirović put away, and how many times the ‘Slovenian girl,’ Dusha Podlogar, watched with the same excitement, through the same window of the same green train as the same lights slowly expanded, while thorn-trails formed in the palms of the same nervous lieutenant, before he finally summoned the courage to kiss her on the lips for the first time, as they sat on a park bench. Or did he unclip her bra with his shaky hands, and even touch her erect nipples? Who knows if her lieutenant once welcomed her with a woollen army blanket beneath his arm, instead of a red rose, and took her to a gloomy, lonesome place, instead of to the Hungarian Café? Perhaps comrade Dusha then missed her train back home, unable to pull herself away from his strong, lusty embrace?

      My mother didn’t talk about this, of course, but she did talk about how she began buying her co-worker toffees so that she wouldn’t tell their mutual boss that she liked to take naps in the small warehouse of the shoe shop on Tito Street, because she was so exhausted from catching the train almost every day and then running straight from the station to work in the morning. Mother also spoke of how her colleague used to tease her, saying that this had been going on long enough for her to expect a ring instead of a rose, but she’d reply that she was just having fun and was in no rush. She also liked to add that any girl would be afraid to marry someone who looked that handsome in his uniform, because a girl could never be sure if it was the uniform she liked more than the man in it.

      Before Dusha could unpick this riddle, her colleague had grown tired of her repetitive work, and of the toffees. And it wasn’t too long before her boss had also stumbled upon his salesclerk, curled up like a baby among the shoeboxes on the warehouse floor one afternoon.

      But since misfortune never walks alone, comrade Podlogar, a notorious snoop from a nearby town, heard through the grapevine that his model daughter, Dusha, who worked so hard at the shoe shop to earn her keep, hadn’t been seen at the Faculty of Education in ages. Dusha’s father, Dushan, was a special sort: he had reluctantly moved away from his modest home, where he had dragged himself after the first heart attack, which resulted in obligatory invalidity retirement from his long-standing career as the staunch police commander of the small town. But when comrade Maria Podlogar, a former secretary at the primary school, who made a hobby of keeping tabs on the moral meanderings of the neighbourhood, commented one day that it just wasn’t right when parents don’t know what is happening with their own children, Dushan felt forced into action. It was never his choice, but he went about it professionally.

      So Dusha not only lost her job at the beginning of March 1978, but former police chief Podlogar made sure, in his own special way, that her wayward ways would be punished, and she ended up loosing her rented apartment very quickly. While Dusha was still a theoretically diligent student in Ljubljana, her offended father had silently accepted the gall of her decision to leave home, putting up a good façade when the neighbours inquired, claiming that he was proud of her, supported her. ‘A student needs complete peace and must be close to the faculty,’ Chief Podlogar would say, projecting confidence in his deliberation on the immutable laws of student life, which were utterly unknown to him. Those he spoke with, however, knew even less than he did. In order to avoid admitting that Dusha had escaped his parental control, Dushan Podlogar convinced himself and the neighbours that her departure was all part of his master plan.

      But Chief Podlogar’s house of cards began to collapse the night that Lieutenant Borojević summoned up his courage, after a whole evening of preparation, and requested the band on the hotel terrace to sing ‘Hey Hey Hey We’re Not Going Home Yet,’ (the only Slovenian song in their repertoire) so that he could grab a dance with the beautiful Slovenian tourist. It was not long after this that Chief Podlogar lost faith in his own lie. As a last grasp, he tried to reel his head over heels daughter home as soon as possible, and set her up with a ‘dream’ job at the local leather plant, which was certainly a form of punishment as far as she was concerned.

      But the machinations of his carefully prepared correction-plan graphically demonstrated that comrade Podlogar did not know his daughter at all, despite his conviction over the years that she was his favourite. This infamous snoop, who the local hooligans used to justifi­ably dread, never took seriously the hereditary stubbornness that he had passed on to Dusha, though stories of it had been circulating for long enough. Podlogar’s plan had been to force Dusha’s Ljubljana landlord with a report since, like so many landlords, he had never registered the fact that he was subletting his apartment. So Dusha was kicked out, and Dushan might’ve thought that she would have slumped down on a street corner, before humbly sulking home to daddy. But instead, she went straight to the train station and waited, for the last time, for the green train. Carrying two small suitcases, her stubbornness dictated the rest of the story – she was determined never to return to her father’s village, not even for a Sunday lunch. She rode off towards the lights of Pula, believing that this very evening, her lieutenant would be waiting for her with a rose in his thorn-scratched hand, on Platform 2, and for the last time.

      But as luck would have it, Lieutenant Nedelko, on the very evening that should have been the most special of his young life, failed to remember that it was Thursday. Thursday evenings saw a special ritual at the Karl Rojc Barracks. Around seven, Colonel Neven Barac, fresh from the shower and anointed with smuggled Italian cologne, set out for dinner at the Fisherman’s Shed Restaurant with his mistress, Zhana. The soldiers in Pula were well aware that the good colonel was officially on call at the barracks on Thursdays, and that he also, unofficially, cheated on his wife, Ivana, in room 132 of the Brioni Hotel, his coital maneuvers squelching over a stomach full of grilled squid, mixed salad and a litre of red wine. But the soldiers guarded this secret as if it were treasonous to release it. When Ivana called, as she did on rare occasi­ons, they meticulously served their country by explaining to the wife, without a blush of guilt that ‘Colonel Barac can’t come to the phone right now.’ Only once had a new-recruit,