Читать книгу The Museum of Lost Love - Gary Barker - Страница 13

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Goran

The transit camp was set up in a primary school about two kilometers outside the center of the small town. Teachers had been replaced by guards. Or maybe, Goran thought, the male teachers and staff had simply become the guards. The men in charge were standing in small groups, smoking, rifles hanging on their shoulders. Mostly they laughed. Until someone approached the gate from inside or outside. Then they immediately turned serious. And the rifles came off their shoulders and into their hands.

Goran’s mother was inside, in what had been the school’s office, waiting to show their papers. A line of adults, backpacks on their shoulders and suitcases at their feet, extended outside and part way around the building.

On their first day in the camp, Goran and his younger brother Srdjan played football with other boys their age. There were Bosnian Serbs, Serbs, Bosniaks, and Catholic Croatians, as there always had been in Yugoslavia. Later that same day, Goran joined the group that was playing basketball on the outdoor court. They asked around where each was trying to go.

Germany, the US, Croatia for the Croats, Slovenia would do, Austria, the UK, Canada. One said Russia. The others laughed.

“That’s just trading one mafia state for another,” one of them said.

The rest of the time, Goran sat on a table outside reading and listening to his CD player, hoping his batteries would last.

His mother had no news at the end of the day.

“They just need to check a few things. The people inside are nice. We should be allowed out in a day or two.”

Her face was tense. Her lack of conversation over dinner in the school cafeteria told Goran it was not as easy as she was presenting it.

At night they slept on cots in the classrooms, the desks piled up and pushed to one side. They were divided into separate rooms: adult men, adult women, teenage boys, and teenage girls. Younger children slept with their mothers.

It was cool at night in the classroom but bearably so. There were enough blankets, and the guards and other staff were polite. Goran noticed that the adults spoke in hushed voices. The young people’s rooms buzzed with conversation like the dorm rooms at the state-sponsored summer camps he went to every year. Until the talk turned to what they had left behind and what would become of their homes.

The next day it rained. The young men, most of whom had played football outside the day before, were now crowded in the small indoor gymnasium. Goran joined one of the games for a short time, then made an excuse and dropped out when the players on the opposing team started to shove and curse every time they had the ball.

Once outside he found an empty picnic table and pushed it under an awning so that it was mostly shielded from the rain. He sat on top of the table and leaned against the wall of the school. He pressed play on his CD player. He was memorizing the lyrics to every song on U2’s Achtung Baby.

Goran’s eyes were closed when the girl came over to the table. He jumped slightly, embarrassed that he had been mouthing the words.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Do you mind if I sit here?”

“No, go ahead.”

“I’m tired of being in the room with all those girls. It’s either knitting, playing cards, or gossiping about boys they probably won’t see for a long time.”

“It’s basketball for us. One court and, like, eighty guys.”

“I’m Nikoleta, from Mostar.”

“I’m Goran, from Sarajevo.”

“You’re Serbian?”

She asked this as nonchalantly as if asking what his favorite color was, or which football team he followed.

“Guilty.”

“I’m Muslim. Not that it matters. Or it didn’t, before all this.”

“Where are you trying to go?”

“Germany. My father has a cousin there. But they don’t seem to want to take our papers. You?”

“US. My mother has an aunt there. But now my mom’s really tense. I can’t tell if it looks good or not.”

“What are you listening to?”

“U2.”

She smiled. He couldn’t tell if the smile meant she thought his choice of music was too obvious, or if she truly liked U2, or if she was just relieved it wasn’t one of the local nationalist, turbo-folk bands inciting war. The only thing he knew for sure about her smile is that it hinted at irreverence and self-assurance.

“May I?” she said and reached in the direction of his earphones.

“Here,” she continued, moving toward him so she could put one earpiece next to her ear and he could hold the other next to his.

“Which is your favorite?”

“It’s this one,” Goran said.

They listened to a few songs this way, their shoulders touching. Goran pressed the pause button when he saw the military vehicles pass on the road outside the school. Three tanks, two personnel carrier trucks filled with young men, some in uniform, some not, and two jeeps pulling cannons that looked to be from World War II creaked by.

Goran reached out to touch Nikoleta’s arm and she held on to his. She released it a moment later, then opened her knapsack and pulled out a drawing pad and a charcoal pencil.

“I draw when I get nervous, or anytime really.”

“I play guitar. Or I would if I could have brought one with me. That’s what I do when I get nervous. Or bored.”

He felt her gaze on him as he said this. It was then that Goran noticed her full lips and that Nikoleta was wearing lipstick, or maybe just that her lips were naturally red, and that her green eyes, reddish-brown hair, and pronounced cheekbones all went together.

The rain shifted from a light drizzle to a full-on downpour. Nikoleta put away her drawing pad as the water began to hit it. Even with the awning over them, the rain splashed off the roof and table and onto them. She reached to wipe the drops from Goran’s face. He recoiled slightly at the unexpected gesture and immediately wished he hadn’t. He knew she could tell how nervous he was.

“You’re cute with rain on your face,” she said.

“Should we get out of it?” he said.

“I know where,” she said.

He nodded.

“Those cars behind the school. No one’s ever there and we’ll be out of the rain. I’ll run first. Wait a minute or two, then come. You know, so no one sees us.”

Goran nodded again and she leapt off the table and ran around to the back of the school, out of his view. He waited a minute, put his CD player in his backpack, threw it over his shoulder and ran in the same direction. As he reached the rear of the school, he saw six cars. With the heavy rain he couldn’t tell which one she was in. He was getting more soaked with each second he spent outside.

Goran looked in the driver-side door of three of the cars, and then a fourth, and she wasn’t in any of them. He wondered for a moment if she had changed her mind and gone inside the school. Looking inside the fifth car, he still couldn’t see her. The door opened.

“Get in, quick,” she said.

It was a red Yugo with worn, black seats and Nikoleta was sitting in the passenger side in the front. It smelled faintly of gasoline and mildew. They looked at each other and at the steamed-up windows, and laughed.

“We haven’t done anything and they’re already fogged up,” she said.

Goran ran his hands through his hair to rub out the water.

“Play the song again, your favorite one. Translate the words for me.”

Goran knew this much: that while he was in the red Yugo with Nikoleta, his mother was inside the school, pleading, explaining, confirming details, desperate to get them out. That nearby, men were amassing weapons. That his relatives waited for word of his family’s fate. That in military barracks, plans were being drawn up for creating enclaves that separated Serbs from Bosniaks from Croatians. That in some camps like these, men and boys were being taken into the woods.

The rain let up slightly as dusk approached. Nikoleta leaned her head on Goran’s shoulder as he translated the lyrics for her a third time. She wanted to memorize the song. In a hushed voice, he sang the words to her.

They turned to face each other and he brushed her damp hair away from her face and ran his finger lightly across her lips. Goran wasn’t sure about this next part; he had limited experience. He believed the look she gave him was that of a woman asking to be kissed.

◆ ◆ ◆

About a year later, in the afternoon, in their small suburban house in Chicago, Goran found a box in his mother’s closet with a collection of her possessions from their previous life. Among them was a VHS tape called Lepota Poroka—Beauty of Sin. He recognized the lead actress: Mira Furlan. He remembered his mother speaking of her with admiration. The actress and her husband had left Yugoslavia a year before Goran’s family did. Goran recalled his father’s words.

Traitors. Too soft to stay and fight for their side. Intellectuals who make noise about what is right and wrong and then leave.

The film, made a few years before the war, tells the story of a couple from rural Montenegro, a place where a woman’s infidelity was once punishable by death. A peasant woman—played by Mira Furlan—gets a job as a maid in a nudist holiday resort on the Montenegrin coast.

The images of rural Montenegrin men mistreating women contrasted sharply with the modern, liberal Yugoslavia Goran remembered from his childhood. The scenes of a Western European couple who sexually liberate the beautiful Montenegrin peasant woman were erotic in a casual way that Goran seldomly saw in American films. Early in the film Mira Furlan’s character only makes love with her peasant husband while both are fully clothed and her husband covers her head with a black cloth. After her sexual liberation, Mira Furlan’s character refuses to have sex with her husband unless she can see and touch his body.

As he watched it, something else about the film caught Goran’s attention, a phrase used by the manager of the resort to get her workers to do their jobs. A classic Balkan insult: “You’re a goat.”

Goran remembered the phrase from his early education in Yugoslav swearing. Such insults were nothing. They were expressions to toss out and laugh about, verbal acrobatics with which to spar. He noticed the difference in the US, which had a much smaller offensive vocabulary. And he learned that in the US such words were much more likely to provoke a fight.

Occasionally, he and his brother Srdjan would trade insults in Serbian, many of which used the phrase your mother’s cunt. They both understood, as a puppy or a kitten learns the difference between a play bite and a real one, that these were not meant to be taken literally. Until the day that Srdjan brought up Nikoleta.

“Get over her, you goat, there is plenty of pička out there.”

Goran hated the way this sounded coming from his thirteen-year-old brother.

“How can you still think about that girl? You were a stupid fourteen-year-old who had barely left your pička materina. The smell was probably still on you.”

His brother laughed. Goran cursed back at him in their native Serbian.

Fuck you, stupid!

And: Go to the mountain and fuck goats!

And: Sereš na sve strane! You shit in every direction!

Srdjan laughed again, not taking Goran seriously. Then Goran said, in English: “Fuck off. Just fuck off.”

They both knew that when Goran switched to English, he was no longer playing.

The movie also made Goran think of Nikoleta. He imagined that she would grow up to be a woman like Mira Furlan, projecting the unguarded optimism that Goran thought he saw in Mira, a look that said she was open to whatever the world brought. Mira and Nikoleta also had similar reddish hair, green eyes, and movie-worthy cheekbones.

Goran thought about that evening in the red Yugo in the transit camp. He and Nikoleta had kissed for what felt like a long time. He remembered that when they started kissing it was dusk and when he looked up again it was night. In the dim light, Nikoleta unbuttoned her sweater and unhooked her bra and Goran touched her breasts. She undid her jeans and he slid his hand down her underwear. When they heard someone pass nearby, Goran quickly pulled his hands away. As he looked up at her in the faint light, he saw that Nikoleta’s eyes were wide open.

Samo za tebe, she said. Only for you.

Goran recalled that Nikoleta’s skin had felt so soft that it almost startled him, as if his fingers, calloused from his obsessive guitar-playing, might scratch her.

He also remembered the last days at home in Sarajevo before they had arrived at the transit camp. There had been shouting between his mother and father, more than usual. Objects were thrown. His parents had had one last argument. They made no effort to hide it from Goran and his brother.

You would have us stay and fight? You would risk that?

It’s the right side. It’s our country too. We can’t let them do this.

After all this country has been through, you believe there is a right side?

Go, if that’s what you want. I won’t stop you.

Will you join us?

I don’t know. I have my duty. What if we all left? Who would stay and fight for our side? Would you have us hand our country over to them?

Will you join us?

I don’t know, I told you. Do you know how long this war will last? Can you see into the future?

Will you join us?

I don’t know.

I need to know.

Will you wait for me if I stay here?

Why won’t you promise that you’ll join us?

Will you wait for me?

Will you?

I asked you.

…

No.

…

No.

You were just waiting for an excuse.

You were just waiting to give me one.

You fucking goat.

Looking back, Goran realized he couldn’t actually remember who called the other a fucking goat or which one accused the other of using the war as an excuse.

In his new bed in his new house in his new country, Goran often fell asleep thinking of the softness of Nikoleta’s lips on his cheek, and of her tongue lightly touching his ear as she said, when they finally had to leave the red Yugo: I won’t forget you. I promise. Find me.

Goran had been raised with enough cynicism to find this trite, and with enough realism to know better. He was moved, but skeptical of the romantic certainty in her voice. He had put his earphones on her and sung one last time.

Love is blindness

I don’t want to see

Won’t you wrap the night

Around me?

Oh my love

Blindness …

Goran was crying when his mother showed their papers to the men with guns at the camp gate and they were allowed to leave. Srdjan laughed at him.

“Look, Goran is crying. He met a girl and he had to leave her behind.”

They drove through the Serb-controlled region around Banja Luka and into Croatia, and then to Vienna where they sold their car for close to nothing, and then went to the US Embassy and got their papers to travel to the US.

Goran had given Nikoleta his father’s address in Sarajevo, and she had given him the address of her grandparents’ house in the countryside near Mostar. They knew it was likely a hopeless gesture but it would have felt unbearably sad to part without trying.

◆ ◆ ◆

There was no girl for many years who captivated Goran the way Nikoleta had. He was used to stuffed paprika, borek with yoghurt sauce, Turkish coffee, curse-filled conversations with lots of wine, adults who spoke with their hands and with big facial gestures, and going to smoke-filled cafes and outdoor restaurants at the end of the day. His first moment of understanding the mysteries of the female body had been in that red Yugo. How could suburban American girls compare to that?

He met girls in high school, of course. He was cute and articulate enough that they would allow him his few minutes to make his case. Some went out with him; some went out with him a few times. But it was always the girls he had no chance with that he obsessed about.

Girls like Isabella, whom he noticed in his world history class. In a discussion about World War II, he heard her tell a story about her grandfather, who had survived an internment camp for political dissidents in Italy. He thought he saw in Isabella’s eyes and felt in her voice that she might understand what the war in Yugoslavia meant.

Plus, he knew Isabella had a boyfriend, an inseparable, permanent boyfriend. The running joke was that they had been dating since pre-school. They stayed in their circle of two most of the time and were so nice, beautiful, and good in all they did that no one seemed to care.

He walked out behind her that day when she mentioned her grandfather’s experience in World War II and started a conversation. He guessed he had about three minutes before her boyfriend would appear.

“Do you still have family in Italy? Like, who survived the war? Sounds like it was hard for them.”

Isabella looked at Goran as if he were speaking another language.

“I never even knew my grandfather. He died before I was born. My mother just talks about that sometimes and what happened to him.”

Goran nodded.

“Yeah, I just … um,” he started. “My family had to leave Yugoslavia because of the war and, so, your grandfather’s story made me think about that, you know.”

“Oh,” she said, pursing her lips as if chewing imaginary bubble gum. She turned away, her eyes scanning the hallway.

Goran imagined dozens of gestures he might have tried and things he might have said. He imagined reaching his arm out to hold hers as he had with Nikoleta. He imagined handing Isabella his earphones to listen to his new favorite R.E.M. song. He imagined mimicking Michael Stipe’s dance moves and making Isabella smile. For that one moment his most urgent desire was to know what it would take to make her truly look at him, to whisper something sweet and secretive in his ear.

Isabella smiled the smile that girls learn to extricate themselves from unwanted advances and walked off without saying any more. Goran thought about her for several days, weeks even, discretely watching her, imagining what it might be like to be with her.

◆ ◆ ◆

A few years later, Goran wrote his senior thesis at university on the Yugoslav War. He found articles about the social construction of masculinities in the Balkans and used those to come up with his own reflections on masculinity, xenophobia, and homophobia. He did rudimentary research on Balkan newspaper articles and popular music with nationalistic messages from the time of the war. He graduated with honors and his advisor suggested he continue this research in graduate school.

With a scholarship letter confirming funds for his doctorate, he decided to use his savings to travel to Bosnia to see his father. The war was over, and although ethnic tensions were alive and well, it was safe to travel there. He called his mother to get information on how to contact his father.

“I think he’s still in Sarajevo, last I heard of him. Still in the military, or maybe working with the government, I think. Are you sure you want to go …”

“I thought he fought with the Serbs. I thought he would be in Serbia or at least in the Republika Srpska.“

His mother was silent, then responded.

“No, he stayed in Sarajevo.”

“My father’s a Serb from Sarajevo who fought on the side of the Bosnian armed forces against the Serbs in the war?”

“You remember that he worked in the education ministry before the war? Then he was drafted by the Serbian Army when the war started, back when it was still called the Yugoslavian Army.”

“Yeah, I know that part.”

“He joined the Bosnian side. He thought it was the right thing to do. That he was from Sarajevo and should stay and fight for Sarajevo.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me that?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Because he wasn’t on the side that was carrying out mass rape and slaughtering civilians. He didn’t buy into the ethnic bullshit that fueled the war.”

“Do you think they were growing flowers and raising baby rabbits on the Bosniak side?” she said.

“You know it’s not the same.”

“When you have two teenage sons who you want to keep safe, it’s the same. If we had stayed, assuming we made it through the siege of Sarajevo, you would have been drafted. Do you think I cared which side your father was on? Have you ever stopped to think about why I did that? Bring you and Srdjan to the US?”

Goran was silent on the other end of the phone. He rarely spoke back to her because he knew she would throw this question at him.

“It matters to me which side he was on. Of course it matters which side he was on. You should have told me,” he stammered.

“You never asked.”

“I just thought …”

He stopped. The words passed through Goran’s head but he didn’t say them. You’re both fucking goats. You and my father.

“Goran …”

He hung up.