Yugonostalgia

Joe and I were sitting at the table on the front terrace of his house. Plump feathery clouds perched lazily on the hill across from us; the hawk was up there doing his usual thing. I could see the barn below us and the massive walnut tree that blocked off a view of the old house in which Štefek and Mila had lived.

“They’re all gone now,” I remarked.

“Life doesn’t go on forever—what do you think?”

“I wasn’t just talking about the swallows,” I said. He had told me that the son-in-law, the one who had stolen the apple I’d saved for my grandmother back in 1977, had boarded up the hole in the barn through which the swallows had used to fly when the big sliding door was shut. And now that the ditch had been covered over and the pipes put in to transport water from Samobor, there was no water for the swallows. They had moved on.

“I was talking about the people.”

“I know that.”

“There’s only Jana left.”

“That’s right.”

“Of the people here who knew you when you were a kid, I meant.”

“That’s right.”

“What do you feel about that?”

He thought for a moment. “Nothing. What else is supposed to happen?”

He wasn’t sentimental about it. Unlike me, he didn’t concern himself with thoughts of the waning number of people who knew him as a boy, his ever-growing isolation from his own childhood.

“It’s a different country now, a different life,” I said. “Do you think it’s better?”

He stopped to think. “Sure, it’s better, but how much better I don’t know.”

Croatia’s entry into the European Union in 2013 had had some positive consequences, like funds for urban renewal projects, subsidies for farmers, and duty-free exports into the European market. On the other hand, there was high unemployment and emigration of educated youth to other E.U. states. Right now, people were proud to be Croatian, and there was no going back to the old Yugoslav days. Yet somehow there had been a rise in Yugonostalgia.

For example, in 2017 there had been blowback among some politicians, journalists and ordinary Croatians about a decision by the cities of Karlovac and Zagreb to rename streets and squares still dedicated to former president Tito, thirty-seven years after his death and twenty-six years after Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia.

“I guess some people think Yugoslavia wasn’t so bad,” I said.

“Not so bad. But not so good,” he laughed.

“Those politicians who call themselves anti-fascists say fascism is on the rise.”

He smiled that wicked smile of his. “In this country, they think anyone against communism is bad, is a fascist. They call themselves anti-fascists because they don’t want to use the word ‘communist’ anymore.”

“Why did it take so long to change the street names?” I asked.

“There were old communists in power before, so no one made a change,” said Joe, “even at the beginning of the new Croatia. These politicians said they were nationalists then, but they didn’t want to say goodbye to Tito. It’s finally time to get rid of him.”

There was more going on in Croatia than a revival or suppression of Tito in the interests of political advantage. Not everyone I knew in northern Croatia felt things were better now than they were in Yugoslavia. It wasn’t Tito some people missed but a way of life gone for good. And that didn’t only mean lost job security, or the dwindling of farm life, that old family vineyards were disappearing, like the one Miško had decided to cut down because he was too old to do the work any longer, and his son was unwilling to carry on, the vineyard my grandfather and his brothers had planted at the start of the twentieth century. When I thought of the brothers digging the long trenches, imagining that all their work would come to something, when I considered that my grandfather hardly had a chance to enjoy the fruits of his labour before his life was cut short in the war, before he even met his own son, his brother dying soon after of tuberculosis, it bothered me that Miško had had that pleasure instead, although yes, I know, he did work for decades. It wasn’t like he was gifted something, and I know the vines were not all the same, yet I felt Miško had been disloyal to them when he cut down the vineyard.

What people missed about Yugoslavia was also the camaraderie and collective spirit that was no more. My thoughts went back to my early years in Yugoslavia, the work people did in the fields together, the conversations and jokes and gossip, the post-haying get-togethers with gemišt, all the collective labour over a lifetime, the closeness of neighbours. My wife recalled some of her own experiences, “When I was a little girl, women would pluck the slaughtered chickens to make pillows and blankets. They spread the feathers on the table and separated the fluff from the quills and the women sang while they worked. I can hear them now. It’s a fond memory of my childhood.”

Emblematic of this tightness between the people in Yugo-slavia coming to an end was the strange falling out between Jana’s husband Dragec and Milivoj, their big neighbour in Dol. Something happened that even the neighbours I spoke to over the years didn’t know about, a secret acrimony that festered for fifteen years and caused the two men never to speak again. I wanted to ask Dragec what had happened but always thought better of it. In his last years he was bedridden. Hip-replacement surgery and wounds on his legs that never healed, which Jana had to treat every day, kept him in the bedroom downstairs. His mind was still lively, though. He could tell stories, crack jokes, knew all about the politics and sports of the day. If I came to visit, he allowed himself a glass of wine and let loose on some issue or other and enjoyed a good laugh. So having a mind that worked was a godsend from a certain point of view. However, for Dragec, having a sharp mind was a double-edged sword because he knew all too well his hopeless situation. When I think back to him and Milivoj after a session of haying, sitting at the table by the outdoor kitchen and drinking wine and talking, the friendship still intact, the friendly wine flowing, I know it was a better time. Veliki dečec! Big Boy.

Joe and I were working one morning on the slate tiles of the driveway, which drew the attention of a neighbour, who came over to chat. Milovan was a sixty-year-old interpreter by profession who told us he’d just finished translating the most recent Spider Man flick for the Croatian cinemas. Joe and I had been discussing the street names again.

“You have it wrong,” Milovan told me in English, “This feeling for the past has nothing to do with Yugoslavia versus Croatia. It has everything to do with the economy. The average person is worse off than before. The economy is 1,000% worse. You just cannot get ahead today. Simply cannot. Employment among youth is high. Maybe it is improving, I grant you that, but you are faced with the choice of living here with a doubtful future or leaving. That is what the new Croatia is.”

Thinking more about how good Yugoslavia was, Milovan went on, “There were freedoms. You could travel out of the country whenever you wished, for example. That is not any different than today.”

“Hold on,” Joe said, “I couldn’t just leave the country in the 1960s. There was not this freedom that you say. I had to escape to get out!”

“Well, you were young and hadn’t done your military service. But by the late ’60s it was different for the public. Things had loosened up.”

Generally, he was right, but not all parts of the former country were so liberated. The island of Vis was a military island closed to all outside traffic until 1989. And at least into the 1960s if residents wanted to leave, they had to do so secretly. Many tried to escape by sea in the night and many were caught; some were killed.

Yugonostalgics tended to overlook other obvious problems with their former country. Unless you were a bigshot communist insider, striking it rich was impossible. There were jobs, but the pay wasn’t great and there was never really enough work; factory labourers often finished their quota after only six hours, then would sit around playing cards for the remaining two. Service across the board was rude and slow. Saleswomen in state-owned department stores preferred smoking and talking to serving customers. At the border you could run into trouble if you ran across the wrong guard. My father with his Canadian passport and Croatian last name drew the ire of the Serbian-born police who didn’t like it that he was a Yugoslav emigrant; they made him wait and then rifled through all his suitcases. A similar thing happened to me travelling by train from Paris to Zagreb in 1989, when my passport was taken at the Yugoslav border in Slovenia, and I was asked to step out into the cold winter day and wait outside the control office, inside which I could see the passports piled together and waiting beside the guard’s still steaming coffee.

My wife said that when she was a young girl in the early 1980s there were nestašice. During these shortages, stores would run out of things like sugar or coffee, and when news spread of an incoming supply somewhere, everyone would swarm to the location. Around 1982, there were blackouts every third night from eight until eleven.

Nevertheless, there were plenty of pro-Yugoslav communists still around. Miško had been one. I remember the small golden bas-relief of Tito in the hallway of his house. On the same day we had spoken to Milovan, Miško stopped by to borrow my father’s sit-down lawnmower, and we had a chat. “I was a member of the Party, yes, for a few years, but then I quit when the fees became too high and I wasn’t getting anything out of it.” He spoke a little sheepishly as thought he were embarrassed. Asked whether he thought about life back then, he said, “Some things were definitely better. Everyone had work, that was the big thing.” But when I wondered whether he would like to go back, he said flatly, “Not a chance. The Serbs controlled too much.” This was a familiar refrain in Croatia today. There might be nostalgia for Yugoslavia, but it didn’t run deep enough to become a full-blown movement.

Joe and I sat outside a while longer, then later in the evening went upstairs to watch the semi-final between England and Croatia. It was the year of Croatia’s run to the World Cup Finals. People’s spirit and pride of country were high. A guy down the street in Srebrnjak had started off the tournament by grilling pork chops before Croatia’s first game, then had gone gastronomically bigger with each successive win, marking the occasion of the semi-final by roasting a whole pig! Croatian flags hung off balconies and were wrapped around the mirrors of cars and families gathered in their yards for barbecues hours before each match.

The game turned out to be oddly analogous to Croatia’s uneven progress out of the gate after independence. England had the advantage 1–0 after the first half, but increasingly Croatia improved. First Ivan Perišić stabbed in a cross with his left foot to equalize and then Mario Mandžukić slipped into the box during extra time and slid home the winner. We went crazy. I leaped out of my chair and screamed. Joe spilled his wine. When I pulled open the slider and ran out onto the back terrace, I could see fireworks and flares above the hills and hear gunfire somewhere in Molvice. Pop-pop-pop-pop. A rumble like thunder seemed to shake the ground and I sent a barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the valley.