Srebrnjak Winter

When I flew into Zagreb in December 1992, I saw the ominous, disconcerting sight of hundreds of crows huddled in a huge black mass on the far side of the tarmac. They had gathered against the cold and the snow and from time to time they rose en masse and landed somewhere else. Yugoslavia was dead and a new Croatia had been born. The “log revolution” in Knin in 1990, which had seemed comedic at first, had turned very serious. Propaganda directed at Serbs inside Croatia about the allegedly imminent threat of the new nationalist Croatian government, led by Franjo Tuđman, fomented rebellion and war. Vukovar fell in 1991. A third of Croatian territory was seized by Serb-led paramilitaries supported by the Yugoslav National Army (JNA, Jugoslavenska narodna armija). The war in Croatia would spread even more violently in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

So, it seemed a natural time to go on a holiday to Croatia, or at least that was the conclusion reached by Joe. No one besides him thought it was a good idea. I was halfway through my Ph.D. at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton by then, and classmates thought I was crazy for going. “You’re crazy,” one of them told me, a young guy with curly black hair who tried to impress me by telling me his habit every January of not drinking in order to prove to himself he wasn’t an alcoholic at the age of twenty-one. “I mean you’re going into a war zone! You have to ask yourself one question—do I feel lucky? Well, do you?”

Joe himself had reasons to go to Croatia in the middle of a war. Being with his Croatian family was, I think, a means of grounding himself again after his separation. Every morning he came down to the kitchen of the Srebrnjak house wearing a silk suit, silk tie and pointy leather shoes as though he were going out to a formal dinner. One suit was a shiny silver that glistened in the light, and one tie, which he wore without a trace of inhibition, had a pattern of red and blue soap bubbles, and was garishly out of sync with his refined silk suits. However, he was confident and immune to my mockery. He spent most of his day in the kitchen, which smelled heavily of burning wood and food cooking on the stove, like žganci or smoked sausages or blood sausages or a piece of pork already in the oven for our midday meal, with a glass of wine in front of him.

Other than conversations with people in the house, Joe’s only other entertainment was watching the news about the war, or whatever documentary was on about Croatian cultural practices like grandma so-and-so’s cheese-making in Slavonia. There was a lot of this in the new Croatia. The language, culture and history of the country were bound up more than ever with national pride. I was told that people had rediscovered the Catholic Church, went more often to Sunday mass, christened their newborns again, etc.—things they had done during the communist period, true, but that now intensified. I didn’t notice this emphasis on religion among the people in Srebrnjak but there was a great deal of focus on the war effort and the news broadcasts, which we all gathered around to watch on the grainy black-and-white TV.

The front was fifty kilometres south, in Karlovac. I hadn’t heard any of the fighting nor was I afraid, even though I knew that some bombs had hit Zagreb in the early days of the war and there had been a few skirmishes at the nearby Yugoslav army barracks at one point. Croatia was re-armed after the JNA had confiscated all of its weapons in 1990, so the likelihood of war in Srebrnjak, so near the capital, was low. For me, the ordinariness of every day in Srebrnjak, my history there and all my good memories, made the chances of all that coming to an end seem impossible.

It was very cold at night, and the small wood-burning stove upstairs in the hallway didn’t heat well, and I wore a toque, socks, and multiple layers of clothing to bed. When I took a pee, the steam rose from the toilet’s basin. I dreaded having to sit on the cold ceramic. Every two days I got a bucket of dried corncobs and started a fire for a shower. If I made the fire strong enough there would be enough warm water in the morning to wash my hair. As I found out, it was a bad idea to use cold water to wash your hair in the winter in Srebrnjak. But the one aspect of our fortnight in Croatia that winter that I wished I could have changed from the get-go was having to share a bed with Joe. Talk about someone not being your first choice. One night, I had a bizarre experience of falling into a deep sleep and then dreaming, dreaming of a woman with me in bed, beautiful and enticing, but upon throwing my arm around her in an ecstasy of anticipation, something inside me woke me in a fright, and I realized I was hugging my father instead!

We hadn’t rented a car for our stay. Even though Miško was willing to take us wherever we wanted to go, he worked all day and normally didn’t arrive until the afternoon. Sometimes he showed up with a student in tow and drove us somewhere. Not having a car was significant because it kept us in the kitchen, the only heated room in the house, most of the day. This was bad for Joe because he drank too much, but it was good for me because it forced me into the hills on long walks. For the first few days the brown valley with its spectral and skeletal trees was hard to adjust to. I was so accustomed to the green summer in Srebrnjak, and my eyes had to accommodate themselves to the sparseness of the country. I could see farther now that the leaves were gone. I saw things I hadn’t noticed before, like an abandoned nineteenth-century house in the upper valley that had once belonged to wealthy landowners from Samobor. The familiar sounds of summer had disappeared. Instead there was mainly silence, broken now and again by a dog barking or someone chopping wood. Smoke from stoves going all day filled the crisp air. I saw the thin grey lines rising and unfurling from kitchen chimneys and from barns, in which people were distilling šljivovica. The frozen ground crunched under my boots, but when the temperature climbed just a few degrees the earth grew soft and my boots got heavy with brown clayish mud. There was a lot of this clay in the upper hills of the valley from the topsoil having washed down over the years. As I walked through the orchards, I saw perfectly preserved apples that had gone unnoticed on the cold ground. Squished on the road in the upper part of Srebrnjak, where water in the ditches still flowed from a spring somewhere, were speckled black and yellow salamanders.

The big changes in the area since I’d been here last didn’t have to do with the time of year, but with the arrival of capitalism in the new Croatia. This was most noticeable in the form of small stores that had popped up in the area. I remember my astonishment at the array of new enterprises, especially with the products on the shelves. When before you went into the state-owned stores—SAMA or NAMA—and walked down the aisle where there were shaving supplies, for example, you had a choice of Ralon or Pino Silvestre aftershave and little else, but now all of a sudden Gillette and you name it had made inroads. When before there was just Yugoslav beer, now there were other options like Heineken or Tuborg, not to mention foreign hard liquors like Jack Daniel’s, Canadian Club, and the like. Other new businesses had sprung up, such as the stone and ceramic tile company on the highway towards Samobor that sold imported slabs from all over the world, and a chic marble-floored café in Brezje with ceiling mirrors and black steel furnishings—a total anomaly in the countryside.

As I write I’m reminded of an incident in this bar a few years later, which proved that the shiny arrival of new commerce hadn’t yet changed the bad service one used to get in Yugoslavia. I’d shown up at the café one afternoon wearing a canvas safari hat I’d bought at Canadian Tire, which prompted the waitress, a tall raw-boned blonde, to ask as soon as I stepped inside, “Where did you come from, cowboy?” The beer she served me was already open; she’d removed the cap from the half-litre bottle, and when I took a sip, I noticed a plastic spoon inside. I put the bottle back on the table and looked at it for a moment as various thoughts went through my mind. Besides the waitress, who I later discovered was also the owner, I was the only person in the bar. I waved her over and pointed out the spoon in the beer. I asked for my money back, and she said, “Why should you get your money back when you drank from this beer?” I told her I had only taken a sip before I noticed the spoon and that I didn’t want to drink a beer with a spoon inside it. If she suspected I was a foreigner when she first saw me, then she confirmed her suspicions on hearing my accent and botched declinations. My memory of the incident ends there. I can’t remember any longer whether I got my money back or got a new beer or got nothing. If I got a new beer, if I continued to sit there drinking it slowly, nursing it and enjoying her fuming, then I sure as hell hope I asked for an opener to crack off the cap myself!

On those winter walks in 1992, I normally went by myself. However, on one occasion the boy across the street came with me. He was Marko’s grandson, who lived in the big new house Marko had constructed recently. The boy was the son of Marko’s daughter, Zdenka, she being one of the two sisters who’d played with me back in 1969 and from whom I learned my first Croatian. He started showing up every day while we were visiting. I think he might have been drawn to me because I paid attention to him, talked about sports, and played soccer with him in the field outside the front door where I myself used to play in 1977. He seemed lonely. He was a biggish kid of about eleven, with ruddy healthy cheeks and big feet and hands, which for sure he inherited from his father, a Muslim from Bosnia whom no one seemed to talk about. He had lost most of his right foot when he stepped on a mine, though some people say he shot himself. The boy’s father was gone a lot of the time for work, so maybe I was replacing the dad at some level. I don’t know.

This I do remember very clearly. We were all watching the news one late morning, and the boy was there too. A report showed a Muslim paramilitary warlord (and former gangster) in Bosnia with the nom de guerre Juka (Jusuf Prazina). He and his militia were training in the snow, wearing black jumpsuits that had JUKA stitched on the front. The black-and-white TV gave this picture of tough insurgents the look of a World War II documentary and made them resemble the Partisans of that period. War often produces men like Tito or Juka who have constructed outsized and mythical personae out of modest and, in the case of Juka, criminal, pasts. Juka had grown up a troubled kid in an impoverished family, and by his own reckoning had spent more time behind bars than at home. In time, he built a debt-collecting enterprise in Sarajevo that led to him and his men brutalizing delinquent debtors by mangling their fingers or disfiguring their faces. When the war started, his gang of 300 became useful to the poorly armed defence forces of Sarajevo, and his pre-war criminality was overlooked by the Muslim-controlled government, so that he was named head of the Bosnian army’s special forces. With his distinctive equine and lantern-jawed face, he became a noticeable figure; he was a hero to Sarajevans, and a patriotic Robin Hood to the foreign press. But his ongoing criminal activity, including privately beneficial collaborations with Republika Srpska officials, cocaine addiction, petulant narcissism, and ambition to climb the ranks of the Bosnian military led to a call for his arrest. Juka retreated to Mt. Igman, where he continued his criminal ways and where he joined the Croatian forces to fight the Bosnian army. Labelled a traitor by some, and with only two hundred of his most loyal men on Mt. Igman with him, he saw the writing on the wall, retreated to the Dalmatian coast, and eventually to Belgium, where he was discovered in a ditch by two Romanian hikers in 1993, dead of “lead poisoning” as a report in Vreme put it—two bullets in the head.

The footage of Juka we saw in Christmas 1992 appeared to have been from his time on Mt. Igman during his rapprochement with Bosnian-Croatian forces. That was why Croatian TV was showing a documentary about him. Miško, who had taken a break from his driving instructor work, and was watching the broadcast with us, wasn’t impressed by the heroic persona of Juka. He thought Juka was an opportunist who was temporarily useful to the Croatian cause, which at that time was unification of Croatian parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina with Croatia proper. Miško had no sympathy for Juka’s Muslim soldiers. When the Serbs attacked Vukovar, the Muslims in general hadn’t take a stand against that aggression, he pointed out. “But now that the Serbs are raping their women,” he said, “aahhh, now they run to us for help. Well, to hell with them.”

The boy’s reaction to the story about Juka was different. He smashed his fist on the table and screamed, “We have to explode the Serbs!” His face turned red, and he looked wildly around at us. Mila told him, “Hush, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She went to the cabinet and took out a package of Napolitanke wafers and put them in front of him. “Have one,” she said. I remember pondering the possible conditions and influence at the boy’s home that might have produced this reaction. If, indeed, anything or anyone influenced him.

The documentary about Juka was followed by a report about the U.N. presence in Bosnia. There were images of newly arrived peacekeepers carrying supplies into a building. A shell landed somewhere nearby, causing them to duck their heads and scurry into the building. Everyone in the kitchen laughed. Štefek said, “So this is who they’re sending. First they sanction weapons so we can’t defend ourselves, then they send cowards like this to protect us.”

The next piece showed a crew from Britain’s Sky News visiting a Serb unit in the hills above Sarajevo. They were drinking šljivovica and singing patriotic songs. When they noticed the cameras, they waved their guns menacingly and the journalists fled. Later, the journalists visited a friendlier group of Serbs who invited them to sit and chat. “We are tired of this war, this killing,” one of them said. “We want to go home to our families. We have nothing against the Croats or Muslims. We only want to protect our people.”

“These Serbs are okay,” Miško said. “But even they talk about protecting their people. They see pictures on television, and they think we are all butchers. Ustaša butchers.”

So, these were the sorts of conversations we had in Srebrnjak and elsewhere during this trip. We were on holiday, true, but disturbing stories began to reach me even here on the periphery of the war. Soon after arriving, I found out that even where there was no war there were war victims. Guns had flooded the black market, so accidental deaths and killings and suicides had spiked. There was Slavko Jakopač’s son, Ivek, “The Moth,” who was shot in the chest at a drunken party. The boy’s aunt, his mother’s sister, Milena whom I’d played with back in 1969, bought the pistol she carried in her purse for two months before apparently shooting herself late one evening at her boyfriend’s apartment.

The worst case I heard of took place the next year. Tea’s friend, Natalija, the black-haired girl who accompanied her on those walks in 1988 and whom I met on the road once, was murdered by her boyfriend, a young man without much going for him who had moved into the house with her and her parents. This choice of hers, the direction her whole life had gone, might have been some sort of psychologically complicated reaction to and rebellion against her upbringing. Her father was very proper and strict. As the story goes, her father laid down a hard law with her, tried to control her, forbade her certain things. But he was an honourable man too, they say, an ethnic Serb who had experienced persecution when the war started. With his daughter, it seemed that his strictness had had the exact opposite effect on her. Natalija rebelled and gravitated to the sex trade and had been working in a massage parlour. The father’s decision to allow the boyfriend into his house turned out to be a fateful one, for the boyfriend strangled Natalija in the yard after she refused to quit her job. He then crept into the bedroom of the parents and hacked them to death with an axe. He hesitated, though, as he stood above the baby in the crib. He was unsure about killing her too, and just stood there for a moment. Without parents or grandparents, he thought, she would be without family and would end up in institutions, and that would be no life. It was mercy, he decided, that forced his hand. He took a knife and stabbed her through the chest. The blade went right through her into the mattress. But she didn’t make a sound, he said at his trial.

Our vacation in Christmas 1992 occurred during a very dark period in Croatia’s history, and I felt the reverberations in Srebrnjak during our visit. I felt ready to go back to my life at grad school, and I can say it is the only time I was happy to be leaving Srebrnjak.

But before I left, I took one last walk down the road to Brezje. I wanted to see the young woman I’d met in 1988, the one with whom I’d gone on that walk to Marija Magdalena. I knew she lived in the little wooden house on the road. But that was all I knew. Four and a half years had gone by. I wasn’t sure she would even be there anymore. When I got a closer look at the house, it struck me as the worst one in the entire area, worst in the sense of poorest or most impoverished. It was a mainly wooden structure in the style of the oldest two-room peasant houses like the one my father was born in, with a meandering brick addition on the front. I didn’t know it then, but the house where the murder took place was right next door. There was also a sloppily built barn made of wood and sheet metal that was three times the size of the house. I opened the gate, walked across the muddy yard to the front door and knocked. No one answered at first, so I knocked again. There was no car in the yard. Finally, the door swung open, forcing me to step back out of its way. The same curly blonde woman with green eyes faced me. I recognized her right off, but I wasn’t sure she knew me. Even after I told her who I was I wasn’t sure she remembered me. Her face expressed vacant disinterest. She seemed to look right through my body. What conversation we had I don’t remember, but I know our conversation lasted only a minute or two and then ended, and that she never moved from the half open door and didn’t invite me inside.