The Ministry of Pain (8 page)
Pull your pants down, love, it’s no holds barred.
All the way from Frankfurt I’ve been hard.
- 6. The icon of Yugoslav consumerism of the eighties was the train to Trieste. It was a train loaded with black market goods: jeans, coffee, rice, olive oil, T-shirts, briefs, panties—you name it. The peak of the Trieste shopping spree coincided with Tito’s death. Tito died at the age of eighty-eight, and one of the ways the event was marked was by a flurry of agricultural activity: one community
planted “eighty-eight roses for Comrade Tito,” another “eighty-eight birches for Comrade Tito,” and so on. Hence the Gypsy joke: A customs official on the train from Trieste asks a Gypsy, “What have you got in those sacks?” The Gypsy responds without missing a beat, “Eighty-eight Levi’s for Comrade Tito.” - 7. The last Yugoslav train was “the blue train” that carried Tito’s body along the Ljubljana-Zagreb-Belgrade line to be buried in Belgrade’s House of Flowers. Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs flanking the tracks paid homage to “the greatest son of the Yugoslav peoples and nationalities.” And the years of Yugoslav “brotherhood and unity” were immortalized in powerful lines like:
In the railway tunnel, in the dark.
Our five-pointed red star makes its mark
.
- 8. The breakup of Yugoslavia and the war it engendered trace their origins to the historic day when the Krajina Serbs in Croatia blocked the Zagreb–Split line with boulders and put an end to train service for several years
. - 9. The Zagreb–Split line was reopened several years ago. It took the train, baptized “the Freedom Train,” an entire day to make the trip, which was broadcast live on Croatian TV. The reason the Freedom Train took so long was that the Croatian prime minister got off at every whistle-stop to make a speech. Meanwhile the Serbs we chased out of the Krajina made their way to Serbia on foot, by bus or car, by tractor or horse-drawn cart, by anything but the train
. - 10. Last but not least, one of the best arguments that Serbian and Croatian are different languages and that the war was accordingly a historical necessity is likewise train-related,
namely, that the very word for
train
differs in the two, the Croats calling it
vlak
, the Serbs
voz
.
IGOR: HORROR AND HORTICULTURE
(Comments on Yugoslav poetry by my friend Mikac after looking through the
New Anthology of Yugoslav Poetry
[Zagreb, 1966] I lent him)
They’re all there: Serbs, Croats, Macedonians, Slovenes. There aren’t any Bosniosi or Montenegrins or, rather, there are, but they don’t have their own sections. The biggest eye-opener for me was reading the Slovenes in Slovenian and the Macedonians in Macedonian. Sans translation.
Okay, I said to myself, let’s see what the old folks at home were reading before you were a twinkle in their eye. So out comes the calculator—you know, like in the marketplace, Dolac, say: What are your eggs going for today, love?—and do the arithmetic. Out of the 173 poets in the anthology, 56 are Serb, 62 Croat, 40 Slovene, and 16 Macedonian. Okay. Cool. So then I count up the females. The Serbs have 1, the Croats 3, the Slovenes 2. That makes 167 guys and 6 gals. And of those 6, 1 was so browbeaten she wrote under a male pseudonym. Another thing I picked up along the way is that our poets are so name-conscious they prefer three to two, like those partisan heroes they name schools after, so you see a name like Jure Frani
evi
-Ploar or Milenko BrkoviCrni and you can’t tell who is the man of the pen and who the man of the sword. The same holds for the current crop of wannabe Nazis: they’re heavy into triple names, too. They really get off on them, the longer the better. Which makes me wonder if they’re not trying to make up for an anatomical defect, you know, down where a centimeter or two can make a world of difference. Oh,
and something else. Our poets have a thing about dedicating poems to one another. Know what I mean? Like one guy chatting up another. Need I say more?
Anyway, on we go. And surprise, surprise! Circa fifty percent of their output is about mama or the mamaland. Which kind of turns mamaland into mama. And vice versa. Whereupon they boo-hoo-hoo over both. Fucking unreadable, let me tell you. Oh, and then circa ten percent is made up of these horror stories, I mean literally, graves and tombs and that shit. Man, it really traumatized me. I mean, our poets are a bunch of fucking ghouls, always digging up some enemy or other. One of them marks out his territory (“This is the ground where my dead are sown”) and then picks up his shovel (“I summon you, my shades”). You fucking body snatcher, I think. You’d put the fear of God into Stephen King, you would. And just as I’m getting over it, what do I see but
O mirrors of horror! Show scenes without gallows or noose! “Blood! Blood!” screams my blood in this land of Croatians ill used
.
Shit!
But onward. To the ten percent belonging to what I would call the megalomaniac or me-me-me poems, poems where the guys talk one-on-one with the stars, the universe, like “If man you be, walk tall beneath the sky”—that shit. Poems where every man’s a fucking superman
.
Okay. Fine. Next category: the twenty percent that sing the beauties of nature, you know, the seasons, rainfall, crap like that. You’d think they were a bunch of—what was the name of that Serbian weatherman?—right, a bunch of Kamenko Katies. Our freaks are into flora a lot more than fauna. True, I did find one poem about a calf, but I didn’t get it till the end.
At first I thought it was about this hot little number—the language was nice and sexy—and then in the middle of it all comes this line about dung…. But to get back to the flora. There were all kinds of poems about fucking trees—aspens, willows, poplars, oaks. After all the horror stuff I was surprised our guys had a thing for flowers—lilies of the valley, pansies, roses, cyclamen. I didn’t think horror and horticulture went together. Though one guy had something about bloody cyclamen
.
How much does that make altogether? Ninety percent? Okay. So then I went through them with a fine-tooth comb on the lookout for sex. Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a feather: our guys don’t care shit about sex. It jumps right out at you. No calculator necessary. Believe me, the only time they can write about a woman is when she’s dead and buried. It’s like they can hardly wait for the gal to bite the dust so they can write a poem about her. The sadder the better. Like the Dalmatians, for Christ’s sake. You know the poem:
I saw you last night. In my dreams. Sad. Dead.
In the fated hall midst an idyll of flowers.
On a lofty bier midst the throes of the candles.
Of course you do. We had to learn it in school. Well, the same necrophiliac wrote:
I know not what thou art: art thou woman or hyena?
Shit! Did that guy get my goat! I mean, what’s the point if you can’t even tell a woman when you see one. And then there was the guy who couldn’t find a place to bury his broad (“Where can I bury you, O my love, now that you’re gone?”) and the guy—the more I read, the more they pissed me off—who was
away for so long that by the time he got back his girl had kicked the bucket:
But when I arrived,
I found you no more.
What did he come back for, the shithead? And then there was another one we had in school, remember?
Love may yet come, befall us yet, I say,
But do I wish it or wish it away?
That always made my blood boil. Your problem ain’t whether you want to, pal; it’s whether you can! So pack up your wares and get a move on. I’m not buying.
They’re a bunch of sickos, our poets. And not only the ones in the anthology. There hasn’t been a sound mind among them in the past two hundred years or however long they’ve been at it. Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Macedonians—it makes no difference. Old farts all. You don’t need a calculator to tell you that.
UROš: I WISH I WERE A NIGHTINGALE
During our second year in elementary school the teacher assigned us a composition about Tito. Tito had had a leg cut off, she told us, and was recovering from the operation. It would make him happy if we wrote something nice. I wrote I wished I were a nightingale so I could fly to Comrade Tito’s hospital bed every morning and wake him with my song. The teacher praised me to the skies and read my composition to the class. My classmates made fun of me. They called me the nightingale. “Hey, here comes the nightingale,” they would
shout with a guffaw. When my family heard about the composition, they made fun of me, too, especially my old man. Then, not long afterward, Tito died, and my old man cried and the whole family sat in front of the TV for the three days of the funeral and cried. The thing that impressed them most was all the foreign dignitaries attending the funeral. “All those famous people,” my old lady said. They had a good time pointing out the announcers’ mispronunciations of the statesmen’s and celebrities’ names. But when I said that Margaret Thatcher’s name is Thatcher, not Tratcher, my old man said, “That’s enough out of you, Nightingale. Go and get me a bottle of beer from the fridge. And, mind you, don’t drop it from your beak!” Which got a big laugh out of everybody.
Yugoslavia was a terrible place. Everybody lied. They still lie of course, but now each lie is divided in five, one per country.