name I call myself – Rusty – in private.
Immediately after the war, through an exchange of volunteers, a precocious first-year student from Heidelberg ended up among us. He had come to interview us for their student radio station about the post-war life of young people in Croatia.
‘You live in a multicultural country...’ he began.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said into the dictaphone, distinctly, as though it was a microphone.
‘Oh, I knows what he means,’ my sister butted in. ‘There’s various nations here, at least two nations in every house in our street, but it’s all the same mangy culture, if you asks me. Only the Chinese can save us from boredom.’
My sister had her own way of being imbued with the spirit of internationalism.
‘Eh,’ said my sister to the lad from Heidelberg, slapping him on the shoulder in a comradely way, ‘before this war we used to play at war with the tourists; then the little Germans and Italians acted Germans and Italians. ’
‘And in this war? And afterwards?’ he cleared his throat and turned the dictaphone towards me.
‘Oh, I don’t know. No one played at these Balkan wars, if that’s what you mean. Fuck it, they all wanted to be Croats.’
‘Yep,’ my sister confirmed.
‘That’s why we played cowboys and Indians.’
‘With the outlanders.’
‘Against the outlanders. You have to have some kind of conflict: cowboys and Indians.’
English and Dutch people had recently settled in our narrow lane, followed by Belgians and French people – I don’t think the Chinese believe that poverty is especially romantic. It was fascinating to watch dwellings stuck together with stone, cement and bird droppings, with worms burrowing through their beams and mice nesting in them, turn into little picture-book cottages. It was a delight for those with a bit of time and money.
All the Chinese people I’ve ever met live in high-rise blocks, I reflected. There are those who value the solidity of construction, I completely get that. They are people who live in settlements like ours all over the world.
'Jesus, these tourists are cracked,’ said my sister before taking her suitcase and going down the hall, saying goodbye to us and disappearing behind the baker’s house, leaving a greasy, pinkish mark on her cup. My sister calls all the westerners who have moved into our street over the last few years, transforming those hovels into pleasant summer-houses, tourists.
'Paint away, carry on painting,' she said, watching our Irish neighbour waving to us in a friendly way from under a paper cap. ‘You’ll never get rid of the damp and woodworm, the stink of burned onions, or the kids on your steps.’
Perhaps that’s why they come, I thought.
The daddy tourists push their children around in buggies, and we see them hanging out washing on the line between houses in the street. They don’t grill fish on charcoal in an old concrete mould or cardboard box in front of their front door with the other men in blue overalls. And they haven’t learned to play cards.
We used to have my father’s Yugoslav National Army officers, but they all married nice girls and evaporated after a while during the last war, or they ran off after some skirt, and their wives went back to their parents’ kitchens, in their unsuitably fine dresses, and later concealed their children’s surnames. We also used to have the working fathers, manual workers, usually from Macedonian or, more often, Bosnian villages, who married bad girls. They stayed on in our street, to drink with their wives and fight with their sons. Or the other way round. They were the only fathers we ever saw, apart from the occasional sailor or a dad working abroad. Every time they came home, those men would find a new bun in the oven.
And then there was my father, not quite like anyone else. He bore the surname of his long-dead mother, and whether his old man had been a Kraut, as people said, no one knew for sure. At home no one talked about that, he least of all. He had this red hair and light skin. Like me and Daniel.
My sister is the image of Mother, she looks like the other women in the Old Settlement: brown velvet, black silk, sandpaper.
Later Daniel transformed that unknown forebear into a soldier of the Third Reich who falls in love with a young virgin in the occupied Town from – to make matters worse, but more interesting – a Partisan family. He returns several years after the war and in a brief and passionate affair he gives her a son. They never see each other again; she dies young of grief, a victim of complex political circumstances.
I believe that my father heard this story, because one morning at breakfast, out of the blue, he said that his phantom old man had been a customs officer from Cetinje.
‘Well honestly,’ said my sister later. ‘Whoever heard of a red-haired Montenegrin?!’
‘Our old man is an incredible loser,’ she added. This was the time when older boys were beginning to smoke Croatian cigarettes, war was just brewing and everyone had suddenly become nationally aware. ‘He’s always on the wrong side. First he was a Kraut, and now he’s a Montenegrin.’ Montenegrins were historically aligned with Serbs, and that was the wrong side to us.
‘Filthy half-breed!’ said Tommy Iroquois to Daniel in the course of one of our fights, belching like a pig.
‘Lousy redskin! Scabby Indian!’ responded Daniel, belching even more loudly and piggily, and knocking him into the dust.
A half-breed like Castellari’s Keoma, like McQueen’s Nevada Smith. Or Sergio Leone’s Nobody.
On several occasions, the neighbour with whom we quarrelled about the communal steps cursed our Kraut mother. We used to curse her cunning, heathen mother in a familiar manner. But in principle, we never knew who was what, so we were caught off guard when everyone else knew who we were better than we did. The advent of the war had a way of making people’s ethnicity everybody’s business.
It still happens today that one neighbour will spit on another or piss on his car tyres or pour dirty water over his children during their afternoon siesta. Sometimes the women, who are more highly strung here and fierier than their weary husbands, fight so that their tits gleam and their teeth and kitchen knives flash. But, this pathetic neighbourhood is no worse than others when you grow up in it – that’s what I think when I sit with Ma on the balcony and we drink beer from plastic bottles, and the fan pretends to be wind. When the night's sultry, those neighbours who don't go off to bathe with a towel slung over their shoulders, amuse themselves singing outside their houses.
And I join in, whispering, from my bed: You’re a heavenly flower.
This business with the cowboys was my father’s doing. He started it, and somehow it was his story. Everyone else in Yugoslavia liked the Indians best, apparently because of our most popular TV series, which had Winnetou, the Indian boy as the hero. It was only much later that cowboys came into their own. But my father loved the proper cowboys: John Ford, Zinnemann, he used to say. He adored the Italian westerns of Leone and Sergio Corbucci, he said he liked Sam Fucking Peckinpah as well and all the films acted in and directed by ‘the great Ned Montgomery’, as he called him. Since he became my late father, I have dreamed about him twice, the same dream both times. How it was before, when I was able to smell him after his morning shave, rubbing my cheek against his chin – of course I don’t remember that, because then dreams were different. Ordinary dreams about other things.
In my dream, my father is coming towards me, accompanied by a bird. It is the same cockatoo that used to peck at the top of his ballpoint pen while he did Rebus and crossword puzzles in his leisure time in the afternoon. He took it everywhere, my father did. It cackled on his shoulder as he sat at a table on the waterfront with the other tall men from the settlement.