before the entrance to the restaurant. When two of the little Gypsy children heard his stern voice, they instantly stepped back, while the furious waiter managed to grab the youngest by his frayed collar and literally flung him toward the parking lot.
‘Go fuck yourself, you little thief!’
‘Fuck you!’
‘Watch it, kid, don’t make me come over there!’
‘Suck my dick, you idiot!’
Apparently I’d found myself in the middle of an enduring siege between the uniformed army at the restaurant, and the Gypsy guerrilla children; wrestling for supremacy of the muddy path linking the improvised parking lot and the improvised restaurant. Just then a Volkswagen Golf with Bulgarian plates pulled in, and the little Gypsies forgot the unhappy waiter and ran off with their slop buckets. The waiter returned to his sentry duty by the door, and continued his smoke break.
I sat at a table covered in a white cloth, as well as aged coffee stains, which lay over an even dirtier red tablecloth. A plastic ashtray sat in the middle, alongside a vase containing plastic flowers from the Yugoslav Mesozoic period. I had to wait, of course, to earn the right to pay for a sour coffee, hand-mixed with a disposable thin plastic spoon, amidst this particular ambience. It was my first time in such a setting. The honorary waiter extended one smoke to two, spoke with a comrade who stood behind a stainless steel bar, and managed to somehow get lost on the way from there to my table.
It seemed as though I were experiencing the genuine tradition of southern hospitality that I’d heard so much about. Others, far wiser than I, had tried and failed to change this mode of behaviour, so it was futile for me to do anything but absorb it. I tried once to communicate with these local human-like creatures, asking the innocent question, ‘How far is it to Brčko?’ To which came the reply, ‘I don’t give a... ’ from one of the death row inmates working that day.
The uniformed guy with a moustache, who had taken my petrol money, seemed to have hated himself that morning, but graduated to hating the whole world in the afternoon. His spontaneous reaction to my question about Brčko, a town which history had consigned to his outrage because it had not ended up in Croatian hands at the war’s end, did provoke something in the same phylum as a smile. This was probably just to give me the false sense that he was joking, rather than intending to terrorize all passengers en route to the Serbian Entity.
I was fed up, and I had only just started.
Twenty minutes later, I was sipping undrinkable coffee at the restaurant next door, wondering why this unspoken, projected accusation could still make me feel like shit. I put my hate for moustache guy on the boil, and it bubbled into an imaginary biography, in which he was a smuggler of stoves and washing machines stolen from Serbian houses. I could picture Mr. Moustache carrying Gorenje appliances up and down the village, after his shift at the petrol station ended, offering them to neighbours, claiming that they all came from his nice Swedish son-in-law, who had just bought brand new Electrolux appliances for his holiday home and didn’t need them anymore. But when Mr. Moustache vanished into my hallucinatory Slavonian mist, several washing machines under each arm, logic settled back into place, and it seemed to me that it would be hard to find a more normal petrol station attendant in the middle of this lousy stretch of nothingness between Zagreb and Belgrade. For the locals, it was surely normal that their grasp on geography in this, their God-forsaken world, did not extend to the escarpments of misery behind the Sava River, from which I had come. It was also probable that Serbian expatriates, whose relatives in Brčko likely lived in the houses of expelled Muslims or Croats, and were none too likeable to begin with. So it was normal that he wouldn’t pretend to be professional, just to please a passers-by.
This version of normal was strange to me, but that didn’t explain why I still felt bad. I’d never thought of myself as sensitive, and barrages of swearing don’t move me at all. But I suppose I felt that all of this was somehow connected to my father’s Lazarus situation, and I wondered if Mr. Moustache could read my sense of guilt. Hadn’t my own sense of innocence, which I had believed whole-heartedly until recently, irreversibly ruptured the moment I decided to Google my dead father’s name? Was that why I couldn’t look Mr. Moustache in the eye and tell him to fuck off? Was that why I now felt like someone in the dock, judged by the self-righteous?
The village of Višnjići, in eastern Slavonia, was now on my conscience, even though I couldn’t have found it on a map. I knew even less about what had happened there, on the night of 13 November 1991, at a time when Dusha and I were already living in Ljubljana. But I felt guilty all the same, and this feeling grew stronger now that I was nearing it.
‘Anything else?’
‘Sorry? Uh, no... no thanks.’
‘Twelve kunas.’
It seemed that my time at the Javori Restaurant had come to an end.
This was the first time I had come to the country of my birth and also my first contact with Croatian citizens, if you set aside the encounters on the streets of Ljubljana, and the customs officer in the nice light blue uniform at border control
I thought of Nadia, whom I hadn’t even managed to inform of my departure. When I set off, she was still in sweet dreamland, and I couldn’t bring myself to wake her. I would have been able to concoct a story that would plausibly mask my true intentions and travel plans, which was full of holes anyway and unpredictable in every way, including its duration. But when my phone rang for the third time in thirty minutes, I knew I couldn’t ignore her any longer.
‘Hello.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Nadia... something’s happened.’
‘What?’
‘My father’s... aunt... Milosava. She’s dead.’
‘Really? Where are you now?’
‘I’m going to the funeral. Driving.’
‘Where to?’
‘Bosnia.’
‘Bosnia?’
‘Yes. Now I’m here... in Croatia.’
‘And why didn’t you tell me? Why did you just drive off to Bosnia? Is everything okay?’
‘Everything’s fine. It’s just... I’m not sure when I’ll be back.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yeah. Long story.’
‘I don’t get you.’
‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah. Whatever. Call me.’
Nadia hung up and I got this irresistible urge to call her back and continue our conversation. I couldn’t put my phone down, but I also had no idea what else to say to her. She certainly didn’t deserve my lying to her from a parking lot in front of the Javori Restaurant about my supposedly deceased Aunt Mirosava, my only relative on my father’s side, who had unexpectedly passed away, aged ninety-two, while cutting down an apple tree in the garden of the only nursing home in eastern Bosnia. I had invented my aunt’s life story in such detail that, without any hesitation, I could have recounted stories of Milosava’s stuffed peppers that she used to pack, every winter, into vacuum containers and take to the bus station, along with a letter for my mother and twenty Deutschmarks for me, and give them to the driver of a bus destined for Ljubljana. I could have also told her about my aunt’s husband, Slavko, who had sadly died of stomach cancer, which she had always blamed on her unhealthy home cooking, resulting in her turning to organic food at the age of eighty-five, which led her Bosnian neighbours to assume she suffered from dementia, causing them to put her in a nursing home and take possession of her house.
My imagination was vivid, and I liked to indulge it when it came to the ladies, but this time, I’d reached an impasse. Nadia’s voice numbed me, and I stopped midway through my first invented sentence. I could feel how much good an honest