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tesko mi je povjerovati da je bas nitko nije poznavao a vise godina prije rata bila je profesorica u sarajevskim skolama, objavila nekoliko knjiga...
Vertigo*
ByTatjana Lukic
In 1991 Tatjana, her husband and her baby daughter became refugees in their own homeland, the former Yugoslavia. Though they wanted to return to their home after what was meant to be a short visit to another city, war intervened. They survived for many months on intermittent casual work, help from their friends, and later from the International Red Cross. Eventually they decided that they had no alternative, they simply must make contact with a relative who lived in Australia to see if he could help them. Their swift decision to immigrate to Australia was based on the desire to give their daughter the chance of a safer future. Their experiences since then all follow from that one decision.
If you ask me suddenly about my age, I cannot answer you. I have to consult my papers and think for a while. Is it true that I am already thirty-six? Then, when I look around me, I wonder if this is another life, another reincarnation. How is it possible that so many things have happened in such a short time? Has it really been me who has been suddenly moved away from the place where I planned to live forever? Has it really been my Jelena, now almost five, who has already changed homes ten times within four countries and two continents? Perhaps if I tell you some of what has happened to us in the last few years, you may be able to answer those questions for me.
It was the beginning of 1991, a snowy winter, when Jelena was born. It was just a year since we were married. My husband, a free-lance graphic designer, who had always been the busiest in the city of Osijek where we lived, had not been able to find good jobs for months. And the company where I had worked as a sociologist for six years was closed. It was a period of much change in Yugoslavia and we believed the changes were going to bring an even better life for all of us. At that time we registered our own company and planned optimistically for our future. As it turned out, it was a comfortable and warm winter. Jelena, our small princess, was our huge motive for hope that everything was going to be fine.
At the end of this winter, my husband was called to work for a few months on a new television project in Novi Sad, a centre of Vojvodina district in Serbia, just an hour’s distance by train from our city. He was working there for the five working days of the week and coming home on the night train for the weekends, his hands full of little dolls for Jelena.
At this time I was discovering all the happiness of having a child and I was finishing my new manuscript of poems that I planned to send to a publisher in the coming summer. Writing had always been my first and most loved occupation and, as I thought then, the experience of motherhood was making it even more possible.
However, events around us in those first few days of spring hinted at changes to come. There was an atmosphere of unreality that enveloped the city and made us uneasy. The media were full of aggression and hatred. In one part of Croatia outbreaks of fighting had already started but, to us, that was still ‘somewhere else’ far away from our quiet city. However, in the news we learned of more barricades every day. New, very loud and very intolerant politicians from every party promoted their interpretation of the history of the homeland. Some of the people I knew were already selling their homes and moving to Serbia if they were Serbs, or, if they were Croats, somewhere far away from our city which was so close to the Serbian border. My closest friends and I thought these people were over-reacting. War was something that existed only in our history books. As usual, we continued to concern ourselves with our small children and our occupations.
But my husband telephoned every night from Novi Sad to check up on Jelena and me and to ask how things were going in Osijek. The days were quiet and sunny but every now and then there was an explosion at night somewhere. Once it was a shop that exploded; once it was a news agency. There were no answers given about what caused those explosions or why they occurred. The police remained silent. We became quieter, more preoccupied and even more closed up within our homes early in the evening. But the lovely sunny days encouraged me to relax and I remained sceptical about a war waiting around the corner.
It was already June when my husband had an idea. When he came home the next weekend we were to join him and stay with him in Novi Sad until he finished his present job. He said, “Just imagine that you are going to have a few weeks holiday.” At first I did not like this idea. Nappies, bottles, milk and a hundred other small things for Jelena would need to be packed. How would I manage a young baby in a hotel? What if she cried at night? These and other worries of mine provoked arguments between us. Also, we had not planned any holiday for this summer. We knew we had more important things to do when he finished this job. After all, we were starting our own business. All the same, he booked a room for us and insisted on it. Waiting for him that particular weekend, I was still thinking that I could shift him from this idea. I could not. He was worried about us and he won.
I will always remember that sunny morning in June when I was collecting the washing from the terrace, looking at the roofs and backyards of the old buildings that surrounded our home. It was a quiet moment. My only thought then was, “OK! Let’s go on holiday! The weather is nice. It won’t be at the sea but it’ll be a change for a while. Why not go!” It was a strange attitude for me, usually very pedantic about planning each holiday in great detail. I thought, “It’s part of a new life. My husband is different and we have to adapt to each other’s ways.”
Rushing with the nappies from the terrace, I met a man talking with my husband. He was going to each household collecting applications for the installation of satellite television and, although it was only an hour before our train left, my husband sat down and filled out our application. I had given our house keys to my sister the day before and she had promised to collect our mail and water our flowers. I had taken enough money from the bank for the two weeks away and I had already packed two bags full of the baby’s things, along with a few pieces of clothing for my husband and myself. What else? On the desk was a mass of papers for the new manuscript that I was retyping whenever Jelena slept. I was planning to send it to a publisher in the autumn. Before I changed and dressed Jelena for the journey, I put in my bag only a local morning newspaper and a book that I was reading at that time: a klix, blue covered copy of Encesberger’s Propast Titanic. Jelena was smiling in the taxi. Her first two teeth had appeared that morning. A special day!
We heard on the radio the very next day that the railway we had travelled on the night before had been destroyed by a huge explosion. Who did that? Why? Again the same questions. Just a few days later fighting started in Slovenia. In Osijek people started clearing out their cellars, preparing and bringing in bags of sand and nailing up the windows and walls of the houses with wooden planks. They were also buying bags of flour and sugar. I read all the papers that I could find in Novi Sad and I telephoned my sister and friends in Osijek every day. Something was obviously going to happen, but what? I was very reluctant to believe that war was possible. After all, I had both Serbian and Croatian family connections that went back many generations.
While my husband was working, I walked around near the hotel and through the quiet old streets of Petrovaradin with my smiling Jelena in a stroller. We were just two hours by car from Osijek. I still did not believe that these days, these hours, these moments were the last that we would live in Yugoslavia. Could you walk around your own backyard and lose your homeland just like that? Could it be our holiday forever? Would we survive?
We decided not to return to Osijek just yet. Only a few weeks later we decided to move from the hotel and rent a flat in the city for a while. My husband was still on a part-time contract, but he was earning enough for the three of us to live on. Our friends helped us with furniture, dishes and all the simple things that you need when you start with nothing. I cooked on a small camp gas ring and everything felt very temporary. If we returned to our city, my husband would have to go into the army immediately, as other men had already done, and I would have to remain in a cellar with Jelena. She had only just turned six months. No, we could not do that.
The summer of 1991 was hot everywhere and the guns started their work. The flow of refugees began to move all over the country. At night young men and boys were taken into the army and sent to fight in neighbouring Slavonia, which is the area we came from. For everyone it was still incredible. Friends, neighbours, all those I knew in Novi Sad were frightened. Many of them were escaping and leaving the country. It was hard to get anything other than local newspapers and magazines and they were full of the details and photographs of youths who had been killed. Luckily, our friends in Novi Sad helped my husband whose status was by now really illegal. He worked very hard, spending many nights drawing under the desk in the corner of our small, dark one-roomed flat. In another corner was Jelena’s bed, next to my husband’s and mine. We had a small table and two chairs, an old black and white television set and a window that looked out at the grey back wall of a huge store. At the end of August, just two months after I collected the washing from the terrace in sunny Osijek, it was obvious that we could never return.
My mother-in-law came from Osijek and joined us, and later her very elderly sister joined us too. Three generations of us, each one in their own klix corner of this small room, were coming to terms with their own desperate misfortune. With no simple things like photographs from our childhood and none of the things that could have reminded us of our past, we all felt we had no tangible past and no future. We had no pensions and no bank accounts. All had been left behind.
Only Jelena continued to smile. There was no evening that I did not sing to her before bed. I remember that I made up a special repertoire for her . . . and for my soul. Every night I sang songs from a different part of the country. One night she fell asleep with all the Macedonian songs that I knew, another night with Bosnian lullabies, then Medimur and Dalmatian songs, then songs of Serbian dances. Maybe the land could be divided but there had not been a gun that could take from me my very personal history and my love for all of those people who were, even at that moment, being separated. Her little ears, I believed, had to be familiar with all the melodies that she would now not hear from anyone else.
Some time passed before I went to the Red Cross office and registered us for the first time as refugees. It was autumn and I had already been told by my sister, whom I called on nights when the telephone lines still worked somehow, that a few armed men had come to our home in Osijek, forced the door, changed the locks and had thus taken our home from us. Our neighbours told her about it. The world is a very small place. I knew the very next day that a man who had been at the same college as my husband showed them our door and told them that we had gone over to ‘the other side’, the Serbian side. By moving to Vojvodina, we were seen to have changed sides in the war. This meant that we did not have a place to return to even if things returned to normal, which still sometimes happened in my dreams.
With the first cold days of winter our ‘holiday’ started to be forever and we started to depend more and more on help from others. I will always remember walking around and around the Red Cross building with Jelena sleeping in the stroller. I finally stepped inside. It is so hard to ask for help for the first time in your life, but the money my husband had previously earned was not available any more. There was less and less money in the whole country and part-time workers were paid after all others, sometimes never. We needed food.
I was questioned about my husband and I had to lie that he was in Slavonija in the army. It was a rule that all refugee men be mobilised. What could we do without him? Thus, along with many others, we became officially refugees in our own country, and in our case, with an illegal who tried to work to support us all. When January came around again, we moved from the dark flat in the centre of Novi Sad to the ground floor of a house on a hill across the city. It was cheaper and there was a lovely view. Was there a future for us too? Jelena started to walk as soon as we moved there because there was more space in those three rooms.
Although my husband’s friends helped us a lot by bringing us pieces of second-hand furniture and visiting us regularly, they could not do any more about jobs for him. We managed on less and less money from the beginning of that year, but it was still better than a refugee camp. We spent the last money that my husband had earned on a year’s rent in advance. Landowners did not run ‘specials’ for refugees. It was a cold winter, as is usual there. We managed to buy an old wood-stove that we used as both heater and stove to cook on. Sometimes the rooms were full of smoke and the white walls very soon became grey, but it was warm at last and we had a stove. I could make bread every day, something that I had never done before.
Our only ‘machine’ was the important one: the telephone. It kept us in touch with relatives and friends if the lines were working. Only sometimes and only at night after hours of trying could I get through to Croatia by then. Fortunately, it was still possible to talk with my parents and friends in Bosnia because there was still peace there. My parents asked us to join them. It was difficult for them to think of us as refugees. We didn’t go, not because we thought even more terrible things were going to happen in other places but because we did not know what work we could possibly find there. They lived in a small city. We still believed that there was a future for us somewhere with some work for both of us.
At this stage, my husband was going to work regularly but was rarely paid for it. Monthly food supplies from the Red Cross were our only certain hold on the future. With the first days of spring there were more and more refugees, this time from Bosnia. The Red Cross packages became lighter and lighter. It was a question of when they would be unable to support all those in need.
Our neighbours were kind. Some of them had large gardens and a few farm animals. Every evening they left a dish full of milk for my Jelena, sometimes eggs appeared, sometimes also vegetables or fruit. What they did for us I will never forget.
But, in the end, even with all my newly acquired survival skills and our neighbours, there was no future for us there at all. We had no status . . . or maybe we did, that of marionettes. I was frightened that we could be moved by force one day to an empty house in Barany, or another area where some other poor people had been forced out. It was this feeling of someone else pulling all the strings influencing our lives which was more difficult to bear than all the other difficulties put together.
After a month with no money coming in at all, we sat up all night one night. That particular evening, a friend had come by with some food for dinner. He had talked of his plans to leave the country. He was escaping mobilisation into the army by going somewhere else in Europe. His stories and our desperation finally made up my husband’s mind: he was going to call his half-brother in Australia, the only person from both our families who lived outside our own country. It was our only hope. We both knew by now that we had to move somewhere and make a normal life for our child. Maybe this brother would help us. Who knows? These two men had only seen each other a few times when they were very young children. It was more than thirty years since then. We knew almost nothing about him. Only his telephone number existed, given pleasantly by his sister on a visit many years before.
When our friend left us we were very excited about this one possibility. It was midnight. Jelena was sleeping in another room. I joined her, covering my ears with my hands so that I couldn’t listen to what was going on in the next room. What if he refused to listen to my husband? What if he had forgotten his younger half-brother with whom he had never lived? A hundred such questions filled my head during those few minutes, along with one klix hope. The thought of a new country, language, culture, even the thought of meeting this half-brother was very strange, yet we had to try it, we who had never contemplated leaving our own country that we knew and loved so well.
Since that midnight, everything changed. My brother-in-law immediately promised to help us. He advised us to move out of the country quickly because everyone expected war to break out all over the country. He warned us that if we stayed longer, the borders might close and we would not be able to move at all. We borrowed money for the tickets because there was hope now that we could return this money one day. We phoned our friends in Czechoslovakia and told them we were coming. Just a few calls to my parents in Bosnia to tell them that we were going and my mother’s quiet voice: “Who knows if we will see each other again, my dear. You are going to the end of the world.” And for my mother-in-law, already in her eighties and only recently moved into accommodation in a nursing home in Novi Sad, it was especially hard to part with her son, her only child.
Just a few days later, we were on our way. Having passed in the collected things to the Red Cross for other refugees, we were again on a train with only a few bags. The only extra thing we kept was Jelena’s stroller that served as her special little travelling bed.
Since then, everything has moved very fast and my story can be told this way. My husband’s half-bother sent us money to rent a flat and to have enough to live on while in the city of Brno in Czechoslovakia. I tried to enjoy this time, walking around the charming old city with Jelena in the stroller all the time trying not to even think about the possibility that we might not get our visas for Australia. We had to get them. There was no other way for us. No going back. No going forward. In our heads huge changes were occurring.
Then the day came. Our visas arrived by mail. My Australian brother-in-law immediately bought tickets for us and everything was ready within a few days. Our friends took us to the airport and that is how we moved from autumn in Europe to spring in Australia.
When we landed at Sydney’s airport we had exactly ten dollars in our pockets. My English was even poorer. I could say hallo, goodbye, thank you, yes, no, how much? But from the moment I stepped off the plane, all my anxieties evaporated. Suddenly I felt I was a different person. Or was I again what I used to be in the best times, long before all the recent events in my life?
My very first impression was that the sky was huge here, and the sun bigger and warmer. Since that day I have started every day with a smile. Life was going to be new. Everything was possible again. Oleanders were in bloom. Jelena walked around and around a table where a huge bowl of bananas waited for her and every now and then she quietly collected another one.
Three years have passed now. There have been a lot of other stories that have happened in our lives since then. I can put them into a few words. After all, everything has turned out well, finally. Today I live with Jelena alone. She will start her first year of Primary School very soon. Every weekend she meets up with her daddy, who lives in a nearby suburb, or we all go for a walk together and talk about what she has done during her week at child care. If I make mistakes while reading her stories at bedtime, she explains to me kindly, with great patience, how to pronounce the words correctly. We are already Australians. I do not write poetry at all now but, as I joke with myself, perhaps it is time for me to live it. I am doing research for a doctoral thesis on immigration, hoping that I will still have plenty of time to work and to help Jelena on her way through her schooling and her life. When I take her little hand I always feel really happy and I’m just her mum who is concentrated on her small wishes and her life. There is still a huge, huge sky above us that, to me, is a symbol of the future. “Dear Mum”, I write, “You were wrong. Here is the beginning of the world. You will see if you come.” From where we came, why we came, how we came, I sometimes try to explain to Jelena in simple terms. But usually she brings me back to the present with her charming and, to me at least, clever words, “Who cares about that Mummy!”
*"Vertigo" is a story taken from "Passages through parenthood: Real-life stories from Australian parents" - Anne Godfrey (editor) 2000
U znak sjecanja na T. Lukic.
