Dubravka Ugresic - Europe in Sepia

In early December 2012, I rode the single daily train between Budapest and Zagreb. There used to be an Osijek-Budapest line, but now that’s gone too. People say trains are too expensive.

It was this irreparable feeling of absence that settled in me in Gyékényes, on the border between Hungary and Croatia. It was as if Gyékényes was the edge of the world, and that nothing came after. The carriages emptied (is really no one traveling to Croatia?), and the Croatian border guard stamped my Dutch passport, his movements lumbering, the stamp moist and cold. And then darkness enveloped Gyékényes. Dim station lights shone in Koprivnica, Križevci, Vrbovac, and Dugo Selo. Everything else was lost in the murky black. Watching the pale light seeping from the tiny station office in Vrbovac, that’s what I thought about, the collocation murky black .

At some point the train stopped. A middle-aged woman appeared from a neighboring compartment.

“Where are we?” she asked, as if in an amateur theater production.

There being no answer from anywhere, she dared give it another go.

“Where are we now?”

Again there was no reply, and the woman, chastened somehow, withdrew into her compartment.

I took a taxi from the railway station, and heading toward Novi Zagreb noticed a billboard for Intimissimi lingerie. In the murky black above Zagreb, giant supermodels floated in panties and bras, laid out on their sides, heads resting on a hand, staring out into the endless murk ahead. .

7.

Zagreb is a city that often comes a halt, and then just stays there. In Croatia there is a tunnel that leads nowhere, just stops dead, right there in a hillside. One of Zagreb’s most well-known streets, Savska, stops being a proper street before it even gets going; Ilica, one of Zagreb’s main thoroughfares, is also barely urban. Perhaps this explains Zagreb’s terminal moroseness, the inspiration for countless chansons poeticizing its absence of content, its tired urban imagery: street lights, old lanterns, the banks of the Sava (which the city stubbornly ignores), parks, pigeons, and clay-tiled roofs. In this endless poeticization of return ( I’m coming back, oh Zagreb, to you, you on the banks of the Sava . .), the poetic voice is always out there on the road somewhere, his return to Zagreb a sounding of the alarm. Zagreb is a deaf and indifferent urban stain, its pulse barely discernable as the poet whinnies his return.

I remember my first longer absence from Zagreb. There was no such thing as the Internet, international phone calls were expensive, letters the sole means of communication. Return was cause for real celebration. My three best friends awaited me at the airport, and we headed straight over to my mom’s, my mom having prepared a special lunch. My friends nattered away merrily, attempting enchantment with stories of everything that had happened while I’d been away. At one moment I burst into tears. My friends excused themselves, oh, she must be really tired, let’s go, we’ll leave you to rest up, let’s catch up tomorrow. . I don’t really remember what was said anymore, it wasn’t important. But I didn’t burst out crying because I was tired, I burst out crying at the regime of the Zagreb everyday, leaking from my friends’ mouths like unsightly mucus. I burst out crying because of the absence of content, because of their absence of interest in anything beyond their own lives. My friends never asked what I’d been up to in the ten months I’d been away. Zagreb fell on my cheek like a dollop of indifferent spit.

The Yugoslav Gastarbeiter of the seventies know the story well, as do the flood of Yugoslav refugees of the nineties; every returnee learns it some day. Either you are here with us, or you don’t exist. It is a cast-iron rule. And it is why every time I go back to Zagreb, slowly, like a reconvalescent, I practice the rituals of return. In Zagreb I have my pedicurist, a heroine whose handiwork supports an unemployed husband and three school-age sons. As she struggles to keep her head above water, my periodic appearance works like an oxygen mask — I see it in her eyes and smile. At the nearby market I buy eggs from the same statuesque woman, who, adorned by chicken feathers, keeps the day’s takings in a tin can, the lid of which bears stickers of the Virgin Mary and Severina, 1the two women my egg seller worships. I visit my dentist, who isn’t actually my dentist anymore, he’s retired, but I like to sit down in his chair, and for us to talk, about his grandchildren, about mutual acquaintances, some of whom already lie buried. I go to my hairdresser, even though she does a wonky job; I go to my seamstress, even though she’s sloppy and charges the earth. All offer me a vague warmth. They are my measure of Zagreb, as much as I can handle; nothing too exciting, nothing that hurts.

The rest is just sadness, a sadness that comes from helplessness, from watching a little crappy homemade porn, from a cheap betrayal, from the realization that we’ve been had, that the streets are full of shell-game cons, that we’ve played having consented to losing in advance, and that we would’ve been conned even if we hadn’t played; it’s the suffocating sadness that comes from a momentary glimmer of hope that all is not lost, that, for fuck’s sake, all can’t be lost, and the realization that this record has been stuck for years, that all really is lost; it’s the sadness that comes from cheap revenge, from the realization that someone’s spat in our soup, that they’ve been at it for years, and don’t even themselves know why; the sadness that overwhelms us on sighting curtains with ingrained filth, from the stench of piss in our nostrils, feline and human; a sadness whose sheer weight knocks us to the ground, a sadness born of a realization of the banality of human evil, an evil that sucks the oxygen from our lungs. .

8.

Merry Christmas to our veterans and heroes in prison! — a banner snakes through Zagreb’s main square. A dozen or so men, war veterans presumably, support the banner. War veterans, volunteers, they’re a new breed, ghosted in from invisible wings to occupy center stage in Croatian life, a breed of man who voluntarily took up arms to fight a “defensive” war. When the war was over, they got themselves organized, started up all kinds of associations seeking recompense — pensions, apartments, jobs — for their voluntary entanglements. The state has paid them the deepest financial and moral respect. For many veterans, the four-year war has become an identity, a biography, a career, a raison d’être. A handful of associations (and the odd individual) spent years pestering the relevant military organs to make the veteran register public, and in December 2012—twenty years after the fact — it finally was. It turned out that the figure of half a million, which had long provoked disbelief, was indeed correct. It also turned out that almost a third of those on the register had faked their service. In recent years the number of veterans on invalid’s pensions has increased by around forty percent. An invalid’s pension is more than a regular veteran’s. And a veteran’s pension is more than a non-veteran’s pension. All told, the average veteran’s pension is twice that of a university professor.

This is another fairytale of success, Croatian-style. Get yourself in among the vets, and you’ve won a place at the very heart of the Croatian state, your mitts on the sword and cross. The slogan— Merry Christmas to our veterans and heroes in prison! — is season’s greetings to all those still in detention in the Hague, those waiting in pre-trial detention in Croatia, maybe even to fraudsters like former Croatian prime minister Ivo Sanader, who, accused of corruption, is out on bail. Those accused of heroic corruption, they were defending the homeland too.