serbs

Recently when I lose my good woman, I think I’m about to lose the Serbs too. I never intend to fall for a Serb, still find it remarkably unlikely. But having done so, I’ve learned much about the Balkans and the Serbs.

My good woman has circles of friends. They touch on the occasion of her birthday. Her inner sanctum, her kružok, is a group of Serbian women psychologists who meet every month to discuss weighty and not-so-weighty matters of psychology, and life. Stojanka (Koka) is the oldest and she’s the force.

There’s a bunch of Snezas, five of them, none known to the others, but my good woman knows them all. Ĉeĉa (pronounced Tsetsa) and Bata also come without links to the other friends. Ĉeĉa works for Melbourne’s only Serb newspaper. She’s smart as and has a great sense of humour. I like her a lot.

A group of eight meet regularly. The occasion last night is Rada’s fifty-second birthday. Rada is from Pristina, capital of Kosovo, dotted with Serbian Orthodox churches, regarded by Serbs as their heartland, now independent and 90 per cent populated by Albanians. It is in Pristina that Slobodan Milosevic calculatedly lights the fuse for the Third Balkans War.

Rada’s husband Stan (Stanko) is an Aussie of Slovenian descent. Like me he speaks no Serbian (Srpski) and the others all speak English on our behalf. They are courteous to a fault. Zoran is alone tonight, his wife Jasmina dancing—her passion—in Brisbane. He has a sly sense of humour, quietly wafting over you and later you get the joke.

Zeljko and Gordana (Goĉa or Goga) are Croat and Serb. They had an apartment in the Muslim section of Sarajevo. In the 90s Zeljko is in the JNA, the Yugoslav National Army, knows that Ratko Mladic plans the extermination for the Muslim section of the city. He gets word to Goĉa who escapes the siege of Sarajevo with just a pair of underpants in her pocket.

Her escape involves walking a street of snipers. She is stopped, the underpants incriminating. She tells the soldier they are for her old mother who has no underpants because of the siege and he lets her pass. Out of the city and out of her country.

All the Serbs are traumatised in their way, some more than others. They are traumatised by the world’s perception that they are the baddies of the last Balkans war. Through history they have been on the side of the good guys. They started The Great War but were on the side of the English. They sided with the Allies in World War Two, while the Catholic Croats out-Nazied the Nazis.

This time because of Milosevic, Mladic, and Karadžić the Serbs feel ashamed. The Serbs I know are intelligent, gentle people, but they are the very Serbs Milosevic drove out of Yugoslavia. They are the last generation who think of themselves as Yugoslavs first and they mourn the death of their country—the land of the Southern Slavs. I mourn with and for them, and their country.

Rock on. 

together

I meet my good woman for the first time in the year 2000. For each issue of the staff newsletter I edit where I work, I interview a staff member and write a profile. My manager suggests I interview this woman who speaks many Slavic languages.

She tells me she and her husband migrate from Serbia in 1994 because of the war there. At the time she is seven months pregnant, has a two year-old daughter, no English. She loves skiing but a deep sadness lies within her.

I don’t see her much after that: she works at a different site. When she comes to Ringwood for meetings I see her walk across the car park from my office window, self-contained, unassuming. Over seven years my interest grows. I hear she’s divorced and ask a friend in her team what he thinks of her. “She’s all class,” he says. I think I agree.

The end of 2007. I plan to resign from my job. I don’t want to die wondering so I summon all my courage one Thursday and ask if I can see her away from work. She says no, but rings me at my desk on Monday to say she’s changed her mind.

I’m not social, gracious, or conventional. I ask her to pick me up because I have no car at the time. She doesn’t seem to care. We watch the sunset from Mount Dandenong, then talk in a café. Two weeks later we walk the beach at Edithvale, sit on her sarong and talk. She is different, intelligent, her accent gives me goose pimples. I want to touch her but dare not.

  

She is raising two children on her own, just as I have done. She’s impressed. The first time I’m invited for tea her kids sit in the kitchen as she prepares the meal. They’re unaffected, laugh easily. I feel privileged.

I get a job in Bendigo, a bit of a surprise. I set up a quiet life there. My good woman amazes me with what she gets done each day, her focus on whatever she is doing: her work, preparing a meal, going to the gym. When it’s time for play, she focuses on me, although we live in different cities.

No other woman understands or accepts me like this one. Finally I let myself love someone, this brave, smart, funny woman I can’t keep my eyes or my hands off.

Life and human beings are fickle. But four and a half years later we are still together.

Rock on. 

demands

My good woman comes over about nine. I’m actually working on the templates project. I employ her favourite three words: “Just a second,” I say. “I’ve got to finish this paragraph.” She lies on the couch, says nothing. I grapple with words and meaning for a few more minutes then consider her lying on the couch.

She wears a knee-length red skirt I’ve not seen before and a black singlet top. Her legs always get me, athletic and strong. Her torso is perhaps a little thick—she’d say that. She has what her children call her pillow, a soft padding on her stomach. She refers to my Buddha belly, something no amount of exercise, gym or Pilates eliminates on men beyond 60.

Anyway, she looks good. In the kitchen she perches on a tall chair at my island bench. She hoicks up her skirt, an innocent-seeming gesture, to allow me to walk in between her legs and kiss her. I do, but feel way less than innocent. She asks after my lower back, wraps her arms around it.

“You get sore in your lower back,” she says, “and I get it in the upper back,” referring to the tension ache she has between the shoulder blades. I offer to go to work on her ache, but first I slump across the bench and she inspects my back for unwanted guests: blackheads, pimples, melanomas.  Grooming, an intimacy I love her for.

She tells me she is inviting herself to have sex with me and I agree to her request. She knows her mind, and her body, and I’m not about to gainsay its demands. I have my own demands. She doesn’t know them yet. We need to talk. Maybe after sex the words I’ve tried to get right in my mind will come easier, more naturally, and won’t sound like demands.

I have no right to make demands her. I admire her more than any woman I ever met. She is a single parent since her divorce eight years ago. She works full-time as a clinical psychologist and supervises her team. She cooks every meal that is placed on her table; that’s about 15 meals a day for a 17 year-old son. She needs no further demands on her.

She came to Australia against her will—her husband, a pilot, wanted out of war-torn Serbia; she didn’t. She landed here with no money and no English, a one year-old and eight months pregnant. She worked in a servo on the till. She brought up her kids while her husband jetted around the world, living where his employer had its home base—Egypt, Japan, India. Eventually she bought a small house and kicked him out of it.

I have no right to make demands, but things about our relationship are on my mind and forming into something that cannot remain unsaid too much longer.

We lie perspiring and she asks the time: 10:57. I ask if she has to pick up her kids from the academic book warehouse where they are working the late afternoon shift packing boxes for the new school year. They finish at 11:30.

She puts on a navy blue bra with small white spots that that stirred my libido an hour before and pads to the bathroom. Five minutes later she is gone. The things I need to say remain with me.

Rock on.   

my good woman

Orthodox churches adhere to the Gregorian rather than the Julian calendar for feast days. Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas today. My good woman goes to the Serbian Orthodox church in Brunswick for the morning service. She’s not religious: it’s a tradition. She lunches with friends from her homeland. I go to pump class, read the big Saturday paper and work in my garden.

My mother has asked if I will take part in my good woman's tradition. No, I tell her, although I have wondered if I should. I involve myself in many aspects of her life, but not this one. I know more of Balkan history than most people, but it is not my history and not my tradition. History is in the blood, not the head.

My good woman likes the beach. I don’t. I like sweet things. My good woman does not. My good woman relishes the heat and humidity of Darwin. I don’t. I like to speed downhill on my bike. My good woman has the brakes on all the way. My good woman loves snow. I hate snow. I can sit at my computer for hours. My good woman wants to go outside.

My good woman is Serbian. I am Australian. We have different notions of privacy and its importance. My good woman wants to know what I dream about, but I rarely dream and never remember what I dreamt. My good woman looks elegant when she dresses for work. I go to work dressed as if I’m putting out the garbage.

Somehow my good woman and I understand each other 98 per cent of the time. My good woman and I read each other’s thoughts constantly. My good woman understands my need to be alone. My good woman calls me her good man. I never had a role in life I enjoyed as much as being her good man, her Mister Nice.

She is my mate—soul mate, playmate, good mate.

Rock on.