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. 

ballarat

I climb down from my first night in the loft bed at 6:07. I catch the 8:07 from Croydon to Southern Cross and the 9:07 from Southern Cross to Ballarat, my first country train trip since finishing work in Bendigo. Travelling to a different destination makes me feel like an unfaithful spouse.

Ballarat and all places in between are a mystery to me. I have some history here, a nightmare car trip with an over-solicitous girlfriend and a silent sexless night in the last available room at Craig’s Royal Hotel in 1975.

My good woman begins her first job as a psychologist in Australia in Deer Park, but both Deer Park and Ardeer mean nothing to me. I can find them on a Melway without resort to the index, but I have no mental picture of either.

Rockbank is a windy, gravelled platform surrounded by thistles. Someone has scrawled a C in place of the R. The one distinguishing and distinguished feature is the beautiful stark white dome of St Petka’s Serbian Orthodox church just south of the tracks. Does my good woman know of this magnificent edifice?

Melton is the growth satellite of Melbourne’s west. I have never set foot in it.

The flat thistly wasteland of Melbourne’s occident gives way to strange geography as the train climbs towards Ballarat: rocky gorges with no creeks apparent in them; a sudden panorama looking north over Gordon, a town close to but completely ignored by the railway; symmetrical knolls of some height rising from the plain like pimples on unblemished skin near Ballarat.

I’m in Ballarat for 90 minutes to meet the organisers of a new mentoring program. In two months I will train the mentors they are recruiting. After a cuppa and an hour’s chinwag I‘m escorted to an office for an online police check called Fit2Work. No stray jots or tittles here.

On the 12:12 back to the city I engross myself with Jack Irish, enjoying every page more than its predecessor. The Seinfeld theme invades the carriage. My son is calling to say he and Katie have finally scored a house to rent.

“Fantastic. I’m on the train. Talk later.” I hate the phone on the train. Seinfeld again. Sarah. “Did we have a phone appointment today?”

“No. I need you to put the legal and employment policies into one document asap.”

I promise to do it the moment I walk in the door this afternoon and the line drops out.

   

At Southern Cross I bound up the stairs, barge through the barrier, leap four stairs at a time down the moving escalator and hurl myself onto the Lilydale train as the door slides shut. I pant, but I save half an hour on a cold windy platform, cursing.

Half that half hour is lost when the train driver locks himself out of his cabin while laying out the metal carpet for someone in a motorised chair at Box Hill.

   

Rock on.