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. 

only child

“Australia is like an only child,” says my good woman, sometime after midnight. It takes me all of three seconds to see that she is right on the money. As usual.

I arrive at my good woman’s house at seven. A phalanx of females fills her kitchen. My good woman is serving cherry sponge. Her friend Mirta, her daughter Tina and my good woman’s daughter Sasha surround a laptop planning the girls’ trip to Europe in July.

Across the table is Anna, a visiting fifth-year medical student from Norway. Her mother and my good woman were friends before the great Serbian diaspora—to Canada, Australia and Norway—during the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. Anna’s semester in Australia begins the next day.

Mimi the small-brained Turkish swimming cat preens on the windowsill. Djole, my good woman’s son, is holed up in the farthest corner of her small house.

“Leigh speaks only English,” my good woman tells Anna. The conversations around the table flip from Serbian to English. Anna speaks English with a hydrid Serbo-Norwegian accent unlike any I’ve heard before.

Tina and Sasha will begin their five weeks’ in Europe in Paris. Coincidentally I have my Paris le plan pratique with me because I’m reading a book called Buying a piece of Paris about a Melbourne woman’s attempt to buy a Paris apartment. I’m tracking her across the city.

Eventually the itinerary and dates for the trip are concluded, the sponge is consumed, and I am left alone with my good woman in her newly refurbished and repainted guest room. We talk for hours about how childhood influences determine the resultant adult, about the lack of respect for education and teachers in this country compared to the esteem for teachers, known as professors, in eastern Europe. Finally we arrive at the state of the Australian polity.

     

I aver that Australians expect far too much of government. Everything that goes wrong is the government’s fault; anything that needs doing is the government’s responsibility. A prime minister presiding over a hung parliament is unreasoningly held accountable for promises made impossible by her lack of a majority on the floor of the house.

“Australia is like an only child;” says my good woman, “self-centred and incapable of acting in the interest of anyone but itself.” She has such a sexy mind.

Rock on.