The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (20 page)

There were near-whiteout blizzard conditions when I left Zagreb in the morning, continuing east, and I nearly turned back. I'd be damned if I'd spend another night on the highway. But storms are slower than rental cars, even those without winter tires, and within two hours I'd gotten out ahead of the clouds, past lumber farms with square clear-cut acres and little hills with villages huddled at their humble feet. In the no-man's-land between the Croatian exit and Serbian entrance borders it began to sleet, but it was just a border chill.

“To change one's country is tantamount to changing one's century,” Custine declared. Nowhere else—save, possibly, the contrast between Mongolia and China—did I feel this more literally than at the crossing between Croatia and Serbia, once partners in the Yugoslav federation. In the wake of the wars of the 1990s, Serbia, as the most recent loser of the Balkan musical chairs of local villains, became persona non grata on the international stage. Croatia, meanwhile, was in the process of accession to the European Union,
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to be followed at some point by—against the vehement advice of the British and Polish—adoption of the euro.
The laments of the locals notwithstanding, by most appearances this was a modern and relatively developed place.

Not so Serbia. After a bad cop/bad cop routine from the skinhead thugs of the Serbian border patrol, who worked out of what would otherwise pass for an outhouse shack on the side of the road, I crossed into the country and might as well have passed back into the nineteenth century. I was now in a world of oxcarts (really just wooden platforms on truck tires) and conical haystacks, of old women in kerchiefs and old men in flat caps.

I experienced a psychological shiver during the crossing into Serbia. “Serbo-Croat speech has an expression,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “a
vukojebina
—employed to describe a remote or barren or arduous place—[which] means literally a ‘wolf-fuck,' or more exactly the sort of place where wolves retire to copulate . . . easily adapted to encapsulate a place that is generally, so to say, fucked up. This is the commonest impression of the Balkans.” For me, born in 1977, the beginnings of my consciousness of world events coincided with the Balkan wars, in which, Hitchens argued, “the greatest harm was arguably inflicted upon the Serbs themselves. . . . Serbia lost its national honor and became an international pariah.” On some preteen synaptic level, for me, the Serbs have remained filed under “bad guys.” It's the same frisson our grandparents' generation must have felt visiting Germany or Japan (for our parents, it was Russia) or what our younger cousins will feel if they go to Iraq or Afghanistan a decade from now. And so I stared southbound, trying to catch a glimpse of the Bosnian border that lay just a few miles outside the right-hand windows, and pondered the intensely local and bloody politics that, in Rebecca West's words, “grow on the basis of past injustice. A proud people acquire the habit of resistance to foreign oppression, and by the time they have driven out their oppressors they have forgotten that agreement [with each other] is a pleasure.”

I was headed for Bačka Topola, a small town up by the Hungarian border, which is, and has been for centuries, majority ethnic Hungarian. The street signs were in both Hungarian and Serbian. The locals recalled the Communist years with something like active nostalgia. The Yugoslav era “was like Disneyland,” said Nicola, the affable impresario of the café. He wore his long hair in a ponytail, like an Israeli backpacker or a Burning Man enthusiast. Bačka Topola had been an industrial town where everyone worked for one of four state-run corporations. They sent employees' families on vacations to the Croatian coast or skiing in Bosnia or Montenegro. Each company was privatized or closed by the post-MiloÅ¡ević democrats, and, not coincidentally and as part of a common regional trend, reactionary nationalists won the recent elections. The local public swimming pool and spa shut down for the want of municipal maintenance funds.

All of which added up to pretty depressing situation, and the near-universal chain-smoking lent a morbid pall. But Nicola, a printer by trade whose father was a local politician, was one of those congenital optimists you find from time to time returning to their troubled hometowns after a cosmopolitan youth with big ideas about making them off-the-beaten-track hipster destinations. He convinced the city council to let him use the lobby of the old unused theater to open a bar and café with a small stage. (The restaurant next door was named, without explanation, Poughkeepsie N.Y. 12601.) He planned to refurbish the ruins of the theater for bigger shows. Maybe he'd even put on a festival by the river. He had lived in London for five years, studying drums
and touring with an American jazz bassist. He'd even had plans to tour the United States with a band, but his visa hadn't come through. Then his British visa expired, so he came home instead. “It's OK,” he said. “The singer killed himself a week into the American tour anyway! . . . Have you met Miki?”

Miki was another small-town type: the solitary hipster. A lugubrious Harry Dean Stanton lookalike, he was proud of his two-thousand-item vinyl library, meticulously collected over thirty-five years of pre-Internet, cross–Iron Curtain mail order (although the Coltrane and others were Soviet pressings of dubious authorization). “I have four Velvet Underground original pressings!”

He lived in a farmhouse well outside town that he had inherited from his recently deceased mother. “He's like a forty-six-year-old baby,” said another person at the café. “He always lived in that house with his mother, and she cooked for him and cleaned his clothes, and now he's there alone and he doesn't know how to do anything.” Miki told me he was farming corn and herbs in the plot behind the house. “Just enough to survive.” We stayed up late smoking weed and listening to the Incredible String Band.

Serbia has two major highways: a north–south road, the M5/E75, that runs from Budapest to the Greek coast at Thessaloníki, and an east–west road, the A3/E70, from Zagreb to Belgrade. I was only on the latter—no traffic but for a few trucks—for forty-five minutes before turning onto village roads. Like many structurally challenged areas, such as Mongolia and Siberian Russia, the trash-disposal protocol left something to be desired, at least from the standpoint of presenting the best face to the gaze of the passing traveler. The town dump was a half-acre pile by the road, and thus the surrounding farmland
was littered with windblown plastic bags. The only town center en route to Novi Sad was something called Irig, whose sole distinguishing architectural feature was a brick structure buttressed in all directions by two-by-fours. Garish nouveaux riche mansions separated themselves from subsistence garden plots with prefab metal fences. Homemade signs advertised MED—VINO—RAKIJA (honey, wine, moonshine). The color palette, like much of rural Eastern Europe, was pastel wash: pink, lime, lavender, goldenrod, beige.

The GPS, for some geopolitical reason, knew only the two crosswise highways in Serbia, so I had to navigate the old-fashioned way—if by old-fashioned, we can agree to mean finding the route on my phone's Google Maps app, then taking screenshots of zoomed-in chunks. The road went up into FruÅ¡ka Gora National Park. These are the Frankish Hills, “which are called by that name,” said Rebecca West, “for a historical reason incapable of interesting anybody.”

The Englishwoman West, described by Robert Kaplan as the “writer of twenty books, young mistress of H.G. Wells, social outcast, and sexual rebel,” is the spiritual guide of any Westerner traveling through the south Slavic countries. Her massive
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
, based on a six-week trip through the then Kingdom of Yugoslavia in the midwar interregnum of 1937, is like a nut of a travel book wrapped in layers of encyclopedia, mythology, and psychological and sociological history, spiced with shiv-sharp feminist commentary. Its steely and principled opposition to encroaching fascism is undercut only in retrospect by faintly erotic paeans to Serbian militarism and masculinity—then, of course, a celebration of an underdog nation long harried between the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires.

West repeatedly compared the FruÅ¡ka Gora (“the jewel of Serbia”) to Scotland, describing “the most entrancing rounded hills, clothed with woods now golden rather than green with springtime, which ran down to vast green and purple plains, patterned with shadows shed by a tremendous cloudscape.” She made of the mountains, and the ancient monasteries within that held the relics and mummies of the medieval Serbian empire, a symbol for the masochism and nostalgia of Serbian nationalism.

It goes to show you the difference between seeing a place in the summer and the winter: I saw only low hills with sad, thin forests, like the Ozarks, without even a layer of underbrush. A line of trucks was doing about fifteen miles per hour, and cars began to pass them in the left lane, at first just one or two and then by the tens and dozens. As I joined them, I thought that everyone had just decided to cruise in the passing lane until they saw an oncoming car. In this part of the world, in which traffic laws are indistinguishable from anarchy, I wouldn't be surprised. (Eventually, within the forest, the highway divided into opposing lanes—not that the change was marked.)

On the far side of the mountains was the provincial center of Novi Sad, the longtime cultural center of Serbia. The club CK13 was a walled compound of progressive and activist sentiment. Like many similar institutions on the Danube periphery, it was quietly funded by virtuous German NGOs and foundations supporting antifascist organizations. It's a peculiar irony of postwar German liberalism that its NGOs (or perhaps GOs—the level of state subsidy is unclear) underwrite the antiglobalization, antistatist, anarcho-syndicalist activism of these sorts of youth centers. It's all in the name of combating bigotry—the rest
just comes with the worldview of the young European left. In years of touring Germany, I've often bristled at the oppressive political consciousness and correctness of German punks.
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One explained to me recently that “because of our past, we have to go out of our way to be the ‘good' country, and to take the high moral ground on every issue, and it can make us seem humorless because we are trying to all the time be a kind of policeman of ourselves and everyone to do the right thing.” (Former West German chancellor Willy Brandt said his country had to be “a nation of good neighbors, at home and abroad.”) It plays like a cultural descendant of a particularly moralistic Protestantism, reminiscent of the righteous reaction of postwar children that also led to leftist terrorism in the 1970s, and becomes a kind of authoritarianism of progressive ideals.
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My mother hen here was a soft-spoken, dark-haired elf named Ozren. He warmed up soup and pasta in the communal kitchen, showed me the bedroom over the bar, and then took me on a quick walking tour of the center of town. We recapped the relatively short but eventful history of Novi Sad. The second city of Serbia and the capital of the northern, Hungarianized region of Vojvodina, it was founded late and destroyed repeatedly. Like many historical divides in the Balkans, this one has to do with the complex interactions between ethnic settlement and the shifting Hapsburg/Ottoman border. West explained that after
an ill-fated Serbian revolt against the Turks in 1689, the reigning Austrian emperor “offered [the Serbs] asylum on his territories, with full rights of religious worship and a certain degree of self-government. . . . The [Serbian] Patriarch accepted the offer and led across the Danube thirty thousand Serbian families, from all parts of the land, as far south as Macedonia and Old Serbia,” now known as Kosovo. This migration of refugees, combined with Serbs settled there in earlier times by the Ottomans, became the Vojvodina region and the city of Novi Sad. It was the largest Serbian city for the next two centuries, until it was decimated by the Hungarians in 1848.

“It's a complicated history,” said Ozren. “Have you talked to anyone here about the bombing?” he asked me, referring to NATO's 1999 air campaign.

I hadn't.

“It was crazy. The bombs were so . . . accurate. They sent one to the parliament building and hit one specific office. The rest of the building was fine. . . . They would announce what they were targeting, so mostly people weren't killed.”

In a moment of absentmindedness, he'd thought the show was scheduled for April 25, not March 25, until our mutual friend Dejan called two weeks earlier and reminded him. “We canceled the movie screening,” he reassured me. I replied that I'd opened for stranger acts than a movie.

We met Dejan at a beer bar. A charismatic, hyperverbal, big-boned booking agent for hardcore bands, he had an intense manner that set Ozren's quiet and ironic demeanor in relief. I was under the impression that Dejan had put me in touch with some Bulgarian booking contacts and thanked him.

“No way,” he said. “They have a real problem with
right-wingers at hardcore shows in Bulgaria. People get their tires slashed and stuff, so I don't book there.”
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