The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (21 page)

It's the second most common complaint I hear, and they followed it, like a script, with the most common: that the punk scene in Novi Sad, they agree, is not what it was a few years ago. “These things come in cycles,” said Dejan philosophically. “Five years on, and five years off.”

I'd met Dejan the year before, when we stayed up drinking by the club's courtyard fire pit with an effusive Hold Steady superfan and his friend, the singer of the local punk band the Bayonets. They had strong opinions: about Gogol Bordello, who they condemned for doing a Coke commercial, and about the Serbian director and musician Emir Kusturica, whom they accused of being a radical Serbian nationalist in a progressive globalist's clothing. Kusturica converted from his Islamic roots to Orthodox Christianity, they said, and presents a face of inclusive “world music” while being a “state project” funded by the nationalist government. (Indeed, his film
Underground
, which won the Cannes Jury Prize, was partially funded by Yugoslav state-owned television, although that isn't necessarily an unusual arrangement.) “He showed his true face” while on tour with Manu Chao, they said—he objected to a Manu Chao T-shirt listing concert dates that included Kosovo as a non-Serbian city.

I'd fallen hard for the Kusturica mythos in the early 2000s, as did many in what became the New York “gypsy punk” scene. The colorful, gold-toothed Rabelasian fairy tales of his film
Black Cat, White Cat
and the Balkan rock of his band Zabranjeno PuÅ¡enje (later called the No Smoking Orchestra) fed a facile, romantic exoticism of a world of roguish present-day pirates and clowns. Zabranjeno PuÅ¡enje (“No Smoking”) was part of the 1980s generation of controversial, punk-influenced bands across the communist sphere who became associated with a wry, surrealist version of anti-establishment commentary. The best-known anecdote about the band involves a concert in Rijeka during which a band member announced, “The Marshall is dead . . . I mean, the amplifier.” This was widely understood as a pun referring to the late Yugoslav strongman Marshal Tito, and the band gained as much in countercultural credibility as they lost in the official clampdown on their music—concerts canceled, records banned from the radio—that followed.

Kusturica was a late, minor member of Zabranjeno PuÅ¡enje, and the band broke up with the onset of the Yugoslav wars. After the war, Kusturica revived the name with a Belgrade-based rump organization called Emir Kusturica & the No Smoking Orchestra, with an “ethno-rock” sound barely related to that of the original group. (A competing, Sarajevo-based group using the name Zabranjeno PuÅ¡enje plays the original, garage-rock style.) Kusturica's version of the group, while popular overseas, is controversial in a wholly different and less sympathetic way than the 1980s punk incarnation: he is widely seen as sympathetic to the violent Serbian nationalism of Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević; is a supporter of Russian president Vladimir Putin (he was a guest at Putin's third inauguration in 2012); and has written a song (“Wanted Man”) in support of the indicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić, with lyrics including “If you don't like Dabic Raso”—a nickname for Karadžić—“You can suck our dicks.”
Tilman Zülch, the German president of the NGO Society for Threatened Peoples, published an impassioned anti-Kusturica letter in 2009 that began “Stop the propaganda for war criminal Karadzic on the Munich concert stage!” and ended “P.S. It is unbelievable that Emir Kusturica is still Serbia's UNICEF ambassador.” Once again, as in the cases of Letov and Limonov, an artist associated with anticommunist rebellion in the 1970s and 1980s made a latter-day turn into strident, even xenophobic nationalism. As Nietzsche once said, “Extreme positions are not succeeded by moderate ones but by extreme positions of the opposite kind.”

Both Ozren and Dejan were politely skeptical about the evening's show. There might have been six people in the room for my first visit last year, and we decided, at Ozren's strong suggestion, that I would perform acoustically on the floor. So when, back at the club, people started pouring in, I rushed to set up onstage. It was one of those shows that makes you think, against all evidence to the contrary, that sometimes the game still works like it's supposed to, that if you just
keep coming back
to a place eventually you'll break through. Drunk but articulate, the crowd was dominated by relentless, though good-natured, hecklers, and they kept me fresh and quick.

I slept in the guest room upstairs, under the warm gaze of gay-tolerance propaganda posters featuring stylish butch lesbians. The shower was awkwardly located down the hall, in the bathroom of an active office. I say “shower,” but that's not quite right: there was a hose screwed onto the sink, and a cloth mop and bucket to dry the floor when you were done. A towel around my waist, I nodded good morning to the arriving office workers.

For three of the past four days, I had awoken to blizzard conditions, as the snow I outran the day before caught up with me in the morning. This morning, I pulled out my phone to call ahead and cancel the evening's concert, but some vestigial showbiz reflex made me pause and give the show a chance to go on. The streets of Novi Sad weren't, of course, plowed, but it was a heavy wet snow that turned quickly to slush and melted under my tires. I got out of the city, across the bridge over the Danube, and turned back up into the Fruška Gora hills, my wheels slipping ever so slightly.

At the park's entrance, two policemen were leaning into the window of a stopped car, and I thought the road was closed. They waved me through. I wound my way up to the ridge, crawling and slipping. At the peak sat a line of stopped cars. “Not again,” I thought, with visions of another night spent becalmed on a snowy foreign road. I had the impulse to pull a U-turn, head back to the city, and take the longer highway route through Belgrade.

But Serbs are made of sterner stuff than the French—in West's words, “they were certain in any circumstances to act vigorously”—and not five minutes of fidgety inaction passed before a dump truck the size of a small house lumbered forward from the back of the line of traffic and nudged its way to the front, and we began to creep forward in its wake. Once the line was moving, restless drivers chafed at the slow speed and began to pass the plow truck on the snowy downhill, and in this way we put the storm behind us.

Assume what you might about potholed Serbian highways, but they had the benefit of being nearly deserted, and the gas stations had free Wi-Fi and toilets with proper seats, which is more
than I can say for large portions of France. The road was steamy with fog and littered, on both sides of the Serbian–Croatian border, with the broken fluff of what must be the slowest, dumbest sparrows in creation. It's hard to imagine what the birds were eating on the roads—worms can hardly crawl through asphalt—but they didn't have the reflexes for such hazardous grazing. Every mile or two, another startled bird thudded off my front bumper. One was a direct, bloody hit in the center of my windshield. A stubborn feather stuck to the glass for hours.

I crossed the border alongside a convoy of vans and heavy machinery painted blue with a yellow stripe and labeled “Republika Slovenija Civilna Zaščita” (Republic of Slovenia Civil Defense). One flatbed hauled a four-wheel off-road vehicle; another was loaded with kayak paddles. As I passed Zagreb and approached the craggy Adriatic coast, the low hills and huddled hamlets gave way to frosted mountain tunnels and majestic elevated bridges over vast pine valleys. Some government organization had, for obscure reasons, erected bear silhouettes along the roadside, which caused me more than one adrenaline-shot double take.

Once through the final tunnels to the littoral, I might as well have been in a different country. The sun—the sun!—was shining in a clear sky, and the pine had given way to sweeping, sail-shaped mountain peaks covered in threadbare deciduous forest. The beauty of the Dalmatian coastline is matched only by the exploitation of same—once for natural resources, now for favorable exchange rates and Caligulan vacations taken by British lugs. “The human animal is not competent. That is the meaning of the naked Dalmatian hills,” wrote West. Centuries of reckless logging, by Illyrians and Romans, Hungarians and Venetians, had treated the land with “the carelessness that egotistic
people show in dealing with other people's property. . . . After this wholesale denudation it was not easy to grow the trees again.” But over the hills is the blue vista of Rijeka and the sea, with accents of port crane. Like Dundee, or Duluth, the city climbs vertiginously from coast to cliff. Here the cliffs are scaled by weathered stone buildings and crumbling concrete housing projects, whose grotty and disintegrating functionalism stands in sharp contrast to the spectacular seaside.

From the sixteenth century well into the eighteenth, Rijeka (historically called “Fiume” in Italian—both names mean “river”) was a free port city and a haven for a guerrilla group known as the Uskoks, who had a taste for piracy and a flair for the dramatic: adding their victims' blood to their bread and collecting bags of Turkish noses.
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It had been a flashpoint border for centuries: militarily between the Austrians and Turks, and theologically between the Catholic and Orthodox worlds. Between the world wars, the city had a colorful and violent interregnum while Italy and the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia disputed its control. Into the vacuum swooped the Italian “poet warrior”—and proto-fascist—Gabriele D'Annunzio, who invaded with a private militia and introduced a kind of commune dominated by his own cult of personality.
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In the fallout after World War I, the expansionist Italian government, collecting on what West (referring to the 1915 Treaty
of London) calls “a bribe to induce the Italians to come into the war on the Allied side,” made an attempt at the Paris Peace Conference to undermine the nascent Kingdom of Serbs, Slovenes, and Croats in order to claim regional hegemony and Adriatic control—specifically, over the port of Fiume. Italian prime minister Vittorio Orlando stoked the still-hot fires of Italian nationalism to pressure American president Woodrow Wilson to acquiesce to, or at least ignore, the move. Wilson, though, had developed a personal distaste for the Italian delegation that accentuated his political disagreement with their territorial demands.

Enter D'Annunzio. Short, bald, mustachioed, and flamboyant, he was a parody of the Byronic artist-provocateur—womanizing, free-spending, ludicrous, but memorable in wartime. In
The Balkans
, Misha Glenny described him “charging Austrian trenches in the middle of the night with pistols and knives, dressed in a flowing cape.” Caught up in the paranoid nationalism of 1919 Italy, he and some units of the Arditi special forces decided that, rather than wait out the vacillations and negotiations of mere politicians, they would march on Fiume and solve the issue by force of arms, will, and the fate that favors the bold, naïve, and narcissistic.

For the next fourteen months, the Free State of Fiume became, depending on one's viewpoint, the “last of the pirate utopias,” an aesthetocracy, a proto-fascist testing ground, an anarcho-syndicalist dictatorship, or an ongoing orgy. The constitution declared, in Hakim Bey's paraphrase, “music to be the central principle of the State.” Leaders resurrected the Uskok pirate tradition to fund the never-ending party. Bey, who idealized the Free State as an anarchist utopia—“very nearly the first” of what he calls “temporary autonomous zones”—described it as a magnet for

            
artists, bohemians, adventurers, anarchists . . . fugitives and stateless refugees, homosexuals, military dandies (the uniform was black with pirate skull & crossbones—later stolen by the S.S.), and crank reformers of every stripe. . . . Every morning D'Annunzio read poetry and manifestos from his balcony; every evening a concert, then fireworks. This made up the entire activity of the government. Eighteen months later, when the wine and money had run out and the Italian fleet
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finally showed up and lobbed a few shells at the Municipal Palace, no one had the energy to resist.