Whole Wild World (31 page)

‘You sound like a Hungarian,' I'd been told by more than one relative and a few barmen, masters of being cruel because they could. There is no greater insult to a Magyar, short of being told you speak Hungarian like a Scotsman.

Initially, Sam and I went through community-run Croatian schools at the club. Later, on weeknights, a serene, patient priest, Father Gracijan, taught us at the church. But it was hard going.
I could not easily discern the difference between the hard and soft ‘ch', even though Dušević uses the latter. You have to lightly press the tip of your tongue against the soft palate in your mouth, and make a sound between the ‘ch' of chalk and the ‘tu' of tune. Already there's too much to think about, before overcoming a lisp I have when tired or lazy.

Then there is the hellhole of grammar, my declension deficit disorder. Nouns in Croatian have seven cases in both singular and plural. Seven is supposed to be lucky. But in the masculine there are hard or soft forms, depending on the last consonant of the stem; then you have animate and inanimate designations. By the time you get to feminine nouns, you're buggered, well and truly. Although in this part of the word world, nouns tend to end in ‘a', so that takes a lot of side bets out of the equation. There are no hard and soft delineations, for instance, no cage fights between animate and inanimate.

Our teacher Teresa, a family friend, loses me fifteen minutes after
Dobro jutro
. By noon I am neutered and infinitively confused. In all my endeavours, although it was a stretch to call turning up an effort, neither I nor the language would stick. On this score, the sort of ‘ic' I'd become was dyslexic. It was as if I had developed an internal stutter – second-guessing myself, over-stressing, too many ways to get it wrong – and I was hobbled. I tried to mask my poor grasp. Teresa encouraged me to read and work on my grammar but my heart was dissident and my mind followed its orders.

The nasty sting in all this was Croatian was taught on Saturday mornings at Ashfield High School, a block from the Croatian church. That extra half-day of school when other fun such as rep basketball or part-time work beckoned seemed unfair. The good part was getting to know Croatian kids my own age, esp- ecially the girls, who were studious without being annoying about it. The boys I sat with kept up a constant low-hum commentary
of one-liners, soccer talk, expletives and erotic tales. Not all were doing Croatian for the HSC; some were too young or too old, others were exiles from school sport, to my mind the ultimate blasphemy in any creed or code.

At morning tea break, the playground was like the second division of migrant languages. The premier league of French, German, Italian, Spanish and Indonesian were done in luxurious home grounds, part of the regular school timetable. The faces in the crowd at Ashfield told you Modern Greek, Arabic and Cantonese were the top teams, with a long tail of Turkish, Korean, Dutch and Polish pupils, ahead of newly promoted Serbian and Croatian contingents.

I'd had no experience of Serbs but it was quietly suggested that we keep our distance from them. It was an article of faith among us that Serbs were the ones keeping Croatians down in the home country; Belgrade controlled Yugoslavia, milking industrial Croatia and Slovenia, sending its military brass on a pension to the Dalmatian coast as soon as they'd completed their service. The Serbs I saw on Saturdays appeared to be just like us, so I worked hard to spot the differences. The boys seemed older, dressed in faded denim and were on the verge of thin, shifty moustaches; the girls were louder than the boys, dyed blondes and wore jangly jewellery and bright nail polish. Serbs here had a lower profile than Croatians, given they sat under the Yugoslav banner; for devout Croats, the term Serbo-Croat, red star on the flag and appeals to
bratstvo i jedinstvo
, brotherhood and unity, were a sure way to raise the blood pressure.

‘What do you say when someone asks where you're from?'

‘Croatia!'

‘What will you say when they respond, but that's part of Yugoslavia, Croatia doesn't exist?'

‘I'll say Croatia's been around a lot longer than Yugoslavia.'

We'd all endured such lectures from parents. But no one
outside the conflict wanted to engage on such remote issues, unless they were trying to stir you up or grab your vote. My knowledge of Balkan history was sketchy; unlike all the other facts I'd stored, my curiosity about Croatia was limited because there seemed little point digging deeper. Like my Catholicism, I was operating on pure faith, and happy doing so. The questions I was actually interested in were about our family in Croatia, where all our closest relatives, except for Teta, still lived.

How did they pay for things? What did they think of the regime? Why were they still living in Yugoslavia? Are they free to leave or visit us? Are they really happy, slim Commies living Tito's dream of socialism with a suntan and smile? I'd assumed Tito was a Serb. Josip Broz, now dead, had been born in the north of Croatia.

Due to time and geography, it was not easy to reconcile the past or understand the present; both were pushing against each other. As a boy, I'd read about the Ustaše during the war, described as a brutal, fascist outfit that had slaughtered Jews and gypsies. Hrvatska was supposedly a Nazi ‘puppet state'. My father believed this to be a vile lie, an utter misrepresentation; the alliance had been one of convenience, not a joint project. Terrible things happened during the war, my son, best a boy not know everything. The victors, he said, write the history.

What about the losers?

By 1980, Croatians were notorious for soccer riots, rowdy demonstrations and terrorist attacks. In primary school I'd been shocked when a Croatian group hijacked a plane in America. When the Sydney Hilton was bombed in 1978 I was relieved Croatians weren't responsible. Then, a year later, six men were arrested over a complex plot to blow up Sydney's Elizabethan Theatre during a Yugoslav cultural event, to bomb a number of city businesses, to cut Sydney's water supply. The so-called ‘Croatian Six' were convicted and sentenced to fifteen years' jail.
I was miserable and ashamed. Boys at school badgered me with questions about terrorism.

‘Why do you bring your troubles here?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Why do Croatians want to hurt innocent people?'

‘We don't.'

‘Then why blow things up? What have Australians got to do with your fight against Serbs in Yugoslavia?'

I couldn't get my head around it either: killing people
here
, causing mayhem, to change an entrenched political order on the other side of the world?

‘How can it possibly help Croatians anywhere to let off bombs in Sydney?' I asked Tata in exasperation. ‘What happens next?'

‘Bullshit. It's all bull-a-shit,' Tata said, more emphatically than usual. ‘UDBA (the Yugoslav secret police) are behind it. These young men have been tricked into a stupid plot by Yugoslav agents.'

I wanted to believe in agent provocateurs, but wasn't convinced. I'd heard the claim many times from people I respected: Yugoslav spies had infiltrated Croatian groups to discredit them in the eyes of the Australian government and people. I thought Tata naïve; this time his dedication to Croatian independence had stopped him from seeing what politicians and others had been claiming for years. He cried conspiracy, but I needed facts, to see the evidence. Just one case would do it for me. I'd have the tools, then, to explain the truth to anyone who said Croatians were ‘bomb chuckers' and terrorists. The men lost their final appeals. Guilty – and so were we.

After each had served up to a decade in prison, evidence emerged the Croatian Six had been set up by the UDBA. An operative ‘Vico Virkez' had infiltrated the Croatian community; plotter, police informer and Crown star witness, he was flown back to Yugoslavia after testifying in the men's first trial. In 1991,
ABC
Four Corners
reporter Chris Masters tracked down ‘Virkez', who was actually a Serb. Vitomir Misimovic admitted being a spy and setting up the innocent men. Later, author Hamish McDonald in
Framed
revealed Canberra officials withheld intelligence material from the courts that would have led to ‘not guilty' verdicts. He detailed how Yugoslav spies used Australian police and security services to discredit Croatian nationalists. Maddeningly slow, the truth arrived, as did Croatia's independence.

Wally's mother had remarried. He and his sisters were now living in a two-storey home in Georges Hall, near Bankstown airport, with a garden, pool and rock-solid stepfather. Wally was on his third car, the tantrum-throwing Bambino ditched for a VW Fastback, which blossomed into a full-scale Kombi. Wally's campervan was a fixture in the Benilde car park. By the end of Year Eleven Wally was off his ‘P' licence and I was just old enough to get my learner's permit.

He offered to teach me to drive but I wasn't ready to engage with the VW's stick shift. Tata had taught Sam, so my first lesson was with him in the Kingswood station wagon with its three-speed manual column shift. The session soon became a scream opera, a rolling catastrophe of stalls, jump-starts and near misses.

‘I'm not teaching you anymore, you don't listen.'

‘I'm never going with you again, you're a hopeless teacher.'

This Balkan stalemate needed a peacemaker.

‘You have to take your brother,' Tata said to Sam, ‘because we can't afford to pay for lessons, okay?'

Sam drove me to an industrial estate near Kingsgrove.

Signal. Accelerator, ease off the clutch. Handbrake down, rolling. Hop, hop, stall. This went the way of the first lesson until we agreed not to say anything.

Silence. Calm, off we go. For an hour, I drove laps of the circuit (it really was called that), finding rhythm through the gears, listening to the engine, getting a feel for the release point of the clutch. We did this for weeks and I extended my range.

As I was gaining confidence I tore the ligaments in my ankle at basketball and was on crutches for a month. It was a naggingly slow healing process, partly due to the severity of the injury. Not aiding recovery was my mother's insistence that the best treatment – to reduce swelling, speed tissue repair – was a home remedy of a cloth (had to be pink or red) soaked in water and vinegar. The method had worked wonders for Mama on Tito's Brotherhood and Unity highway project. It was also effective on ailing livestock, Teta added. Supercoach thought it was hilarious, poultices last used on athletes and damsels during the Middle Ages.

My seventeenth birthday passed, so I booked a driver's test. As the family car was needed elsewhere, it was decided I should use a vehicle from a driving school. Column-shift manuals were impossible to come by so rather than stumble with a four on the floor I thought it best to do the test in an automatic, even though I'd never driven an auto.

‘I only need one lesson,' I explained to the instructor, an Indian with a moustache like cricketer Kapil Dev, the all-round star of the summer. ‘I'll take the car for an hour before the test to get used to it.'

‘Okay, put it in D for drive, blinker, check your mirrors, hand-brake off, now show me your stuff.'

The instructor directed me around the streets of Beverley Hills and Narwee, near the motor registry. He taught me a handy way to reverse-park this Datsun Bluebird, guided by plastic studs fixed to the rear shelf. It never failed. I did an hour with him on the morning of the test as well. I made polite conversation with the examiner, impassive, who provided a series of clear
instructions and nothing more. A dream run. He didn't utter a word after the test until we were in the registry.

‘Wait here,' he said, pointing to a chair near the eyesight test. He went over to the driving school instructor, who'd been chatting to the women working at the counter. They had a short, intense exchange.

‘He said you hit the kerb when you did your three-point turn,' my instructor said. ‘He's not going to pass you.'

‘What? He didn't say anything at all during the test about that. I didn't even come close to the gutter when I did the three-pointer because the street was so wide.'

‘You'll have to sign up for a few more lessons to brush up on your driving skills.'

I sensed a shakedown. In the postmortem, Wally concurred. So, too, did Tata.

Scam.

‘Next time, you use my car,' Tata said. ‘I'm not paying a guy for lessons you don't need.'

The test queue, however, was so long it would be a month before the next opportunity. Sam drove and parked the car across the street from the registry. Taking no chances, we were early. A better parking spot came up and I urged him to grab it. But he couldn't move forward; the Kingswood in gear, engine revving, but the car was sliding backwards.

‘What are you doing? Take the spot.'

‘It won't move.'

Broken axle. No test. Fail.

A month later. Sam parked in the same spot. I started the car.