Diary of Interrupted Days Read online

  “You know how planes have to fly through certain corridors? There are roads up in the sky, just like down here. Some of those roads are in the way of the bombers. When a plane is late, it usually means that its normal corridor is closed and the bombers are coming sooner. We have to hurry.”

  Sara had already been gone when the bombing of Serbia started, and Boris’s world had turned surreal. As an artist, he deconstructed reality and reinserted pieces intended to create a shift in perception in those who saw his art. But now nothing seemed real enough to deconstruct. He would turn up every morning at his job on the twenty-ninth floor of a building at the intersection of Yonge and Bloor, and he would try to work, concentrating on shapes and colours, lines and shades, and then find that hours had passed as he stared out the window at the CN Tower. A similar tower had already been destroyed in Belgrade. Sometimes he envisioned a giant condom covering the whole edifice, turning it into a colossal penis aimed at any deity allowing this nightmare to happen. Whenever he put his headphones on and inserted a music CD into his Mac, he ended up searching instead for radio news on the Internet.

  When he pulled into the big underground garage in his apartment building at night, he judged its merits as a shelter from air raids. On the supermarket shelves, he only had eyes for canned foods. He returned from a trip to the drugstore to buy shaving oil with band-aids and antiseptic cream. He melted sedatives under his tongue several times a day, and took Saint John’s wort before he climbed into bed, but slept only a few hours each night.

  He was safe in Toronto, far from the fury of metal that was happening in the Balkans. He also knew that his parents would be fine. His father was a retired general, after all, with access to the best shelters. Still, he felt that everything was being destroyed. He had been abroad long enough to start perceiving his homeland as an idea, not a set of particular people and buildings—still it was an idea buried in the foundation of his being. Each building the NATO bombers hit was part of the idea. Every time he heard of another bombing, he felt physically ill. His neck and shoulders turned to stone.

  Boris thought of going back to Belgrade, but he knew he would be drafted immediately. He talked with his mother almost every day on the phone—he always expected to hear bombs exploding in the background, but never did. They had moved to their cottage an hour south of Belgrade for the duration. They had enough food and his father had brought his whole collection of weapons and ammunition with him, even a sniper rifle he obtained through channels. His mother sounded upbeat and he had no doubts about his father’s mood, although, of course, they never spoke.

  For the first time in years he made a steady stream of phone calls to his old friends in Belgrade, who all talked fast, describing crazy things—how terrific all-night parties were taking place in several of the larger shelters, how people brought drugs with them, and booze, how people had sex and made jokes about the bombing, how everyone had a badge with a target drawn on it. How everyone prayed for their enemies to come on foot, so they could give vent to their frustration.

  In the beginning, the bombing victims were just people, somewhere, just numbers. Then, during the second week, they were people with names, people friends of his friends knew. By the third week, they were colleagues.

  Boris’s mentor died. The old artist was staying with his family in a city that had not been bombed at all. One night, the raptors finally came to destroy a factory on the edge of the town. The artist was three days short of his ninetieth birthday, and during his lifetime had seen both world wars and the Balkan wars. He was almost completely deaf and mostly blind and did not hear the first few explosions. But then they dropped a large one, and a trace of that horrific sound reached what remained of his hearing. Jolted out of his silence, he asked what the noise was. “It’s a bomb, Grandpa!” his granddaughter replied.

  “Not another war,” he said, and died.

  At his funeral the air-raid sirens sounded, and everyone abandoned the coffin except one man, himself old enough not to be afraid of dying.

  Boris knew that his mentor’s name would not be added to the list of victims, he knew that the cynical NATO spokesman would not be apologizing for this death, the way he ironically apologized for other blunders.

  Then came the fourth week, and in the chess of death a move that found Boris on a bad square.

  The border was close now. Miša switched the radio on and fumbled with the dial, checking for news bulletins. When all he could find was music, he relaxed a little bit.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, “why are you all in black?”

  “I’m going to a funeral. My father died.”

  “From the bombing?”

  “Not directly, no.”

  His father, ever vigilant, had got into the habit of borrowing a horse from a neighbourhood farmer. It was a workhorse, rarely used for riding, and the animal hated having someone on its back—but that’s precisely what had attracted the General to it, his mother said. The owner did not mind lending the mare: he thought that it was the rider who was in danger, not the horse. The General would mount the horse, avoiding its teeth as it tried to bite his leg, and take it for a slow ride among the vineyards on the hill above the village. He would carry his binoculars and his old shotgun, and put on the jacket of his old uniform, claiming that it was the only thing that could protect him from the wind up there, on the hill. The villagers started addressing him as Marshall.

  On a sunny afternoon, the General rode uphill some time after five. The horse returned home alone just before six. While they were gone, a huge formation of bombers from Italy had flown over, going south towards Kosovo. The planes may have scared the horse or some animal had run out of the bushes to startle it. The villagers found the General lying under a pear tree. He was alive, but semiconscious and breathing with difficulty. It took the ambulance an hour and a half to get to him, and almost three hours to drive him to the military hospital in Belgrade—another group of bombers had started attacking the capital in the meantime and the roads had been closed. The General was pronounced dead on arrival. The autopsy showed that a broken rib had punctured his lung and caused internal bleeding.

  Like every other bit of news about the General from the past ten years, Boris had heard this from his mother. Boris and his father had stopped talking to each other in 1989, and there were a few years before that when they hardly talked at all. After Boris had moved to Toronto he’d rarely even thought of his dad, and when he did, it was always as the General. The General who went into politics after retiring. The General whose party was directly responsible for his son’s leaving the country, like tens of thousands of others, all young, educated people, artists, doctors, engineers. The General whose political convictions were more important to him than his only son.

  “This grandpa from my building, he’s been through the big war,” Miša said. “He told me he’d prefer to die than see enemy soldiers on our streets again.”

  “They will never come down from the skies.”

  “I don’t think so, either.” Miša sighed. “That’s frustrating. Or maybe that’s good. Perhaps our dicks are not as long as we think they are.”

  The music on the radio was some Croatian song, recorded before the war.

  “They’re playing that now?” Boris asked.

  “It’s as if nothing ever happened.” Miša paused. “People are trying hard to forget that there was a war at all. As if all of it was just an incident caused by the drunken guests in a Balkan bar. I know some people who were in Bosnia and Croatia—they all claim they shot in the air or they didn’t aim. Who did the killings, then? Maybe they’re not lying, maybe mujahideen came, and mercenaries, such scum.”

  “We wish,” Boris said. “My best friend was in Croatia for just a few weeks. He saw some ugly stuff that our boys did.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Deserted one night. Then left the country.”

  “He must have seen something he shouldn’t have.”
/>   Boris didn’t answer. My best friend. Johnny. It came so naturally.

  They rode in silence. Half an hour later, they saw the customs sign on the side of the road. There was only one car ahead of them, and they were soon at the booth. The single duty officer nodded at Miša, looked curiously at Boris, and stamped their passports. The same procedure was repeated on the Serbian side, and they were through.

  The General had retired in 1986 in a regular renewal of the commanding cadre. He went gracefully—got his gold watch, his decorations, and his farewell party. Still, it hit him hard. He used to say how he could hardly wait to leave the army so he could go hunting, play chess, read all the history books he had piled in his study over the years that he never had the time for. Boris remembered the large old bookcase full of red tomes behind the pompous writing desk in his father’s study, a place he rarely entered. The classics of Marxism, Tito’s collected works and some leather-bound volumes of the regime’s favourite authors. One whole row was full of books in Russian—the lowest shelf behind locked doors. Those who had showed their support for Stalin went to jail after the country refused to enter the Eastern bloc, so the General was discreet about his love for Russian literature. Even when Boris advanced to the grade level in which Tolstoy, Yesenin, Sholokhov, and Gorky were on his reading list, his father refused to lend him his copies—he had translations as well as the originals—giving him money to buy his own.

  During the first few months after he retired, the General indeed took to reading, approaching it as if it were his new job. He got up at five in the morning, had a shower, shaved, and made his first coffee. Then he read the newspapers in the living room for an hour. After a breakfast and his second coffee, he went into his study, where he would sit at his desk with a book opened flat in front of him, his notebook positioned a little to the right, his golden fountain pen next to it. He would put his glasses on, and begin to read, and wouldn’t get up until one, when Boris’s mother called him for lunch.

  Later, in Canada, when exile edited his list of new friends without regard for his personal prejudices, Boris for the first time had the chance to spend more time with engineers of different kinds, and he saw the same need for precision in them.

  It was so noticeable he wondered whether there were only two types of human brains in this world: that of an engineer (or soldier, or scientist) and that of an artist. Gender didn’t seem to influence the mindset, nor class, nor colour of skin or ethnicity. Engineers wanted to measure and polish everything until it was perfect, and then they wanted to preserve it in that final state. Artists wanted to make jazz of everything. Late, disorganized, insecure, sensitive to the point that they seemed mostly incapable of communicating in any language. If you could find a brilliant engineer and a brilliant artist of exactly the same IQ, same age, and same background, put them in the same room, and put only one object in front of them, they would each describe different things. Yet both moved the world: one in seconds, degrees, radians; the other in reflections, hints, wisps.

  For months, his father read—but then cracks in his concrete schedule started to appear. He would come out of his room to fill his coffee cup or to make a telephone call. Then he stopped altogether. In the late fall of 1987, he began leaving the apartment as soon as he had finished his morning newspapers, always checking his watch before he left, as if he did not want to be late. Then he started holding sessions at home with some of his old soldier friends. They went into his study and stayed there for hours, talking in subdued voices. Then new faces started appearing at those meetings.

  Boris was already at the door one day when the elevator opened and a tall man stepped out. He was a legendary theatre director, also the son of a general, whom Boris had met several times during his art studies. They had even talked one time about Boris designing one of his shows, but that had never happened.

  Confused, Boris extended his hand. “Hello, Maestro. Are you looking for—?”

  “You? Not this time. I’m meeting with some people in IIB—” He saw the number on the open door behind Boris, and added, “Oh, I guess I’m seeing your father, then.” He smiled a little awkwardly. Boris moved aside. “Have fun,” he said, and headed for the elevator. He was late for his own meeting at the Student Cultural Centre.

  So his father had entered politics. The director had just become a member of the United Left, a new party made up of ex-communists. Everybody in Belgrade’s artistic circles talked about his betrayal: he had clashed with the communist regime all his life but now he had become one of the new apparatchiks.

  An hour later, sitting at the brainstorming session for a new collective project that would ridicule both the famous director’s new party and Milosevic’s Socialists, Boris suddenly realized: his father and him—direct enemies now.

  That project, titled “Giant Shadows of Little Men,” turned out to be difficult to execute and—for one reason or another—opened in the Happy Gallery on a Sunday in February 1989, several months late. The idea was to toy with genealogy, to ridicule the nationalists who claimed that Serbs were among the oldest peoples on earth. One artist enlarged the image of a single amoeba and turned it into a passport photo. Another exhibited a broken fork—sculpted in stone—with the caption, “An early Serbian fork; 1200 BC.” Boris chose to manipulate pictures from his family album: in one collage, his grandfather was a priest with a large cross on his chest and a Hitler moustache; in another his mom was addressing a Communist Party congress, her fist raised, in full red regalia. The General was there, too, a child riding a white horse through the streets of liberated Belgrade at the end of World War II, the masses ecstatic, carnations falling on his head. The nationalist media immediately and satisfyingly attacked the exhibition, calling the artists either traitors or internationalists—equally bad in a country crossbreeding xenophobia with paranoia. Only one independent magazine published an affirmative review, and the author heaped kudos on Boris’s work. A couple of days later, Boris came home late to find an envelope leaning against the lamp on the desk in his room. Inside was a letter from his father:

  Boris, you have sold us, your family, your parents, for a little piece of dubious glory. I hope you will find support among your peers, because we cannot give it to you anymore. We have nothing to talk about.

  Boris moved out that same night, a suitcase in one hand, a large black portfolio of his drawings in another. He stayed for a week with Johnny, then found a small studio, the first of several he would rent during the next few years. He was lucky that Johnny was not on tour the night he left home. He was lucky that a few months earlier he had done a cover design for Johnny’s most successful album ever, and that Johnny and he had become friends. He was lucky to meet Johnny’s girlfriend, Sara, that night. Her face was familiar: she worked in the news department of Belgrade TV. She and Johnny had been together for three years already, but Boris had never met her until he turned up homeless on Johnny’s doorstep. Later he wondered why it was Johnny he had turned to. Some of his colleagues had studios—he could have crashed there, and stayed longer. Was it because Johnny had meant burning, and not slow release? Or because Boris had wanted to exit his world and step into an unknown? Or because he had known, only five minutes after he had first met Johnny, that the two of them would be best friends forever?

  Several miles into Serbia, Miša pulled off the road to park behind a small white car. The car’s driver got out—he wore a large badge with a target on it—and opened his trunk, which was full of canisters of gasoline. He shook Miša’s hand then filled the minibus tank. As Miša and Boris drove away, the man waved at them.

  “You can’t find gas anywhere except with guys like him,” Miša said. “I used to carry my own canisters, but I don’t want to ride on a bomb.”

  Miša was not joking when he said that once inside Serbia he would drive as fast as he could. The old engine roared as they blasted along, occasionally swerving into the oncoming lane to avoid bumps. As the day grew older, the traffic slowed. The road was em
pty in both directions.

  Miša had to yell over the revving engine. “I saw the demonstrations in Toronto on television when the bombing started. Were you there when they set the American consulate on fire?”

  “I saw the man who did it,” Boris said. “He was masked, and had one of those Palestinian scarves around his head. He passed me in the crowd, holding something tight under his jacket. A minute later the fire broke out.”

  “So who was he then, a provocateur?”

  “I don’t know, but the Serb protesters never wore those headscarves.”

  “The Americans deserved it.”

  “What was the point? After that the cops put up concrete barricades and moved us to the other side of the street. And there were so many cameras on the roofs around us that I’m sure none of us will need a passport photo ever again.”

  “Forty minutes to Novi Sad,” Miša said, pressing harder on the gas as the old minibus engine revved higher.

  Like most women married to army officers, Boris’s mother was a homemaker in the truest sense of the word. She was halfway through her university studies—French language and literature—when she met the General. Soldiers attack head on, full force, and they were married six months later. The first few years were hard times. His father served in remote areas and was often posted from town to town. But he moved up the ranks quickly and, finally, they were able to settle in Belgrade in a large, sunny apartment in an old building confiscated from some industrialist after World War II.

  His father’s friends were other officers who often visited with their wives. These women were all similar—handsome, but quiet and obedient—as if there were a prescribed type that a high-ranking officer was supposed to marry. None of them worked. Their husbands earned almost as much as the country’s political leaders and their power seemed limitless. When he had achieved his rank, Boris’s father had helped his relatives find jobs, get better apartments, get good loans from banks. Perhaps the only thing his father was never allowed to do was to travel abroad. Several times he went on business trips to Russia and Czechoslovakia, but the family spent their holidays on the Adriatic coast.