The “Better life” that never was

My father isn’t a particularly sociable person. Conversation isn’t his thing. He doesn’t speak often, and even when he does, only briefly. On that September day in 1990, he didn’t even open his mouth. He came home from work and silently disappeared into his room.

It isn’t always easy to recognise when someone close to us is experiencing a collapse. And especially not when that someone is as reticent as my father. A mechanical engineer, at that time he was head of the energy department at the Metaliku factory near Gjakova, a town in the south-west of Kosovo, near the Albanian border. My mother worked in a textile factory, also in Gjakova. That autumn they were both sacked because, like thousands of others, they had refused to sign a declaration of loyalty to Serbia.

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Archipelago Yugoslavia

1. The “Better life” that never was (Kosovo)
2. Life in the crime scene (Serbia)
3. The apocalyptic clock ticking inside me (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
4. In Slovenia, we dreamed of democracy and woke up under capitalism
5. I don’t write about war because I want to, but because I have no choice (Croatia)

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My parents were born when the Yugoslavian experiment was just beginning. I was born when the experiment was about to fail. All three of us experienced the “bolji život” [better life], as the Yugoslavs called it. Socialist Yugoslavia – a joint project involving multiple Balkan peoples – would give them a good, “better life” for many decades. The smaller ethnic groups, like the Albanians, were the exception. Even so, the three of us were able to get a taste of the Yugoslavian idyll. My parents were inspired by the famous Yugoslavian slogan, Tito’s motto that peace would last a hundred years; my generation, by contrast, lived with the constant sense that war could break out at any time. And so it did, at any time, and each time in a new guise.

“Bolji život” was never intended for the Kosovo Albanians. And the 1990s would sweep away the slogans with their declarations of brotherhood and a common peace project. What followed was open enmity, and the former fraternal solidarity withered to a distant memory. Strangely enough, this memory still remains with us today, in the form of the Monument to Brotherhood and Unity in the heart of the KosovoKosovon capital, even if it is interpreted differently now – one man’s glory is another man’s shame. My nine-year-old son just finds it ugly and bizarre. He is even more alienated by the former name of the sports complex: Boro-Ramiz. I tell him the story of the two partisans, both Yugoslavian heroes, one a Serb, the other Albanian. And of their sense of brotherhood, which stood as a symbol of the unity between the two peoples. He throws his hands up, dumbfounded.

The dinosaur-like communist architecture, with its almost sacral air, merges with the profane everyday life of the residents and passers-by, something that younger people, like my child, find extremely odd. These stone testaments to the myth of the brotherhood still have an astonishing power. Perhaps because the death of the myth resulted in violence and disaster, its last breath dragging us slowly, inexorably, into the abyss.

That September day in 1990 when my parents’ lives collapsed like a house of cards was another descent into the abyss. My mother occasionally talks about that day: how their lifelong labours and hopes for a better life were destroyed overnight. My parents never recovered from it: their lives lost forever any prospect of structure and continuity.

Kosovo’s status as an autonomous region within the Yugoslav Federation, which it had held since 1974, had been stripped from it in the spring of 1989. As a result it was now directly under Serbian police rule. My parents’ lives and my childhood were turned upside down. In the state of emergency, a normal life was no longer thinkable. The “better life” was now a thing of the past.

“Bolji život” was never intended for the Kosovo Albanians. And the 1990s would sweep away the slogans with their declarations of brotherhood and a common peace project. What followed was open enmity, and the former fraternal solidarity withered to a distant memory.

I was very young and so at first I didn’t grasp the seriousness of this turning point. But my routine gradually changed. My parents were now at home much more. Our freedom of movement was more and more curtailed: our weekend walks, the quality of our food. Everything began to shrink, including the population. For many who fled to western Europe or even further, across the ocean, Kosovo became the abandoned homeland. But my father refused to contemplate that for a moment. He would always remain true to this soil, he would never leave it. His sense of connection with his homeland was too deep for that, even if outwardly barely perceptible: it was rooted in his turbulent family history. His grandfather had been killed by the partisans, his father had been driven to ruin by the communists, who had forced him to move to other towns.        

The state of emergency and the police measures hit us hard. At our extended Saturday evening gatherings my father, trying to keep family life as normal as possible at a time of ominous upheaval, would take refuge in memories of his student days in Zagreb. He would tell us stories from what he thought of as the best time of his life, or of his travels through Europe in the 1970s and 80s, when Kosovon Albanians who could afford to do so were allowed to move freely.  These were the only stories he wanted to tell, and I loved listening to them. They taught me the source of his love. As I listened to them, I dreamt of other lives, other places, other worlds. What was out there, beyond the borders of our threatening reality? That remained a mystery to me, and I learned to live in my own tiny world. We no longer travelled; just once a year, we’d holiday in Ulcinj, on the Montenegrin coast, where we had a summer cottage.

I pictured that unknown world and those unknown places as very beautiful. I never dared ask where the border was. There were so many borders, both visible and invisible: political, economic, linguistic, cultural. The other world remained unknown, and I became a perpetual dreamer.  

Even dreaming was a “crime”, but no one could stop me, and I told my dreams to myself. The dream of freedom was a beautiful silk cloth.  The dream of a national uprising was a tattered, mended cloth. The God of Justice in that dream was not just when he gave us such grand dreams. Because ultimately, it all remained just a dream. To this day I remember those dreams, which seemed so tangible to me back then, on the streets where the protests were held.  I dreamt my dream of freedom on the roadsides, on the main square, in the midst of crowds of thousands marching, like soldiers, without flags. I believed the great men who called us children “little heroes of the future” weaving the freedom of tomorrow from the roadside of yesterday. 

To take to the streets was to face the reality of our oppression – it was where the powerlessness of a ten-year-old met the national drama. This was one of the most powerful experiences of my childhood: an emotional turmoil made up of revolt, pride and fear. I patched my dream with slogans – “Freedom! Democracy!”, “Kosovon Republic!” – until, at the close of day, it was torn to shreds again and, disappointed, we went home. In this confusion I dreamt of the great revolution that would bring peace, never suspecting that a childhood lived in such a dramatic, tense time would complicate, even distort, our later experience of peace. I was a child living in a continuous state of war and wondering every day what new war would break out tomorrow.

However far removed from our family life these great dreams might have been, at home everything was good, so long as there was enough to eat. After she was sacked, my mother became a housewife, while my father ran a small chicken farm on Grandfather’s land. In calmer times, trade continued. When the tensions grew, it faltered and there was less food on the table. And so our domestic blessings were directly dependent on the political situation.  

I still remember – it must have been in 1993 or 1994 – seeing a highly fashionable red coat in the department store window and wanting it desperately. In vain did I plead with my father to buy it. “We don’t have the money,” was his curt reply. It was a sad day. Not just because of the coat, but because of all the things I couldn’t have. I longed for real things, colours, scents, travel, actual, tangible freedoms, not just images of them. I wanted my own room. I wanted to be able to travel for real, rather than just seeing the world on television. I dreamt of a real life of my own, but I lived in a small house in a small town and in a time when huge, shattering events were brewing daily over our heads.   

History was about to turn a page. It happened before our very eyes and with dizzying speed. I grew accustomed to the dreadful vastness and emptiness, the invisibility of the things I longed for, and acquired indifference. It sounds terrifying, this living with the constant feeling that everything could end tomorrow. But we proved astonishingly robust, able to adapt to anything at lightning speed. In a world where everything was constantly shifting, we learned to protect our little oases.   

This “shifting life” was the opposite of “normal life”. Normal life depends on stability and a sense of continuity. When you live in chaos and normality is out of reach, you tend to exaggerate it. In times when reality is constantly being constructed and dismantled, like theatre sets at each change of scene, the great, metaphysical questions arise – questions about the meaning and absurdity of life, and that which lies undeciphered in our genetic code.  

The researchers have an “epigenetic” explanation for the transmission of psycho-physical traumas: they leave traces in the genes of the affected individual, which are then passed on to their offspring. My father never wanted to talk about his trauma, and yet his trauma became my trauma. He never wanted to talk about the way reality is distorted by trauma. He never talked about death, other than to say it was time to push it away. As far away as possible! I, on the other hand, liked to talk about death, all the more so since it had assumed a whole new significance in my time. It reigned over our lives and gave them a totally different perspective. It taught me an important, if highly ironic, lesson – not about the nothingness in the hereafter, but about the abundance in the here and now. My flirtation with death was artistic and philosophical. But there were people everywhere at that time who knew all about dying. And some, too, who were capable of killing.   

It is 1998. It is early summer and outside the sun is beating down. My mother is putting in her “day shift”, cooking, cleaning, washing. My father has just returned from the market, where he has been selling eggs, silently, absently, with the weight of the searing heat on his shoulders. He is reading the newspaper. “It’s kicking off,” he says. Mother hangs her head. She goes into the kitchen to make coffee.

A few days later my childhood friend called round. “I’m going to war,” she said, “we may not see each other again.” She didn’t look like a warrior. She was pretty, blond hair, blue eyes, very attractive. I’d known her for ever, she lived in the house next door. We had often talked of the revolution and played “Heroines”. The revolution allows itself the honour of devouring its own sons. For the daughters, even that is not enough. They remain behind the door, like a broom for sweeping the floor. This beautiful, passionate sixteen-year-old girl escaped one night into the hinterland, to the Kosovon army. A few years later we heard that she had committed suicide.   

Our ways parted that summer. She went, I stayed. Thus does history shape parallels and differences. Perhaps the revolution sometimes allows itself the honour of devouring its own daughters too. But if so, then on real battlefields, not in dreamy corners like mine. While the people outside were occupied with a real tragedy, I stayed with my books. That was my way of surviving amidst the raging torrent.  

The revolution allows itself the honour of devouring its own sons. For the daughters, even that is not enough. They remain behind the door, like a broom for sweeping the floor.

The dividing line between those who made revolution and those who merely dreamt of it ran a few kilometres behind our house. But what we cannot imagine, cannot happen – until it actually does. I was protected by my own inability to imagine; I could not believe this new war would be so devastating. The horror concealed itself behind the unimaginable.  

But 1999 would bring merciless clarity – the whole extent of the tragedy and the absurdity of being, of history, of fate. It was the descent into hell, into utter inhumanity. It was the encounter with the fascination of Evil.   

On the evening of 24 March 1999, my father and I listened to a BBC News report about the start of the NATO bombing of Serbia. It was an old radio that he had had since his student days. He was drinking raki. “It’s the beginning of the end,” he said, “they’re saying it will all be over soon.” Then he fell silent again, his ear pressed to the radio. And I listened too, in my yellow pyjamas. I couldn’t sleep. That was the last night I would sleep in my pyjamas in my own home. It was a beautiful night, albeit starless.   

Many slept peacefully that night, shielded by the unimaginable. Many others had already become engulfed in the unimaginable. When I woke the next morning, I heard women’s voices in our living room. The women of my town had always been the first to hear and pass on any news. Now, utterly distraught, they told of atrocities, killings, rapes, expulsions carried out by military and paramilitary Serbian forces that night. Atrocities that would continue, systematically, until the middle of June in that year of the Devil.   

Our house filled with dozens of refugees. That same day we all moved together to another house. And then another, and another, mortally threatened nomads trying to push death as far away as possible. That first night of the bombs split our lives into two parts: the time before the horror and the time after it. The unimaginable became imaginable, and would remain so ever after. The two parts are separated by a memory gap, the riddle of how, overnight, we could become nothing and nobody.

The war was over, but the worst days were yet to come. The fallen had gone to sleep to the sound of owl cries, the survivors returned home. The dead know no grudges, the living had to unlearn them. They had to learn peace and forget war.  

For me, the worst day of the war was the first day of the liberation. I felt exhausted as never before. My mother put the house in order after its months of abandonment. My father went to his former place of work, the factory, to look around. The metal giant stood there, empty, plundered. I dug up my buried books and my first manuscript of poems. The earth had kept them, as it keeps the bones of the dead. The house was there, everything was there. But our souls struggled to follow.   

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This article is part of the Archipelago Yugoslavia project by Traduki. It is published in collaboration with the S. Fischer Stiftung.

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