Fare Well, Illyria

Chapter 1: Serbia

Chapter 1 Serbia In May 1963, I journeyed to Belgrade, capital of the Socialist Federative republic of yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. In the 1990s, I took the same route but now crossing the state frontiers of Slovenia and Croatia, which had never existed as durable states, to Serbia, once an ancient kingdom. The car was a Steyr Fiat, sort of an imperial automobile —at least for the Balkans. It was manufactured in austria which had ruled Slovenia, Croatia, and parts of Serbia—under license from Italy, which once ruled much of Dalmatia. Made probably in part by yugoslav workers, Gastarbeiter as they were known in German lands (where their fathers and uncles had worked as slave laborers in World War II). The sleek grey station wagon was all right on the smooth highways of Northern europe. On reaching the Balkans, it began to suffer breakdowns as had so many imperial machines in the millennial past. Not a region for finely tuned mechanisms. Better for a russian or German tracked vehicle but nothing Italian. aside from that, the Steyr was a bad-luck creature—a Balkans New York Times correspondent predecessor, M.S. Handler, had struck and killed a pedestrian in Vienna driving it. My goal was Belgrade, then the capital of the assertive, and determinedly original, nonaligned yugoslavia—also the capital, much less emphatically, of Serbia. The facade of the main railway station was split down the middle, souvenir of an engineer whose brakes had failed when he reached the terminal. High above on a bluff towered the green and gold brick Moskva, the proud turn-of-the-century hotel whose backside had been sheared off by a bomb in the luftwaffe attacks of april 1941. Beograd, the White City, loomed at all azimuths in almost every shade but white on its un-roman seven 2 FARE WELL, ILLYRIA hills, handsome in its undulations. In later years, I became fond of its old streets paved with huge kaldrma—paving stones from Turkish times—and its fine nineteenth-century houses. Belgrade had been destroyed fiftytwo times in its recorded history. Something scarcely to be grasped by an american who knew only that Chicago had been leveled once by fire, and San Francisco once by earthquake. So what was I doing there? a question asked perhaps too infrequently in a time of swift and easy travel. reared in the age of radio and comic books, I had an answer: The yugoslavs alone, among the peoples invaded by the German Nazis, Italian Fascists and their greedy allies, had risen up against these oppressors already in 1941 despite daunting odds of Panzer divisions, Stuka dive bombers, artillery, and ruthless reprisals by Wehrmacht and SS units. I read about them at the age of eleven in November 1942 in Real Life Comics, in a strip about Colonel Draža Mihailović’s Serbian Chetniks attacking Wehrmacht positions , sabotaging trains, blowing up bridges. (No Tito was yet visible on the american screen.) amplification of the comic strip came from war correspondents like leland Stowe, who visited our newspaperman’s house in a Chicago suburb—men who had been there. So I had a memory and thus a reason to become acquainted with those yugoslavs. I am still at it. at the Moskva, the front door fell off its hinges when I pulled it open on a May morning. I found myself bracing my legs to hold the heavy glass panel upright and keep it from shattering on Balkanska Street—a dance with a door. “Nema problema,” said the blue-uniformed porter who rushed to relieve me, introducing a basic South Slavic attitude toward trouble, in a soothing voice: “No problem.” The door had fallen off its hinges before, he explained. My Serbo-Croatian vocabulary consisted at this point of such absolute necessities as sutra (tomorrow), ne može (you may not), nema (we don’t have it), brzo (quickly), and polako (slowly). In each there was strong emphasis on concepts of time or timeliness. among South Slavs, they did not square with american expectations of promptitude. What bedazzled me was the self-assurance of the denial of service with a smile accompanying the message that what I sought or desired was either impossible to find or undeliverable. The Moskva was in addition a monument of sorts to those brief, intense, and often mutually disappointing moments in the history of Serb-russian relations. It had a Slavic soul, that is to say, occasionally unpredictable for...