4

“I’m intuitively suspicious of people,” my father is saying, on the phone, six hundred and thirty-five miles away. I can picture him, his towering frame, more frail at eighty-two, hyper-fixating on organizing some persimmons on the windowsill in the small sunny kitchen that has just enough room to turn around and get what you need from the countertop to the stove to the small table at which he is about to sit down to give me his full attention. I am interviewing him for an academic thesis towards the completion of my master’s degree in applied linguistics – a thesis around the effects of language and identity loss on a person, and for this specific story that person is my father.

“People will disappoint me if I get to know them, you know,” he says. That’s all he says, as if it’s an obvious statement without any further explanation. I can hear him shuffling around, arranging the bright orange persimmons on his windowsill. I inherited this fascination of arranging small things in the sun by a window. It makes me happy as it makes my father happy and so I can depend on his mood right now as I initiate questions.

I let my mind drift back to my childhood. My father also holds a fear of sharing things with people, which I suppose is what he is talking about. My mother’s social anxiety would kick in whenever we were around others and she would overshare out of nervousness, divulging how my father was from Yugoslavia, but that the family is now in Germany, explaining that it was really complicated and that her husband who was in earshot probably wouldn’t want all of this told to strangers anyway. Later my father would lecture her that, indeed, it’s never okay to share these kinds of details with strangers. Ever, he would add, shaking his long finger at her.

“You’re being ridiculous,” she would say with that indignant tone we were all used to hearing when the battle of the verbal ping-pong would begin. “What’s the big deal?” That would infuriate him more that she couldn’t see what the big problem was. It was entirely shocking to him that she would say the things she would in public and she would push back, doing it every time and at some point in the arguments in private would tell him he was being neurotic and tell him that he should really read The Balkans (referring to the widely acclaimed 726-page book by Misha Glenny about the centuries-long human conflict in the Balkan region) in order to understand where his neurosis came from.

This was their dance we were used to as kids: provocation, anger, and fanning of the flames that eventually culminated with our mother pulling out some intellectual card from her back pocket to which my father responded that he didn’t need to read a book to know what he was talking about. As a child, I learned to tiptoe around my father’s story and identity, and his anger, and we were only really talking about any of the details now, here, on the phone, as he arranged his persimmons.

My father has great charm and everyone who meets him tells me how funny he is or how interesting it was to talk to him with the very little he let through. He has a fantastic sense of humor and lets you in with his words right away. Maybe it’s the you know? that he ends every sentence with, drawing people in as if they have a connection.

But he doesn’t really get to know anyone.

“I never learned to trust people,” my father says. “How could I coming out of that environment?” He is talking about his childhood, and that environment means many things that he has perhaps only briefly acknowledged with his own parents, his sisters, and likely in most great detail with my mother, his confidant. That environment means the starvation camp he and his family were sent to during World War II by the Nazi and Serb forces of which he has buried the memories of the atrocities he witnessed as a young child; that environment means the angry and punitive society that his family was released back out into as some of the few survivors of the camp – classrooms where he was beaten for not being an ethnically pure Serb during the rise of nationalism and ethnic cleansing; and, that environment also meant the angry and destitute home life as his father struggled to keep the family alive during deportations to UN-sanctioned camps and eventually refugee housing. That environment is meant to sum up a violent and displaced childhood – a miserable childhood lacking nurture and joy.

I am not sure how much to ask, or, how to ask it, but he has agreed to talk to me about this now, for my project, and this is the first I am hearing full sentences about his thoughts on his childhood coming from an ethnically complicated lineage during a politically complicated and violent time in history. “The problem was that I was neither German, nor Serbian, nor Hungarian – I didn’t know what I was. You see, wherever I lived, I was always a stranger” he goes on. “I was a stranger in a strange land – I even feel today like that.”

I ask him if the family ever had conversations about what was going on during this time. It’s a long shot, but I am scanning for examples from my memory of reading memoir accounts of families in wartime, hoping to drum up an example or two.

“My parents were just in survival mode,” he says and I feel almost silly for asking the question from my podium on the emotionally sensitive stage that is the current time we are living in here in the US. “Nobody ever asked me how I felt or what I thought, or if I was going through a hard time,” he says in a tone hinting at mockery. “I was not taught to communicate, you know?” I can tell that the organization of the persimmons is coming to a close and soon so will this phone call, as his tolerance for going back in time is limited.

I consider my own childhood, as the daughter of this man who was never taught to share or process his own feelings – who was, in his words – “a totally disturbed kid” by the time he was twelve years old. I think of how it could have been for me and my sister, and how it was.

No one ever came into our house. My parents didn’t have any friends. The story went that when I was born, my mother threatened my father that it was either his drinking life at the bars, or her, My mother had come from a long line of alcoholics and my father was a self-described addict, so rather than continue the cycle of addiction, they isolated themselves.

My father eventually built his own small construction business and everyone he worked with, and still works with today after decades, he claims that he does not trust. I bring this to his attention. “You had to trust people to some extent,” I insist.

“I know exactly when and how they are going to lie to me,” he says, “I know their weaknesses and when and how they’re going to screw me,” he continues, “and that is what I can trust.”

3

It is two in the morning, and the dogs in the town square outside my hotel window won’t stop barking. The Hotel Grand Hedonist is quite assuming and tall for this town and has the usual thick-framed heavy large windows I remember from when I spent time in Germany with my aunts and uncles, but most of the buildings we saw coming into town are of a different aesthetic – less modern, more cement. A lot more cement.

There are many stray dogs here in the Pančevo town square, day and night; seemingly the same square where my father says he played soccer as a child. He alludes to areas of town in his fragmented memory of time and place. My sister, in preparation for this trip, researched as much as she could from the few geographic points she extracted from these recent conversations.

It is late and I lie awake thinking of all the connections that have been lost, and what little connections might exist, much like I imagine it feels to lose all photographs and possessions in a house fire. I switch on the side table lamp, the dogs still barking. I review the links to the Google map locations we will attempt to explore: Church of Saint Anne, the Catholic Church our grandparents possibly attended where our father might have been an altar boy; the blue house at Žarka Zrenjanina 68 which might have been the house where my father lived after the camp (or was it before?); Mašinski Centar, the elementary school my father might have attended; and Kozačenko, the car repair shop that our grandfather might have once worked in, which is across from the blue house with the number 68. My father has dimly recounted these memories that seem like anchor points in his time in Pančevo after he survived the camp – the camp he and his brother and mother were forced into, hopefully to starve to death, after they refused to join up with the Nazi occupiers that came to town in 1944.

It is strange to see these locations on Google maps. The car repair shop has 64 reviews and a star rating of 4.6 so it must be a decent place to take your car. I think of these things from my own modern frames and consider how much time has passed and what the streets and townspeople might have looked like then. My sister has also bookmarked four different cemeteries or areas of probable mass graves – only a few locations to mark where it is said that an estimated 50,000 ethnic Germans died in the region during WWII. These are eerie visuals to pull up late at night in the hotel room. The dogs’ yapping and howling grows less frequent.

In the morning, after a breakfast of sausages and coffee, my sister and I spend time walking through the places on the map, blindly photographing possible artifacts and structures of the past. It’s an odd feeling to spend time examining an old heavy iron gate that might have one my father swung open as a child… or that might be just some gate. Passersby examine us with furrowed brows and glares as if we may have just transported down here from some other planet. These are not tourist places. We might share the same cheekbones and furrowed brows that connect us to this part of the world, but we don’t look exactly local and we don’t speak the language. They watch us stare at a seemingly abandoned house with the number 68 and track the mechanic shop across the street trying to determine if these structures were standing here in the late 1940s or if they had been built since.

We text our father photos and panoramic videos but he doesn’t respond. We want some affirmation we are barking up the right tree, that where we are standing is ground where he once stood, but there is no response. We go in search of other locations and engage in stilted conversations with elderly people who may have a clue for us. Google translate helps but only so much, and the juxtaposition of this new technology alongside this sixty-year-old story feels strange.

We gingerly call our father from Serbia the next day, as it is his birthday. He is eighty-one. He was supposed to be here. He sounds confused that we didn’t find a deserted, bombed out site – the one etched in his mind – and he is seemingly in awe that there is some cultural activity and even a Chinese restaurant in Pančevo. “Well I would not have imagined that,” he says. We try to reassure him that people are nice and it’s a jovial place with families and activity. We tell him we are going to try to find a bus to Homolitz tomorrow and my sister says she’s trying to see how to locate the yellow chapel in the cemetery where the mass grave should be, and that she needs to do some inquiring with the hotel staff.

Our father grows quiet as the conversation continues, distant. It’s hard for me to tell if he’s distracted or sad or just put down the phone. I have only rarely seen him sad, not even when my mom passed away; during that time I only saw him angry, not sad – he hides most things behind anger. When the conflict in Yugoslavia erupted in 1991, I was in high school, and I remember him standing furious in front of the TV with tears in his eyes. That was the only time I really saw my father cry. “It just never ends,” I remember him sharing a private, angry moment with the TV. “It’s the same shit all over again.”

“Dad, are you there?”

He says he has to go; he has work to do.

2

I am sitting with my father. He is now an old man, a grandfather. His wife, my mother, passed away almost a decade ago and perhaps because of this he is starting to relax enough to open up about things that he never has in the past. Plus, “I have a project,” I tell him. “This is important for my graduate work at school.” You can always get him to agree to something if it’s for school even though now I’m in my late forties going back to school for the third time. My father values education more than anything as he never really had one growing up and struggled as an adult because of it. Whatever combination of reasons, he agrees. “I’m happy to answer anything you want to know. I am an open book, as they say,” he laughs. My face looks at him quizzically and with that family trait of being able to comment a thousand words with a glare. We both know this is a ridiculous statement considering he has enforced a closed book policy around his past over the course of his life. When he left home at sixteen, drunk and on a bicycle, refusing to stand by any longer and watch his father beat his mother, he never kept in touch. He didn’t contact his parents again until I was born, as the story goes.

This is my father’s story. This is my family’s story. Most importantly, this is my retelling of how I see the pieces of the lives that came before me having unfolded - lives that were not my own, but whose suffering and strengths flow through my veins and my daughter’s veins and that will flow through the veins of generations yet to come. As I grapple with the events that took place during my father’s life, I think of how these events forever altered the story of my grandparents’ lives, particularly my grandmother as a young mother. My grandparents were young and in love with two young boys – my father was almost three and his older brother was four and a half, maybe five. My grandmother was barely twenty years old when they were forced into the camp, and the years that followed recounted horrific events: her first child died from starvation and all of my grandmother’s teeth and hair fell out from Typhoid which was rampant in the camp. I ask my father about this time. “Well my mom, you know, Omi, she almost died,” my father says, “and when we got out of the camp for the next ten years or so she never had any teeth.” He laughs. “It’s not funny – she was a beautiful young woman you know with no teeth, but the funny part is that to me it was just normal. And I remember vividly this day when I came home from school and she had received some teeth for the first time and she was smiling and waving to me and I was so scared. It was like Halloween here you know,” he’s laughing. “I had never seen my mother with teeth.”

My father says he has no memory of the four or so years in the camp, which if I calculate is from around age three to seven. “It’s all just black,” he says, “I don’t remember anything from that time,” noting that once every ten years or so he will have a flash of something and collapse on the floor in sobs. My grandfather was recruited to work outside of the camp to fix military machinery, luckily, so pieces of bread and an occasional piece of meat came back with him – enough to keep my grandmother and my father alive, not the case for all.

The stories and perspectives in the region vary, not only around the events of the Nazi invasion of Serbia during World War II, but in general. It was documented that the town of Homolitz – or Omolijca – was bilingual: Serbian or Serbo-Croatian and German. To this day, taking the bus across the border, the sign is displayed with both names. Linguistic research texts of the region speak to this documentation. And, according to townspeople who were old enough to recount the stories of the time, the town was home to Serbs, Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians with different churches, schools, and community centers.

When I ask my father about his first language, the language he spoke at home, he says, “Oh, it was just this funny dialect we spoke at home, kind of like a German from four hundred years ago.” He laughs. He can laugh now at eighty years old. This is the first time we have talked about this. “No one could even understand it anymore, you see.” He drifts away. The conversation likely brings up memories he’s not prepared for. I ask if his parents considered themselves German or Serbian – if he has any recollections of that now, over seventy years ago in the past. Swabian. Danube Swabians was technically the term for the ethnic family line that had been sent out from the Hapsburg Empire hundreds of years prior to expand the monarchy, so to speak. Hundreds of years ago is a really long time. Language changes, reasons for living change, but last names, passed down through patriarchal lineages do not. “My parents were just living their lives,” he says. “No one ever talked about these things, like what you’re asking. Identity. We didn’t have any kind of identity like this. We just spoke this dialect at home – my mom would use words for things that usually had to do with cooking – and then I would go out and play and I would be a regular Serbian kid, you see.”

The intersection of language and culture is something that I have struggled with my entire life, not knowing what my father’s ‘real’ language was and not having any cultural anchor growing up. My sister and I were American, but my father was from Yugoslavia (as it was still referred to when I was growing up). I presented a school project on my ‘family heritage’ on Yugoslavia in third grade with information taken solely from the big Encyclopedia Britannica volumes. ‘Does your family speak Serbo-Croatian?’ friendly parents at the school event asked. I did not know.

I sit with my father aware of the subtle shifts around his tolerance of my questions. I am used to this. As a child he would explode in fits of anger – never physical, but terrifying. I am used to the volatility of his emotions and I gauge my questions appropriately, offering statements of connection, particularly jokes, when things stray too far. I know when to call it a day and pick up questioning another time.

My grandparents were not educated and did not have fine penmanship nor large vocabularies - they were simple people, untied to any sense of national identity. My grandfather grew up as a peasant, herding sheep – sent away often for days as a young boy, alone, to perform this family necessity. My grandmother had been orphaned as a child and the family often joked that she came from gypsy blood. She was an apprentice as a seamstress when the town was seized and now, hearing my father’s answers to things about the camp, I consider that their own difficult childhoods perhaps made it possible for them to survive the hardship of the camp.

But it is this time that has stayed with my father, in his veins, in the fabric of his being. “My parents were really destroyed by what they had gone through in the camp, you know?” He describes photos from the 1950s as trying to put on a sense of normalcy by way of dressing up, but they were completely malnourished still and trying to find a sense of normalcy after being put through hell. He describes his mother as terribly sad and his father as angry, often ironically taking out his rage on the family, having been stripped of his power as a man to take care of them. “Anything forward was simply survival, so you just do as you’re told,” he says. “That’s how life was lived.” He pauses, his mood having shifted. “In the United States, everything is Teddy Bears – a Teddy bear for this, if you’re sad or had a bad day. Nobody ever asked me how I felt or what I thought, or if I was going through a hard time,” he says.

1

It is a crisp but sunny day in September of 2023 as I sit in the backseat of the dirty Toyota Corolla my taxi driver uses to shuttle tourists to and from the Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport. My driver is chatty and his English is decent; he is excited to learn that my father is Serbian and if he could embrace me in a bear hug from the front seat as he shifts from fourth to fifth gear to speed past the cars along what is seemingly east on Highway 47, he would. He is shocked to hear that I have never been to Serbia and proceeds to talk about how he drives to make money no matter the weather, “because I am Serbian and Serbians we can do anything,” adding that he even drives in the winter blizzards after a few shots of Slivovitz during the holiday family parties when women are inside cooking and men are outside drinking. “No problem!” he says. This show of hard exterior bravado feels familiar, and not only from the eastern European post-soviet aesthetic core content on platforms like TikTok, but in the regular familial fabric of my childhood home: we are survivors.

I should be taking notes or taking out my phone to ask if I can record our conversation, but I don’t. I just want to be here, in the moment, listening to this guy, absorbing it all. It’s been a while since I have travelled anywhere and it feels alive to be here – ripped quite precisely from my world of thick books on the history of American Structuralism and Second Language Acquisition. Going back to school again in my late forties to attempt a master’s degree in applied linguistics – all while working full time and parenting a teenager on my own – was quite the decision. But being here, in this taxi, in a country I have only heard about in small parts of sentences from my father’s side of the family, absorbing the first moments of what Michael Agar coined several decades back as a new languaculture feels like exactly where I should be.

My taxi driver hasn’t stopped talking. He asks if my father (who he relates to as another male Serb) drinks Slivovitz? Oh yes, he does, I say. He used to, I footnote that remark privately, around the heavy wooden table in my grandparents’ house in Erftstadt after dinner when things got late, emotional, and in need of a song and a shot or two of Slivovitz. That was after he reconciled with them, I think – when things were good again, or at least after most major wounds had been repaired.

“What’s the word in English,” my taxi driver is asking. “It’s fruit. Famous Serbian fruit.”

“What fruit?” I ask.

“Slivovitz,” he says.

“Oh, plums,” I say. Slivovitz is a liqueur made from plums. I remember that well because my mom tried to make it once at home in San Francisco on her extra wide gas range and it smelled awful to me as a child. My grandparents were visiting and she thought she would make something really special for them ‘to remind them of home,’ she said. I can’t recall what happened but I do remember it being the conversation and source of laughter and of my grandma raising up her hands to exclaim ‘jeses nah!’ for days – looking back it was probably that my mom boiled up some moonshine that no one could get down. Although I could be wrong.

“Plums,” I repeat. “I think it’s plums.”

“Plums?” He tries the word.

I think of how far I am from the United States, where Tesla cars are now commonly on the roads, and yet here, even with all the claiming of fame for the famous engineer, so far I do not see any Teslas. Dropping back into the frames I use in my daily work in marketing, I consider the irony of migration and modern-day use of historical persons and brand manufacturing to sell products; and, putting on my budding ethnographer lens, I consider that I have just entered this new languaculture, albeit familiar perhaps once I get my bearings, and particularly if I were to understand the language, the richness of my surroundings would come into focus. Without the reference points of language and culture, I can only understand so much. I see my taxi driver’s statements as bravado – an American use of a word from Middle French, Old Spanish and Old Italian etymology from sources bookmarked for research signifying a “blustering, swaggering conduct; pretense of bravery” – but what would the Serbian description of my chauffeur’s language be? Would Serbs consider this verbal demonstration bravado? Do they use the same word or concept, and if they do, do they use it in the same way? I might know in years to come if I am able to spend more time here, but I am missing too much language to even guess.

It would help so much to have my father here, in this taxi with me. It would be interesting to see how much of his Serbian would return. I spend a minute wondering just how difficult it would be for him – all of this. I won’t know. He’s not here. But simple things, like not getting taken advantage of as an American needing a taxi for the half hour drive to Pancevo – I could use him here for that at the very least, if not for the more important role of understanding our family’s history on this land from 1942 – 1950.

For now, I am here only for the next few weeks. We are nearing the Hotel Grand Hedonist (a perfect example of a clash in pragmatics as I had confirmed prior to booking that this was neither a brothel nor a swinger’s club). I will meet my sister here as two adults in our forties. It will have been more than 65 years since anyone in our family returned to this part of the world and set foot back on the land here. And it will be the first time touching this ground and moving between the spaces here for me and my sister. It will be without my father, who was supposed to join us, but who seemingly couldn’t face the potential for the intrusion of memories that have been missing from his consciousness for just as long.