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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.