MY OWN BELGRADE
A family emergency at the end of March brought me from the seclusion of a
professor's office in upstate New York to the explosive lights and sounds and
smells of my native Thessaloniki. A few hours after landing there on Saturday
evening I found myself in a bookstore located in the city's main youth
district. Instead of the usual background music, a live radio broadcast
from Belgrade and an interview with a Greek-speaking Serb woman about to
descent to a shelter for the night -- that was at about the same time the
Stealth was downed. Exactly one week later, a week filled with war news
and discussions, with destruction and refugees fleeing the bombing (and
only that, according to Greek media), on the eve of my return to the U.S.,
a last look at the news on Greek TV before a last stroll around Thessaloniki:
guards standing by the cages at the Belgrade zoo, ready to kill animals in
case of a NATO-assisted escape! It only then occurred to me that the scenes
from "Underground" were not fictional, that not too far from home 1999 did
not look that different from 1941 ... but at the same time it occurred to
me that it was "my first zoo" that it was now under threat, the zoo that I
visited, at the age of 10, on the way to Venice ... the Yugoslavia that
was, the NATO that is ...
... That magic family trip, the first one abroad, and, foolishly on my
part, the last one to Yugoslavia ... From the barefoot, almost fearsome
children of the Skopje streets to the "welcome" signs in Greek in the
restaurant of the Zagreb hotel where our group stayed, charmed by all that
neatness and deeply unaware of being in Western Europe already ... and
somewhere in between, THE FAULT: the impossibly long and straight stretch
of highway bypassing Sarajevo -- did I even know of it back then? -- and
leaving back that mysterious city of Belgrade, poor and rich at the same
time, with high rises higher than those at home and parks at every other
corner, it seemed ... The zoo, where each hippopotamus tooth loomed as
large as a human head ... and the pineapple we proudly brought back to
Thessaloniki as a "proof" of Yugoslav happiness and prosperity, so exotic
and so decorative that it was half-rotten by the time we finally dared to
cut it: the Belgrade that my childish memory has sheltered from oblivion,
the Belgrade I forgot to revisit before the flames brought it back in the
middle of an otherwise uneventful "Spring Break" trip to Greece ...
Dedicated to the memory of the young Serb who was killed
upon firing at the NATO "peace" forces entering Pristina
Kosovo in 1912
Kosovo in 1982
Kosovo and Iraq