Read Part 1 here

Both my parents are now dead, and of course I have plenty of regrets and unasked questions which will forever remain pending in a rotting pigeon-box; snuck in but unopened, and I’ll soon forget the actual articulation of these questions and everything will join the same ghostly realm of the nostalgic miasma that I’m straining to pin down and describe here.

As we’ve said – time moves forward, and this forward motion also implies the scalding away of the bodies of those who gave you life and who – inadvertently or otherwise – shaped your social and emotional expectations. But these expectations are never perfect, and often in fact emerge from a build-up of keen and unique damage: unprocessed and even barely addressed.

You know all this. We know all this. But the forward churn of time often leaves these scars lodged into our bodies while we’re forced to tend to other, fresh ones. To put out new fires while older ones are still raging, though some may be reduced to a slow, keen sputter that has morphed into a fireplace of sorts.

I’m overreaching with these metaphors, maybe. I’m just sculpting verbal play from immediate impressions, in the hopes that it would yield something useful. But in the end, isn’t that what all writing is? Isn’t that what the essay form is in particular – to assay, to try, to learn as you go along.

Besides, I like the old-flames-as-new-fireplace metaphor. I think it speaks to the tendency of ‘legacy-trauma’ becoming a default state. Something to return to. A toxic form of comfort. Stories we tell to root ourselves into a sense of coherence, if nothing else.

One of these fireside conversations could concern the details of my father’s time in Libya. He was there around 1991 and 1992 – it had to be around the first half of that time period because by July of 1992 we had already ‘settled’ into Malta with the same provisional air that would inform pretty much everything else we would do as a family.

He was meant to work at the drydocks there, but that plan obviously did not work out because we ended up starting a new life in Malta instead. (There would’ve been something divinely ironic though, wouldn’t there, in going from one country with an authoritarian wartime crisis that devolved into civil war, only to find ourselves in another further down the line).

The fireside story is that he was given a reprieve from whatever hands-on work he was expected to do and he was sent to ‘deliver documents’ to people in Malta. He never got too specific about either. And I never really felt the need to ask, for some strange reason. It’s not so much that I feared the answer would yield something suspicious or unsavory. It’s just that at the time, I took his word for it. I guess we all did. It’s just the kind of thing you allow dads, I suppose, because you want to submit to that imperative – to believe they are the ones providing you with that stable bedrock from which all other meaning emerges and grows.

The fireside story isn’t so much about what he did and didn’t do there, exactly. For that, I suppose there’s both the prosaic and the spurious – if not romantic – interpretations available to us to bandy about.

He could’ve just decided it wasn’t for him – any by extension, per the aforementioned patriarchal imperative, not for us – and that he made a judgement call and opted for the post-colonially wrecked but pretty Mediterranean island instead. Then we could of course run riot with the poundshop espionage narratives, the lurid conspiracy theories: ‘delivering documents’ from Libya to Malta at the peak of the Gaddafi regime? Juicy. Le Carre worthy. Even ‘sus’.

(Later, much later, as my brother and I would bond over his many faults and wounds after his death, he’d offer a plausible stitch to the story: our artsy father was ‘useless at actual construction work’ and so his uncle found some use for him as an messenger boy).

But funnily enough, the fireside story doesn’t amount to a culmination of any of the above. It concerns an even more finely-tuned and concise piece of storytelling. One that frames our tale of settling into Malta as both sanguine and inevitable.

“My dad went to work in Libya, he didn’t really like it, so he took a Captain Morgan boat to Malta to scope out the island and once there he said, this is good – we’ll settle here.”

An elevator pitch. Free of needless detail and complication. Emboldened with pure immigrant pluck, and animated by hope.

Just like we never questioned the details of my father’s time in Libya, so my family never picked all that much at the thorny matter of the Yugoslav Wars, at least not in any incantatory way that would cohere a united front – those micro-political stances some families do take on major issues like these. It’s not that the subject was taboo – my parents spoke about it among themselves in our presence, openly discussing it with fellow Yugo-expats while trying to condense it into bite-sized chunks for Maltese acquaintances – but there was a sense in which talking about it at length with the kids meant infecting the family with its oozing ugliness.

There were some tableside scraps of the narrative which were easy to internalise, though: such as the prevailing thought that the very premise of the war was absurd, that the internecine divisions which characterise it were arbitrary and that nationalistic impulses in whichever direction were enabled by a lumpen mass of the uneducated.

But on a day-to-day level, the war only registered in the undeniable fact of our displacement, and our ongoing distance from the home country as it all raged at its worst and sanctions still barred us from traveling.

So that we lived in that absurdist limbo state where Bryan Adams’s ‘Everything I Do (I Do it for You)’ – ubiquitous as the equally incorrigible camp-fest that was Robin Hood: Price of Thieves to which it was wended as the banner theme song – edged itself into our lives in a more significant way than the contemporaneous Battle of Vukovar never could. Similarly, when we finally got to return to Serbia in 1996, the main emotional undercurrent was that we got to introduce my sister – born a year prior – to our grandparents… us kids were oblivious to the fact that the Dayton Agreement is really what made the trip possible.

‘The war’ was just a perpetual hum in the background of our lives: an undeniable state whose particulars, however, were always remote for us in the immediate sense.

I suppose this is the privilege of those like us who made their way out. (Not to mention the position of Serbia in particular, when it came to its role in the conflict itself).

But there are so many remainders and loose ends. No real narratives, only impressions. And I suppose that, when it comes to war, this is all for the better: we know that concrete narratives in these scenarios often breed monstrous things.

But for a child, the space of silence is rarely a cocoon for meditation. More often than not, it becomes an incubator for loneliness.

Continues…

Photo by Zvezdan Reljić