When she got home, Hope dipped herself shortly through a shower, trying to rationalize some of the things that were cluttering her fragile teenage mind beyond repair.
Perhaps it’ll do me some good to be alone for a while.
Home, alone, and undisturbed, she was safe from visions and creatures unknown that inhabited distant and yet to be fully explored corners of her brain.
Perhaps I'd better leave them exactly where they are.
Mess with visions and gods, and you may end up with more than you bargain for.
***
Their crammed apartment was safely anchored in the real world.
These rooms, made-up and furnished and abused by the neverending list of its temporary inhabitants, never instigated anything other than repulsive need to leave as quickly as possible.
She always felt like a trapped wild animal, caught inbetween the damp-ridden chipped walls, that looked like they were about to collapse, from the weight of the dirt on them, any moment now.
Lack of money that her family suffered constantly had left her with no room of her own, and she was a proud owner of a broken down fold-out sofa in the living room and a battered cupboard, the only place her mother dared never open, fearing the chaos that Hope bred in there would come alive, and swallow her somehow.
She went to the kitchen thinking that she should eat, opened the fridge and lost all of her appetite seeing the neatly labeled food conspicuously arranged inside.
Oh yes, mom was the true believer of the church of order.
That one time when she and her father were left alone when mom was in a hospital, two of them only attempted to prepare lunch once.
Green peas turned to black smoke, stuck to the bottom of a ruined pot, was the image that floated from her memory, that had back then inspired her father to run to the nearest restaurant and sign them both for the daily menu for the rest of mom’s involuntary absence.
Mom took care of everything and everyone by default.
***
Hope entered her parents' bedroom to pick up what she was ordered to – extra rounds from the second drawer, left , two crisp clean and immaculately pressed shirts, underwear, socks from the shelf, closet on the right.
If only anything else in life could be folded this neatly and picked up when needed from the exact spot.
Hope realized she was standing in front of the closet wondering who the true soldier in this house was - her robust, free spirited father or the super inhumanly accurate mother.
***
And the whole refugee camp thing was soooo typical of her father.
As an ex-officer of a broken down army, he had no skills whatsoever to do anything else but be a soldier. Yet, this war, it had no need for a man with code of conduct and knowledge of Geneva convention.
A solder who had lost his war before the whistle said go rip your heads off.
This was the war fought by humans reduced to their less human form, downsized of their own choice and free will, to mere beastly animals.
Overnight, with the ease of coming home, the tribe of men that were wolves once had returned to their pack in spirit and actions.
***
So her father was now a reserve policeman, too old and too educated to ever become a good or useful one.
His superiors were very savvy of this strange man, unable to trust him because his family name sounded rather odd, and was not Serbian enough, although his accompanying papers claimed otherwise.
He was given one of the worst beats to patrol, the train station downtown.
Imagine a landfill that’s fulled up and spilling over, she thought. Imagine it on a veeeeery hot day. Now imagine the nauseating smell.
Yep, that’s what the the Belgrade train central smells like after it’s been cleaned, Hope wrinkled her nose with disgust.
***
She had made it to the suburban bus station without stopping, and fell ill at the sight of some two hundred people waiting for the bus designed to carry fifty-to-seventy people at best, that she was supposed to get on somehow.
Cattle ride on a top of a train in India sounded like a good idea compared to almost an hour of no air to breathe, people’s smelly armpits pressing on her face and the unavoidable trash turbo-folk music soundtrack to the ride outside of the town, into a world people blissfully unaware of urbis and its meta-troubles occupied.
She greeted every stop along the way with immaculate rejoice, for the people getting off on each of them provided her with space to unfold her limbs one by one, and she eventually got off at the last stop and made it across the overgrown field down towards the camp.
***
Civilization was on the move.
Unfortunately, here it was going backwards, and someone had pressed the ultra speedy rewind button.
When the first war broke out, people said: We'll survive.
And then there was another one.
And, yes, another one.
Those fighting them grew so fond of the blood and destruction, that they started fighting against their allies, just to keep the hunger of war alive.
Cities lay in ruins, entire villages were extinct. Families had brothers shooting at each other standing on opposite sides.
No soul was spared.
Ethnic war demanded proving how much you love your own nation by how many others you were able to kill, annihilate, murder .
The accounts of war crimes that were whispered among those who managed to escape from under the knife were unbelievable, in the sense that a normal, reasonable human being on either side of the conflict could not understand how these acts of torture, humiliation and mutilation, could be taking place here, on European, enlightened, Old World soil.
The year of 199something in the Balkans was definitely not good for anyone.
***
The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was increasing in both tempo and intensity, and the Muslims driven out by the Serbs had to endure one last humiliation of having to make a stop in Serbia, to apply for the documents issued by mainland Yugoslavia, before they could get a valid passport to cross the border and get the hell out.
With often nothing more than a plastic bag holding all of their earthly possessions, entire families, conspicuously lacking adult males of military usable age, were forced to spend weeks hanging around the train station , staying close to the police headquarters, where the documents were being issued, camping on the benches in the infamous junkie's haunt park nearby .
As the Bosnian Serb forces made advances that year, their numbers started rising with rapid progression.
Mothers, children, old, almost immobile people and babies born on the run, sometimes three or four generations of a family with nowhere to go but as far as possible away, was what her father encountered on his no longer routine night rounds.
The policemen were instructed to ignore them, pretend like these people did not exist, and only make sure that, once they had the documents, they were on the first train or bus or whatever out.
Close your eyes and it does not happen.
But her father could not.
***
One cold and rainy springily night, when a young mother was trying to feed her baby on the bench, with another little bundle crying soaked wet on her lap, he gave in, a refugee of a sort himself, because he never could just pretend that everything was honkey-dorey alright and walk by.
He had remembered some closed down auto camp at the edge of the suburbs from one of his burglary 911 calls, knew it was empty safe for the night guard who was somewhere sleeping passed out drunk.
Her father, once a proud officer, nowadays an ashamed petty policeman, with the heart in all the right places, took the scared, exhausted woman and her children to his patrol car, found another mother with three children inside the station that he had noticed earlier, and drove them out to the camp.
He woke up the confused guard and, paying no heed to his loud protesting, broke the locks on one of the small wooden cottages that were built for the tourists during what was known as better times.
Upon returning, he put up his scariest official front and went to find the station supervisor.
Dad made him declare the station bife open shelter for the night.
He made them serve every refugee he found drenched in the park a meal of hot soup and bread, and waved a gun at the bartender just to make sure that it was understood that they were to let these poor people stay inside for the night
As he returned to check the terminal, a new train had just pulled into the station and three more families with about twenty children among them were coming past him, keeping their heads bowed down.
Father sighed and frowned, deepening the lines that already crisscrossed his face carved with legacy of compassion in hard times, and drove three more times out to the abandoned camp that night.
Next evening he was on duty again, trying to figure out what he was going to do with the women in children in the camp.
The rain was merciful enough to stop, but there was almost a hundred or so refugees gathered, waiting for him, at the main entrance.
Word of mouth had traveled like lightening, they knew that he was the man who would help them before they even arrived.
And so he did.
***
The once-not-a-very-successful tourist camp site, that was one of fine examples of the socialist times ingenious planning mind which truly believed that motorized people would flock to the dirty capitol’s suburb, surrounded by nothing, just because they built a camp for them to flock to, was thus woken from its slumber and turned into a refugee camp.
Not officially, of course.
We are not the ones turning people into refugees, they are, cried the national TV farce every night.
When father’s commander found out what he had done, there was nothing left to do to punish or straighten him out, without acknowledging the existence of these refugees and the camp they were now in, so, instead, they authorized him to take care of the security of the location and make sure that no public or procedure disturbance happened.
And continued to keep their eyes and their mouths conveniently shut.
***
Hope knew about the euphemistically named ‘ transit help camp’, that her father was now semi-officially running, few weeks after that rainy night , but was never allowed to visit him there on site.
Dad always tried to keep the bad things away from his little girl’s eyes, wanting to keep her in a world where what he saw and lived through each day didn’t happen.
Mom was more practical, and didn’t stop to think about anything other than making sure that a list of things to do for that day was ticked off , and was only worried if her daughter would manage to remember what she was told to pick up without turning all the closets upside down.
Hope was curious about what she was to find in the camp, and thankful for something to do to prevent her from the spontaneous combustion the image of him had been sparking in her all day long.
***
Her father had pulled a lot of strings – somehow there were a lot of people who owed him favors, - to get the food supply organized, to have the city buss take people from the station here, and take them back to town when needed , to borrow military tents and blankets when the population of it grew to a couple of hundred and they couldn’t fit them into broken down trailers that were parked out back any longer
The police had started registering people there in the camp, making the whole passport issuing process faster – even the authorities were willing to help make these people disappear as quickly as possible across the border easier.
A local photographer was coming in daily to take photos and probably prevent the refugees from going over into the village and finding his shop.
Regular business tends to suffer when people have to question their conscience while running errands.
The camp also had the Red Cross volunteers who were appointed as personnel.
Father knew most of them from his own volunteer work, which included driving a truckload of food into a town in Croatia where his ' brothers the Serbs' were under siege last winter.
No one in the Red Cross dared drive that truck, and they needed to find someone insane enough to even try.
Crazy bastard almost got killed on his way back, the truck was returned zigzagged with bullet-holes, and father got a nice Thank-You -For-Your-Contribution card that was promptly framed and mounted on their kitchen wall.
Someone always had to volunteer to do the goddamn right thing to do, no matter what the cost was. Someone who believed, and was stupid enough to believe in anything here and now.
Yep, that was her old man.
Two meters and hundred plus kilos of pure idealism, powered by the purest of hearts.
And besides, he told her, it was not madness, it was 'helping his own people, his blood'.
His kind.
Well, these five hundred desperate souls stashed here in the camp weren’t his kind .
Now , with the same righteousness in his step, he had to take care of the people his fellow Serbs were driving out of their homes leaving them with nothing .
Nothing, except for the hatred to get by until the next war breaks out and the score is evened for a while until the next historical rerun.
*****
Perhaps it’ll do me some good to be alone for a while.
Home, alone, and undisturbed, she was safe from visions and creatures unknown that inhabited distant and yet to be fully explored corners of her brain.
Perhaps I'd better leave them exactly where they are.
Mess with visions and gods, and you may end up with more than you bargain for.
***
Their crammed apartment was safely anchored in the real world.
These rooms, made-up and furnished and abused by the neverending list of its temporary inhabitants, never instigated anything other than repulsive need to leave as quickly as possible.
She always felt like a trapped wild animal, caught inbetween the damp-ridden chipped walls, that looked like they were about to collapse, from the weight of the dirt on them, any moment now.
Lack of money that her family suffered constantly had left her with no room of her own, and she was a proud owner of a broken down fold-out sofa in the living room and a battered cupboard, the only place her mother dared never open, fearing the chaos that Hope bred in there would come alive, and swallow her somehow.
She went to the kitchen thinking that she should eat, opened the fridge and lost all of her appetite seeing the neatly labeled food conspicuously arranged inside.
Oh yes, mom was the true believer of the church of order.
That one time when she and her father were left alone when mom was in a hospital, two of them only attempted to prepare lunch once.
Green peas turned to black smoke, stuck to the bottom of a ruined pot, was the image that floated from her memory, that had back then inspired her father to run to the nearest restaurant and sign them both for the daily menu for the rest of mom’s involuntary absence.
Mom took care of everything and everyone by default.
***
Hope entered her parents' bedroom to pick up what she was ordered to – extra rounds from the second drawer, left , two crisp clean and immaculately pressed shirts, underwear, socks from the shelf, closet on the right.
If only anything else in life could be folded this neatly and picked up when needed from the exact spot.
Hope realized she was standing in front of the closet wondering who the true soldier in this house was - her robust, free spirited father or the super inhumanly accurate mother.
***
And the whole refugee camp thing was soooo typical of her father.
As an ex-officer of a broken down army, he had no skills whatsoever to do anything else but be a soldier. Yet, this war, it had no need for a man with code of conduct and knowledge of Geneva convention.
A solder who had lost his war before the whistle said go rip your heads off.
This was the war fought by humans reduced to their less human form, downsized of their own choice and free will, to mere beastly animals.
Overnight, with the ease of coming home, the tribe of men that were wolves once had returned to their pack in spirit and actions.
***
So her father was now a reserve policeman, too old and too educated to ever become a good or useful one.
His superiors were very savvy of this strange man, unable to trust him because his family name sounded rather odd, and was not Serbian enough, although his accompanying papers claimed otherwise.
He was given one of the worst beats to patrol, the train station downtown.
Imagine a landfill that’s fulled up and spilling over, she thought. Imagine it on a veeeeery hot day. Now imagine the nauseating smell.
Yep, that’s what the the Belgrade train central smells like after it’s been cleaned, Hope wrinkled her nose with disgust.
***
She had made it to the suburban bus station without stopping, and fell ill at the sight of some two hundred people waiting for the bus designed to carry fifty-to-seventy people at best, that she was supposed to get on somehow.
Cattle ride on a top of a train in India sounded like a good idea compared to almost an hour of no air to breathe, people’s smelly armpits pressing on her face and the unavoidable trash turbo-folk music soundtrack to the ride outside of the town, into a world people blissfully unaware of urbis and its meta-troubles occupied.
She greeted every stop along the way with immaculate rejoice, for the people getting off on each of them provided her with space to unfold her limbs one by one, and she eventually got off at the last stop and made it across the overgrown field down towards the camp.
***
Civilization was on the move.
Unfortunately, here it was going backwards, and someone had pressed the ultra speedy rewind button.
When the first war broke out, people said: We'll survive.
And then there was another one.
And, yes, another one.
Those fighting them grew so fond of the blood and destruction, that they started fighting against their allies, just to keep the hunger of war alive.
Cities lay in ruins, entire villages were extinct. Families had brothers shooting at each other standing on opposite sides.
No soul was spared.
Ethnic war demanded proving how much you love your own nation by how many others you were able to kill, annihilate, murder .
The accounts of war crimes that were whispered among those who managed to escape from under the knife were unbelievable, in the sense that a normal, reasonable human being on either side of the conflict could not understand how these acts of torture, humiliation and mutilation, could be taking place here, on European, enlightened, Old World soil.
The year of 199something in the Balkans was definitely not good for anyone.
***
The ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was increasing in both tempo and intensity, and the Muslims driven out by the Serbs had to endure one last humiliation of having to make a stop in Serbia, to apply for the documents issued by mainland Yugoslavia, before they could get a valid passport to cross the border and get the hell out.
With often nothing more than a plastic bag holding all of their earthly possessions, entire families, conspicuously lacking adult males of military usable age, were forced to spend weeks hanging around the train station , staying close to the police headquarters, where the documents were being issued, camping on the benches in the infamous junkie's haunt park nearby .
As the Bosnian Serb forces made advances that year, their numbers started rising with rapid progression.
Mothers, children, old, almost immobile people and babies born on the run, sometimes three or four generations of a family with nowhere to go but as far as possible away, was what her father encountered on his no longer routine night rounds.
The policemen were instructed to ignore them, pretend like these people did not exist, and only make sure that, once they had the documents, they were on the first train or bus or whatever out.
Close your eyes and it does not happen.
But her father could not.
***
One cold and rainy springily night, when a young mother was trying to feed her baby on the bench, with another little bundle crying soaked wet on her lap, he gave in, a refugee of a sort himself, because he never could just pretend that everything was honkey-dorey alright and walk by.
He had remembered some closed down auto camp at the edge of the suburbs from one of his burglary 911 calls, knew it was empty safe for the night guard who was somewhere sleeping passed out drunk.
Her father, once a proud officer, nowadays an ashamed petty policeman, with the heart in all the right places, took the scared, exhausted woman and her children to his patrol car, found another mother with three children inside the station that he had noticed earlier, and drove them out to the camp.
He woke up the confused guard and, paying no heed to his loud protesting, broke the locks on one of the small wooden cottages that were built for the tourists during what was known as better times.
Upon returning, he put up his scariest official front and went to find the station supervisor.
Dad made him declare the station bife open shelter for the night.
He made them serve every refugee he found drenched in the park a meal of hot soup and bread, and waved a gun at the bartender just to make sure that it was understood that they were to let these poor people stay inside for the night
As he returned to check the terminal, a new train had just pulled into the station and three more families with about twenty children among them were coming past him, keeping their heads bowed down.
Father sighed and frowned, deepening the lines that already crisscrossed his face carved with legacy of compassion in hard times, and drove three more times out to the abandoned camp that night.
Next evening he was on duty again, trying to figure out what he was going to do with the women in children in the camp.
The rain was merciful enough to stop, but there was almost a hundred or so refugees gathered, waiting for him, at the main entrance.
Word of mouth had traveled like lightening, they knew that he was the man who would help them before they even arrived.
And so he did.
***
The once-not-a-very-successful tourist camp site, that was one of fine examples of the socialist times ingenious planning mind which truly believed that motorized people would flock to the dirty capitol’s suburb, surrounded by nothing, just because they built a camp for them to flock to, was thus woken from its slumber and turned into a refugee camp.
Not officially, of course.
We are not the ones turning people into refugees, they are, cried the national TV farce every night.
When father’s commander found out what he had done, there was nothing left to do to punish or straighten him out, without acknowledging the existence of these refugees and the camp they were now in, so, instead, they authorized him to take care of the security of the location and make sure that no public or procedure disturbance happened.
And continued to keep their eyes and their mouths conveniently shut.
***
Hope knew about the euphemistically named ‘ transit help camp’, that her father was now semi-officially running, few weeks after that rainy night , but was never allowed to visit him there on site.
Dad always tried to keep the bad things away from his little girl’s eyes, wanting to keep her in a world where what he saw and lived through each day didn’t happen.
Mom was more practical, and didn’t stop to think about anything other than making sure that a list of things to do for that day was ticked off , and was only worried if her daughter would manage to remember what she was told to pick up without turning all the closets upside down.
Hope was curious about what she was to find in the camp, and thankful for something to do to prevent her from the spontaneous combustion the image of him had been sparking in her all day long.
***
Her father had pulled a lot of strings – somehow there were a lot of people who owed him favors, - to get the food supply organized, to have the city buss take people from the station here, and take them back to town when needed , to borrow military tents and blankets when the population of it grew to a couple of hundred and they couldn’t fit them into broken down trailers that were parked out back any longer
The police had started registering people there in the camp, making the whole passport issuing process faster – even the authorities were willing to help make these people disappear as quickly as possible across the border easier.
A local photographer was coming in daily to take photos and probably prevent the refugees from going over into the village and finding his shop.
Regular business tends to suffer when people have to question their conscience while running errands.
The camp also had the Red Cross volunteers who were appointed as personnel.
Father knew most of them from his own volunteer work, which included driving a truckload of food into a town in Croatia where his ' brothers the Serbs' were under siege last winter.
No one in the Red Cross dared drive that truck, and they needed to find someone insane enough to even try.
Crazy bastard almost got killed on his way back, the truck was returned zigzagged with bullet-holes, and father got a nice Thank-You -For-Your-Contribution card that was promptly framed and mounted on their kitchen wall.
Someone always had to volunteer to do the goddamn right thing to do, no matter what the cost was. Someone who believed, and was stupid enough to believe in anything here and now.
Yep, that was her old man.
Two meters and hundred plus kilos of pure idealism, powered by the purest of hearts.
And besides, he told her, it was not madness, it was 'helping his own people, his blood'.
His kind.
Well, these five hundred desperate souls stashed here in the camp weren’t his kind .
Now , with the same righteousness in his step, he had to take care of the people his fellow Serbs were driving out of their homes leaving them with nothing .
Nothing, except for the hatred to get by until the next war breaks out and the score is evened for a while until the next historical rerun.
*****
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