Ch-11: Bitter Leaf

In mid-afternoon Browder walked down the several flights of stairs of his aunt’s building, and at the entrance almost stumbled right into Willy, his childhood friend and a relative through marriage. They almost missed each other as they both had their heads down pensively. They hugged as though they had last seen each other just last year and not twenty years ago. They exchanged mobile contacts and agreed to hang out, catch up really, that night. 

Though Browder never talked to Willy after his family emigrated, he was aware of the progression of his life over the next several years, the years when he still used Facebook. Willy was very active on that platform. Willy’s posts made clear his identification with groups on the extreme religious right of Serbia’s political spectrum. Browder remembered early signs that Willy’s family were believers, but they were modern and moderate. It was only Willy that drifted into fundamentalist waters. 

The fundamentalist Orthodox Christian groups, allied with those in Russia and enthralled by them, can fairly be described as clero-fascist, as they combine religious fundamentalism with a worship of the nation. They spend great efforts in attempts to save that nation from annihilation and to restore its blighted honor. A fragile god, that Nation. To be fair, at least publicly such organizations do not advocate violence against foreigners. In Serbia, as in many if not all nations of the region, the game is rather in the victim narrative, and the talk is mostly about the horrible wrongs and the horrendous suffering that the Nation had endured.  

Browder walked to his grandma’s in the exceedingly dry and bright air of February. Sitting down to eat once again with the old lady and a middle-aged lady neighbour, the conversation turned to gossip about Willy, once Browder mentioned him.

-       You know, I really pity Willy, said the neighbour. He is thirty-five and still not married. He had two long relationships, and none of them worked out. Now he is all alone again and looks so gloomy, my soul hurts when I see him walking down the street all alone like that.

Browder’s grandma had a theory.

-       I know his family had two men that became monks. In the old days we all used to say, what kind of man would forsake creating a family to become a monk, God forgive me – grandma crossed herself at this point – and you know what it is? There must be something wrong with them. I’ll tell you, that sort of thing runs in the family. 

-       It’s not like that – the neighbour defended Willy – It’s the modern times now, young people marry much later now. It was his decision not to marry, he wanted to find the right woman for himself.

-       I am telling you that he is not a proper man! Women, they are clever you know, they are going to figure that out. 

There was a moment of silence. Then grandma continued, seemingly on a completely new thread. She gestured upward with her finger like a professor. 

-       Willy is such a nice young man. Every time he sees me walking down the street he stops and talks to me. Even when I got old and could barely walk, he crosses the street and takes time to ask me how I am doing. He is as good as bread. 

As she finished talking, there was the sound of the muezzin’s call from the mosque around the corner. It was muffled and discrete, but really, thought Browder, it was a bit invasive. Browder looked up into the corner to his grandma’s icons, opposite a painting of uncle Vanya smiling in fatigues and holding the Serbian flag.  There was a pair of saints standing in a stylized desert, Saints Sergius and Bacchus, together with a sad icon of the Theotokos with child. All such icons are sad. Whatever one may think about the icons, though, they are in a private space. Meanwhile, the muezzin seems to claim public space as the exclusive turf of his religion. If Americans or Parisians or Londoners had to listen to it, Browder wondered how much their globalist stance would change. A lot, he thought. Then again, some of them might end up actually listening to it soon enough.

There were moments when Browder had sympathies for the Bosnian Muslims, on an abstract level at least. Most of them converted to Islam when it was a thing of power and prestige, when it could be viewed as a cool new thing. The fact that that changed in the last three hundred years was unlucky for them. In that way Islam was similar to communism, except that communism, being the dumbest ideology of all time, petered out much faster. Aggravating their bad luck, it turned out that the division between Islam and Christianity corresponds roughly to a grand racial, geographical, and civilizational divide in which the Bosnian Muslims found themselves on the wrong side. If they are going to stick to their religion, they better hope that resistance to immigrants collapses in the West.

Furthermore, as much as Serbs may rail against them abandoning the religion of their ancestors, a lot of Serbs aren’t all that into the Serbian Orthodox Church themselves. And that’s not even counting the types who have been indoctrinated by the communists to see the church as the symbol of all that is backward and ignorant. Okay, the church helped preserve the Serb identity during Ottoman occupation. Nevertheless, it was impossible not to notice a strong current of paganism, especially among the dumber churchgoers. Though not exactly theologians, many ordinary and intelligent Serbs subconsciously sense this as something negative, and are repelled by it, preferring your typical modern agnosticism instead. Browder had never met a Serb who reads the Bible, and he never met a pious Serbian grandma who didn’t view icons as instruments of magic. His own grandma, who barely learned how to read before she war removed from school to tend cattle, would religiously follow the church calendar of feasts, but she had no clue nor interest in even the most basic narratives of the Good Book.

On the other hand, Browder has met rather blood-thirsty Serbian nationalists who are also very devout Christians of the Orthodox church. They constitute a sort of jihadist analogue, though they are not nearly as accomplished as their Islamic counterparts. Browder eventually figured those people don’t see in their church much beyond a clear and perfectly accurate marker of tribal belonging. To them, the whole thing with liturgy, calendar, praying, stories, rules – was just busywork needed to make the ethnic marker stick. From a social Darwinist perspective their behaviour made sense. Given the violent intensity of their competitive environment, they may even appear as a justifiable phenomenon to a modern evolutionary biologist.

Anyhow, Browder could totally see how the Serb Orthodox Church can be off-putting to an outsider. 

-       Are the Muslims really religious here? Browder asked his grandma, specifically. The woman no longer had a filter, so even though she was quite senile and utterly uneducated, Browder put great value in her raw testimony. 

-       What? What wretched faith? They can yodel all they want, Allah this, Allah that, they love pork and brandy more than you and I. 

-       Is it really true?

-       Of course it’s true. I remember every year we held slava, they knew there would be a lot of pork at the feast, and they would show up first thing in the morning on my gate to get some lard. I used to start yelling at them, how on earth are you my first guests on this holy day, all wrapped up like that, you will bring me bad luck!  

Browder’s mom laughed and confirmed. Grandma continued 

-       But I always went back into the house and gave them bacon and lard. I felt sorry for them. 

-       But what did they say, why do they want it?

-       They said they had to eat it for health reasons. Of course! How are you going to be healthy and strong without lard? They would otherwise fry food with that thing called butter, as though they were destitute - grandma finished with a look of sincere pity in her face – only around Ramadan they avoided pork and brandy.  

Browder was amused. Cheered by this history lesson, he. Sspent the rest of the afternoon inquiring about the family stories from times before he could remember. He felt transported into a strange land that no book or movie ever showed him, and what was more, it was in a way, his land.

Around eight o’clock he dressed up and went to meet Willy at a street corner. They both arrived punctually and proceeded to a two-level bar on the central road, one that Browder already passed several times and wondered about. The place was large but still managed to look busy on a Thursday night, with mostly groups of acquaintances lounging casually over drinks and cigarettes. Browder and Willy ordered two cold beers and started to catch up.

Willy was a civil engineer with a degree from the University in Belgrade. He worked for several companies on contractual basis. Construction projects were typically long, maybe two years on average, and the construction industry in the country was one of the few healthy sectors, so that most of the time his employment could be characterized as steady. Unlike almost all of his friends, he has never set foot out of his two or three home countries, a fact that baffled Browder, though it didn’t surprise him. In particular, it was very easy for Serbs in the construction business to get work on Russian civil projects in Siberia, and some of Willy’s friends who have done it have gotten rich, and some have transitioned to the West afterwards. Yet Willy, who must think of mother Russia as the glorious protectress of his sacred faith, wouldn’t even go there.

-       You know, people think that the grass is greener on the other side, but for me, Belgrade was big enough. Maybe most of all, I was afraid of nostalgia. I was afraid of missing Serbia.

Browder thought that Serbia is so small, if he got drunk three times a year in Belgrade, one of those times he would have accidentally stumbled and fell over a border into Greece or Hungary. They bought took sips of cold, crisp lager.

-       So how is business in Serbia then? On my way from Belgrade I noticed great many more buildings than the last time I was here. I saw a lot of them under construction, too.

-       Sure, there has been a lot of work, but the level of professionalism with us is still low. I did several big gigs both as a designer and as a construction project manager. In both cases, there is so much pressure from the top to cut corners. As a construction overseer, the deadlines were brutal. To meet the deadlines and costs they set for me would necessitate becoming a slave driver. I tried to be good to my men, but there was no escaping working seven days a week, rain sleet or snow. 

-       I did construction a couple of summers as a student in Canada. It’s slave work.

-       Well, if its slave work in Canada, you can imagine what it’s here. Once I had a man fall from top of the warehouse straight on his back. He couldn’t say a word or lift a finger. The management refused to even call the ambulance for fear of getting bad press. I had to load the man in my personal car and drive him to the emergency. They deducted a penalty from my paycheck for the downtime caused. 

Browder was relieved that Willy, despite being a clerofascist, had a critical stance against the system and the government. At least he wasn’t a dupe in that way.  

A couple of beers later they walked out. Willy took them through a few empty streets to a riverbank road, where they walked into a large hall with some twenty round tables packed with people. A DJ in the corner played loud music and a wide bar in the back was busy serving food and munchies. Browder found a spot in the back at a table with a few local kids. The kids ordered a bottle and an ice bucket. The bottle was a brand of herbal liqueur called Gorki List – or Bitter Leaf – and was the domestic answer to Jaegermeister. The bitter in the name was perhaps symbolic. The drink was sweet and went down easy.

Yet again, Browder found himself carried by the night. He was in a strange setting tonight, but as a teenager he would have considered this his hometown. Parties in small towns are conservative because everyone knows each other. If you do something stupid, the whole town will know about it in two days. If you get drunk, people will know about it. If you hit on someone and get rejected, everyone will know about it. If you sleep with someone, everyone will know about it – so you better keep sleeping with that person. 

-       What do you think about our local talent here? Willy beckoned to a table where several girls were standing from their chairs and dancing to a new hit. He pursed his lips and eyebrows lustfully.  

-       It’s world class! There may be the next Novak Djokovic somewhere in here.

Browder really meant it. Here he was in a random town in Bosnia, and the girls – and the boys – walked around with easy swagger, dressed in the smartest style, observing the world confidently from the tall height of their calm and earnest faces. The ladies in question had exceptional curves, and they wore dresses that told you all about it. Browder was proud and thought that his people were resilient.  

They are like lions, they have to live through so much dumb struggle on daily basis, and they still walk around full of strength and confidence - full of grace, thought Browder. He figured he’d break down within a month in their shoes. But then again, a man learns to cope with everything. Maybe the copious amount of smoking is just the type of medicine one needs to handle the stresses of everyday Serbia. Willy, alternatively, had become a religious fundamentalist. Smoking definitely rewires your brain. Maybe after a month of chain smoking, Browder would undergo a metamorphosis; he would freeze into a patriarchal cocoon and after a few days of unexplained chemistry he would emerge as one of those permanently self-assured dudes with colorful tracksuits and fades, that glorious specimen of the Slav butterfly.

A few of Willy’s acquaintances came and went by the table. The guy overdid it with the whole religion thing, but he was still the local kid that everyone knew. Browder loosened up and told Willy about Fairy’s Inn and the offer he had with them. He showed him a few photos on the phone. Willy knew about the place, he had worked on a project like that in Whiteton four years ago.

-       I had to reject their offer – Browder lied – It may be a promising idea but I’ve spent too much time outside of the country, I wouldn’t know much about the domestic market. I am scheduled to fly back to the US on Saturday morning. Work is waiting for me. I’m busing back to Belgrade tomorrow and catching a flight back first thing Saturday morning. 

They talked about the Chapelton. Willy recounted how a few of their childhood friends ended up. They ordered another bottle of Bitter Leaf. At some point Browder walked over to the table with the talented girls and chatted them up. It can be argued what his chances would have been in ordinary circumstances, but at that particular occasion he was too incoherent to get anywhere. After a minute of patient listening the ladies politely suggested he go away. 

That night Browder fell asleep in his grandma’s apartment in his fell coat and covered with a thick feather duvet. He woke up the next morning around ten o’clock, and noticed that although the radiator was blasting hot, he was not sweating. He only felt incredibly thirsty. He walked out to the washroom.