Ch-9: Childhood Memories

It was nice to see his grandma, his only surviving grandparent, in a much better condition than he expected, and his mother taking care of her. They greeted warmly and tearfully and immediately sat down to lunch.

He thought how incredibly decent his mom was to come from Canada to take care of her mother, around the clock, and find her a retirement home. She and his aunt were resigned to her slowing down and dying soon. Grandma herself said that this illness would bury her. Browder’s mom slept in the same bed with her own mom, aware that those may be the last intimate moments she would have with her ever. She was incredibly patent in taking care of her mom, and is a retirement home nurse by profession, but she tries to correct her impatiently when grandma starts rambling and showing signs of mental confusion. Browder’s mom still looked strong and nice, though this was the first time that when Browder saw her, he thought that she was definitely fat. American life, he thought.

When Browder’s mom arrived to Chapelton to take care of her mother she found the old woman essentially on her death bed. Having stopped eating in the days leading up to her illness, grandma lost all energy and was unable to move a finger on her bed. Her daughter washed her and took complete charge of her caretaking. Most importantly she began preparing the right kind of food and forcing her to eat. The food revived the old woman, so that by the time Browder arrived she greeted him on her feet and with a fairly clear mind. Throughout his sta, her daughter fed her, arguing with her reluctance to eat and ultimately winning most of the arguments, just as she did with Browder when he was a child.

 Browder’s mom and aunt then went shopping around for retirement homes in Republika Srpska and Serbia. Long-term senior care is a new and growing industry in the region, and it leaves a lot to be desired. They first went to a pricey retirement home near the town of Whitten, on the Bosnian side. The head doctor and owner, a neurologist who showed them around the establishment, turned out to have gone rather mad. He looked the part too, an old man with disheveled hair, white lab coat, and restless speech.

Upon entering the premises, Browder’s mom and aunt were greeted by unbearable stench of human excrement and bodily decay, and it became immediately clear that old Dr. Frankensteinovic was basically running a death camp, murdering his clientele with complete and utter negligence, rather than the more conventional methods of firing squad or lethal injection. To impress the arrived ladies, he showed them clutters of obscure medical machinery and pitched his services with convoluted medical jargon. As they walked around, they saw an old woman in her death throes, suffused in her own stench, moaning mindlessly. The visitors made it clear to the doctor that they would not be fooled, shamed him a bit, and quickly made their way out.

 The mom and the aunt believed that the establishment probably takes advantage of old folks whose families have moved abroad. The adult children buy their ageing parents a place in a retirement home that looks expensive and good on paper and don’t bother to fly back to Bosnia to actually check out the premises, inadvertently - or maybe sometimes intentionally - leaving their parents at the mercy of a murderous maniac.

- In Sarajevo, I was taken care by all Croatian lady doctors, interrupted Browder’s grandma. Not one of them, ever, did anything bad to me! Not once! They were kind to me at all times, they talked to me, and they showed me respect. What do you know, when someone is good, it doesn’t matter what nationality they are, they are just good and that’s it! When a person has that mercy in their soul, it doesn’t matter who they are [ethnically], they can’t help but show it, and they show it at every turn! Her speech was a passionate crescendo, ending with her finger wagging emphatically in front of her face.

 After that first unwholesome experience, the mom and aunt visited a few more homes in the region, one of which was very good but out of capacity. Ultimately, they settled on a mid-range one also in Whitten, where grandma would live with a woman she knows.

 When asked how she feels about the plans for her life, grandma shrugged her shoulders and smiled, and she was fine with going to a spa.

Browder was on the whole gladdened by his grandma’s energy and appearance. Looking at the TV, on the other hand, was disheartening. The Bosnian Serb channel showed some university professors, dressed in cheap suit jackets and polo shirts and drug store spectacles, with gel-spiked hair, and standing in front of some botched attempts at abstract paintings (which, to be fair, all look like botched attempts at something). Browder had talked shit about Italians overdoing it with art while he was travelling through Italy a week earlier with Laura, but now he thought: European elegance, we need you! The professors were talking about the need to fight for the continuation of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet in Bosnia. The Serbian students were interviewed and concurred, with a lot of umms in their depositions. The students as a rule looked like they just got out of bed.

 Browder guessed that team Serbs cared to keep the Cyrillic alphabet more than the team Muslims cared to end it. Does anyone really give that much shit about Serbian Cyrillic alphabet? Other than Serbian nationalists?

 Then there was an extended news report interviewing some locals, clearly not well off, about their family members who’ve been horrendously slaughtered by Muslim militants almost thirty years ago. They received no justice and are understandably still not over it. Browder guessed that the Muslim channel would have shown some inverse report, perhaps about the Srebrenica Massacre.

Following that, there was coverage on Djokovic winning the Australian open. It mixed references to Novak Djokovic’s “conquest of the world” with repeated suggestions that the world hates Novak Djokovic because he is a Serb. In Balkan narratives, conquerors are always resented by their new subjects.

Finally, the next thing they showed, and the last thing Browder noticed, was some cheerful English language show with subtitles about a patisserie in Germany.

Both his mom and his grandma displayed a confusing mix of opinions and narrations regarding local politics. On one hand, his mom talked about the need for peace, local incompetence and corruption, how all people are the same, the wholesale flight of youth from the region, and the need for economic development. On the other, she also talked about how the world hates Serbs and all Serbs ever do is fight for their survival. She also mentioned a few traitor politicians in the region being greenlighted by shadowy and powerful Serb-haters. Grandma generally concurred, and wondered aloud why no one shoots those traitorous politicians, saying that if she were a male, she certainly would.

Browder never really believed that his mom really cared all that much about politics, and figured that her second set of opinions, more political and therefore less of a direct interest to a women, were done out of loyalty to her man, namely Browder’s dad, a functional alcoholic and a permanently heartbroken Yugoslav, then Serb, nationalist. But then again, maybe her first set of opinions was done in deference to Browder. Browder’s mom was not an intellectual kind of woman.

Grandma’s political oscillations were even more extreme. She was now telling and repeating traumatic stories from her childhood. Her most repeated story was how her own grandmother was shot and killed right in front of her and her sister, by a couple of Muslim Ustashe soldiers. Grandma had been probably about five years old. Towards the end of the Second World War they were walking down the field, holding hands, when her grandmother saw the two soldiers following two teenage Serbian girls, and warned them to desist as she would tell the Chetniks, the Serb nationalist militants. The soldiers made angry remarks, and after a short disappearance they returned, kicked her in the chest, and shot her to death while she was on the ground. Grandma was still burdened by the image and the lack of justice.

On a brighter note, she recalled how the Ustashe set up their camp right on her father’s premises, her farther having been the wealthiest local land-owning peasant. They regularly invited Grandma and her sisters to take as much food from their supplies as they wanted. When a train wagon broke her ankle, the Ustashe promptly arranged for a car to drive the five-year old Grandma all the way to Zagreb, their capital, where she received medical attention and returned home healed.

These headquarter Ustashe were Croats. Grandma’s father, the harsh patriarch of the family, had his younger brother fighting for the Chetniks, the Serb nationalists, while having to host their mortal enemies, the Ustashe, on his property. Between a rock and a hard place, as they say in the US.

Finally, Grandma told how after the war, her dad would often hire Muslim farm hands to harvest his land and would sell them his produce but would curse them in private for killing his mother. The communist partisans also killed his brother or a relative, or both, it was difficult to keep track. Those Ustashe, mused Browder sarcastically, what’s one to make of them? It was an emotional roller coaster.

To deal with such a Spartan blast from the past Browder helped himself with steady sips of homemade rakija throughout the day. Together with exhaustion the drink created a haze that numbed his emotions and gave him the strength to sit calmly in the quaintly furnished living room. After a few hours, before dinner, he needed a stretch, and he went to stroll in around the city in the dusk.

Visiting his land of birth as a young man was never touristic in nature for Browder. Rather it was more a spiritual ordeal consisting of vertical descent down circles of hell, or at least something like purgatory. The journey typically started in Belgrade, a loveable city with a few wrinkles. This stage may not even be purgatory just yet. Then, he descended lower into Chapelton, Bosnia, a small town awkwardly squeezed between two countries and two hills. This was the city of his war childhood. He had a good childhood here and thinking back he was surprised by the spirit and the will to live, really, that he had had in it, and that locals still do. He even saw a Porsche Cayenne and a crowd of happy youths. He looked at some men in their twenties to see if he would recognize childhood friends, but then he realized he was thirty-five. His childhood friends were probably bald and fat.

When he came back he was greeted by a savoury smell of dinner. Browder applied himself to a wonderful plate of what they call “young” cheese and smoked beef cuts, together with warm breaks of tender bread. The main course was sour cabbage rolls with rice and ground meet stuffing, baked with red smoked pork ribs. Salad were crisp, pickled bell peppers stuffed with shredded pickled cabbage, and soft red bell peppers roasted and marinated. Browder’s strength was replenished.

The evening settled and in the quaint old living room and an old TV, and the stoic stillness of a small town, and surrounded by his still living grandmother, and his mother, and relatives, Browder began to feel some personal sacred hanging in the air. Memories of his childhood came to him, and he felt once again the eternally lost warmth of those days, when his mother and father were two deities, and the relatives and friends a pantheon around them, and the town of Chapelton was Olympus.

His thoughts slowed down and anxiety left him. He remembered a world when he did not think all day, either planning for the future or remembering the past. It was a world without doubt, without insecurity. The basic state was that of self-assurance, of blessedness, of knowledge that the good God is with us, and we are with him. And now again in this night, despite age and despite exhaustion, that state returned at least temporarily. Browder was with his people, and he was deep within his clan again. And to his clan he did not need to explain anything, nor did he have to tolerate anything from them.

He sliced some bread. It was to him the original bread, the kind that he had eaten first. He sliced it with an old hunting knife, and he recalled the day when he found that knife twenty-five year prior. He and Billy were messing around in an abandoned house in an abandoned Muslim house in the Cemetery Hills neighbourhood, and they wandered into a cluttered garage of a house abandoned by refugees. There they found a working bench grinder. They turned it on, and excited by its powerful whirr, began to scavenge the garage for something to sharpen. Browder found the knife then, probably, as he remembered sharpening the blunt instrument on the grinder. A thick burst of sparks flew up and away from him. He saw the rough marks of the grinder on the knife and smiled and shook his head.

After they left the garage, Billy and he got into a fight, but he doesn’t remember why. Maybe it was about the knife. He remembered Billy getting the better of him. Billy ended up pinning him to the ground and ran off to discontinue the fight, knowing that Browder wouldn’t stop at a loss, for Browder was an exceedingly proud boy, and the most headstrong in the whole school. Browder got up as Billy ran and flug a wooden stick at Billy’s legs. Miraculously, the move had the exact intended result of tripping Billy, who fell hard face first. Browder sat on his chest and punched him in the face a few times, going well beyond what he had received from Billy moments earlier. He then ran off with the knife.

Later on that day, twenty five years prior, ten year old Browder was sitting on the banks of Drina river next to his dad, who was talking to another man. Do men still sit by rivers and talk to each other? Without getting drunk or doing drugs? Browder took out the knife and in boredom found a branch, out of which he was going to fashion a spear. He stripped the leaf branches with the knife, which was now exceedingly sharp. He gripped the branch in his left hand and swung with the knife at it with his right. One of the swings missed, and he landed the knife at the base of his index finger. Blood began to rush profusely, and for the first time ever, Browder saw in the middle of the cut the white surface of his own bone. He went to his father. Dad probably thought it wasn’t a big deal, as his solution was to wrap a broad leaf around the wound and wait until they got home for bandage.

Browder looked at the top of his left hand in his grandmother’s living room, and looked at the scar from the knife he carried still and always, and looked at the knife, and looked at the rough but effective marks of the grinder on its blade, and he remembered clearly his past and who he was.

After night fall an uncle twice removed came to visit. He still looked intelligent and dignified, as Browder remembered him, but moved and spoke slower and was now completely grey. Unlike most Serbs his age, his wasn’t overweight and his face was free of effects of long-term smoking. He dressed elegantly and smelled of nice cologne. Browder inquired about his children. They were both specialist doctors now working France and Germany. Browder expressed congratulations. He thought how he has so many cousins who are doctors and lawyers, even though he’s never been financially secure, perhaps he belonged to the upper middle class. His uncle and his immediate family even looked like Jews, all of them having the nose shape. Another thought was that coming from Chapelton, it was less about settled status and more about having an especially powerful motivation to succeed and get the fuck out of there.

The uncle left after a short visit and Browder begun to retire to bed. He cleaned up and lay down in a bed and thought about how tomorrow or the day after, he would have to descend further, to the village of Campari, and meet his father’s severely diabetic sister Melania, her severely uneducated son, and his wife and two sons. He would probably also cross over to the adjacent hill, to the property of his Granda’s Basilic clan and that earstwhile Ustashi camp, and express condolences for a deceased uncle.

Aunt Melania’s daughter had fled to her Croatian dad’s side of the family in the Adriatic city of Split, Croatia. The pair had divorced long before the war broke out. Browder thought how Split was indeed a better option than Campari.

Browder’s dad’s parents had fled to Campari from their original village of Pine Hill during the population reshuffling of the Bosnian war. It wasn’t far.

Browder’s paternal grandfather, also named Browder, was scooped as a teenager right after the second world war by the victorious communists. His father and uncles were seized on their fields by the Ustashi and disappeared. Year later it was the younger Browder who found their names on a list of victims of the Jasenovac concentration camp, on a Holocaust website ran by an Israeli organisation. Realising they had a smart and enthusiastic kid on their hands, and a fatherless one too, the communist sent Browder the Elder off to Belgrade, where he was brainwashed into the communist doctrine, permanently as it would turn out, and served the army in the guards of Josip Broz Tito.

Upon the end of his two-year compulsory army term, in a fit of virtue and loyalty worthy of Cincinnatus, Browder’s grandpa left the capital to till his old hill in Bosnia and keep the peace between the Muslims in Pine Hill, some of whom sent his dad and his uncles to the slaughterhouse, and Serbs in the village of Greens. His communist loyalty earned him the privilege of running the local supplies store, and he had received some rudimentary commerce training in Belgrade. Feeding mostly from the yield of the fields he worked and livestock he maintained, Grandpa Browder had his store produce an impressive excess of cash, which he used to educate his mathematically gifted son all the way to an engineering degree at the University of Sarajevo, and to spoil terribly both his son and his daughter, Melania. An incredibly nice guy, he died in two thousand and thirteen.

Following in his own father’s footsteps, Browder’s dad also left a relatively cosmopolitan Sarajevo to work in management in a steel components factory in Fortville, the closest town to his native village and probably the smallest one on earth. He met Browder’s mom at the only hotel restaurant there and married her after twenty-one days of dating. Engineering undergrads as a rule are starved for women; consequently, they tend to fall hard and fast for the ones they do get.

Years later, Browder became mistrustful of both his father’s and grandfather’s explanation of why they gave up on the big cities of Sarajevo and Belgrade, respectively. With his grandfather, it was more believable, because to many peasants of his time everything on the other side of their hill was a foreign land, and a different province may well be outside of the Solar System. But with his dad, he has told several ambiguous narrations from which Browder started to suspect that he had felt cold shouldered by incumbents in Sarajevo. Balkan city folk are maniacally protective of their urban status. That said, he was indeed a man of exceptional filial piety.