Father on a Business Trip

The Culibrk family, two brothers and their wives, and two children each, lived in a great big house together until war broke out. They now live in a flat they have broken into. The children were born one after the other, and are inseparable. Jadranka (10) and Dusko (8) have lost their father. Jadranka cried while her mother talked of the war, as did her mother. She and Dusko only said a few words when they heard the grownups say they were "shy and didn't talk much". Later, with the other children in the other room full of clothes and bunk-beds, they laughed and waited their turn to say what they thought. In front of her mother Jadranka had said that she "wished to go home", and "A refugee is a person without a hearth and then goes to another when he flees. A refugee is a person who has left his homeland, house, family. I just left my house. You live in a place four or five years and then you become a citizen. After the war everybody stops talking about it.

"I miss my daddy terribly."-said Jadranka. "He had to go and fight for our country, for our Serbs, to defend our home so that we'd have a place to live in again. Mummy told me that a tank crushed him. All his bones were broken. A month later they gave the body to granny and grandfather, his mummy and daddy, and they weren't sure that it was him because a woman came and she said that it was her husband. But I know that he's dead, because when granny comes to Serbia, she buys flowers and takes them to his grave." In front of the children she said: "I'm afraid to return because the Croats butcher the Serbs and poke the children's eyes out with knives. Mummy said she'd heard it on the news".

Do you think that's true?

"I don't. People say that to scare the children or the grownups. If my daddy were alive, we'd have the same house, or two houses, and we'd live together, and we wouldn't be afraid."

Jadranka's cousin Zoran, is the eldest child in the family and the only one to remember something else from the prewar period, not just the big house and the pet. He laughed at the ignorance of the other children and interrupted them, saying: "I don't know what reason those who wish to return have. I just know that I don't want anyone to maltreat me." He said that they had called him a Chetnik before the war, but that he wasn't afraid because his parents had told him that they would leave for Serbia, but that he wasn't to talk about it. "If it weren't good here, many would have returned by now. I speak Serbian now. There were problems when we came. Nobody understood me at school. They speak a different language, Croatian, over there. They use different words for bread, brush, sharpener. Mummy and daddy told me to learn a lot of words, and I don't make mistakes anymore. Over there it's not a village or a town, just three, four shops and a department store. I like it here, especially here in Banovo Brdo (Belgrade suburb). We had a lake over there and went swimming sometimes. We have swimming pools here and in summer go to Ada Ciganlija (popular place for outings in Belgrade) every day.

Dusko and Jadranka didn't ask their mother about their father. They heard about his death in passing. Dusko cried for months, saying that his foot hurt him.

The Buncic family are refugees from Petrinja, and have one of the rare "refugee" apartments which is nice, full of light and clean. "Now I know that walls aren't important", said Dusanka, who is bringing up her two daughters Milena and Dragana on her own.

"For a long time at school I didn't want to say that my father had died. I was afraid they'd pity me, that people would be good to me because I was a refugee and didn't have a father. I wanted to be accepted for myself, for my character, and I hate it when they ask me where I come from, and then they say 'you refugees are such and such'", said Dragana (16). She has visited Petrinja several times in the past four years since she's been living in Belgrade with her mother and sister. She says that they are tired of the war, that people have become alcoholics and changed. They've divided things up and dispersed. "Things aren't as they were before, even though much is being built and it all looks better than after the first year of war. Even the entry into Krajina is very unusual."

Dragana hates the word refugee: "It's such an ugly word. I don't like it. Many here believe that we fled because we wanted to, and then I tell them that it has nothing to do with me. I hate that word. What I hate most, is that everybody identifies us with those alleged refugees who first came to Serbia, who found out what would happen, sold everything and came here with sacks full of money. We're not all the same. How many people from other countries live in Belgrade and nobody calls them refugees".

"They're foreigners", said her mother.

"So, why don't they call us foreigners? In Petrinja they all think that we live like kings here. The last time I was there, they said, 'Here come the girl from Belgrade.' They call me 'the girl from Belgrade' there, and refugee here. That means I don't belong there or here. Then where do I belong?"

She said that she didn't watch the news, that she didn't understand them, and that she wasn't interested. However: "I think that it's good that we've separated. We can cooperate over electricity, water. I think that we have finally created our customs, church. It could all have been done without war. But, daddy, he had to remain there. He just wanted to defend our home, so that we could come back, because when we left for Serbia, we thought that we'd be away just a few weeks. I blame all those who fled from Petrinja. I understand the anger of the people here, because a lot of young men got killed, while the men from over there fled to Serbia. I'm not saying this because my father got killed. That's the way things are."

One of the changes she has experienced, is her discovery of the Church. "I didn't go to church in Petrinja. And then when I saw how the people here nurtured the customs. I was afraid over there how people would react if they saw me going to church. I remember when we were learning about nationalities at school, only one boy knew what his nationality was. I asked mother what we were. It wasn't important before, but I think it's important that I can now say what I am."

Milena (7) was listening carefully to what her sister was saying. She answered all questions with a smile. Milena is a ballerina, and speaks English well. When talking of music and things she likes, her vocabulary is very grownup. In the end, bored with things she wasn't interested in, she answered only when we asked her if she thought of the things that had happened. She said that she thought only of songs.

Her mother and sister didn't tell her that her father had died for a whole year. They now think that they made a mistake, but they were afraid of the consequences, because Milena was very close to her father. She likes only men with big moustaches, like her father used to have. She doesn't want to return to Petrinja. Dragana added: "If I were to return to Petrinja, I'd have to come here too. I have two homes now."

Vera Markovic is twenty and has two children aged three and six months. She lives in a hotel from which the management wants to eject her because the High Commissioner for Refugees has cut short her stay in Belgrade. She wishes to stay in Belgrade because her brother and friends are in Belgrade, and they are the only people helping her. She hopes she will get the flat Brana Crncevic (nationalist writer and political figure) personally promised her.

"You can't imagine how hard it is when you lose the man you love. I don't know... if it weren't for the children. I'm still in shock and can't believe that I'm completely alone, and that he's dead. I had so much love. No, I don't believe in the future. There's nothing left. I can't tell the children, especially the elder boy that their father is dead. He keeps asking me where daddy is and I lie that he'll come. I'll tell them when they grow up, then I'll tell them what it was like, even though I don't understand it. I keep them away from other children. That's what I'm most afraid of. Because those other refugee children are undisciplined, and one of them could tell my son that he doesn't have a father. It happened once, and I told the girl never to do it again. I try to protect him, I tell him when they tease him that his father isn't here, to tell them that he has a young and beautiful mother. Just so he'll have something to brag about".

Vera doesn't believe that the war will ever end. She has no place to go back to. She said that things would be easier if she got the flat. She believes that she'll get it.