Shopping for a Better Country Read online

  Now I am tempted to say, Remember where we are. This is not America. We as Americans are being exiled from our country of liberty through the general paranoia being injected into our asses. The total spying which we suspected in Yugoslavia, Hungary, and East Germany, is only now possible, in the States, through credit cards, computers, EZ passes, surveillance cameras, and well-meaning neighbors. We can be observed. But as a friend of mine points out, So what? What has happened to you? Who can review and read all that data?

  Nothing has happened to me, I say, except that I feel self-conscious now. I am not doing anything bad, but I feel self-conscious, the way I did as an adolescent, when I danced relatively spontaneously but then saw myself in the mirror, and my dancing looked awful and I no longer wanted to do it. Maybe my conversation and my emails sound awful, and I should like to quit communicating. But I refuse to feel self-conscious. I will write the way I please, I will talk the way I please—or at least I hope so.

  Countries change, of course, and it is still the same country, in a way, resembling a McCarthy America, except that McCarthy’s America was not in debt. This is a bankrupt America, bankrupted partly by its suspicions and overspending on the military and over-reliance on consumerism.

  So how much do I belong to America? This is my chosen country. Was, anyway. Croatia is my rejected country, was anyway. And now? How do I define my nationality? Do I need to? I often refuse to, but then I am introduced as a Croatian writer, or American, or Croatian-American. I don’t lose sleep over the definition, but nevertheless, the problem is there. (And to further complicate it, I am emigrating to Canada!)

  The question of nationality remains a question no matter how I answer it. If a nation rejects you and you reject it, it still is not a permanent and absolute severance of ties. It’s like disowning parents when you are fifteen and then weeping at their funeral when you are fifty. That is what a friend of mine, a Serbian exile from my hometown in Croatia, has done. Miodrag disowned his father, but he found his father’s death very painful and fears that he might be like his father and commit suicide one day. He also disowned Croatia, but now he plans to retire there. Of course, after Yugoslavia fell apart, Miodrag has two or three homelands, one where he immigrated, Great Britain, one where he grew up, Croatia, and the other, Serbia, where he studied and got married for the first time (he’s been married three times, I believe), and although he doesn’t visit Serbia, he might still reclaim that homeland as well. Now in his successive polygamy with women and with nations there’s a striking parallel. You can divorce, but if you have children with someone, you never fully do. You can leave the country of your birth, but you never fully do.

  Anyhow, for a while I wanted to be fully American, and believed that America was a cosmopolitan, multinational and transnational country, and I believed in the Marxist notion that nationality is a purely bourgeoisie phenomenon which willdisappear with the disappearance of the classes. But the classes are not disappearing, and these days, there are sharper divides between the rich and the poor all over the world. While the rich may feel global enough and have enough of a global reach through travel and finance, the poor and even the middle class seem to be stuck where they are, and their identity depends on where they are. If they are in America and have been there most of their lives, they are American; if they are in Russia, they are Russian, etc. No matter what, even if nations suddenly disappear, they would still exist for me since I grew up with them; they would remain a significant part of my psychology as so much of my thinking and remembering and activity has had to do with leaving one country for another, and with choosing to become an American citizen, and choosing to write in English rather than in Croatian.

  Who are you? people asked me in Russia, at the Murmansk Writers’ Club. You’ve been introduced to us as an American writer but we see you are Croatian.

  I am both.

  When you left, did you feel that you betrayed your country? a writer at the round table asked me.

  No, I felt that my country betrayed me since I couldn’t fit in as a Protestant.

  Ah, so, said the writer, now I understand. That’s how you can live in America. I am sure I couldn’t.

  But nation is not the same thing as religion, is it? I asked. You can be a Catholic and still be a Russian, you can be Jewish, Muslim… and still be Russian.

  Then you have two identities, and you betray one.

  I have two identities, and having them makes me more American than not having them would make me. And perhaps America is unique that way, that dual identities are part of most people’s heritage.

  A woman stood up and said, I have visited Croatia, and it is the most beautiful country in the world. How dare you leave it! You should be ashamed of yourself. And isn’t it true that most Americans are fat and stupid?

  (Wow, I thought, how things have changed. Where is the American prestige? And why indeed did I leave Croatia?)

  Listen, I answered her. America used to be a great country. It has declined, I admit. I couldn’t predict that.

  Now, if I decided suddenly to forget about the rest of the world and become a Russian, could I be a Russian at the age of fifty? I don’t think so. They might accept me as a Slav, via the nebulous Slavic soul, but for me, despite long immersion in Russian literature and culture, it still wouldn’t work. If I were younger, sure. I could be an expat in Russia, but an expat has a patria. It’s not the ex but the patria that defines you. The question is which patria is stronger, the new or the ex—or is it all about having an ex, and the exing? The act of leaving gives us expats the real sense of identity and home—of nomad home.

  Now, after living in the States for thirty years and having American kids, I have sort of earned the identity, but America, now in a state of disarray, with its huge suburbia, huge cars, and ugly, unwalkable downtowns, has suddenly alienated me. I feel more at home in Russia, where I can walk into chaotic streets, where many people walk. But feeling at home and being part of a place is not the same thing.

  I perhaps thrive in this national confusion. The tongue has much to do with it. I have chosen English and lived in it so long that it has become my home. No matter where I go, I have this English. Of course, I have Croatian as well, but I don’t write in it, I read in it very little, and I talk in it rarely.

  The question of exile and national identity can’t cease for me. Some people know where they belong. My mother, although born in Cleveland (where she lived until she was three years old), knows she belongs in Daruvar, Croatia, where she spent most of her life. Despite possible hesitations in identity, she had—thirty-five years ago, to my horror—her name cut into the gravestone next to my father’s, after my father’s death. She did not remarry, and now she seems to be dying. For a while she had a strong pull toward America, and one year she wanted to fly there to see the country, but I was too broke to buy her a ticket, and just a few years later, when I could finally afford to buy one, she did not want to go. She did not feel up to it, and her desire subsided. Still, to my mind she could belong in Cleveland Calvary Cemetery, Lot 111, where her Slovenian immigrant grandmother is buried. But she does belong more to Daruvar, where actually, as I rewrite this essay, she is already buried, in the soil where I was born, only two kilometers away, and where most naturally I will be buried when it comes to that, as that indeed is my native soil. Actually, I have no idea where I will be buried.

  Chopin, famously, as an exile from Poland, kept a bit of Polish soil, rodna gruda, native soil, in a jar and wept over it. Was he ever French? His name is pronounced the French way: Shop-Un, not Hop-In (as it is in Polish). He became French and remained Polish—although his remains are at Père Lachaise buried under French soil and an incessant supply of flowers from Polish visitors.

  Some people are practically unexileable. For example, Solzhenitsyn, while in Vermont, was in Vermont only physically. He recoiled from anything American—the disco music particularly horrified him—and continued to write about Russia, and as soon as he could, he returned to Russia. Well, he is now buried there, in Rodina.

  Nabokov, on the other hand, loved being an American, and waved his American passport proudly when he traveled in Europe. Yet, rather than weep for the native soil, he tended to weep for the native language, writing pages and pages of the untranslatable nuances of his favorite Russian words.

  While I used to be proud to show my American passport, now I am a bit more hesitant, and I might be shopping for a better country. I enjoyed immigration to the States, writing in English, and if I were younger, I would perhaps look for a third language to write in, exile myself spiritually. Now, in 2011, I am thinking of moving to Montreal, living at least with the presence of another language in my ears. Maybe it’s a waste of energy to worry about it all, and maybe it’s simply a longing for a change of political and cultural scenery that drives me to seek yet another shift in my nationality.

  I think for me the essence of emigration, of being an émigré, is that I have not resolved the issue of national identity and that I never could. My coming to America took place too long ago; it has lost its freshness. I am tempted by the possibility or impossibility of another shift in identity. That shifting may be more important than the concrete choice of where to move and what national belonging to strive for.

  For me the issue of being an émigré, or exile, or Gastarbeiter, boils down to border crossings physically and mentally; being an émigré depends on breaking down the borders and definitions of national identities. I am exiled from easy definitions, from clear identity. Exiled from exile, but not from migration, emigration and immigration. Who am I? It would be best if I could answer, Mensch, citizen of the world. Or maybe a Canadian in the making? Could I begin to think of myself as Canadian? How long would it take? Or if I moved to Canada
, would I suddenly be reminded of just how American I was? (Actually, since writing this I have moved to Canada and I am working on my Canadian immigrant papers, and I suddenly feel more American than ever… after all, I was naturalized in the States, sorry to say. Canada has been voted the country with the best reputation in the world by the Reputation Institute— that institute actually sounds pretty disreputable to me—and maybe in many ways it is, but I don’t have that impression yet as I have to file incessant paperwork, worse than I remember in Yugoslavia and perhaps even Russia.)

  Moving away from Croatia made it easier for me to write about Croatia. I have written more about Croatia than about any other place, and in a way, my being in America has strengthened my being Croatian. I have difficulties writing about the States—not that it is a boring country, but perhaps I need the distance, and there’s a lot to say. Now, in Canada, maybe I will discover that I have more to say about America and more to remember and imagine than I suspect? I do suspect! As a good American, I suspect. In God we trust, and suspect everybody else.

  DEAD FATHERS SOCIETY

  THE MATH IS SIMPLE: men marry older and die younger than women. That means that many children born to older parents grow up with a dead father lurking in the background. My father died when I was eleven. One of the first things I want to find out when I meet people is whether they lost their fathers. I think there is camaraderie among the people who lose their fathers early. I experienced that as soon as my father died; I made friends with a boy who seemed to hate me before.

  The day after my father died Mladen and I stood kicking stones in my backyard, and he said, Now we are the same.

  What do you mean?

  My father died when I was three. You will see what it’s like not to have a father.

  He seemed gleeful to have a friend in the same predicament, and while I can’t say I rejoice to find out someone had lost his father early on, I do feel immediate camaraderie on that account.

  I take this camaraderie into the writing world, where I notice which writers lost their fathers in their youth. My friend, Bill Cobb, lost his at the age of four. The first novel Bill wrote opens with an image of a father’s ear pickled in a jar, for remembrance—a beautiful and macabre image. I think that describes the sensibility of many of us, male or female, in this non-exclusive club, the dead fathers club. Another friend of mine, Madelon Sprengnether, describes in her book, Crying at the Movies, the moment that sent her adrift into her youth and adulthood: she saw her father drown in the Mississippi. He slipped off a sandy islet while saving his son, and an undertow pulled him in, and to Madelon’s horror, he didn’t resurface. When I visited her she was listening to Mahler, some of the most tragic-sounding passages. You sure know how to spread cheer, don’t you, I asked her. She laughed. I like grief, I find it beautiful. OK, that is slightly twisted, but then, I agreed with her. Those jolts in minor keys, they do something electrifying for my brain, too. Of course, it would be too much to claim that the others who haven’t lost their fathers early don’t know such pleasures of grief.

  At a certain level, when I get together with friends who have lost their fathers, I have the sensation of being in a group of kids who are playing without supervision. The supervisor, the builder of the super-ego, has vanished. Sure, he lingers on in a ghostly and sometimes intimidating way.

  It’s possible that in moments of fear, I clung to the superego, as though it could give me the security of being with a father the protector. To this my faith in God was easily grafted, and sure, in moments of danger, I prayed to God, but in moments of pleasure I shunned God. My father died in such a way that he only strengthened my fear and my faith. The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the Biblical saying goes, and seeing my father die filled me with dread and with a desire to transcend it.

  In 1968, February 6, midnight, both my brother and I finished our shrieks of horror upon seeing blood coming out of Father’s nose after his heart attack, and upon feeling no pulse in his hand and neck, yes, after our frantic prayer to God to save him, we paused, almost surprised that we were alive ourselves. And what now? I asked. My brother Ivo stared at me with incomprehension—that life would go on. For a few seconds we were both calm, strangely relieved. A horror could happen, and you could go on. Soon we relapsed into wailing and prayers, and when I tried to go to bed, I shivered. (Well, it was a winter night, and I am not sure we remembered the heat.)

  My relatives and family friends who came to pay homage to my father’s corpse, which was laid out on a table in the living room, looked at me with sympathy, petted me on the head. I hadn’t felt loved that much before. I slipped away from the party into the yard, and there, the thought that I was free startled me. Who could catch me now? I could run away, I could do something bad, and there would be no father to flog me (he believed in the biblical don’t spare the rod). There would be no father to judge me. Nobody else’s judgment had mattered that much. Who should judge me now? My mother? Sure, but she was milder, and she was consistently cynical, so that if she said something negative, it didn’t matter—I was used to it. She would whip me with her words, not with a rod, and words would leave no wounds but self-doubt.

  I came back into the house to mourn, but I had this dirty secret, that at some level beyond and beneath all the horrors, I was pleased. But that didn’t last. The fear—How will we live now? Will we be poor? Will we have enough to eat?—came to the fore. Who will run our father’s clog-making workshop? Even before then, we could afford to eat meat only once a week; the rest of the week we ate vegetable stews, dark wheat bread, and eggs.

  My brother and I were known to be good fighters among the kids in town. Almost every day we were involved in fistfights, wrestling matches, and so on, many for sport, as a test of strength and skill, and many out of conflicts of pride, or a sense of justice (if I saw a boy torturing a cat, I would attack him). Soon after the death of my father, I had a fight which I thought I should win, but suddenly I got scared that I would lose, and I was too slow, so I found myself under the boy, who was hitting my head against the cement of the handball stadium. I lost another fight soon afterward. This loss of self-confidence may not be universal with the loss of a father, but it does seem to be fairly common. My brother went through the same crisis. He quit fighting and began to play the guitar. He hid himself in the attic and played for hours; he wanted to become a classical guitarist but there was not enough support for that. He became excellent nevertheless, and was invited to play with one of the best rock groups in Yugoslavia, but he admitted that he didn’t show up for the first concert because of stage fright. Maybe he could have become a rock star, but his doubts drove him back to the attic. He dropped out of the fancy grammar school where he was enrolled and became a factory worker, and later, he became philosophical, and pursued his introverted activities to such an extent that he just got a Ph.D. in Theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary. He is almost certain that his life path would have been different if our father had lived past our adolescence. Well, our older brother, who was twenty-seven at the time of our father’s death, had become a doctor, a far more practical man than the two remaining brothers.

  Of course, my theory is subjective, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a sociological study proved my common sense wrong. Before my father’s death, I didn’t have a practical bent anyway. I wasn’t one of those guys who at the age of seven knows exactly what he wants to do with his life and proceeds to do it, like Tesla, who had a clear image of putting a turbine generator into Niagara Falls, and did just that thirty years later.

  When I visit friends who have fathers, I’m usually surprised. Sometimes I wonder why one would want to hang out with an old guy. Hardly any of my friends’ fathers have struck me as anchors of stability and wisdom. Maybe I don’t make friends with people who have strong fathers, but more likely there are very few strong fathers. It’s hard to be a good father. I know it, because I’m a father. Actually, now my son is as old as I was when my father died. Sometimes, jokingly, I tell him to be nice to me because you never know—fathers just don’t last.