asking to be kissed.
◆ ◆ ◆
About a year later, in the afternoon, in their small suburban house in Chicago, Goran found a box in his mother’s closet with a collection of her possessions from their previous life. Among them was a VHS tape called Lepota Poroka—Beauty of Sin. He recognized the lead actress: Mira Furlan. He remembered his mother speaking of her with admiration. The actress and her husband had left Yugoslavia a year before Goran’s family did. Goran recalled his father’s words.
Traitors. Too soft to stay and fight for their side. Intellectuals who make noise about what is right and wrong and then leave.
The film, made a few years before the war, tells the story of a couple from rural Montenegro, a place where a woman’s infidelity was once punishable by death. A peasant woman—played by Mira Furlan—gets a job as a maid in a nudist holiday resort on the Montenegrin coast.
The images of rural Montenegrin men mistreating women contrasted sharply with the modern, liberal Yugoslavia Goran remembered from his childhood. The scenes of a Western European couple who sexually liberate the beautiful Montenegrin peasant woman were erotic in a casual way that Goran seldomly saw in American films. Early in the film Mira Furlan’s character only makes love with her peasant husband while both are fully clothed and her husband covers her head with a black cloth. After her sexual liberation, Mira Furlan’s character refuses to have sex with her husband unless she can see and touch his body.
As he watched it, something else about the film caught Goran’s attention, a phrase used by the manager of the resort to get her workers to do their jobs. A classic Balkan insult: “You’re a goat.”
Goran remembered the phrase from his early education in Yugoslav swearing. Such insults were nothing. They were expressions to toss out and laugh about, verbal acrobatics with which to spar. He noticed the difference in the US, which had a much smaller offensive vocabulary. And he learned that in the US such words were much more likely to provoke a fight.
Occasionally, he and his brother Srdjan would trade insults in Serbian, many of which used the phrase your mother’s cunt. They both understood, as a puppy or a kitten learns the difference between a play bite and a real one, that these were not meant to be taken literally. Until the day that Srdjan brought up Nikoleta.
“Get over her, you goat, there is plenty of pička out there.”
Goran hated the way this sounded coming from his thirteen-year-old brother.
“How can you still think about that girl? You were a stupid fourteen-year-old who had barely left your pička materina. The smell was probably still on you.”
His brother laughed. Goran cursed back at him in their native Serbian.
Fuck you, stupid!
And: Go to the mountain and fuck goats!
And: Sereš na sve strane! You shit in every direction!
Srdjan laughed again, not taking Goran seriously. Then Goran said, in English: “Fuck off. Just fuck off.”
They both knew that when Goran switched to English, he was no longer playing.
The movie also made Goran think of Nikoleta. He imagined that she would grow up to be a woman like Mira Furlan, projecting the unguarded optimism that Goran thought he saw in Mira, a look that said she was open to whatever the world brought. Mira and Nikoleta also had similar reddish hair, green eyes, and movie-worthy cheekbones.
Goran thought about that evening in the red Yugo in the transit camp. He and Nikoleta had kissed for what felt like a long time. He remembered that when they started kissing it was dusk and when he looked up again it was night. In the dim light, Nikoleta unbuttoned her sweater and unhooked her bra and Goran touched her breasts. She undid her jeans and he slid his hand down her underwear. When they heard someone pass nearby, Goran quickly pulled his hands away. As he looked up at her in the faint light, he saw that Nikoleta’s eyes were wide open.
Samo za tebe, she said. Only for you.
Goran recalled that Nikoleta’s skin had felt so soft that it almost startled him, as if his fingers, calloused from his obsessive guitar-playing, might scratch her.
He also remembered the last days at home in Sarajevo before they had arrived at the transit camp. There had been shouting between his mother and father, more than usual. Objects were thrown. His parents had had one last argument. They made no effort to hide it from Goran and his brother.
You would have us stay and fight? You would risk that?
It’s the right side. It’s our country too. We can’t let them do this.
After all this country has been through, you believe there is a right side?
Go, if that’s what you want. I won’t stop you.
Will you join us?
I don’t know. I have my duty. What if we all left? Who would stay and fight for our side? Would you have us hand our country over to them?
Will you join us?
I don’t know, I told you. Do you know how long this war will last? Can you see into the future?
Will you join us?
I don’t know.
I need to know.
Will you wait for me if I stay here?
Why won’t you promise that you’ll join us?
Will you wait for me?
Will you?
I asked you.
…
No.
…
No.
You were just waiting for an excuse.
You were just waiting to give me one.
You fucking goat.
Looking back, Goran realized he couldn’t actually remember who called the other a fucking goat or which one accused the other of using the war as an excuse.
In his new bed in his new house in his new country, Goran often fell asleep thinking of the softness of Nikoleta’s lips on his cheek, and of her tongue lightly touching his ear as she said, when they finally had to leave the red Yugo: I won’t forget you. I promise. Find me.
Goran had been raised with enough cynicism to find this trite, and with enough realism to know better. He was moved, but skeptical of the romantic certainty in her voice. He had put his earphones on her and sung one last time.
Love is blindness
I don’t want to see
Won’t you wrap the night
Around me?
Oh my love
Blindness …
Goran
