INTELLECTUALS AS LEADERS
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good Croats distinguished from bad ones, and so on. That minority of
undeclared people who facetiously filled in the census form with
"Toshiba" or "Mercedes" was greatly mistaken. There was nothing
lighthearted about the red-hot national branding irons at work.
Not even the dead succeeded in escaping. Danilo Kis, the last Yu–
goslav writer, who upheld his Central European and Yugoslavian iden–
tity, who fled
to
Paris from the manipulators, did not escape. He was
buried with full orthodox pomp, and his name is now waved like a na–
tional banner by those who had chased him out. The passionate
necrophiliacs have torn to pieces the only Yugoslav Nobel laureate, the
writer Ivo Andric. They beat upon their tribal drums with his bones until
someone decided that Andric 's monument in Visegrad should be torn
down. In response, someone in Gospic tore down overnight the monu–
ment to Nikola Tesla, the Serbian inventor from Croatia. Monuments in
Zagreb went up in the course of a few days to the Croatian writers
Marija Juric-Zagorka and Tin Ujevic. As for Ivo Andric's bones, the
Serbian tribe has dragged them over to its side.
Even the very well-known can't escape involvement. The Serbian
writer Milorad Pavic, who had traveled the world explaining to the Jews
that his Khazars were really Jews, dropped in on the Croatians to hint
that the Khazars might have been Croatians, claimed to the Basques that
the Khazars were none other than Basques. Today, after joyfully sliding
into the Serbian warrior camp, Pavic explains to the world that the
Khazars are simply Serbs, and along the way he gives a free advertisement
to the Great Manipulator, the Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. As
is only right , the lesser writer serves the greater.
Foreigners don 't get away, either. Milan Kundera made a remark in
some newspaper and is now inscribed forever in Slovenian hearts as a
Slovene. The half-Slovene Peter Handke was quoted and since then has
been expunged forever from Slovenian hearts, perhaps also from Slove–
nian publishers' lists. George Konrad's words confused everyone. He will
never be forgiven his refusal to take sides. Those who have temporarily
fled the country, like myself, aren't free either. When I ran into a British
colleague recently , he asked me what I was. I replied that I was a writer.
He said, "What are you technically?"
I answered, ''I'm a writer. That's my type and nationality."
He asserted, "Well, it's clear that you are technically a Balkan."
"Yes, I'm a Balkan," I sighed with resignation.
He had slapped a label on me that felt for a moment like a healing
balm. But only for a moment. Because my British colleague could not
have know about the joke circulating all through Yugoslavia. About
buying a ticket on the Balkan Express. A one-way ticket. Because they
don't sell round-trip tickets. There is no return on that train.
