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PARTISAN REVIEW
goods. This is Europe!" I have to admit that I like to hear this, in spite of
the fact that my very first reaction to such excitement is a kind of uneasi–
ness, perhaps even anger. What image did this person have of Zagreb and
Croatia anyway? Then I remember all the pictures he must have seen
before he came here, and I understand his delight completely. I become
delighted mysel£ This city doesn't look at
all
like the city of a country on
the edge of a war zone. When I tell my friends in the United States that
the front lines are some thirty miles from Zagreb, at first they don't be–
lieve it. Then they start to panic. Then they suggest that I come over and
stay with them until the war ends. (Ends? At that moment, I realize that
my friends' concept of war is a kind of quick Desert Storm, something
that here in Croatia is obviously out of the question.) When I finally
refuse my friends' generous offers of hospitality, they think I'm either
crazy or heroic. Well, I am neither, and that is precisely what is difficult
to explain to anyone who doesn't live here.
Zagreb is a typical Central European city, with nineteenth-century
buildings painted yellow, white, blue, even pink, like huge decorated
cakes.
It
has a main square paved with marble, a charming old town on a
hill, street cars, and many pleasant sidewalk cafes. One can see soldiers,
perhaps more than usual, but one can see no damage, no poverty, no
refugees at first sight, only youngsters strolling around. Yes, but ... but
everything here is different than it looks. More precisely, life here is not
only what is visible. This is why, for me, Zagreb is a kind of metaphor for
schizophrenic living. What one can see, what I can see when I go to the
open market on Saturdays and then have coffee with friends in a Ban
Jelacic Square cafe, are only masks. And the longer I look at the city and
its residents, the more I detect that they are pretending to live with all
their might in normality; that they are now on the verge of hysteria, as
if
they are afraid the masks they're wearing will fall down at any moment,
exposing their reality, their poverty,
all
their fears. Cracks are already
vis–
ible to the careful observer. "People are not buying new shoes. They
wear old ones. Last year I looked at their faces. This year I look at their
dresses, at what they buy," says a photographer who has been document–
ing Zagreb city life for the past two years. It's no wonder: one pair of
shoes costs about eighty dollars, an average monthly wage. But neither are
people buying meat. They buy potatoes and pasta, maybe vegetables, and
no fruit. (One good thing about Zagreb is that everything is available to
buy.) This is only one of the many faces of war in this city - the giving
up on everything little by little, until one can afford only the bare neces–
sities.
Only a year and a half ago (it seems so long ago!), hardly anyone
would use the word "war." Until it comes to your own door, war is an
