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PARTISAN REVIEW
Place,
covered South-Eastern Europe) that "the truth" about Yugoslavia
is not only knowable, but blatantly obvious. Yet Hall insists he's never
been in a country where the truth was more intrinsically complex, more
fundamentally unknowable. "If you disagreed, you had a motive. Perhaps
you were someone's agent ... duped by the other side. You were, they
would shrug, 'a Western sheep among the Balkan wolves'." Hall's
telling quotes and eye for detail make one realize how much suffering
the people in this land endured even before the outbreak of war:
So many people in Yugoslavia had been tortured at one time or an–
other, and every one I had met, Serb, Croat, Muslim, Albanian, had
been seized with the same expression. The face set slowly, like a pud–
ding congealing, and a flush rose, and the eyes went through an ex–
traordinary transformation; they locked on to yours, and deepened,
and turned inward, trance-like, as tears welled up around the edges of
a brutal clamping-down of the will. It was a terribly intimate look, a
defenseless, childlike look.... Perhaps this was how you looked at
your torturer ... as he scanned your face to see how you would re–
spond to ... this.
Hall discovers outlandish xenophobic tales that have persisted for
nearly two thousand years, a national insecurity in the face of "all things
Western" linked to Europe-envy, and a derision for all things tarred by
association with "Balkan." Muslims, he notes, "were desperate to assure
Europe that they were as Western as the next Balkan nation; but any
attempt to stress their unique culture made them look Eastern. Like it or
not, their culture was Turkish." And Albanians within Yugoslavia's bor–
ders disgusted every other ethnic group:
Serbs despised the Croats, but they were haunted by the Albanians.
Croats were their twins who had gone bad, the unsettling image in
the mirror of what the Serbs might have become had not God, in his
grace, granted them their Serbness. The Albanians were bogeymen ...
Even people who managed to be rational about the Croats could not
speak of the Albanians without sounding as though their skin was
crawling.
Yugoslavia, Hall observes, "had always specialized in an absurd, half–
assed sort of harassment, which appeared to spring from a knee-jerk re–
pression response unbacked by the will to carry through. If Dubcek rep–
resented 'Communism with a human face,' Titoism was Communism in
