Every philosophy is like looking for a black cat in a dark room; Marxist philosophy is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, but the cat isn’t there; Soviet philosophy is like looking for a black cat in a dark room, the cat isn’t there, but you keep shouting ‘I’ve found it! I’ve found it!’
Matthew Lynn

Growing up under the socialistic regime back in Yugoslavia, I became somewhat of an expert on hypocritical issues and sublime two-faced strategies. I watched a rally coverage on YouTube the other day, the Serbian championship battle, where the commentator (her) spoke in such an artificial ‘media’ tone to make my stomach twist. Then the new champ stopped by, and he came across even more feigned. If the rally sport is infested, what’s left? The guy risked his life all season long, outdrove the competition, and in his unique moment of glory he appears on the national television and drops his lively personality to mockery.
Are Serbs one fake nation? They are not, but their cogito needs an urgent medical assistance. Those decades under Tito’s rule, otherwise quite acceptable, left a paranoid residue in people’s conscience, all kinds of phobias, and the national insecurity complex. I used to exchange emails with one of my best friends, a succesful TV journalist of Charlie Rose genre and Robert Redford looks, when his correspondence suddenly went missing for weeks – after claiming the exchange to be very helpful in his current state of mind. ‘I didn’t feel like writing’, he said afterwards. Fine with me. Next time it was months, now it’s already been a year. If it weren’t for the death of our mutual friend, even longer. There is no journalist in the world who doesn’t feel like sending an email to a friend for a freaking year. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, something marked the state with a scar.
Another close friend never answers to my emails, but keeps bombarding me with poker bonus invitations via Facebook, every time under slightly different name. He is an established peddler at the Belgrade’s flea market, a free spirit in both meanings of the word. The three of us used to be inseparable for many years, and grew away as wild variations of the same political system: a successful but incomplete and unsatisfied, a happy peddler, and the observant from miles apart. One climbed the ladders, one laughed at the climber, one burnt the ladders. None fought the system. Drei Kameraden, with Velja being Robert, Baum being Gottfried, and myself Otto.
After Tito died the system disintegrated with a bang, yet the mentality kept going full force, bursting at the seams of irrational exuberance. Numerous ‘psychics’ tried their cures and left feeling dizzy and nauseous, as ‘the liberators of the free world’ followed the suit. Political indoctrination goes long way: it paints your dream with doubt, whispers threats in your ear, questions the political purity of your thought. People get hit from both sides, where schizophrenia grabs the weak and intellectually honest, while paranoia chases the strong and stubborn. It took one Isaak Babel to laugh in Stalin’s face by having a long affair with the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, NKVD’s chief. Babel was executed, as well as Yezhov, while Yevgenia Yezhov committed suicide in a mental institution.
Yugoslavia had a watered down oppression, yet many ended up incarcerated. A distant uncle of mine, Whitey, did his time at Goli Otok, refused to talk about it, and carried his curse around like leprosy. Saban Bajramovic, a Gipsy folk legend, ran out of his army duty at age of 19 to be with his girlfriend, got three years at Goli Otok, showed them finger at the trial, and ended up with a five and a half. When I did a similar stunt years later, they just discharged me as a psycho (which was the plan anyway).*
Serbs got their will taken away for so long, first by the Turks for centuries than by Tito for decades, and the nation lost its ability to breathe. After holding their breath for such an extended period of time, Serb faces turned blue as the country went red. We know from Pavlov’s experiment with dogs that confrontation of red box and blue circle eventually ends up with a mixed signal, aka purple ellipse, i.e. neurosis. The grand ulcer of the nation produced an excuse to whine and fuss, but lament in first place.
When I watch Novak Djokovic winning Grand Slams after stating that he was, unfortunately, born at the wrong time, during the Federer and Nadal supremacy, and beating these two like there’s no tomorrow, I see a future for the nation bleeding from a thousand self-inflicted paper cuts. When I stare at one of Lubarda’s paintings, playful Horses, I feel the strength waiting to erupt.
A close friend of mine left Belgrade after his wife committed a suicide, to take care of his daughter and isolate himself from the world. I wrote to him once, and he answered by refusing any further correspondence. ‘I’d like to see you once more in my lifetime’, he said.
When my father died three years ago, I didn’t have money to go and attend his funeral, nor visit him while he was trying to recuperate from the stroke that shortly afterwards ended his fruitful life. It’s hard to imagine a lower blow to one’s self-esteem.
I do miss the streets of Belgrade, that decor of my past motions in space, the birthplace of my kids, but that’s about it. When Jessica and Miro, my daughter-in-law and my son, went to visit Belgrade this June, for the only time since we left in 1990 and the first time for her, I felt weird. As if the past were reaching for me, like a debt suddenly emerging from the depth of genes, a smiling and a sad Janus telling me stories of glory days and bloody defeats. I felt like a rolling stone that gathers no moss, as well as Sisyphus pushing the same stone back, up the hill of absurd.

* My Psychotic Military Adventure