Belgrade, 2001-2007

I am about to leave for Belgrade. In a few hours I will have my head against my sit on the bus, trying to catch some sleep and asking myself about the destination; with me I will bring three books: La linea dei mirtilli, by Paolo Rumiz, Serbi Croati e Sloveni, by Jože Pirjevec, and the novel she gave me as a present last week, I forgot the title but the editor is Einaudi. I always have a hard time talking to her about her home land. I found two main reasons for that:

1) Her being over defensive against my criticism
2) Her being reluctant to share what she knows about the facts happened in the 90's in Former Yugoslavia

I now understand that I cannot expect an open confrontation with her, as if I dealt with an external observer. She was in the epicentre of the whole issue in those years, she did not overcome the fear of what she feel the external observers might think of that historical process, which involved her land, maybe not directly the territories under Serbia, as she often says, but still the geographical and political entity of which she was part, populated with people who speak her language, who dream in the same language. And I should show solitarity to her for this, rather than judging her for not being detached, distant enough to make her own evaluations, critiques and condemnations. I am an external observer. Once there, I will have to try not to ask myself where were all the protesters, all the students marching in the streets of Belgrade, at the time when the Bosnians would kill each other like flies, as we say in Italian. I still have to understand to what extent the regime propaganda prevented her from knowing what would happen outside the borders of Serbia, in those years. This is something I would like to investigate. She was young, only nineteen in 1995, when the war virtually ended. Thereafter, what I see as a process of removal, surely did not favour her better understanding, her objective analysis about who was responsible. When she is back we will watch together some documentaries about the fall of Yugoslavia, I am very happy that she wants to do it with me. For now, I will try to have a good time in that remote appendix of Europe, and will carefully observe that variety of faces (proposal for an essay: "Begrade: variety without diversity"). As Rumiz points out, there one can see a multitude of traits, the slavic, the baltic, the meditterrean, the turkish, the gypsy. Girls are very tall. Nikola promised a drunken night with great blues.
Ah, one might ask why there are two dates in the title of this post. The first refers to my first visit to the city. Was a Chemistry fresh-graduate with still some nasty back-taste from my time in Glasgow. Long back.