It was the day of the final competition and we had all had enough of Guca—the drinking, the brass bands, the crowds, the grilled pork. Everything that only a day ago we had touted as perfection now in the twilight of a three day binge appeared grotesque. Our spirit of mass revelry seemingly exhausted, we started to slip back into our natural more nebbish-y and misanthropic selves. Here, during the culmination of three days and over thirty bands vying for the Golden Trumpet prize (along with a year’s worth of wedding gigs throughout Serbia), Marissa, Noam, and Jesse lay in the grass reading. Aaron and I, having been driven to near blindness by rakija, contented ourselves with staring into the dark inside netting of our hats.
No one else in the stadium appeared to have spent themselves too soon. In fact, much to our dismay, everyone was drinking and dancing as though they had not been drinking and dancing to the same music for four days. The glee on their inebriated faces was authentic, as though they had not already heard the song “Ederlezy” fifty times that morning. Was our notable absence of energy raising suspicion? “Well”, said Noam, “at least we aren’t being harassed.”
At which point we were harassed. A red-faced Serb in a sajkaca and a 2 liter pivo in hand leaned over and yelled something accusingly at us. Alarmed, I turned to Marissa, Noam, and Jesse and, trying not to move my lips, told them to put their books away, certain that books, unless they were about trumpets, Serbian flags, or whistles, were not allowed in the stadium. The man’s eyes narrowed at our silence and he shouted at us again, spraying spittle on Marissa’s arm. This time his two companions, who looked infinitely more civil than him, turned toward us and one of them said in English, “He want to know where you come from.”
Now that we had an interpreter, our conversation took off. Well, sort of. Our interlocutor, whose name was Rasha Mikhailovic, was so drunk that he apparently spoke incoherently even in his native tongue; and our interpreter Victor, whose English was good, couldn’t translate half of what he said. When we told Rasha we were from America, he responded with initial excitement, since Americans are often still a novelty in Serbia. “Eh America!” And then an awkward pause. Followed by “Bill Clinton! You bomb us!”
It was strange hearing a European accusingly shout the name of a president other than George W. Bush. It was also difficult to decide how best to be an ambassador of a country that had recently bombed the nation whose hospitality we were enjoying. And indeed in Belgrade we had seen the still visible destruction of certain government buildings (as well as the Chinese embassy) from the 1999 NATO bombings during the Kosovo War. “Sorry about that,” we offered sheepishly.
Somehow, everyone laughed and Rasha went on inquiring further about our identities. He told me I looked German. “Schwabisch!” he yelled, poking his finger into my chest, using a colloquial term for German in Serbia, associated with the province of Schwabia in southwest Germany. “Nazi, nazi! Hitler!” he said pointing at me and laughing. Fortunately, Rasha was even more fascinated by Marissa’s physiognomy than mine. Her half-Thai features sparked a whole litany of Asian associations in his mind from Lucy Liu to Bruce Lee to Yao Ming. We concluded Serbians must not get a lot of exposure to Asian people if they thought a 5’4 half-Thai woman resembled Yao Ming. But he clearly like what he saw, as he kept trying to slip his wedding ring on to Marissa’s finger, much to my amusement, perhaps less so to his wife, sitting silently on the blanket beside him.
Rasha took a particular liking to Aaron and insisted on swapping watches with him. Aaron was happy to comply, considering he sported a cheap knock-off designer watch from the African street vendors in mid-town Manhattan. “Now we are brothers” Rasha said, passing round his warm 2-liter pivo to honor the occasion. Later that night, when Aaron took off Rasha’s watch, he noticed there was an inscription on the back. We later found out it read, “To Rasha. You are my brother. I will never forget you.”
But even more astounding was Rasha’s show of generosity toward Jesse. Throughout our drunken parley, he kept remarking on how handsome Jesse was and that he wanted him to take his daughter. We thought this was just a funny display of affection by a slightly unhinged drunk man until suddenly his daughter showed up, a cute blond girl in her twenties, along with her friend who looked like a runway model. Rasha informed his daughter that she was now betrothed to Jesse and insisted that they go dance the kolo together. She seemed unfazed, as though her father married her off to strangers wherever he went. She and her friend took Jesse and joined the circle dance.
While Rasha professed his eternal bond of brotherhood to Aaron and tried to convince him to become blood brothers, I spoke with Victor, Rasha’s brother-in-law. He was warm and intelligent, and seemed to regard Rasha with bemused resignation. “He is like this always. He likes to get drunk,” he said with a shrug of his shoulders. Victor asked what I did in America. I told him I studied European history. He said he loved history, that he would have liked to study it, but went into computer business instead. I told him I thought Serbian history was fascinating and wanted to learn more. “Yes, but the history of Serbia is sad.” Victor told me I was lucky to live in America, that Serbia had bad leaders, no jobs, and was run entirely by private firms. I said that sounded a lot like America. “Tell me,” he said, lowering his and pausing to find the right words. “Were you afraid to come to Serbia?”
How could I explain to him my stupid paranoia about Vuk Brankovic and my nightmare fantasies of being swindled and kidnapped? But it wasn’t just me. Since the 1991-95 War, the nation of Serbia had been portrayed in the American media as precisely the arch-villain I had imagined. The stain of genocide and war crimes had marred Serbia’s international image seemingly irreparably, and as the aggressor state, they became more associated with the appalling violence that characterized the conduct of certain Croats, Bosnians, and Serbs alike, and victimized the majority of them alike. When I told people in the States I was going to Serbia, some of them looked at me like I was crazy. A few even recoiled in disgust, as though I had told them I was going to a Klan rally. One would think Americans, of all people in the twenty-first century, would be sensitive to the inadequacy and injustice of passing judgment on an entire nation and its people based on the conduct of its political leaders and military abroad.
Of course, that’s not to say Serbia does not have major problems with chauvinist nationalism, as the Karadzic and Mladic souvenirs attest, and that post-Tito Serbia, like most of the former Yugoslavia, still suffers from a culture of latency, from the wounds of the two World Wars that have not been given a chance to heal. But I was happy to be in Serbia. It was a safe and hospitable country and I felt reassured to find that there, as elsewhere, there reigns a heady mix of decency and idiocy, where the former must always strive to stem the ever rising tide of the latter. In short, I liked Victor and Serbia enough to lie to him.
The winning band, proud recipients of the Golden Trumpet, took the stage for a victory lap performance. We all got up and joined the giant circle in front of the stage for a final kolo. As we danced round and round, Rasha’s warm pivo sloshing in our bellies, our spirits returned. We spotted Jesse across the circle, surrounded by his new lady friends. Judging by his form fitting shorts, he was clearly enjoying himself. In these final moments of the festival, everyone had risen to the occasion.
That night back on the porch, we emptied our final decanter of rakija. The music had died out and a silence that had not been heard for four days now reigned. Holding our glasses aloft, we made a toast to Guca, the greatest music festival in the world, and vowed never to return.
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