Godzilla in Kosovo

Not long ago one of my best friends died. He was a mar­vel­lous poet, highly regarded in Serbia, although he pub­lished only three vol­umes of poetry in the 1970s. After that, he devoted him­self to edit­ing a mag­a­zine for world lit­er­a­ture in trans­la­tion. He was fifty-nine when he died, and I’d known him for more than fifty years.

I’m think­ing of him again now, in Calgary, because of another feel­ing of loss that has crept up on me unex­pect­edly. It began when I heard the news about Kosovo’s procla­ma­tion of inde­pen­dence. I was sur­prised to feel any­thing like that. I have always thought that although it is my birth­place, Kosovo means noth­ing to me. 

I was born in a town called Peć, on the Bistrica River in Serbia (now Kosovo). My father, who was a gyne­col­o­gist, was sent down there after the war because, accord­ing to fam­ily leg­end, he refused to become a mem­ber of the Communist Party when he got back to Belgrade after four years in a German pow camp. Whatever the rea­son, I spent only a few months in Peć, and in the fall of 1948 we moved up north to a small, provin­cial Serbian town. 

After that, I vis­ited Peć only once. I can­not remem­ber when it was — at the begin­ning of the 1960s, I guess — but I do remem­ber going to see a movie there. It was the first time I saw Godzilla, the sea mon­ster, and she has been with me ever since. Godzilla is usu­ally con­sid­ered to be male, but in Serbia, where all female names end with the let­ter a, it was nat­ural for me to think of that enor­mous lizard as a female char­ac­ter. I even wrote a story about Godzilla’s love affair with my father. He died many years ago; Godzilla has also died in a num­ber of movies but she keeps com­ing back. My father doesn’t. He died once and that was it; he never came back.

In my mind Godzilla still lives in Peć. The name of that town means “stove” or “fur­nace” in Serbian, and when I was a kid, other kids laughed at me, ask­ing me how it felt to be born in a fur­nace. Actually, after the Holocaust and cre­ma­to­ria, it must have seemed strange for a Jewish fam­ily to live in a town named Peć. Godzilla, on the other hand, could not care less. For a long time she fre­quented my dreams, walk­ing down the streets of my birth­place, burn­ing bridges and houses, swal­low­ing peo­ple alive and hav­ing lots of fun. In one dream I saw her frol­ick­ing naked in the river, and when she saw me on the bank, she hid her pri­vate parts, gig­gling until she was ready to spit a fire­ball at me. When I saw it com­ing, almost touch­ing my face, I woke up screaming.

I don’t dream about Godzilla any more, but when the dec­la­ra­tion of Kosovo’s inde­pen­dence took place, I was wor­ried that it might bring Godzilla back into my dreams. It didn’t, but I woke up that night any­way. The house was quiet and even our cat was asleep. I lay in the dark­ness lis­ten­ing to the dis­tant sounds of the out­side world. And that’s when I thought of my friend the poet and remem­bered two lines about Kosovo from his long poem “Horoscope”: “When cel­e­bra­tion of the first and only Serbian defeat is over / a bet­ter [Balkan] brother will be born.” 

I knew what he meant to say: as long as the his­tor­i­cal Serbian defeat is glo­ri­fied, there will be no peace in the Balkans. No won­der nation­al­ists crit­i­cized his poem when it was pub­lished in Belgrade in the 1970s. And today he would prob­a­bly be seen as a trai­tor to his own nation, some­body to be stoned to death. Not even Godzilla could save him.

The fol­low­ing morn­ing I drove to Kensington. There, next to the Higher Grounds cof­fee shop, is a place I go when I need com­fort, one of those very per­sonal places in the city that we all have. One has to look at it from a spe­cial angle — or, I guess, in a spe­cial frame of mind — to see what I see there. It is a pas­sage lead­ing down sev­eral steps to a small plaza-like open­ing, where there’s usu­ally a table and a cou­ple of chairs. To me, from that spe­cial angle, it looks very Mediterranean. I look at it and it takes me far from here, all the way to the Adriatic coast. I needed that, I had to have a break from the Godzillian world of Kosovo; I had to ­become the sea for a while.

But this time some­thing went wrong in the small plaza. I didn’t find myself in any city on the coast. Instead, I saw myself in Cambridge, England. It was the sum­mer of 1989, and I was there for a sem­i­nar orga­nized by the British Council. The list of speak­ers was impres­sive and included George Steiner and the Nobel Prize win­ner William Golding. After Steiner’s lec­ture, a group of us walked with him along quiet Cambridge streets. Several peo­ple were from dif­fer­ent parts of Yugoslavia. When Steiner real­ized that, he said that Yugoslavia would fall apart in sev­eral years. He pre­dicted that there would be some local fight­ing — but, he said, if there’s a con­flict involv­ing Kosovo, it might be the begin­ning of a new war on a large scale.

We all fell silent. Nobody likes to think about wars. I walked more slowly and decided to drop away from the group. I could hear Steiner speak­ing but I did not want to lis­ten to him. I thought: What does he know? War in Yugoslavia, war in Kosovo — he doesn’t know what he’s say­ing. It will never happen.

But the first part of his grim pre­dic­tion was right. Yugoslavia did break up in a bloody local war and the beau­ti­ful Adriatic towns are in another coun­try now. And with Kosovo’s inde­pen­dence, my birth­place is in another coun­try. Suddenly I felt as if I had nowhere to go except to this small magic place in Kensington, Calgary. So I went down the steps and sat on a chair. There was only one thing I could do: wait and see whether Godzilla would wake up in Kosovo. There is always hope that this time George Steiner did not get it right.