Pazi Pas: on Dogs

We were rather saddened to hear that the dog belonging to our neighbors on Krk had died. It actually went along with the death of the old goatherd, who had been looking after the old, blind, wheezing dog. Not to worry, opined one of the other villagers, the dog was really old, “maybe six or seven”. In a way, that about sums it up for dogs in the Balkans, and I guess much of southern Europe: a dog does very well if it makes it to six. This shocks the likes of me: my first dog lived to 13 (hobbling, deaf, blind, epileptic, no bladder control, constant visits to the vet in the last years) and my sisters two dogs just died a few months ago aged about 14 (blind, deaf, wheezing and living only for their daily carrot), my other sister has a dog that thrives aged about 9 and going strong(ish).

So we have a dog, as readers will know. And I must admit that now that we have a baby, she is less of a princess than she was, but she still: lives in the house, very often sleeps on our bed, eats only dog food, regularly goes to the doctor, has a passport, travels with us most everywhere, and is generally part of the family. To pacify both G. and her family, we bought a dog house for outside, and I went along at least vaguely with intentions to have her live outside, but I just couldn’t do it: making a seen week old puppy live outside in February just didn't gel. I don’t think I’m so unusual in that I love my dog like a family member, and indeed most Germans, British, Americans, Canadians, Swiss, etc. would heartily agree. Perhaps on farms, people would be a bit less coochie-coo about the animals, but on the whole, people where I come from and where I live behave similarly. Germany, on the whole, is extreme: dogs can more or less go everywhere – we’ve found only one or two restaurants in Germany that don’t allow them – and I’ve heard it said that people are often more welcoming of dogs than children, which is an exaggeration, but not a very gross one.

This is, however, clearly not the case in Serbia, or elsewhere in southern Europe, for that matter. I had, for a time, a relationship with a Spanish woman, and she mentioned one day in passing that she had “dogs” at home. “Oh”, I said, “what are their names?” She gave me a strange look, and said that they didn’t really have names, or that we called them this or that, but it didn’t matter, they were just dogs. Same kind of thing in Serbia: vague memories of dogs one had as a child, inconsistent names, not trained, and “umm…. I can’t remember what happened to him; he ran away, I think”. Of course people love their dogs, but somehow the relationships are most distant: they seem to be only rarely allowed in the house, and even people with flats often condemn (cruelly I think) dogs to live on some tiny balcony.

G’s mother is convinced that our dog caries terrible
germs, and when visiting tells us 2-3 times daily that the dog hair (abundant in the house when she sheds) will be terrible for the baby. I must admit she has a point: their dog regularly walks unattended around the neighborhood and smells like a tramp’s underpants, because she has almost never had a bath, and regularly eats garbage only after she has rolled in it. I wouldn’t let that feral animal anywhere near our baby. In contrast, I believe our dog, who is virtually never unsupervised, to be a lot cleaner than many people I know.


Croatia, though similar in attitude, seems however to be on the turn, at least on the coast. There seem to be a lot more dog-friendly people, and the general trend that they are banned from public places seems to be over-turning. As recently as last spring, one could see harsh warnings that all dogs must be on a leash and muzzled at all times in public, but I haven’t seen so many this summer. Not surprising, I guess, as a large fraction of the tourists are (of course) Germans, and think that if little Maxi-schen can’t come with us, we won’t spend anything.

Perhaps, in any case, G's mother is on the turn too. During a recent visit to Germany we caught her sitting on our sofa with the dog at her feet ("they were cold"), and she spent three days babysitting our daughter alone on Krk and was seemingly very appreciative of Monitsa's amazing instinct to guard the baby and all associated with her.

Numb to the Ex-Yugo experience

My brother-in-law has a new girlfriend. Unlike his last, this one is not naša, or rather, not Serbian. This one is German, and thus, like myself, a foreigner. We met her the other weekend and she seems very nice, but I experienced an alarming sense of irritation at just how enthusiastic she was about Serbia and Serbian (textbook tucked eagerly under her arm). Obviously it’s new love, and with it comes a healthy helping of blind enthusiasm about the new partner and where he's from, so I readily forgive her for this. But I was alarmed by my reaction. For me Serbia – together with Serbian, Croatia, Croatian, the former Yugoslavia, the Balkans, burek, Šlivovica, bad homemade wine served in Knjaz Miloš bottles, Nationalism, typical Balkan men, dangerous driving, the smell of the air in Novi Sad, typical Balkan behavior – are now so ingrained in my life as to be like something between a rather pleasant recurring dream and an untreatable genetic disease.

I had all of that, everything. I had that feeling of first-love with a native from the former Yugoslavia too. I bought every language book there was, and I’m proud to say that I definitely function in this language, if a little clumsily. And not just language books either: a recent survey of my book collection revealed no fewer than twenty books about the history of the place (e.g. Black Lamb, Grey Falcon), or novels by ex-Yugo authors (e.g. Ivo Andrić). I certainly know the lands, or more specifically, I know a lot about Novi Sad, that part of Vojvodina, and Krk in Croatia and its surrounds, where we have a house, and bits about most everywhere else. I know that Serbs don't normally want to go to Split, and that Croats should probably avoid places like Novi Pazar. I know the people as well: warts and all.

But I’ve certainly lost my original sense of mystique about the people and the place: both impress about as often as they disappoint, or in other words, they are normal. I still have, obviously, an emotional attachment to the place, but somehow it is more like a sympathetic cousin than a new friend: the relationship (and by this of course I mean to the place, not to my dear G.) is a bit forced, but not unpleasant.

P.S. Apologies for the long silence. Our daughter M.T. was born in June and time has become a precious commodity. Blog about Balkan Baby Balderdash to come.

Krk diary 2009 Number 1: Y-tong and Krk village culture

Well, our house is almost there. As ever with construction, people are telling you that it will be “about two weeks” for about (say) three months, and costs escalate and what have you, but we saw it yesterday, and the view from what will be the terrace is fantastic – Cres and the blue Adriatic in the distance, just over or through our little Olive grove. It is heaven.

Well, sort of. At least the old Yugo (ca. 1978) is no longer sitting without tires in the property next door, there seem to be fewer wild dogs and children running around than before. Sadly, we heard that the funny old guy who used to walk shirtless and smoking with his flock of twenty goats met his maker a few months ago (we don’t know what became of the goats), which is disappointing for our dog, but she’ll survive.

And maybe I’m just getting used to it, but the gastarbeiter houses look a bit less thrown together. This is something one gets used to in this part of the world. Those who left home 20-30 years ago, worked usually in Germany or Austria, and then returned home, bearing a big Mercedes Benz, a wide-screen TV and enough money to build the dream house. The problem is they normally build it themselves, and often the gastarbeiter (i.e. Guest worker in German) mentality doesn’t go along with a good sense of the aesthetic. Big, modern box-like constructions are favored – I guess because they are easiest, and provide the most room for the whole family, plus a complement of paying guests to bolster the retirement income.

Anyway, in our tiny Krk village, there are fewer houses like this, and indeed many signs of a kind of Western European gentrification: more tastefully renovated old houses (including ours I would like to think), and fewer cinder block monstrosities; tidier rubbish bins, and even better roads. Though the village lacks running water (apparently in a year or two), but now has DSL internet. I’ve got mixed feelings about all of this, I suppose. On the one hand, I think that it will be nicer to live in the village as it is becoming, but on the other, I feel we’ve somehow contributed to the destruction of this little way of life: what was once a village of Krk old-timers and refugees is now a village of well-off former Croatian ex-pats, Austrians, Slovenians and ourselves. I think we and the others really are restoring some kind of traditional Kvarner look-and-feel to the place, but perhaps we lose something more than Y-tong and bad-brickwork in the process. Ah, progress.

Somebody who comes here is nobody

Groucho Marx famously said that he wouldn't care to belong to a club that accepted people like him as members. Something that happened recently in Croatia reminded me of this statement. I met a famous Croatian, who works outside of the country. He could, like many others, have decided to stay away, but he actually gave some of his valuable time to founding something in Croatia, with an aim to give something back to his country. Admirable sentiment, to be sure, and to be fair, he gets a lot of points in some sectors of Croatian society. However, there is, he admits, another side to it: namely that there are many at home who question his true worth, to the point of even denying that he really is well known elsewhere. The problem, it seems, is coming home. He said he moves from the 1st league abroad to the fourth league at home, and as he put it "I'm not very good any more at fighting in the fourth league".

I've experienced this before. Several times in Novi Sad, we had arranged for people to visit who were well known or at least highly experienced outside of Serbia, and the simple fact that they turn up leads to people thinking they are nobody. Some fourth rate academic at the University of (say) Minnesota is, on the other hand, somebody important. I mean he has a website, and has published something, and most importantly, didn't deign to visit this place. He is thus somehow preferable to anybody whom I've actually met.

This is an odd, recurrent theme in the the former Yugoslavia, and I wonder where it comes from. Is it a generally poor sense of national self-worth? That is, the sentiment would run: Why would anybody who was anybody ever come here? There must be something wrong with them. The rather dumb thing is that it has a rather negative effect on anybody who decides to do something useful. What is the point of doing any good if you'll be considered a sap if you do it? Is it better to stay abroad and not bother?

I guess by the same logic, bands like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, who visited Serbia a few years ago, must be second class? Nah. Maybe I'm just an over-sensitive nobody with a chip on his shoulder.

Pretending not to be what you are

I like to ask people about where they come from, particularly when I see or hear a name with an origin that doesn't tally with who they apparently are. As one might imagine, these days I tend to look for the "ić" endings in their various disguises - I even asked my mother recently about the obviously English name Aldrich that is in our family history (I still wonder, frankly). I have a nominally German colleague who's surname has the German ending itsch and he admits, with just a bit of reluctance, that at least part of his family history is from somewhere down in the Balkans (in fact, he shares a name with a famous, heroic Croatian politician who is now on the 200 kuna note).

A few years ago, I met a rather strange Austrian fellow once who's surname was pretty clearly simply the name of an animal in a Slavic language. When I asked him where he was from, he said that he was from the south of Austria, some old family. When I said that it sounded curiously like the animal name in Serbian, a Slovenian, also in attendance, broke in and said that it was in fact exactly the word in Slovenian. Ah, I said, so some of your ancestors must have come from Slovenia, zar ne? No, he said, it was south Austrian. Eventually, I think he conceded that his name was probably Slavic, but there was also this reluctance to do so.

There are other examples that are more poignant somehow, in that they involve people denying their true origin rather than their ancestry. I heard of people in the UK who would say that they were (say) Irish but were actually be Czech, and of course anybody who's lived in both North America and the UK can probably spout off dozens of examples of people feigning Britishness despite being born in (say) Oklahoma. And the fake accents can make your ears bleed, even if people from (say) Oklahoma would probably never notice. Once I met an American living in Paris who, upon hearing that I lived in the UK for a long time, said: "I'm glad you don't have that stupid accent that so many people try to make up".

Not all people deny their ancestry. Certainly in the once highly multi-national Austria, I've met a lot of people who embrace it. But it is just frequent enough to warrant mention. The simple fact of the matter is that some people just seem to be ashamed of who they are, and think that somehow they will do better in this world if they hide it. This seems a stark contrast to the attitudes of people at home, who are almost invariably proud to be who they are. As ever, I don't have a sensible ending to this, but just a thought: take some more of this pride abroad, and remember you don't normally get many points for being a pretender.

Your mother's south slavic tongue

There is a short but fascinating book called Your Mother's Tongue, by Stephen Burgen. I don't remember everything about it - I borrowed a copy and read it about eight years ago - but it was very interesting. This was mostly because he charted the trends in swears, and how the tendency to swear and the nature of them varies geographically around Europe. Norwegians, I recall, are wimpy at it - I think the worst that can be done is to call somebody a Devil; latin people from the south are much more prone to the worst, or at least most insulting & sexual forms of swearing. The British were a strange exception, being north Europeans who swore more than the others of a similar latitude, and English and Spanish speakers in the Americas hardly swear at all compared to their European counterparts. And so on.

In Germany, where I live, the swears are essentially only scatological and any attempt to insult or affectionately cajole somebody about the sexual habits of his mother will either not be understood, or just laughed at (Waaait a minute, you think my mother is a what? What does this have to do with what we are talking about?). I understand this perspective when I think about the Spanish insult cabron (cuckold) which is very complicated , particularly when applied out of context (let's see, I just accidentally spilled your beer, and now you are saying that, though you don't know her, or indeed if she exists at all, that my significant other is having relations with some other man also unknown to you). And of course in English, it is all about the F-word, unless you come from some minority that has imported the concept of insulting another's mother from elsewhere (i.e. MoFo among African Americans).

I should say that I swear - and I swear too much. It's a bad habit, I know, but as with everybody, I try to avoid doing it in polite company. I firmly believe that a well-placed swear is about the most effective literary tool there is. For a great, great example, see the Martin Amis Autobiography Experience where he talks about his father's - Kingsley Amis - best ever instance of the F-word as said by an angry dog. But through my own overuse I think I ruin my chances of any kind of suitable emphasis.

But it's fair to say that my foul-mouthed behavior comes nowhere close to that of the men I know from the former Yugoslavia. Get a couple of men from Serbia going and - whether they are closest friends or casual business colleagues - and the invective invects. And man oh man, are they dirty.

As anybody who isn't a monoglot knows: swearing in another language is a tricky business. Frankly, you should almost never do it unless you are fully, Joseph Conrad-like, fluent. You'll always offend, and never get the use of it right. But undeterred, or just seeking some additional insights into the place/language that I had found myself increasingly associated with, I asked a few years ago how one swore (psovati incidentally) in Serbian or Croatian. G. was no good, wouldn't tell me anything: don't swear, you savage, it's primitive. But every now and then, when something fell on her toe, or she dropped something, very very occasionally an utterance would come: P--- M---! What was that, I would ask, never to be told. Nothing, nothing.

Eventually, I worked out that this was absolutely the darkest of all swears that exist. When I realised, what it was (my mother's WHAT?), I started spotting it all over the place. Two people speaking in a cafe dropping it into an otherwise ordinary conversation. Elsewhere, there is the more standard fornicator type of invective, that I think is more common in Croatia (at least the Croatians I know use it more often). Related to this verb, some of early attempts to conjugate the similar sounding verb to eat (jesti or ja jedem) led, after some forgivable mix-ups with ds and bs to some interesting looks (We f--- dinner now?). Indeed, people sometimes warn you about this mix-up if they have ever previously dealt with anybody learning this martian language.

If I had to draw a parallel it would be to the way that I remember the English speech of working class Quebecois, that I would sometimes encounter during my student days in Ontario. The F-word came typically once or twice a sentence. And I think it is similar in the sense that nobody means anything by it. Obviously no insult is intended: it has just become a useful adjective/adverb/interjection. It might as well be OK or like or more suitably Ovaj or Važi.

I don't have a sensible ending to this, but one word of warning: to the prudish West, swearing is often frowned upon, even by hipocrits who swear constantly, and given the (often unjustified) reputation of people from the former Yugoslavia, perhaps it is wise either to cut down on it, or at the very least, never translate what you are saying about your friend's mother's anatomy to some curious outsider.

And of course, I know, I can go f--- myself. Oh, and f--- you too.

But your parents must come from Srem, zar ne?

When I first flew to Belgrade in 2002 it was quite an experience. I had the feeling that there were no other foreigners on the plane - judged by the appearance of the people, and the fact that I heard no English or German spoken. It was quite a surprise, then, to see the queue for "foreign nationals" at passport control in Belgrade nearly as full as that for the locals. The official rather mercilessly (like all officials, in all countries) asked me in rapid-fire Serbian what I was doing there, and when I said I didn't speak any Serbian (I hadn't even bought my first language book yet), she rolled her eyes and had to get somebody else who spoke English to ask me the normal immigration questions about whether I was a terrorist, a smuggler, infectious or whatever. [As an aside, today things are very different, and one even regularly hears English on the streets of Novi Sad in February].

I asked G. about this afterwards, and she told me that most of the "foreigners" where just people who had dual nationalities who had probably temporarily without a Serbian passport, or children of far-flung diaspora from Canada, the US, Australia, Germany, etc. Now that I sort of speak the language, I'm often reminded of the diaspora when I simply say something. Unless they presume I'm Hungarian or Romanian (in Novi Sad this is pretty common), people normally ask where I'm from and when I say "Canada", they then almost always say, "ali roditelji?" ("but your parents?"), whereupon I'm supposed to say that they are from Zrenjenin or Niš or Bjelovar or something. When I deny any true genetic links, people are always rather sweetly surprised. In fact, I once had a waiter in Novi Sad disbelieve me, perhaps thinking I was pretending to be something I was not.

For me, its deeply encouraging. For all of us who are sometimes frustrated with learning these moon-man, mega-complex Eastern European languages, it is good not to get the reaction that one gets (say) in Paris when speaking bad Canadian french to snobby French waiters who would rather speak appalling English than suffer your accent.

Having said that, people could be just a tad better at speaking to foreigners: as for all languages where few foreigners attempt them, people in Serbia or Croatia are a bit merciless when you show signs of speaking it - 1000km/h with all the complexities put in. Polako, polako. Gs mother is extremely good to me, speaking slowly and even having the patience to tell her mother to show a bit more understanding. Gs grandmother has little patience for me, thinking that people who don't speak properly are some kind of alien species, but on the telephone she now speaks to me like a tape-player and quarter speed: "Oooonnaaaa jeeeeeee uuuuuuuuu graduuuuuuuuuu. Daaaaaa liiiii razuuuuumiš?" (Shheeeeeeee's innnnnn theeeeeee towwwwwnnn. Doooooo yoooooouuuuu unnnnnderrrrrrstaaaaaand?"). Then she says, as ever, "Robert, trebaš da uceš" (you need to study) and continues at 1000km/h about some further details of which I understand about 50%, but growing steadily.