The Politics of Exile

Elizabeth Dauphinee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415640855
• eBook ISBN: 9781135135195
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"The most thought-provoking and refreshing work on Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia in a long time.It is certainly an immense contribution to the broadening schools within international relations." Times Higher Education ( THE ).

Written in both autoethnographical and narrative form, The Politics of Exile offers unique insight into the complex encounter of researcher with research subject in the context of the Bosnian War and its aftermath. Exploring themes of personal and civilizational guilt, of displaced and fractured identity, of secrets and subterfuge, of love and alienation, of moral choice and the impossibility of ethics, this work challenges us to recognise pure narrative as an accepted form of writing in international relations.

The author brings theory to life and gives corporeal reality to a wide range of concepts in international relations, including an exploration of the ways in which young academics are initiated into a culture where the volume of research production is more valuable than its content, and where success is marked not by intellectual innovation, but by conformity to theoretical expectations in research and teaching.

This engaging work will be essential reading for all students and scholars of international relations and global politics.

VIII

Milan walked along the waterfront of a new, safer country with his hands thrust deeply in the pockets of his spring jacket. The newly risen sun dispersed the thin silver clouds like smoke as it climbed up the side of the sky. There was a chill in the air that lingered over from the night. It would not be long now before no trace remained. These were the moments that Milan recognized most easily; the quiet moments just at the border of where one thing ended and another began—the three-second space between songs on an album, but also less definitive borders: the constantly negotiated place where water met earth, where day met night, where lies met truths, where lives intersected. These spaces changed all the time—altered with seasons or tides or with the waxing and waning capacity to choose between things. This made him uneasy, but he recognized these moments just the same. They were not comfortable spaces, but he was familiar with them.

Milan liked to walk alone along the water in the mornings before going to his job as a clerk with the city's health department. He would quietly rise from the bed while his wife still slept, breathing softly, warm and sweet-scented, a lock of dark hair curled over her left ear. He watched her each morning like this, briefly, furtively. He did not linger. He always felt there was something betraying about watching her sleep. Maybe it was her defenselessness—the vulnerability of sleep. Or maybe it was the gentle slope of her shoulder against the bed sheet; or the shallow hollow at the base of her throat. Milan would watch her, balanced precariously at the border between sleep and wakefulness—the border where dreams are still believed to be reality and reality dreams. She would sometimes roll over suddenly, stretching her arms above her head, and Milan would retreat.

Every morning, Milan quietly kissed his sleeping wife's shoulder and slowly backed out of the bed. He dressed quietly, so as not to wake her. He crossed the boundary between the warm interior of the overheated apartment building and the crisp chill of early morning on the waterfront. On most days, he experienced an almost complete cerebral emptiness—a sort of comatose bliss. And this is why he walked. He was in search of emptiness. But sometimes, on other days, memories and fears seeped through his skin and filled him like rain. It was impossible to determine beforehand which sorts of days would be which. There was no pattern. There was no way to guess. It only became apparent once he had arrived at the waterfront, and by then it was too late to turn back. All along the water's edge he walked as the sun rose higher in the sky, glaring with staggering brightness, a solitary figure at a solitary time of day.

Milan was demobilized in the spring after Luka was killed. He continued to visit Jelena, and she encouraged him to study, saying she thought it might be a form of insurance against being mobilized again. She had heard that there would be a need for physicians as the war dragged on, and that studying for medicine would likely protect him from being mobilized a second time. He made it through the entrance exams, which were becoming more and more irregular. Everything seemed to have fallen apart or gone crazy. The best students were rejected, and the worst were accepted, and it all became a matter of who one knew or how much one could pay. Thus went the Yugoslav republics in the south, one after the other, until everything was in such a state that no one had any idea of what was going on. But classes went on despite the war. Students studied and teachers taught because they did not know what else to do, and Milan, who had passed the exams despite the stubborn presence of his heart in his mouth, finally got a space when the son of a local functionary was accidentally killed while he was in a bar showing off the antipersonnel mine he had found.

“Watch this,” he commanded his admiring friends, but whatever it was he was trying to show them did not work out as he had planned it, and the thing exploded in his hands. The son of the functionary was killed instantly and his place in the medical school was suddenly free. So Milan Milanović went to study in his place, and his heart continued to beat steadily in his mouth.

After Luka's death, Jelena slowly recovered a tentative, precarious stability, and Milan stayed in Sokolac with his mother so he could visit her in Pale. For a while, he bought gasoline for his little silver Volkswagen from a neighbor-turned-entrepreneur on the street corner. Then the pumps at the stations opened again, and it was a little easier. He piloted his car between Sokolac and Pale along narrow roads flanked by steep canyons that dropped down to the rock-strewn riverbed below. He made this journey first out of guilt, and later out of a combination of guilt and love. After a while, it grew so that he could not distinguish between the two feelings. But he knew that it was guilt that kept him returning to her in the beginning, because she didn't smile even once for six months after Luka's funeral, and that was not easy to swallow down and live with. He came to see her whenever he could, and she always let him in, and always made him coffee, but she never smiled and he could never really tell if she was happy to see him or not. He sometimes wondered whether she secretly hated him for thwarting her plans for death on the day of the funeral. She didn't seem to feel the need to talk to him. Sometimes she talked. Sometimes she didn't. Sometimes her dark eyes were raw and red, sometimes they were hard and distant, and other times they were wet and deep and vulnerable. It started out very uncomfortably, very awkwardly, because Milan was constantly haunted by the memory of what had happened to Luka, and of what he himself more and more felt that he had unforgivably allowed: the dark-eyed woman who had lost her lover; the house on the side of the hill which was now without its middle son. At first, Milan tried to make her laugh with silly jokes and questions. But she did not respond. She would stare into some distance that he could not see and ignore him. So he stopped.

After a while, he discovered that she seemed content to just let him hang around. She made coffee and they would sit together throughout the afternoons and sometimes into the evenings. Sometimes, Jelena would read during his visits, as though he was not there at all. He felt angry at this—it was a long journey from Sokolac to Pale in winter to be ignored. From time to time, on his way home at night, he told himself that he would not return to Pale. But a few days would go by, and his heart would beat more insistently in his mouth, and his guilt would magnify, and before very long, he would find himself in Jelena's kitchen, drinking coffee and wondering what he should say and what he shouldn't. Eventually, he discovered that neutral, intellectual conversations were safest. He mapped out his family tree for her, and asked her to do the same. He discovered that she had a natural gift for math-related problems. She could solve in her head equations that took him several minutes with paper and pencil to work out. And she was good at identifying birds.

One afternoon while Milan was visiting her, Luka's father came to the door of Jelena's house to give her a pile of photographs, which she carefully placed in a drawer without looking at them. She would look at them later, Milan knew, when she was alone with her memories of Luka. And he was right. Jelena would lock herself in the bathroom and rifle through the photos with the water running so that no one would hear her weeping. On this occasion, Luka's father was pleased to see Milan, and invited him for coffee that evening.

“You must come, and tell me about the time you and Luka spent together,” he pressed. Milan's blood went cold, trying to think of a way out of it, but he knew it would be impossible. So at sunset, Milan slowly climbed the side of the hill and, with his heart beating heavily in his mouth, he tapped feebly at the door. The old man opened it immediately, and the coffee was already waiting. Milan walked across the threshold.

The house had low ceilings, but high windows, and the long light of the fading sun flooded through the handmade lace curtains on the west-facing wall of the house, illuminating everything with intricate, warm patterns. Old Sokolović invited Milan to sit down at the table, which had a fresh cloth draped over it. His pale eyes had gone dark, but they were still friendly and welcoming. Milan sat as unobtrusively as possible, and the pit of his stomach was now throbbing in time with his heart. Sokolović brought the coffee to the table with old, unsteady hands, and the cups rattled against the saucers, and the saucers rattled against the tray.

“Milan, son,” old Sokolović began.

“Yes,” Milan responded automatically.

“I have been without my Luka now for six months,” Sokolović said slowly.

“I know, father,” answered Milan quietly.

“And Stojan does not return, either.”

“Where is he?” Milan asked through numb lips. His voice sounded strange to him, as though it belonged to someone else. He wondered for a moment whether maybe his relocated heart was resting against his throat, and changing the pitch of his voice.

The old man rubbed his hand over his cheek as though he didn't know, or couldn't remember where his youngest son was. Then he said, “Višegrad.”

“And Vladimir is gone to Germany,” he went on, placing his three sons, who had all vanished in one manner or the other.

“Where in Germany?” Milan asked politely.

Sokolović looked up over Milan's head, as though the answer might be written in the air somewhere. It took him long seconds to answer.

“Konstanz,” he finally answered with an authoritative nod of his head.

“Konstanz,” Milan repeated.

“Konstanz,” Sokolović confirmed.

Milan nodded. He had never been to Germany. “I would go to Canada,” offered Milan honestly.

The old man nodded. “Yes. I would like my Stojan to go to Canada. Canada is a good state.” He slurped his coffee. Will you take Jelena with you?” he asked pointedly.

Milan did not know what to say. He thought for a moment before answering, “I don't know if she wants to go…,” he began awkwardly.

Sokolović interrupted him with a sharp burst of laughter. “Milan, don't be a fool.” He looked at the young man intently. “There is nothing left here in these mountains. Take the woman with you when you go. Make a life for yourselves in a normal country. Give your sons the passport of a country that will not send them to die. Trust me. I know. I have lost my son. And I may yet lose another,” he said, referring to Stojan, who was somewhere on the lines around Višegrad. “And Germany does not accept what is not its own,” he added thoughtfully.

Milan was mute. “Jelena loves Luka,” he whispered truthfully.

Sokolović became pensive. He thought for a moment. Then he said, “He returned from Belgrade because of her, even though I told him not to. Even Stojan asked him to stay in Serbia. But Luka wouldn't listen, because of his love.”

“I know that she loves him still very much,” whispered Milan, struggling to keep his voice neutral.

“And this will not change.” Sokolović looked pointedly at Milan. “Don't try to take that away from her. Don't be jealous of a dead man.”

“I wouldn't,” protested Milan. “I wouldn't do that.”

Sokolović nodded, satisfied.

“Luka was always quiet and shy,” Sokolović mused. “Did you find him this way? Or did the war change him?”

Milan felt such a wave of sadness wash over him that he thought he would cry. He struggled with this for a moment. Milan did not know who Luka was, but he knew how Luka had died. Then there were these people, who knew him and loved him and missed him, but didn't know what had really happened to him.

“He trusted,” Milan answered simply. That was why he died, he thought. He trusted us in those cursed woods. He trusted us like a child. And why wouldn't he have? We were all wearing the same colors.

“Yes!” the old man exclaimed, slapping his palm on the edge of the table. “That was very well put, Milan.” He nodded. “He trusted. That's why I didn't want him to serve in the army. It is not a place of trust.”

Milan did not answer.

“They brought him home without his boots,” Sokolović said. And he shook his head.

But Luka had been wearing sneakers when he died, Milan remembered, because his army had run out of proper boots. They had mobilized so many.

Sokolović was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “When my wife died, Luka was the most devastated. He refused to leave her grave. We had to drag him out of the cemetery.”

“I didn't know,” Milan whispered through lips that had grown numb.

Sokolović went on as though Milan had not spoken. “Only Stojan could get him on his feet. Luka was ten. Stojan, seven. They were close as Siamese twins. They slept in the same bed.”

“I didn't meet Stojan,” Milan said, just to say something. And a shadow passed over the old man's face.

“No,” he said. “Stojan did not come for the funeral. He sent a letter back with a neighbor's son, but it didn't arrive until long after Christmas.” sokolović considered for a moment. “Maybe he will be able to come for the raising of the stone,” he said, referring to the gravestone that was being carefully prepared by Rade.

“That would be good,” Milan answered uselessly.

“Yes.” He trailed off. Then he said, “You served with Luka. How did you get to know him? He was always so quiet.”

Milan looked at sokolović. His eyes were creased with lines, more from grief than age, it seemed. Milan began to speak slowly, “We were assigned to the same brigade—the same task force.”

“Luka never mentioned you,” sokolović mused. “I don't know why. You are a good friend, to come to his funeral and look after his Jelena.”

Milan sank into silence. He was not used to lying. He did not like it. Then he said, with a smile that felt like it had been carved into a stone face, “Luka talked about Jelena a lot. So I wouldn't expect him to talk about me.”

Sokolović nodded. “I hope you don't feel badly that I told you Luka didn't mention you. I hope you are not offended, I mean.”

“Of course not,” Milan shook his head.

“These are not easy times,” sokolović asserted.

“No,” Milan answered, grateful that he could drop the smile he had manufactured.

“Do you love her?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Do you love Jelena?”

“I don't know,” Milan answered hesitantly, and it seemed immediately to be the wrong answer. He didn't know how to answer this. It seemed to him that there was no answer that would make it alright for the man who had lost his son, and who knew he would now lose the woman who was meant to be his daughter-in-law. He didn't want to insult Luka's father by saying he loved her, but he also...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• I
• II
• III
• IV
• V
• VI
• VII
• VIII
• IX
• X
• XI
• XII
• XIII
• XIV
• XV
• XVI
• XVII
• XVIII
• XIX
• XX
• XXI
• XXII
• XXIII
• XXIV
• XXV
• XXVI