“I think so.” Kristina rolled her eyes. “I overheard something in class. I began to suspect something was up when four juniors ‘friended’ me.” She gave the quotation-marks gesture with an eye roll.
“Look.” Brigita handed her a piece of paper that had been on the desk. “A letter came yesterday from the PTA. They’re calling for a meeting, your transfer, an inquiry.”
“They are out of their minds!” gasped Kristina.
“Of course they are,” said Brigita. “But you know what this is like. We scramble and patch things together for years, and then something like this nonsense with the municipal signage comes along. You, as their teacher, shouldn’t be making public comments about things. I mean, you’re welcome to entertain whatever opinions you like—I don’t care; we all have opinions. And besides, we all know who’s been up to what around here. But do avoid clashing with students on Facebook. You’ll make problems for yourself, and for all of us, and we don’t need that.”
“I see.” She paused briefly, and then asked, “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll do what I can to calm them down, for starters . . . and besides, what you wrote wasn’t so bad.”
“I didn’t comment; all I wrote was—”
“I know; it was sent to me. ‘The Thompson concert! Be there or be square! And if you don’t come to the concert, watch Channel 3 at home.’ I think the fuss is overblown, but best leave Thompson and his Croatian right-wing extremism out of our classrooms, especially in the context of your Serbian students. So they don’t take what you said as a threat.”
“A threat?” asked Kristina.
“Well, that’s how the kids understood it, or so the letter claims.”
“Oh, come on, please. Who’s behind this? What threat? I’m their champion, and they know it . . . I can’t believe this!” Kristina stuttered.
“I guess Mrs. Olivera Vujanović is running this particular show; she’s writing the letters and is extremely active in protecting their Serbian identity, as she puts it—scandalized by discrimination and violent attempts to assimilate them into the Croatian community.”
“Vujanović—ah, I should have known.” Kristina pursed her lips and paled ever so slightly. “Did you see the cake she brought in for School Day?”
“No, I did not.” This conversation was beginning to fray Brigita’s nerves. Her thoughts were straying far from school and the problems with parents, professors, ethnicities, and singers, like Thompson and Ceca, who toyed with politics.
“The icing was decorated with the Serbian white eagle and the Only-Unity-Saves-the-Serbs symbol, and then she even posted a picture of the cake to Facebook, like she was saying, This is how we celebrate our School Day, in this, our city, with our Super Serbia cake.”
“Fine. Let it go, please; that is the worst they can do. From now on, stay away from Facebook and comments. Leave this to me. Listen, I have to go; I have a meeting at two o’clock . . .” She was eager to wrap things up, but she noticed that though she was trying to calm her, Kristina seemed increasingly agitated. Her gaze wandered off, but then it fixed on the sheet of paper and the signature of Mrs. Vujanović, PTA president. A name known far and wide.
Olivera Vujanović owned several local butcher shops and was patroness of the Serbian saints’ day celebrations, the self-appointed guardian of ethnic identity and the daughter of Predrag Vujanović—who was murdered. He had been one of the commanders of the territorial defense forces, a prominent city butcher before the war, whose refrigerator trucks in mid-autumn of 1991 were crammed, during the siege of the city, with dead Croatian bodies. According to testimony by the witnesses at the Belgrade trial, he’d been a particularly vicious executioner at the Velepromet warehouse and a close former collaborator of Stanko Velimirović, a man who was a city councilman today and leader of the Serbian opposition. Vujanović, Olivera’s father, was one of the commanders of the Begejci camp, through which some five hundred Croatian prisoners passed in 1992, packed into stalls with concrete floors meant for livestock. A thin layer of straw for bedding.
Though this was not widely known, Olivera came to visit her father several times there, bringing with her in the trunk of her Yugo compact car—the car having been stolen for her from the army as a gift for her twenty-first birthday—a load of booze, cigarettes, ham, and smoked sausages from the attics of the houses Serbs had plundered. In the month after the siege was broken and the city fell to the Serbs, the territorial fighters were in particularly gleeful spirits almost every night, and around midnight they’d come barging into the barn, howling and forcing the Croatian prisoners to stand. In the corner of the barn stood a father in front of his seventeen-year-old son. The trembling shadows in the corners were always the most tantalizing for the guards. They sniffed out the stench of fear, discovered the fragile boy hidden behind his dad. He’s as cute as a girl; come on, old man, look at that ass; pretend he’s your daughter. Tears furrowed the man’s face, and the boy’s big brown eyes bugged out like wild chestnuts. Some puked; most had little but bile left to vomit. Some wet themselves. But one of them, Ante, fixed his eyes on a distant point. He was able to turn a blind eye to any crimes as long as he saved his own skin. If they’d only known, the skeletal wraiths around him would have throttled him, but they all thought he was being dragged off for questioning each time he was taken out by the guards. In fact, Ante was occasionally slipped a slice of sausage and a swig of brandy as his reward for informing on his fellow prisoners. He’d sit with the Serbian guards in the room while they played cards and drank. That night as well, they pulled him out and questioned him about
