Friend for all times
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 22: MoneySexPower
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Nikola Gurovic
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Nikola Gurovic's biography and other articles by this writer
It was the summer of 1969. I had just scraped through my first year at the University of Belgrade. I felt like a complete failure. Instead of studying for the final exams, I had discovered the charms of Belgrade's bohemian life and the thrill of poker games. No wonder I only passed three out of ten subjects, holding on to the slim hope I could do the impossible in September – get enough credits for third semester.
I returned to my family home in a small provincial town in southern Herzegovina with a bag loaded with textbooks and the accoutrements of a new habit – smoking. Tucked into my shirt pocket was a piece of paper that would change my life for good.
One evening in June, my room-mate Zoltan, a student of mathematics, came from the university and handed me a pamphlet – one paragraph printed in bold letters on a cheap printing machine. It read that some self-proclaimed committee representing the students of Belgrade University was urging professors and fellow students to show solidarity with the ‘hungry miners' of Bosnia and to support their demands for better wages and a decent standard of living. At the time, I did not care much for politics but I knew my father would listen to my comments about life in Belgrade and the mood in the capital of Tito's Yugoslavia.
Hungry miners? For the Yugoslav ruling elite out of touch with ordinary people, the concept was science fiction. It was a situation only possible in the Soviet Union or Poland, and certainly not in Yugoslavia where the workers were the driving force of society – at least on paper – in Communist Party program speeches and declarations. The pamphlet would be proof for my father that the rosy picture portrayed by official media did not correspond to reality – or so I thought. Let me remind you that this was the first summer after the ‘revolutions of 1968' in Europe, and the echoes of unrest were still in the air in Belgrade.
Back home, I met my closest friend Milos, a student of law at the University of Sarajevo, as well as three other colleagues from high school. Over a beer we talked about life at the university, the café society in Belgrade and Sarajevo, movies, music and sports. And, of course, girls. At some point I put the pamphlet on the table just to make the point that my school was the most liberal among Yugoslav universities. No heated discussion followed because we had just enjoyed the first positive changes Yugoslavia's leadership had made after the students' protest in the summer of ‘68.
Later that day, I showed the pamphlet to my father, who got so angry he threw it into the bin, warning me to stay away from troublemakers at university. My father, who fought the Nazis with Tito's partisan army during World War II, was a loyal member of the Communist Party. He believed that the pamphlet was a useless attempt by young, spoiled kids to stir public opinion.
THE WEEKEND ARRIVED AND I didn't think much more of it, enjoying swimming and basking in the sun on the beaches of Dubrovnik just twenty miles away. On Monday, back home, dark clouds started to build on the horizon of my holidays. I was summoned to the police station. The agent knew my name, my family background, my friends, my school record, my love for music and basketball. He had no time for niceties.
‘Where is the pamphlet you smuggled from Belgrade?' he demanded to know. ‘To whom did you show it? What were you talking about yesterday at the pub? Why did you bring the pamphlet? Are you a member of a student committee? Who are your comrades in Belgrade?'
The questions were engulfing my brain, my heart was pounding, my mouth got dry, my voice froze, and my hands were shaking and sweaty. I couldn't hide that I was terrified. Somehow, I explained that I did not have any revolutionary agenda and I did not care for politics at all. I said the pamphlet had ended up in the garbage bin in my father's shop.
Having had what seemed like a long career in the police force, my tormentor was not the kind of man to give up easily. He kept repeating the questions while altering their order or adding new ones. After a while, when he realised that I would not change my statement, he handed me a pen and a paper.
‘Write down every single word you remember ... the heading, the date, the signature ... every comma, every dot, every letter. I want everything, do you understand? Everything.'
I can't say whether I spent an hour or less undertaking this task, but I remember how horrified I was while desperately trying to visualise in my mind the damned piece of paper that could have ended up kicking me out of university and destroying my dream of becoming a journalist.
It was a hot and dry early afternoon by the time I left the police building. The lengthy interrogation had left me breathless and nauseous. Who had told the police about the pamphlet? The waitress at the cafe? An informer among my friends? Was it Milos, my most trusted friend, the most intelligent and lucid of all of us? I knew he has just secured a scholarship from the Ministry of Interior. Had he become one of them already? Questions buzzed in my head. I locked myself in my room and lit a cigarette. I wanted everything to be just an awful dream, a chapter of a novel written by a Soviet dissident whose name, as well as the plot of his book, I would soon forget.