Redefining 'Normal' in Yugoslavia

...I slept very well indeed my first night there, and in the morning I awoke to extraordinary music: The apartment overlooked the domes and turrets of St...

...There's a saying that everything beautiful has gone," one woman told me...

...Friends insisted that I move out, and I shifted to an apartment that had belonged to Tamara's mother, who died six months earlier at the age of 81...

...When I mentioned this to a usually astute journalist friend of mine, he said, "I saw someone who looked like Kostunica...

...My own sense is that the country is trying to redefine "normal" after a decade in which it has meant—among other things—political isolation, nationalist frenzy, NATO bombing, economic collapse, media brainwashing, and a deliberately fostered sense of denial and paranoid victimhood...

...He," naturally, is Milosevic...

...Suppliers in several towns have served notice that they can no longer provide meals at a price low enough—70 cents a meal— for local Jewish community budgets...

...I think it's because our building is across the street from a big bakery that has to keep going...

...The power blackouts are perhaps the most dramatic symptom of the economic collapse...

...Normally this is a threehour trip...

...The only passengers to escape alive are two Roma musicians who, as the ultimate survivors, stand up and play their music in front of the wreckage...

...During my first two nights here I stayed in a hotel in the central part of the city...

...I am so ashamed," she said...

...The walls of this shabby capital are still plastered with black and white posters shouting a triumphant message: Gotovje ("He's Finished...

...From then on I had an acute fear of being trapped in an elevator...

...paintings and family photographs adorned the walls...

...I went with Stevo Niksic, an old friend who is the editor of another opposition publication, Nin...

...The green tile was cracked...

...Only those who were in his immediate vicinity were aware of his arrival...

...The economic situation is catastrophic," Aca Singer, the 78-yearold president of the Federation of Yugoslav Jewish Communities, told me...

...There was a long tunnel and now we can see some light...

...The best thing we can do is get out of their way...

...Eventhose sectors thatuntil now somehow functioned and provided minimal living conditions have been affected, and inflation has caused prices of items like meat, cooking oil and sugar to skyrocket...

...Earlier this year they also opened soup kitchens in Belgrade and six other locations...

...My friend Tamara put it another way...

...We haven't had any power cuts yet," she said...

...Once the series of Balkan wars broke out in the early 1990s, though, I stayed away...

...In the corner, a singer and two musicians belted out folk-inspired pop songs through an amplification system that produced a reverb effect I have only heard in the Balkans...

...It was about as far a cry as possible from the luxury Hyatt in an inner suburb across the river, where most Western visitors and correspondents stay...

...Two decades ago, in the years immediately before and following the death in 1980 of Yugoslavia's longtime leader Josip Broz Tito, I was based in Belgrade as chief correspondent for United Press International...

...Is this real...

...Beefy men sat drinking beer at stained tables...

...An e-mail from an art student half Brane's age said: "Guess what, today I went to the center of the city and a lot of people had a smile on their face...

...It is a wonderful feeling," she told me, "to be going away but not be running away...

...I should have known better than to believe them when they told me 30 minutes...

...I don't have a job either, but I am studying computer science," she confided...

...The friend who met me at the station had been waiting there for an hour—and he blamed himself, not the railroad, for the inconvenience...

...She was blasé as three of us crowded into the little lift...

...The young people brought about the change...

...Another said, "He's great...

...The bathroom was, well, a throwback to earlier times...

...It will still take some time for what has happened to completely sink in...

...Only one or two of the best friends we grew up with are still in Belgrade...

...My generation let all this happen...

...AS ONE tends to do during homecomings, I have been looking up old friends, revisiting old haunts, and walking, walking, walking through the city...

...I could have recited the menu...

...The mood was euphoric...

...Unbelievably for a politician, he did not make a speech...

...Called Ko To TamoPeva ("Who's That Singing There"), it was a Serbian version of the Ship of Fools motif: a surreal black comedy set in April 1941 about a busload of misfits traveling the back roads of deepest Serbia en route to Belgrade...

...The rhythmic throb of drums and trumpets and tubas rose in the air and rattled my windows...

...A day after I checked in, a local newspaper ran an article about the place, noting how it derived much of its income from renting rooms by the afternoon...

...Many men and women arejobless, and formose who do have work the monthly salary may be less than $50.1 bought a brightcolored peasant rug at an outdoor market, and I was embarrassed to tell anyone what I paid for it...

...Beyond the church, I could see the burned out ruin of the television building that had taken a direct hit in the NATO bombing raids against the city...

...This winter all of Yugoslavia has been hit by rolling blackouts for up to four or even six hours...

...On occasion the sensation is so intense that I feel as if I were in a time warp...

...and, yes, there was even a pubic hair somehow stuck to the wall...

...These serve a total of more than 700 hot lunches a day, five days a week—simple fare like bean soup or pasta with poppy seeds...

...That contrast is one of the features of Kostunica's appeal...

...Thus the Vreme party celebrated the return of the building to the other side...

...Once again, I could not help thinking of the old movie, Ko To Tamo Peva, and of the various definitions of normality in what remains of Yugoslavia...

...In the end, my train arrived in Belgrade 90 minutes late, without any other mishap...

...We are scattered all over the world," said thirtysomething Jelena, who was visiting from Vienna, where she now lives with her husband...

...Other, bigger, black and white posters show the stark outlines of bulldozers and the ominous admonition: "We are watching you...

...When I asked what time we would get in, the conductor reacted with an exaggerated shrug and a rolling of the eyes worthy of a silent movie melodrama...

...The mood is undeniably high, but no one is expecting miracles...

...Jewish organizations distribute medication and aid packages to the 3,000member Jewish community...

...The hall was smoke-filled, noisy and packed so solid it was hard to move...

...He is a nice and very boring, principled person," one friend told me with satisfaction...

...Who knows...

...He had been in Moscow that day meeting with President Vladimir V Putin, and apparently had come to the party directly on his return...

...From morning till night Roma brass bands play music for the wedding groups, who dance and drink as they wend their way toward the church entrance...

...The contrast with Milosevic's arrogance could not have been more mind-boggling...

...At the Writer's Club, the upscale basement restaurant that has long been the haunt of diplomats, intellectuals and (in the past decade) profiteers, the owner greeted me as if it had been days, rather than years, since he last saw me...

...The train limped along—slowing, stopping and occasionally speeding up— through a landscape impenetrable in its darkness...

...In trying to describe the feeling here, 'disbelief and 'emptiness' are probably the closest terms I can use," he continued...

...Given the depth and complexity of Yugoslavia's crisis, an overall recovery will be long and difficult...

...The carpet and the upholstery of the chairs also were unchanged...

...the spigot dripped...

...But, said Singer, the economic crunch is now threatening their operation...

...Most of the people present had formed part of the opposition, and many now had been catapulted into the ruling elite or its fringes...

...The venue, a cavernous student cultural center, was symbolic...

...During the past decade it was taken over by pro-Milosevic students...

...It is clear that the redefinition is not going to be an easy process...

...With the Balkan winter looming, the shattered economy is the most urgent challenge...

...I think my worst moment came when I visited a friend who lives on the 11th floor of an apartment block...

...I had a bed, but both the mattress and the sheets had holes in them...

...But this is the first time we have hope...

...We are still eating at soup kitchens, and there are shortages of heat, electricity, medicine, and medical care,' one woman told me...

...I feel that I was bom again...

...Downtown Belgrade has seen little new building and little cleanup of facades that were shabby 20 years ago...

...One could have been a stage set from the late '70s...

...My feeling of temporal displacement, of course, was an illusion...

...One evening, I attended a big party thrown to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Vreme, a magazine that was one of the main anti-Milosevic publications...

...the food even looked identical, and the deep-fried zucchini and roast lamb were as good as ever...

...The bus arrives in the capital after a series of bizarre adventures...

...A few photographers crowded around him, but he seemed more intent on grabbing a drink and chatting with his friends for an hour than playing to the media...

...She was packing to leave on a two-month fellowship to Amsterdam...

...My room cost me $ 12 a night, and I got what I paid for...

...I took a taxi back after dinner one night, and just as I reached the door all the lights in the entire quarter of the city went off...

...Throughout the 1980s, I returned frequently...

...Letter from Belgrade Redefining 'Normal' in Yugoslavia By Ruth Ellen Gruber Belgrade The train pulled out of Subotica, on Yugoslavia's northern border with Hungary, just after 5 p.m., right on time for its 120 mile run to Belgrade...

...I had already experienced such outages in Subotica, and had even interviewed the Mayor during a blackout that cut electricity to City Hall...

...The downtown building had been the center of activities for the radical 1968 generation of students, and when I lived in Belgrade it hosted avant garde exhibits and other events...

...he responded, flinging his hands upward in a gesture of both exasperation and resignation...

...The rank smell of cooking fat hung in clouds of cigarette smoke...

...I swear that one window display, at a pharmacy on a major downtown intersection, is the same as it was when I lived here...

...But the triumph was tempered by a warning...

...You can't imagine what it is like just to hear someone talk sensibly...

...The Hotel Toplice could generously be called "downmarket...

...Belgrade is a much different city than it used to be...

...This time I found a country that was still pinching itself in the wake of Milosevic's ouster...

...Most seniors must exist on pensions that average about $30 a month...

...My trip was a homecoming of sorts...

...My husband used to work for Yugoslav Airlines, but he lost his job," said a woman who lived for many years in Pristina, the Kosovo capital, but was evacuated with her family during the NATO bombing in 1999...

...It's man-bites-dog news here if a train is on time, so naturally I called to see how late it would be," he said...

...Terrified that we would be stuck somewhere for the night, I was reminded of a classic Yugoslav film that had come out around 1980...

...The past decade of war, economic sanctions and dictatorial rule turned Yugoslavia into an economic basket case as well as a political pariah...

...A woman in her late 50s admitted she could hardly live with the realization that her passivity had amounted to complicity with the regime's brand of terror and corruption...

...We are really free, for the first time in most of our lives," my friend Brane, who is 53, had told me in an e-mail before my trip...

...Looking outside, I could see the domed Parliament building, scarred from the demonstrations that had finally ousted Milosevic...

...I was wondering, am I dreaming...

...We are thinking of selling our car to get some income...

...To know that I actually want to come back...

...There were shelves fall of books in four or five languages...

...The loss includes the 300,000 or more people, including many highly skilled professionals, who have left the country over the last 10 years...

...Mark's church, which on weekends has a constant stream of weddings...

...But just as it does, it suffers a direct hit from Nazi warplanes that at that moment start bombing the city...

...At one point, there was a stir near the door as Kostunica himself walked in, unheralded and without bodyguards or at least visible security...

...The state and its inhabitants are practically left without any financial orfood reserves...

...There's no power—no power...

...They have to tell us...

...The desk clerk was lighting candles as I entered, and I had to walk up to my fifth floor room...

...These posters refer to the bulldozers driven by workers from provincial cities who converged on Belgrade in early October and were catalysts for the mass protests that brought Kostunica to power...

...It was a small sixth floor flat in a building on the corner of the very street where I had lived 20 years ago...

...In many ways Belgrade seems to have been frozen in time—at least physically...

...We should not tell them how to do anything...

...My only visit to Belgrade since 1991 was made in the winter of 1997, when tens of thousands of people took to the streets in student-led antigovernment demonstrations that raised hopes for change and then fizzled out in a few months...

...For many Serbs Kostunica's election has meant waking up to the realities of the Milosevic regime...

...Entering certain cafes and restaurants, I felt as if I had plunged precipitously into the past...

...Some are just beginning to recognize the inestimable damage that was done—in their name— to themselves, to their country, and to hundreds of thousands of others...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a correspondent for the NL who covers Eastern Europe...

...But "normal" is an exceedingly flexible concept in Yugoslavia...

...Some live in the U.S., some in Israel, some in Canada—and there is even someone in New Zealand...

...I arrived in Yugoslavia in late October, a couple weeks after the mass popular revolt that ousted Slobodan Milosevic from power and installed opposition leader Vojislav Kostunica as the democratically elected President...

...The price was quite good, but I knew it exceeded the wages of some of my friends...

...Like the train from Subotica, it also was still lurching along through the dark, attempting to come to grips with the new situation...

...You mean it really was him...

...The spirit of the old ladypermeatedtheplace...