..And so it begins....

Is War. Is not good.

The most inventive cussing I ever heard was whilst I was sitting outside on a stifling summer day. 

We were smoking cigarettes with my cousin's wife on the front porch watching people on the street and life go by in a tiny village in Croatia's heartland called Vrbanja.

Raucous protestations from a very drunken man defending himself from the strident accusations of his wife that he'd been at one of the two local pubs and spent all their green stuff.

"Odi u tri picke materine" was her retort.

My mouth curled into an embarassed smile.

Go to not one, but three of your mother's pussies.

She had raised blasphemy to an art form I hadn't yet seen. 

Perhaps she had good reason. 

My cousin told me they were forbidden to go to the forest and sell the wood as they had done in previous years. 

Work was scarce. 

Money was tight.   

Still, the ever present alcohol always flowed.

As I noted whilst sitting with my cousins and one of their friends whose perpetual gaze in my direction had me looking up at the ceiling, whistling and twiddling my thumbs, completely oblivious to my uber-discomfort at his ogling.

My shaven legs were the target.

The complete opposite of the prevalent custom of uncontrolled body hair among both sexes. 

He then proceeded to lift up his top whilst peering over his drink at me like some sort of bizarre and unexpected mating ritual.

Suffice to say that this particular form of non-verbal communication was not reciprocated....

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I cranked up the volume in our rented car with Zagreb number plates.  The kids nodded their heads in time to "Get me off" by Basement Jaxx, a CD I paid a hefty ransom for in a Zagreb music store, as we wound our way on the road to Bosnia.

As we crossed the border, women and children appeared with berries in jars for sale alongside the road.  My husband slowed for two young boys.  With eyes widening in enormous surprise, their eager fingers almost tore the large note from his hands.

As we drove up the cramped, narrow road that resembled little more than a goat track in the village he hadn't seen for 17 years I wondered what we would find.

It had always been the piece of the puzzle that had eluded me for the longest time.

 That of the life he had before he met me where Serbians, Muslims and Croatians trained together in the compulsory fifteen months of military service....

and that of the previous lives of his brothers and their families who had lived with us for a time when they came out to Australia as refugees and whom I treat now as my own family and not only his... 

I wanted to see the houses they fled from carrying nothing but the clothes on their backs.

I sought to meet the people who had returned, to truly put a name and face to the old photographs stuck in albums often dragged out and examined.

Needed to hear the stories of family, some who had been living in a motel room you couldn't swing a cat in for almost ten years after being ethnically cleansed and still living with the mental scars of torture during imprisonment.

**Kad smo dosli kod njegove staru kucu, komcinica izasla iz kuce.  Jedna starija zena, oko sestdeset godine.

Ko si ti? ona njega pitala.

Nije ga mogla poznat.

On se okrenijo.

"Vidis ona kuca"?

"Ja sam jednom tu zivijo".

Pocela zena plakat....***

The time we spent in Croatia and Bosnia enthralled, amazed, amused, bemused and saddened me, sometimes all at once.  The thoughts of people who had died from the war, some family, other's family members of friends and all those who were personally affected by ethnic cleansing have stayed with me and always will.

It's a part of my life that is a box of personal treasure - opened very occasionally and looked at with sadness but also love....

**When we came to his old house the next door neighbour came out from her house.  An older woman, about sixty.

"Who the fuck are you?" she asked.  She couldn't recognise him.

He turned around.

"See that house over there?"

"I once lived in that house".

The woman started crying**

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***The above is the correct translation from Croatian to English. 

***Except for the word fuck.

***I just like that word.