Life is sometimes so confusing that you can’t be certain what came first and what came later. By the same token I don’t know whether I’m telling this story to get to the end or the beginning of things. Since living abroad, I have experienced my native language—which, as the Croatian poet’s ecstatic verse would have it,

as a stammer, a curse, a malediction or as babble, drab phrase mongering devoid of meaning. Which is why I sometimes feel that here, surrounded by Dutch and communicating in English, I am learning my native language from scratch. It’s not easy. I swallow words, regurgitate vowels and consonants. It’s a losing battle: I fail to convey what I want to say, and what I do say sounds empty. I’ll come out with a word, but can’t sense its substance, or I’ll sense a certain substance, but can’t find the word for it. I keep wondering whether a language thus maimed, a language that has never learned to depict reality, complex as the inner experience of that reality may be, is capable of doing anything at all, telling stories, for instance.

Life has been good to me. I’ve learned to leave my curtains open. I’m even trying to consider it a virtue. I’ve enrolled in a Dutch course. Like my classmates, I overuse the personal pronoun ik. For beginnings the world begins with ik: Ik ben Tanja. Ik kom uit vormalige Joegoslavië. Ik loop, ik zie, ik leef, ik praat, ik adem, ik hoor, ik schreeuw…For the time being ik doesn’t commit me to anything: ik is like a children’s game, it’s like hide-and-seek. People say it’s easiest to hide out in the open. In the Dutch mountains. Behind that tough little i and k.

True, my nightmares have started up again. Now I dream of words, not houses. In the dream I speak an unchecked, uncontrollable language, a language with a false bottom, whose words leap out like a jack-in-the-box and thumb their nose at me. They are usually monologues reflecting my fickle moods. I go through them with a fine-toothed comb. They are long and painful, a never-ending list of complaints. I am often awakened by a painful doglike whimper, my own. In the dream I populate the space around me with words. They burgeon and wind round me like lianas, they spring up like ferns, climb like creepers, open wide like water lilies, overrun me like wild orchids. Their luxuriant jungle sentences leave me breathless. In the morning, ravaged, I can’t tell whether to construe their lexical exuberance as punishment or absolution.

But life has been good to me. Paul and Kim, the American couple whose children I take care of four days a week, pay me more than a decent wage. I’ve become an expert in nursery rhymes and counting rhymes: ours, the English ones, and even a few in Dutch. The children know En ten tini, sava raka tini, sava raka tika taka, bija baja buf. And Eci peci pec, ti si mali zec, a ja mala vjeverica, eci peci pec. They know Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub: the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. And Amsterdam, die grote stadt. Die is gebouwd op palen. Als die stadt eens om-meviel, wie zou dat betalen…. Paul and Kim never fail to introduce me to their friends and relatives: “This is Tanja, our babysitter. She’s wonderful with children. She really has a way with them….”

My mother is doing fine too, if “fine” is the word for it. She perks up whenever I phone. She tells on life the way children tell on one another: she pulls out her list of complaints and goes on about her diabetes (which she calls “the sugar curse”), her arthritis, the high cost of living…. She never asks about me: I’m just there to register the complaints. I’ve made peace with my role and grown used to our one-way dialogues. I’ve learned not to let it hurt too much.

Goran’s father is no longer with us. “They might as well have stuck him in a garbage bag!” said Olga, sobbing into the receiver. “A garbage bag!” He’d fallen into a coma, so she called for an ambulance, but the paramedics couldn’t get the stretcher into the elevator, so they had to wrap him in a blanket and carry him down all ten flights. He died in the hospital a few days later. She told me all about it when I phoned with my condolences. “Though it had to end somewhere,” she added in an odd voice, thereby putting a sad yet apathetic end to the incident.

Ana survived her return to Belgrade by less than two years: she was with the Belgrade Television team that perished in the NATO bombing of the city. I’ve kept the letter she sent me several months after her departure. Along with a short note saying she had found a job and was doing fine, she enclosed a short composition entitled “Depot,” her late contribution to our imaginary museum of everyday life in Yugoslavia. It was a melancholy description of the place where the Belgrade tram lines come to rest, a description of the sounds, the sultry summer sunset, the smell of the dust-filled air. “Put it into our plastic tote, the one with the red, white, and blue stripes,” she wrote. I was touched by the sweet folly of the gesture. Geert decided to remain in Belgrade. I have no idea what he’s doing or how he earns his keep. He phones me now and then, and I can tell from his voice that I, a foreigner, am his only link to “home.” I am still at his address.

As for the rest of them, they seem to be holding their own. Ante still plays his accordion all over town. He’s at the Noordermarkt every Saturday. People toss their coins into a cap given to him by the fellow from Virovitica who has the hat stall there. All “our people” know him. Nevena has married one of “our” boys and has a daughter by him. She’s working at the Mercatorplein branch of the Rabo Bank. Meliha is in Sarajevo. She’s managed to reclaim the family flat and evict the people who had been living there illegally. Meliha’s parents will have nothing to do with the city: they haven’t been back once since moving here. Meliha is living with her Daer, who has set up an NGO for “vulnerable people.” Mario has left the university and found work in computer graphics. He has a baby, too, a boy. Boban has joined a local Buddhist sect, shaved his head, turned vegan, and got himself on welfare. Only Johanneke has stuck it out at the university. Her elder daughter has run away. She’s in Bosnia with her father. Johanneke is devastated. Selim has gone super Muslim, hanging out with the Vondel Park weirdos, grumbling about how “us Bosnians gotta kick the shit out of them Serb bastards and then the Croats and then the whole Euro crowd, Yanks included.” Zole, who came to class only once or twice, has supposedly split for Canada, claiming to be a “double victim”—of Miloševi and of the NATO bombs. But a more likely version is that he got in with the local Serb mafia and split to save his skin.

I had this all from Darko when I ran into him on a deserted beach near Wassenaar one day. It was surreal. I barely recognized him: He had a bronze tan and light blond hair, and sported a pair of chic sunglasses and a Walkman. And he was on a horse. He looked like a Calvin Klein model or, rather, a fragile version of same. He was taking riding lessons at the Wassenaar Equestrian Club, he told me. He had a friend, a successful American businessman, and hung out with the gay crowd. Except now he’d left the low life—which he’d always been open about—for a house in Reguliersgracht: Thanks to the friend who’d blown a cool million on it. That’s right—a million dollars, two million gue….

“I’ve discovered I love riding,” he said. And giving me a soulful look, he added, “Sign up for a course, any course—yoga, salsa, whatever—I tell everybody. As long as it’s physical, you get a lot out of it.”

“I’m taking Dutch,” I said.

“Good for you!” he said, as if talking to somebody somewhere else.

Just then I caught my reflection in his sunglasses and a chill ran up my spine: there were two faces glinting in the lenses, and neither was mine.

But most incredible of all was Igor’s story. He’d gone off the deep end, people said. First he got a job as a translator at the Tribunal, where he wasn’t the only member of our gang to be thus employed, by the way. But he got himself fired when he stopped showing up for work. Then one day he was found—found himself might be closer to the truth—at some airport or other in Calcutta, Kuala Lumpur, or Singapore. They said he was suffering from a post-traumatic syndrome with a great name, the musical name of “fugue”: dissociative fugue, to be exact. These fugues are apparently brought on by a sudden trip. They last anywhere from a few days to a few months and trigger a total blackout, during which the “fugued out” have to manufacture an identity: they have no idea who they are or where they’re from. And when they go back to their former lives, they have no idea what they went through in their fugued-out condition. It is a completely crazy lost-and-found disorder nobody’d ever heard of before. Some psychiatrists claim that the fugues don’t just happen, that they’re set off by drink. Maybe so, but Igor didn’t remember having been a drinker. Nobody knew where he was or how he was making ends meet. He might even have gone home. As for the others, they’d gone their separate ways. They’d lost touch.

“By the way,” Darko said in a voice a bit too cheery, “I’ve made another discovery.”

“Namely?”

“Opera!” he said, pointing to the Walkman. “I’m wild about Verdi.”

He paused and slumped ever so slightly, a fine shadow crossing his delicate, pretty-boy face.

“That time with Uroš…” he said haltingly, as if spitting sand from his mouth, “after the dinner, when we celebrated your birthday, remember?”

“I remember,” I said.

“Well, I walked him home, and we…horsed around a little…. Uroš wasn’t gay…But we were drunk….”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t know…. It’s been bothering me forever….”

As far as the Hague Tribunal is concerned, the files are piling up, the mounds of paper growing; the videotapes of the proceedings could cover the length and breadth of the land that is no longer. Every loss seems to have been taken care of in real, ironic, or grotesque terms—yet taken care of nonetheless. Wounds have healed properly for some, poorly for others—yet healed they have. Even the scars are fading. Everyone is somewhere, some doing what they do best, others doing the best they can. Life has dealt better cards to some than others, but everyone has found some kind of niche. The dead and disappeared have yet to be counted, many of the perpetrators are still at large, much rubble has yet to be cleared, many mines defused, but the dust has settled. Life goes on and for the present at least is good to everyone.

One day the Tribunal will land the biggest culprit of them all, and I will go have a look at him. He will be wearing a gray suit, white shirt, and bright red tie. The color of the tie will be identical to that of a judge’s robe. The defendant will sit in his glass cage, his jaw clenched and his mouth in the shape of an upside-down U. The clock will show the time, but it will not be the time of the world outside the courtroom. I will be shocked to discover that in the few intervening years I have forgotten everything, that I can scarcely bring up the names of the people who so played with our lives. I will have the feeling it is a hundred years since the war broke out, not nine or ten. I will confront my forgetting head on and with a profound sense of horror. The man in the red tie will speak a language I no longer understand. I will remember even the following detail: leafing through the papers in front of him, the accused will lick his fingers like a village shopkeeper; he will raise his head, as if to sniff the air around him, and squint into the courtroom; at that moment the eyes behind the glass and mine will meet; the eyes will be dark, dull, void of expression; his tightly clenched jaw and dull stare will remind me of a polar bear; then he will lift his paw, brush the invisible flies away from his nose, and go back to staring blankly in front of him.

Sometimes I think of Uroš and think he made the right choice. He took along his pencils and pads and velvet yarmulkes, one for each day of the week. He brushes his teeth and, circumstances permitting, turns to face the sacred Kotel ha-Ma’aravi wall. Sweating like an accountant, he writes out his grievances and prayers on scraps of paper, which he rolls into small tubes, and stuffs them into the cracks between the blocks of stone.

We’ve come out of everything we went through in one of three ways, says Igor: The better for it, the worse for it, or, like Uroš, with a bullet in the skull. I don’t know where I stand, except that I managed to dodge the bullet.

And speaking of Igor, I didn’t let on to Darko that I knew more about his circumstances than what he’d told me that day on the beach. For one thing, the statement I gave to the police never reached him. The cop who came to my place must have felt he’d done enough for me by removing the handcuffs. And right he was, too. I underestimated his acumen.

Igor is currently working with some Irish builders. The Irish are good with their hands, skilled carpenters. They renovate houses and flats: tear down walls and build them up again, lug out all the junk that has piled up over the years—do whatever is called for. Not that Amsterdam isn’t full of “our people,” but Igor steers clear of them. Igor has taken to this hard manual labor quite recently. He puts everything he’s got into it, as if it were a penance of sorts. Maybe he’s driven by the insane notion that by the sweat of his brow he is restoring a certain equilibrium, that for every wall he builds here one will rise out of the ruins there, in the villages of Bosnia or Croatia or wherever it may be needed.

Life has been good to us. Igor leaves early and comes home early. He heads straight for the shower, washes off the dirt, puts on clean clothes, rolls up his shirtsleeves, and takes his seat at the table. I serve a freshly prepared meal. We eat slowly and, oddly enough, speak little. Our words are as dry as sand. I like their dryness. Maybe we’re becoming Dutch. The Dutch are said to speak only when they have something to say.

After dinner I curl up next to him, breathe in his smell, breathe through his skin like a fish through its gills. I set my pulse to his, I course through his veins. I pull back for an instant to look at him, as if unable to believe he’s here…I notice a smudge of paint left on his cheek and lick at it, remove it with my saliva. I pull at his lip with my teeth, push my tongue into his mouth and suck out the oxygen crucial to my survival, then deliver the oxygen crucial to his. We both feel an intoxicating blast as the present invades our every last vein, and for a time we inhale the pure extract of nothing to remember and nothing to forget.

Occasionally my angst gains the upper hand. When it does, I grab my bag, fling a coat over my shoulders, and race out of the apartment. Igor has stopped offering to go with me; he leaves me to my own devices, knowing where I’m off to. It’s usually the seaside, one of those long sandy beaches. I love the deserted Dutch beaches in late autumn and winter. I stand there gazing at the gray sea and gray sky, stand there riveted, facing an imaginary wall. Then I open my mouth and let out the words, slowly at first, then faster, faster and louder. I flicker my tongue like a fairy tale dragon, and it forks into Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Macedonian…. Facing the invisible wall, I thrust my head rhythmically into the wind and speak. I do not believe in God; I know no prayer. Enveloped in the wind, imprinted onto the landscape as into a lantern-slide panorama, I, the Teacher, the pride of my generation, speak what I have to speak, speak my Balkan litany. I shatter the glass with my voice like Oskar Matzerath. I secrete the words from my mouth like ink from a cuttlefish. I post my sounds to the nameless like a message in a bottle. Having cast them to the winds, I see them flying through the air. I watch them curl into tiny tubes, loop the loop and nosedive into the wall of water, where they dissolve instantly, like Alka-Seltzer.

May you be cursed in this world and the next.

May you not live to see the sun rise.

May the vultures get you.

May you vanish from the earth.

May you walk a thorn field barefoot.

May God make you thinner than a thread and blacker than a pot.

May you reap wormwood where you sow basil.

May the Devil torment you.

May the Devil lap your soup.

May ravens caw at you.

May thunder and lightning strike you.

May lightning strike you and split you down the middle.

May you wander blind over the earth.

May a serpent bite you in the heart.

May you suffer like a worm under bark.

May your heart quarter and burst.

May you never more see the light of day.

May all abandon you.

May you lose all but your name.

May your seed be obliterated.

May your life be bleak and barren.

May a serpent wind round your waist.

May a serpent swallow you whole.

May the sun burn you alive.

May your sugar be bitter.

May you choke on bread and salt.

May the sea cast up your bones.

May grass sprout through your bones.

May you turn to dust and ashes.

May your mouth utter never a word.

May you be damned.

May a live wound devour you.

May the waters close up over you.

May your name be forgotten.

May you never see the sun.

May you rust over.

May you be murdered every day of the year.

May your roots dry up.

May you lick ashes.

May your heart turn to stone.

May you die in darkness.

May your soul fall out.

May you never eat your fill.

May your joys lament.

May you drift without end.

May you go deaf.

May you go dumb.

May the earth push up your bones.

May you be devoured by worms.

May you lose your soul and nails.

May you never again see your house.

May you lack bread when you have salt.

May you turn to wood and stone.

May your star go out.

May you take to the road.

May your days be black.

May your tongue go mute.

May you leave your bones behind….

And when my vocal cords give out, when my forehead goes numb from the wind, I abandon the beach calm and collected, leaving no trace. The Dutch horizontals are good; they are like the school blotters of yesteryear: they absorb everything.