The Bottom of Madness
On February 18, 2004, while living in New York and working on a memoir of my childhood in the former Yugoslavia, I learned that my cousin Silky had opened his apartment window and jumped. I was stunned. Speechless. Wanted to write about him, tell the world how much I missed him. Storytelling had so long been the screen behind which I hid my nightmares. Now I could not find the right words.
In July 1982, my homeland was still called Yugoslavia. My mother died. My father had left before my birth, and nobody was too crazy about adding a 15-year-old girl to the roster of mouths to feed. My mother’s brother took me in reluctantly. I had one chance.
So began my war with my family. In my country, as the world has seen, revenge can never be too brutal, and I used all of the resources available to a teenage girl. I dragged home inappropriate dates, or dragged myself in, drunk and stoned at breakfast time, and finally dropped out of school. Pretty soon my uncle’s verdict was in; I was told to go live with my father. I tried. We tried. I moved to Greece, where he lived part of the year, and discovered more of the power of drugs—revenge and oblivion, combined. Father endured my getting stoned all the time, but not my wasting his money on tuition, so a few months after I arrived to Athens, I took two-day cargo-train ride back to Belgrade.
I moved back into my mother’s apartment, empty since her death. I quickly made a mess of things. The electricity was shut off. I don’t think I knew I had to pay for it. The government sent me welfare checks, but I never went to the bank to cash them. I didn’t even have ID. But it was still warm, and I stayed out at night visiting friends. The best remedy for an empty refrigerator: showing up at someone else’s dinnertime.
Then one day, right before the winter, my crazy cousin Silky (a nickname he earned for crying once—a crime for a boy in our family) showed up at my door with a suitcase. He had left his home—he’d been hearing “TV people,” the demons that visited him regularly, and the family wanted a cuckoo crybaby just as much as they wanted me. Silky saw the checks on the table and told me he could deposit them, get the electricity turned back on, and even clean up a little.
“You can take the other room, then.” I said.
He moved in and every morning picked his way from his room to the bathroom, stepping over my junky friends sprawled on the floor. By then, everyone who had no place to go and no money for drugs was welcome in my living room. He kept his “medicine,” a bottle of moonshine with which he started his days, in the bathroom. When I asked why he didn’t keep it in his bedroom, he said, They find you by the bottle signals.
* * *
I hadstarted to go to school again. One day there was a writing competition. The twist was that we would write pseudonymously, and the best piece would be published anonymously.
Something about the idea that no one would know who wrote the piece lit a feverish fire inside my pen. I wrote and wrote, feeling alive for the first time in years, when the bell rang and we had to stop. I slipped the paper into the bottom of the pile so that no one could figure out it was mine, walked out of the school, and forgot about it.
Two weeks later my story won the award. The writer was called forth to give his name. (For some reason everyone thought the piece was written by a boy.) I crumpled the receipt with the code name written on it. I would not dream of telling anyone I was the author. But since that day, I have never stopped writing. I didn’t stop even after I dropped out of school a few months later, not even at night, sitting in the dark in my apartment next to a flashlight, or a candle when I didn’t have money for a battery.
Silky and I lived peacefully, save for the occasional “TV people” visits (by then we knew that unplugging the TV from the wall did the trick of shutting them up): we were a bad girl and her schizo cousin who scared the neighbor’s kids. The only problem became getting ink for my fountain pen. Then I developed symbols (my own shorthand, really). Within a year I must have had close to a thousand pages written in longhand in the undecipherable language of adolescence.
What would have happened if we had stayed there? I don’t know. In 1989 Milosevic took over our already insane Balkan world. The war was about to explode. Like me, a child of a mixed marriage between a Serb and a Muslim, Silky was forced into immigration. Canada needed people who, like Silky, were good with numbers. I went to New York. We spoke twice a day.
* * *
I loved New York. I could disappear completely, get as far away from the hell of my personal memories. I became fiction—the abused, raped, betrayed junky disappeared each time I opened my mouth. Soon I found out that I was not afraid to say anything in English: for some reason it was easier to learn how to write in another language than it was to try and say what I had to say in my own. There are things I still can’t say in Serbian—emotions, for example, are too painful to express. I was almost happy. The war in Bosnia raged on. Then the mass graves in Srebrenica become public knowledge. NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999. Already a student of fiction at Columbia University, I sat down and started a short story about a Muslim soldier who returns home after the war. I didn’t use any dates, no real geographical places. I just told the story. This was my first novel, Homecoming.
And in 2002 I managed to get a little closer to my past. I started what I called a memoir, a first-person narrative about a young girl who escapes death by sheer luck. I was having a lot of trouble recalling things in the order in which they occurred. Buildings in which I lived, the clothes I wore. The facts of my past, the dates, the names, the distance were drowning my efforts, the intensity of my story.
I was still calling my project nonfiction when Silky leaped from the fifth floor onto the concrete. Four hours before he took flight, he had called and cried on my answering machine. I didn’t call him back right away—I was away with a boyfriend who asked no questions about the past. Nobody saw what happened.
Caught in the darkness of my grief I sat down to write. I started by writing Silky’s real name on the paper. Then I stopped. I had no idea how to continue. Do I say how tall he was (six-foot-three), or how old (42), what he weighed (190 lbs.), the height of the building from which he jumped? The more facts I used to describe the events, the further away from Silky I was getting.
Elie Wiesel wrote “to touch the bottom of madness.” Where is the bottom, I wondered? Then I got it, and I erased Silky’s real name. I wrote “Silky” instead, and in the same feverish way I wrote Homecoming, when the only way to express the madness of war was to tell a Muslim soldier’s story in its aftermath, I wrote for many hours, ignoring that dry, tedious trap of “what actually happened.”
In other words, I returned to fiction.
* * *
Excerpt from You Don’t Have to Live Here
The Serbs at the party huddle closer. The patriotic songs are about to start. Brandy pours down. Tears of pride follow. The Serbian men are pledging to freedom. It’s on its way. Sweet Freedom. Sweet Victory. Long live Serbia. More tears of pride stream down their faces, and they hug one another – Brother, for you I would kill anybody; for you and for our beloved Serbia – and they hug one another some more and sing and cry.
In the morning, the television and a piece of wall are missing; somebody has taken a hammer and knocked out part of it. Had to have been Marko, the one boasting of nationalism the most, and of the soon-to-be-rightfully-restored Christian right to pillage Muslim women. . . . Three years later, when the last of the Muslims leave Belgrade, [one] will be holding on to the hand of a son Marko will never know. A steep payment for some torn off cement, a black-and-white TV set, and a lot of bragging? Maybe? But by then Marko will have long volunteered to serve in the Serbian special units called the Red Berets, responsible for a lot more than my wall.
I stop at the Mental Building to say good-bye to Juma. The family’s kept the news about Mother’s death away from her. She hasn’t been sleeping. She stopped sleeping and reading the Britannica after she returned from Cuba. She just sits by the window. Aunt Ludmilla says the orderlies don’t even lock her door anymore.
Take me with you, she says with her back turned to me.
How did you know it was me? I ask.
Who else could it be?
I can’t take you, I say. I know, America is for the strong.
I am sorry, I say.
Don’t be. You don’t have to live here.
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About the Author
Natasha Radojcic was born in Belgrade. In her early 20s, on her own, she came to New York City, earned an MFA in fiction writing from Columbia University, and stayed. She is the author of Homecoming.
