One weekend in July 1993, when independent Slovenia was two years old, my father announced over breakfast: “Ana, our life will change soon”.
I immediately thought of poverty, which I was obsessed with at the time, and began listing items we could sell.
“Don’t worry”, my mother said, “we will just be hosting another family for a while”.
I was excited. With another family added to ours, I could get siblings – finally! “How many are they? Who are they?” I gleefully asked.
“Well”, my father answered, “we don’t exactly know them. We know their names – the mother is U, the father is H and their teenage daughter is M. They’re from Bosnia”.
I was barely eight, but I understood something about Bosnia: it was a country at war. There was already a Bosnian child in my class, who had told me his family had to flee because of who they were and how they prayed. My new classmate was sadder than anyone I’d ever met before, and I promised him that this new country of ours would help him to breathe easier. Our young country had, of course, been created precisely because it wanted to make everyone happy, I reasoned.
This built-in national promise extended to U, H and M as well, so I ordered my parents to be on their best behaviour for once.
They laughed.
And they listened. When the new family arrived, my parents acted benevolently, but what’s more – they were fun. They invited U, H and M to play cards and take walks together, and they involved the Bosnian family in their little garden projects.
I cooperated to the best of my ability, but had an agenda of my own. As soon as I realised what praying differently meant, I couldn’t stop asking them about their God. “Did he also die on the cross? What does he think of animals? Can he be inexplicably cruel?” All of my questions were leading to the ultimate question that I never mustered up the courage to ask: did he also numbly watch as a brother killed a brother? Although I was obsessed with poverty, it was Cain and Abel’s story that haunted me.
Our living arrangement quickly became tedious. My parents’ eyes were larger than their stomachs, as the Slovene proverb warns. Not only was our house far from finished, we also didn’t have enough beds – or room for a new one. Someone would always have to sleep on the floor, causing morning stiffness and pain.
The family moved in with our neighbours, who had actual rooms to spare. My father still wanted to be useful, so he offered H paid work in his car parts business and my mother oversaw the family’s “bureaucracy and administration”, as she called it. She also drank litres of coffee with U on our terrace. In the meantime, I buzzed around M incessantly in an effort to befriend her, which didn’t really work. She was older and much quieter than me; she preferred books over playing in the street. We nevertheless walked to school together often after a morning cup of hot cocoa.
By the next spring, the family’s life had settled. Or so it seemed to me. Then one day, H declared they were leaving for Germany – my heart broke. As they were loading their belongings into a small car that my father had arranged, I asked my parents if they were leaving because this new country of ours is not happy enough.
“Germany is a bit older and therefore richer. They might have more opportunities there”, my mother answered.
That day, I hugged U and H and M as tightly as I could. After I had said goodbye and wished them all the best, I accepted my mother’s view as the truth.
But today Slovenia is a little over 32, and I am a little over 38 years old. Today, I have no God, neither Catholic nor Muslim – I just have social media accounts. I search for M on those social media accounts sometimes, but unfortunately never find her.
What I do find is a legion of Slovene-speaking men and women who see no issue in dangerous far-right ideology of the kind espoused by Janez Janša, the leader of the biggest hard-right party.
Quite the contrary: I find their many online likes – their applause, their racism and their Islamophobia – proof that the myth of Slovene-ness and the myth of Slovene independence that nationalists seeded have successfully germinated. Grown. I, essentially, find a lot of hate, propelled by fear. This is fear that nationalists have managed to whip up despite our country not having very many immigrant workers, refugees or even citizens who were born outside the Balkan region. Such is their grip on public imagination.
Janša, a former prime minister, tweeted a call to arms after a pro-Palestinian protest in Ljubljana. Slovenians, he said, should arm themselves against Arab and Muslim migrants, who in his view pose a serious threat to western civilisation. For three decades now this man has been trying to usurp the very idea of what Slovenia is.
Today, I know that every country, be it two years or 32 years old, is always just old – always already a relic. In order for its nationhood to be conceived, it will have resorted to some of the oldest tricks in the book: violence, dehumanisation of certain groups of people – those whose ethnic or religious identities do not align with the country’s founding idea – and carving up the land at random.
Today, it is the very concepts of country and nationality that haunt me. That’s not surprising: a country is a Cain. A Cain is not just an envious figure. It is a figure that desires power.
Still, I was right, in part, when I was eight. What I witnessed and took part in back then was something new. It had nothing to do with sovereignty, fresh lines on the maps of Europe, wealth or “bureaucracy and administration”. It had everything to do with community.
What I would still like to ask you, M and U and H, is if this community of ours helped you breathe easier, and if you found a community where you can now breathe fully. If it’s not the Gods who want that, I am sure there are still some humans who do.
Ana Schnabl is a Slovenian novelist, editor and critic.