The Book of My Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

sometimes,” sang Bowie all the way to Kinshasa, “about sound and vision?”

 
    FAMILY DINING
    1
    Back in the happy days of my mildly troubled adolescence, my parents returned from work around 3:45 p.m., so the family dinner—which we called ru č ak , which is lunch—was at 4:00. The radio would always be on for the four o’clock news, featuring all varieties of global decline, international disasters, and the homey accomplishments of socialism. My sister and I would submit to an interrogation on school matters by our parents and were never allowed to eat in silence, let alone read or watch television. Whatever conversation we mustered up had to be terminated for the weather forecast at 4:25; the dinner was usually over by 4:30. We were obligated to finish everything on our plates and thank our mother for her efforts. Then everyone would retreat for a nap, after which we would have coffee and cake, sometimes an argument.
    My sister and I took our family meals to be a means of parental oppression. We regularly complained: the soup too salty, the green peas served too often, the weather forecasters obviously lying; the cake too unattractive. For the two of us, the ideal dining experience simultaneously involved ć evapi (grilled skinless sausages, a kind of Bosnian fast food), comic books, loud music, television, and the absence of our parents and weather forecasting.
    In October 1983, at the age of nineteen, I was conscribed in the Yugoslav People’s Army and served in Š tip, a town in eastern Macedonia, which apart from the military barracks was home to a bubble-gum factory. I was in infantry, where the dominant training approach was ceaseless debasement, beginning with the way we were fed. At mealtime, we would line up on a vast tarmac—where our hunger was exacerbated by the bubble-gum smells wafting in the air—undergo a roll call, and then march into the cafeteria, unit by unit, soldier by soldier, sliding our icky trays along the rails, each of us thinking up a way to solicit a bigger slice of bread from the all-powerful and pitiless kitchen staff.
    The choices were impressively limited, stamping upon our minds the basic quality of serving —none of the choices could ever be ours. For breakfast, apart from dry bread, we would get a boiled egg, a packet of rancid margarine, occasionally a slice of sticky, thick, unsmoked bacon (if you were deft and quick, which I was not, you could solicit it from a Muslim); we washed it all down with tepid, sweet tea or decondensed milk in plastic cups that had been absorbing grease for an eternity. Lunch always required the use of a spoon; the most common and widely beloved dish (which I profoundly hated) was a thick bean soup—complete with tiny sprouts that looked exactly like maggots—because it filled up the starving heroes-in-the-making and allowed for an encyclopedia of fart jokes, complete with sound effects. Dinner consisted of modified lunch leftovers, unless it was the very same lunch all over again (once we had green peas for nine consecutive meals), plus a greasy cup of prune-based bowel-movement potion. Even if we wanted to talk to one another, there was never time for conversation, for we had to devour the crappy grub quickly and then clear out for another ravenous unit. A persistent rumor claimed that bromide was added to all the food to keep soldiers docile and hard-ons down.
    And those were the good meals. We longed for them when we left the barracks to be deployed in the arid Macedonian plains and practice sacrificing our lives to dam the flood of foreign invasion. Between hypothetical heroic victories we slurped indefinable concoctions out of canteens or munched on the contents of our MREs: stale crackers, ancient tuna from cans, impenetrable dried fruit. Perpetually hungry, I recalled my family dinners before sleep and constructed elaborate future menus featuring roast lamb or ham-and-cheese crepes or my mother’s spinach pie. The fantasy just made me