The first time my wife and I came to a Yugoslav border post together, in the summer of 1971, was conspicuously reminiscent of a bad and malicious, or simply anti-Yugoslav, movie script. It was late at night. The serpentine approach from the Austrian side grew darker and more foreboding, the potholes in the narrow road became increasingly numerous, and the road-signs grew ever less legible. Our dilapidated V.W. camper coughed uphill alone, as there was no traffic in either direction. We cheerfully noted the change and joked about the Iron Curtain horror stories. After many a twist in the road, we finally arrived. We saw a poorly maintained and illuminated one-story building with musty window-panes in modern aluminum frames, and a flat roof which was decorated with a limp Yugoslav flag; a red and white bar with a red stop sign stretching across the road; and two policemen in blue uniforms sitting comfortably at a small unpainted and greasy table located on the pavement between the building and the striped bar. The remnants of their last meal were strewn on the table-top. One of the policemen was fat, pink, red-eyed, and visibly dull-witted, while the other was small, wiry, pock-marked, emaciated, dark-skinned, and irritable. Both of them sported toothpicks in their mouths, and they acknowledged our arrival with the indolence of petty officials in possession of unlimited powers over the quotidian affairs of their squirming and scheming subjects. We got out of the camper and stretched our stiff limbs. Everything ached, as we had not had a proper rest since Darmstadt, Germany. They poured over our papers slowly and meticulously. The crimson Yugoslav passport and the gray American passport did not match well in their minds. The enemy never sleeps, as the expression goes, and every precaution must be taken carefully and deliberately. Besides, there is not much else to do out there. We had nothing to declare, and our appearance supported our claim to their satisfaction. There were no problems with our papers either. They were in perfect order, and the two returned them to us without a word, eyeing us with unabashed suspicion. The fat one eventually said “Go!” and motioned toward Yugoslavia. My wife asked where the toilet was, and the fat one pointed somewhere behind him with his thumb, yawning loudly all the while. His golden teeth shone victoriously in the dark. A couple of minutes went by in awkward silence. They watched me. They were immobile. As I waited impatiently in front of the camper, the skinny one finally motioned vaguely toward me and asked: “Hey, you, is she rich?” He, too, pointed toward the toilet, and grinned conspiratorially. I smiled, mumbled something to the effect that she was not, and ambled away from their improvised outdoor post. My blood was boiling. I understood his question well, and I felt like screaming at the top of my lungs. He could not imagine what other reason could I have for marrying such a scrawny and otherwise unappealing creature: all the cow-like features that he appreciated in a woman were palpably absent. There was nothing soft and cushy there to sink into. Out of sheer politeness he had omitted the qualifying words he had in mind: “at least.” I understood his intimacy, as well. It was us, me and them, against her—an alien. He tactfully refrained from winking at me, and I appreciated that. As we drove away, hoping to find a place to sleep somewhere nearby, my wife was amused by my rage. She could not care less. She was tired but content. The long drive was nearing an end. Perhaps she was also used to bad and malicious movie scripts… The only complaint she had was that instead of toilet-paper she found pieces of newspaper stuck on a large nail driven into the door of the toilet. She had correctly inferred the function of this display, as there was no logic to the clippings, but she claimed that this discovery was rather uncomfortable, if not painful. My shame and my pain meant nothing to her back in the summer of 1971.

Addendum (February 22, 2000)

Exhausted after a long ride, we crashed in the first hotel we found on the Yugoslav side of the border. When we woke up late next morning, I pushed to the side the heavy curtains. On the other side of the road there stood one of my father’s hotels, which I last saw a couple of years earlier as a model in his design office in Belgrade. Only then I realized we were in Kranjska Gora, a skiing resort a few minutes from both Austrian and Italian borders. As I am writing this into my notebook, I am standing between the two hotels. Dorian and Maya are playing in the snow while Lauren is being fitted with skiing boots in a ski rental shop. The hotel in which Elise and I stayed is called Kompas. The ski rental shop is just outside its lobby. My father’s hotel is called Larix, that is, “larch” in Latin. The two hotels are exactly as I remember them minus the wear and tear of the intervening three decades.