THE TASTE OF NAMES

THE TASTE OF NAMES

- Excerpt from a novel –

VIDA

Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1998

Here’s what you need to know about me:

1. My Name is Vida. I used to hate my name, but I don’t anymore.

2. I was born in Yugoslavia, so I’m Yugoslavian, but I’m also Serbian, because everyone here has at least two national identities. And now that the war is coming, who knows what we will all be called once it’s over.

3. I am eighteen going on nineteen and I’ve never been kissed.

4. I look just like my father, only with long hair. His features are so dark, people have nicknamed him Crni (Black), just like his ancestor on his father’s side, Đorđe Petrović (or Black George), the hero of Serbian independence against the Turks.

5. My mother stopped speaking when my baby brother died. I was nine at the time. She hasn’t said a word, to me or anyone else, in nine years. It’s like she fell asleep and got lost in a dream. I feed her meals and stories every day, hoping she might wake up.

6. My grandmother hates me and the air that I breathe. I have yet to figure out why.

7. I smell colors, hear shapes, and taste names. I’m not entirely sure that I’m human.

8. I hear voices. They tell me things no one else knows. When I was little, I was afraid of them, but now I can’t imagine swimming through the world without them. They function like a sixth sense and in Serbia someone like me needs one just to stay alive.

9. I don’t have many friends, but some of them are gods, which is a pretty good tradeoff.

10. I’ve been in love with my best friend, Despot, since the age of seven. He is oblivious to that fact, and he will be fleeing to America soon, because being an 18-year-old boy in Yugoslavia right now is like dancing with Death.

11. You may not know it, but everything is alive and has a spirit: chairs, letter openers, saltshakers, soil, irises, walnuts, shoes, washing machines, thimbles, sweet paprika, flowerpots with a hole in the bottom, moon, spatulas, water. Especially water.

12. I like rivers, doorways, silence, Converse shoes, holy basil, stories, lists, and the number 13.

13. My favorite thing in the world, after Despot, is cooking.

FROM VIDA’S COOKBOOK: Plum slatko to honor all visitors, no matter what they’re bringing

Every guest is welcome in a Serbian home and offered slatko, sugary preserves made with plums or other fruits that sweetens even the bitterest of days and the worst of destinies. It is a great way to turn a foe into a friend; a little sweetness goes a long way.

A spoonful of slatko must always be chased down by a glass of ice-cold water. Don’t forget to serve water with slatko; one needs the other to express itself fully.

To make the best slatko, you should always talk to the plums first, the way you would to children: the honey in them will recognize the honey in your voice and will rush to the surface to greet you. If you look closely, you will notice that some of the plums you just spoke to have cried tears of joy: they will appear along the edges and around the stalk in the form of little golden droplets. Once you see them, you will know that the plums have indeed heard you and have agreed to be cooked with sugar and made even sweeter in the process. It’s important that you ask first before taking; that is the way of making all things friendlier.

Ingredients:

1 kg friendly plums

1 kg sugar

Lemon juice (the sunnier the lemon smells, the better)

Vanilla

A handful of rose petals (especially important if you’re hiding any bitterness under your tongue)

As with any other recipe, it’s always good to compliment your ingredients. Like people, plums will be sweeter and more fragrant if praised than if scolded. Save your swear words for battle; they have no place in the kitchen and have been known to poison the food and make the eater sick.

The words you use as you prepare slatko must be soft and round, like the plums. Once tasted, they will banish all ill will and fear, which are one and the same.

WHAT VIDA REMEMBERS

Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1985

“You are a bad child, Vida.”

My Grandmother, Baba Zora, is in the know.

She spits once, like the words she just uttered are too heavy on her tongue and she must expel them before they burn a hole in it. She doesn’t do it out of superstitious fear, like so many babas, grandmothers, do: mock-spitting three times to ward off the evil eye and knocking on the nearest piece of wood to invoke the blessings of the spirits that dwell in it.

No, she isn’t calling me bad and worthless so that Death and Misfortune wouldn’t hear her praise and take me too soon. She isn’t bursting with carefully concealed joy, secretly thinking how lovely and plump my arms are, how long and dark my eyelashes, how endearing my giggle.

She isn’t concerned with invisible demons, listening intently. She truly means it.

I am a bad, good-for-nothing child. And bad children grow up to be even shoddier adults, so they must be disciplined before they’ve had time to grow into their worst selves.

Only bad, very bad little girls enter their Grandmother’s attic room at the top of the creaky staircase while she’s at church, and get caught in the act. For no one is to enter Baba Zora’s room.

Only bad, very bad little girls are then sent out into the communal garden, wedged between grey pre-war buildings, golden with summer haze, to pick the switch with which they will be punished. And if it is your first time picking the switch that you are to be whipped with, you too might make the mistake of picking a thin, green one, thinking it would hurt less. But you will soon learn that the thinnest ones hurt the most.

If you are one of these bad, good-for-nothing children, your Grandmother may say, her words like spells wishing unspeakable things into being:

“Vida, there’s a devil in you, black as night, and I will beat it out of you. Now kiss the switch you picked.”

And if you’re quite as bad as I was back then, quite as bad as I surely still am now, at the age of nineteen, you may refuse to kiss the switch, too. And if your Grandmother is anything like Baba Zora, you will sorely regret that choice.

There are five things you might remember, later:

1. The way the switch cuts through the air, with a crunch, like through an apple.

2. The whispered swish that always comes before the pain.

3. The way the switch rests in midair for a moment before it splits open the center of your right palm, like a ripe pomegranate from Dalmatian coast.

4. The way the skin rises up, like two pink embankments on each side of a red river.

5. The way Baba Zora smells as she moves in for a second strike, like Dr. Oetker vanilla sugar, dry willow wreaths, angry sweat, and secrets.

FROM VIDA’S COOKBOOK: Creamed spinach to feed your resilience

Pick the most stalwart plant you can find, the one that was forgotten and left uncovered during the winter. The one whose leaves froze and died, but the plant itself survived and grew new, pale leaves in the spring. You will know it by its roots—red like chicken legs and smooth.

Wash the leaves tenderly and briefly boil them in hot, salted water, until their color changes to an unforgiving green. Drain them and chop them up finely. If there is a song waiting in your throat to be released, this is the time to do it.

Once chopped up, cook the spinach in butter, add flour and crushed garlic and a little Vegeta seasoning. If you are Serbian, like me, you already have your jar of Vegeta handy.

Soothe the spinach with strained milk until it forms a thick, creamy mixture. Let it simmer for a while, until it takes on a resolute shade of pale green.

Serve on a large plate, with two eggs fried sunny side up, like a smile.

WHAT WATER TOLD VIDA

Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1998

The boy I love knows many things. Some of them are:

1. How to play upright bass with his 18-year-old forehead furrowed like the waters of the vast ocean he needs to cross to get to America, the land of Brooklyn Spearmint gum, Levi’s 501, and his wildest dreams.

2. How to fill out a Diversity Lottery application in English that he learned by watching Johnny Bravo on Cartoon Network and become one of the 696 people from Yugoslavia to get a green card that most boys our age waiting in line to be drafted into the war they never asked for would gladly give an eye, a hand, or a kidney for.

3. How to pack all his worldly possessions into one large suitcase and one upright bass case and say goodbye to his weeping mother with only the slightest quiver of his lower lip, but no tears.

4. How not to notice things that few others could ignore, like the fact that his best friend, me, is desperately, stupidly, hopelessly in love with him and has been since the day we met in first grade, 11 years ago.

He is the one I love, this boy who knows so many things worth knowing and is utterly clueless about other, equally important ones. His name is Despot, but that’s not his fault.

He was born in the Belgrade City Hospital on the morning of May 4, 1980. His mother says that she woke up before sunrise that day because she dreamt that river Sava was singing to her, an impossibly beautiful song, cloaked in longing, but once she woke up, she could no longer remember it. But there was another river, flowing between her legs, and she stumbled out of bed and into the street with an old towel stuffed between her knees.

She was rushed to the hospital in a clunky, vanilla-scented Mercedes taxicab, screaming in the throes of labor, amniotic fluid gushing out of her like water from a broken pipe, in perfect rhythm with the folk music blaring from the ancient radio and the terrified cabbie spitting curses through his tobacco-stained teeth. Despite the labor pains and the humiliation of almost giving birth in a taxi, all she could think of as she was being rolled into the hospital on a metal gurney was the song of the river that stubbornly refused to come back to her.

The same day Despot was born, the beloved president and dictator Josip Broz Tito died. It was only a decade before Yugoslavia was to be dissolved. Some things can’t survive the death of those who created them. The entire country was in mourning that day, people sobbing and wailing at the top of their voices in the streets and collapsing to the ground in heaps of wordless sorrow.

What followed four days later was the largest state funeral in history, only to be surpassed by that of Pope John Paul II several decades later. Among the mourners queuing to pay their last respect to Tito were 31 presidents, 22 prime ministers, 47 ministers of foreign affairs, six princes, and four kings. And then, there were millions of average Draganas and Dragans grieving in a much less dignified manner, at their homes and in the streets of every city, town, and village in Yugoslavia. With everyone so wholly enveloped in grief, not a single person rejoiced Despot’s birth, except for his mother. She secretly thought that President Tito had gotten way too much attention while he was alive, and that it was now her son’s turn to shine.

It was the end of an era, so Despot’s mother refused to bestow upon him one of the popular names that celebrated long-awaited freedom, hard-won peace, and selfless camaraderie, like Slobodan, Vladimir, or Branimir. Instead, she decided to name him after her great- grandfather Despot Bogdanovic, who was said to have been a stern but kind-hearted man. In a word, it was a travesty of a name, guaranteed to attract unwanted attention and cruel jabs of particularly mean schoolmates. But, as a true Serbian woman, Despot’s mother chose her son’s name out of spite, and that made it perfectly acceptable in her eyes.

However, what she never acknowledged, even to herself, was the fact that the word despot denotes an emperor or a king with unlimited power; a tyrant. And so, as one despot perished on May 4th, 1980 in the private room on the seventh floor of the Department of Cardiovascular Surgery at the University Medical Centre in Ljubljana, another, much less powerful and highhanded one was born at the stark and austere maternity ward of the Belgrade City Hospital, devoid of lavish flowers and not nearly as quiet, where his mother shared the room with seven other women. So, in a way, Despot was really named after President Tito. And ever since he opened his eyes and looked around the hospital room, he’d had only one thought: How do I get out of this stink hole of a country?

Despot never gave his name a second thought, until he started first grade at the age of seven years and three months. The teasing and taunting started almost immediately, as having an unusual name turned out to be enough of a reason for him to be singled out by his classmates.

“Hey Despot, was your mother drunk when she named you?” one boy would ask and before Despot could think of a good retort, another one would supply: “No, she just thought it was a perfect name for a skinny little bastard!”

The only crime that a child could commit in the Belgrade of the late eighties greater than to bear an unusual name was to lack a father. And Despot was guilty of both.

WHAT VIDA REMEMBERS

Belgrade, Yugoslavia, 1988

It’s the third week of first grade and even at the age of 7, I am painfully aware of how the unwritten rule of good and bad names works. My father named me Vida, after my grandmother’s long-departed friend from youth. Nobody else in the entire first grade is called Vida. A couple of kids in class have grandmothers or great-aunts with that name, but the girls are all called Ana, Marina, Sania. All perfectly lovely and age-appropriate names. Not mine.

When I was barely four, my mother explained that my name meant “eyesight” or “life.” She said there once was a Pagan and early Christian deity by the name of St. Vid, the god of battle, fertility, and abundance, which didn’t sound too impressive to me. He was also the patron saint of clairvoyants and healers, my mother added, which I liked more.

Whenever I think of my name, I see a whirlwind of luscious green foliage, like a jungle, and angular Cyrillic letters intertwining endlessly, like snakes. It tastes like lemongrass: invigorating, tangy, and with a hint of bitterness. It’s fragrant and glossy, with sharp, triangular tips. Perhaps not the most delicious of names, but a name with the flavor one wouldn’t easily forget.

There’s this boy in my class. He’s called Despot. His name is so different than mine: smooth and rounded, like a chocolate truffle coated in cocoa powder, soft and brown. But he is, nevertheless, relentlessly teased for his name, just like me. Why they tease me, I can understand. Fluffy pink candy floss flavored girl names are infinitely superior to a green one. So are the powder-blue ones that taste of rosewater and lightly toasted, sugarcoated almonds. But can’t the other kids see the potential behind the name such as Despot? All the dark, chocolaty richness lurking right below its powdery surface. The silky bubbles of joy that slowly melt in my mouth as I taste his name on my tongue.

I wait for recess to let him know how special his name is.

“Hey,” I announce to Despot. I pause and click my tongue silently seven times. He is playing cars by himself on the edge of the playground. He looks up at me, pushing his sun streaked bangs out of his dark eyes.

“Hey,” he mutters in response, and lowers his gaze back to battered toy cars in front of him.

He has two—a green one and a red one. The red one tastes like gummy bears and the green one like sour apple candy.

“Hey, Despot,” I say again, louder this time.

“Yeah?” he responds, without looking up. I’m just this weird girl from his class. The one that’s always counting cracks in the pavement. He’s willing to tolerate me, for now, because his mother told him to be nice to girls.

“Your name,” I start, unsure where I’m going with it. I pause to lick my chapped lips.

The warm wind whips a strand of my bushy dark hair into my eyes. I brush it away like an annoying insect.

“I know your name is brown,” I say with more conviction, “but it tastes really good. Like chocolate and stuff. Really, really good.”

I can hear someone sniggering in the background.

Despot looks up, confused. “What?”

There is no backing out of it now. I raise my voice: “I said your name is brown and it tastes like chocolate. And it’s better than other names.”

This is for the benefit of other kids who are now listening to our conversation, uninvited, but nevertheless intrigued. More kids start laughing. I do my best to ignore them. One of the older boys makes a poor attempt at a wolf-whistle.

A couple of girls giggle and one squeals, loudly enough for everyone to hear, in a grating, sing-songy voice: “Weird Vida likes Dorky Despot!”

“I do not!” I yell, not looking at her. I’m clicking my tongue rapidly. Seven. Fourteen. Twenty-one times.

“Vida likes Despot, Vida likes Despot!” more kids start chanting, nudging each other conspiratorially.

“No, I don’t!” I bellow, turning to face our audience, tears of rage in my eyes. “Despot and Vida, boyfriend and girlfriend!” sing the rest of the kids.

One of the older boys shrieks, his voice whiny and high-pitched. He puckers his thin lips into a mockery of a kiss: “Hey guys, look, I’m Vida! You are my chocolate, Despot!”

Then, without warning, the thin-lipped boy pushes me onto Despot, who is swaying on the balls of his feet, unsure where to go and what to do with his hands. Despot is one of the nice boys, and I’ve never seen him hit a girl or even pull a girl’s hair like the rest of them. But he has his limits too.

I stumble when the older boy pushes me, lose my balance, and fall on Despot.

And Despot does the only logical thing for a seven-year-old boy in his situation: he pushes me away with as much power and as far as he can, to distance himself from me, the freak.

All that drivel about his name—it’s not his fault that Weird Vida decided to pick on him today. I land on my hands, my palms and knees scraped and protesting in pain. The burning feeling in them is a bright, angry, painfully tart orange.

The bell shrills across the schoolyard, announcing the end of recess. It sounds like a box of sewing needles landing on a tin roof: silvery, salty, prickly. Everyone rushes towards their classrooms, Despot among them, their laughter and shouts fading in the distance.

I’m alone. But that’s nothing new.