Love and Hydrogen (9 page)

When the Germans came my parents enlisted in the first Slovene brigade to be named after a poet, in their case, Cankar.
(“The
people will write their destiny alone / Without tuxedoes, or the
beads of priests.”)
They fought illiteracy by giving begging children pencils and paper instead of money or candy. They disseminated periodicals like
Death to Death!
and
Today's Woman.
They lectured on the relation between spontaneity and ideology. They used doors for blackboards. They stayed frozen and hungry. They stopped at doorways from Stajerska to Koruska and sang the old Slovene songs to pry some bread out of the shuttered homesteads. Sometimes they were allowed to sleep in the barn.

My grandmother was my mother's mother. Her father had been a minor railway official and had died of typhus. Her mother had been widowed with six children, my grandmother the last of the six. By the time I knew her, she had her little bit of jam each morning in a spoon that had to be cleaned just so the night before.

She described her son-in-law as someone with a good memory, but no depth. Our father always smiled when she said so. It was hard for us to imagine him as having shot Germans. He was pleasant and gentle, if not always direct.

Before the war, he'd worked late into the night, under a feeble lamp, to enable imprisoned comrades to mull over the most recent literature and prepare themselves for the battle outside. My mother had made lists and tea and helped him with the phrasing. They saw themselves as in battle with the medieval darkness and fury in the souls of our backward peasants. They believed the Party and the movement were very special, and that people within the Party and the movement were very special. They were convinced that they had a scientific ideology. Misery and despair were all around them, and the more unbearable life became, the closer they were to the new world. Implementing decisions was not sufficient. Anyone could do that. They had to transform themselves so that at any time all of their actions could be measured in terms of the interests of the revolution. The role of history's observers had seemed undignified once history had pointed the way to final freedom and brotherhood among men. A PERSON ABOUT TO LEAVE prison suddenly becomes loved by everyone. And he feels the same about those he is leaving behind. Quarrels and hatreds are forgotten and forgiven, and he says good-bye warmly and directly, as if nothing had ever happened.

The night before my departure for the West I wept and waited for the dawn. While I made tea and watched the sun rise, my mother and father brought my belongings—a suit and a few other things, packed and creased and smelling of mothballs—to the door. My lawyer came with me to get a big shot to sign the necessary final papers. In the corridor where we waited there were several frantic young men. I registered little of the train trip to the airport. Willows and alders along clear streams.

Colors and smells overwhelmed me when I stepped off the plane at Schiphol. Women in spring coats and hats, strange fashions. My translator met me with a hug, though she was a pretty young woman. I rode to the city in a stupor. A far-off bridge, suspended on an invisible thread. A university. A square in front of it.

I was left in my new flat to tidy up after my trip. I wandered to the back garden. A branch full of purple blossoms hung over the wall, and from the window of the house next door a young woman was shaking rugs. In my own language, I told her I was a persecuted student. I asked if she would lend me a rug to lie on. She smiled.

My eyes filled with tears for my father. What hadn't he thrown underfoot and sacrificed? He'd built himself a life which, for the sake of an idea, had buried itself. A life surrounded by spite in a godforsaken, frightened little town. They thought they were doing it for us, and for our children. But this was the world of their imagination, and they'd pictured it falsely to us, and we at first hadn't wanted to believe things to be different.

MICHELS WAS THE PERFECT COACH for me. He required fantastic discipline. Even with the assistant coaches he was like an animal trainer. He told me I was his favorite player because I couldn't ask him questions. He told us all that when we came to the stadium, we were the numbers on our backs. When we left, we became people and he could talk to us.

Each night I went home satisfied to my flat with its one chair. I never understood why you'd play a game in which you lost four kilos of your body weight for nothing. When you put on the shirt and laced up the boots, you had to win. Otherwise you might as well stay at home and watch the television.

With such an attitude I was very helpful to the Dutch, who were not naturally ferocious. If there was an art to defending, they were blind to it. They prized Technique and Tactics. Courage, will to win, speed, size: none of that aroused much interest.

So during training sessions Michels did all he could to develop aggression. We played games in which he acted as the referee from hell, calling the fouls with such enraging one-sidedness that our nickname for the matches became the Bloodbaths. He made sure we lived only football: he got our salaries raised, so that Cruyff could leave the printing works, Keizer the tobacco shop, Swart his haberdashery.

Understand, though: he never scored the goals. He did his part, and we did ours.

We couldn't believe, ourselves, what we held in our palms. Against MVV Maastricht in our first game we won 9–3 and I scored five goals. A defender! We scored 122 goals in the League season.

Johan Cruyff, Piet Keizer, Barry Hulshoff, Ruud Krol, Gerrie Mühren: they were all unleashed, with me, on Liverpool in the fog in the second round of the European Champions' Cup on the 7th of December, 1966. Together we remade the football globe. Liverpool barely deigned to look over at us during the warm-ups; the side was stuffed with demigods from their World Cup Champion team of the previous summer. While we stretched, the fog rolled in, and the game was played in such a murk that the scoreboard operator, who sat near our bench, needed runners to let him know what was happening down the ends of the field. He demanded confirmation when told we'd scored the first goal, and then confirmation when told we'd scored the second, and then, when the third went in, less than ten minutes into the match, he shouted at his runners, “Come on, boys, don't make up stories!” His words were reprinted in all the Dutch newspapers the next day. One front page, in letters large enough that there was room for nothing else, proclaimed: AJAX 5–1! Everywhere we went—shops, cinemas, schools, restaurants—those two numbers appeared.

When we traveled to Liverpool for the second leg, everyone said that now we had their attention. Their coach predicted they'd win 7–0. We drew, 2–2. An Amsterdam headline read AJAX WINS, 2–2.

Was there a connection between cultural and football revolutions? Reporters wanted our opinions. Keizer said no. Hulshoff said no. Krol said no. Mühren said no. I said no. Michels refused to answer. Cruyff said it was an intriguing idea. He spent postgame interviews talking about the Provos' White Plans. What did he think of Luud Schimmelpeninck's plan for free bikes, all over the city? Poor Michels sat in his office, his elbows on his desk and his hair in his fists.

He came out every so often to throw a Provo out of the locker room. They were easy to spot, all in white. And they loved Cruyff, who attracted reporters.

“What's he on about?” Michels would ask someone standing nearby, jabbing a thumb toward a Provo.

“He's saying that under New Babylonic circumstances, the lust for aggression will be sublimated into the lust for playfulness,” Cruyff would explain.

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” Michels would say.

Cruyff didn't spout such stuff, but you could see he believed in parts of it, kept an eye on it. He was intrigued by his own uniqueness. Whenever we set foot on a pitch, he was interested in revolutionizing the game. The rest of us were happy to settle for winning it.

And yet at night, lying in my bed and hearing my neighbor still shaking her rugs, I'd envision my parents' faces and wonder if this were in some strange way their gift to me: Partisan tactics, Partisan strategies. In their war, there'd been no front lines or rear, and encirclements had emerged and dissolved fluidly on both sides; superiority had been achieved not by numerical strength, but by tactical resourcefulness. Survival as a Partisan had meant being creative about space.

“Fascinating,” Michels had said when I mentioned this to him. I'd brought it up on a bus when he'd complained to me about Cruyff. My Dutch was by that point sufficient for semicomic conversation.

But all was well as long as we kept winning. We were becoming something majestic and invincible. One moment we'd be marked by two defenders, the next, completely free. One moment the pitch before us was crowded and narrow, the next, huge and wide. The brilliance of our passing was unassuming: the white and black of the ball against the blue of the sky. Against the green. Beautiful in its precision, and quiet and modest. No one danced or took off their shirts after such passes.

Bad weather or rotten pitches meant different kinds of advantage. Keizer in a swamp of a pitch produced a goal by lobbing a high ball into the thickest mud where Turkish defenders, expecting a bounce, found themselves wrong-footed when the ball stuck. A Kuwaiti Emir in the stands was so moved that after the match he gave Keizer the gold watch from his wrist. Against Panathinaikos in a downpour we spent the match playing passes into the areas of poorest drainage, knowing the balls would stop while the Greek defenders continued to overrun them.

Following Cruyff's lead, we built castles in the air, while he appeared where most needed, always pointing, pointing, pointing:
you go there; you belong here.
He would have been happy on a pitch two kilometers long with no goals, and nothing but beautiful waves of movement, streaming up and streaming down.

Our perfection seemed to be automatic. Our instincts intimidating. We brought to bear on our opponents calm minds, immaculate technique, and visionary passing. The beauty of Ajax at its peak was like the beauty of thought.

Cruyff became the young Amsterdammers' hero. “Our John Lennon,” Keizer told me after a match.

“Who's John Lennon?” I asked him back.

I got furniture for my apartment. I sent money home. My brother was twice denied permission to visit.

Cruyff's opinion was consulted on every conceivable subject: science, culture, technology. The present, the future, even the past. Modern youth needed to know what he thought of the past. Two months before I'd arrived, Holland's princess had married a German who'd served in the Wehrmacht. All of Amsterdam had found this the end of the world. One afternoon I found Cruyff giving an interview about that. Who knows with whom. Should the protestors have carried out their threat to put LSD into the water supply? he was asked.

He turned to me. “What about it, Vasovic?” he asked.

The reporter, bushy-haired with thick black glasses, turned with him, pen poised. “Should they have put LSD in the water supply?”

“No speak,” I told him, and dropped my shorts to change.

The protests went on for much of the summer. You could watch on the television the Provos and student demonstrators, all in white, carrying their banners. And the police, all in black, waiting to beat them up.

Help me,
my brother wrote.
Your brother's in need of help,
my father wrote. My brother had developed a romantic rivalry with a lawyer named Tasa who'd turned out to be UDBA.
That's your
brother,
my father wrote.
Cuckolding the Civil Secret Police.
In a bar, drunk, he had railed against Yugoslavia's silence in the face of the invasion of Hungary. It had been ten years ago, his nervous friends had counseled. He should let it rest. But my brother had mounted a table and balanced with his bad knee. The immortal Hungarians! Puskas in prison!

I was able to arrange a return trip only at the end of the season. I spent the night in Belgrade and walked to the train station during the following dawn. Mist hovered above the woods and in the golden treetops. I needed clean air. I snorted like a horse and felt the freshness.

I found my brother in hiding in a town not far from our own. He was staying in a room with a metalworker from Bosnia, a poverty-stricken Moslem who'd moved in the hope of survival. The room was clean, with two beds, a wood stove, a small fir table, and a wash-stand. An alder shadowed the tiny back window.

The metalworker set out tea for us and then disappeared. We embraced. Everyone liked my brother. He was an open, emotional man, so handsome that women turned to look at him on the street.

He told me he'd read about the Liverpool match. We smiled and talked about the old days and the cowshed.

He asked me to get him out. I wanted to know his financial picture. He had no financial picture. Our parents were in a terrible state, he confided. He was testing their faith in the Party's infallibility. It caused him pain to be doing this. Could I get him out?

I told him I would try. Of course, I would try. We were silent, the fir table between us. He looked into my expression. It was as if I had said, What can I do?

I'd brought money, hidden, as well as other gifts. He accepted them all with a combination of apathy and good-natured fear. He'd never refused financial assistance.

At the airport check-through, a commissioner asked why I was not playing in my homeland. I told him I was spreading the glory of Yugoslav football to the West. While he looked over my paperwork, he said, “And your father's an honest man.”

“What makes you think I'm not?” I asked. Everyone around us looked up.

He was unembarrassed. “I was talking about your father,” he said mildly, holding out my passport. “I don't even know you.”

I wrote my brother upon my return to tell him how my attempts were proceeding. I heard nothing back. My father wrote a week or so later and mentioned nothing about it. He described instead how he'd felt during the Liberation: the muddle inside. The enormous happiness all around him—everyone on the street dancing and jumping—and he himself just walking through it all, feeling only a sort of heaviness.