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That day was Saturday, after a two hour drive from Sydney, I stopped in a small mountain town. The best description would be a small town. Walking through its streets, which are like an open museum, alongside houses with unusually landscaped courtyards filled with flowers and greenery, at one point I caught a glimpse of a beautiful yellow rose hanging over the fence.
As I was pulling a rose out of my hair, I heard someone singing “Far Away.” At first I thought that, God forbid, things were causing me great stress.
However, the words of a song sung by a warm female voice still reached me. I spread the branches of the rose bush, crawled on tiptoe, and saw a slim, older woman digging beds full of flowers.
I yelled “hi”. She raised her head, leaned on the hoe, looked at me for a moment, and then said goodbye.
– You have a beautiful garden, I continued in English.
The woman put down the hoe, approached me and waving her hand said:
– It used to be a beautiful garden and now I only maintain it when old age and illness allow.
– You sing very well, I still only spoke to him in English.
– Ah, his sigh escaped him and he continued: “It’s a song about my land.”
– So, our homeland is the same, I started in Serbian.
Joy flashed through her beautiful blue eyes. I still remember that glow today.
“My sunshine, where are you from?” He asked.
As I explained my origins, he approached the door with unusually agile steps for his age and gestured for me to enter. He looked at me for a moment and then hugged me around the waist with his slim arms.
My compatriot asked me if I wanted to go inside or sit on the terrace. I chose the latter. Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a pleasant warmth, both by the beauty of the nature I was in and by the joy of a sudden encounter. Meeting a person of your origin in the most distant place in the world always causes me a storm of emotions.
As she served me coffee and gingerbread, I touched the hand-embroidered tablecloth. She spoke in a low voice: “That is my only memory of my homeland.”
Her name was Clara, a retired teacher. He was born in a small town in Vojvodina to a mother Lalinka and a father Nemca. He is 89 years old. He left the village before the end of the Second World War, along with other Germans, who were expelled from Vojvodina. They were first housed in a collection center in Austria, from where they were deported by ship to Australia. His mother said it was their punishment because they did not resist the partisans.
“That journey, my dear, has been so long and arduous.” Many people were ill and many did not even make it to Australia. On the way, my mother put my brother and me to sleep with the song “Far away.” Do you think my father sang it too?
I listened to Clara very carefully. She said that life was very difficult for them upon arrival. They lived with two other families in the same house to save and collect a deposit, first to one, then to another, and finally to a third family. In this way, each family reached its own roof over its head.
Clara’s parents introduced the rule that the children speak Serbian at home and German with their father. English was not spoken at home. In this way, they ripped the tongue out of oblivion.
“Well, you’re pretending to be a polyglot, you speak three languages,” I told him.
-Ah, now that doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. The older I get, the more I dream of my homeland. I must go to that world quickly because people say, when you often start dreaming about the place where you were born, that the end is near.
You know, I would give anything to grab that loose dirt from my garden with my hands one more time in my life. And smell it. That scent has been with me my whole life. “
Clara, shut up for a moment. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was looking into the past. Then he continued sadly:
– The life of the first generation of migrants is difficult, the second is much easier. But the first generation! In my life here, I have not met a single happy migrant. Everyone is sad in their own way. The experience led me to the conclusion that people go abroad in search of a better life and live much worse spiritually. Or maybe I’m wrong. “
So for almost two hours, with coffee and gingerbread, on a terrace, in a town where I least expected, I listened to the life story of the beautiful countrywoman Clara.
At the farewell, with the obligatory “bye,” he packed my gingerbread.
– Take it, let them find it.
As I walked away from Clara’s house, the sun shone at its zenith, the leaves rustled under my feet, the emotions raced in my heart. The chords of the song “Far away, far from the sea, there is my people, there is Serbia” passed through my head.
Zora Darina
Dear readers, “Politika” has revived the column “My life abroad”. It is primarily intended for those of you living outside Serbia, around the world, who have been taken through life to new unknown places and countries.
We hope you’ve noticed we’ve changed a bit in the meantime. We sewed a new, more comfortable and comfortable digital suit, but we are still the right address where you can send your letters, reports, notes and photos.
Write us how you are abroad or in your new homeland. What does Serbia look like when you look at it from Vancouver, Oslo or Melbourne? Is there nostalgia for your new directions?
And our address is [email protected]
The rules remain simple: the length of the text is up to five thousand characters, if it is written in some common format, preferably in Word. The headlines and the team are editorials, the texts are not respected and are subject to editorial intervention.
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