In Europe

parlour down on the corner. It is already dark, almost closing time. Two girls are still sitting under the hairdryers. I ask all the women in the place what has been on their minds most this week. Marita, thirty-five, has a fifteen-year-old son who wants to go out tomorrow night, but she doesn't have a cent to give him.Gordana, the thirty-three-year-old beautician, wants a new lover. ‘How else can I find the inspiration to go on?’ Mirjana simply wants to go away, far away.‘I was seventeen when this misery started, now I'm twenty-three. I've lost the best years of my life to this stupid war.’
    Mirjana is dazzlingly beautiful, beside her I suddenly feel old and fat. She has an office job at the state oil company; it's Serbia in miniature, she says. ‘The idiots, the brown-noses, they take everything. The people who think about things and do their work well are the ones who get left behind.’ Gordana says: ‘Almost all my old friends have left. The ones who stayed are all crazy.’ She laughs, but she means it.
    Her brother Goran, twenty-two, comes in and eagerly joins the discussion: ‘There were five of us, friends. Three of us have already left, and that's all we talk about now.’ Ten buses now leave Belgrade each night for Budapest, he tells me. ‘That's 500 people a day! If things keep on like this, the whole opposition will be living outside the country before long. And all our girls want is a husband with a mobile phone!’
    Mirjana stares dreamily into space: ‘Canada, that might be nice, don't you think? Or Holland, maybe?’

    ‘They asked a colleague of mine, a playwright, whether what was happening to this country was a drama. He said: “No, this isn't material for a drama, it's material for a comedy.” And he was right. All the big countries of the world going to war against this weird little Yugoslavia. All the evil of the world suddenly gathered together in this poor country. The 100,000 Albanians the Western papers say were murdered by the Yugoslav Army … but now, suddenly, they can't find the graves. Of course, horrible, terrible things have happened. But in essence it's a comedy, not a tragedy.
    ‘Every poor man is a fool, you know. Simply because he's poor. His clothes don't fit, his hair isn't styled, he's dirty, foolish. And in that way we're fools as well. We are the village idiots of the world. We live in a ghetto, we don't have any contacts with anyone any more. We used to have excellent ties with France and Holland, for example. But the NATO planes which bombarded us came from those countries too. They're onthe other side now as well. Everyone's on the other side, except for us. That's not sad, that is, above all, foolish.
    ‘This can't be serious. You can't believe this is really happening. I still have the feeling that these things are not really going on, that it will be over tomorrow, like a head cold. But I'm afraid it's going to last a long time. Because there's no way out. We lost the war in Kosovo, we signed for our defeat, but everything has stayed the way it was. No politician can pull us out of this quagmire.
    ‘The bombardments were sort of like a comedy too. They bombed day and night, you got up with it and you went to bed with it, but you knew they didn't want to kill civilians, you could tell that from the targets they chose. So I wasn't afraid of a bomb falling on my house. Everything in the city kept on going, the cafés, the shops, even when the air-raid sirens were blasting. The farmers simply came into town to the market, the way they always had, and their prices weren't any higher. The run of the mill Yugoslavs weren't thinking about their role in history, mostly they were just flabbergasted.
    ‘When I was young, Novi Sad was more or less the same city it is now. Of course bits have been added, but life was the same, the mentality too. People here aren't interested in things that happen outside their own street. They're cool, and they're also a little dumb. The people who have put together these policies and caused all this trouble, they don't come from here. Radovan Karadžzić, Miložsević, Ratko Mladić, they're all mountain people. Those of us from the flatlands suffer under the things that happen, but we're not active in them.
    ‘This is a tolerant place, though: during this war there wasn't a single Albanian, Muslim, German or Dutchman harassed. But we're not cosmopolitan. We'd like to be, but no one is interested in us. We don't produce