First person

A Balkan love-affair
When Hannah Marshall met her Croatian grandma for the first time, she fell in love with her Balkan heritage. It was a love that culminated in a passionate liaison with a small communist-era car 'This car," the policeman said as he paced towards the rear of my Zastava 750, "it's no good. It is, how do you say, dangerous." I was in no position to argue. The exhaust lay crumpled on the motorway verge, and those Italians unfortunate enough to be following my 750 when it started to fall apart had joined me in the layby. "And you take car to London?" he continued. I nodded wearily. "But why?" It was a perfectly reasonable question; in fact I was beginning to ask myself the very same thing. Why was I so compelled to drag this old wreck (with an engine the size of a lawnmower's and a reputation as the worst car ever made) all the way from Ljubljana to London? "Strange holiday, huh?" he concluded, patting the orange roof, turning on his heel and walking away. Even if I had spoken Italian, I don't think he would have understood my dream of a decade; how this little car was an important part of my heritage. The Zastava 750 (or the Yugo) was the car of Tito's Yugoslavia and I had come across it when I was 17 and visiting my relatives in Croatia for the first time. Since that family holiday 10 years ago, an obsession with the Balkan world has gripped me. I've visited the former Yugoslavia eight times and travelled extensively in Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Slovenia. I've learned the language, I've taken an MA in South-East European studies and been seduced by the culture. In the process, I've developed a close relationship with my great-aunts and uncles, and with my cousins once and twice removed. And finally I bought my Yugo. It all began when my dad told my brother and me, aged 12 and 14, that we were going to meet our grandmother. To some degree I understood the implications of this. My dad's relationship with his mother, Milka, was a thorny issue. Milka had walked out on her husband when my dad, Robin, her only child, was three. Having been left for another man, my grandfather cut his wife out of all of his photographs and then he cut her out of his son's life. After an awkward meeting with her in his adolescent years, Dad decided for himself that he had no desire to piece things back together. So for many years, despite living in the UK, Milka remained a distant figure in all our lives, one who sent the odd gift - Yugoslavian dolls, squares of peasant-made muslin cloth, a Cyrillic edition of Pinocchio. Then, in 1994, Milka called to say she had cancer and that she would like to see my father before she died. Suddenly, at 49, my dad had a mum - and I had another grandma. And she was no ordinary grandma but an exotic one who came from somewhere far away. Although I had no understanding of what it meant to be Slav or Croat, or even where Croatia was, at that first meeting it was my expat grandmother's east Europeanness that made the deepest impression on me. I remember, most sharply, the joy of discovering a different world, one that belonged to my grandmother and therefore one I could claim ownership of as well. Her flat, on a leafy suburban street in Acton, west London, was always full of people, cigarette smoke and the smells of cooking. I would gorge on homemade dishes of calamari, gnocchi and ragu, borek and baklava. It seemed to me that each time I visited, all my senses were awakened, and when the time came to leave I was left tantalised and hungry for more. At the heart of this world was the concept of "family". So the fact that my dad had been "kept" from them for so many years, hung over proceedings like a dark cloud. The stories she told us were about how she had suffered, about how cruelly she had been treated by my grandfather, about how being separated from her son was like having her heart ripped out. She had had to choose between the man she loved and her child. In the end, her decision was driven by desperation, trapped as she was in an unhappy marriage and isolated and lonely in a new city where she couldn't speak the language. She had

left believing she would still have access to her child. When it became clear that her status as an adulterous woman, and an immigrant, denied her any influence in divorce proceedings, she retreated to bed for months, broken. There was even a monument to her grief: her second husband had bought her dozens of china robins in memory of her lost son, her Robin. But Robin was listening to a woman who had abandoned him speak negatively of the father who had raised him. He, too, had to come to terms with what he was losing; and what he had already lost. Thus, this reunion with his estranged maternal family was tainted by painful childhood memories and underlying tensions. My dad had rejected this family once before. As a 16-year-old boy, wary of oppressive familial traditions, he made the decision that he didn't want any more relatives in his life. I, however, had never had many relatives and, as a result, when I met my extended family I was more than willing to let them in. Milka's funeral and wake - when they came - proved tumultuous. Fights erupted continually. My parents joked that it was like being in The Godfather but in reality they were struggling with this Balkan obsession with lineage and family loyalty. I, one step removed, was able to enjoy the drama. After the funeral I felt bereft, not only for my grandmother but also my Croatian heritage. I was only just beginning to appreciate it. Fortunately, two years later we went on holiday in Pula to visit relatives and so began my immersion in all things Balkan, which resulted in me digging up my family's past: their role in the anti-fascist resistance during the second world war; how they had lived under Tito's communism; how they felt about the recent conflict and the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It fed my academic progression, towards an MA at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. My Croatian family suggested that I should forget London and buy an apartment in Pula. By now, my fascination with Balkan history and culture was such that even my younger cousins couldn't fathom it. For them the Yugo was the strangest compulsion of all. Slumped at the table after dinner, my cousin's husband, Marion, jibed: "These cars are like toys, you fix them with your underwear!" No one could understand why I was doing it. But my cousin Ivica had planted the seed years earlier by telling me a 750 would never make it to London. "All right," he relented. "You are very brave. Or crazy. Anyway the Yugo is not such a bad car, the engine is strong. Just be careful. Oh, and make sure that you have brakes - they must work even if nothing else does." A few days later, Ivica's words rang in my ears as my car limped on to a tow truck, exhaustless. And it was only when I saw it on the back of the lorry that it dawned on me how much I loved it and how determined I was to get it home. After five days of twiddling my thumbs in Monfalcone, famous only for shipbuilding, two denim-clad mechanics had me on the road again. Averaging 45mph and stopping in obscure villages every 50km to rest the engine, the Yugo wound its way through the Italian countryside and (very) slowly I was able to join up the dots on my map. It took five days to journey across northern Italy, and it was never boring. Forced to stop in towns far from the tourist trail, the car paved the way for many encounters on my journey. There were plenty of Italian men who appreciated the Yugo as much as I did. "Seicento!", they would scream through my open window. "No," I would shout back, "Z-A-S-T-A-V-A. Yugoslavia." For them, it was beautiful, if only because it reminded them of their own Fiat 600. The glamorous crowd holidaying along the Cte d'Azur were less in awe; I just slowed up their Ferraris on the narrow roads. By the time I arrived in St Raphael I had been travelling non-stop for eight days but I was only half way to London. It was now Friday and I was due back at work on Monday. My last hope was a car train, which would arrive in Calais on Sunday morning, then a ferry to Dover. Next day the white cliffs welcomed me. As I drove through immigration, the family in the car next to mine were taking photographs of me: I was home and so was my Yugo. It now sits outside my front door and creates a curious amount of interest. As the years have gone by I've been to many places more beautiful, but the pull of Pula remains strong. Last summer, I sat on the city's ruined ramparts with my cousin, watching the sunset over the port. She

was consumed with the same angst that I was when I was 16 and we gossiped in the twilight. Some tourists were taking photographs from the ledge in front of us, and it dawned on me that I wasn't one of them. I wasn't on the outside looking in. I was on the inside. I belonged. I didn't need an academic qualification, extensive travels or a special car. I was part of this place and this place was part of me. By Hannah Marshall First published in the Guardian, Saturday 7th July 2008