I’ve been told by most people who loved her that I am the second coming of Julijana Trokšar.
When I was six, my great-aunt, who by then had not seen her sister-in-law in decades, proudly exclaimed that she could pick me out of a crowd and proclaim that I’m my Oma’s grandkid in a heartbeat.
“It’s the eyes especially, but really you have her entire face.”
When I look back, some of my proudest moments were when I was standing next to her. I’ve been seeing it too — I’m undoubtedly her kid’s kid.
So if growing old means growing like Oma, the only thing I’ll do differently is hope that I’ll stick around a little longer.
In the bones of her home, my home, in the outskirts of Belgrade two summers ago, my Deda and I sifted through her old mountain of scrapbooks. This was one of many hobbies she had that I’d end up learning about from anyone but her.
It’s funny, you know — my Deda and I connect most when she’s the topic of conversation, the two most loyal liaisons of her life story.
I spent most of my early childhood in her presence, so much so that my mother’s side of the family jokes that I speak Serbo-Croatian with a Slovenian accent due to her influence. Allegedly, it’s too soft and melodic to pass for a native speaker.
Oma was a singer.
In exchange for words, she sang, yodelled and hummed her way through subjects she’d rather not discuss. To call her quiet would be a mistake, because she had a lot to voice — I just wasn’t listening until now.
The two extremes of her music taste were Balkan folk songs and Jimmy Sommerville. The former reminds me of her more.
Ask anyone from former Yugoslavia who the unifying glue of a crumbling state was in the 90s, and I guarantee you they will answer with the name Djordje Balašević. Through song, he had the rare ability to overcome all the barriers that kept the nation from harmony. His superpower was recovering the then politically-charged genre of folk that had been weaponized for mass propaganda, and repurposing it for peace.
So in my mother’s Serbo-Slovenian mixed home in Belgrade, a metropolis far from Julijana’s village that stood on the intersection between Austria and Hungary, I’d like to think that Djordje’s soothing voice played on a CD as the bombs fell, keeping my Oma company in a place where she seemed to be belonging less and less.
Balašević is most known for the song “Devojka Sa ‘Čardas’ Nogama.” The English equivalent would be “The Girl with the Cardaš Legs”; cardaš is a style of a Hungarian folk song in which the music begins at a slow duple tempo and then progresses, faster and faster until the song finishes in a dizzying whirl of claps, strings and accordion.
Oma loved that song.
The lilting fiddle that parallels Balašević’s voice is one of the most prominent sounds of my childhood.
Balašević tells the story of forbidden love. A young woman about to fall into a sacred marriage bares a cross necklace that masks an untamable desire to dance. She catches the eye of a musician who senses her hesitation, and he pleads with her to let her hair down and spin. And she does, toying with the skirt of her dress above her knees and stomping to the staccato of the guitar.
When I close my eyes, consumed by the song, I’m in that room, watching this girl liberating herself from the same things we were all enchained by. She’s youthful, petite, pale and blonde. As she spins, I catch glimpses of her face as her eyes spot a far off point on the wall, concentrated. Her legs move underneath her with an unwavering rhythm as she chants to the music. But her hair is not long enough to be let down, and she’s stolen my eyes.
When the song ends, the crowd disperses, and she is coming down from her euphoria. I muster up the courage to tap her shoulder and ask her where she found the self-assurance to be so vulnerable in front of so many people.
When she turns around, my stomach twists — it’s Oma.
Then my eyes are open and tears well, as I discover a new element to the song that I couldn’t grasp before.
“She was wild,” my Deda would say. Like the czardaš itself, my grandparents’ romance stabilized at an unexpected and frantic whirlwind. Like the girl with the czardaš legs, Oma was raised very Catholic but grew to be more secular.
My Deda built this home, our home, from the ground up, though like Balašević’s musician in the song, my Deda was not working with much. It was the fruits of Oma’s labour that brought the only television on their street to their living room, and the space became a stronghold for gathering and sound.
Oma was the outlier of her family. There was something punk and unorthodox about her. As a professor, she was a relayer of all knowledge, except about herself. As a guardian, her contagious love was meant to channel the world, but it was always up to others to decode who she was.
Those two summers ago, I soaked up every scrapbook photo. My eyes fell on one of Oma leaning against her trusty Fiat in the 60s crossroads of the Yugoslav countryside. Women there invented the term “passenger princess,” leaning back and letting the scenery and life unfold. But not Oma — she was always at the wheel.
A few pages over, the camera caught her dress floating above her knees as it captured her smile at a ballroom dancing competition, hair tossing around her cheeks.
We loved to dance together. It was my way of growing into her feet.
On a day in June when I was 13 and when we were already sure of the inevitable, Oma and I were sitting on her bed, silent in our own thoughts. She was typing away something on her laptop when she turned to me with a child-like smile on her face.
“Do you remember this song?” She pressed play on her laptop.
I put down my book as that undeniable fiddle filled the room. I could feel her smiling at me, but I couldn’t look her way because I knew seeing her there, slowly flickering out, wouldn’t do either of us any good.
But she sprang up so nimbly, and began to sing the first verse of “The Girl with the Cardaš Legs,” reaching out to take my hands so I could follow her footsteps.
When the music faded out, what followed was a cascading playlist of songs from the vault of my childhood memories that had faded into the folds of our minds years prior.
We danced and giggled, she sang, I nodded, slowly letting the music remind me of easier times.
I believe that most music is frozen in moments and places. It’s encased in the good, the bad and the ugly. Some images you’d rather forget, others you're grasping at because they just feel so damn good lazily floating past the kaleidoscope of your daydreams.
Unknowingly, Djordje Balašević is my teacher. He’s telling me everything I would have ever needed to know about Julijana Trokšar.