The Furious Spinner

I've always thought Mario's story is fascinating, and I've encouraged him to write his memoirs for a long time. He's never been interested. He tried once not too long ago to start them, but he couldn't sustain any interest. Mario was the first immigrant I knew well, the first person I knew whose parents were not born in North America. I had never met anyone whose father worked in a mine. His life story was completely alien and interesting to me. For him, it's just his life.

I’ve tried to convince other people to write down their lives. Living history is fascinating and important. Things have changed so quickly in our life times. Our descendants needs to know how we lived. However, I understand the reticence: I haven't written my own memoirs!

I love to read memoirs. I think everyone has an interesting story—if it's told the right way. It's about impressions; it's about what memories of events shape a person. I like memoirs better than biographies because it's more about memory than it is about facts. It's a recitation of feelings, flashes of colors, tastes, scents. I asked Mario if I could write parts of his story, and he agreed. I might do a lot of essays, I might never do another one. But I started with what you'll read below. As always with these things, this is first draft. It could change completely as time goes on. If I were to put this piece in a book about Mario, it probably would be the forward or prologue. See what you think.

Aliens

This is the story he heard from the beginning, although he does not remember when it was first told to him. It was always a part of his life, a creation story of his very own, where his mother and father were major figures but he was the result. It did not make him feel special or superior. Sometimes he was embarrassed when his parents told new friends about his beginning years. The listeners were always amazed and enthralled. He did not understand why. Nearly every immigrant in his parents’ circle of friends had a similar “escape” story. His story was not special. For one thing, he didn’t do anything in it. He was only a baby. For another thing, it was just their story. Didn’t everyone have one?

It began in 1956 and went something like this: His mother, Agica Dragicevic, was a 17 year old girl who wanted adventure she could not find on a farm not far from a Croatian village. So she left with her sister and brother-in-law. They walked across the mountains to get to Italy. He never asked which mountains, or what town she had lived in, or if she had told her mother ahead of time she was leaving. Did her mother cry? Did her father try to stop her? Or were they glad their daughters were escaping? His parents always called it that: escape. They escaped Yugoslavia. At the Italian border, the guards asked her why she was escaping from Yugoslavia. She couldn’t say she hated farm life and wanted something different. She said, “I am fleeing communism.”

“I didn’t even know what communism was,” she said when she told the tale, “but I knew what I had to say.” So they let her in, and she went to a refugee camp on the west coast of Italy near Naples.

His father, Ilija Milosevic, was a 26 year old bachelor, a policeman, in a town in Serbian Yugoslavia. He was a loyal communist, as anyone would be in his position. One night when he was out at a bar with friends, someone said, “Ilija, when are you getting married?” He said, “I will never get married as long as Tito is in power.” Since Tito was an unelected dictator with no plans to relinquish power, Mr. Milosevic was essentially saying, “Never.” But someone listening—a rival after his job perhaps—reported his comment to the party and Ilija was jailed and held “pending investigation.”

He sat in jail for three months, staring out the window at an orchard in the near distance. The longer he was held, the more he began thinking about communism and Tito and the unfairness of his situation. When they finally let him out—because they found nothing they could charge him with—he was no longer a loyal communist. “They said they were for the people,” he said. “But that wasn’t true.”

He decided to escape Yugoslavia. Several friends agreed to go with him. It would be easy. They would get into a boat and row across the Adriatic Sea to Italy and find safe harbor there. Once they got to the shore, however, the other men looked at the small boat and the sea; they couldn’t really see the water in the darkness but they could imagine its vastness as they listened to it lapping against the shore—eating up the shore really—just like it could eat up them. They all walked away. Except Ilija.

Disgusted, 6’6” Ilija Milosevic climbed into the boat and rowed across the Adriatic Sea alone.

Mr. Milosevic rowed across the Adriatic Sea alone.

When the Italian authorities asked why he was escaping Yugoslavia, he said he was fleeing communism. He ended up in the same refugee camp with Agica Dragicevic. They met. He never heard how his parents met or what they liked about each other. He only knew that the teenager was soon pregnant, and his father answered a call for railroad workers in Canada. Ilija shipped out while Agica stayed behind in the refugee camp, where the walls were made of sheets, she had no privacy, and she was a single pregnant woman.

A rich Italian family offered to adopt Agica and her baby. Agica refused. She had the baby in a small Italian hospital. She was very sick afterward and could not care for the baby boy. When she finally got better and the nurses took her to him, he was dirty, soiled, and obviously uncared for. He cried all the time. She was furious. She got her baby and took him back to the camp—where he continued to cry.

He was baptized at a nearby Catholic Church. Ilija had written to Agica when he reached British Columbia and told her that if the baby was a boy, she should name him Nenad, after a Serbian hero; if it was a girl, he didn’t care what she named her. The priest said Nenad was a pagan name, so Agica needed to pick a Christian name, too It was St. Mary’s day, the priest said, so you could call him Mario. Agica agreed, and the baby boy was baptized Nenad Mario Dragicevic.

In the camp again, Nenad continued to cry. Soon no one would watch while Agica was gone.

“It was so hard,” Agica told him. “Once, I threw you down on the bed and said, it’s you or me. You better stop.”

When the boy was 14 months old—and still crying—the other refugees took up a collection and got Agica a berth on a ship going to Halifax in Canada. She didn’t know exactly where Ilija was, but she was going to find him. She only knew the name of the mine in Ontario where he now worked: Denison Mines.

Mother and child got on the ship and headed for Canada. He doesn’t know if his mother was afraid or excited. She was still a teenager, an unwed Catholic girl with a baby without a father. She was determined to find Ilija and marry him. When Nenad and Agica arrived in Halifax harbor, she stood along the railing with Nenad on her hip, looking out at her new country. It was cold, January or February, but she wanted to see the new world. In one hand she held a small purse with her papers and money inside. As she looked around, Nenad grabbed her purse and threw it into the bay.

“I almost threw you in after it, let me tell you,” she said.

She stood in front of immigration with no papers, no money, and a screaming 14 month old child. All she could say was “Denison, Denison.”

The story gets a bit fuzzy here. Did she bully the authorities into letting her in? Back then, Canada wanted immigrants, so they probably weren’t as strict about having the proper papers. Did she give the names of family members? He didn’t really know. Some nuns at a convent in Montreal took them in for a time and cared for them. She still remembers those nuns with affection. The story picks up again when she somehow convinced a cab driver to take her to Elliot Lake, where Denison Mines were. It was a long drive on a cold dark winter night. At the gates where the taxi stopped, Agica kept repeating Ilija’s name until the guard went to the barracks and got him.

“I thought I left them in Italy,” Ilija Milosevic said, shaking his head and smiling. “And there she was. No woman was allowed!”

The story blurs again. He knows his father said, “This country is not like we thought it would be. It is very hard. You have to work very hard.”

They had escaped from a communist country where everything had been provided for them. Once in a a free country they had expected everything would be better but still free. They were wrong.

Ilija did not want Agica and the baby with him, or could not have them with him, so she went to stay with a sister and her husband who lived in Port Arthur. They did not want her in the house or want anything to do with her because she was an unwed mother and the father was Serbian, an enemy to the Croatians.

Agica went back to the father of her child and told him they were his responsibility, and he had to marry her. It did not matter that they would be a mixed marriage and their families would disown them. He had to do the right thing.

So he did.

“It wasn’t easy,” she said, shaking her head. “It was very hard.”

Nenad remembers none of this adventure. He never asked for details: What was it like in Italy? Yugoslavia? What did you do as a policeman? What are our relatives like? What did you feel like as you escaped? How long did it take? What was the camp like?

It wasn’t that kind of tale. It was whole as it was, without the need for details: three aliens, going from country to country until they found a kind of home. It was a story the three of them shared, the story that set them apart from everyone else. The story that always made him feel like a stranger in a strange land.

0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

All photographs and written material copyright © 2003-2008 by Kim Antieau unless otherwise indicated. May not be used without permission.