I was always told by my father during and after the divorce that "I am like my mother". That was never meant as a compliment. If I'd do something he didn't like, he'd explain it through my mother's "bad genes" which were inevitably a part of me. Marko, the son from her first marriage, has been contemplated as a poor evil by my father: he had bad grades in school, he was disobedient, he was somehow full of hate and resentment and violence. My father dismissed him as just iredeemably bad person. I had some chances - because in me my mother's genes mixed with his. Eventually, I could be driven to the right path, he believed. But I had to be driven hard, he was always quite convinced.

What is wrong with my father? He is good at making money, flamboyant socialite and commands impressive knowledge in about any science. He, also, beats women, does not tolerate adolescence and believes that he is the God's right hand (the one that holds the sword). That right hand beat up my maternal grandfather so badly during the divorce to win my father one year probation for aggravated assault. That right hand also, by the testimonies of my mother and of his mother, beat his own father. Sometimes, it hit me, too. I consider myself lucky, however: I was never knocked down on the floor.

It was a Christmas eve, and I was about four years old. Christmas was a big holiday in Italy and Germany so both my dad and my mom were home at that time every year. We usually went to my grandma the next day for a Christmas dinner, but Christmas eve we spent alone, together at home, pretending to be a happy nuclear family, not three strangers who barely knew each other in an apartment that was for the most of the year vacant. Mom would prepare fish and "Kalte Platte" (cold-cuts and stuff, with mandatory caviar; she actually loved to use the German term - it sounded more chic, I guess) and dad and me would do the tree. That year, however, we were distracted by a sudden snow blizzard, and my dad got worried about his car. He wanted to cover it (well that's exactly why he had bought that expensive cover, hadn't he?). So he went outside to cover the car.

Half an hour later I remember my mom carrying me in her hands while we were watching daddy being stuck in the snow with car just half-covered. He was always so unbelievably clumsy. Not only that he couldn't do the dishes, which was in patriarchal Balkans considered a woman's job, but he also couldn't wash the car, for example, which was, of course, a typical man's job. The only thing he was ever good with was writing, talking on the telephone, meeting people and endless accounting. For everything else he'd hire outside help, or let his wife do it. Mommy at that point decided to go down to help him, feeling sorry for the poor gawky bastard, but she didn't want to leave me home alone, so she spent some time bundling me up. At the time we were downstairs, dad finally somehow managed to cover the car all by himself. But he was pissed.

He just brushed us aside as he walked in the building. Didn't speak a word. As soon as we were all up safely behind the locked doors of our little happy private place, he screamed out something very loud to mommy, and then he slapped her. Twice, I believe. The next thing he slammed the living room doors behind himself, and I was there barely an inch away from the entrance doors watching my mother spread on the floor in her black dress, black coat and black stockings. For a moment I didn't know what to do, since she blocked my way. Then my father came back (he put his house-robes on) and said: "Come over here to your daddy. Mama was bad a little.". And I came over to him and he helped me build some electric train toy.

Mother finished her dinner later. She was crying a little, but she brightened up with our approval of her food designs. They both pretended as if nothing had happened. I never realized what was he really angry about. I was, however, often instructed how my mother was a bad girl. As my father explained me during the divorce and after the divorce, my mother was a selfish, uncaring, bad woman. Not only her characater was rotten, but also her genes. And that's where my evil was coming from. Since he was such an ultimate source of goodness, the only way how he could explain anything that he considered a design flow in me was through my mother's screwed genetics. During the divorce she didn't spare him any criticism, either. I remember that I helped her cook a witch poison (my father always said that she was a witch, so I suggested her to use her powerful witchcraft in order to win). I also remember us sneaking on my father and his future wife, my future stepmother, who then claimed in court that she barely knew my dad, while in the evenings they walked their son together. My half-brother, whom my father registered at birth under the last name of his mistress's current husband - dollars would buy you anything in Yugoslavia, was two years old already at that time.

My step-mother was an epitome of goodness - she was everything that my mother wasn't and most importantly she was telling my father that he was right, that he was always right about everything. She worked, remarried three times (always into more money), bleached her hair, dressed tight red dresses over her buxom body, and she cared for children, at least, children of rich men that she wanted to marry: she cared for me. She was the only one among my father's concubines to be willing to wipe my ass. She cared so much, that she pacified her own son with a leather belt, when he wanted to go out with us (my dad, her, and me) for a dinner, so she can shower all her attention to me. That broke all my father's resistance. Then she made him a baby. And he decided that she might be a better mother to me and my future half-bro than my mom. He actually convinced me in that, and at one point I told my mom that her services were no longer necessary since I've got a younger and better mother.

Nevertheless, despite the goodness, she got beaten, too. One evening my father came home late, and we were all already asleep. My step-mother had to wake up the next day at 6 am to go to her job. But my father came home hungry. And in the kitchen he was entirely helpless. So, he went to wake her up to prepare him something to eat. She did it, grudgingly, lacking the enthusiasm required to serve such a vainglorious breadwinner like him, and that spoiled his mood, so he hit her. We (me, her son from first marriage who shared a room with me, and our joint younger half brother) heard the sharp, crisp thud. Next morning I found a bread-basket broken. I found that ironic: to be hit by the breadwinner with a bread-basket. That convinced me that my father did not appropriate punishment by any objective rule or law, but by a whim, depending on his moods. And I decided not to feel . If I didn't feel the emotional message behind the punishment, I reasoned, punishment would be ineffective. That helped me later in my unwanted dealings with the Yugoslav state security apparatus.

Despite this previous paragraphs may show my father as somebody who often beats his family up, that was not the case. He actually used physical violence on very rare occassions (though, in his history he beated both his wifes, his father and any of his children at least once): his tortures were mostly verbal. He liked to twist your mind. He always spoke with great admiration of one Ignatio Loyola and his henchman Torquedo Mada. His lectures (particularly those about moderation), however, couldn't be further from his reality of a fat Epikurean slob. Finally the difference between the lie and the truth lost importance in his approaching us. We shouldn't dare lie to him. But he could tell anything to us and it would always be the truth, even if today's statement contradicted the yesterday's one. My mother quite often reminds me how he used to brag in front of her how he would pay for me to go to college in the U.S. He never mentioned that to me. He indeed promised to send me in the U.S. for a vacation, when I had a complicated operation of appendix (that bursted). But once I healed up, he forgot. My step-mom used to say that a parent could tell anything to a child. I never bought that crap.

Besides being strong on false promises, my dad was also very succesful, in enforcing his little bans. There he always kept promises. Whenever we children did something wrong, he'd call us up in his "office" like some sort of CEO and there he would give us shit taking lengths to explain to us our sins in terms of strict moral standards, that he never applied to himself. Sometimes he went even further: it was May and I was still in high school (junior year), and there was a concert that evening at 7 pm at Kulusic hall in Zagreb. Sarlo Akrobata, a Belgrade punk-rock band, which I liked very much at that time, played. I saved up money for that occassion and planned that evening with my friends days in advance. My father was at some business trip that week, and he was not available to give the permission for me to leave the house for a non-school purpose. My step-mother just shrugged her shoulders, telling me that my father might not approve my decision. So, I went to the concert.

Pretty much like everywhere else, concerts advertised to begin at 7 pm usually begin at 9 pm. Masses of unrully youth gathered in front of the Kulusic hall waiting for ropes to open. My friends and me had a few beers while we were waiting (there was an age limit in the supposedly illiberal Yugoslavia set at 18, but it was almost never enforced, and there was no ban on drinking in the street). My father came home around 7:30 pm, and was immediately briefed on my whereabouts by his trusted secretary (my step-mother actually worked as a secretary at the same company, before he married him). He had a dinner at 9 pm scheduled with some of his business partners. So, he realized that he had an hour and a half spare time to play what he would think a practical joke on me: he drove to the Kulusic hall, and mingled with the crowd. At 8:30 pm when Kulusic opened its gates finally, he stood right near the entrance pretending to be a guard (which perhaps everybody believed given his age, size, and suit). I was in the middle of the crowd moving in, laughing with my friends and not really giving much attention to people around until a hand grabbed firmly my right shoulder.

It was him. I couldn't believe it. My friends couldn't believe it. They found it hillariously funny. I didn't. He asked me to come aside and talk to him. While escorting me to the car, he argued that I shouldn't be vasting time with that mob of loosers, now when the exams are nearing. He argued that my two best friends, twin brothers, were worthless slackers who wouldn't ever ammount to anything in their lifes (one of them is a doctor now, another is a dentist, a pretty good dentist that fixed me with a bridge that spans 6 teeth a decade ago), while I had a future in front of me. He didn't mention sending me to the college in the U.S. at that time, though. He argued that they have a schizophrenic mother who is crazy enough to let her sons do that (she actually majored in chemistry in the class of my father, only it took him a few years more; she also cooked coffee and hot cacao for me after I spent nights in park and sometimes I slept over at their house, when my father would lock the doors and not let me in after I had missed his curfew; she was perhaps crazy because she didn't want to sleep with him, he thought), while I of course had a caring daddy, who would never allow such a horrible thing to happen. He drove me home.

Always giving attention to the detail, he waited near the intercom, until I climbed up to the apartment, so that his wife could confirm my arrival, to make sure that I didn't wait for him to leave and then went back. He was probably late to his dinner, but he must have been satisfied at least: again, he proved his point.