Something else tormented Ilija Soldo and warranted that he keep his distance from Serbs if he happened to come across them in the police force, and had kept him from going to Belgrade. Although he’d been born and raised in Zagreb, and despite sharing one of those characteristically Croatian surnames, Ilija was — through both his father and mother — a Serb. His father Marko, an old partisan, veteran of the struggle against Hitler and the German occupation, had spent his whole professional life in the police force and, of course, had not hidden the fact that he was a Serb, born in eastern Herzegovina where Soldos — although rare — also could be found among Serbs. But it didn’t bother him if someone mistook him for a Croat. And so, little by little, as interethnic relations in Yugoslavia deteriorated and Marko grew closer to retiring, he tended to keep quiet about not being from the majority, but from the minority — that is to say, the Serbian Soldos.
At the end of the eighties, as the Communist system collapsed, and the first political parties were established, Joža Marunić, the former chief of the secret police and Marko Soldo’s friend, invited him to be one of the founders of the HDZ, the radical Croatian nationalist party which was to be supported by the powerful and influential Catholic Church. What else could Marko do other than accept? Marunić knew, of course, that Soldo was a Serb, but most likely he’d thought that in having one of them on board, he’d keep those extremists under control.
His mother Jelica, a housewife from one of those Serbian villages in the Banija region, did not think too much about it and quickly agreed to the change in their family’s identity. If you have luck with your first and last name, then it’s easier to present yourself as a Croat to Croats, and a Serb to Serbs. But it’ll burden you later on when you constantly have to think about who and what you really
And this was the reason why Ilija Soldo promptly, even earlier than 1991, before the destruction of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the Croatian army, joined up with the volunteers and spent all those years at war with the Serbs. It would probably be going too far to say that he’d been fighting against himself and the latent Serb within him, but the fact was, he couldn’t prove to himself that he was a Croat. He needed that war, after which no one was ever going to think that he was anything else.
And everything would have gone well, there wouldn’t even be this story and everything that’d follow, had Ilija’s father not had a sister named Smiljana, and had Smiljana not been married to the doctor Miloš Stanojević, a renowned Yugoslav neurologist, who she had lived with in a villa in Senjak, the richest residential area of Belgrade. Marko Soldo had broken off all relations with his sister back in 1972, after quarreling bitterly with her husband about the political situation in the country. Dr. Stanojević had thrown Soldo out of his house when Soldo called him an American spy and a fascist scoundrel. They didn’t speak again until the beginning of the war in 1991. Soldo didn’t even contact his sister when, two years earlier, Dr. Stanojević had died unexpectedly. She, however, called him the very first autumn of the war when she heard on the radio that Yugoslav army planes were bombing Zagreb. She was afraid that they had killed her brother, and that was all that mattered.
After that they maintained their relations at a distance, staying in touch but not visiting each other. Aunt Smilja, as they called her endearingly, would have — had they ever invited her — gladly come to Zagreb, but they never did, lest their family’s shame and fraud be uncovered, and their neighbors and all of Zagreb find out that they were not Croats, but Serbs.
Out of all this, Aunt Smilja had one great sorrow: she would never see Ilija again. He’d been six years old when she had last seen him. That was the day when her Miša — as she called her husband — threw Marko out of the house, and Jelica and the child left with him. Smiljana and Miloš could not have children, so her nephew had meant more to her than any son could have meant to his mother. Ilija represented all of her unborn children.
This was why she left him the villa in Senjak in her will.
To Ilija Soldo — who lived with his wife and their four children in a two-bedroom apartment in Zagreb, in one of those buildings from the seventies built during the time of the most vibrant socialist construction projects, producing what people called the “cans” because they were coated with waves of aluminum siding — Auntie’s villa in Senjak felt like an unfathomable source of untapped wealth. It was worth well more than fifty times his own apartment.
