Forbidden Bread (new)

Now three female teachers of Slovenian step up onto a small platform at the front of the hall. One of them calls our disparate group to order and makes an announcement in English, our lingua franca for the moment. The three teachers seem taken aback by the size of the turnout, by the sudden interest of so many people in France Prešeren’s language of shepherds and milkmaids, and, like me, they must first tackle the task of figuring out who we are, of dividing us into categories, though their criteria is not geographical or degrees of Yugoslav cool but mastery of languages, especially Slavic languages, knowledge of basic grammatical structures, and the amount and variety of Slovenians words and phrases that we have managed to pick up along our way to the lobby of Filozofska Fakulteta.

They distribute questionnaires. These are the words I managed to pick up along the way and that I write down in the empty boxes and columns of the questionnaire.

Dober dan: Good day.

Kako si?: How are you?

Dober večer: Good evening.

Lahko noč: Good night.

Hvala lepa: Thank you very much.

Nasvidenje: Good-bye.

Vino, kavo, mleko, ričet, sarma, džezva—though that last one—who knew?—is not a Slovenian word at all but comes from the south where the little copper pot itself comes from, the word being a Turkish borrowing in Serbo-Croatian, once an official language in these parts but now, in a fit of defensive nationalism, being vigorously erased like all those Yugoslav birth certificates.

These are the words I managed to pick up along the way but do not write down:

Pička (variant: pizda): cunt.

This word is used with such frequency and variety as to lose much of its meaning and ability to shock. It is used to start sentences, to end sentences, as a stopgap in the middle of sentences. It is used to express a wide array of both positive and negative emotions: disgust, disbelief, dismay, admiration, anger, amazement, awe. Used in the diminutive, pičkica, it can mean a hot chick, as in, “Kakšna pičkica!” What a babe! Or, it can refer to any girls, as in, “There were a lot of pičkice at that party last night.”

Combined with your mother, as in “pička ti materna,” it creates the classic Mediterranean insult, a turn of phrase so common that it is abbreviated to p.m. when used in movie subtitles. Combined with the ija it makes pičkarija or pizdarija, which translates into something like “mess” or “chaos.” There is a good deal of disagreement, I have found, among Slovenian men and women alike, as to whether the word is offensive or not. With the typical tin ear of the foreigner, not to mention the foreigner who has learned much of her vocabulary in bed, I cannot seem to summon the feminist outrage to condemn the word. To me it has a sweet and sexy sound. It sounds onomatopoetically like “peach.”

Kurac: dick, prick, cock.

On the grammatical and expressive levels, the word has a similar function as pička, beginning and ending sentences, expressing disgust, disbelief, dismay, anger, amazement, awe. In this masculine Balkan culture it is rarely used in the diminutive, though it is employed in a number of set phrases, such as, “Kurc te gleda,” meaning “my dick is looking at you,” and translating into something like “go to hell,” or, “Imam poln kurac,” meaning “I have a full dick,” and translating into something like “I’ve had enough of this, I’m fed up.”

Južnjak: southerner.

This word refers to all former Yugoslavs—Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Kosovo Albanians—other than Slovenians. I have been told that it is a completely neutral and objective term, not in the least bit derogatory, merely descriptive and geographical.

Bosanc: Bosnian.

This word also refers to all former Yugoslavs—Croats, Bosnians, Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Kosovo Albanians—other than Slovenians. Like južnjak, it is a neutral term, or so I have been assured, although the fact that all former Yugoslavs except Slovenians should be lumped together by Slovenians under the classification of “Bosnian” makes one wonder.

Čefur: Bosnian, southerner.

Yet another term for all former Yugoslavs other than Slovenians, this one unambiguously derogatory, especially when used in a phrase such as “Raus čefuri!” These two words—deliberately echoing the World War II racial epithet “Juden Raus!” Jews Out!—are spray painted on the walls and cement bridges of my proletarian neighborhood.

Šiptar: Albanian.

This refers exclusively to Kosovo Albanians, who are numerous in Slovenia and the other former republics of Yugoslavia, usually working as ice cream vendors or sellers of fruit and vegetables imported from Italy and Spain (one rung lower on the market hierarchy than the old women who push their home-grown products to market along the streets of Ljubljana), or, as the Slovenian locals rightly or wrongly complain, as drug mafia. As to whether the term šiptar is derogatory or not, the question, when I have asked it, has been met with mystification, as if Albanians belong to some entirely separate human category in which such notions no longer apply.

Zamorček: the little one from across the sea.

This term, in contrast to the previous ones, designates not the known and despised foreigner—Albanians and other southerners—but the unknown foreigner, the mysterious foreigner: blacks, moors, Africans. The turbaned zamorček with the gleaming whites of his eyes and his full red lips is both an exotic and frequent figure in Central Europe, a fact that makes Americans uncomfortable. He appears on the logo of Julius Meinl, a chain of Austrian grocery stores, on boxes of imported coffee, on sugar packets in Ljubljana cafés. He also appears in the classic Slovenian story of exile, Lepa Vida, in which, in a reversal of the usual tale of subordination, a moor comes and lures away a young Slovenian wife and mother named Vida and forces her into bondage as a wet nurse in his land across the sea.

The contemporary unturbaned black, on the other hand, is an extremely unusual sight on the streets of Ljubljana. Briefly, during Tito’s reign at the head of the nonaligned movement, Slovenia’s universities hosted many dark-skinned students from other nonaligned countries, but this is no longer the case. Indeed, there is only one dark-skinned student in the otherwise surprisingly large group at Filozofska Fakulteta. But whatever its origins, I like the term zamorček. I like it much more than all those words for former Yugoslavs, and I hope it is not, as I suspect they are, insulting. After all, were it not for the color of my skin, for the fact that I can slip virtually unnoticed (as long as I keep my mouth shut) through a crowd of Slovenians, the word zamorček, the little one from across the sea, would be a very apt description of me.