July 14. For the third time, we are headed to the border for a visarun–the monthly errand to renew our permission to stay in the country.
Early in the morning, our driver, Max, picks up my husband and me near the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius to take us to the checkpoint on the Bosnian border. Inside the car, five sleep-muddled, disheveled Russians who fled to Serbia from the war are already waiting. Three adults, two children. We exchange brief greetings.
The drive takes about two hours. The landscape outside is familiar, though the season has shifted. In May and June, during our previous trips, it was the time of poppies and sweet cherries. Now, plum and raspberry season has arrived. Heavy branches bend under the weight of ripening fruit, and signs advertising refreshing raspberry sorbet beckon at every turn.
We travel along pitted rural roads, passing through naselja with whimsical names–Ledinci, Rakovac, Čerević. The jostling of the car cuts short any lingering dreams, but watching the countryside slip by is a quiet pleasure.
As we draw closer to the Danube, storks and herons swoop past. When the car emerges onto the highway alongside open fields, we spot plump kraguji–falcons. They sit regally on fence posts, anticipating prey, hunting even in the morning with a distinctly Serbian sense of polako–slowly, unhurriedly.
The terrain calls to mind Tuscany–a place dearly loved, yet now closed to us because of visa restrictions. The same vivid green hills softening into emerald valleys. Yellow mustard fields pinned to the vast book of the Earth by sharp cypresses and poplars, like the wings of cabbage butterflies. Here and there in the meadows, neat stacks of fresh hay are already turning gold. Still, these local views lack that Italian charm. Our relocation, though it brought us to a hospitable land, landed us in a far simpler Serbia too.
Then comes the border. The visa run is a ritual indifferent to even the thickest skin.
After two hours on the road, the driver drops us off near a roadside café and pulls over half a kilometer from the checkpoint to smoke, leaving us–a haphazard group of different ages and walks of life–to cross back and forth on foot.
Under the blistering sun, beneath the scrutiny of long-haul truckers lined up in a separate queue, we march toward the border post.
Beside them, we feel miserable. They are the free pirates of the open road; we are degraded petitioners pleading with the state. Our freedom comes with an expiration date, and time is running out. We have one foot planted in the legal realm, but the pinky toe of the other has already slipped into the gray territory of the undocumented. We envy their freedom, even while knowing full well that theirs, too, is relative.
As we walk, a trucker might wink mischievously from his high-perched cabin and shout, “Privet, russki!” or “Spasibo, da!” or “Putin!”–clicking his tongue to let us know he understands exactly who we are and why we are here. Somehow, we gather that they aren’t particularly keen on Serbia’s gentle migration policies.
Our procession carries the faint air of an arrival at a prison–a pathetic line of newcomers greeted by the caustic banter of old-timers. Even though the visa run is entirely legal, and we are not criminals with anything to feel ashamed of, we lower our eyes anyway. Our heads bow, our shoulders curling inward like shells.
Regardless of who we were in our lives before the war and the move, we are hitched to the same cart now. Forced displacement is a great equalizer–almost as absolute as the One we prefer not to name.
We walk single file toward the nearest window for our required exit stamp: quickening our pace, stumbling, nearly tripping over ourselves. We just want to get it over with. Thank God the man behind the glass isn’t Saint Peter. And thank God we don’t actually have to drag ourselves two kilometers further to the second checkpoint on the Bosnian side. Instead, we can stand around the corner in the shade of a sprawling willow tree, pretending to be occupied with terribly important business, before returning fifteen minutes later for the entry stamp.
This performance is staged here daily. The ritual never changes. But we know it works. And clinging to what works becomes essential when your world goes off the rails.
The climax arrives just before the final stamp. The border official looks up from the passport, stares directly at you, and deliberately slowly asks in Serbian when you intend to finally learn the language–after all, you’re four months in now. While you stammer a response, the officer, thoroughly satisfied by your fluster, presses down the stamp. Scene over; curtain drops.
We trudge back wearisomely past the big rigs. As an armored police car speeds past us, I say to my husband:
“We’re like characters in Men in Black. Remember when the agents stop that truck carrying illegal Mexican workers, and Jay unmasks the alien hidden under the poncho? That massive blue monster disguised as a respectable bracero?”
“Ah, we’re all aliens here,” he replies. “Extraterrestrials hiding our monsters behind respectable facades.”
“Yeah,” I say. “And there are rules that allow us to be here. If you can’t follow them, beat it. ‘Earth is not a picnic ground for galactic tourists,’” I add, mimicking Agent M’s voice. We share a quiet laugh and keep walking.
The rules are simple, yet even when you follow them impeccably, you can’t shake the feeling that you’ve wandered where you don’t belong–like a toddler caught walking into his parents’ bedroom. You didn’t plan it, but your father’s sudden bark–“Get back to your room!”–sticks with you forever. That tiny internal illegal alien stays with you from then on, sure to remind you, at the most inconvenient moment, where you really come from.
Max drives us back; his passengers prefer silence.
In that quiet, the sudden voice of the older boy in the backseat rings out like a bell. Everyone turns. A six- or seven-year-old boy with a mop of curls and huge blue eyes asks, “Daddy, Daddy! What’s more important–the heart or the brain?”
The out-of-place question, like so many children’s queries, brings a sudden stillness. I instantly remember myself at that age–following my father around like a shadow, badgering him about the sky, the sea, about why the world was built the way it was. Time back then felt stretched out, thick like the flavor of the bubblegum he brought home for me to the USSR from Poland. Of course, it wasn’t his answers that mattered–answers that were sometimes silly, brushed off just to quiet me–it was seeing how he handled my persistence, and how long he would let me follow him.
People say the “why” stage passes in a flash, leaving behind a sharp, lingering ache. I wouldn’t know. I have no children.
The boy’s father begins to answer, choosing his words carefully.
“From the perspective of biological survival,” he reflects, “the heart probably comes first. Doctors already know how to transplant it, just like the liver, but they can’t do that with the brain.”
A quiet breath of relief ripples through the car. The logic is clear: if they haven’t learned to transplant it, the brain must be secondary. Or not?
“So they still haven’t figured the brain out?” the boy presses on.
“No, they haven’t.”
“Doesn’t that make it more important, then?”
An awkward silence falls. Admitting one’s own unknowing to a child is uniquely hard for adults.
The conversation among the adults drifts listlessly toward organ cloning technology and the ethical dead ends of modern medicine, before petering out completely. Really, what is there to discuss for so long? Illegal organs? Intruders of some kind?
I would have kept asking Him, though. I would have kept following him around.
I would want to know: will a transplanted stranger–this desired yet unwanted element–have enough strength to endlessly beg the Big Organism for its visaruns? Won’t a catastrophic rejection happen in the end, or will Central Command grant permanent residency? Or this: how will the alien change the host, and how will it change itself–will love spark between them?
But above all, what I would ask my Father, if he were still alive, is: “Dad, Dad, do you happen to know why I don’t have children?” And I would trail behind him for a long, long time, waiting for an answer for as long as he’d let me without pushing me away. I am certain the last thing he would ever say is, “Earth is not a picnic ground for galactic tourists.” But even if he did say it, we’d both chuckle, and keep walking.