A TRIBUTE TO MY THREE FATHERS

Dear Chloe and Astrid,

When you check out the pictures on my bookshelf, there are several people there you may not recognize. Just the same, I don’t want them to be forgotten. Not only because they were important in my life, but also because they came from obscure or faraway places – places we don’t know much about or just dismiss. As it happens my three fathers were not Americans. Their birth countries were Russia, France, and Montenegro (which was part of Yugoslavia).

And then there is my claim that I had THREE fathers. Is that weird or what? All three have passed on some time ago. I myself am pretty old now, and what’s the point? But I just want to get it off my chest that I wish I had told them when they were alive how grateful I was to all three of them. 

So, let me get my Russian father on first. He is the main one. He is the one who raised me – the one who told me stories about the living things around us, and far-away places, and the constellations in the night sky.  

He was Russian alright, even though he had left the country when he was twenty years old. But the country stayed with him, and over the years he would tell me bits and pieces about it, and I am still trying to put the puzzle together. He talked about growing up in the countryside, and what it was like bounding through snow mounds in a sleigh drawn by fast horses, or ice skating on the frozen river nearby. But the big deal was when the ice finally broke, and slabs of it rose and clashed and carried everything before them, and the sun bounced around among the ice splinters, announcing springtime.

And in the village, things began to stir as well. The young women dressed in bright garments and sang and danced, and the young men danced too, competing as to who could leap highest: that’s how they made sure that the wheat would grow high too. And the wheat did grow tall.

Father, maybe I should call him Dad, for that’s who he was to me. So, Dad just looked on at the merrymaking from the sidelines. He lived in a big house built by French prisoners of war from the days of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the 19^th century. He belonged to what they called the service nobility. The tsars, as they put the country together, would grant land to good soldiers who were bound, in exchange, to rally to the flag in times of war. This set the tradition of the first born to be dedicated to the military calling: Dad was symbolically inducted into his future duties by being placed on horseback even before his baptism.

This is sort of funny, because Dad was not at all soldier-like: I never even heard him raise his voice. What he really liked is poetry, and I grew up listening to Russian poetry. And yet he had known wars.  His own father had been killed in the Russian-Japanese war of 1905. He had been sent to the same military academy his father had gone to, in Simbirsk on the Volga. And when the next war – World War I – erupted, he too was sent to war. He was just seventeen years old, but fighters were needed on the Austrian front, and off he went.

As I said, he was not soldier-like even then, because his small outfit was quickly surrounded by an Austrian outfit, and they had to surrender. What happened next was rather unexpected: The Austrian captain looked him over and told him to scram. Dad turned around and started walking, fully expecting to be shot in the back… and walking – all the way home. The Russian front had caved in, and it looked like soldiers on the Austrian side were not excited about killing teenagers.

But then when he got home, things were a mess. His mother, who had been raising horses for the Imperial cavalry, was no longer in charge. The city commissars who represented the new Communist government were running things now, and the villagers were confused. They gathered at the house, and the word was that they had been told to chop down the family orchard. Was it not the common property of all now – so why chop it down? Orders were orders… Dad witnessed these democratic proceedings and made up his mind then and there. That night he picked out a good horse, and with his mother’s blessing rode into the night to join the Whites. The Whites were the ones who were organizing to fight the Revolutionaries or Reds.

As we know, the Reds won. Dad ended up in exile – in what we now know to be Former Yugoslavia. My maternal grandfather was also a “White,” and he and his family also ended up in Yugoslavia. Dad and Mom met, got married, and I was, I thought, the result.  We spoke Russian at home – my maternal grandmother moved in with us at some point – and it never occurred to me NOT to speak Russian with her. I loved the Russian fairytales she told me at bedtime. 

But Dad worked long hours. He was driving a truck and disappeared for days. I remember a very special day in Belgrade because Dad was at home. Just as well, because the Germans bombed us that day out of the blue (the year was 1941) and Dad picked me up and we all ran down the stairs into the cellar, and Dad held me tight, and I felt safe. World War II was on, the Germans came marching down, and people were running away into the mountains and forests. Dad kept driving his truck, though, and one day we all piled up into the truck with a lot of other people and drove away.

The place we ended up in was Germany. No one explained anything. Grandmother just told me not to cry even though there was nothing to eat, and here too bombs were crashing all over the place. But one day the bombing stopped and Dad’s truck reappeared, and we drove away. We moved from place to place, and I was told that these new places were Displaced Persons Camps.

After some five years in Germany, we moved again, this time to Morocco in North Africa. We lived in this little mining town on the Southern slope of the Atlas Mountains. I was 12 years by then and had some questions on my mind. How come life was so complicated, and what was it all about? But Mom sent me off to Marrakech to boarding school. I had to function in yet another language, now French, and better put my nose to the grindstone.

But I did keep asking questions. Dad’s poetry was wise, beautiful, witty – but ultimately an elusive way to explain the world. What was the Russian Revolution all about? What about the Civil War? After all, he had fought in it for two whole years. But after a brief silence, he would just change the subject. He would start talking about how he had gone hunting wolves with his uncles.

And then there was the whole World War II episode, and why did we end up in Germany? Were they not the enemy? But there were more pressing matters to attend to just then. We lived in Morocco, I was preparing for the French Baccalaureate, but the Moroccans decided that Morocco belonged to them, and not to the French. Vietnam was ejecting the French, and now Algeria was in flames. It looked like we would have to move again.

But first I need to back up and introduce my second father, the Frenchman. On one of my vacations from boarding school I noticed this guy hanging around. I also noticed that Mom was acting sort-of different, stealthy or something. And Dad too was different – even quieter than usual, and sort-of withdrawn. I eventually caught on to the “sort-of” situation: Mom and that man, Maurice Jobert, must be doing it.

Oh, how I hated the intruder! I hated him with every fiber of my sullen teenage being. But the adults carried on as if nothing was going on, and the talk centered on the need to find a new place to live. Mom had cousins who had emigrated to Australia, they were willing to sponsor us, and that looked like the best option. I had hoped to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, but Australia held the promise, in my mind, of leaving the Frenchman behind. We made our plans, but Maurice beat us to it, and when we landed in Sydney, there he was, greeting us with an armful of flowers.

Australia proved hard for us. We had had the Moroccans to fetch and carry for us back in North Africa, but now it was our turn to do the same. And we knew all those languages, but not English. In short, we were dumb immigrants, and had to start from scratch – once again. Mom took over, as was her want, made the men pool their resources, and we all moved in together. We had a roof over our head now and marched off to work – factory work.

It is not as if being part of this ménage à trois was not humiliating for me. And standing for endless hours at a conveyor belt, sorting apricots at the fruit factory, was not exactly like dallying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Just the same, we held together, and maybe things would have been even harder without Maurice. I got to find out more about him. He had grown up on a farm near Paris, the fourth of five children. Here too war had played a major role. His father had soldiered in World War I, had been gassed by the then latest “weapon of mass destruction,” and had come home damaged.

When World War II broke out, Maurice escaped to Senegal in West Africa, where General De Gaulle was organizing the French Free Army. He thus fought every step of the war up the Italian peninsula and into Germany. He told us how his company of Senegalese soldiers was wiped out while he lay wounded in hospital. He told us how furious he was when General Eisenhower forbade any African soldiers to march in the victory parade on the Champs Elysees. He was also furious with his brothers. They had made money hand over fist selling their produce on the black market under the German Occupation while he was away fighting. It was in this fit of high-mindedness that he had left the family and started over in Morocco.

And now he had followed Mom to Australia, and we were all in it together. I was beginning to pick up the language after a year or so, and even enlisted at the University of Sydney. Things were hard for all of us. Dad, after all, was pushing sixty. But it was Mom who turned out to be hit the hardest. She who had been the driving force for all of us, she now simply crashed. It was a full-fledged mental breakdown and she had to be hospitalized.  

Amidst all these travails, I managed to fall in love with a fellow student. I was, after all, in my early twenties at the time. He was Belgian born, and it was the French language that played cupid to our romance. Wedding bells were in the offing, but Rick was a corporate brat, his parents had been transferred yet again, this time to the U.S. They were expecting us there, but what about Mom? This is when both Dad and Maurice stepped up to the plate. They gave me their blessing to get on with my life and promised to take care of Mom. To simplify things, Dad would offer a friendly divorce, and Mom and Maurice would get married. This is how Maurice became my stepfather.  

I was now free to fly off to America and enter yet another life episode on yet another continent. But what of my third father?  The revelation of his existence had taken place back in the day of my teens in Morocco. I had been sent on a summer vacation to France to stay with some of Dad’s relatives – aunt Natasha and aunt Nadia. They kept looking at me and whispering behind my back. Then they finally decided to enlighten me: did I not know that my father was not my father? Did I not know that my birth father was another man, a Montenegrin?

I did not know, and the news was traumatic. But I did not want to show those women how I felt. I acted cool, and once home, confronted Mom. “Those bitches,” she said, “it’s true.” If I had had issues with Dad, I would have latched onto the other, the “real” father. But Dad was the one who had fed, and protected, and raised me – what can be more “real” than that? As to the mysterious stranger, I locked him in my genes and threw away the key. But who knows how genes work their way in one’s life?

For now, a new life in America beckoned, and Rick and I set out to meet our future. Rick got a job as an economist with General Motors. I resumed my studies, got a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, and got into teaching. We lived in New York, first in Manhattan, but when the kids (Alex and then Muriel) came along, we put a down payment for a house on Staten Island.

At some point Dad came down from Australia to live with us. He was great with the kids, and they loved him back. Rick was off on business trips a lot, and I struggled at work and on the home front. One day I happened to look out the window: Dad was standing in front of the house, and Alex’s friends had turned the hose on him. Was it because it was the 80s, there was much talk of “the evil empire,” and Dad’s English bore a heavy Russian accent?

At any rate, Dad decided to go back to Australia. He put his meager savings into buying a second-hand van, and went off driving to Queensland, stopping to fish and sleep on the beaches. Feasting on mangoes, which you could just pick up for free along the road, was a special treat for this man who had been born among the snows of Russia. But his eyesight began to fail, and Mom and Maurice found him a nursing home. I was able to visit him before he passed away in 1987.

The phone rang some six months later, and it was Maurice. Mom had died of a heart attack the night before. He had taken her out to celebrate her seventy sixth birthday, they had danced and toasted with champagne, and that night she had died. That was Mom, alright. She could have “walked quietly into the night,” but that was not her way.

Maurice lived on into his eightieth year. But friends let me know that he was developing dementia, and I went “down under” to check things out. Maurice was, as the French are wont to do, a food connoisseur. He was now receiving “meals on wheels,” and I watched him do the tasting ritual. He took a bite of the nondescript food, held it in his mouth a bit, and pronounced it to be passable to fair. I found a good place for him, but he died within the year.

Back home, l resumed my busy life. Rick liked his job at General Motors. I kept up with teaching and the kids: PTA meetings, bake sales, baseball, drama classes, summer camps… It was a typical middle-class life, and we were grateful: no bombs fell out of the sky, and no one told us to get the hell out…

And yet… wars and rumors of wars rumbled below the surface. The 80s were rife with threats of a nuclear holocaust. The Russians, or rather the Soviets, were front and center. I was fluent in Russian, maybe I could be of some use in the situation? Is a mother’s duty confined to the kitchen, or should she not step out to the frontlines when danger calls? I became a peace activist.  

Childhood memories of running from bombs, long suppressed, made peace work like finding religion. I was in my element. But it was also like opening the floodgates: the more I learned, the more there was to learn. I was an American, and was not America born of Revolution? Back in my French high school days, I had been taught all about the liberty, equality, and brotherhood heralded by the French Revolution. So why not Revolution in Russia as well? Wasn’t change urgently needed there? Maybe, just maybe, my poetry-loving Dad had been too captive of his position, his privileged position after all, to know better?

And what were the French doing in Morocco? And had we not enjoyed our privileges there as well? And why did the Americans step in in Vietnam when the French were booted out of the place?

Questions and more questions. In the 90s the kids went off to college, Rick took early retirement and we moved to Tucson, Arizona. I learned about the Sanctuary movement: had I really forgotten what it was like to be a refugee?  Another revolution, the Cuban Revolution, had evidently upset the applecart. President Kennedy had founded the School of the Americas, and we sponsored “regime change” all over South and Central America.

But was the Cold War not over at last? There had been arms treaties with the Soviet Union, which had dissolved and renounced Communism. This is why I was so shocked when we bombed Belgrade in 1999. There I was, a three-year old girl crouching in a cellar in Belgrade, and here I was, a late middle-aged American bombing some little girl crouching in a cellar in Belgrade. It felt like I was bombing myself. Yes, I had heard all about Milošević, and how the Serbs were the new Nazis. REALLY? My Montenegrin birthfather, locked for all those years in the prison house of my mind, demanded to be let out at last to say his piece.

The personal side of it was no longer as shocking as it had appeared to me when I was fifteen years old. Mom had confided in me since that my Russian Dad was not too interested in sex. The tall, dark, and handsome Montenegrin had stepped in, and here I was: I owed him my life in the most elemental way possible.

Besides, war, once again, had made settling ordinary life issues very hard again. Unlike some other European countries, which all jumped on the bandwagon of German conquest, Yugoslavia fought back. Colonel Draža Mihailović took the leadership of the Resistance and as Mom told me, my birthfather, Vojeslav Lukačević, became one of his principal aids.

A second Resistance movement had been formed in Yugoslavia at the time, led by Josip Broz, better known as Tito. He was a Communist, and he and the defender of Constitutional Monarchy, Draža Mihailović, were unable to come to an understanding about the political settlement of the country once the Germans were expelled. But when that result was finally achieved after bitter fighting, it was the Communists who carried the day. Mom told me that together with Draža Mihailović and a few others, my birth father had been executed by Tito.

So, just like my Russian father, my Montenegrin father had fought on the conservative side of history. He too, apparently, had been a member of the Yugoslav elite. And here I was, despite my childhood of danger and deprivation, now also a member of the world elite: is this not what being an American means? And what are then the implications of running the world? How did it come to mean bombing Belgrade – and later Iraq, and Libya, and Syria, and Yemen? The child in me who had been on the receiving end of such interventions bristled with questions.

I did my homework, and the facade of “humanitarian intervention” in Yugoslavia proved just that – a facade. Was not Slobodan Milosević cleared of the “crimes of ethnic cleansing” in 2016 by the same tribunal at the Hague which had hounded him to death before? And why is Russia, no longer the fearsome Soviet Union but reduced to just the Russian Federation, the enemy again? Why do we sanction them and demonize Putin the way we demonized Milošević? Is it because Putin is resisting our taking over of the country’s business – particularly the oil and gas business? Are we playing chicken, once again, with the nuclear option?   

Under such conditions I am prepared to turn to my Montenegrin genes for inspiration. The Turkish Empire, which had overrun the Balkans for centuries never quite conquered the mountain fastnesses of Montenegro. Its inhabitants were famous for their fighting spirit, and it seems that this spirit of rebellion and stubbornness lives on in me.   

And it lives in me as an American. Did I not learn to question and protest and speak out for peace and justice right here in America? Most Americans are not excited about being the masters of the world. By acknowledging my un-American fathers, I hope that my many roots will bind us back to the world community. Constant war is no way to build the future.

And so, dear Chloe and Astrid, I have inflicted another “history lesson” on you. Hope you don’t mind. As the cliché goes, “if you don’t know history, you are condemned to repeat it.” My hope is that you will find a way to make history instead of having to just suffer it.