Playwright Not Ready to Exit Theater of War

Her university closed after the first bomb. Next went the lights in her Belgrade apartment. Then her sense of security. As her friends began leaving one by one, Biljana Srbljanovic got the eerie sensation of drifting from reality into one of her plays.

The author of “Belgrade Trilogy” and “Family Stories,” Srbljanovic, 28, became Serbia’s most acclaimed young dramatist by giving a voice to young Serbs who have moved abroad during this decade’s Balkan wars.

“Now I realize that I am going to become like them,” she wrote in her diary April 12, in the third week of NATO’s assault on Yugoslavia. “It is only a question of time, to leave my city, give up everything I’ve acquired.”

But she is still here. Between lonely self-exile and a harrowing life under the bombs, Srbljanovic has chosen to stay--a decision she reconsiders every few days amid the same conflicting impulses tearing at many of her compatriots.

By some estimates, one-fifth of Belgrade’s 2 million people have left for safer nearby towns or have abandoned Serbia, the Yugoslav federation’s dominant republic, since NATO began bombing the country March 24.

Young men are slipping through closed borders to dodge the draft, older men to avoid call-up to the army reserves. Parents are taking children away from the scary explosions. With Serbia’s economy at a crawl, people are looking elsewhere for temporary jobs or new careers.

One young Belgrader reports that so many friends and acquaintances have left--dozens, he says--that his phone bill in April was eight times higher than in March.

Many Serbs able to leave, however, cannot bear the thought of doing so. Instead, they call friends in Sarajevo, the long besieged and now revived capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, for survival tips. They huddle in bomb shelters or put their trust in fate. They tell jokes and try to stay busy enough to avoid despair.

Srbljanovic’s situation is special because hers is one of the few dissident voices inside Serbia with an international audience. Her plays have been staged in Austria, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands.

For her and others in Belgrade’s Western-oriented circles, the choice between staying and leaving involves judgments about the future of a homeland that is being destroyed by countries they once admired but is still in the grip of a strongman they fear and revile, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

“It’s like two giants are trying to settle a private feud and the whole country is their hostage,” Srbljanovic said at the downtown cafe hangout of her shrinking circle of friends. “Do I escape? Or do I stay to try to build a better society and be an optimist and a fool?”

The question also divides Serbia’s weak political opposition. Some activists have left, accusing some of those staying behind of complicity with the regime; some staying behind have accused some who left of complicity with NATO and abandonment of Serbia in troubled times.

From a Serbian friend living abroad, Srbljanovic recently got a wounding e-mail message that cut to the heart of this debate.

“We Serbs deserved this,” it said, for tolerating Milosevic’s provocations of ethnic bloodshed as Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia broke from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. NATO is bombing what’s left of the federation to try to halt his more recent crackdown--barely criticized by ordinary Serbs--on the ethnic Albanian majority in Serbia’s Kosovo province.

Watching her country come apart over the past decade, Srbljanovic has wrestled with this notion of collective guilt. Her allegorical plays portray Milosevic as a warmonger, but she often asks herself whether she’s been outspoken enough.

“Sometime I feel I have to apologize to my friends who have left. Some of them get the picture that, just by staying, I’m supporting this whole thing here,” she said. “Then I realize that this is an absurd position.”

Srbljanovic completed “Belgrade Trilogy,” her senior university project, after visiting Serbian friends in the U.S. and considering a move there. First staged here in 1997, it consists of three one-act plays about young Serbian emigres one New Year’s Eve--in Los Angeles, Sydney, Australia, and Prague, Czech Republic. Each is in touch with a common friend in Belgrade, who bemoans their fate in the epilogue.

“Family Stories” won Yugoslavia’s top theater award last year for its portrayal of four children pretending to be a family overwhelmed by the country’s post-Communist troubles.

Both plays were being staged here when the bombing closed the theaters in late March. Also shut were the University Academy for Dramatic Arts, where Srbljanovic taught, and McCann-Erickson, the American-owned ad agency where she moonlighted as a copywriter. Vreme, a Serbian magazine she wrote for, fell under wartime censorship.

“With one bomb,” she said, “everything I worked for ceased to exist.”

She accepted a job as a writer in residence at the municipal theater in Hamburg, Germany, and planned to attend the German premiere of “Belgrade Trilogy.” She bought a one-way ticket, packed a suitcase and said goodbye to friends.

On April 17, the night before the bus was to leave, she had second thoughts. She had a long walk with her boyfriend and a short talk with her mentor, the Belgrade poet Filip David.

I can persuade you to go or to stay, David said.

Persuade me to stay, she replied.

“I’m too nostalgic for the old Yugoslavia,” Srbljanovic said in the cafe several weeks later. “I couldn’t leave everything behind--my parents, my friends, my city, my streets, my language. Language is important for me as a writer. If I left, I’m afraid I would be very homesick and write only about Belgrade and its . . .”

An air raid siren interrupted that thought.

“My life here is no longer mine,” she said. “It’s guided by the missiles of NATO. We have no faith in the enemy’s precision. We live in a silent panic, knowing that staying alive is just a matter of chance.”

How long can she endure? Srbljanovic said she could not imagine staying if Belgrade is dragged into a winter war without heat or electricity. She would certainly leave, she added, if the police tried to stop her from writing or saying what she feels.

With Serbian media being censored, she has found a purpose here as wartime chronicler of Belgrade life, in diary form, for the Guardian newspaper in London and La Repubblica in Rome. Full of irony and gloom, her journal is scathing about Milosevic and NATO’s top brass equally.

“Last night,” she wrote recently, “NATO, surely for humanitarian reasons, left two-thirds of Serbia without electricity. . . . As I bumped into furniture in the dark, I wondered if perhaps the generals at NATO imagined that tomorrow I would buy weapons for myself and my family, go down to the square and start a revolution.”

Another entry imagined the orders she’d give if she could be “the mediocre dictator of a mediocre country” for one day.

Even such oblique criticism, voiced openly from Belgrade, can be risky. The dramatist believes that she was a target of a column in the government-owned newspaper Politika Ekspres against Serbs who “spread lies” in the Western media.

“Their names are known but not worth mentioning,” columnist Miroslav Markovic wrote. “Nobody disturbs them in this ‘undemocratic Serbia,’ even though they are betraying their country.”

“My father is always telling me, ‘Please just shut up,’ ” Srbljanovic said. “Maybe I am a little bit stupid.”

Just before the bombing began, Srbljanovic finished a new play, “The Fall.” Unlike her journal, it has an upbeat ending: The dictator’s son turns his back on his father, signaling the independence of a new generation that sheds the past and builds a democratic civil society.

One reason she clings to Belgrade is a longshot hope that the war will end and the play will be performed here before its scheduled premiere in Germany in the autumn.

“I’m a little bit hysterical and a little bit crazy right now,” she said. “Every day, I wake up depressed but somehow find strength. I just couldn’t stay here without being an optimist. It would kill me.”