Pump in Kaposvar

Here, za difference od The snow, it is not problem kako se alienate, nego kako se alienate.

In a century which, perhaps more than any before it, was marked by large, violent migrations of hundreds of millions of people, and in which the notion statelessness - especially for intellectuals who held on to their dignity - acquired an emblematic meaning, writing from a stateless position is necessarily in (sad) harmony with the spirit of the times; statelessness can, of course, also be a willful choice of an emancipated person who is "above tribal divisions", and then there is, for consolation, something in that romantic; or, on the other hand, it can be pragmatic-market, like contemporary "intellectual nomadism" in search of something better with a chair or some other craze; however, it is most often imposed by circumstances and not at all glamorous, not in the least like the digitized ideas that those who only think they know what they are talking about can have about him. Zagreb (or Belgrade, or both, or neither?) writer Vesna Biga deals in a book of diaries Bus People precisely this, "down-to-earth", proletarian nomadism and stateless wanderings not so much "ideological" as existential Post-Yugoslavia, that is, of all those people - including herself - who the bloody disintegration of the common SFRY state found "inconveniently" torn between Here and There, pressed by personal, family and business reasons, torn apart, caught in an overnight "illegal" conflict... This book speaks, therefore, Fr plebeians among To the homeless, for, don't doubt that even the Homeless have their vainly haughty aristocracy!

Ti plebeians, mostly the "ordinary" world, workers, peasants and just a few dishonest intellectual, people from the famous "mixed marriages" (as if there were any others), officer's families and other apparently surviving shipwrecked survivors left after a bloody massacre, travel during those war seasons 1991 - 1995, which this diary covers, for fifteen or more hours back and forth , in and out of all those own Serbia, hrvatski, Slovenia and then (all three) Bosnian, all of ours niche express i chasmatransim, eternally with some vague feeling of guilt, with "built-in" apprehension for an unclear reason and a very specific and clear fear of one, other and third State Bodies to whom they are constantly somewhat suspicious, and even directly repulsive, as traveling embodiments of the Other, what "to us "it is no longer nice to see here, at "us". Those buses loaded with human misfortune and one quiet, piercing Despair in about fifty different, individual versions, glided all those nights, all those years, through the selenders, palanquins and wastelands of southern Hungary, bypassing Crisis Places down in the south, passing through those sleepy-idyllic Mojace, Baja and Nađkanjiže, where instead of the former tourist spritzer-goulash-chardash romance, they were greeted with insulting exposed "banality" of the gas station in Kaposvar, as the most common place for reloading of these Spiritually Displaced Persons from Cyrillic to Latin buses, and vice versa... They are in their respective parts Bus People, with all their "little" stories, poignant, fragmented road movie from words, as the progenitor of a non-existent, common-sense "impossible" genre.

What Biga sees and hears between his two trips, staying in Belgrade and Zagreb, between which all communication withered and died, being replaced by symbolic and real by exchange fire, is what it really is spooky, we hear more than the restless dozing and thrashing of Superfluous People in the meadows and ditches between Balaton and Drava: Serbian TV-hatred mixed with Croatian TV-hatred, yesterday's Quiet Neighbors who suddenly show themselves to be very enthusiastic fascists, the Hypnotized Crowd that just needs to point a finger at someone should be hated, and this one will tear him apart with its teeth, and above all, all those two-legged fawns from intellectuals – at the head, always at the head of p(j)esniks, writers & the rest menagerie - who, ah, have a rich enough vocabulary to be able to graphically and rhetorically loudly rationalize their atavistic hatred, essential ignorance and miserable prejudices, or else the slimy cowardice and conformity of not opposing either the Government or the Crowd (because that's, damn it, dangerous); but, on the other hand, Biga records those relatively rare, but all the more precious examples of courage, lucidity and honor, all those who were ashamed in the name of the Shameless, forming that spontaneously created human community, gathered in catacombs, who decided not to succumb to the elements by becoming a part of it. And the writer delivers all of this to the inveterate reader in these three hundred or so pages, seemingly without "aesthetic" ambitions, and so much better and more mature than the sterile speculations of all those pompous literary characters with their Big Stories. Which, in turn, is a possible explanation for why the book in both the Serbian and Croatian editions passes almost without a critical response, because the Pihtijas, both of them, now want to "make peace", so they are most bothered by those who, by their very existence, show that they didn't even have to are "arguing", as it is theirs wheezing, therefore, whatever their choice.