I call my street the most beautiful street in Belgrade. Is it local patriotism? Definitely. Most people living in the half-ruined, half-neglected city of two and a half million that of Belgrade is -- the ugliest city in the world, as an international board of architects declared my town some years ago -- firmly believe that they live in the most beautiful street of Belgrade. Some would also claim, of the world. Well, that definitely is local patriotism, but something very typical of a city in which, as a good friend of mine put it: in all parts of the city it is the same shit.

I agree with the same shit, I do not agree with the definition of the shit. He said: no well-built flats, no infrastructure, no beauty or proportion. I would say the opposite: lots of untouched green areas, infrastructure everywhere, not only in the center of Belgrade, new flats with central heating. It does not really make much difference whether you live here or there, you belong to a community that has its own rules, and to a bigger community of equally distributed beauty and poverty.

Coming back to my street: it is in downtown Belgrade, crossing the avenue of embassies, luxurious prewar houses, the King’s road; it is very close to the biggest black and green market where you can buy nowadays anything from a baby to a lamb. My building was built by a rich Jewish family immediately before World War II, just a few months before the bombing of Belgrade by the Nazis in 1941. The family had a premonition that the building they were living in, only a hundred meters down the road, wasn’t “safe enough.” They moved a few months before the bombings and during the air raid their former building was hit and reduced to dust whilst their new building, my building, was one of the few in the area completely intact. The old lady from whom I bought the flat told me proudly: this is a happy place, I raised three children and three grandchildren in this flat. During the latest bombing of Belgrade, in the spring of 1999 by NATO, her words were echoing in my head all the time, even when the building shook from one side to anthe other from a nearby blast, or the windows shattered or and mushrooms sprouted in the cracks in the walls grew mushrooms after heavy torrential rains. But I had never thought of my building in terms of bombs or community before. I lived in my own flat, in my own room, in my own world.

When the sirens went off on the first night that Belgrade was attacked, we all ran to the basement when the sirens went off: there were quite a few of us. Actually, we have no empty basements, our basements are populated by Gypsy and Turkish families. So we ran to their rooms and they opened their doors. They took out beer and rakija because we were trembling with fear, and we all stood there speaking words of fear, of personal and historical knowledge, of pain, of anger. For the first time since I lived in this building, I looked at my neighbors. I must admit, I never liked neighbors, I come from the big alienated city of Milan where you pay a lot not to know your neighbors. Some call it cruel, but for some it is a choice; I got used to it.

Apart from the basement tenants, whom I knew best because I once intervened with the mother beating a child and later became her friends with her, the rest I didn’t know. But I did have enemies. My main enemy was a retired actress who shares the phone line with me. In Belgrade, to have a private phone line is a matter not only of luxury but of good political connections: I didn’t have either of those. As I put it to my family, if a civil war were to erupt here in our town, I think we would first turn against those with whom we share our phone lines. The things that woman said against my family and I because we talked on the phone too much I will never forget. Her husband had even cursed my teenaged daughter; in the basement, he offered her water and told her he had a boy of the same age living a few blocks away. The people from the huge first floor flat, the best in the building, are retired communists from the old Yugoslavia: they got their flats, their privileges during Tito’s time. Now their children are scattered all over the world, thanks also to those privileges, and they are bitter with their meager pensions and lost power and glory. In the basement they were presumptuous but decent, exactly as my parents would be, deposed rulers but decent people. They hadn’t looted, they hadn’t killed, the red bourgeoisie was a class they simply belonged to by history and trade. The woman who lived next to them in a small windowless flat , is an old woman belonging to the pre-communist times. She is completely an outsider, terribly poor and half- crazy. She speaks many languages and lives by tutoring. She dresses as a queen gone mad and speaks different languages all the time, her flat stinks with the books and the dirt she collects and children just love her: The Madame. Actually we don’t know what country she comes from: Russia, Poland?

Then come I, the feminist writer with spoiled children who listen to loud foreign music, with a husband who lets his wife do all the man’s jobs. We are the family from the papers, we write in the papers and the papers write about us, which of course nobody reads, but it is undeniable and that brings us the status of untouchables.

Next to us is a very nice small family with a sick son and a wild ugly dog who barks all the time. The man died during the NATO bombings of a heart attack. He didn’t go to the shelter often. He said, good night, before being taken to the hospital and those were his last words. He was a dentist.

Upstairs: divided flats. Roughly, illegally-divided and illegally-sold flats because of divided families, poverty, fights; second two generations living together because of decisions having nothing to do with them. before the war, In the former Yugoslavia, a square meter cost as much as in Rome. Today in Belgrade, after the bombings, a square meter costs only as much as in Lisbon, but far too much for an average monthly salary of 88 DM. Selling a flat, whether legally or illegally, is big business. Then come some rented flats with different tenants: students, Chinese traders, refugees from Bosnia. Rented flats bring wild things to our building and our life:, police, public space, because tenants never last long in a flat, don’t ask me why, is it the flat, is it the owners, is it the war? People who rent flats are in desperate need of something and they have to move on, away from something.

Then, we come to the roofs. The roofs have been overtaken by new power in order to build new flats, renovating the attics and adding on to the roofs notwithstanding the bad state of the basements. New flats mean easy money, mean new power. The roofs are inhabited mostly by people who made money in the war, as war profiteers, as war criminals. Some very shy, some very loud, they have one thing in common, the power and money to renovate the building if they want to. While in the basement I listened to their speeches, and the inflection of their accents. Nobody was saying anything political: we were all in the same boat, all in the same trench for the moment. The cellar we were in was that of a gypsy prostitute whose husband lives on by collecting rubbish and selling it: a scavenger. Her hand was crippled when she was a kid by her parents to make her beg more convincingly. Nowadays, since the last phase of the war started, she would get drunk very often get drunk and roll on the pavement half-nude, cursing her life and invoking love and justice. Often she would cut herself with a broken bottle and declare love to her husband. The ambulance would come and very soon she would be sitting on her doorstep with her husband and grandchildren drinking a new bottle of beer offered by the ambulance driver. We, the Molerova Street onlookers, would listen and watch from our windowsills: Mica’s show. Her behavior always had something to do with weather or political changes. I learned how to decode her performances into fortunes, like an I Ching, or a cockfight as Karen Blixen described in Out Of Africa.

What we found out in the basement is that we actually all spoke the same language, with different inflections, with different opinions, with differing weights of status and power behind our words, but the amazing thing was that we all spoke something that can be called, perhaps politically incorrectly, Belgrade's language. Let me describe it: a song, the words eaten, sluggish, full of slang and vulgarities and humor. Of course you can speak haute Serbian, or Serbo-Croatian, but in that basement, you would have felt and been ridiculous. A legitimate choice. A safe choice. An outsider’s choice. But, when I mentioned say language, I meant something else: I meant the interior language, the culture, the body language. Mica, the Gypsy prostitute, screamed at some point when a big blast hit somewhere near: They will kill us, they will kill us all. Now instead of saying to her something like: no, it is not as it used to be, this is a different war, a different bombing, not like the Nazi one, the bombs are more subtle, the targets are precise, blah, blah, blah... I said only: Maybe we will survive, somebody always does. Our conversation was everybody’s few thoughts crippled by fear and impotence. Irrational fear and imminent death made us equal.

I watched on the BBC an interview with a Chilean-American writer who writes about politics and sex. He said, speaking about Pinochet and his extradition into Spain where he will be for trialtried as a war criminal: criminals never get old and never escape. They are never beyond punishment, they never are and they never should be only national. We all belong to the same culture, he said, a displaced culture. He writes in Spanish in the morning and in English in the afternoon. Well, I completely agree with this writer, a Jew, identifying with both a rich and a poor country of the world, at the same time, at the same place. But he is also a man. For me, being a woman, things are slightly more displaced; my identity is always displaced, belonging officially to the men who gave me my name, history and a home. When I abandon that, I am lost for a second I am lost, and the next second I am everything, from a bird to a queen. My identity is actually mobile, it goes with my body, with my personal story. It has no proper language, no proper history, it is just me, an anonymous and universal me that is for the most part you, wherever I am, whoever you are. When I finished writing in the first person my normality diary, a Belgrade diary of bombings and war in Kosovo, I switched to my diary of Nefertiti and democracy and beauty issues, in the 19^th century BC, switching myself from a Women in Black to a queen. I am both, personally I am even more Nefertiti than Woman in Black, but Nefertiti and a Woman in Black have much more in common than what it seems at first sight. Especially when they both climb down to the basement, as to a hell, clinging to and fighting for their life. Social space disappears.

The margin between Mica and I melted steadily under internal repression and NATO bombs. The only difference in our behavior, her screaming and rolling nude in public and me writing and sulking in private, was because I am a white girl and she is a gypsy girl. My war, my only war, the last most recent one in Serbia, based on ethnic intolerance and political violence, brought the biggest insight of tolerance and peace politics. It will never be the same in my street, in my Molerova Street in the center of Belgrade, nor in any street in Belgrade. My neighbor the war profiteer no longer dares to harass me or my car: he is indicted, or will be, but his family and mine spent time in the same cellar. My telephone line partner doesn’t curse me anymore, we drank the same water in the cellar. And my gypsy friend, well, even before the war, we were the mirror opposites of the same story: a feminist and a prostitute, women dealing with men’s culture, day by day...

The language and politics of tolerance does not have to bear pain or trauma, but it has to cross the dungeon of deep feelings of recognition and identification of the same and individuation of the different. And it is not an easy or a free way: it is paved with prejudices, comfort, blindnesses that easily turn into hate, intolerance and violence.

We are not children or students of our own choices or free will: in the emergency situation of the ideal cellar of the world as I have described it, personal life has no free space, to be more precise: no space at all. Personal projects and personal lives in a concentration camp do not exist, but some kind of life does, oh yes, how it does. A Nazi concentration camp survivor said: it was okay after a few months, we got used to it. In Benigni’s film you realize that it can be fun and be horrible at the same time. From my protected experience of war, with the true sufferings elsewhere, I can say: it was warm, full of understanding, full of tolerance and love. And after it was all over I missed it. Of course it was terrible, but the way it wasn’t terrible, when it wasn’t, was the best part of my social life, my dream society in my cellar.

During a heavy raid, a woman gave premature birth in an underground station where we used to hide. Everybody was sitting around her and beaming, as in an African tribe or in modern hospitals where families take part in childbirth, here we were all part of it. No shame, no borders. I thought what a twist of fate for that woman and her child. The father had been drafted and was somewhere fighting, probably for no cause he could understand, and here we were, strangers, having his baby for no particular reason, caring for it more than for our own children...Well, if it didn’t happen to me, I wouldn’t have believed it, but things do happen, and people do change, sometimes for better, not only for worse as the modern Western ideology of the cult of youth and fear of decay preaches...

Cultural, class, race and gender differences exist, all the time, everywhere, because they are part of each individual story and personal identity, never repeatable nor repetitive. They exist in highly developed democracies as well as in totalitarian regimes, and perhaps in the same quantity. What actually does not exist everywhere in the same measure, or sometimes not at all, is the language to express those differences without offending or killing Oneself or the Other. When we speak about democracies and politics I guess we always have to speak first and foremost about language and free space. There is no time in a personal life span to change the world, nor is it our purpose: the world is always given to the individual as it is, as the result of too many different and uncontrollable elements. So language and absolute freedom, which are actually no good for anything other than transgression, or naming desire or the object of transgression, are the only tools for identifying and embodying the difference, the Other, the non-mirror images of Self and Society. It is a very painful process that doesn’t necessarily bring happiness: sometimes the less the difference, the more the happiness.

Often children seem the only happy ones in the world: no differences, no pain, no rivalries, no identities: you alone are the world. Yet Juliet Mitchell, in her recent book on hysteria, argues: it is not the parents who make a person, psychoanalytically speaking, it is the rival brothers, those who share your place and position in the world. By means of this common milieu, the child differentiates itself from parents and siblings. I also would argue on that line, that it is not the multicultural society that makes your identity through the coexistence of differences, it is the sameness in a particular place that creates the multicultural milieu or difference. In short, it creates the possibility for difference. In my basement, where all the inhabitants from my building gathered in fear during the bombings last year in Belgrade, nobody said, “I am a Serb”, or “we Serbs.” Being in Serbia during the war, we all were Serbs, at least during the air raids, notwithstanding the fact that some were Gypsies, some Turks, some Croats and all of us in a Jewish building. But will peace and democracy guarantee us that safety of no difference? Death makes us equal. Western democracies make me a Serb the moment I cross the border; there in my totalitarian basement and country during the war, all differences were swallowed and we became brothers. In that space of sameness, I could have been anybody: a cockroach, a slave, a queen... The balance between uniqueness and sameness is precarious but is the only way of staying alive without killing anything that resembles life, whether in ourselves or in others.