Battling Brexit Read online

  He starts reading a list of something. “Illegal entry into the Schengen area, failure to declare livestock, resisting arrest, theft of a vehicle, shoplifting, multiple counts of assault and battery, disruption of a peaceful demonstration and being an accessory to the damage of private property.” He looks up at me. “You are in a world of trouble, young woman. I’m booking you in. Do you know anyone in the area you can call?”

  I have to keep myself from shooting to my feet. “Yes, please call the office of Croatia’s Permanent Representative to the European Union. He can vouch for me.”

  The police officer is about to look up the number, when the guy who was manning the front desk walks into the room.

  “Excuse me, sir, but we have a visitor from the Croatian diplomatic corps to see you.”

  A tall woman, a bit older than me with straight blonde hair, walks into the room. She is kind of familiar, like I’ve seen her in pictures or something. She’s dressed in a severe pantsuit and shakes the officer’s hand like she’s about to crush it, despite her slight build. She speaks with a throaty voice.

  “Lucija Kovačević-Bektashi, the Republic of Croatia’s counterterrorism liaison at the EU Intelligence and Situation Center.”

  My eyebrows go up. This is Hristijan’s older daughter, the cousin I’ve never met.

  She goes on. “I heard about the mess she caused today. Nevertheless, Croatia’s Permanent Representative to the EU wants her released. The Croatian embassy will cover the costs for any damaged property.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but until we set bail that won’t be possible. Croatia’s Permanent Representative has no jurisdiction over local police business.”

  Lucija shakes her head. “Apparently you don’t get what the deal is. There isn’t going to be any bail and you’re not going to book her.” She rummages through my passports on the desk and finds the Croatian one. “This is a diplomatic passport. This young woman is a member of the Croatian mission to the EU and the Kingdom of Belgium. She has diplomatic immunity. You’re the one who doesn’t have jurisdiction. Release her, immediately.”

  The police officer stews. “Very well. However, we can demand that she leaves Belgium immediately.”

  “Not unless you want to cause a major diplomatic incident. Do it and I’ll see to it that your job is on the line.”

  “Fine, but I intend to file a protest with my superior.”

  “You do that,” Lucija says as if she couldn’t care less.

  The officer raises an eyebrow. “This so-called member of your diplomatic mission was caught on a flight originating from outside of the European Union. I may have to release her, but the dog doesn’t have an animal passport. I’m afraid we’re going to have to quarantine it.”

  I leap out of my chair and lean over the desk into the officer’s face. “You are not quarantining Rada.” My dog growls, backing me up.

  Lucija grabs me on the shoulder. “Will you calm yourself and your dog down? Let me try something just a bit more subtle than leaping down a police officer’s throat.”

  I hold Rada by the collar and stroke her head.

  Lucija reaches into her attaché case. She takes out a yellow and black adhesive band that says ‘diplomatic property of the Republic of Croatia’ on it in English, French and Croatian. She cautiously fastens it around Rada’s collar.

  She looks up at the officer and puts her hands on her hips. “Are we good?”

  He glowers at her even more deeply.

  “Elena, let’s go.”

  I follow Lucija out of the station. As soon as we’re outside, I switch from French to Serbo-Croat. “So Lucija, you’re Hristijan and Mojca’s daughter, right? How did you get such a high-up job so fast? You’re not much older than I am.”

  She shrugs and sighs. “How did you get to be the Maršal of Yugoslavia? Nepotism that you never asked for, same as me; I was trained to be a beat cop.”

  “Thanks for getting me out of there.”

  She keeps walking toward a car with a license plate beginning with CD on it.

  Rada and I pile into the back seat. Lucija drives. “Don’t thank me,” she says at length. “It wasn’t my decision. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t deserve to be here now.”

  “Hey, what do you have against me? Your dad is supposed to train me. He even made me a part of the diplomatic staff, apparently. It’s good to see that I changed his mind about having me here.”

  “You didn’t, thank God. He had to do that as a stunt to get you out of jail, after you proved beyond all reasonable doubt that you have no concept of what constitutes socially acceptable behavior. Suffice it to say you’re going back to Macedonia on the next available flight.”

  My heart sinks.

  Rada sticks her head between the car’s frame and the seatback, by Lucija’s head, like she wants to be petted. Lucija elbows her in the face as she drives. Rada whines.

  Lucija grumbles. “Until then, stay out of my way and keep your mangy beast off me.”

  ***

  The car pulls into the underground parking lot that I guess is used by the residence of the Croatian Representative to the EU. It’s across from what looks like the side of a palace on a big road. On the way, I glimpsed the park in front of it. It should be good for walking Rada. The automatic gates that separate the road from the downward-sloping driveway slide back into place. We get out of the car and walk into the elevator. Lucija swipes a card from her key belt. The elevator starts to ascend.

  The doors slide open after about thirty seconds. I walk through a short entry hall and out into the living room. Lara, Hristijan’s second wife, greets me with a warm hug. Lucija looks at her coolly. I glance around the most modern space I’ve ever seen. I always thought that the villa I was raised in was the lap of luxury. Compared to this, it’s a falling-apart dump. I don’t have much time to gawk. Lara shows me into Hristijan’s office, next to the kitchen.

  He stands from behind his cluttered desk and, instead of being impressed that I managed to get myself here, doesn’t waste any time in yelling at me.

  “I am extremely disappointed in you, taking a risk like you did, especially when you don’t know how anything outside your compound works. You caused a major disturbance in Belgium today.”

  “But I had to convince you that I am serious about coming to Brussels to assume my duties,” I excuse myself. “My parents were on board with it. I can acclimate to life here as I help out trying to bring the rest of the former Yugoslavia into the EU.”

  He rubs the bridge of his nose. “You’re getting ahead of yourself; your parents aren’t exactly the most in-touch people anymore. Your actions in the city today prove that you can’t adapt to life here as easily as you think you can. You can stay here tonight. Then I am sending you home to the compound.”

  I stand from my chair. “Please, I’m already here. Don’t send me away. I know I made some mistakes today, but I’ll be more cautious from here on out. I promise.”

  “My decision is final.”

  “Why? You and my mom and dad got into a lot of crazy stuff on your adventures, why won’t you trust me?”

  “Because, these are complicated times in Brussels. They require patience, diplomatic subtlety and the following of complex protocols.” He throws his hands out at me. “Not brute force, which is apparently all you’ve been taught.”

  “From what I saw of the city today, maybe a little force is what it needs. I don’t have a lot of experience with cities—none, actually—but even I can tell that things here are totally messed-up. It’s like no one in power seems able or willing to take action, if they even know what’s going on. It took them the better part of a day to catch me and I’m just one girl with a dog. That’s all the more reason why I should stay here and try to fix things.”

  “For now, you’d only hurt more than you’d help.” Hristijan stands up and shows me out of the office. “Lara will show you to the guest room. Then I’ll see about getting a flight reservation for you and somehow ge
tting that dog back to the winery compound.”

  The elevator door to the residence opens. Erika walks in with a backpack. Her eyes light up. She runs over and hugs me. “Elena, you’re here! Are you going to live with us now?”

  I kneel down and hug her back. “Your dad still says no.”

  “Oh, too bad. It would be nice to have someone else around besides Lucija. All she ever does anymore is work.” Erika walks off to her room.

  Lucija rolls her eyes from where she’s working on her laptop.

  I’m about to go look for Lara when I hear Hristijan’s voice in the doorway to his office, looking at me and Erika.

  “Wait. I made you a Croatian citizen. That means you’re an EU citizen too. The right to freedom of movement is yours as much as anyone’s, no matter how your parents chose to raise you. We’ll try it, at least for now. Just try to be calm, keep a level head and ask before you try to do basically anything.”

  I almost leap into the air. “Yes!” Then I realize that it probably wasn’t the most confidence-inspiring response I could have made in these circumstances. I force myself to calm down and put my hands behind my back. “I mean, thank you for the confidence you have decided to show in me.”

  “You’re welcome. The dog still goes back to the vineyard, though.”

  All of the enthusiasm goes out of me. “What? No. I can’t leave Rada. I raised her since she was a puppy.”

  “For crying out loud, what is a thirty-something-kilo Šarplaninec going to do in the middle of Brussels?” Hristijan shoots back at me.

  Rada pads over to me. I kneel down again and let her kiss my face. Erika hugs me and Rada again.

  Hristijan rolls his eyes. “All right, your dog can stay, too.”

  Lucija, who is still sitting at the table in front of a laptop, drives her forehead into her palm and groans at her father.

  Lara comes over and shows me to one of the bedrooms in Hristijan’s apartment. It has something that I think is air conditioning. I stand there not knowing quite what to do with it. I’ve just become part of a new family.

  I hear Hristijan mutter to himself as he walks back up into his office, sounding suddenly as overwhelmed as I am. “Oh God, what have I done?”

  Three:

  The Guild of Social and Political Sciences

  Elena

  Adapting to life in the city has been surprisingly easy over the past few months, once I got the basics of what’s allowed and what’s not. I think it was easier for me than Hristijan thought it was going to be. If anything, Rada had it harder, having to settle for a few walks a day in Brussels Park, which is almost across the street and in front of the Royal Palace, rather than having the run of the vineyard.

  I started my studies a week ago at the Université Libre de Bruxelles—the ULB—and I’m already behind. Hristijan has been trying to teach me the basics about EU integration when he has time. But he doesn’t have a lot of time; he has to deal with some Kosovo Agreement thing that I’m supposed to be handling. This is my first time in a formal classroom setting and I’m not getting it there either. The EU makes how federal Yugoslavia worked after my grandfather died sound simple. The EU is kind of like that but with twenty-eight quibbling nationalities instead of only six.

  Hristijan and I sit in the living room. One of my textbooks is open on the coffee table. I recite, hoping I’ll get it right this time.

  “So then the Commission passes a proposed directive to the Parliament and the European Council, which is where you work, and they take a co-decision by qualified majority, either passing it, or sending it back to the Commission for revision.”

  Hristijan shakes his head, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Not quite. It’s not the European Council. The European Council works with the Commission.” He falls silent, expecting me to guess again.

  “The Council of Europe?”

  Erika walks into the room and says matter-of-factly, “Actually, the Council of Europe isn’t an EU institution. It’s based in France and it mostly deals with human rights. It shares a flag with the EU, though.”

  I let my head flop back on the couch and groan. “That doesn’t even make sense. It’s like whoever came up with this system designed it chiefly to give people headaches.”

  I can almost hear Erika hunch her shoulders. “Well, it is Europe.”

  Hristijan talks to his daughter. “Erika, could you please go do your own homework instead of Elena’s?”

  Erika sighs. “All right.” She walks back into her room, down the hall on the other side of Hristijan’s office. He turns to me. “The body I work for, and incidentally the correct answer, is the Council of the European Union, and I don’t work on the Council itself. I’m a member of the Committee of Permanent Representatives, which sets the agenda for the Council of the EU.”

  I blow out a breath in frustration. “This is ridiculous. It’s so over-complicated that there is no way I can keep it all straight overnight. I feel like an idiot. My ten-year-old cousin knows more than I do.”

  “Your younger cousin was raised in embassies and during my negotiation of Croatia’s accession treaty. You’ll get it, Elena. You just need time.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have it. I have to write a paper about how the role of the EU Parliament has expanded over time through some treaties or whatever and how that relates to the EU’s democratic deficit. I don’t even know what the Parliament does in the present day. What does qualified majority even mean? Maybe those Brits I saw on the day I got here were right. This whole thing is just a big, evil bureaucracy.”

  Hristijan laughs. “The Brexiteers? Nonsense, they’re just a bunch of crocks. The EU may have its problems but the thought of Britain actually leaving is ridiculous.”

  Lucija looks up from the dining room table, where she’s hunched over a laptop, like she always is.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure. If there’s one thing I’ve been taught, it’s that the most dangerous threats are the ones you don’t see coming. My instincts say this city and the entire Union have a lot of those. Both are so fragmented that no one has all the information about what is going on.”

  “I know that Brexit is a possibility,” Hristijan acknowledges to his daughter, almost too defensively. “I just think it is a far-off one.”

  “That is exactly my point, Dad. Everyone thinks that, so no one takes it seriously.” Lucija rolls her eyes.

  Everyone falls silent. Finally, I speak up. “Right. I guess I’ll try and take a stab at that essay. Hell knows what I’m going to write, though.”

  “Show it to me before you turn it in,” Hristijan says.

  If it’s like the earlier one I had to do, he’ll probably just look at what I wrote, shake his head and then redo the whole thing for me. I get up off the couch. Rada stands from where she’s sitting under the coffee table. She hits her head on the bottom of it just like always and whines softly. I walk back into my mess of a room and turn on my computer.

  The blinking cursor on the white page stares me in the face. I look at my textbooks and course syllabi strewn about the desk. I throw one of them across the room in frustration and I pick up my smartphone, something I’d never seen before I moved here. Hristijan bought it for me. I suspect it’s a way of keeping tabs on me; a lot of the things on it don’t seem to work. I didn’t like it at first, but it grew on me. I hit the radio application and start scrolling through the frequencies.

  I flip just past 92.1 FM. “Next time on ULB Campus info…”

  ULB? The university I just started going to? I flip back.

  “Will Tone Tomšič, the former president of the Social and Political Sciences Guild, change to a program at the Solvay School of Economics and Management, leaving his old guild’s finances in dire straits, and costing them a place in the parade for Saint V’s Day? Can the new president, Drago Horvat, find the funds to even rent a truck? Tune in tomorrow for the latest updates on Campus Info, the ULB’s student news service. For more updates…” It goes on with more information abou
t the party circuit that the student guilds at my school and its Dutch-speaking equivalent are apparently sponsoring. This is totally new to me. I want to know more and it’s not like I’m going to get much information from Hristijan.

  I walk out into the hall and poke my head into Erika’s room. “Erika, what channel is this?”

  She hunches her shoulders as she does her Croatian homework, hearing it. “Oh, that’s just the radio that the students at your school run. It’s pretty boring most of the time.”

  Boring? Why would she think it’s boring? What I’m listening to sounds a hell of a lot more interesting than the endless cobweb of councils, committees and commissioners that I’m being constantly bamboozled with.

  Hristijan walks into the room. He looks annoyed. “What do you two ladies think you’re doing? Elena, you have an essay to write, and Erika, you have your Croatian homework to do. Please do it.”

  “What? I’m not allowed to listen to the radio now?”

  He takes my phone and looks at it. “That is not why I gave this to you. I don’t want you to have anything to do with those student guilds. The university is a serious educational institution, not a glorified excuse to throw wild parties. I understand that your studies may not come naturally to you. Not to put too fine a point on it, but you have to focus.”

  “I just ran across a program about the guilds on my phone. How does that constitute having anything to do with them? Also, I’m not sure that staying away from them is a good idea. Some have members that come from the former Yugoslavia. This could be a great opportunity to connect with some of the diaspora.”

  “That is ridiculous. Making a few friends won’t help you bring the rest of the former Yugoslav countries into the Union. You should be focused on your essay, not listening to this nonsense. The last thing you need is more distractions.”

  He takes my phone and leaves. I hunch my shoulders and walk back into my room. I don’t know anything about the development of the EU’s Parliament. But I suddenly realize that I really want to know more about these guilds and what Saint V’s Day is.