I was talking to a patient of mine who is a fellow ex-Yugoslavian, and he mentioned “the ghost of Communism,” which made me think about why Disco Elysium’s ending makes perfect sense, though it may never translate well enough to those who merely read of Communism in their grade school books, where Tito is a dictator and Yugo Communism was something other than anti-imperialist or even anti-Soviet.
Like in former Yugoslavia, the spectre of Communism that haunts Revachol is the knife that cleaved time between before the war, and after the war - whatever happened in-between is the blur in which Pale exists as a relic of the past: it irradiates, it divides, it grows like a cancer. When you’ve felt it, you’ve felt the pain of people you don’t and will never know.
That gray area of time muddles the identities forever ensconced in the bullet holes all around the land’s barren architecture; their identities don’t matter because internal struggle has existed there for centuries on all sides. The game underlines that like a breath of fresh air, it’s raw and unspoken but we all know it in the Balkans. It’s hard to admit when you have three presidents of different ethnicities ruling over one majority, the victim of ethnic cleansing. It’s hard to discuss when one country still demands their spoils of war, promised to them by a foreign power in a peace treaty. It’s hard to recognize with fascism so embedded in longterm ideals of one group.
Yugonostalgia, as they call it, refers to a state of pluralism where people had jobs that weren’t privatized and riddled with nepotism, free healthcare and education, ethnicities were merging in classrooms and in marriage, and according to some, a time when “swallow” birds (lastavice), a symbol of new beginnings and good crop, flew to the music of their era, the same way a 2mm hole in the city could be tamed to create art.
(There’s something about Yugoslavia’s unofficial anthem “Lipe Cvatu” that can make a roomful, or in my case, a bus-full of people of different backgrounds sing together, beginning to end. It’s hardcore.)
With all that being said… The sad truth is that the ghost of Communism remains vigilant on their island of guilt, addicted to the pheromones of trauma and nostalgia that keeps them tethered by a chain in the middle of the ocean, between the future and the past. A crushed flower, waiting to be seen after the violent murder of their perceived abusers.
