Read Milosevic for Free Online

and Moma Markovic, had been partisans, and Moma was now a government minister, one of the most important politicians in Yugoslavia. So when Slobo bumped into Mira outside the library, and saw that she was upset after getting a bad grade, he was happy to offer comfort.
    Mira recalled: ‘We went to a mixed school and we used to see each other at break time. The first time that we really talked was mid–term, and we got our marks. I had a C in history, and I was desperate. I had all As, and a C in history. I was totally desperate. My wish was not only to be an excellent student, but to be the best student.’
    When Mira became desperate, she turned to her favourite book for comfort.
Antigone
, by Sophocles, is the story of Oedipus’s daughter – by his union with his own mother. It is a Greek tragedy of suicide and death and certainly a morbid choice for a school girl of sixteen. Antigone defies the command of Creon, king of Thebes, that the body of her brother should remain unburied. Creon sentences her to death, but eventually relents. By then it is too late. Antigone has killed herself in her prison cell. Her great love, Haemon, son of Creon, then commits suicide in sympathy. That in turn prompts Creon’s wife to kill herself. The play ends with Creon alone and desolate. With hindsight it is easy to see its grim themes as a harbinger of the destruction of Yugoslavia itself.
    But Mira could not get into the school library to read
Antigone
, because her library card had run out. ‘I didn’t have the money to renew my card. I met Slobodan in the street and I asked him if he had the small change I needed. I told him that I only got a C in history and I was desperate. He comforted me because of that C. Then I told him why I wanted to read
Antigone
for the zillionth time. I saw that he did not quite understand why.’ All grade As and one grade C did not seem too terrible to Milosevic, but none the less, he saw his chance to make a connection. He sensed too a driving ambition in the young woman with such powerful family connections.
    Sympathy was offered and the conversation soon flowed naturally. ‘Somehow he tried to establish a connection between the C in history and the destiny of
Antigone
. He put an effort into that.’ He succeeded. In fact, it seems that Slobo swept Mira off her feet. ‘It is even more romantic than I am able to tell you. Everything was romantic, but I am restrained from telling you how romantic it was.’
    Slobodan and Mira became inseparable. They blotted out the rest of the world, finding in each other the emotional support missing in the rest of their lives. At school they were known as ‘Romeo and Juliet II’. Their fractured family backgrounds had much in common. Slobodan had been abandoned by his father. Mira’s father was a partisan hero but he barely acknowledged his daughter’s existence. Although Mira said that she had ‘normal’ relations with her father, virtually the only time she saw him was on summer holidays with the Yugoslav elite at Tito’s favourite holiday home on the island of Brioni. Moma had married and started another family, with whom he lived in Belgrade. He did not take much interest in either Mira or his son Ivan, by a different, third, woman.
    Mira was brought up by her maternal grandparents. It was a childhoodfull of love, according to her. ‘It was very romantic. I grew up in an old house dating back to the nineteenth century, with a big garden, with a lot of flowers and trees. My mother was killed in the war, and my grandparents kept me with them. They would not give me away to my father and my stepmother, which I think was correct. There was a gentle atmosphere, and I had a lot of attention as a child. Everybody in the family, every cousin that my mother had, they all took care of me because I was a child living with my grandparents and they loved me a lot.’
    In Mira’s repeated