Sofija Stefanovic

because it’s my face, and the face of these girls. We’re more than news reports about war and ethnic cleansing.

peek out of the dressing room door to watch the patrons, who have all paid thirty-five dollars a ticket and are demanding the free glass of champagne they were promised on arrival.

I know that some of the people in this room, all dressed up, smoking cigarettes and knocking back Šljivovica plum brandy, were ethnically cleansed from their villages. When they were fleeing to refugee camps, starving under house arrest, or huddled in basements to avoid bombs, could they have guessed they’d end up here years later, in a club on the other side of the earth surrounded by ex-Yugoslavians from all sides of the war? Yet here they all are, waiting to pick a queen among the young women who will soon be parading their flesh onstage, in a country where bodies are not in danger of being blown up. If they are thinking these things, people aren’t saying them. The horrors of war are generally something people keep to themselves; they are the secrets that wake them up at night, not topics to be discussed on a Friday night out, when turbo-folk music is pumping.

The person who knows these secrets best—what people did to one another in the war—is sitting out there tonight. From my vantage point, I can just make her out, her heavy frame coming into focus through a cloud of cigarette smoke. It’s my mother. She’s at a table surrounded by her friends, and every now and then, as if she’s Marlon Brando in The Godfather, someone comes up to her.