They think I'm a spy!

The joke that I was a NATO spy was no longer funny, I tried to explain to my neighbors; I told them to knock it off. I wasn't really afraid that I would get lynched, mostly just tired of the constant inversion of the truth that is so overwhelming in Serbia.

The small episode of being perceived as a spy was just one symptom of the larger insanity of life in Belgrade, where people have succumbed to a whole parallel universe of lies and propaganda spouted by the regime, and conditioned by an earlier lifetime spent on the fault line between two superpowers. Such as, "The Kosovo Albanians are terrorists, deserving of whatever happened to them." Or "All foreigners in Serbia are spies and their local friends, NATO mercenaries." Or "NATO bombed Serbia because the U.S. wanted to control Kosovo's coal mines," because of Serbia's "strategic" location on the crossroads between East and West or because, some said, in her youth U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was jilted by a Serbian boyfriend during a stint in Belgrade after her family fled wartime Prague. Others thought Milosevic was an American agent too, putting a wrecking ball to Yugoslavia to fulfill America's desire to dominate the ever-important Balkans.

What was at stake for me in this whole episode was my credibility among this group of fairly powerless and bored gossips. But what was at stake for my neighbors was something bigger. They wanted to believe that I was a spy because it filled in one part of a larger mosaic of lies that allowed them to cling to the belief that the violence that had overtaken Yugoslavia for the past decade was just as the Milosevic regime said it was -- the work of outside powers, and not any fault of their own.

All I wanted, stubbornly, vainly, at times desperately, was for people to perceive me as I was. But what they wanted was reassurance that their suffering had some larger meaning, some purpose, some explanation. They couldn't bear to accept that their suffering -- the years of sanctions and international isolation and condemnation -- was the result of the wartime policies of the Milosevic regime, which some of them defended and others criticized.

I left Serbia for a couple months, returning to Belgrade in the lush green of late May, with its lengthening days and lighter mood. Neighbors greeted me with what seemed to me a growing acceptance, and I found friendly faces waiting for me at the neighborhood cafe at all hours of the day. There had not been another round of NATO bombing, the U.S. hadn't overrun Serbia and I felt vindicated. People stopped talking about NATO spies. Finally, I thought, it's getting more normal around here.

In late May, the Milosevic regime took over the last remaining independent television station in Belgrade. As I reported on the growing tension between the government and the people, I felt a sense of solidarity grow between me and my neighbors, similarly frustrated with the increasing totalitarianism of the regime.

One day a man in a white polo shirt stopped by the neighborhood cafe and began to question me. He knew the foreigners who lived in the flat before me, White Polo said, a French diplomat with whom he used to play tennis, and then an American, who worked, where was it? White Polo waited for me to answer. "People here say he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency," I said.

White Polo asked if I was having any problems in Serbia; I told him I wasn't. He asked if my visa situation was clear and offered to introduce me to some of his contacts in the Serbian political world. I didn't bite. He noted that I had picked up a few words of Serbian as I chatted with friends, and moved closer as I picked up my ringing cellphone.

Although I wasn't immediately aware I was being questioned by a professional and I didn't have anything to hide, White Polo was making me nervous. When I went inside to try to shake him off, he followed me, a menacing white presence in my peripheral vision, rendering the whole cafe silent. Finally, he left, and I was overcome with the feeling of having been interrogated, followed, harassed.

As rage welled up inside me, I exploded at Serbian friends who had witnessed the whole incident, telling them of the frustration of constantly having to explain myself to every new outsider who came by. They clucked sympathetically, and said they went through the same thing at their jobs and universities, with people from the regime coming to let them know they were being watched. But later, I wondered, why hadn't anybody there told him to get lost?

At the time, I was becoming friends with some young people active in liberal political circles and human rights groups. They seemed refreshingly unbrainwashed. As I got to know them, I learned that one's grandfather had been in charge of counterintelligence for Marshal Tito, and that the father of another had been the head of the analytic department of the Yugoslav intelligence services, the UDBA. Was everyone else in Belgrade in the intelligence business, I began to wonder?

Sometimes, I mentally reviewed the people whom I spoke the most with in Belgrade and wondered, is one of them reporting on me? Probably, almost certainly yes, but who?

Then a week ago, I chatted by phone with a friend, the daughter of the former intelligence analyst for the UDBA. "Yes, you know, people in your neighborhood, they think you're an American spy, and they don't believe you're married. They think you're just pulling their leg."

Good grief.

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