REAL HOUSEWIVES OF THE CIA 149fully furnished quarters were fine by Yugoslav standards, but it was defi-
nitely a step or two down from our wonderful Latin American home. Soon
after moving in, I inadvertently confirmed our phone was being monitored
when I called a family member and complained about some routine Yugo-
slav aggravation. The Serb SDB (Yugoslav KGB) agent listening in actually
joined the conversation to argue with me. Yes, Serbs are really like this, and
it partially explains why they were the common denominator in all of the
Balkan wars of the 1990s. To this day I have close Serb friends, and to their
credit, they would not disagree.
Since we knew our quarters and phone were both bugged, Stacy and
I would have to be careful what we said inside the house. And the car.
When we disagreed about something, we’d take a walk around the block
so that we could talk freely. There might be an SDB car parked nearby, but
the low-tech thugs inside would have no way of listening to what we were
discussing.
In Belgrade, Stacy was harassed by locals on the road, in state-run stores,
and on the ubiquitous streetcars. Some aggressive Serbs did not take kindly
to being passed in their decrepit Ladas by a foreign woman driving a new
Peugeot, and they let her know it. She was flipped off and even almost run
off the road more than once by these paragons of masculinity. Walking into
a state-run clothing store, Stacy would be “greeted” and then escorted back
out the door by a surly, cigarette-smoking clerk, dressed in a Communist-
issue smock. Salespeople had no incentive to be polite or sell her something,
since they received the same paltry pay whether they made any sales or not.
A common expression heard throughout the Communist world was “Gov-
ernment pretends to pay us and we pretend to work.” Emulating the local
custom of rarely buying a ticket on a Belgrade streetcar, foreigner Stacy was
once rudely singled out by a city cop to pay a fine and get off the streetcar.
Other realities of daily life were annoying but harmless. Since there
was almost no foreign, non-Serbian food in Belgrade, we were excited to
learn of a new Mexican restaurant in town. We tried it once. Every time
we hopefully asked if they had a particular menu item (taco, tostada, enchi-
lada, etc.), we were always given the same answer: “Da, imamo ali nema,”
meaning “Yes, we have it, but there isn’t any.” In one of Belgrade’s finer
dining establishments, the downtown Writer’s Club, candlelit tables were
decked out in white tablecloths and fancy silverware. Waiters wore vests