Waiting for Rambo

My mom loved watching Rambo. She was excited as a kid admiring that man. Now he’ll come, just wait, she would sayat the high point in the scene. I knew she wanted to be Tarzan as a child. Grandma told me how she asked her father for a pair of Tarzan leather shorts and a Kama (large knife) form the Commission (a foreign goods shop).

Then one day, marked with the death of a young Macedonian soldier in the Yugoslavian army, it started. Long silent war. People lying in the streets, in a single moment. Snipers they said, silent snipers, no combat, no heroism. That is how people died in the Balkans, suddenly, silently, remaining on the asphalt, motionless.

My mom would not move from the TV, they will come you’ll see, they will. She was waiting.

There were blue helmets on the horizon, fragile blond Scandinavians as young as the first that was cut from this world we knew. They were watching over the city with disbelief in their eyes. They called them observers then. They saw kids playing bang bang ... next moment cut like young spring grass. They would have played with them few years earlier somewhere on the Adriatic coast.

My mom would not give up, wait wait , she would cry… We were waiting for Rambo

Left: Self-portrait Natasa Georgievska aka Lolita

Right: Reunion by Azsacra Zarathustra