On a train from Budapest to Novi Sad, my mother tells me the story of my name, the one I share with her: Ibolya. It means “violet” in Hungarian, and it’s a name like Myrtle or Ethel — trendy in the 1930s and ’40s, but now out of fashion

During her life in the former Yugoslavia, my mother was not allowed to have this name. Only Serbian names were permitted. She was christened Giselle, but the Serbs called her Ljubica, the literal translation of violet. Her family nicknamed her Cunca, and, in grade one, when the border region was retaken by Hungarians, my mother’s zealous Hungarian teacher told her there was no saint called Ibolya; she called her Amalia.

Twenty-eight years later, my mother considers the possibility that this name, which gave her so much grief over the years, may also have been problematic for me in a world of Susies and Andreas. I have always gone by “Ibi” — the diminutive of Ibolya — mainly because, as the junior, and a writer, I wanted to avoid confusion between my mother and me.

“You would be a good Stephanie,” she tells me, nervous about returning to her former home in Novi Sad. She says that she wouldn’t be offended if I changed my name. She explains that when she and my dad were young and idealistic, they thought it important that my brother and I be given authentic, untranslatable names. My brother’s name is Zoltan, the Hungarian incarnation of the Turkish word for “sultan.”

Both my parents were born as ethnic Hungarians in the former Yugoslavia. They immigrated to Canada in the late 1960s because they felt the ethnic tension in Yugoslavia decades before terms like “ethnic cleansing” became de rigueur.

The historical context for ethnic Hungarians in much of the former Yugoslavia, Romania and Czechoslovakia is one of displacement and insecurity. After World War I ended with the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Treaty of Trianon was signed at Versailles. Under Trianon, Hungary lost 64 percent of its inhabitants and 72 percent of its territory. More than half of the dispersed Hungarian population remains unrecognized and unprotected by the international community and successor states. So, like thousands of Hungarians across Europe, my parents grew up outside the borders of their nation. And while they lived in Yugoslavia at a time when Tito made communism relatively palatable, their minority status denied them opportunities.

It’s now 2001 and Slobodan Milosevic is on trial for war crimes. This is my first trip to Serbia as an adult. My mother and I are the only passengers on the train besides a family of friendly American missionaries and two sketchy looking teenage boys who are obviously smugglers. When we reach the Hungarian– Serbian border, the Serbian customs agents and police walk up and down the aisles aggressively. The boys disappear; the Americans talk loudly. Although my mother speaks fluent Serbian, she answers the police in English, afraid that they will detect her provincial accent.

The train has stopped. The American family has not obtained their visas before travelling, and now they are having problems with customs. The father stands in the aisle and looks in our direction despairingly; he obviously considers us to be locals. My mother sighs and goes over to translate for him, blowing her cover as a middle-class Canadian tourist.

In Novi Sad, all the bridges that extend over the Danube have been bombed out. The red-rusted hulls of huge cargo ships, placed in a line and covered with what appears to be plastic, serve as makeshift bridges.

It’s in Novi Sad, staying with an uncle, that I become claustrophobic, anxiety-ridden by the impermanence of bridges that seem to go nowhere. My childhood was spent hurtling through space. As an obsessive cross-country runner, I spent most of my youth racing up muddy hills towards the finish line. My personal, outward trajectory was offset by an inherited European collectivity, though. Raised without hang-ups like knocking on doors or having to sleep in our own beds if we could share one with a family member, my brother and I often found ourselves knocking against each other’s arms and wrestling for more pillow space. Despite our roomy suburban house, we would have our most important discussions and arguments piled on our parents’ bed. It seems that while our parents had inherited the limitless of Canadian fields and prospered in their new country, they could never quite abandon poverty’s intimacy.

So, spending three weeks sharing a bed with my mother is no great breach of privacy. Living in our relatives’ tiny apartments only underscores the roots of my parents’ communal style of living. Every centimetre of space is shared in Eastern Europe. Architecturally, this lack of personal space manifests itself in boxy bathrooms and kitchens so tiny they would drive any North American domestic goddess to tears. Socially, the lack of space manifests in the overbearing quality of its people, particularly the women, and it’s this breach of privacy that has driven me nearly insane. At night, exhausted after a day of listening to my mother’s friends squawking about my lack of husband and my inability to consume another cabbage roll, I wail at my mother when we have a second of privacy. “Why are they so invasive? Why won’t they shut up?”

Curled next to me in her pajamas, she cocks an eyebrow at me.

“This is all new for you?”

“This overbearingness? This constant running narrative and judgment? Yes, it’s new, Mom. How could you stand it?”

Stroking a strand of hair out of my eyes, my mother smiles, as if privy to a secret.

“Guess what, sweetie. This is love. Wait till they’re mad at you.”

My cousin Veronka drives me to see a road bordered with ostentatious mansions ten minutes outside of Novi Sad. This road has been dubbed the Lane of Thieves. The homes here belong to corrupt cohorts of Milosevic’s, and all the houses have complicated security systems. Many of these allies have locked themselves inside their mansions to avoid arrest and persecution. In the same breath, Veronka rattles off the names of young men who have committed suicide since returning from the war due to post-traumatic stress disorder, a fate my mother wanted both my father and brother to avoid.

These deaths remind me of the last time I saw my high-strung father, when he said goodbye to us at the Toronto airport. He is a retired elementary school teacher, and his body sometimes assumes the effortless gestures of a child. I think of him, cocking his long arm in an exaggerated wave, saying goodbye to his two women. My father, who has spent a large portion of his life here, in Canada, writing political articles pushing for the emancipation of ethnic Hungarians, trenchantly refuses to ever return to Serbia again. Having buried his entire family in Yugoslav soil, my father is a political and literal orphan, and all of his visits back have been bookended by death and alienation.

Driving through his countryside, I picture my irrepressible father striding out the airport doors after we’d left. I try to connect this image of him to the young undergraduate who was so poor he spent his first year of university sleeping in the dorm’s casket-sized elevator shaft. I struggle to comprehend that this man — who taught me how to hold a ski-pole and a pencil — has devoted most of his intellectual energy cultivating a relationship with a country that has consistently denied his existence as a Hungarian.

As much as my father’s inability to return to Serbia has to do with the rampant political corruption, I think there is something more primal at work in him, too: survival. After all, the last time he went to Yugoslavia he buried his younger brother and was almost drafted into Milosevic’s army. Also, my father — who now spends much of his time working outdoors — can no longer be contained in the claustrophobic physical and political cities and rooms of this European landscape. That is, as much as he longs to be a recognized Hungarian citizen, he cannot return to the coffin-like spaces of his youth.

It’s been almost three years since my mother and I visited post-war Serbia. Since then, a referendum on granting displaced Hungarian minorities Hungarian citizenship has been denied. Even though many countries, from Israel to Portugal, have granted dual citizenship on the basis of cultural and historical linkage, Hungary did not follow. The Hungarian government began, instead, waging an anti “outsider” campaign. With the country’s population decreasing by close to 40,000 people a year, common sense would suggest that a pool of Hungarian speaking citizens would be an asset to the country. But, somehow, that point was lost on the Hungarian government.

When I call my parents to talk about the results of the referendum my mother just keeps repeating the word “heartbroken.” I hear my father in the background banging around the kitchen and yelling about the unconscionable corruption of idiot Hungarians. My mother is silent and then she sighs. I understand what her sigh communicates: Now, he will absolutely never go back again.

When I put down the phone I think about how my parents spent most of last summer digging up the wide garden in front of their country house. The ground was full of clay, and my mother’s plants and flowers couldn’t grow. So they undertook the massive project of removing the six feet of clay beneath the garden and replacing it with fertile soil. They tackled this tedious project as they have approached the challenge of constantly re-inventing themselves as outsiders throughout their sixty-odd years in host countries. While my mother rescued the most delicate plants and stashed them in safe places, my father sat in his tractor and patiently tried to claw out the filth choking the roots.

I wanted to call my mother back to ask what their plans were for the new front gardens. I wanted to tell her that sometimes your earth is sick and dry, sometimes your people deny you, but you still belong. I needed them to know that they had salvaged all the best parts of our past. I wanted to thank them for my awkward and unusual flower name, which, although trimmed and woven into my own split Hungarian-Canadian identity, remains as much a part of me as my typing hands and running legs. And how, because of all this, I would never change my name to Stephanie.

Photo © Daniel Cianfarra

Ibi Kaslik is a freelance writer and novelist whose debut novel, Skinny, was shortlisted for Amazon's Best First novel award (2004) and the CLA Best Young Adult book (2005). Skinny is currently being translated into several languages for foreign releases.  Ibi lives in Toronto where she is currently at work on her second novel.