REFLECTIONS of a Serbian-American.

• Author: RANKOVIC, CATHERINE

My father is buried in a Serbian Orthodox cemetery in a remote part of Milwaukee County. It is a depressing place--not that it should be a cheerful one, but its origins plainly lie in Plan B. Our community of Serbs had prepared a graveyard for themselves in Libertyville, Illinois (a Serbian Orthodox diocesan center), next to a church they had built with their money and love. A federal court awarded it all to what we called "the other side," a separate faction of Orthodox Serbs formed from a dispute over church leadership. After twenty years of litigation, the groups were supposedly united, but my father's group, the Free Serbian Orthodox Church in America, always the smaller and dwindled now to nearly nothing, still holds out and buries itself apart.

So this place, two treeless acres abutting a soccer field, is yet another of pride's always-dubious achievements. Twice a year, I visit my father's grave and replace the miniature American flags I keep stuck in the ground in front of his marker. He loved the United States, became a citizen in 1955, and, once he retired, flew the flag daily in the front yard. I, his eldest child, sit on his grave, talk to him, pray for him, water any plants, and study his stone. Unlike some others, it has never been defaced. Perhaps my father's stone is not interesting. It says, "Husband and Father," my mother's choice of epitaph. His dates: 1919 to 1982. He was born in Serbia. Naturally, he loved that country, too.

I'm glad he's dead. Not happy, glad. My stepfather, another Serb, born the same year, turned eighty the day after NATO started bombing Serbia. "Yoy," he said, a Serbian word with the same marvelous elasticity as its Yiddish cognate, the same ability to lasso and decry the whole crap-spewing universe. "Serbs do everything. Blame for everything. Ooh, yah. Yoy!" Within twenty-four hours, his local Serbian Orthodox church had organized drives for money, clothes, and blood for Serbia.

I have never been to Serbia. My resistance to the war consists of gestures only, and private ones at that. I put on gold cross-shaped earrings. I unrolled from a soft cloth my father's prison-camp dogtag and wear the little tongue of gray steel as a pendant. No one who sees it knows what it is, and hardly anyone asks.

A great follower of television news, I now watch it much less. During broadcasts, I page through a mail-order catalogue or hide my face in pillows and writhe. "Stop it, just stop it," I tell the reporters, the Pentagon officials, the hangdog President refashioned, in mere weeks, into a crusader. I'm sure that two years ago they had never heard of Kosovo and two months from now they'll wish they never had. NATO is bombing a part of Europe with a long history of ethnic wars and ethnic cleansings. Most recently, in 1995, the Bosnian Croats drove 170,000 Serbs out of Croatia. Does NATO think its bombings are teaching Serbia that tolerance is the better way?

Grown furious, I told the Serbs, Albanians, and Americans on TV: "Go ahead. Everybody kill everybody. Then you'll all be happy."

My stepfather and mother flew to Yugoslavia in 1994, or, rather, flew to Bucharest on a Romanian airline, since wartime sanctions--that war was in Bosnia--prohibited direct flights to Belgrade. Then they took a bus to Belgrade and a car to the Serbian village of Brzan, where my stepfather's brother was dying of cancer. This man moaned day and night, crying, "Why doesn't God take me?" My mother said it was dreadful. There wasn't morphine or anything. C'est la guerre.

While visiting, my mother and stepfather felt obliged to drive twenty-five miles to my father's home...