Cardboard City by Katarina Jovanovic

Thirteen-year-old Nikola Seich loves to play the trumpet and he's good at it.  He learned from his grandfather and then when he died last year, from his neighbor's brother, Bosco. Nikola lives with his Baba and his older sister Saida in Cardboard City, located underneath a bridge in Belgrade. 

At the summer festival, Rika who plays with his trumpet quartet, notices Nikola mesmerized by the music and making motions like he is actually playing a trumpet. When he meets Nikola, Rika tells him that his quartet will be playing at the big brass festival in the town of Guca. Nikola is very interested in attending, so Rika tells him if he can get permission he can travel with him to the festival. Rika takes Nikola to have dinner with him and his girlfriend Almira in their trailer. Nikola loves the food she prepares. Almira tells Nikola they will leave early the next day.

Nikola goes home to his grandmother, Ramina whom he calls Baba, and tells her his dream of becoming a trumpet player. He tells Baba how Bosco taught him more about playing the trumpet and how to play the piece, Carnival in Paris. To help him understand the music he was playing, Bosco also showed him pictures of the city of Paris. Baba has Nikola play for her on a neighbor's trumpet. The trumpet that his grandfather had was taken by his sister Saida when she recently ran away. Baba is so impressed with Nikola's playing that the next day she takes him to Rika. After satisfying herself that he is trustworthy, she gives her permission for Nikola to travel to Guca.

When they arrive in Guca, Rika and Almira's truck and trailer is not allowed into the town but forced to park in a field. To Nikola, the area around Guca smells fresh and different from his home in the Cardboard City. While Rika and Nikola are in Guca for the festival, Almira goes to a restaurant down the road to get clean water for making soup. There she sees a young Romani girl singing at the bar in front of a group of rowdy men. Realizing what is going to happen to this young girl, Almira intervenes and takes her back to the trailer, feeds and clothes her. She learns that the girl, named Saida, has run away from home after her Baba wanted her to get married or work as a house cleaner and that she has a younger brother named Nikola. To Almira, it is a strange co-incidence that Saida has a brother with the same name as the boy who has accompanied them to Guca.

After playing on the main stage, Nikola finds himself being asked to play when he is on the street and earning money. Then he meets a trumpet player, Drago Nadic, who won the Golden Trumpet last year. Drago is so impressed with Nikola's playing that he offers him a chance to play with his band on the main stage the next day.  They part ways but it is so late that Nikola cannot find his way home.

Rika and another  man who is Romani, return to the trailer carrying Nikolai who has become very ill.  Saida is shocked to see it is her brother and Rika and Almira realize they have taken in a brother and sister. But the festival and Saida's refusal to return to Cardboard City will offer new possibilities for the young Romani brother and sister.

Discussion

Cardboard City presents the plight of the Romani people in Eastern Europe. The novel is set in a real-life slum known as Cardboard City which existed up until 2009 when the residents were removed. It is also a story about people who are impoverished, marginalized and discriminated against.

Cardboard City (Karton siti) was located in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, beneath the Gazela and Stari zeleznicki bridges, close to the upscale, five-star hotels,  Hyatt Regency Belgrade and the Continental Hotel Belgrade. In 2007 there were just under one thousand people living in Cardboard City, all of them Roma who made their living by collecting garbage. The slum had no roads, running water, electricity or sewers. Many of the dwellings were constructed of cardboard and other non-building materials. In 2009, the residents were removed, after several unsuccessful attempts. Some were moved to containers placed across various Belgrade suburbs, while others were dispersed throughout municipalities outside of Belgrade.

With Cardboard City as the setting, Jovanovic presents her readers with a portrayal of the Roma people, how they are shunned and mistreated in a society which offers them no opportunity to escape a life of poverty.  Readers learn of the terrible living conditions which are described by the characters in the novel. Nikola talks about working all day to collect paper and boxes from schools, parking lots and other places, how his shoes wear out and he manages to find another pair in the rubbish, and how they often have little to eat, sometimes only bread with lard for lunch.  Saida describes how she steals flowers from the graveyards and sells them to people at restaurants. She talks about riding the streetcar and almost stealing the wallet of a rich lady who yells at her to get a job and that she is "Lazy Gypsies. You only steal and beg."

Neither Nikola nor Saida attend school. We learn that they did attend at one time, but that Baba pulled both out after they were "humiliated for being Romani". Nikola remembers the humiliation he felt because no one would sit with him, except one girl. "They all laughed and some pretended to gag.  What Nikola wanted most at that moment was to crawl into a deep hole in the ground or to run away from the long-necked teacher and the big white building full of chalk, and the children with clean hands and white collars, who ate white bread for lunch." 

The isolation made Nikola feel different, but not in a positive way. "One day, while Nikola was walking in the school hallway, some gadji mothers moved their children protectively away from him. He suddenly felt alone, like a strange wild plant."  Because they were not attending school, Nikola and Saida lived in fear that they would be taken to an orphanage, "...one of those big buildings with windows with bars on them from which Romani orphans could never escape." 

The situation for his sister Saida is much more dire. She runs away from her home in Cardboard City because Baba wants her to marry. Many Romani girls marry by the age of fifteen. She is at risk of being trafficked and is likely in that situation when she goes to Milos apartment. When Saida runs away from Milos' apartment, and is standing on the Gazela Bridge, Saida believes she will never find a place in Milos' world. "The water under the bridge had the colour of coal - visible through the rising smoke of burning tires, tall and surreal, were the tents and makeshift huts of the encampment spread out before her....she thought that maybe it was her destiny to live here forever. She resigned herself to a life there - the buckets, the walk to the fountain to get the water, the leaky hut, selling flowers, roaming the gloomy alleys to look for food."  

Almira finds her singing in a seedy bar, on the verge of being abused by a group of men drinking. Thankfully she saves Saida from that fate. Saida tells Almira about her life and that she survives through her dreams - something she calls "dream mending". We know that Saida dreams of a better life because she tells Baba so: "...I dream about food. I cannot think of anything else. I don't have the money to buy new clothes, or even soap. I want to live in a clean apartment, to smell of flower-scented shampoo and face creams. I want to go to school and eat lunch in a real kitchen. It doesn't seem to matter how hard I try or what I do, I have to live in this smoke den and eat your devil goulash." In this regard, Saida, a Romani, is just like her fellow Romanians. She wants to live with dignity.

It is Almira who effects change in Nikola and Saida's lives by working to obtain guardianship over the two, by taking them in and sending them to school. She comes to understand that their lives are very different but that despite this, they are like people everywhere. "Almira came to understand that their lives - with their own laws, customs and values - though laced with sorrow, were rich with dreams."

As Jovanovic mentions in the front matter to the novel, "...These events could be about marginalized and impoverished people anywhere in the world. It could take place in the suburbs of Rome, in the favelas of Sao Paolo, in Dharavi in Mumbai, in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver - or in refuge camps anywhere in the world." Like the characters in Cardboard City, many marginalized, impoverished people do not attend school and therefore cannot improve their lives, do not have enough to eat and therefore are often ill or have much shortened lives, and often work hard for very little income. They may also use alcohol or drugs to escape the trauma and difficulties of poverty. The author does include a very informative Historical Note on the Romani people at the back.

Cardboard City is a short read, well written, with an engaging storyline that highlights the issues of poverty, marginalized communities and discrimination. Cardboard City is derived from a previous novel, Kartonac, written by the author in Serbian in 2009.

Book Details:

Cardboard City by Katarina Jovanovic

Vancouver: Tradewind Books     2023
129 pp.