How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

While waiting for a streetcar she suspects is not coming, Drakulić notices a woman in an expensive fur coat. It makes the woman conspicuous, and Drakulić wonders what animal it came from. She recalls, “years ago, I fell into the trap of buying a fur coat” (133). She found a used one on a trip to Massachusetts, and recalls that “I looked like the person I wanted to be” (134). She put aside her list of books she had intended to buy, and the pangs of conscience about dead animals, and listened to the voice whispering, “take it, take it, here’s your chance” (135). In early 1989, while away in New York, Drakulić recalled her own coat after a friend sent her a revealing newspaper story from back home. A young girl wearing an “old fur coat” was bullied off of a bus in Belgrade, and told, “‘if you can afford a mink coat, you can afford a taxi!’” (135). Drakulić notes that the reporter may have emphasized the coat’s age as proof “she wasn’t really rich, she was as poor as the aggressors, and therefore she was not to blame” (136). Drakulić calls this the “logic of equal distribution of poverty”—that in a socialist state any display of wealth is an affront to the egalitarianism that kept everyone struggling equally (136).