Belgrade Noir Read online

  I put my index finger to her lips. “I understand everything,” I said.

  She stayed for another half hour. Told me to let her know if I learned anything new, and that she’d tell her mother nothing until it was certain. “You know,” she said, “my mother hasn’t really lived her life since that day. She’s not herself anymore; she’s not a person, not even a mother; she’s just a widow, a widow dressed in black.”

  At the door, she asked me if I needed more money. I said what she’d given me was already too much.

  When she left I went back to bed. I was tired and thrilled. I lay my head on the pillow that still smelled of her, and slept until two in the afternoon.

  When I woke up, I went to Stara Hercegovina for lunch. I didn’t exactly know what to do next. I needed additional proof of identity, as well as another witness, before calling my friends in the police department and prosecutor’s office so they could arrest this guy. Now I was even less in the mood to reveal his identity to Nađa; it was more important to me to make sure he went to prison. If I just told her who he was, the rest would fall on her, and she was a foreign citizen who had no idea how the system in Serbia functioned. She’d already suffered enough.

  After lunch, I went back home, then read about trials for war crimes on the Internet: the Hague, Belgrade, and Sarajevo. I didn’t dare dream too much about Nađa, but I wasn’t afraid to fantasize about how grateful she’d be if Vojvoda was thrown in jail. I caught myself playing psychoanalyst, thinking that, because she lost her father so young, she certainly had a weakness for older men.

  I sipped some whiskey, and around ten I was drunk enough to send her a message about how great the previous night had been. She didn’t reply. I kept drinking, and around one I was intoxicated enough to go to sleep.

  When the phone woke me in the morning, I hoped it was Nađa. It wasn’t; it was Mirko. “Hey man, you know something I don’t know?” he yelled into the receiver.

  “Mirko, dude, I just woke up. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He laughed. “C’mon, take a shower and wake up. In half an hour it’ll be all over the Internet. Early this morning at Tašmajdan Park near St. Mark’s Church, someone shot Đorđe Jovanović. I asked around a bit. Turns out his old friends call him Vojvoda.”

  And before Mirko hung up, in a tiny fraction of a second, shorter than the one between the moment I felt that her cheek and then her lips were wet, I realized that although I’d said nothing to her, everything she’d needed was in my phone. I realized that I’d never hear from or see Nađa again. And I realized that I should stop drinking White Russians. Even without them, I’d think of her too often.

  REGARDING THE FATHER

  By Vladimir Arsenijević

  Topčiderska Zvezda

  Translated by Ena Selimović

  Whenever one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.

  —Isaac Newton

  “We goin’?” I say.

  “Yeah, let’s go,” Zoe responds from the front passenger seat.

  I listen to her quickened breathing in the dark. Then I put my seat belt on. I turn the key in the ignition. The car rumbles. The headlights switch on automatically. As the two powerful beams illuminate the tree-lined plane before us, the ancient trees seem stunned, as if caught in some wrongdoing.

  Before we set out, I look at Zoe again. I raise a questioning eyebrow. That almost always makes her smile. But, apparently, not now.

  Zoe doesn’t return my look. She stares straight ahead. Her forehead is coated with droplets of sweat. Beneath her white shirt, her chest rises and falls visibly in the darkness.

  “Okay,” I sigh. I lower the handbrake, then move my foot off the brake pedal. I slowly press on the gas and release the clutch. “Then let’s go,” I say.

  From a poorly lit side path, we drive onto a freshly paved road with a line of evenly spaced streetlights that border the northern end of Hyde Park on the slopes of Topčider.

  It’s late and cold. An easterly wind is whistling, and a sharp icy rain is falling diagonally. Except for the occasional superenthusiastic runner on the trail winding through the small woods, there is nobody around anywhere. Even the private security guards, tasked with protecting all those mansions in the vicinity (which have for decades alternated between various generations and members of the political, economic, and entertainment mainstream), are holed up in their poorly heated cabins.

  In the hollow silence, we drive toward Topčiderska Zvezda. Even though it’s only early November, the roundabout is all stacked up in tacky Christmas and New Year’s decorations. It shines in front of us like a lone galaxy in the desolation of a dark and cold universe. The two life-size wire giraffes, which have stood in the very center for years, have now sunk entirely into darkness. There were once three, but then one was mowed down by a drunk driver. The remaining giraffes have stood there in solitude ever since. When thick vines cover them in the spring, they give the impression of being almost imposing. Now, though, in November, it is as if they are there by mistake, like lost characters in the wrong fable. While one of them, the smaller one, appears to be grazing calmly, the other has lifted her head on her long neck and with pricked ears scans the surroundings in unending concentration. There’s no relaxing, they seem to be telling us as we enter the gravitational field of Topčiderska Zvezda. There’s no relaxing; someone always has to be on alert in this fucked-up city.

  * * *

  We followed him for days. And we just loved it. Well, at first, anyway.

  We didn’t argue. We slept well. Even sex became more frequent and passionate than usual. Every morning, after a mutual orgasm, sitting over Zoe’s ginger tea and my Turkish coffee, we made plans and delegated different tasks to one another. Then we methodically went about executing them. Zoe and I had finally been living a life worth living. A life that seemed to emerge directly from a very specific pulp subgenre that we both simply adored. We were self-proclaimed heroines of a real, bona fide lesbian noir detective story.

  Childish? Fuck if we cared.

  We followed him all day long, literally. Wherever he went, you could bet we were sniffing around after him. From this point in time, it seems like a real miracle to me, considering all our goddamn amateurism, that he didn’t notice us. But he didn’t, no. The fact that I’m now behind the wheel, that Zoe’s in the passenger seat, and that the load’s in the trunk—that, in other words, everything turned out just as we had planned—this is evidence that miracles do happen. Well, sometimes at least.

  It was not too long before we felt like we knew his routine. Each morning around half past eight he would leave his mansion in the Dedinje neighborhood—that paradise for the nouveau riche fuckers and sons of bitches alike—sitting in the back of a shiny black car with tinted windows. The silent driver would take him to the headquarters of his construction company in New Belgrade. Other than for an occasional business meeting or lunch, the car would leave the company garage around seven in the evening and head back to Dedinje. But it didn’t go toward Tolstoy Street. Instead, it would continue straight toward the Pink Television building where he would pick up his wife who had just wrapped up her daily TV show. Together, they would then go off shopping or to some kind of cheesy social event with politicians or whatever, or to some sort of reception. Or maybe to dinner. Then finally back home to Tolstoy Street. Occasionally drunk. And bickering or arguing more often than not.

  Whatever the tabloids write about them, their lives appeared remarkably uneventful to us, their paths beaten and well worn out.

  This discovery depressed Zoe and me quite a bit. To the point that we were ready to abandon everything. There didn’t seem to be a single crack in the routine of our prey. But then one night, just as we got into a vicious argument in the car, parked not far from his mansion, he slipped past us, dressed from head to toe in fancy sports gear. That’s how Zoe and I discovered, t
o the eternal shame of all lesbian detectives ever, that our prey runs three or four rounds around Hyde Park every Wednesday around midnight. And sometimes on Fridays too. And always with the tiny headphones of his MP3 player implanted deep in his ears.

  We felt stupid beyond belief to have missed this for so long. But we quickly made a decision: we’d come up behind him while he stretched after running. And we would easily overpower him. Using the darkness and discretion offered by the Topčider woods, we’d knock him out and stuff him into the trunk. And then we’d drive to the darker recesses of Košutnjak Park to do away with him in peace and quiet.

  * * *

  My name is Maja, BTW. From a very young age, they filled my head with stories about how my name relates to spring. To the month of May, precisely. Maja, or Maia, they chirped, is the Roman goddess of fields and produce associated with nature’s awakening and rebirth.

  My mother was a mean-spirited woman who taught me many false things. And so it took me awhile to independently uncover that the truth about Maia—like the truth about many other things—was totally different than what I’d been told. I was quite relieved when I learned that Maia was no hormone-driven psycho goddess who frolicked in a white gown on freshly bloomed fields weaving flower wreaths, but actually one of seven mountain nymphs—a dangerous bitch, if you will. Titan’s daughter who fucked Zeus in the darkness of a cave and gave birth to Hermes, god of thieves, merchants, and orators.

  As for Zoe, her name means “life” in Greek. That’s what Hellenized Jews, translated from the Hebrew havvah, called the biblical Eve. It was only logical that someone entirely unburdened from any history and free from it, like Eve, would appeal so strongly to Zoe, who wanted more than anything to free herself from the weight of her own past. To the extent that she changed her previous name to the one that, she felt, suited her much more. And thus became Zoe.

  And now we can safely make a great leap over time and space to this very moment when the two of us, Zoe and I, the dynamic duo of lesbian-detective-avenger-murderesses, are driving in our little Japanese car through the Topčiderska Zvezda roundabout with a heavy load in the trunk.

  They’ve taught you Newton’s laws, I assume? They definitely have, you’ve just forgotten. You don’t remember those kinds of things. What’s it good for? you think. But you’re wrong. Take Newton’s second law, for instance. Or the law of force. Owing to the fact that the total mass of our car is now greater than usual, and by about two hundred pounds of male body weight which, bound with rope and tape, is jerking violently in the trunk right now, its rate of acceleration is slower than usual. Because of that, this dizzying movement around a quarter of the Topčiderska Zvezda roundabout is taking forever.

  I’ll use that time to tell you how Zoe and I met.

  It was seven years ago, during an open mic poetry festival at an alt-cultural center in Belgrade where I performed among a crowd of comparable losers. At the time, presenting myself as a radical poet-performer still seemed exciting to me. I believed passionately in the transformative power of words. My idealism began to fade when I realized that those who fared best at the aforementioned festival were the notorious psychos. And maybe a talentless idiot or two.

  That’s why I consider it a real wonder that poetry, the thing I progressively lost faith in, eventually brought me something so vital. I mean Zoe, of course. What attracted me, in a word, were her eyes. Enormous and green, with a distinct hazel lining, they looked right at me from the audience during my last performance where I read that long poem dedicated to Pat Califia. When they tried to get me off the stage, I started to resist and cry out against the oppressive heteronormative patriarchy and the impotent militarism that bars a poet even from reading her poem to the end. Only Zoe jumped out of the audience to help me. We fought with the organizers and got wasted together later that night at some dive bar in lower Dorćol. We made out until the crack of dawn in a dark dead-end street that smelled like rotten trash. What can I say? I was beside myself with love and happiness.

  What delights me most about Zoe? Basically: everything. Our love was and remains a real spectacle. Today, after this many years, I can openly declare that my love for her is eternal. All you women who aren’t fortunate enough to get to know Zoe, you don’t even realize what you’re missing.

  Zoe is a privilege. She is, admittedly, also a mystery. Although life with Zoe is not all sunshine and rainbows. Because the past stalks Zoe and breathes down her neck with its rough, putrid breath. Zoe does everything to shake it off, but it isn’t easy.

  I remember that I read somewhere, Faulkner I think, that the past is never dead. And that more often than not it isn’t even the past. Well, that is one big, painful truth. In Zoe’s case, at least. The past has inextricably enmeshed itself in her present. Demons grip her constantly and the tightening of their sharp claws inflicts unending pain on her.

  Finally, after a lifetime or two, we exit the roundabout and turn into a cozy unlit boulevard. It bores through thick woods to the lower parts of Topčider and on toward the neighborhoods of Banovo Brdo and Košutnjak. In all that darkness and peace and quiet around us, a bout of forceful drumming coming from the trunk startles us both. I can feel Zoe freeze up next to me. The load then jerks even more forcefully than before and the car suddenly reels to the side. “U pičku materinu. Motherfucker,” I murmur, searching for support in Zoe’s gaze.

  And Zoe? She just shakes from the feet up. Like a volcanic eruption. This also happens in accordance with some law of physics, though no Newton can be of any help here anymore. “Stop now, please,” she says through clenched teeth. “Here, stop here.”

  * * *

  Zumreta.

  That unusual name was, for a long time, the only tangible information Zoe had about her past and her origins. She learned of it at the age of sixteen, from her foster parents. Zumreta was, apparently, the name of her mother. She also learned that she was born somewhere in Bosnia during the war, in 1993. They couldn’t tell her much more than that. But even that was enough to tear her apart. Truth crumbled noisily before her eyes. When it settled, she discovered that not much remained. Nothing but scattered fragments. Unsubstantiated, unreliable, impermanent stories.

  Some years later, however, her fragmented knowledge was largely validated and significantly supplemented, during the trial popularly known as “The Case of the Women at the Korzo Motel.”

  A good part of the testimonies of two female witnesses under protection codes BP-76 and RN-72 focused on a certain girl that both witnesses had shared a cell with in a female prison in the Republika Srpska territory. She was called Zumreta.

  The mere mention of that name was enough to attract Zoe’s complete attention. She almost fainted when she learned that Zumreta had already been very well into her pregnancy when she was brought there. A certain unnamed Republika Srpska army soldier or corporal or officer had pulled her sometime earlier out of the notorious Korzo Motel and had held her captive in an apartment for several months. But when she became pregnant, he simply disposed of her and left her to rot in the prison.

  According to the testimonies of the two witnesses, Zumreta gave birth prematurely, maybe a month after arriving at the prison. She had a beautiful girl. But three or four days later (at this point, the statements diverge somewhat), the child was viciously seized from the cell. Two days after that, Zumreta was also taken away. And she was never seen again.

  Only much later would the witnesses get wind of two opposing versions of her ending: that she threw herself, as one claimed, or that she was on the contrary thrown, as claimed by another, through a window during one of the nightly “interrogations.”

  It took quite some time before another significant piece of information came up about Zoe’s mother. Half a decade later, precisely. Two years ago almost to this very day, a confessional article entitled “Cries from Korzo Motel” appeared in a popular national weekly, signed by the well-known and quite infamous journalist M.N. She was then quickly fading in the oncol
ogy department at the Clinical Center in Belgrade. So this text can be seen as her attempt to redeem a life filled with political subservience, an extreme betrayal of the profession, and all sorts of other improprieties. This unusual and unexpected testimony on the systematic rape and sexual slavery of Bosniak women during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina complemented and shed light on what the public had only heard about from the women at the Korzo Motel.

  The text was published, almost simultaneously, by several regional media outlets. It also circulated for quite a while on social media networks and was lauded, disputed, and ignored in equal measure. But since the journalist M.N., “due to a serious illness,” was first totally unavailable and then passed away quickly thereafter, the circumstances around the text’s publication added the necessary dose of mystery to the whole thing and it stayed in the public eye for quite a long time.

  We read the text together, Zoe and I. Words fail me every time I try to describe the look on her face when we spotted the name on the page: Zumreta. Followed this time by a surname: Alispahić. According to M.N., the story of that particular young girl—Zumreta Alispahić—begins in the early summer of 1992, when the armed local Serbs began to wreak terror on Bosniak locals in her village. One night they broke into the Alispahić home and, after a brief altercation with Zumreta’s father, shot both of her parents right in front of her. Everything moves fast, the journalist contended. Much faster than one thinks. People are sacks of blood, flesh, and bones, you attack them with a bullet, knife, or bayonet and they fall apart, dissolving into nothing, like deflated balloons. Nothing. People are nothing and death is nothing.

  Zumreta Alispahić screamed for a long time. She trembled, huddled in a corner of the room. Much later, she was taken, along with eight other girls and women, to the Korzo Motel, that bullet-riddled building on the main road not far from the little town. A group of about thirty soldiers was already there. They greeted the women with impatient cries, wild chants, and a burst of uncontrollable, drunken laughter.