Belgrade Noir Page 15
This was why she left him the villa in Senjak in her will.
To Ilija Soldo—who lived with his wife and their four children in a two-bedroom apartment in Zagreb, in one of those buildings from the seventies built during the time of the most vibrant socialist construction projects, producing what people called the “cans” because they were coated with waves of aluminum siding—Auntie’s villa in Senjak felt like an unfathomable source of untapped wealth. It was worth well more than fifty times his own apartment.
He only needed to travel to Belgrade and attend the probate proceeding. Upon accepting the villa, and the incredible amount of cash that he would be left with after he sold it, he would, of course, have to accept the origin of his newfound wealth. And most likely everyone from whom he had been hiding his unfortunate identity would find out where the money had come from. Ilija Soldo might have been able to bear it somehow, if only it didn’t seem that he was in the process of becoming a Serb—again.
He lied to his wife and said he was going on a business trip to Budapest.
And that’s how we find him, confused and a little afraid, as he leaves the hotel and crosses sunny Obilićev Venac to a taxi stand.
The court hearing will begin on time and won’t last longer than twenty-five minutes. On parting, the judge, a young and friendly woman, will ask him about Hvar, the Croatian island her family used to have a house on—the last time she was on Hvar was that summer before the war, when she was three years old, but she doesn’t remember anything—and he will give her a friendly smile and, in order to not disappoint her, lie and say he loved Hvar too, even though he’s never been to the island.
The decision regarding his inheritance was in a plastic envelope. He laid it on the bedside table, resolved to not leave the hotel again until morning, when he would return to Zagreb. He sat in the hotel bar, which had been one of the centers of Belgrade social life after World War II, the place where the state and party heads, secret police agents and generals—some of whom Ilija had heard and read about, though it didn’t interest him much—used to meet. It was important to him to pass the time and return to Zagreb as soon as possible. He felt like a good and faithful husband who had just cheated on his wife.
He returned to his room around nine, after sitting alone in the corner of the empty bar, where it seemed no one came anymore, drinking fifteen whiskeys, all in an effort to sedate himself and forget what had happened that day. He lay in bed and tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep. He got up and went to the window, struggling to unlock it. Barely succeeding, he leaned against the window ledge, breathing in the night air for a while and taking in the sounds that carried from Republic Square and Dorćol. Suddenly, he was struck by the thought of what it would have been like if he had gone to the other side in 1991, if he had—instead of joining the Croatian volunteers—left for Aunt Smilja’s in Belgrade, and that thought made him afraid and ashamed and he tried to think of something else, of raspberries, which he had heard grew very well in Serbia, of plums, which somehow, he supposed, Serbia had more of than Croatia, and in the end, though he tried to avoid it, he began to think intensely about Serbia and what kind of a country it really was. What did it mean to him after he, one way or another, had spent the best years of his life fighting against it? It meant nothing to him. Like all other countries that meant nothing to him, including the one he lived in. A country is there so a person has something to lose and something to compromise himself for. He thought about that, closed the window, lay down, and finally fell asleep.
He was climbing up the stairs. With difficulty, one foot in front of the other. He was heavier in his dream than in reality. He barely managed to reach the fifth floor, already more out of breath than he’d ever been in his life. He knocked on the door of the apartment where the clerk Hinko Ajzler lived. He was investigating the circumstances surrounding a street incident in which Ajzler had shoved a Mrs. Petronijević, because, he said, her poodle sneered at him. The old woman had fallen and broken her hip, and three days later her son-in-law, also a senior clerk in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, filed a complaint. And now they had sent him, a known softie, to investigate Ajzler. They knew that Inspector Joso Rakita never said no. In his dream, Ilija Soldo was Inspector Joso Rakita, the year was 1941, the day Friday, April 4, but it didn’t surprise him at all that in his dream he could simultaneously be Ilija Soldo, chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police in 2019.
No one, however, opened the door. And just as he was starting to wonder what to do and to pity his unfortunate fate, someone tapped Joso Rakita or Ilija Soldo on the shoulder.
“Sorry, sir!” Mento Josef Konforti, the postman, no taller than a seven-year-old and equally timid, introduced himself. “It’s been days since Mr. Ajzler has opened the door. Everyone thinks that something has happened to him.”
In the dream he didn’t have to go down the stairs and climb again to the fifth floor with the notary Dušan Marković, an ill-tempered, fat, middle-aged man who was the spitting image of the minister of foreign affairs, Cincar Marković (who Ilija Soldo only knew about in his dream), along with two more colleagues from the police, the aids and witnesses for his investigation of Hinko Ajzler’s apartment. The repeated ascending and descending of stairs in dreams, as in a good story or novel, is an unnecessary detail that the consciousness censures. This fact provided Joso Rakita with a sense of relief.
He pulled the pick out of his pocket and easily opened the shoddy lock. He was hit with the stench of urine, gravy, and some sort of chemical. The stench was more real than anything he’d ever experienced in real life. Inspector Joso Rakita was seized with terror, as was the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, Ilija Soldo. He approached the bed on which, gray as the wall behind him, lay a balding man with a clothesline tied in a sloppy noose around his neck. On the nightstand by the bed there were two empty bottles of the phenobarbital Luminal, a sedative once made famous in Hollywood movies, which is still used today as an antiepileptic. But Joso Rakita hardly noticed the bottles of Luminal, because more interesting to him, as to Ilija Soldo in whose head he resided, was the amateurly-tied noose. He couldn’t have hung himself like that, he thought, and then it seemed to him that the man was alive, staring bug-eyed at the low ceiling.
Along Ajzler’s right eye, below the yellowish iris, crawled a small black ant, sliding across it as if on ice.
Rakita moved to pluck the ant from Ajzler’s eye with his fingers.
And then something happened which could hardly be translated from dream to reality. Suddenly the person lying there was no longer Hinko Ajzler, and the fingers did not belong to Joso Rakita; instead the ant was crawling across Joso’s wide-open eye and Hinko’s fingers went for it. He could feel the ant moving but he couldn’t blink or move his eyeballs.
At this point, he awoke with a scream. He grasped his neck, but there was no noose. Underneath him, his halfway-expelled shit was smeared across the hotel bedsheets.
This should have been the greatest fright in the life of the Croatian war veteran and esteemed policeman Ilija Soldo, the inheritor of the most beautiful villa in Senjak.
But this was just the beginning.
For the next ten nights upon returning to Zagreb, Ilija Soldo couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, devoid of any thoughts. He said nothing to his wife, nothing of his trip to Belgrade instead of Budapest, nothing of the considerable wealth he had inherited, nor of the dream he’d had the last time he’d fallen asleep. Over time, his silences and lies multiplied.
On the eleventh morning he got on a bus to Belgrade. He called in sick to work and told his wife that he was traveling to Vinkovci, out toward Serbia, where a few days earlier a thirty-year-old railroad worker had smothered his two children and then disappeared. He’d left a short note for the mother of his children, who in the police report was listed as his “domestic partner,” where he wrote that he had smothered the children because she had been cheating on him with a waiter from
the railroad station café. He was suspected to have escaped across the border to Serbia.
As awake as Ilija had been over the past days and nights, he rode east on the empty highway. When they crossed the border and entered Serbia, he closed his eyes, thinking he’d be able to sleep now. But no. The world was just as clear, real, and awake as on the other side of the border. What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either!
Those words, as if regimented, were drilled into his head: What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either.
He quickly glanced across the endless flat land in the direction of Sremska Mitrovica and Ruma, following the perfect geometrical shapes of the black, freshly plowed earth, and he tried to think about something far away from what his life was mutating into, away from the villa in Senjak and Aunt Smilja’s inheritance, away from the lies which he was guarding himself from the world or from himself with, away from insomnia which, he was sure, was caused by that strange, terrible dream in the Hotel Majestic. And that’s how he came to the case of the crazy switchman from Vinkovci, who had smothered his nine-month-old daughter and a three-year-old son with a pillow, and then wrote to his wife that this was how he was punishing her and promised that if she mended her ways, he would give her new children. He was crazy, but really, should police be the ones dealing with crazy people? How could he conduct an investigation against a disturbed mind? He thought about it, and then by association, through those mysterious and inexplicable trips that a person takes as they transition from one thought to the next, from thinking about the world to thinking about themselves, it occurred to him that what he was currently going through was also a criminal case in need of further investigation. The fact that the crime had happened in his dream, or perhaps it wasn’t a crime but a suicide, didn’t change anything. Or it changed only the fact that now he couldn’t go to the police, neither in Belgrade nor in Zagreb, and report his suspicions of murder; now he had to investigate the case himself.
All kinds of nonsense occur to you while riding the bus from Zagreb to Belgrade. Especially if you’re a police detective who hasn’t slept in ten days.
It was late afternoon, almost evening, but the main hotel entrance on Obilićev Venac was still bathed in light. The other side, the entrance on Maršala Birjuzova, was surely dark. Was it Ilija Soldo who thought that? Later he’ll be sure it was. And maybe it really was.
Luckily, there were rooms, as there would be in ten, twenty, thirty days, whenever Soldo came back on his regular future trips to Belgrade, when he would depart every eleventh day, after not having slept for the past ten nights. This will go on for six months, and each time it’ll happen according to that fatal identical scenario, which would probably make a good twelve-hour experimental film that wouldn’t be shown in regular theaters, but maybe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But the story about a case, which Ilija Soldo, the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, finds himself in the middle of, requires that all those nights at the hotel be told in the same breath, and that the reader or listener bears in mind the unbearable and frightening repetition, the monotony of terror that our unfortunate Ilija endures.
The receptionists get to know him. He lies, saying that he is a traveling salesman; he isn’t going to tell them that he’s a police officer. They look for the best room for him, he’ll even sleep in the presidential suite, where Marshall Tito and his minister of police in Communist times allegedly held meetings with the many heads of their secret police—regular citizens had no idea how many there had been; he agrees to all this only to avoid appearing suspicious to the receptionists. Then he enters the elevator, and once in his room, he gets undressed, lies on the bed, and five or six hours later wakes up to his own scream. The same dream repeats itself without any variation, only each time he finds out more and more about himself, about Inspector Joso Rakita, a Croat from Lika, serving in the Belgrade police at the beginning of April 1941. He already knows as much about him as he knows about the other one, supposedly his actual self, Ilija Soldo, who in his dream exists alongside Rakita. He is, however, unable to change anything in his dream, like not breaking into Hinko Ajzler’s apartment, or not attempting to pluck the dead ant from Hinko’s dead eye, or not turning into the dead Hinko, who he still knows nothing about.
The logic of dreams differs from the logic of reality. This logic ought to be investigated so that one knows how to behave in their dreams, or so that a good police investigator can investigate his own dream.
During these six months he didn’t say a word to his wife. She, of course, noticed that Ilija wasn’t sleeping. At first, she urged him to see a doctor, but he didn’t want to, so she got him sleeping pills, which he took, though they didn’t do a thing to help him sleep. Finally she started to suspect that her Ilija was having an affair. This suspicion generated domestic hell, which, besides the two of them and their four children, involved the neighbors, her parents, her brother and sister-in-law. He derived a strange pleasure from this since it distracted him from his dream and the futile investigation he was leading, becoming ever more convinced of the difficulty of carrying out an investigation from afar. Is there a greater distance than the separation of dreams from reality in the very same head?
After six months, the investigation led him to the following conclusion: the only place where he could fall asleep was the Hotel Majestic; everything around that hotel, Belgrade, Zagreb, the whole world, was the space where his insomnia dwelled. At night, as soon as his head hit the hotel pillow, after a few hours of deep and empty sleep, similar to being in a coma, he had the same dream; in the middle of that dream was the police case from the beginning of April 1941, most likely from Friday, April 4.
He went to the Croatian State Archives, then to the Zagreb national and university libraries, digging through newspaper documents, searching in vain for the name Hinko Ajzler. He also asked about him in Belgrade; through his police connections he requested that Serbian colleagues look into the name, but they likewise found nothing. Finally, by complete accident—most great discoveries are made by accident—he discovered on the Internet that the Archives of Serbia had digitized their entire collection of the daily newspaper Politika, from the very first issue, printed on January 12, 1904, to the very last, printed on April 6, 1941, a few hours before the German bombing of Belgrade. It took him ten minutes to find an unsigned article with the headline “Mentally Disturbed Clerk Poisons and Hangs Himself,” appearing on the tenth page of the issue from April 5, 1941. The text described his dream word for word, while the accompanying photograph showed Hinko Ajzler looking just as he had in the dreams, perhaps slightly younger.
Ilija Soldo was tremendously relieved. So, the case had existed in reality, although that reality was imprisoned in the depths of the past, in the year 1941. This completely freed him of the fear that had tormented him from the start, so unspeakable that it couldn’t even be mentioned in this story—that he had gone insane and that his dream and the persistence of his insomnia were only symptoms of a serious and irreversible psychological disorder. If everything was as real as in this article from Politika, then he couldn’t be crazy. Especially since there was no way he could have known about this article before he’d first had his dream.
He came upon a detail in the article that would, it seemed, lead to the unraveling of this case. The murder, or suicide—as it had already been suggested in Politika’s headline—took place on April 4, 1941, on the fifth floor of a building located at 30 Kosmajska Street. Easily, without anyone’s help, and using only the Internet, he found out that in 1941 Maršala Birjuzova was called Kosmajska. On the virtual map of the city, intended for tourists and those who easily get lost in Belgrade, he was pointed to the gray and damp street that he’d taken to the Hotel Majestic’s garage on his first visit. That perpetually quiet, empty, and gray street, that clouded-over street, while Obilićev Venac, which the main hotel entrance opened out onto, was always bright and sunny.
Althou
gh he only arrived at this great discovery on the third day without sleep, by early morning the next day he was already on the bus to Belgrade. As he approached the border between Croatia and Serbia, at one time two warring countries whose mutual intolerance was turning into some sort of cultural tradition, his wife, whose name has been omitted here to avoid putting her in an awkward position, was packing up herself and the children, firm in her decision to get a divorce. But in Ilija’s crazed euphoria he didn’t care about anything anymore, because it seemed he was on the verge of cracking the greatest case of his police career.
Before he went to the hotel, Ilija Soldo walked up and down the short street called Maršala Birjuzova—named after the Soviet general and one of the liberators of the city, who was killed in a plane crash on his way to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the city’s liberation—and recognized that the building in which Hinko Ajzler had lived no longer exists. It was most likely destroyed during the bombing during World War II, perhaps even by April 6, 1941. He peeked over a tall wall which surrounded a synagogue and peered furtively at a police officer, who had come out from the little glass house to monitor the man who kept crossing back and forth in front of him. But he let him pass, which is how the young Belgrade police officer by the name of Perica Utješanović—the son of Jova Utješanović and Stoja Utješanović, née Ćopić, who came to Serbia in August 1995 in a long line of Serbs expelled from Croatia during Operation Storm, the last major Croatian war operation, settling in Borča, the poorest suburb of Belgrade, now married, a father of two-year-old twins, a little girl and boy—would never find out that he had failed to identify a senior Croatian police officer, who in the subsequent days and months would be in the headlines of all of Belgrade’s tabloids.