Belgrade Noir Read online

  “Ha-ha.”

  But Miodrag Mika Golubjev knew what he was doing. He pictured his colleague of the distant future reading the ad. By then, Germany would have certainly won on all fronts. The new Europe would have emerged. Hitler would have died long ago and his successors would have since taken turns as führer, serving a monarchy called “Hitler.” Berlin, now called Germania, would have become the city of all cities—a megalopolis covering larger portions of Germany and Austria, boasting uninterrupted boulevards along which hundreds of kilometers of impressive structures would stand. Gazillions of people would wait their turn for years to see Germania; the luckiest would win it through a lottery.

  Certainly, all of this was not apparent in 2019, but a paper yellows with time.

  It took three weeks for detective Jovićević at the Majke Jevrosime Street police station to stumble upon the ad in Opštinske Novine from 1942. Actually, this was the work of a clerk at the National Library who reprinted this unusual ad in the September 11, 2019, issue of the daily paper Politika.

  It didn’t take Slobodan Jovićević long to figure out that this was like a message in a bottle, floating for three-quarters of a century until he had discovered it. He had to hurry though.

  In 2019, he already had evidence: seven mice caught. The theater canceled performances of The Lower Depths, Electra, and The Balkan Spy, stating that the cancellations were due to “actors’ illnesses” (incurable, one should say). As a result, the number of people murdered by Dr. Hetzel, alias Sweeney Todd, rose to eleven, including the four corpses of 1942.

  What could Detective Jovićević do? He rushed to the boiler room, stocked up on food and water, and settled in. He didn’t bathe, so what? Policemen do not like water, anyway. He also had rotten teeth. A cavity in his upper molar bothered him, so what? It didn’t smell too bad. The stench of fuel dominated the boiler room, anyway.

  Detective Jovićević waited for more than a week. In darkness. In silence. Alone. Eating the last remnants of food prepared by the loyal officer’s wife.

  On the ninth day, he heard echoes of footsteps. At first from afar, but then ever closer.

  * * *

  I don’t understand. I can’t believe my eyes. I am opening the door to the boiler room on the 1942 side, but, instead of the street, in front of me is the boiler room of 2019, with a detective tapping a stick against the metal pipes and pulling out a gun. I turn around—breathless and distraught—again I pass through the door of 2019 and back again, yet there in 1942 stands another detective, the Toothpick, clanking some chains. Both men want to see me finished, without judge and jury—me, the god of the National Theater, who has selectively killed only talentless actors. In desperation, I turn and run to the wall. I think: better to bust my own head than allow them to catch me in either 1942 or 2019. And what ensues: instead of shattering my skull, I fall into the wall—simply fall through it. I smell mortar in my nostrils, brick dust in my lungs. I realize that I’ll remain a part of that wall forever and no justice will ever reach me, yet there is no exit.

  I’m still here. Over time, I have crawled up from the lower levels to the wall dividing the box seats of the first gallery. From there, I watch performances through the seasons. Sometimes I scare the actors during rehearsals with my mysterious sigh or roaring laughter, the source of which they are confused about.

  But in spite of it all, I’m bored . . .

  THE MAN WHO WASN’T MARS

  by Vule Žurić

  Pioneer Park

  Translated by Jennifer Zoble, Mirza Purić

  A new and powerful revival of the grotesque took place in the twentieth century, although the word revival is not exactly suited to the most recent forms.

  —Mikhail Bakhtin (translated by Hélène Iswolsky)

  A tall, portly officer in a tight and tattered overcoat stood smoking beneath the bare branches of a tree at the edge of the large park. As the two Red Army soldiers in front of him dug a hole that increasingly resembled a grave, there was not a trace of tension to be seen on his round face.

  The equanimity with which he released the smoke from his Soviet lungs confirmed that this was a man who was well acquainted with the world on the other side of certainty. And for him, that world could be found, on this late October afternoon in 1944, on the other side of the fence surrounding the Old Royal Palace Garden, right in the center of the capital of Yugoslavia.

  Just twenty minutes before, at the park’s entrance, there’d been an enemy fire position. The German Schwarzlose machine gun had relentlessly barked from the watchtower that, in the words of the Partisan lieutenant, had been transported stone by stone from Kaimakchalan after World War I.

  “Kai . . . Ka . . .” the Soviet officer tried unsuccessfully to repeat the strange name of the mountain on the border of Macedonia and Greece, whose conquering by the Serbian army had perhaps decided the outcome of World War I.

  “That’s where my father and uncle died,” added the lieutenant, who sometime after noon had received special orders from Partisan Supreme Headquarters to have his platoon “take the Red Army operational group along the shortest and safest route to the Old Royal Palace Garden and be at their disposal until they’ve completed their special assignment.”

  “A good combat position is always a good combat position,” said the Russian at last, having once more surveyed the space between the Old Palace and the new Parliament building.

  He would have liked to formulate a theory on how these two structures were separated not by a park, but rather by a historical period during which the seeds of poverty had sprouted another offshoot of the world revolution, but the Partisan lieutenant clearly had no feel for the rhythms of such discourse.

  “With your brotherly assistance, we have once again liberated our capital,” the Partisan declared like an actor in a bad propaganda film, so for a few moments the whole scene continued to flicker in black and white, accompanied by the sounds of one of those revolutionary marches.

  “The Germans are fleeing from Belgrade again, and the stone watchtower will, from this day forward, serve as a monument to yet another great victory for our side. I’ve heard it’s already been decided that this park will be renamed Pioneer Park. Young Pioneers from all corners of Yugoslavia and the entire free world will come to this place to experience the glory of our people’s revolutionary liberation war.”

  The Soviet officer knew that the lieutenant expected him to offer an even more pathetic reply, in which he’d invoke Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, the great leader of the even greater world revolution, and summarize the vision of a just, classless society, but the crack of single shots and machine-gun bursts again resounded in a nearby street, while muffled detonations continued to come from the direction of the setting sun, which for some time had been hiding behind the battalion of large gray clouds sprawled across the remaining roofs.

  Everything returned to Technicolor, replacing the ceremonial military music with the sound of gunfire, and the air endeavored to conceal its scent of blood and death.

  A mere thirty minutes earlier the sun had warmed the battle for the city, but now the only stars that shone were those on the caps of its liberators. Darkness falls at the dawn of freedom, the Soviet officer would have mused, but clambering up his cordovan boots was the sound of a trench spade hitting human bone.

  “Konačno,” the Partisan lieutenant said in Serbian from across the dug-out grave, gesturing toward a nearby fence, where his soldiers kept their guns trained on the assembly building, the main post office, and the central square known as Terazije, where, it seemed, the fighting raged on.

  The Soviet officer considered how the Serbian word konačno could very easily be taken to mean “of course” instead of “finally,” given its similarity to the Russian word for “of course,” конечно. So he briefly nodded, stamped out his cigarette butt, and said to the young man that, as far as he was concerned, the assignment had been completed.

  “You’re free to go.”

&n
bsp; “Yes, Comrade Makhin,” said the lieutenant, and took off with his platoon toward the buildings at whose doors freedom had not yet knocked. The colonel approached the hole where a pair of soldiers had carefully placed the ivory bones in an empty ammunition crate.

  Only he and that skeleton knew that the outcome could very easily have been (he searched a moment for the phrase that would most precisely describe such a set of circumstances) the exact opposite: that those bones, first and foremost, could have been his own, and perhaps they would have been discovered by the very man whose remains he was under special, top secret orders to find “at all costs, unearth, and send posthaste to Moscow!”

  “Comrade Makhin, it seems Fritz broke every bone in this guy before they finished him off,” said the first Red Army soldier.

  They may have broken the bones, Makhin ruminated, but they hadn’t broken the man.

  For even if one of the comrades dared to think that their fellow soldier had betrayed them at the blows of some unbearable bludgeon, a portion of the notes from his interrogation that they’d obtained the previous winter had said unequivocally that in that grave lay not only the remains of perhaps the greatest hero of the world revolution, but all its darkest secrets too.

  And one of these secrets most directly concerned Makhin, who in the spring of ’41 had stayed in Belgrade illegally on assignment. The Germans had just crushed Yugoslavia and much of the rubble in the bombarded capital had yet to be cleared.

  It was agreed that he would meet, in this park, the man whose bones the soldiers were now transferring into an empty ammunition crate.

  The treetops were in full leaf that day, the sky clear, but the two of them were, like all experienced intelligence officers, as relaxed in the shadows as they were tense and alert.

  They exchanged a few of those meaningless opening words that expressed recognition and served to establish communication. Then they set off on a leisurely stroll, during which they exchanged but a few brief glances and almost no long, ambiguous words.

  Makhin was tasked with conveying an important directive from Moscow to this man before traveling back to Thessaloniki later that afternoon. From there he’d proceed to Istanbul, where they’d failed previously to destroy the man who was known in Moscow as Walter, and who in the meantime had become the marshal and supreme commander of the Partisan army, the new ruler of the even newer Yugoslavia for whom the liberated people of Belgrade would enthusiastically cheer, “Ti-to, Ti-to!”

  The message he’d brought to that park in the spring of ’41 had pertained to the new plan of the Central Committee in Moscow to remove this man from the leadership of the Yugoslav Communists.

  The plan had been canceled for the time being.

  The order from Moscow was indeed a little unusual, but crystal clear.

  “Uncle wants you to leave the swallow in her nest for now.” Makhin rattled off this nonsense as if he were Hamlet and then lit a cigarette like Bogart in Casablanca.

  The man on whose grave Makhin now stood didn’t say a word. He knew very well that nothing would’ve been different had he been the one who bore the important orders from the Central Committee and Makhin, the fellow he was meeting in the park, the one to carry them out.

  They had both been taught to accept all orders without question. They were both accustomed to the fact that it didn’t matter who delivered the orders and who received them. The only thing that did and ever would matter was who issued them. The two men, just like the tens, hundreds, thousands of secret agents scattered across the globe, served in their roles so that life for the planet’s inhabitants would change forever.

  Therefore the man didn’t nod, nor did he blink, but rather turned toward a woman who’d just passed by. She’d left behind the scent of French perfume, and her gait was all about everything but getting from point A to point B.

  Yet, as Makhin had heard from many others who knew the man whose bones lay in the place where they’d met that one and only time, the world of romance was pure mathematics for him. The number of women he’d been with was considerable, and one might say the way he’d recruited them was right out of a textbook.

  One could clearly see from the interrogation notes that the Germans, thanks to the information obtained from a detective in the local Serbian police, knew about the meeting in the park, but it was even more clear that they in fact had no clue whom they’d nabbed. Gestapo chief Helm had thoroughly interrogated the captive about his false documents and connections to the black market and viewed his confiscated weapon as the basic tool of most common criminals. But he’d insisted most emphatically on knowing the name of his prisoner. He kept asking the suspect the same question, like a kind of refrain: “Are you Mars?”

  Police agents had most likely found out about their meeting through some petty informant who worked for both the Germans and the Communists, and who was convinced that the man he’d betrayed deserved even worse because he was a party defector and traitor, and that his downfall would only strengthen the revolutionary movement.

  Still, Makhin was bothered by the fact that the Germans had learned his code name.

  “I can understand how they know the two of us have met because Tito’s people have been tailing the man who posed the biggest possible threat to them,” he said to Stalin after reviewing the notes from the interrogation. “But, Joseph Vissarionovich, where did my name come from?”

  Stalin fixed him with that foxish gaze he had that led his interlocutor first to believe he’d been personally responsible for the suffering of Jesus, and then to sign a statement accusing Christ of collaborating with the Romans himself.

  “Fyodor Yevdokimovich,” Stalin began softly, “neither you nor I are new to this game.”

  “No, we’re not,” affirmed Makhin, completely aware that, as usual, he was not expected to say anything else.

  “The two of us have worn more code names than coats.”

  “We have.”

  “Your name simply . . .”

  “Came up?”

  “Exactly, came up,” said Stalin almost cheerfully, even though Makhin could never tell what the generalissimo was really thinking. “Came up like an empty shell in which they found nothing.”

  The notes from the interrogation proved this.

  The Germans had simultaneously captured a man and overheard a name. And so they wanted to somehow connect them. For that reason they couldn’t grasp that one of the top Soviet secret agents had fallen into their hands, one who, among other things, had laid the groundwork for Trotsky’s liquidation.

  * * *

  “And you, Fyodor Yevdokimovich, know for sure that he was a hero?” Another soldier hopped into the grave, startling Makhin, picked up a large skull, and looked the martyr of the world revolution deep in the eye, while the muffled strains of Katyusha rockets drifted in from the edge of town.

  “Certainly. And Comrade Stalin knows it too,” said Makhin.

  The two Red Army soldiers stood at attention, and it was as if the whole front had suddenly fallen silent.

  A silence much more complex reigned over the Kremlin the following day, when the leader of the world revolution laid that same skull on his desk and read carefully to himself Makhin’s message written in a steady hand on a frozen piece of paper.

  Dear Comrade Stalin,

  Acting on your personal orders, I send you the remains of the hero Mustafa Golubić from liberated Belgrade.

  Mars

  The contents of the message had so thoroughly absorbed Stalin’s attention that its baroque style went right over his head.

  Even the best intelligence officers suffer from the desire to say much in as few words as possible, he thought. He struck a match, lit the piece of paper, and then his pipe with it, taking a few short, apprehensive puffs. Trying quickly to conjure a thought about silence as the only appropriate means of expression for comrades who, in the darkest basements of the Party, had been exterminating traitors hell-bent on subverting the foundations of world revolution (t
hough it could just as well be the reverse: the basements of the revolution, and the foundations of the Party), Stalin went to the window where the vista of the war’s last winter unfurled.

  Oh, my dear . . . he wanted to say to his fallen comrade, but suddenly he couldn’t remember a single one of the ten or so code names this one had used, so he returned to his desk, sat back down, and lowered his gaze to the dead man’s skull. Although there was no mustache on it, nor those oddly sagging sallow cheeks, it was the head of the only one who’d fearlessly dared to tell him what he really thought, and who wouldn’t have hesitated to liquidate even Karl Marx himself had the Party ordered it.

  “There,” murmured Stalin, satisfied. “Now I can finally look you right in the eye, unafraid!”

  The same couldn’t be said, however, by the German soldiers from the firing squad that stood, in late August 1941, facing the stout, mangled man, who was tied to a chair under the green treetops in a corner of the large park.

  They stood while he sat and stared at them.

  They were healthy and whole, while he was battered and broken; they would leave that park alive, while he would stay dead and buried.

  Nevertheless, the man looked at them as if all of this were an ordinary lie. Some of them were ready to admit that it wouldn’t have surprised them if, at the command “Aim!” he had pulled out a weapon and carefully aimed it at them.

  But when the command to shoot finally came down and they fired, everything seemed to move in slow motion.

  The German officer who commanded the firing squad thought for a moment that time would snap like a strip of film, then darkness would descend and the convict would manage to escape into some quiet Belgrade street, after which they’d lose the war.

  At that same moment, apart from thinking as well that the Germans would surely lose the war, Mustafa Golubić noticed how the Russian equivalent for the Serbian word for “finally,” konačno (в конце концов), could very easily be heard in Serbian as na kraju krajeva, or “after all.”