Belgrade Noir Read online

  He felt transformed into a bottom feeder in an ocean of shame. He had never felt so miserable. He was desperate to slam shut his laptop in order to end the tortured on-screen show and its associated sighs and grunts. But he knew well that this would soak his motherboard with the viscous liquid and render it unusable. All the data of his Xenonauts conquests lay there. So he did the only thing he could: he started to cry before finding some tissues with which he could clean up the mess and turn the machine off.

  Over the next few days, Miloš refused to even open his computer. Not only did he stop spying on Katarina, he actually stopped playing Xenonauts. At work, he retreated into his own thoughts. Bane and Jovana tiptoed around him—aware that something was very wrong, but apprehensive about doing anything that might trigger what they suspected was an emotional volcano.

  Five days later, Miloš could no longer resist the lure of Xenonauts and so he lifted the lid on his laptop. He stared at the keyboard, the focus of his recent embarrassment. He thought he detected a couple of small stains which he carefully removed with a dab of water on a tissue. Before long, he was back—this time in a new environment that the aliens were seeking to establish as their base in the Middle East.

  It was soon after he had stumbled across an oasis south of Mosul that the alert sounded. It was six thirty-five p.m. Katarina had returned home. He froze the Iraqi action and flipped over to her webcam, his heart pounding. Deploying those hawk eyes which had been the downfall of so many aliens, he clocked the two glasses next to the wine.

  Jealousy, anger, prurience, desire, tristesse, curiosity. Which impulse would take over? As they vied for his attention, something most unexpected occurred, recalibrating all his emotions into a wave of astonishment. A dinner plate came flying through the door and sailed right across the bedroom before exiting into the bathroom, followed by a loud crash which was efficiently picked up by the microphone on Katarina’s Mac.

  Worse followed. Much worse. Miloš heard Katarina scream as she fell back into the room before the man with a swift, expert sleight of hand immobilized her. It reminded him of the Vulcan nerve grip that Mr. Spock was able to deploy so fatally in his close-combat encounters aboard the USS Enterprise. The man squatted over her with his back to Miloš. Having kicked her to ensure she remained on the floor, the man turned to grab Comrade Tito before raising the statuette above his head in preparation to strike.

  Miloš was suddenly confronted with a truth that he had always suspected somewhere deep down. The man inflicting the harm, reponsible for the violence, was his father. He looked as indifferent as he did at the breakfast table. A man without humanity who could take a life as nonchalantly as he might sip a whiskey.

  Years of Xenonautical strategic thinking kicked in. Miloš called up a GIF of talking lips on a white background and lit up the screen with them. He also filtered his voice through an alien distorter. “Gvero! Your actions are being monitored in real time. Desist now! Failure to do so will result in the Supreme Intergalactic Court ordering your immediate liquidation. The court is already considering its verdict in the case of the death of Dragana Gvero.”

  Miloš’s father gaped at the screen—baffled, terrified. He dropped the Comrade Tito statue, which hit the floor with a thud, narrowly missing Katarina, who had also turned her eyes to the screen, as bewildered as her attacker. Without even glancing down at her, Gvero ran out of the room and a moment later Miloš heard what he assumed was the front door open.

  The lips continued, “Thank you, Katarina, for your courageous role in ensnaring the defendant.” The lips morphed into a big eye. It winked.

  Miloš walked into the kitchen to brew a cup of tea. As he sat back down at his laptop, he thought, How on earth can I follow that? Within three hours, he had cleared the entire Middle East of aliens.

  Mission complete.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Vladimir Arsenijević was born in 1965 in Pula, Croatia. His first book—In the Hold, an antiwar novel—won the 1994 NIN Award and was translated into twenty languages. Since then, Arsenijević has published numerous novels, graphic novels, and essay collections. He is the founder and president of Association KROKODIL that runs one of the most distinguished literary festivals in the former Yugoslavia. He lives and works in Belgrade.

  Muharem Bazdulj was born in Travnik, Bosnia, in 1977. His novels, essays, and short stories have appeared in twenty languages. Three of his books have been translated into English and published in the UK and US: The Second Book, Byron and the Beauty, and Transit, Comet, Eclipse. He lives in Belgrade.

  Jamie Clegg is a PhD student of comparative literature at the University of Michigan. She is interested in contemporary Diné (Navajo) poetry and histories, and modern Palestinian literature. She translates from Arabic and Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian.

  Verica Vincent Cole is a crime writer whose novels introduced to readers Belgrade’s first fictional private detective. Cole was born in Belgrade, where, prior to moving to Malta in 1999, she had her own practice as an attorney. After obtaining her degree in international maritime law at the IMO International Maritime Law Institute, she stayed to work at the Institute. She lives in the old city of Rabat, Malta, with her husband Kenneth and their two dogs.

  Rachael Daum received her BA in creative writing from the University of Rochester and MA in Slavic Studies from Indiana University; she also received certificates in literary translation from both institutions. Her original work and translations have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Two Lines, EuropeNow, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, and elsewhere. Daum is the communications and awards manager at the American Literary Translators Association and lives in Cologne, Germany.

  Mirjana Đurđević was born in Belgrade in 1956. She has published seventeen novels, as well as several short stories and essays. Her novel Deda Rankove riblje teorije (Grandpa Ranko’s Fish Theories) won the Female Pen Award in 2004. For her novel Kaya, Belgrade and the Good American, she received the prestigious Meša Selimović Award for the best book in the region in 2009. Her works have been translated into English and Slovenian.

  Sibelan Forrester is a professor of Russian language and literature at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her translations include Irena Vrkljan’s lyrical autobiography The Silk, the Shears and Marina, Milica Mićić Dimovska’s novel The Cataract, and a book of selected poetry by Marija Knežević, Tehnika Disanja (Breathing Technique).

  Aleksandar Gatalica was born in 1964 in Belgrade. He graduated with a world literature degree in Ancient Greek from the University of Belgrade’s Faculty of Philology. He is a writer, critic, and translator, best known for his novel The Great War, winner of the NIN Award for Best Serbian Novel of the year. His works have been translated into more than ten languages.

  Misha Glenny is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. His best-selling nonfiction book McMafia was translated into thirty-two languages and was broadcast as a BBC and AMC fictional TV drama series. A former BBC Central Europe correspondent, Glenny won the Sony Gold Award for Outstanding Contribution to Broadcasting for his work during the wars in the former Yugoslavia. His books include The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-2011 and The Fall of Yugoslavia.

  Vesna Goldsworthy was born in Belgrade in 1961 and has lived in England since 1986. She is a best-selling writer, academic, and broadcaster. Her books have been translated into twenty-three languages. Her novel Gorsky, serialized on the BBC, was a Waterstones’s Book of the Year and a New York Times Editors’ Choice in 2015. Monsieur Ka, which imagines the life of Anna Karenina’s son, was a London Times Summer Reads for 2019.

  Kati Hiekkapelto was born in 1970 in Oulu, Finland, and has lived in Kanjiža, Serbia. She is a crime writer, punk singer, and performance artist. The protagonist of her novels is Detective Anna Fekete, a Hungarian born in Serbia who fled to Finland as a child during the Yugoslav Wars. Her novels have been translated into fifteen languages, and in 2015 she won the Clew of the Year Award, presented by the Finnish Whodunnit Society for the
best Finnish crime novel of the year.

  Milorad Ivanović is a Serbian investigative reporter and editor. He was editor in chief of the Serbian edition of Newsweek, and executive editor of the daily paper Blic and the weekly publication Novi Magazin. Presently he is an editor at BIRN Serbia in Belgrade. He has a special interest in cross-border journalism and is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His investigations have included work on human trafficking, Balkan mercenaries in Iraq, and clinical trials.

  Miljenko Jergović was born in 1966 in Sarajevo, Bosnia. He published his first article in 1983, and his first book of poetry, Warsaw Observatory, in 1988. He has written several collections of short stories and a dozen novels. In 2012, he received the Angelus Central European Literature Award and in 2018 he won the Georg Dehio Book Prize. His stories and novels have been translated into more than twenty languages. Jergović currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.

  Aleksi Koponen is an opera singer and translator who has previously worked as a script reader and literary editor. He lives in London.

  McKenna Marko is a graduate student of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Michigan currently residing in Budapest, Hungary. Her research interests include Hungarian and Yugoslav literature, film, and culture. She translates from Hungarian and Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian.

  Vladan Matijević was born in 1962 in Čačak, in central Serbia. He served in the Yugoslav People’s Army in the territory of present-day Northern Macedonia. He has published twelve books, has received various awards, and has been translated into several languages. His novels Very Little Light and The Adventures of Mace Aksentijević were both especially successful in France. He lives in Serbia, on the outskirts of a small, gloomy town, and does not like guests.

  Nataša Milas was born in 1976 in Sarajevo. She is a scholar of Russian and South Slavic literature and film, and a translator from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian. Milas edited a special issue of the literary journal Absinthe 20: New European Writing, focusing on Bosnian prose. Her translation of Muharem Bazdulj’s novel Transit, Comet, Eclipse was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2018. Milas lives in New York City and teaches at New York University.

  Genta Nishku is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of Michigan and holds a graduate certificate in critical translation studies from the same department. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Balkan literatures, as well as activism and resistance. She translates from Albanian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, and Italian.

  Oto Oltvanji was born in 1971 in Subotica, in northern Serbia. He is the author of the novels Black Shoes, The Backbone of the Night, and Splinter. Some of his fifty crime, horror, and science fiction short stories were published in his collection The Tales of Mystery and Magic. He has translated, into Serbian, numerous Jonathan Lethem books. His latest book is a children’s mystery, How I Became a Detective. He lives in Belgrade with his wife and daughter.

  Nada Petković is an instructional professor at the University of Chicago. A native of Belgrade, she joined the Slavic Department in the late eighties and prefers to refer to herself as Yugoslav. Her projects include the book Balkan Epic: Song, History, Modernity, coedited with Philip V. Bohlman, and the reader Po naški through Fiction. She is the recipient of honors and awards from the Fulbright Program, the Mellon Foundation, and the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning.

  Mirza Purić is a literary translator, a contributing editor at EuropeNow, and a former editor at large at Asymptote. His book-length translations include works by Nathan Englander, Michael Köhlmeier, and Rabih Alameddine. In 2019, Istros Books published his translation of Faruk Šehić’s novel Under Pressure. His cotranslation, with Ellen Elias-Bursać, of Miljenko Jergović’s Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah will be published by Archipelago Books.

  Ena Selimović, born in Belgrade, spent much of her childhood in Turkey before migrating to the US in 1998. She is completing her PhD in comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research brings a comparative approach to the study of twentieth- and twenty-first-century US and Balkan literatures, with an interest in establishing their interimperial, racialized, and multilingual network in the historical longue durée.

  Goran Skrobonja is one of the leading genre authors in Serbia. He was born in Belgrade in 1962. His publishing and translation work introduced modern horror literature to Serbian readers in the 1990s—books by Stephen King, Clive Barker, and James Herbert. His first horror novel, The Brood, was published in 1993, and he went on to publish several story collections and novels, including his best-selling title, The Man Who Killed Tesla.

  Dejan Stojiljković was born in 1976 in Niš, in southern Serbia. His book Constantine’s Crossing was a hugely successful, riveting, multigenre novel. That was just the first in a long line of releases that have won prestigious literary awards and critical accolades. Stojiljković has also written several comic scripts and a collection of essays on comics. His writing style spills from fantasy to horror and everywhere in between.

  Jennifer Zoble translates literature from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian and Spanish. Her translation of the short story collection Mars by Asja Bakić was published by Feminist Press in 2019. She received a 2018 NYSCA grant for her translation of Zovite me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić. She’s an assistant clinical professor in the Liberal Studies program at NYU, coeditor of InTranslation at the Brooklyn Rail, and coproducer of the international audio drama podcast Play for Voices.

  Vule Žurić is a Serbian writer who was born in 1969 in Sarajevo. He is the author of eleven novels, seven short story collections, and also writes for screen and radio. He has won several major Serbian literature prizes, including the Ivo Andrić Award for Best Book of Short Stories in 2015. He lives in Pančevo, near Belgrade.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not exist without my friend Tamara Jorgovanović. It was she who gave me the idea to contact Akashic Books. After several years and numerous e-mails, Johnny Temple and Johanna Ingalls finally agreed—and I am very grateful for their support and courage to enter this unknown territory. I owe a special gratitude to Professor Tatjana Aleksić, Eric Eaton, and Rachael Daum for their painstaking efforts to help me polish this collection of stories. I am dedicating this book to my parents, sister, niece, and my friends, who have always been by my side.

  BONUS MATERIAL

  Excerpt from USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series

  Also available in the Akashic Noir Series

  Akashic Noir Series Awards & Recognition

  INTRODUCTION

  WRITERS ON THE RUN

  From USA NOIR: Best of the Akashic Noir Series,

  edited by Johnny Temple

  In my early years as a book publisher, I got a call one Saturday from one of our authors asking me to drop by his place for “a smoke.” I politely declined as I had a full day planned. “But Johnny,” the author persisted, “I have some really good smoke.” My curiosity piqued, I swung by, but was a bit perplexed to be greeted with suspicion at the author’s door by an unhinged whore and her near-nude john. The author rumbled over and ushered me in, promptly sitting me down on a smelly couch and assuring the others I wasn’t a problem. Moments later, the john produced a crack pipe to resume the party I had evidently interrupted. This wasn’t quite the smoke I’d envisaged, so I gracefully excused myself after a few (sober) minutes. I scurried home pondering the author’s notion that it was somehow appropriate to invite his publisher to a crack party.

  It may not have been appropriate, but it sure was noir.

  From the start, the heart and soul of Akashic Books has been dark, provocative, well-crafted tales from the disenfranchised. I learned early on that writings from outside the mainstream almost necessarily coincide with a mood and spirit of noir, and are composed by authors whose life circumstances often place them in environs vulnerable to crime.

  My own interest in noir fiction grew from my early exp
osure to urban crime, which I absorbed from various perspectives. I was born and raised in Washington, DC, and have lived in Brooklyn since 1990. In the 1970s and ’80s, when violent, drug-fueled crime in DC was rampant, my mother hung out with cops she’d befriended through her work as a nearly unbeatable public defender. She also grew close to some of her clients, most notably legendary DC bank robber Lester “LT” Irby (a contributor to DC Noir), who has been one of my closest friends since I was fifteen, though he was incarcerated from the early 1970s until just recently. Complicating my family’s relationship with the criminal justice system, my dad sued the police stridently in his work as legal director of DC’s American Civil Liberties Union.

  Both of my parents worked overtime. By the time my sister Kathy was nine and I was seven, we were latchkey kids prone to roam, explore, and occasionally break laws. Though an arrest for shoplifting helped curb my delinquent tendencies, the interest in crime remained. After college I worked with adolescents and completed a master’s degree in social work; my focus was on teen delinquency.

  Throughout the 1990s, my relationship with the urban underbelly expanded as I spent a great deal of time in dank nightclubs populated by degenerates and outcasts. I played bass guitar in Girls Against Boys, a rock and roll group that toured extensively in the US and Europe. The long hours on the road not spent on stage gave way to book publishing, which began as a hobby in 1996 with my friends Bobby and Mark Sullivan.

  The first book we published was The Fuck-Up, by Arthur Nersesian—a dark, provocative, well-crafted tale from the disenfranchised. A few years later Heart of the Old Country by Tim McLoughlin became one of our early commercial successes. The book was widely praised both for its classic noir voice and its homage to the people of South Brooklyn. While Brooklyn is chock-full of published authors these days, Tim is one of the few who was actually born and bred here. In his five decades, Tim has never left the borough for more than five weeks at a stretch and he knows the place, through and through, better than anyone I’ve met.