Belgrade Noir Read online

  Smiley was upset and confused, he kept repeating that Ira had been arrested. I concluded that he meant my young acquaintance, yet I couldn’t grasp why Smiley was saying this to me, what I had to do with her arrest.

  I looked back at Chief Bromden. He started muttering, I almost fell off my footstool. I managed to understand that the two of them expected me to intervene with Inspector Vasović. They knew, just like everyone on the bulevar, that I worked for the inspector, they’d noticed that every morning he gave me instructions and signals.

  “So you have to go to his office right now,” the leader ordered me belligerently. “Let the inspector see that Ira has someone to take care of her.”

  “Her parents have disowned her and surely won’t help her,” Smiley chimed in. He was pleading with me to help.

  “Why did they arrest her?” I asked, just to say something.

  “She was fighting with some soccer fans, she cut one on the arm,” Chief Bromden answered.

  I said that I wouldn’t undertake anything. While I was saying it I saw astonishment on the chief’s face and heard the angry cries of Ira’s followers.

  * * *

  Žana left me in that cursed year, in ’91, and I left Filmski žurnal. So I was writing film criticism, I was writing. I made peace with the fact that I was never going to make my live-action film and I went off to Slavonia—the bloodiest front in Croatia. I thought I would heal myself of my frustrations in battle, or at least die. Preventing the creation of an independent state of Croatia and protecting the Serbian minority, I admit, was not my goal. But in Slavonia there were cannons and howitzers. Great cannons, great howitzers. Dark-green trunks of ammunition. Snipers’ bullets and newly composed faux-folk music worse than death. Rakija and beer, and everything they lead you to. Kettle, ladle, and mess tins. Dysentery. Pigs, rats, crows, worms . . . Land mines and the sanitation crew . . . And my acquaintance with you, dear Peppy.

  * * *

  That afternoon Ira came along with Smiley. They were both smiling. I concluded that Ira took drugs too. I was angry at her because she was friendly with a man like that, at the same time sorry, because I was disappointed in this girl. She was worthless; everything indicated that I would have to kill Oliver.

  Smiley told me, along with some jokes, that yesterday Strongman had planned to give me a beating because I’d refused to mediate on Ira’s behalf. I understood that Chief Bromden was named Strongman. Smiley had barely managed to calm him down, told him he knew me well and that I would certainly go see Inspector Vasović.

  From the ensuing conversation, I grasped that Smiley really thought they had released Ira thanks to my intervention. Ira didn’t deny it, and it looked as if she too thought I had gone to the police for her.

  I was getting more and more nervous. Ira considered the whole episode with the soccer fans not worth discussing, which was the right thing to do. Then she told me I shouldn’t feel responsible for her, that I had struggled in the way I knew how to and was able to, and that now it was her generation’s turn. Ugh, how she got on my nerves! I decided that I would no longer talk to her, she definitively didn’t deserve to be killed.

  * * *

  On Uzun Mirkova Street a married couple jumped from a sixth-floor window, a seven-year-old girl was kidnapped from her bedroom on Knez Mihailova Street . . .

  Miljana is sitting on her folding chair and selling handicrafts. Drago is begging so he can buy rakija, Kombucha is playing Van Morrison. Employees of the university library have been erasing Ira’s graffiti for a whole hour, supervised by their glowering director. I shout: “Vlast je obezbedila ambijent!” Today I’m shouting that the authorities have created a great ambience, and I admit with regret that I’m not capable of killing anyone. I’ve decided not to carry my pistol anymore. I don’t need it. I’ll make peace with my lazy fate, I’ll continue vegetating. I’ll leave the action to other people.

  Citizens lynched an old man who had groped a girl on a public bus, robbers broke into an apartment on Banovo Brdo and tortured a whole family until they handed over their jewelry and their life savings . . .

  Today Strongman came to see me and threatened me. He said that not a hair on Ira’s head may be harmed. With his two fists resting one on the other, he mimed the wringing of a goose’s neck.

  I didn’t go to the Iron Butterfly concert, I was wondering where Strongman could have gotten the idea that I wanted to kill Ira.

  * * *

  Dear Peppy, my hands are bloody, but I’m not satisfied. I keep feeling that the person I was trying to kill might still be alive. It seems likely that I’ll have to go to the penitentiary.

  By the florist’s wall, at the place where Miljana always sits, there was a stone. I bent down, picked it up, and struck Smiley in the head with all my strength. He all but flipped over, along with his wheelchair. His head was completely covered in blood, but he didn’t give up. His body flailed, I could hear wheezing from his throat.

  The streetlights were on, cars were racing along the bulevar. Fortunately, the sidewalks were empty. It was a cold evening, you could sense autumn.

  I hit him in the head several more times, but awkwardly. I wanted to pound him in the temple, but I missed, I nailed him in the forehead, the chin . . . His face turned into a bloody mess, his eye hung out of its socket, but his limbs continued twitching; I also heard that gruesome rattle. The drivers were minding their own business, they didn’t look to the side, but even so I screened Smiley with my body. I had to finish him off as quickly as possible and clear out of this place. I struck him with all my strength, the blood spurted, pieces of bone flew. Smiley fell out of his seat and slid down on the sidewalk, with his back leaning against his wheelchair. Then the chair moved and he lay down on the sidewalk. His body kept on twitching. I kneeled beside his shoulder, took the stone in both hands, and hit him on the head twice. He didn’t go still. I grabbed him around his chest and lifted him, his blood soaking through my clothes and touching my body. It was hot, it seemed that way to me. I put him back in his chair. His head was the wrong shape, he had a black hole in the crown of his skull.

  Cars were racing past us, not one slowed down. At the trolley stop across the street several people had gathered. They were watching the tires go by or staring at their cell phones, deep in thought. They didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary, and even if they had they wouldn’t have wanted to get mixed up in things that had nothing to do with them. I held the rock under my jacket and went down a side street, less well lit than the bulevar. Smiley remained sitting and waiting there, dead, for his brother. Blood was flowing out of him and making a black puddle around his wheelchair.

  It was inevitable that the night would end like this. Did he want something from me when he approached or did fate draw him to me?

  Around ten p.m. he called his brother to come get him. Then he told me nonchalantly that his brother had been in the same unit with me. I looked at him in an unfriendly way, he had to notice that.

  Peppy, you know we weren’t in any kind of unit, the officers acted as if they hadn’t even heard of our regiment, never mind seen it in the vicinity of the regular army.

  I kept quiet, I didn’t contradict him. Sometimes words aren’t the right means, you have to express yourself in other ways. But Smiley didn’t keep quiet, the devil wouldn’t leave him in peace.

  “They called you Peppy,” he said. He wasn’t asking, he didn’t doubt, he concluded.

  I saw in his eyes that he wouldn’t believe me if I told him I was a different person.

  BLACK WIDOW, WHITE RUSSIAN

  by Muharem Bazdulj

  Palilula

  Translated by Jamie Clegg

  She was beautiful and instantly reminded me of Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. She had blond hair and dark eyes. She acted like she was thirty years old and, as it turned out, was exactly that. She looked a bit older than she was, in fact, but not in a bad way. She had a kind of alluring maturity, an aura that said that she
hadn’t been a kid for a while. Said her name was Nađa. I wondered what she was doing at my apartment door.

  It was spring of 2014. I was forty-six years old, freshly divorced, and freshly unemployed. Fortunately, I still had an apartment. I’d recently read in some book how apartments on the ground level exude a peculiar loneliness. I’d bought the apartment on the ground floor, at the very end of Palmotićeva Street, across from the Institute for Mental Health—which taxi drivers referred to as the loony bin—more than twenty years earlier while the war in Bosnia was still going on and Serbia was still under sanctions. It was relatively cheap—that’s how it was in those times—and apartments on the ground floor were always the cheapest. It was important for me to be in the center of the city, so living on the ground floor didn’t bother me. I even enjoyed that feeling of peculiar loneliness I already carried with me. It wasn’t so bad that the apartment came with it.

  She said that Nikolina, a friend of hers, had given her my address. They’d met at some diplomatic reception, then saw each other a few days later at a café. She asked Nikolina if she knew anyone in Belgrade who could help her with an investigation. It had something to do with Bosnia, so Nikolina recommended me, since I’m from Bosnia, know half of Belgrade, have good connections, and am generally an okay guy.

  In 1993, the same year I bought the apartment, Nađa’s father was killed. That’s what she told me as she came into the room and sat on the armchair I offered her. I sat directly across from her. She said that she was born in Rudo, a little town in Bosnia along the border with Serbia. The place is only known for the fact that the first brigade of Tito’s partisan army was founded there on Stalin’s birthday in 1941. That was the twenty-first of December. However, after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, the date was subsequently changed to the twenty-second of December in our history books.

  Nađa’s father, as it turned out, was a Bosnian Muslim, while her mother was originally a White Russian. Her father was a senior official during the Communist era, a true Yugoslav. When the war started, he was certain that nothing bad would happen to him. Still, a Serbian paramilitary unit raided their house in Rudo and took Nađa’s father. For years he was missing until they found his remains in a mass grave ten years after the war.

  Not long after they took her father, Nađa and her mother escaped to Montenegro, where Nađa’s uncle lived. Several months later, they left for Sweden. Nađa finished high school and college there, gained citizenship, and now worked at the Swedish embassy in Belgrade. She’d been here almost a year and a half and loved it—it felt good to return to her childhood culture. And then, a month ago, as she was jogging through Tašmajdan Park, she nearly froze with terror. On a bench, in the area of the park closest to St. Mark’s Church, she had noticed an old man reading a newspaper. He looked familiar. Then she realized: it was the commander of the group that had taken her father.

  When I asked if she was sure, she completely lost it. I said it was hard for me to believe that after twenty-two years she could clearly remember a face she’d only seen once. She looked at me contemptuously and said that in those twenty-two years there wasn’t a single day or night that his face wasn’t the first thing she thought of when she woke up in the morning, and the last thing she thought of before falling asleep.

  I asked her if she knew anything about him—his name or something. She said she only knew that he wasn’t from Rudo but from somewhere in Serbia. Some said he was from Priboj, and some said he was from Raška. They called him Vojvoda, which was an aristocratic title often used for Chetnik leaders. I told her to describe him, and she spoke slowly but without pausing, as if she had repeated these sentences to herself over and over: “He was wearing white sneakers, light-blue jeans, and a black T-shirt. He’s balding a little in front, but barely—you could say he’s got a high forehead. Big brown eyes. A large nose speckled with capillaries, like an alcoholic. Clean-shaven. Above his left eyebrow there’s a deep scar in the shape of a rotated parenthesis. He’s slim, doesn’t have a belly. Medium height. On his right forearm there’s a tattoo of a cross.” Then she fell silent. I asked her if she remembered tattoos and scars from the time she first saw him, when they took her dad. “Of course I remember,” she said. “I remember everything.”

  I looked at this young woman who every day remembered the trauma she’d experienced when she was only nine. They took her father and killed him around the same time I had returned from America. Actually, it was my second return. The first time I went to America was in 1987 when I got a scholarship to improve my English and finish high school there. I returned, served in the army, then enrolled in law school in Sarajevo. I went to America from a normal, healthy country, and in just two years—one of which I spent in America, the other in the army—the country started to fall apart and it seemed like there was no hope for it. In the spring of 1990 I went back to America, and this time I enrolled in a sociology program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Everything there was great, while everything in my homeland was already seriously going to shit.

  And although both my mother and father are Serbs—respectable and wealthy people, the director of a bank and a lawyer—I didn’t feel like a Serb until the beginning of the war. I had a Yugoslav passport, I served in the Yugoslav army, I stood for the Yugoslav anthem, and I felt proud of seeing Yugoslavia’s flag fly when our athletes won medals.

  Then the country started to fall apart and everyone did some fucked-up shit. Serbs made up the country’s majority, so most likely did the most shit, but they were far from being the only ones. In America, however, and especially since the siege of Sarajevo began, a consensus was reached that Serbs were guilty for all of it, at least judging by newspapers and TV reports.

  Nađa’s father was definitely killed by Serbs. I asked her what she wanted from me. She said that she wanted to find and identify Vojvoda so she could send that information to the prosecutor’s office in Sarajevo. Allegedly, there was an investigation that’d been open for a while but they didn’t have enough information to indict anyone. Nađa took out a purple 500-euro bill that the local punks call a Gaddafi because the Libyan dictator supposedly had a weakness for them, and would hand them out to waiters and musicians when he was in a good mood. She asked if that would be enough. I nodded my head and asked if she wanted a receipt. She smiled for the first time since she entered my apartment.

  “No need. You look like a trustworthy guy.” She took out a business card and set it on top of the bill. “Here’s my number and e-mail address. Call me when you find anything out, but don’t mention any details except in person. When you call, I’ll come over.” Then she stood and slowly walked out.

  How did she feel when she thought her father was still alive? I remember I was completely unhinged when the siege of Sarajevo began because I didn’t know what was happening with my parents. But thanks to connections and money, they were able to reach Belgrade by the summer of 1992. It’s not that as Serbs they had any major problems in Sarajevo until then, but there was suspicion and provocation. In any case, they were lucky to have escaped the city in time. Still, a lot of our relatives, like many of my schoolmates, stayed in Sarajevo.

  In the fall of 1992, after two years of being an excellent student, I practically gave up on my schooling in America. I almost never went to lectures. I incessantly watched television and read newspapers, and at school I fought with colleagues who repeated stereotypes about “Balkan savages” without thinking. Ironically, I only confirmed those stereotypes with my aggression.

  I drank a lot, and the American prices for alcoholic beverages took a chunk out of my student budget. In the spring of 1993, I realized there was no way I could pass my exams, nor did I feel particularly motivated to take them. When I called my family in Belgrade, it seemed like they were good: Dad was working again in some bank, though not as a manager, and Mom had succeeded in getting a job in the office of one of Belgrade’s best attorneys. I knew that they’d managed to get most of their savings out of Sar
ajevo. I decided to return to Belgrade—if it’s possible to return to a city you’ve never lived in, only knew from a few short visits, and knew as the capital of your home country, Yugoslavia, which no longer exists.

  And yes, my parents told me that I had fucked up by coming back, but on some level they were also happy. I guess that’s why they gave me the cash for this apartment. They were living in a big apartment in New Belgrade that had enough rooms to make one mine, but they understood that at the age of twenty-five and after three years of living on another continent, I just couldn’t share an apartment with them. They gave me enough pocket money to live off of. Out of love for them, I enrolled in law school in Belgrade, though I had even less motivation to study here than I did in America.

  For the next five or six years, I mostly fucked around. I found a couple of buddies, witty and smart types who, because of the general breakdown of society, had given up on their ambitions, studies, and careers. We’d get together at my apartment, listen to music, drink, and smoke. If I was alone, I would read, watch films, and wander through the city. Near my apartment, on Kosovska Street, there was a movie archive where they showed classic old films two or three times a day. I loved black-and-white crime films with Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum the most, but my absolute favorite was Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï with Alain Delon. I got a big poster of the film, framed and hammered it to a wall in the living room. I often strolled through that strange district of Palilula that leads from the city center toward distant suburbs. My favorite walk was from George Washington to Roosevelt Street. I’d go, say, past the Botanical Garden, then walk down November 29th Street, amble all the way to Pančevo Bridge, turn toward Bogoslovija, then walk down to New Cemetery, cut through Liberators of Belgrade Cemetery, pass through Professorial Colony, through all those beautiful houses where intellectuals and White Russians who escaped the October Revolution lived during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then up through Dalmatinska and back home.