Belgrade Noir

A Different Person by Vladan Matijević

Translated by Sibelan Forrester

King Aleksandar Boulevard

Peppy, I’ve decided to kill someone. I decided in one instant and then didn’t think any more about it.

A river of people was flowing around me, King Aleksandar Boulevard, the bulevar, was breathing deeply. The sun-roasted cars were racing around, beggars asking for money. Street vendors were offering sunglasses, umbrellas, underwear, socks, shoelaces, insoles, cosmetics, children’s toys, medications that hadn’t yet expired, to passersby. They sold their goods from improvised stands made of cardboard boxes and pieces of clothesline.

I was standing, just like every morning, close to the Đeram market and shouting from a wobbly footstool: “Vlast ima kapacitet!” (“The authorities have a tremendous capacity!”)

Hardly anyone looked at me, the rumble was constant, but I didn’t give up. Kombucha was playing Clapton on his guitar, I had to outshout him too.

“The authorities have a tremendous capacity! The authorities have a tremendous capacity!”

I didn’t give up my political protest. People in this city don’t care about anything but politics and the crime report; if you want them to pay attention to you, you have to stay within the framework. The daily newspapers have turned into mouthpieces of the regime, no one reads them, people have more faith in me. And I have faith in the people. I eavesdrop on other people’s conversations.

Yesterday by Lipov Lad kafana a patient fell out of an ambulance and died instantly, last night on Maxim Gorky Street a man bashed a woman’s head with a beer stein…

Every so often in Belgrade a husband kills his spouse. The women have never looked better, every second one could be a runway model, but they get no benefit from their beauty. I say that some devil has entered into people, but no one gives a damn. Inspector Vasović gives me a barely perceptible nod. He goes to the market every morning, but when he’s not in his office he has no interest in what’s happening in the city.

I met an interesting young woman. The way she walked reminded me of Žana, my first love. She was going down the bulevar to the Vuk Monument and suddenly came to a stop in front of me. She addressed me as druže, “comrade.” She was tiny, with red hair and a ring through one nostril. She gave off an air of cleanliness.

“Comrade, will you sign my petition against trashy culture, schund?” she asked. Two pimpled teenaged boys stood behind her.

“Against schund?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I will,” I said, and started to get down from my stool.

She held me by my upper arm with both hands, she was afraid that I might fall and perish before I could fulfill my promise. I’m sure she didn’t think I meant to run away from her, it was obvious that I wasn’t hesitating. Who, Peppy, could miss out on an opportunity to settle accounts with rubbish?

As I took the papers and pen I noticed that there were already many pages filled with signatures. The campaign they had started had accumulated plenty of supporters. In addition to my signature, the girl wanted my personal ID card number. I pulled out my military service booklet, to this very day I have no other documents, and I copied the number from the first page. A photo of our little volunteer, um, paramilitary brigade was sticking out of the booklet, I pulled it out for a moment and looked at it. The girl didn’t like that, she made a face. Perhaps I could kill her went through my head.

The two hunched, pimply kids neither moved nor spoke. I thought they might be mute. I asked the girl what her name was, she said Ira. I decided she had gotten her nickname from the Irish Republican Army, and I liked that. Kombucha had moved on to playing Bob Dylan.

Belgrade, Peppy, has become a monster. Mothers here name their sons after famous criminals, politicians have run out of neglected relatives, so they put their house pets in government positions. Now our leaders moo, baa, bark, and meow at us from their official armchairs.

Anyone who’s dissatisfied with the condition of society can complain, the counter’s open every weekday from ten a.m. to four p.m. However, there’s always a long line, plus the computer has crashed, and you can’t get anything done without the computer. They say they’ve called the IT man, but he won’t show up, he hasn’t been paid for the last time he fixed things.

Thus, no one will be surprised when I carry out a murder. It’s a firm decision, Peppy. But who should I kill? At first glance, it seems easy to choose a victim. In Belgrade, no matter who you look at it seems that you wouldn’t be wrong to kill them. However, that isn’t so. Many of them aren’t worth the time or energy…

Yesterday, the Danube tossed up the lifeless body of an opposition party leader, last night a television magnate overdosed in the Intercontinental Hotel…

A couple of police are walking in my direction: a young woman and a tall, bare-chinned young man. Pairs of handcuffs jingling against their butts, the weight of their pistols pulling down their belts.

“The authorities have a tremendous capacity!” I shout as loudly as possible. They don’t even look at me.

I can’t say anything wrong, the police never pay any attention to me, nobody mistreats me. People are tolerant of me. Both when I was shouting “Let’s clean up Serbia!” and when I stood at the intersection by the Lilly drugstore and directed the traffic, no one did anything to stop me. No one wants to get into an argument with me, Peppy. Probably because I’m crazy.

My health’s pretty good, I can’t complain. Sometimes I mix up the past and the present, but that’s not terrible.

Peppy, nothing’s terrible here, people quickly get used to everything. No one minds that they pour water in the gasoline, that they mix air into the natural gas, that they send your electric power at a low voltage. Babies don’t mind that their milk’s diluted, sick people don’t mind that their injections are diluted, drunks don’t mind that their rakija is diluted. Pedestrians don’t protest that the streets are dug up, that cars are parked on the sidewalks, they jump and fly like the Chinese warriors in the movie House of the Flying Daggers.

I asked Doctor Teodosić to prescribe me a higher dose, what I get isn’t enough for me, but he won’t. He thinks I might be selling my medication. Why would I sell my meds when I don’t even have enough? Doctor Teodosić asks me how it is I haven’t died yet — I ought to, if I’m taking everything he prescribes for me.

“Why would I die, doctor?” I act surprised. “A person quickly gets used to everything here.”

There’s always someone outside his office who’ll make a fuss that I’ve cut in line, but I don’t pay any attention to those losers. Maybe sometime I will, when I have a weapon on me. “The authorities have a tremendous capacity!”

If only Kombucha knew about all the pills I have, he’d shove me off my footstool, snatch my key, and hotfoot it to my apartment. Nothing would stop that guy, whose nickname comes from fermented mushrooms, from robbing me. As it is, whenever he lands on hard times he brings his books and sells them cheap. It’s mostly philosophy, Kierkegaard and crap like that. Sometimes I buy one of his books — to be honest, philosophy relaxes me.

The woman whose husband hit her with a beer stein has passed away. The doctors fought for her life, but the hospital didn’t have enough units of blood on hand.

Peppy, we never have enough of any of the blood types. Every day more people die a violent death here than are born. Death drives an electric lawnmower and clears out the streets of Belgrade, if you aren’t a killer then you’re a victim. Neutrality has lost its foothold, the laws are the same as on the battlefield. Perhaps that’s why I’ve succumbed to the general atmosphere, the euphoria so to speak, and have firmly resolved to kill someone. I probably won’t be punished for the crime, which gives me additional motivation to carry it out.

Peppy, the Belgrade police don’t chase criminals anymore. The detectives and killers sit in kafanas at the same table and eat dinner together, criminals practice shooting at the police gun ranges. If by some miracle a person is arrested, and at the end of a marathon trial is convicted, they don’t go to prison because there’s no room. The prisons are packed: it’s those who don’t pay off their bank loans, who owe for parking tickets, who don’t pay their cable bills, who are serving prison sentences. Farmers who didn’t respond to the order to root out ragweed are serving sentences. There’s no room for long-term prison sentences.

Last night on Vračar a well-known lawyer’s Jeep was blown up; this morning a bank guard was killed in Čukarica…

In Senjak this morning they found the lifeless body of a sixteen-year-old girl, on Zvezdara some teenagers locked a homeless guy in a shaft and left him there to die without food or water…

I can hardly wait to kill someone myself, for the adrenaline to flow through my veins. I’ve been useless for so long, it’s time for me to take my place in society and come back to life a bit. I just have to figure out what criteria the victim must fulfill; I’ve suddenly become conscious that I don’t want to spill just anyone’s blood.

A line of police cars rushes down the bulevar, the sirens wail. They’re simulating a major kidnapping.

“The authorities have a tremendous capacity!” From time to time someone looks at me in an unfriendly way, they probably take my words as a provocation. Then I start shouting with all my strength, and I myself marvel at my throat’s power. “While you were all sleeping, I guarded you!” After I shout that, one turns his head away and picks up his pace — an airplane wouldn’t be able to catch up to him, he’s so fast.

Do you remember, Peppy, how our own fighter planes accidentally bombed us, the volunteers, as soon as we crossed into Croatian territory? It happens, the commander explained to us later. The important thing was that we suffered no casualties, only that fat guy with the crossed bullet belts lost some of his hearing from the explosion. But in any case, he died in the first skirmish after that. What would good hearing do for him in the grave?

I recognized her immediately, even though this time her hair was blond with some multicolored streaks. She still wore a ring in her nostril. She stopped near me and squatted so she could look over Kombucha’s books. Her T-shirt pulled upward and on her back, just above her butt, she had a big tattoo, a five-pointed star with a hammer and sickle in the center.

The pimply teenagers were standing behind Ira, they were her bodyguards. I called them Tom and Jerry, after the cartoon characters. I wondered whether I should consider killing one of them. But I quickly rejected that idea. I didn’t want to separate them, and I considered it too much to kill both of them. It’s not good to overdo things, nor to throw your weight around unnecessarily. One dead person is quite enough, it would satisfy my requirements. Besides that, I sensed that they didn’t fulfill my requisite criteria for a victim.

Kombucha stopped playing his guitar and started chatting with Ira. I felt jealous, as if that tiny girl belonged to me. I could hardly restrain myself from interrupting them and acting ignorant. Ira was delighted when she saw a Kropotkin book and an issue of a literary journal devoted to Bakunin.

“Look, they’ve published his letters.” She showed the journal to Jerry. She bought both the journal and the book.

Kombucha has been a drug addict for a long time and he needs a lot of money to feed his habit, so he visibly livened up after taking the money from her.

I asked her whether she had collected enough signatures against trash culture. The smell of roasted meat came from a nearby fast-food kiosk, and the beggar Drago was drinking rakija from a bottle. She had, she told me, succeeded in collecting a thousand signatures, but she had a problem. She didn’t know who to send the petition to.

“Is there any point giving trash a petition against itself?” she asked me. Clearly this was a rhetorical question. The problem always comes down to that. And I told her so.

Kombucha went back to playing guitar, an older man tossed a few coins into his case.

Last night at the main train station a man without documents was stabbed with knives, today on Knez Miloš Street a transvestite threatened to blow up a whole building…

Not for a single moment did I doubt the correctness of my decision, but I still didn’t know who to kill. A young person or an old one? Woman or man? Someone I know or a stranger? A friend or…

Peppy, I don’t have any enemies. I never did have any. In ’91 and ’92 I fired a gun because that was the current practice. Someone in a high place had declared the Croats my enemies, on the TV they talked day and night about their crimes against the meek Serbs. I killed them cold-bloodedly, although I had nothing against them personally. The commander told us that all the great nations had committed great crimes, that ours can’t always be someone else’s prey either. You believed that and rolled up your sleeves, they called you Peppy the Beast.

But I was different. In my heart, I kept on rooting for Hajduk, the Croatian soccer team from the beautiful city of Split. If I didn’t hate anyone on the battlefield, then clearly I wouldn’t hate anyone here either, in Belgrade. And I know a lot of people. And because I don’t have a bad relationship with anyone it’s hard for me to choose a victim. But I have to take someone’s life, that’s the trend, we can’t live as if the world doesn’t involve us.

Last night someone threw a Molotov cocktail at the house of a turbo-folk music star, two children were seriously burned…

Along with everything else, I haven’t decided how to carry out the murder, either. Tenderly or sadistically? In my apartment, I have a Kalashnikov with seven full clips, a CZ 99 pistol with ten bullets, a bayonet with a long blade, and five hand grenades. The grenades are on my table in a crystal fruit bowl, the other weapons are locked in a wooden trunk. It won’t be easy for me to choose the means either. I know that you, Peppy, would surely use cold steel.

That day the sun beamed hot, I was in a shirt and jacket, all sweaty. A tie was squeezing my neck. I can’t be poorly dressed, what would that look like? I have to be different from the beggar Drago.

Red fireflies played before my eyes. If someone had asked me why I didn’t go home, what I was hoping to find in that crowd, I wouldn’t have known how to answer. But that person wouldn’t be able to tell me what I should do by myself in a basement studio apartment. I think anyone who spent two hours in my apartment would understand why first thing in the morning I take my blue footstool and come to this place, out among the people.

I heard that they’re going to repave the bulevar again. I have the impression, Peppy, that the spaces of beauty and freedom in Belgrade are quickly shrinking.

A man with a beard down to his waist was explaining to his hunchbacked friend that Faulkner was a Serbian writer, that only a Serb could understand The Sound and the Fury. An older woman in a blue blouse offered me a ten-dinar coin. I took the coin, but I didn’t thank the woman. I don’t have time for that, nor for explaining to her that I’m actually doing fine financially. I receive a monthly disability check and it’s enough for me. Whatever I earn unexpectedly I always give to Oliver, the kid who washes the windshields of cars that stop at the traffic light by the Vuk Monument. Washing windshields is the best job this state can offer a person who isn’t a party member. “The authorities have a tremendous capacity!”

Kombucha was running madly out of the market, knocking cabbages off stands, bumping into people who swore at him as he passed. His hands were empty, he had probably tried to steal something and hadn’t succeeded. A farmer was running after him. It would be better for Kombucha to be chased by the Sicilian mafia, I don’t believe that anyone can get away from a Serbian farmer, especially one who has the nerve to sell his produce in Belgrade.

Kombucha was hoping he could reach the bulevar and we would protect him. Everyone here who sells, begs, and picks pockets has some kind of cold steel: a knife, an awl, a hatchet… Even Miljana, the little woman who sells handicrafts, has a chunk of rock at her feet. Only Drago is weaponless, he stinks so badly that surely no one would touch him. I don’t have anything on me either, but I look dangerous.

The two young police officers were patrolling the area. The proprietors spoke to them sweetly. As I had expected, the farmer caught up with Kombucha. He grabbed him by the hair and pulled him backward. Kombucha fell down, the enemy sat on his chest, put his hands around his neck, and started strangling him. At first, Kombucha resisted, then he went limp. The young policeman started walking quickly in their direction, but the policewoman pulled on his sleeve and they went off in the other direction. Afterward, the farmer went back to his stand. Kombucha lay there without moving, and it wasn’t until half an hour later that he painfully got up and staggered toward us. His face had gone dark, unrecognizable, his neck was blue, with broken capillaries.

In Dedinje a terrier bit off a woman’s hand, four elementary schoolchildren beat a math teacher to death with baseball bats…

Did I imagine it, or did someone among the passersby mention Iron Butterfly? I concluded that the American rock band must be coming to Belgrade: lots of older musicians have gotten back together in order to tour here. I got the urge to go to a rock concert after not having gone to one in the past twenty-five years. The authorities have a tremendous capacity! I shouted with all my strength that the authorities had the capacity and snickered, satisfied. I knew what kind of person I should consider as a victim, the circle was narrow. The farmer who throttled Kombucha had helped me. I realized that I didn’t want to kill him, but I’d be glad to bump off Kombucha.

Peppy, I want to feel grief after the murder. That emotion lasts longer than others. This society, along with every individual in it, lacks continuity. Therefore I’m going to kill someone who’s dear to me. The first one I thought of was Ira. Then I thought the best thing would be to kill Oliver. I like him the most. Oliver is nice-looking, lively, and cheerful until a limousine with tinted windows stops next to him in the evening. Then he gets unhappy and reluctantly climbs inside.

Oliver is forced to prostitute himself because he’s supporting his sick mother and two younger sisters. I’ll definitely kill someone I like, someone whose death will make me suffer for a long time. The grief will help keep me from drowning completely. I don’t believe in the torments of conscience, just the way you didn’t believe.

Yesterday at a construction site in St. Sava Street, a supporting wall collapsed and buried three people; last night two men impersonating police officers handcuffed a salesclerk in a grocery store on Kosančićev Venac and emptied his cash register of all the money he’d made that day…

My day was complete — I saw Ira again. Her hair was the same color as last time. I asked her how I could get a ticket for the Iron Butterfly concert. She told me to ask Smiley. “He has everything, and if he doesn’t have something he’ll always find it.”

I told her that I didn’t know who Smiley was.

Ira couldn’t believe it. “Everybody knows Smiley,” she asserted, “he supplies all of Belgrade. This city would fall apart without him.”

I had the impression that she appreciated how I wasn’t like everyone else. I looked at her pleadingly and she promised she would get Smiley involved to find me a ticket for the concert by the group with the beautiful name, which she hadn’t heard of until then. After that, she talked for a long time about that Smiley, with great respect, admiration, and love. I thought he must be her boyfriend. “Smiley is a power,” she declared. “At the 1991 demonstrations against the government in Belgrade he wanted to charge the police cordons, he wanted to topple the Slobodan Milošević regime with his bare hands and stop the war.”

I didn’t respond, she probably wouldn’t understand my sense of humor. You shouldn’t joke with anyone these days, Peppy, every person here is a ticking bomb.

A man in a wheelchair approached me, the one who hands out leaflets all day by the Vuk Monument. His brother pushes him there every morning and leaves him, it’s unbelievable how much they look alike, maybe they’re twins. In the evening, his brother comes for him and takes him home. When he offered me a ticket to the concert, I realized that Ira’s surprise at my not knowing Smiley was well-founded. I’d seen him every day, I was pretty sure he was supplying the addicts of the bulevar with drugs. When he was in withdrawal, Kombucha would be running to him every minute. I just hadn’t known they called him Smiley, nor that he had participated in antiwar demonstrations. Which is really absurd. He had struggled against the war and wound up disabled, while I’d taken part in the war and had all my limbs. But in spite of his handicap, Smiley radiated serenity. I tried to figure out his age, but I couldn’t. He looked youthful, but at the same time, something told me we were about the same age.

“How much do I owe you, sir?” I asked him. Calling him sir didn’t really fit him, but I didn’t want to be too familiar. He laughed and asked for almost nothing, probably the ticket had cost that much at the ticket office. I don’t like it when a service fee is not included in the price, and then I have to think about how much to tip. I consider myself a miser, but this time I was generous. But Smiley returned the extra money, vehemently refusing to take a tip. I hate it when someone won’t let me pay for a service, and then I wind up owing them. I noticed that Kombucha was acting as if he didn’t know the man in the wheelchair.

“What’s your interest in this business?” I asked Smiley.

“It’s important for things to get done,” he answered, and laughed again.

A girl was raped last night in the restroom at the Hotel Bristol, a well-known actress was beaten up in the National Theater…

Oliver holds a half-liter bottle in one hand, a squeegee in the other, a red bucket of water sits on the sidewalk. While the cars are racing by, he fills the bottle to the top. When the light turns red, he comes up to the first car and starts washing the windshield, ignoring the driver’s disapproval. He washes slowly as if he has all the time in the world. Then he goes to the second car and does the same. When the light turns green, he goes back to the first car and takes the money from the driver. People behind the wheel get impatient, the whole line of vehicles sounds their horns. Oliver darts to the second car, the driver has already put out his hand with the cash. Oliver’s face is cheerful and because of this he gets more from the drivers than they were planning to give him. Oliver’s a great whore, he’s ideal for the role of victim. I was sorry I didn’t have a weapon with me, I would have executed him right then. Starting tomorrow I’ll carry a pistol, I’ve decided to be ready at all times.

Last night a bank employee died after a ten-day hunger strike, today a young man died in a fight between fans of the Crvena Zvezda and Partizan soccer teams…

Last night a teenager from Mirijevo slashed her wrists, an old woman from Dorćol drank acetic acid…

Ira once again addressed me as druže, “comrade.” I don’t like that Communist lexicon, but I didn’t object. She asked to see the picture from my military service booklet. She’s a marvelous girl, I wanted to kill her right then. And I could have, I had the pistol tucked into my belt, I only needed to unbutton my jacket and pull it out. I don’t know what stopped me from doing it. I would have grieved for Ira my whole life.

“You’re a war veteran?” she asked me.

“How can we have veterans?” I answered with a question. “We lost the war. We can’t have war veterans.”

“What a crank you are,” Ira said, which surprised me.

I held out the photograph. We all had long hair and beards, we looked like the bandits in Walter Hill’s Long Riders. She said I’d been handsome when I was young. I didn’t want to tell her that I wasn’t in that photograph. I myself don’t know why not, probably I was out on patrol that day. But despite my absence, the photograph is infinitely dear to me. It was taken in front of the cantina that Fat Ceca ran. Surely you remember, Peppy. Ceca had a heavy Mauser hanging at her hip, above the cash register it said, No Credit to Anyone. Nothing there was unclear. All around in the meadow lay soldiers, professionals, and mobilized reserves. They drank beer, wrote letters, cleaned their weapons. Some were removing lice. We were paramilitary volunteers, we didn’t acknowledge anyone’s command. At the same time, cross my heart, no one wanted to command our regiment either. The devil himself would have had a hard time paying our bills, and even harder getting our attention. Ira gave me back the photograph, deep in thought. I allowed her to walk away, I didn’t shoot her.

Some graffiti appeared on the university library building: ONLY WINNERS HAVE VETERANS. WE’RE THE SONS OF DEFEAT.

I didn’t like that at all. I didn’t want to participate, nor to inspire anyone. True, Ira for her part had already read Bakunin, but her literature didn’t rehabilitate me, nor did her defiant character. Clearly, the girl liked me. That was an additional reason for me to kill her. If I didn’t do it in time, she’d stop admiring me, and that would be painful for both of us. I waited impatiently for her to appear.

On Mihajlo Pupin Street a father-in-law shot his pregnant daughter-in-law with his hunting rifle, there was a multicar accident on Gazela Bridge with fatalities and serious injuries…

Before me stood a Gypsy, terrifying in appearance. I was just his height standing on my footstool. “What do you want?” I asked him. He kept silent. Although his skull was close-shaven, he irresistibly resembled Chief Bromden from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Another person suddenly spoke up. I lowered my eyes and in that enormous man’s shadow I saw Smiley. Several frightened kids were standing to one side, I recognized Tom and Jerry among them.

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

Translated by Jamie Clegg

Palilula

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 Sarajevo. 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.

There were, of course, women. I mainly indulged in brief and rather meaningless relationships, mostly with younger female students. At some point my parents realized that I wasn’t studying or doing anything, so they decided to try to discipline me by withholding money. It was sometime in the fall of 1998, a few months before the NATO bombing of Serbia began. I had just started working as a night guard. Some guy had a private pharmacy on March 27th Street near Palilula Market. Drug addicts had broken into the store a few times looking for narcotics and strong painkillers. He needed a guy on duty from midnight until eight in the morning. It was perfect for me: I usually read at night and slept in the morning anyway.

I bought a gun just to be safe, but no one actually tried to break in once they saw the light on and a guy inside. In February of 1999, I met Katarina there. She pounded on the door; she urgently needed Voltaren suppositories. Her son had a fever, and she couldn’t get anything else to work. Even though I wasn’t the pharmacist on duty and it wasn’t in my job description to sell drugs, I gave her a box. Two nights later, she came to thank me. I invited her for a coffee, and so it began.

She was four years older than me, her son was in third grade, she was divorced. We married in November of 2000, right after Slobodan Milošević fell from power and things were returning to normalcy. I was thirty-two and went back to college. It just suddenly made sense. Katarina’s husband had left her with a large apartment on Cvijićeva Street after the divorce. When we got married I moved in with her and rented my ground-floor apartment to students. Katarina was a dentist and earned good money, so she supported us financially while I, through some of my parents’ connections, got a job as a lawyer in one of the few banks that were still state-owned. The pay was good, and the position was mostly protocol. I barely lasted five years there.

Katarina supported my idea to open a kafana. I found a perfect place near the pharmacy I’d worked at as a night guard. I’d sit in the kafana, sipping a White Russian cocktail, imitating the hero of the only film from the nineties that I loved the way I loved old black-and-white films: The Big Lebowski. The kafana did quite well for some time. I enjoyed being the owner, flirting with girls who came in, treating them to drinks and all that, but I tried not to engage in full-on adultery. But then I hired Anđela as a waitress. Anđela was twenty-five and I was forty-five, but the age difference didn’t bother her. And stereotypically — in the middle of a midlife crisis — I was madly in love again, and this infatuation fucked up both my business and my marriage. Less than a year later, the kafana was bankrupt, Katarina had left me, and in the end I left Anđela too.

More than twenty years after I bought the apartment on the ground floor, and fifteen years after I started renting it out to students, I went back there. I didn’t know what I would do with myself. I had some savings because I kept the money various tenants paid me over the years in an account that I mostly hadn’t touched.

It was at that time that Nađa appeared at the door. After she left the apartment I looked at her business card. At the top was Sweden’s coat of arms, below was her name, then farther down, Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden, while her number and e-mail address were at the very bottom. I was considering where to start.

My friend Mirko was a journalist specializing in stories about war and war crimes; I could ask him if he knew who came from Serbia to run riot in Rudo and thereabouts. At one point while owning the kafana, one of my bartenders was from Priboj. His name was Petar. He was too young to remember the war, but Priboj is a small place, and he’d know who to see about a guy by the nickname of Vojvoda.

Mirko didn’t answer the phone, so I called Petar. He still worked as a bartender, but now in some neighborhood near Bogoslovija. His shift had just started and the bar wasn’t crowded, so if I had time, he suggested, it’d be best that I come over right away for a drink.

Like he’d said, the kafana was practically empty. Petar was listening to Leonard Cohen. I sat down at the bar and ordered a whiskey. I started in a roundabout way, saying I’d recently heard from a high school friend now living in Canada that he hangs out with some guy from Priboj supposedly called Vojvodić. Petar frowned and said he’d never heard of any Vojvodić from Priboj. I said maybe I remembered wrong, maybe that’s not his last name, maybe they just call him Vojvoda. Petar burst into laughter: “Hey, now that’s a different thing. There’s a guy in Priboj who everyone calls Vojvoda, but fat chance he ever went to Canada.” I started asking questions, but the answers disappointed me. It turned out he was some village idiot, a slow kind of guy who lived on charity. He was called Vojvoda because before the war, during the rise of nationalism, he used to sing Chetnik songs in the street.

That couldn’t be the guy who had taken Nađa’s father. I lit a cigarette, and as I put the lighter back in my pocket, I felt my phone vibrate. A message from Mirko. He’d been doing an interview outside the city in Novi Sad earlier and hadn’t been able to answer. Now he was on his way to Belgrade and hadn’t been able to grab a beer. Great, I texted back and sent him the address of where I was. As time passed, the kafana slowly filled. Petar had less time to chat, but when I realized he couldn’t help me I wasn’t really up for talking anyway. I waited for Mirko, turning to the door every time I heard someone walk in. They were the typical early evening kafana customers from the edge of the city. Like in one of those Springsteen songs, these were people who’d lost something that was the center of their lives: sometimes a woman, sometimes family, sometimes work, sometimes an apartment — sometimes all of it at once — and they were just looking to get through the day. They bet on soccer, bummed cigarettes, drank the cheapest rakija only to pass the time faster, until it was time to go to sleep, and after hundreds and thousands of these days and nights, it came time to die.

At first glance, Mirko looked like a regular at one of these joints: unshaven, balding, with an eternal cigarette in his hand. Disheveled clothes. He was, however, one of the most reputable journalists in Serbia. He had been a brilliant medical student at the time the war broke out. In the summer of 1992, during the break between his third and fourth years, and after he’d taken all of his exams, he was hired as a fixer for foreign journalists reporting from Bosnia. He never went back to school, or even to his old life. The horrors he witnessed urged him toward a search for truth through writing. He became a journalist, focusing on writing about the war, war crimes, criminal privatization, and transitional theft.

He was very skinny and could drink three, four liters of beer without seeming drunk. It wasn’t clear to me how he could hold that much liquid in his body. He was on his third pint when I asked him about a guy named Vojvoda who ran around Rudo and that area.

“You know what,” he said, “that’s the thing about the war in Bosnia. It was so awful that there were some places where, for no reason whatsoever, thirty or forty people were killed, but your automatic reaction was to say that nothing notable happened there since in neighboring cities hundreds, even thousands, were killed. Same with Rudo: shit happened there, but much less compared to Foča or Višegrad. But I think I remember a few accounts of the guy you’re thinking of. He ran a small unit that mainly targeted prominent rich people who sometimes managed to survive because of their connections with local police and military at the beginning of the war, in small towns where there wasn’t any direct armed conflict. They would pay money for protection, and it would keep them safe for a few months. In addition to Rudo, I think he also showed up in Čajniče and Trebinje, all during the summer of 1992. By early fall he was gone. He was probably a careful guy, stole as much as he could, then went back to Serbia to milk it as long as possible. Yeah, he was definitely from Serbia, somewhere close to the border, like southeastern Bosnia or eastern Herzegovina, but I don’t know how you singled out Priboj and Raška — it could’ve easily been some other place. I think he had one of those generic names like loads of other Serbs — our ‘John Smith,’ if you know what I mean.”

When I asked him if it was possible that Vojvoda was in Belgrade these days, Mirko said of course it was possible; people from all over Serbia were moving to Belgrade en masse.

We parted ways around ten in the evening. I was completely plastered; he looked like he had been drinking tea the whole time. On the way out he said, “You know, if you want to find this guy, the best thing would be to check out Romanija, a hole-in-the-wall near the Pančevo Bridge run by Ranko — they call him ‘Leopard.’ He did five years in prison for crimes around Rogatica. A lot of people who fought in that area hang around there. Someone there’s gotta know him. But be careful, those guys are fucked up. And take money to buy them a few rounds of rakija. That’s the easiest way to loosen them up.”

On the way home, I went to KGB for one more drink. It was a kafana near my apartment named after the Russian secret service, an appropriate symbol of the Serbs’ ambivalent attitude toward everything Russian and Communist. With that thought in mind, I ordered a White Russian. I was resolved to only have one. It wouldn’t bode well for me to be hungover tomorrow.

My life would certainly be different if I’d been rational enough to stop drinking when I should have. And unfortunately, KGB is one of those kafanas that’s open as long as there’s a customer. So I stuck to the bar until four in the morning, drinking at least five cocktails too many.

It took me ten minutes to drag myself home, then I slept for ten hours. I woke up around half past two in the afternoon. A cocktail hangover is fucking rough, but when a man gets enough sleep everything’s better. Anyway, it was unlikely that Romanija would even open before four or five in the evening, and it was highly unlikely that the types I was looking for would come in before nightfall.

I first went to the Stara Hercegovina restaurant to eat some veal soup, pljeskavica with kajmak, and šopska salad. That combination raises the dead. I had to be somewhat fresh: in order to gain the trust of the old drunkards there, I’d have to drink too.

At six thirty p.m. I was at Romanija. The kafana was in semidarkness because only one flickering bulb illuminated it. Inside were five tables, two of which were occupied. At each sat a guy in his sixties. On the tables were checkered tablecloths and ashtrays. I sat down and ordered šljivovica, a plum brandy.

The fat, middle-aged waitress looked grotesque in a miniskirt. As she came toward me with a tray in her hands, one of the guys smacked her ass. She acted like she didn’t even notice. Another guy stared into the darkness through the window. No one here seemed particularly communicative.

After drinking two brandies alone, it turned out my lighter wasn’t working, so I went to beg a light off the guy who had unsuccessfully attempted to sexually harass a pudgy woman. I figured he was giving communication a wild shot. The whole time, the other guy stared off into the dark like a zombie.

This guy handed me his lighter without a word. When I lit the cigarette he motioned for me to join him at his table, again without a word. He waved at the waitress and said: “Give us two rakijas on his tab.” I nodded my head. He asked me why I was in the bar. Said he’d never seen me before.

He had a strong Bosnian accent, which gave me an idea: I told him, “I’m Sarajevan; the war started while I was a student in America, I lived there a long time and recently came back. Some friends from high school told me about a graduation reunion, and I only then learned that my best childhood friend had been killed in the war. His name was Bogdan and he died as a Serbian soldier somewhere around Rudo, so I’m interested in knowing more about his death, since no one in our class is in contact with his family. You know how it is in Sarajevo: before the war we were all together — Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews, you know — and after the war, everything fell apart.” I made up a bunch of lies from a kernel of truth, hoping it wouldn’t sound like complete bullshit.

The guy started giving me shit. “Why didn’t you come back from America to fight with your people?”

My problem with the war was that they were all my people; Nađa was surely more my people than this idiot or Vojvoda, but I had no intention of saying that out loud. I was even okay with him giving me shit — at least then I knew he believed me.

My interlocutor motioned for the waitress to get us two more rakijas, then casually nudged the zombie: “Hey, were any of our guys in Rudo?”

The other guy was silent for a minute, like he didn’t even register the question. Then, without even taking his eyes off the window facing into the dark, he replied: “Stevo was there, with some guy called Vojvoda.”

At first, my guy couldn’t remember who Stevo was. I talked nonsense about how I didn’t know if Bogdan had a tombstone, how we’d like to put together some money to get him a cross — maybe even write up a story since we wanted to publish a booklet about our class for the reunion. After another round of rakija, the guy murmured that I obviously had money for drinks, since stonemasons and printers didn’t work for cheap, so maybe I could jog his memory. I gave him fifty euros, and he immediately remembered that Stevo’s last name was Perić, then asked the waitress for his number. We had another drink.

In the meantime, three other people came into the kafana and sat at an open table. They called the guy from my table to join them. As he stood up he said, “You have what you came for, so you should get out of here. If you call Stevo, tell him Ranko the Leopard gave you the number.”

I was tipsy, but not enough to fall asleep easily, so I returned to KGB. I smiled a little to myself for not realizing that the guy who’d slapped the waitress’s ass owned the joint. Him asking her for Stevo’s number came back to me. It seemed like he was one of those old-fashioned types who didn’t even own a cell phone. I decided to try something crazy. I took out my phone and wrote a message to Stevo: Hey compadre, I’m sitting here with Ranko the Leopard. He gave me your number and says you know Vojvoda. I haven’t seen him for thirty years, and we’ve known each other since we were kids. Give me his contact info if you can.

I didn’t even finish my first White Russian when his reply came: I don’t see him much anymore, but I know his wife owns a flower shop on Ilije Garašanina Street.

My hands started to shake. It was nearby, and not just near me now, but near Tašmajdan Park where Nađa had seen him. I paid for the cocktail and headed for the street. I knew it was too late and there was only a slim chance of the shop being open, but I wanted to see where it was. The street wasn’t too long and not very close to the cemetery, so I doubted there were many other florists.

Sure enough, there it was near the intersection with Takovska Street: a tiny, inconspicuous flower shop with Owned by Đorđe Jovanović written on the glass door. I stood there and laughed aloud. Ah, the patriarchy, I thought. This one wouldn’t allow his wife to formally own the shop if his life depended on it.

Walking slowly to the apartment, I wrote a message to Mirko: Could our “John Smith” be Đorđe Jovanović?

He replied within a few seconds: Fuck if I know. I could swear that was his name, but if you wrote Jovan Đorđević, I’d probably tell you the same thing.

Normally I didn’t make cocktails at home, but I had a bottle of whiskey handy. As I set a glass on the table in front of me, I saw Nađa’s business card. Warmed by alcohol, I texted her: There’s been a little progress in the investigation. See you tomorrow?

She responded in less than five minutes: Are you in Palmotićeva? I’m nearby, and can come right away.

Without even thinking I responded: Come over.

I lit a cigarette and for the first time started thinking about what I really wanted to say to her. I wouldn’t tell her everything, not yet. I’d tell her I had a lead on a guy from Vojvoda’s unit, and explain a bit about how I investigate, tell her a few stories.

The cigarette hadn’t even burned out when I heard knocking on the door. I opened it. She was smiling, had obviously been out, and was a little drunk. She looked younger to me than the last time, in a short skirt and heels with a little too much makeup.

She came in and I offered her a drink. She nodded. I handed her a glass, she took a good long sip, and then she looked at me. “So, did you find him?”

I lit another cigarette. “Not yet, but I’m close.” I told her what I’d been up to, leaving out a few details. I didn’t tell her I already had the number of a guy in Vojvoda’s unit, but that I was going to get it.

When I was done, she dropped her head. I thought she’d fallen asleep, that she was comatose from drinking, but then I noticed her shoulders shaking. She was crying. It wasn’t like I couldn’t really console her from a professional distance. I approached her, kneeled in front of her chair, and took her hand.

“Don’t cry,” I said.

She abruptly stood up, and I stood too. She hugged me and mumbled something I didn’t understand, probably thanking me. I stroked her hair, felt on my cheek that her cheek was wet, and then suddenly, and a little surprisingly, that her lips and tongue were too. We kissed, and I realized that this was why I’d called her.

We stumbled to the door that divided the living room and bedroom, where we fell onto the bed. The rest is history.

When I woke up, it was still early morning, but she was already awake. She acted completely sober, as if she hadn’t drunk anything the night before. She was lying at the end of the bed, flipping through a book. It’s easy being young, I thought to myself. “Want coffee?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said, so I got up to make coffee.

When I came back, she’d already gotten up. She wasn’t fully dressed, just wrapped in the shirt she was wearing the night before.

She took a sip of coffee. “You know, last night I wasn’t myself. My emotions got the best of me. Like everything came full circle. Like my dad rose up from the grave to tell me everything would be okay.”

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

Translated by Ena Selimović

Topčiderska Zvezda

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, to 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 oncology 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.

On that first night, ten men raped Zumreta Alispahić. At first, she resisted. So they hit her with their fists and thrashed her with their belts and kicked her with their boots until she could fight no more. Covered in blood, she lay motionless while the soldiers took turns.

Out of the nine women brought in the first group to the motel, three did not survive the night. The rape and torture, beatings, mutilations, and random killings continued into the days that followed. When they were not being raped, they were treated like slaves. After a while, each one of them was allocated to one of the soldiers who would occasionally reside there in the Korzo Motel. Except Zumreta Alispahić. She was, as they liked to point out, “at everyone’s disposal.”

At this point in the narrative the journalist herself makes an appearance. She also swiftly introduces a third character to the story, a certain Neđo, describing him in a few off-hand strokes as a tough, unwavering soldier assigned as her guide during her first visit to the Korzo Motel. He drove her there from Pale, that depressed little mountain town that became the political and military center for Bosnian Serbs during the war.

The journalist’s fascination with Neđo is evident throughout the text but it doesn’t affect her professional judgment. For instance, she does not fail to notice that he was nowhere near as shocked as she was with what they encountered inside the motel. And she couldn’t but notice a gleam in his eye when he caught sight of a dirty, malnourished girl, with bruises, cuts, and burns all over her body.

The journalist spent a greater part of the day interviewing soldiers. But she was strictly forbidden from speaking to the women.

Neđo, on the other hand, was free to roam around. Later in the day he approached a frightened young girl and gave her a shriveled apple that he dug out from the pocket of his uniform. The journalist remembers watching the girl from the corner of her eye as she “grabbed the withered fruit and started devouring it ravenously, like a starving little animal.”

When Neđo came to pick her up and led her toward the jeep, she was somehow not surprised to find the little emaciated creature by his side. Hobbled by confusion and fear, the girl was helped into the backseat. On the way back to Pale, M.N. tried talking to her over her seat. She asked for her name repeatedly, but the girl kept turning away and hiding her face.

“Her name is Zumreta,” Neđo finally spoke for her.

“Zumreta,” the journalist repeated, as if tasting the word, and then turned again to the little girl. “Really?”

“Yes,” said Neđo. “Zumreta Alispahić.”

The rest of the way, they drove in complete silence through the apocalyptic beauty of Bosnian landscapes razed by the war.

Even though that name — Zumreta Alispahić — stayed with M.N. forever, she confesses that at first she did not think much about the girl’s personal fate. As far as she was concerned, Zumreta Alispahić was saved. Neđo had taken her with him, and that was that. “And so I forgot about her,” she admits. “Simply because I believed she had more luck than the others.”

She supposedly dedicated herself to the more pressing fate of all those women who still remained in the Korzo Motel and claims that she used all the influence she had on a few of the Bosnian Serb authorities in Pale. “And,” she wrote with glowing pride, “things actually started getting better.”

The women presumably began receiving food more regularly. They were allowed to gather in the dining room. They were even provided with basic toiletries. Rapes were thinned out significantly. As was the harassment. And the beatings. Days passed without even one of them being killed. And most importantly, the steady stream of “contingents” or “packages” was completely suspended. Then the resettlement began. They carted them away one by one or in small groups. Although the journalist spent many days at the Korzo Motel, she couldn’t figure out where they were taking them. The soldiers kept quiet, and the women knew nothing. Only much later would it become known that they were distributing some of them to the local fitness center and some to the construction site of an electrical power station. In both locations the individual and group rapes, torture, and killings continued with undiminished intensity. A number of women were also distributed to a former women’s prison. The same one where Zumreta Alispahić would also arrive, although much later.

Several months passed after the journalist had last seen Neđo. But Pale is small and she spent a lot of her days there, so it was truly just a matter of time. When they literally bumped into each other on the street one day, Neđo took the opportunity to invite her over to “his” apartment. She happily agreed and they walked together to a neighborhood at the very edge of town.

Even though it really couldn’t have been that long since she had last seen him, she couldn’t help but notice certain changes in Neđo. That conceited prince with his long limbs and light step, who once seemed to float high above all the horrors of war, had gone through a striking transformation. His head was no longer raised on his slender neck in that aristocratic way, but as if it had grown heavier and had become difficult to hold up, so much so that his beard constantly touched the top of his chest. The expression on his face had become suspicious, maybe even evil, his step significantly heavier, and his posture revealed an unending tension. He was quieter than before, but simultaneously more crude and short. But his eyes, at this point the journalist’s words were nearly rapturous, dear God, those eyes! Intensely green and sad. Like the Neretva River he grew up near.

Together they went to a one-bedroom apartment on the last floor of a standard three-story building. She was very surprised when Neđo pointedly rang the bell and when, a moment later, a girl opened the door. It took her a second or two to realize who she was. It was Zumreta Alispahić, of course, but more properly nourished and changed so much from that first encounter that M.N. could barely recognize her. Her eyes gleamed and her cheeks charmingly blushed whenever Neđo addressed her. She fulfilled every order at once and without any comment. She was his faithful, obedient slave. That was obvious from the beginning. The journalist, who had recently read a lengthy essay on Stockholm syndrome, had it all quickly figured out. Or at least I thought that I had it all figured out, she wrote.

As the evening wore on, Neđo, who tossed back brandy like there was no tomorrow, grew increasingly drunk. He babbled about anything and everything, but the journalist could barely concentrate on his words. Instead, she observed how his behavior toward Zumreta was gradually changing. It was, she wrote, increasingly less commanding and increasingly more intimate. At one point, slapping his knees with his open palm, he called her over to sit on his lap.

(Zumreta obeyed that command, like all the others.)

With affection, in which there was at once something of the father and something of the lover, Neđo enlaced his rough soldier’s hands around her thin waist. He kissed her forehead, eyes, and lips, stroked her hair and cheeks.

(Zumreta, so small and slender, bent supplely into his large body.)

Only then did everything become clear, the journalist wrote. She felt dazed as she watched the two lovers, the victim and the perpetrator, exchanging hugs and kisses. Maybe Stockholm syndrome works in both directions under certain circumstances? But then disgust overwhelmed her and all she wanted to do was leave.

“Don’t worry, I’ll help you,” she whispered to Zumreta in the kitchen as they waited for the coffee to boil.

In the living room, Neđo, already dead-drunk, was singing a sorrowful sevdalinka off key.

Zumreta smiled in response. She reminded M.N. of a stuffed bird. “Why?” she asked.

Zato što će te ubiti, budalo, thought M.N. “I’ll save you!” she rasped.

“No one needs to save me from anything. Or save anyone, for that matter,” Zumreta calmly replied. “Neđo loves me,” she added, arranging the džezva, cups, sugar cubes, and Turkish delight onto a tray. And then she turned and looked straight into M.N.’s eyes. “I’m carrying his child.”

“I’ll save you,” the journalist repeated, though this time less forcefully.

The next day M.N. fled, helter-skelter, from Bosnia and Herzegovina. She felt sick, was out of breath, and thought she was going to have a heart attack and die. But her breathing became much easier, she admits, as soon as she crossed the border into Serbia.

Although she never again returned to the war-ravaged Bosnia, she continued to produce, almost mechanically, article after article on the heroic fight of the persecuted and suffering Serbs against the invasive hordes of Muslim militia.

And then the war was over. And then the years went by. Maybe she was once somewhat scared of possible consequences, but this changed over time. She grew more relaxed and understood that no punishment awaited her around the corner. But she was riddled with a guilt that kept growing stronger. She would often remember the emptiness in the eyes, the blush on the cheeks, and the broad, happy smile of Zumreta Alispahić. Whenever she dreamed of her, and she dreamed of her often, she inevitably woke up in sweat and tears.

She would discover the rest of the short and unhappy fate of Zumreta Alispahić years later, however, from the court testimonies of the Case of the Women at the Korzo Motel. But sparse evidence collected at the court hearing was not enough for her. She acquired permission to interview the two survivors and thus gathered additional data. Here is what she was able to add to the story.

According to M.N., Neđo brought Zumreta, already far along in her pregnancy, to the women’s prison in the early spring of 1993. She was placed in a cell with six other prisoners. She spent her days mostly sitting in the corner and looking out into emptiness. She didn’t eat. She spoke little. The other women didn’t believe she would, in the state she was in, be able to survive the pregnancy. But she did. She gave birth prematurely on the concrete floor of the cell. She screamed to the heavens and back. Her distraught fellow prisoners strove to help her and they called for help but no one showed up. She bled profusely. They stopped the bleeding with the clothes they had. She gave birth to the most beautiful girl they had ever seen. They all cried together in a big group hug. Zumreta smiled wearily. Two guards entered the cell the following day. They snatched the little sleeping child without a word and took it away. Later they came for Zumreta as well. They took her away too.

“And that’s that,” both witnesses said.

Indeed, that’s that, the journalist echoed, adding: Zumreta Alispahić was only thirteen years old when she died.

Zoe and I read “Cries from the Korzo Motel” a million times. Until we knew almost every word by heart. It didn’t take us long, on the basis of various hints M.N. had deftly scattered throughout the text, to figure out the identity of that mysterious “Neđo.” It was a stroke of pure genius on Zoe’s part that brought us to him after she whittled down a long list of suspects to the one and only name: Nenad Pavlović, alias Baboon. He was a well-known member of mainstream society, a successful businessman, a subject of numerous tabloid articles, and a regular guest on various talk shows airing on popular TV stations. We googled him immediately, clicked on the images tab, picked one of many photos, enlarged it, and stared deep into his eyes.

For a few seconds, the world stood still. And then Zoe closed our laptop. We didn’t need any further proof.

Her father had looked back at us from the screen with Zoe’s eyes. Identically green, with a hazel lining.

And that’s that, as M.N. would say.

As for me, I’ve already said it, and I’ll repeat it a hundred times: life with Zoe is not all sunshine and rainbows. Nobody knows this better than I do.

Sometimes Zoe’ll sob in her sleep for nights on end. Or for days she’ll break things in a rage that simply refuses to pass. Occasionally she’ll turn against herself. Scar after scar on her body, mirroring the ones in her heart.

Zoe can also be unbearably harsh and sarcastic toward me. Sometimes I know she can’t help it. The pain Zoe carries in her heart, which has intensified through the course of her entire life, has finally neared the very limits of endurance. It is the kind of pain that nothing but pure exorcism can eliminate.

We had to do something about it as soon as possible.

“Stop here,” Zoe speaks quietly through gritted teeth from the passenger seat. “Here,” she says, “stop here.”

Although she’s a full twenty years younger than I am, it’s crystal clear who’s got the last word in our relationship.

So, I hit the brakes and pull up to the curb. I click on the hazard lights. I switch off the engine. I pull up the handbrake. Who am I, anyway, to object to Zoe’s wishes and commands?

For some time we just sit in the dark and listen to the drumming from the trunk.

Zoe then removes a big hammer from the glove compartment. She squeezes it in one hand, placing the palm of the other over its black top.

I simultaneously pull out a large kitchen knife from underneath my seat. The sharp blade flashes in the darkness.

These are the weapons we chose together as a way to bring everything to an end. Quickly but brutally. Just as, we figured, it should be. For vengeance, of course, is best served cold. But on the other hand, it would be stupid for it not to hurt.

Zoe finally turns to me. “We goin’?” she asks. Only then does she, for the first time, actually look at me. From the side, with a questioning, observant glint in her eye.

“Yeah,” I respond. And I laugh out loud, involuntarily.

Zoe laughs after me. It’s always, I admit, nice to hear her laugh.

“Okay,” she nods. “Then let’s go.”

We open our doors and step outside.