Belgrade Noir

Neon Blues by Dejan Stojiljković

Translated by Rachael Daum

The Manjež

I leaned over the terrace railing and puked into the hanging flowerpot. I wiped my mouth with my tie, called the waiter and ordered another double vinjak, Serbia’s national treasure, created as the Communist version of cognac for the working class.

“Disgusting!” the woman at the next table spat at me. I turned to her with a polite nod and showed her that she could suck it.

My double vinjak arrived as my phone rang.

“Mr. Malavrazić?” came a hoarse voice. Hoarse from age, the bottle, or maybe throat cancer, I couldn’t be sure.

“That’s me,” I said, sipping my drink.

“Could you spare a few minutes to discuss a case?”

“Depends on how much time you’re asking for…” Now my voice was hoarse. Vinjak, of course.

“I know you’re busy, but you have to be interested in this.”

“I don’t have to do anything, sir.”

“Ma’am.”

“Ma’am?”

“Ljudmila Hajji Pešić.” Ah. Her husband’s family had completed their hajj, the Orthodox pilgrimage to the grave of Christ in Jerusalem.

“Your services were recommended to me.”

“By whom?”

“Your grandfather.”

“My grandfather?”

“You’re the grandson of Arsenije Malavrazić, correct?”

“I am.”

“Well…”

“Ma’am, my grandfather has been dead a long time. It would be difficult for you to get a recommendation from him. Unless you’re St. Pete’s secretary?”

“It’d be easiest if I explained everything in person.”

“All right.”

“The Manjež. Tonight at nine.”

The line went dead and a mysterious rhythm pulsed from my phone’s earpiece. Every beep was another question I asked myself: Who is this woman? How does she know my grandfather? And how could a long-dead fart recommend… me?

My head hurt from the mystery. I ordered another double vinjak.

I went to the Gusan for lunch. It was a good watering hole run by my friend Ernest. It was in the same area where a small, wild village had been founded long ago, where scum like me used to live.

That’s where I found Uncle Ljuba, a native of the southern Serbian town Niš, who was solidly in his fifties.

“Malavrazić, I’ve had it up to here with you,” he grumbled as he rolled his tobacco. “Didn’t we agree that you’d finish that job for me?”

“What job?”

“The one you didn’t finish.”

“Didn’t we say Wednesday?”

“Today is Wednesday.”

We munched on ćevapi with cheese. The best in Belgrade. We washed them down with a few beers. I made sure not to overdo it since it wouldn’t look good to be too drunk in front of a potential client. Just enough to warm me up.

Then a guy walked in and stomped up to our table. He had a big head covered in bad tattoos.

I looked at him, trying to remember where I knew him from. I thought I knew him from somewhere, but it goes like that sometimes — he could have been a taxi driver, a friend from my time in the army, someone I owed money…

“Did you touch my wife’s ass?” he asked.

“Sure I did,” I said. “What do you want? For me to do it again?”

The offended spouse came in. She didn’t do anything for me. Black hair, middle-aged, small tits, and her ass was… well. I wouldn’t have been able to miss it.

“Yes, that’s him, that’s the maniac!” she cried. “Fuck you!”

“Look at you,” I said. “I wouldn’t fuck you for a barrel of vinjak.”

He grabbed me by the throat. “I’ll fuck you up!”

I lifted my coat and showed him the weapon tucked into my belt. Without hesitation, he and his wife headed straight for the door.

“Still got jealous husbands on your tail?” Ljuba asked, like he actually cared.

“That one wasn’t jealous, just stupid.”

“Jealous, stupid… it’s all the same. It was one of those guys who got you thrown off the police force.”

“Ah, happy memories… Hey, Jelena!” I called to the waitress. “Get me and Ljuba another beer.”

That’s right. They threw me off the police force.

Not because I’d been an alcoholic, not because I’d been irresponsible or disrespectful… Not even because I’d spoken out about the old government, or that I’d called the old head of police a horse’s ass. No, they booted me because I’d fucked the deputy mayor’s wife.

I’d have real problems if I’d banged the actual mayor’s wife. But the deputy mayor? Can you imagine what a loser he was if I’d screwed his wife?

My old lady was no help. “If you’re…” she said. “I knew that your dick would fuck you over for good. Even when we were married you couldn’t keep it in your pants. I can only imagine how it is now that you’re fucking divorced.”

“Come on, don’t be like that…”

“Oh, now that you’ve smartened up so much? Been to your dad’s recently? What’s he doing?”

“The fuck do you care?”

That’s usually how our conversations ended.

Well, what more was there to say? My ex-wife was a minister of culture, and I was an inspector without a job. In Serbia. In transitioning Belgrade. Basically, a bum. A loser. Or just another asshole drunk on the nonstop hunt for cash.

I paid my bill and headed to the Manjež.

In the kafana the waiters eyed me suspiciously. As though I’d come to inspect their heating or steal their silverware. I politely asked for Hajji Pešić, and a waiter pointed me to a table in the corner.

A woman getting up there in years was seated, a proper lady, with her hair done like Jackie Kennedy, a five-hundred-euro manicure, and jewelry that could buy a building in the fanciest part of town. Beside her was another woman, an old lady in a wheelchair.

I cautiously made my way up to them and opened my mouth to introduce myself, but Hajji Pešić just tapped ash from her long cigarette into the ashtray and said, “Sit, Malavrazić.”

I planted my ass on the chair across from her.

“Drink?” she asked.

“Sure.”

As my double vinjak arrived, she decided to introduce the old woman: “This is my mother, Jefimija Dugalić.”

“A pleasure, madam,” I said.

She smiled cynically at that. Mean old hag.

“You look like him,” said Hajji Pešić.

“Like who?”

“Your grandfather.”

“You knew him?”

“No. But my mother did.”

The old lady nodded.

“That’s… nice.” I didn’t know what else to say.

Hajji Pešić pushed a folder across the table to me. It was old, battered, and on the front was written, Police Administration Belgrade.

I opened it. In it were some papers and black-and-white photographs of a handsome man in a three-piece suit, with a mustache like Clark Gable’s. Taken a long time ago, before World War I. There was an obituary between the papers with the name Aćim Dugalić. The name didn’t ring a bell.

“That’s my grandfather,” said Hajji Pešić, as though reading my thoughts. “My mother’s father.”

“Uh-huh…” I shook my head, not understanding.

“He died — well, actually, he was killed — almost a hundred years ago.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

The old lady nodded her head.

I closed the folder, sipped some vinjak. I still had no idea what was going on.

“You have the autopsy report there too,” Hajji Pešić explained, waving away smoke. “The report from the head inspector who led the case…”

“Who cares about these reports after a hundred years?”

“I do, and so does my mother. The killer was never found.”

“And you’d like me to find him?”

“If you can…”

“Maybe I could, if you could get me a time machine.”

The old lady laughed.

“You can help us without that.”

“Me? But why me?”

“Did you see the name of the inspector who led the investigation?”

I opened the folder again, glanced down at the piece of yellowed paper. At the bottom was clearly written: Arsenije Malavrazić. My grandfather.

“So…?” said Hajji Pešić.

I looked at the old lady. Hey eyes shined with anticipation mixed with boundless sadness. I was suddenly reminded of the schnauzer that had died on me last year. Ah, what a dog…

“We’ll pay you, of course. How much?”

“Fifty euros a day, plus expenses.”

“Expenses meaning vinjak, cigarettes, and taxis, I suppose?”

“Tools of the trade.”

She opened her expensive bag and handed me an envelope. Inside was more than was needed, but I didn’t protest.

“Get yourself a new shirt,” she said, and stood.

She pushed her mother to the door with the waiter’s help. The old lady waved as they moved her down the ramp at the doors.

I ordered another vinjak and looked through the folder again. Aćim Dugalić in black-and-white photographs, smiling and long dead, the report from my grandfather that I’d study in detail later, the obit that didn’t say much except that he’d died young, not even twenty-five years old…

Then I looked at the autopsy report. Poor Aćim had had a spectacular death: he had been beheaded. At the bottom was written the name of the doctor who had examined the body: Dr. Edward Ryan, an American.

My old man had been a cop, working in the criminal justice department with the Belgrade police. When he retired, he turned to one thing exclusively: making rakija. But strangely, he never drank it. He left that to me. I knew why: when you grow up watching your own dad destroyed by drink, you get to thinking that you’ll never have a drop of the stuff yourself.

I found my father in the backyard, in front of the still. The house he rented was a few streets down from the Gusan.

My grandfather had also been an inspector. His mentor had been Tasa Milenković, the first school-trained Serbian policeman. He worked before and after the war in the Glavnjača.

It had been a happy spot. The Glavnjača was the nickname for the administrative building of the Belgrade police, but it was also the infamous prison where criminals and political prisoners were housed. Between the first and second world wars, it had been packed with Communists in particular. The police, like today, had been corrupt and in the pockets of criminals and politicians, so they served mainly as the cudgel of state authority and a good litmus test to show what condition the country was in. In the Glavnjača people were interrogated, tortured, and then killed. My grandfather himself had taken part in an incident where two inmates had barricaded themselves in a room with ammunition. They’d tried to negotiate with the city governor. Instead of negotiations, they got shot.

My old man kept away from all that and made an impressive career as an inspector in the criminal justice department. He nabbed scum and felons off the streets, rapists and killers, once he even caught a college professor who had raped a student. The guy got himself out thanks to his political buddies with a lot of pull. The girl withdrew her statement, and he walked out a free man. But he didn’t know how we Malavrazićes are. My old man waited a few months and then got in touch with two crooks from the block who owed him a favor. They almost put our respected professor in a wheelchair. He wasn’t raping anyone else after that. My old man called it “crime prevention,” which was, obviously, more important than the risk of a suspension.

“Come to see if I’m still aboveground?” he asked as a greeting.

“Don’t be like that…”

“Hand me the hydrometer.”

While he tested the strength of the rakija, not looking at me, he asked a question: “What did Hajji Pešić want?”

“Is the waiter from the Manjež snitching on me?”

“No. The maître d’. I got his son out of jail ten, no, fifteen years ago. He drank a little too much and stole a car and wrecked it.”

“Nice to see your old connections still paying off. How do you know Hajji Pešić?”

“She came to me as well. A few times. She offered money…”

“You refused, of course.”

“Of course. How could I not?”

“But why?”

He stood, threw two logs into the fire under the still, wiped his hands on his blue work pants, and peered intensely at me. “Because it’s better if no one finds out the truth.”

“Why do you get to decide that?”

He smiled ironically. He went into the house, and I sipped some almost-done rakija. It had a mild sharpness and a strong aroma of grapes. My old man was a master.

He came back out when I was already on my third glass.

“Don’t overdo it. It’s got methyl in it. It’s not fermented.”

“I noticed,” I said unsteadily, draining the glass.

He handed me a dusty, used notebook.

“What’s this?”

“Your grandfather’s journal.”

“Journal? I didn’t know this even existed.”

“Now you do. Now you can find out about your… hmm… employer. Why she’s hired you. Was the grape good at least?”

“The grape? Excellent.”

I took the notebook feeling some sort of sacred respect. And some tingling glee. Maybe I wasn’t a total loser after all. Something told me that I’d solve this case that even my grandfather hadn’t been able to.

Serbs and Americans had once been friends.

Then came the nineties.

I remember that sometime at the beginning of ’93 I saved a boy from a hanging whose only crime was that he’d worn a shirt with John Wayne on it, and so had insulted the pride and patriotic feelings of a few fans. I also remember that they’d had a good go at him before my colleague and I intervened. The legendary Duke on his chest had taken on blue and red hues, as though some hack artist had wanted to overlay his old black-and-white films.

And it had happened overnight. That hatred. Just like everything else in Serbia.

We grew up on John Houston, Frank Capra, and Don Siegel movies. All the girls were hot for Clint Eastwood. When you said “gentleman” you thought Gregory Peck. We all wanted to be Gary Cooper in High Noon. We wore Levi’s. Drank Coca-Cola and Pepsi. Listened to Michael Jackson and Madonna. Yul Brynner played the part of a partisan in Battle of Neretva, the most expensive film made in the former Yugoslavia. Robert De Niro sat on the steps of the Sava Center while he watched flicks at the Belgrade Film Festival, FEST, the largest showcase of films on the Communist side of Europe during the Cold War. They say that before the festival he’d gotten lost in southern Serbia and was taken in by some nice folks in the village of Čokot, a stone’s throw from Niš.

And then came the nineties. And everything changed.

Hate is the feeling most easy to manipulate. And there was a lot of hate in those years. It spilled out over the edges of our television screens, barked at us from our radios, leaked out like the black oil from The X-Files in freshly printed newspapers. It waited for us in places we least expected it. To beat and break us, like those who beat up the boy whose life my colleague and I may have saved.

Hate came from the other side too. The Americans gifted us a parcel of bombs in 1999.

But that didn’t make Dr. Ryan any less significant, any less heroic.

I read my grandfather’s description of him in his journal:

The headless body. Aćim Dugalić.

My grandfather wrote that the deceased had been in a special company responsible for creating diversions. It wasn’t clear who was in charge. But one name did stand out.

Apis.

Dragutin Dimitrijević Apis, the leader of a secret society called the Black Hand — and also the conspirators who, in May 1903, killed King Aleksandar Obrenović and Queen Draga, and put King Petar from the rivaling Karađorđević dynasty on the throne. At the time he was something of a kingpin of all the Serbian secret services. A dangerous man.

My grandfather went on in his journal:

So there we were. Major Nemanja Lukić. A suspect. Possibly a killer.

“What do you know about him?” I asked my father as he stoked the fire beneath the still.

“Arsenije never proved that Lukić killed Dugalić.”

“That’s not what I asked. Do you have any paperwork on him? Photographs? A dossier?”

“Lukić had been a doctor too. He trained in London. Since he spoke good English, our folks gave him to Ryan to help him out and assist in operations. Lukić had been a member of the Black Hand as well.” He stood, broke a piece of dry wood, and tossed it aside, looking at me anxiously. “Grandpa left the case unsolved on purpose, which you probably know…?”

“Yeah, I know. I just don’t get why.”

“Why? Because some secrets need to stay secret.”

“Is that some kind of Black Hand motto?”

“No, son… Just, Grandpa figured it wasn’t worth the trouble.”

“He figured?”

“I suppose so. Murder during wartime? When so many people were already dying, who was counting one more body? But fuck it… Grandpa was a stubborn guy. Like you.”

“Good to hear it’s genetic.”

“So’s alcoholism. Just saying.”

“Ah, what are you gonna do.”

“I’ll tell you something that isn’t in the journal.”

“I’m listening.”

“One night, about a year before he died, he got drunk — you know how he got. He told me that in 1915, he got a visit from Lukić. Right in the Glavnjača. He’d never come so close to shitting his pants in his whole life.”

I got to thinking, and my old man went back to stoking the fire under the still as though nothing had happened.

I didn’t know a lot about my grandfather. Just what my father had told me and what I remembered through a haze. I was only nine when he died. But there was one thing I was sure of when it came to Arsenije Malavrezić: he didn’t scare easy.

“If you really want to dig through it,” my father piped up again, “there are some documents in the clinic archives.”

The guy had to be nuts.

After all, how with-it could someone be who’d decided to spend their whole life surrounded by books and document registers that no one cared about?

The archivist in the clinic center, a tubby, middle-aged guy, collected vinyl fucking records. For half an hour he blathered on at me about how he didn’t have enough room at home, so he’d brought some of his collection to the archives. He just droned on and on about it. But I had to put up with this idiot, at least until I got what the archive had on Lukić and Ryan. Then I’d tell him where he could stick his vinyl.

He pulled out a file and handed it to me. I started leafing through the documents.

“He’s an interesting guy,” said the archivist. “Dr. Lukić.”

There were photos in the file too. Mostly from the war. Soldiers, officers, nurses, prisoners of war, the sick and wounded… everything to do with misery. War really is hell. That’s why we keep doing it — we’re a hellish people.

There was a photo of Dr. Ryan as well. He’d been the real deal. Dressed in his uniform, a face that radiated certainty, a close-cropped soldier’s haircut, and large, piercing eyes.

“And what’s this?” I asked, pointing to a photo of Serbian and British officers standing around a big cannon.

“British war mission. Members of the Royal Navy. They organized a blockade of the Danube and defended Belgrade in 1915 from the Austro-Hungarian flotilla that was bombing the city day and night. Admiral Ernest Troubridge was in command. That’s this guy here. And next to him is his second-in-command, Lieutenant Charles Lester Kerr. This one right here.”

The archivist wasn’t as useless as he’d appeared at first glance. He seemed to know his way around a few things besides vinyl records.

“But who’s this next to Kerr and Troubridge? This guy in the Serbian uniform?” I asked when my eye fell on a handsome, tall officer with a neatly trimmed beard and, strangely, for the time, long hair tied back in a ponytail.

“That’s Major Nemanja Lukić, a Black Hand. One of Apis’s close associates. Real fucked-up guy.”

I stared at the face in disbelief, feeling a mixture of surprise and horror.

So, that was him. Aćim Dugalić’s killer. Apis’s friend. Real fucked-up guy.

“He was killed on the Danube quay when Major Dragutin Gavrilović led the famous attack telling the soldiers that their regiment was to be sacrificed for the defense of Belgrade, and that they didn’t need to worry about their lives anymore, because they were about to end… Though there’s some data about him that appears later, in World War II.”

“Like what? After he was dead?”

“Ah, fuck it. Maybe there was an administrative error. Or maybe he’d just been injured and not killed?”

I picked up a photo to take a closer look. It was of Lukić again, in a more relaxed setting. He was sitting in the garden of a kafana with company; there was a sign that read, Gostionica Atina, the Athens Inn. On the back was written, Niš. June 1944.

“See anything interesting there?” asked the archivist.

“Oh, very much, my friend… Look — he hasn’t aged a day.”

My tubby friend put on his glasses and studied the photograph. “Maybe it isn’t him,” he said. “Maybe it’s his son.”

“Is there anything about him having kids?”

“From what I know… no.”

“Then it’s got to be him.”

“But that’s… not possible.”

I paced the streets of gloomy Belgrade. As I walked three ambulances passed me. Their sirens were lost in the distance, dissolving into the cacophony of voices and sounds. The city was weeping and singing at the same time. The jackasses from city hall had already put up the Christmas lights even though it was only the start of November. Belgrade sparkled and trembled with unnatural colors, and there was that neon blues that appeared every fall. My hometown reminded me of an aging musician who pours out the rest of his talent into the bucket or the bottle.

The same as me. Except for what I’d been up to today.

I felt a huge emptiness in my chest. I was sorry for the old lady who I’d have to tell the truth about her father to. A new lie on a heap of old ones wouldn’t be worth anything to her, or to me.

I stopped to light a cigarette. That was when someone whacked me in the head. I stumbled and got another whack. I fell face-first onto the sidewalk. Someone grabbed me from behind like a rabid dog.

“What’s up, fucker?”

I raised my head, and saw the same chickenshit from the Gusan, the one with the big-assed wife, standing over me with a baseball bat in hand. The taxi driver, passerby, friend from the army… ah, fuck it. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t figure it out. The lights on the street gleamed faintly off his bald head. He’d jumped me good. He even knew where to do it. There wasn’t a living soul around us. Just me and the moron with the rubber brain and the baseball bat.

“Now I’m gonna fuck you up so hard you’ll remember me your whole life,” he hissed.

“Can I smoke my cigarette first?” I asked.

“Sure, you can smoke, man…”

He turned, then stopped, staring off somewhere behind me.

From the darkness, fate emerged, a man in a long black coat who I only managed to see the back of.

He approached and grabbed the baseball bat my attacker was holding. It snapped like a dry branch.

The moron stared at the man, his mouth hanging open. He looked as if all the blood had rushed out of his head.

“All right,” said the stranger. “March!”

The bald guy tossed aside what remained of the baseball bat and strategically withdrew without saying another word.

The stranger stopped, took out a silver case, and lit a cigarette. He looked into the darkness, waving away the smoke. Then he turned. I stared into the face I’d seen in the century-old photographs. My heart skipped several beats.

Nemanja Lukić just smiled and said, “Good evening, Mr. Malavrazić. I hear you’ve been looking for me?”

We sat in the Zlatna Moruna.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if Lukić had told me that he’d been there a hundred years before, with the Black Hands, planning the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that kicked off World War I. Not much would surprise me about this man. He was unusually animated, in great shape, his movements somehow fluid like a cat’s, his eyes piercing like a vulture’s. But his hands… well, maybe I’d overdone it the past few nights with the drinks, but they reminded me, strangely, of claws.

He ordered each of us a cognac. I didn’t care much for that shit, but who’s nuts enough to argue with a guy who could crush a baseball bat in his bare hand?

He smoked a cigarette, remaining silent.

“How did… How did you find out about me?” I asked cautiously.

“The maître d’ at the Manjež.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“You went to Jefimija?”

“I did.”

“What are you going to tell her?”

“The truth.”

“And what’s the truth, Mr. Malavrazić?”

“Well… that her father was killed on Apis’s orders.”

“That isn’t true. Apis didn’t order anything.”

“So you didn’t kill him?”

“No.”

“So… he just showed up, headless, on the banks of the Sava?”

Lukić sipped a little cognac. He looked thoughtfully out the window for a second, then said, “A friend of mine, a British lieutenant named Charles Kerr, came one night with an order for us to create a distraction. He intended to sink an Austro-Hungarian ship. He was looking for volunteers… Seven reported.”

“Including Dugalić?”

“Yes, including him. It was a very risky operation. We had to sail in the pitch black so the Germans wouldn’t spot us. We managed to plant the explosives. Charlie was very adept at that, a true pyromaniac. And then…”

“What?”

“A steel wire that had bound two trucks snapped, and one solder was literally sliced in half…”

“And it beheaded Dugalić?”

“That’s right. We never found the poor guy. But Dugalić’s headless body washed up the next day on the shores of the Sava. Some locals found him. Took him to the hospital. To Ryan.”

“So that means we can name the Austro-Hungarian king Franz Josef as the killer?”

“You could also claim that it was an accident. Dr. Ryan did so after we told him what had happened.”

So, that was the truth. The whole truth, intact, told from the mouth of a man who gave me the creeps. I could imagine how my grandfather reacted when this guy visited him in the Glavnjača and told him to keep quiet.

I sat in a salon in the old lady’s home. The walls were decorated with antique wallpaper and a mass of framed photographs, watercolors, and oils on canvas. On the eastern wall was a painting of St. Nikola, and under it an officer’s saber. I guessed that it had belonged to Aćim Dugalić.

Ms. Jefimija Dugalić sat across from me. Her fragile hands, covered in liver spots, rested on a prewar edition of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness sitting in her lap. I had learned from her daughter, who was standing in front of the window like a guard dog, that she hadn’t wanted to change her name when she’d married because she was the only offspring of the father she had loved so dearly.

She held a rosary in her hand. Her daughter, an absolute witch — I was sure of that now — stood beside her and glared at me. She stubbed out a cigarette in the massive crystal ashtray that sat on the table in front of me.

“Is this the truth, Mr. Malavrazić?” Jefimija asked me when I finished speaking.

“It is, madam.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am, madam. Your father was not a traitor.” I felt a lump in my throat. I sipped some water. Then added, “Your father was a hero.”

Jefimija sighed, sipped a little rakija from her glass, a sort of toast to the soul of her unlucky father, and looked at me with eyes that had the same clarity as in the photos behind her, when she had been young and beautiful.

“My father was a good man. An honorable soldier. He served his homeland in three wars…” She lowered her head. “My father… my dear dad…”

She got up from her wheelchair with a lot of effort, and managed to stand. She gestured for me to come over to her. She leaned on me, indicating that she wanted me to walk her over to the wall with the St. Nikola painting.

Once there, she struck a match and lit a candle. She stroked the officer’s saber that had belonged to her father, hero and martyr. A tear rolled down her face. She wiped it away with a shaking hand and said, “Now I can die.”

I stood in front of a fresh mound in the Topčider Cemetery. Her name was written on the cross: Jefimija Dugalić. They told me she’d died in her sleep. She just fell asleep… and went.

Her daughter Ljudmila Hajji Pešić offered me payment, a thousand euros. I refused.

I didn’t have the strength to go to the funeral, but here I was, ten days later, paying my respects to a wonderful, unlucky woman.

Nemanja Lukić offered me a cigarette. I took it, and he lit it with his antique Austrian soldier’s lighter. I was freezing from the cold and the wind. He looked as though he felt none of it, his long hair just waving in the wind. His face expressionless, a little pale. The same as in the photographs from 1915.

“Death is… relative. Believe me, I know that better than anyone,” he said.

He crossed himself and lit a candle.

He laid a hand on my shoulder. His hand still reminded me of a claw — the claw of a vampire.

The Case of Clerk Hinko, a Noose, and Luminal by Miljenko Jergović

Translated by McKenna Marko

Maršala Birjuzova Street

One could enter the hotel garage from Maršala Birjuzova Street. Somewhat tucked away from the city, the street was murky, gray, and a bit damp, as if the sun never reached the ground or first floors of the buildings, most of them erected before World War II. The garage was tight, he could hardly maneuver in his Volkswagen Touareg rental. He was greeted by a short, older man whose modest attire made him look more like a beggar than a bellhop, garage guard, or receptionist. Murmuring pleasantries that he didn’t pay attention to, the man led him into a cramped elevator that took him two floors up. He found himself in a hallway, where along the walls hung framed black-and-white photos of the hotel’s illustrious past: a small, smiling black man in the role of an elevator operator, the architect and owner of the hotel with his family, the 1940 New Year’s celebrations, Miroslav Krleža, one of the hotel’s most famous guests… That same Krleža, a Croat, the best-known writer of the Yugoslav era, rushed headlong to Belgrade, to his Serbian friends, and he fought with gusto over national difference; his greatest pleasure was staying right here at the Hotel Majestic, the postwar gathering place of those the writer considered to be the most interesting of the epoch, but whom the outside world found most repugnant.

At the end of the hall there were stairs which descended to the reception desk. After checking in, the guest would climb back up these same stairs — there were five of them — to the elevator that went up to the rooms. It was a complicated system of ascents and descents, whether by foot or elevator, but the guest easily got the hang of it and quickly made himself at home in the hotel.

In the room, there were heavy curtains the color of ripe cherries and bed covers the exact same color and apparently cut from the same cloth. He detected an odor that reminded him of his very early childhood: kerosene. Kerosene, from where? He hadn’t smelled it in thirty years.

He took the elevator, then went down the five stairs to reception, past the receptionists without even glancing at them, and exited through the main hotel entrance onto Obilićev Venac. The glare of the August sun caused a sharp pain, first in his eyes and then in his head. He stood there until it passed, and when he looked up again, he was surrounded on all sides by the colorful tables of the nearby cafés and restaurants. He could hear the humming of hundreds of people, mostly young women and men, who all seemed unbearably happy to him.

For the first time it occurred to him how strange it was that the street he had entered the hotel garage from was dominated by the gloom of the cloudy preautumnal afternoon, while on the opposite side, in front of the hotel’s main entrance, it was a sunny summer’s day. As if the Hotel Majestic stood on the border of two climate zones.

Ilija Soldo, chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police division, a still-attractive man of fifty-two years, was in Belgrade for the first time in his life. Just two months ago he’d believed — and repeated to himself a hundred times — that he’d never set foot in this city. The main reason for not coming was not that Ilija was a Croatian veteran who’d fought in the war beginning in the spring of 1991 — first against the Serbs and the Yugoslav People’s Army in Slavonia, then on the Dubrovnik front, only to fight against the Bosnian Muslims two years later; and then again against the Serbs in the spring and summer of 1995. He didn’t hate those people he had looked at through the crosshairs; how could he hate those who were his only real company during the war and whose fate he shared, in both life and death? And he knew that they didn’t have anything against him. He hadn’t killed prisoners or civilians, nor had he set fire to villages or shot at random, and somehow it appeared to him that those he’d fought against hadn’t done that either. Those sorts of things always happened wherever he wasn’t, though often in his vicinity, only two or three kilometers away. And so, it always evaded him somehow. And why would he now hate his enemies, with whom he shared those years in winter, in snow, in rain, and in scorching heat? And why would he not go to Belgrade?

Something else tormented Ilija Soldo and warranted that he keep his distance from Serbs if he happened to come across them in the police force, and had kept him from going to Belgrade. Although he’d been born and raised in Zagreb, and despite sharing one of those characteristically Croatian surnames, Ilija was — through both his father and mother — a Serb. His father Marko, an old partisan, veteran of the struggle against Hitler and the German occupation, had spent his whole professional life in the police force and, of course, had not hidden the fact that he was a Serb, born in eastern Herzegovina where Soldos — although rare — also could be found among Serbs. But it didn’t bother him if someone mistook him for a Croat. And so, little by little, as interethnic relations in Yugoslavia deteriorated and Marko grew closer to retiring, he tended to keep quiet about not being from the majority, but from the minority — that is to say, the Serbian Soldos.

At the end of the eighties, as the Communist system collapsed, and the first political parties were established, Joža Marunić, the former chief of the secret police and Marko Soldo’s friend, invited him to be one of the founders of the HDZ, the radical Croatian nationalist party which was to be supported by the powerful and influential Catholic Church. What else could Marko do other than accept? Marunić knew, of course, that Soldo was a Serb, but most likely he’d thought that in having one of them on board, he’d keep those extremists under control.

His mother Jelica, a housewife from one of those Serbian villages in the Banija region, did not think too much about it and quickly agreed to the change in their family’s identity. If you have luck with your first and last name, then it’s easier to present yourself as a Croat to Croats, and a Serb to Serbs. But it’ll burden you later on when you constantly have to think about who and what you really are, and who and what you certainly are not.

And this was the reason why Ilija Soldo promptly, even earlier than 1991, before the destruction of Yugoslavia and the establishment of the Croatian army, joined up with the volunteers and spent all those years at war with the Serbs. It would probably be going too far to say that he’d been fighting against himself and the latent Serb within him, but the fact was, he couldn’t prove to himself that he was a Croat. He needed that war, after which no one was ever going to think that he was anything else.

And everything would have gone well, there wouldn’t even be this story and everything that’d follow, had Ilija’s father not had a sister named Smiljana, and had Smiljana not been married to the doctor Miloš Stanojević, a renowned Yugoslav neurologist, who she had lived with in a villa in Senjak, the richest residential area of Belgrade. Marko Soldo had broken off all relations with his sister back in 1972, after quarreling bitterly with her husband about the political situation in the country. Dr. Stanojević had thrown Soldo out of his house when Soldo called him an American spy and a fascist scoundrel. They didn’t speak again until the beginning of the war in 1991. Soldo didn’t even contact his sister when, two years earlier, Dr. Stanojević had died unexpectedly. She, however, called him the very first autumn of the war when she heard on the radio that Yugoslav army planes were bombing Zagreb. She was afraid that they had killed her brother, and that was all that mattered.

After that they maintained their relations at a distance, staying in touch but not visiting each other. Aunt Smilja, as they called her endearingly, would have — had they ever invited her — gladly come to Zagreb, but they never did, lest their family’s shame and fraud be uncovered, and their neighbors and all of Zagreb find out that they were not Croats, but Serbs.

Out of all this, Aunt Smilja had one great sorrow: she would never see Ilija again. He’d been six years old when she had last seen him. That was the day when her Miša — as she called her husband — threw Marko out of the house, and Jelica and the child left with him. Smiljana and Miloš could not have children, so her nephew had meant more to her than any son could have meant to his mother. Ilija represented all of her unborn children.

This was why she left him the villa in Senjak in her will.

To Ilija Soldo — who lived with his wife and their four children in a two-bedroom apartment in Zagreb, in one of those buildings from the seventies built during the time of the most vibrant socialist construction projects, producing what people called the “cans” because they were coated with waves of aluminum siding — Auntie’s villa in Senjak felt like an unfathomable source of untapped wealth. It was worth well more than fifty times his own apartment.

He only needed to travel to Belgrade and attend the probate proceeding. Upon accepting the villa, and the incredible amount of cash that he would be left with after he sold it, he would, of course, have to accept the origin of his newfound wealth. And most likely everyone from whom he had been hiding his unfortunate identity would find out where the money had come from. Ilija Soldo might have been able to bear it somehow, if only it didn’t seem that he was in the process of becoming a Serb — again.

He lied to his wife and said he was going on a business trip to Budapest.

And that’s how we find him, confused and a little afraid, as he leaves the hotel and crosses sunny Obilićev Venac to a taxi stand.

The court hearing will begin on time and won’t last longer than twenty-five minutes. On parting, the judge, a young and friendly woman, will ask him about Hvar, the Croatian island her family used to have a house on — the last time she was on Hvar was that summer before the war, when she was three years old, but she doesn’t remember anything — and he will give her a friendly smile and, in order to not disappoint her, lie and say he loved Hvar too, even though he’s never been to the island.

The decision regarding his inheritance was in a plastic envelope. He laid it on the bedside table, resolved to not leave the hotel again until morning, when he would return to Zagreb. He sat in the hotel bar, which had been one of the centers of Belgrade social life after World War II, the place where the state and party heads, secret police agents and generals — some of whom Ilija had heard and read about, though it didn’t interest him much — used to meet. It was important to him to pass the time and return to Zagreb as soon as possible. He felt like a good and faithful husband who had just cheated on his wife.

He returned to his room around nine, after sitting alone in the corner of the empty bar, where it seemed no one came anymore, drinking fifteen whiskeys, all in an effort to sedate himself and forget what had happened that day. He lay in bed and tried, unsuccessfully, to fall asleep. He got up and went to the window, struggling to unlock it. Barely succeeding, he leaned against the window ledge, breathing in the night air for a while and taking in the sounds that carried from Republic Square and Dorćol. Suddenly, he was struck by the thought of what it would have been like if he had gone to the other side in 1991, if he had — instead of joining the Croatian volunteers — left for Aunt Smilja’s in Belgrade, and that thought made him afraid and ashamed and he tried to think of something else, of raspberries, which he had heard grew very well in Serbia, of plums, which somehow, he supposed, Serbia had more of than Croatia, and in the end, though he tried to avoid it, he began to think intensely about Serbia and what kind of a country it really was. What did it mean to him after he, one way or another, had spent the best years of his life fighting against it? It meant nothing to him. Like all other countries that meant nothing to him, including the one he lived in. A country is there so a person has something to lose and something to compromise himself for. He thought about that, closed the window, lay down, and finally fell asleep.

He was climbing up the stairs. With difficulty, one foot in front of the other. He was heavier in his dream than in reality. He barely managed to reach the fifth floor, already more out of breath than he’d ever been in his life. He knocked on the door of the apartment where the clerk Hinko Ajzler lived. He was investigating the circumstances surrounding a street incident in which Ajzler had shoved a Mrs. Petronijević, because, he said, her poodle sneered at him. The old woman had fallen and broken her hip, and three days later her son-in-law, also a senior clerk in the Ministry of Internal Affairs, filed a complaint. And now they had sent him, a known softie, to investigate Ajzler. They knew that Inspector Joso Rakita never said no. In his dream, Ilija Soldo was Inspector Joso Rakita, the year was 1941, the day Friday, April 4, but it didn’t surprise him at all that in his dream he could simultaneously be Ilija Soldo, chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police in 2019.

No one, however, opened the door. And just as he was starting to wonder what to do and to pity his unfortunate fate, someone tapped Joso Rakita or Ilija Soldo on the shoulder.

“Sorry, sir!” Mento Josef Konforti, the postman, no taller than a seven-year-old and equally timid, introduced himself. “It’s been days since Mr. Ajzler has opened the door. Everyone thinks that something has happened to him.”

In the dream he didn’t have to go down the stairs and climb again to the fifth floor with the notary Dušan Marković, an ill-tempered, fat, middle-aged man who was the spitting image of the minister of foreign affairs, Cincar Marković (who Ilija Soldo only knew about in his dream), along with two more colleagues from the police, the aids and witnesses for his investigation of Hinko Ajzler’s apartment. The repeated ascending and descending of stairs in dreams, as in a good story or novel, is an unnecessary detail that the consciousness censures. This fact provided Joso Rakita with a sense of relief.

He pulled the pick out of his pocket and easily opened the shoddy lock. He was hit with the stench of urine, gravy, and some sort of chemical. The stench was more real than anything he’d ever experienced in real life. Inspector Joso Rakita was seized with terror, as was the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, Ilija Soldo. He approached the bed on which, gray as the wall behind him, lay a balding man with a clothesline tied in a sloppy noose around his neck. On the nightstand by the bed there were two empty bottles of the phenobarbital Luminal, a sedative once made famous in Hollywood movies, which is still used today as an antiepileptic. But Joso Rakita hardly noticed the bottles of Luminal, because more interesting to him, as to Ilija Soldo in whose head he resided, was the amateurly-tied noose. He couldn’t have hung himself like that, he thought, and then it seemed to him that the man was alive, staring bug-eyed at the low ceiling.

Along Ajzler’s right eye, below the yellowish iris, crawled a small black ant, sliding across it as if on ice.

Rakita moved to pluck the ant from Ajzler’s eye with his fingers.

And then something happened which could hardly be translated from dream to reality. Suddenly the person lying there was no longer Hinko Ajzler, and the fingers did not belong to Joso Rakita; instead the ant was crawling across Joso’s wide-open eye and Hinko’s fingers went for it. He could feel the ant moving but he couldn’t blink or move his eyeballs.

At this point, he awoke with a scream. He grasped his neck, but there was no noose. Underneath him, his halfway-expelled shit was smeared across the hotel bedsheets.

This should have been the greatest fright in the life of the Croatian war veteran and esteemed policeman Ilija Soldo, the inheritor of the most beautiful villa in Senjak.

But this was just the beginning.

For the next ten nights upon returning to Zagreb, Ilija Soldo couldn’t sleep. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling, devoid of any thoughts. He said nothing to his wife, nothing of his trip to Belgrade instead of Budapest, nothing of the considerable wealth he had inherited, nor of the dream he’d had the last time he’d fallen asleep. Over time, his silences and lies multiplied.

On the eleventh morning he got on a bus to Belgrade. He called in sick to work and told his wife that he was traveling to Vinkovci, out toward Serbia, where a few days earlier a thirty-year-old railroad worker had smothered his two children and then disappeared. He’d left a short note for the mother of his children, who in the police report was listed as his “domestic partner,” where he wrote that he had smothered the children because she had been cheating on him with a waiter from the railroad station café. He was suspected to have escaped across the border to Serbia.

As awake as Ilija had been over the past days and nights, he rode east on the empty highway. When they crossed the border and entered Serbia, he closed his eyes, thinking he’d be able to sleep now. But no. The world was just as clear, real, and awake as on the other side of the border. What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either!

Those words, as if regimented, were drilled into his head: What doesn’t sleep in Croatia will not sleep in Serbia either.

He quickly glanced across the endless flat land in the direction of Sremska Mitrovica and Ruma, following the perfect geometrical shapes of the black, freshly plowed earth, and he tried to think about something far away from what his life was mutating into, away from the villa in Senjak and Aunt Smilja’s inheritance, away from the lies which he was guarding himself from the world or from himself with, away from insomnia which, he was sure, was caused by that strange, terrible dream in the Hotel Majestic. And that’s how he came to the case of the crazy switchman from Vinkovci, who had smothered his nine-month-old daughter and a three-year-old son with a pillow, and then wrote to his wife that this was how he was punishing her and promised that if she mended her ways, he would give her new children. He was crazy, but really, should police be the ones dealing with crazy people? How could he conduct an investigation against a disturbed mind? He thought about it, and then by association, through those mysterious and inexplicable trips that a person takes as they transition from one thought to the next, from thinking about the world to thinking about themselves, it occurred to him that what he was currently going through was also a criminal case in need of further investigation. The fact that the crime had happened in his dream, or perhaps it wasn’t a crime but a suicide, didn’t change anything. Or it changed only the fact that now he couldn’t go to the police, neither in Belgrade nor in Zagreb, and report his suspicions of murder; now he had to investigate the case himself.

All kinds of nonsense occur to you while riding the bus from Zagreb to Belgrade. Especially if you’re a police detective who hasn’t slept in ten days.

It was late afternoon, almost evening, but the main hotel entrance on Obilićev Venac was still bathed in light. The other side, the entrance on Maršala Birjuzova, was surely dark. Was it Ilija Soldo who thought that? Later he’ll be sure it was. And maybe it really was.

Luckily, there were rooms, as there would be in ten, twenty, thirty days, whenever Soldo came back on his regular future trips to Belgrade, when he would depart every eleventh day, after not having slept for the past ten nights. This will go on for six months, and each time it’ll happen according to that fatal identical scenario, which would probably make a good twelve-hour experimental film that wouldn’t be shown in regular theaters, but maybe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But the story about a case, which Ilija Soldo, the chief of homicide investigations for the Zagreb police, finds himself in the middle of, requires that all those nights at the hotel be told in the same breath, and that the reader or listener bears in mind the unbearable and frightening repetition, the monotony of terror that our unfortunate Ilija endures.

The receptionists get to know him. He lies, saying that he is a traveling salesman; he isn’t going to tell them that he’s a police officer. They look for the best room for him, he’ll even sleep in the presidential suite, where Marshall Tito and his minister of police in Communist times allegedly held meetings with the many heads of their secret police — regular citizens had no idea how many there had been; he agrees to all this only to avoid appearing suspicious to the receptionists. Then he enters the elevator, and once in his room, he gets undressed, lies on the bed, and five or six hours later wakes up to his own scream. The same dream repeats itself without any variation, only each time he finds out more and more about himself, about Inspector Joso Rakita, a Croat from Lika, serving in the Belgrade police at the beginning of April 1941. He already knows as much about him as he knows about the other one, supposedly his actual self, Ilija Soldo, who in his dream exists alongside Rakita. He is, however, unable to change anything in his dream, like not breaking into Hinko Ajzler’s apartment, or not attempting to pluck the dead ant from Hinko’s dead eye, or not turning into the dead Hinko, who he still knows nothing about.

The logic of dreams differs from the logic of reality. This logic ought to be investigated so that one knows how to behave in their dreams, or so that a good police investigator can investigate his own dream.

During these six months he didn’t say a word to his wife. She, of course, noticed that Ilija wasn’t sleeping. At first, she urged him to see a doctor, but he didn’t want to, so she got him sleeping pills, which he took, though they didn’t do a thing to help him sleep. Finally she started to suspect that her Ilija was having an affair. This suspicion generated domestic hell, which, besides the two of them and their four children, involved the neighbors, her parents, her brother and sister-in-law. He derived a strange pleasure from this since it distracted him from his dream and the futile investigation he was leading, becoming ever more convinced of the difficulty of carrying out an investigation from afar. Is there a greater distance than the separation of dreams from reality in the very same head?

After six months, the investigation led him to the following conclusion: the only place where he could fall asleep was the Hotel Majestic; everything around that hotel, Belgrade, Zagreb, the whole world, was the space where his insomnia dwelled. At night, as soon as his head hit the hotel pillow, after a few hours of deep and empty sleep, similar to being in a coma, he had the same dream; in the middle of that dream was the police case from the beginning of April 1941, most likely from Friday, April 4.

He went to the Croatian State Archives, then to the Zagreb national and university libraries, digging through newspaper documents, searching in vain for the name Hinko Ajzler. He also asked about him in Belgrade; through his police connections he requested that Serbian colleagues look into the name, but they likewise found nothing. Finally, by complete accident — most great discoveries are made by accident — he discovered on the Internet that the Archives of Serbia had digitized their entire collection of the daily newspaper Politika, from the very first issue, printed on January 12, 1904, to the very last, printed on April 6, 1941, a few hours before the German bombing of Belgrade. It took him ten minutes to find an unsigned article with the headline “Mentally Disturbed Clerk Poisons and Hangs Himself,” appearing on the tenth page of the issue from April 5, 1941. The text described his dream word for word, while the accompanying photograph showed Hinko Ajzler looking just as he had in the dreams, perhaps slightly younger.

Ilija Soldo was tremendously relieved. So, the case had existed in reality, although that reality was imprisoned in the depths of the past, in the year 1941. This completely freed him of the fear that had tormented him from the start, so unspeakable that it couldn’t even be mentioned in this story — that he had gone insane and that his dream and the persistence of his insomnia were only symptoms of a serious and irreversible psychological disorder. If everything was as real as in this article from Politika, then he couldn’t be crazy. Especially since there was no way he could have known about this article before he’d first had his dream.

He came upon a detail in the article that would, it seemed, lead to the unraveling of this case. The murder, or suicide — as it had already been suggested in Politika’s headline — took place on April 4, 1941, on the fifth floor of a building located at 30 Kosmajska Street. Easily, without anyone’s help, and using only the Internet, he found out that in 1941 Maršala Birjuzova was called Kosmajska. On the virtual map of the city, intended for tourists and those who easily get lost in Belgrade, he was pointed to the gray and damp street that he’d taken to the Hotel Majestic’s garage on his first visit. That perpetually quiet, empty, and gray street, that clouded-over street, while Obilićev Venac, which the main hotel entrance opened out onto, was always bright and sunny.

Although he only arrived at this great discovery on the third day without sleep, by early morning the next day he was already on the bus to Belgrade. As he approached the border between Croatia and Serbia, at one time two warring countries whose mutual intolerance was turning into some sort of cultural tradition, his wife, whose name has been omitted here to avoid putting her in an awkward position, was packing up herself and the children, firm in her decision to get a divorce. But in Ilija’s crazed euphoria he didn’t care about anything anymore, because it seemed he was on the verge of cracking the greatest case of his police career.

Before he went to the hotel, Ilija Soldo walked up and down the short street called Maršala Birjuzova — named after the Soviet general and one of the liberators of the city, who was killed in a plane crash on his way to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the city’s liberation — and recognized that the building in which Hinko Ajzler had lived no longer exists. It was most likely destroyed during the bombing during World War II, perhaps even by April 6, 1941. He peeked over a tall wall which surrounded a synagogue and peered furtively at a police officer, who had come out from the little glass house to monitor the man who kept crossing back and forth in front of him. But he let him pass, which is how the young Belgrade police officer by the name of Perica Utješanović — the son of Jova Utješanović and Stoja Utješanović, née Ćopić, who came to Serbia in August 1995 in a long line of Serbs expelled from Croatia during Operation Storm, the last major Croatian war operation, settling in Borča, the poorest suburb of Belgrade, now married, a father of two-year-old twins, a little girl and boy — would never find out that he had failed to identify a senior Croatian police officer, who in the subsequent days and months would be in the headlines of all of Belgrade’s tabloids.

Ilija Soldo suffered a serious brain hemorrhage that night and fell into a coma from which he has not awoken to this very day. For the next seven days he lay at the Military Medical Academy Hospital in Belgrade and was then secretly airlifted back to one of Zagreb’s hospitals. The Zagreb media have not reported this event, nor have they said what happened to the chief of homicide investigations in the largest Croatian police department, and what kind of a secret mission led one of the most recognized Croatian officers to Belgrade. In Zagreb, the revelations published in the Belgrade tabloids were taken as yet another, though this time quite bizarre, expression of Serbian hostility toward Croatia.

Phantom of the National Theater by Aleksandar Gatalica

Translated by Nada Petković

Republic Square

My name is Dr. Erich Hetzel. I am a theater director. I am German, an evangelical Christian, but because I married a Jewish woman, I found myself on the Nazis’ list of seven artists at the National Theater to be eliminated in 1941. I remember it was a hot day, shortly after the German bombing of Belgrade on April 6, when our interim director Veljković summoned me to his half-destroyed office above Republic Square and said: “My dear Dr. Hetzel, you, a pure-blooded Aryan, why did you need this affair with a Jewish woman…? Well, what should I do now? You, so to speak, ‘dug your own grave.’ Here, look at Articles 18 to 20 in the decree of General Förster, the military governor of the German-occupied territory of Serbia. In Article 18 it reads clearly: A Jew is considered any person descended from at least three Jewish ancestors (this assumes the parents of both one’s father and mother).”

Veljković looked at me with a weasel-like gaze and continued: “Rather, in your case, whether or not your dad’s dad is Jewish, you fall under Article 19. Look — look what it says: In the same way, a Jew is a Jewish mutt married to a Jewess. And there we are! What am I to do? You are married to a Jewish woman. No, no, I have to oust you from the National Theater. You’ll put on one more performance, and that will be the end. Let your Old Testament god save you, my esteemed Dr. Hetzel.”

Barbara, my dear wife, what a strong and murderous rage I felt in that moment. I thought I would become a killer that very day, as soon as I clenched my hands around the neck of that Veljković. Instead, I didn’t join the trade until 1942.

That same year, Miodrag Mika Golubjev was the detective on the job. He wore a pinstriped suit with an always starched shirt collar. He gnawed on a toothpick and had an unfilled cavity in his upper molar, which didn’t smell too bad. He was careful not to show his stubborn dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit, which could ruin his reputation. With his mediocre education, Miodrag Mika had been known as a clever policeman even before the war. He turned down an offer from his cousin Sergei Golubjev — the Belgrade police chief Dragomir Jovanović’s right-hand man — to transfer to the Special Police Department and become “Mr. Officer who chases Communists.” Instead, he chose to stay with the Criminal Investigation Bureau, affirming: “Never will the time come when people are killed for their Communist ideas; rather, crimes of passion will rule in the new social order.”

The track record of Detective Miodrag Mika Golubjev in 1941 was as follows. He solved two murders-for-hire at the open market, one particularly cruel family homicide in the home of a former upper-class Belgrade family in the Dedinje quarter, and the murder of an old lady on Krunska Street, committed by an insane provincial student on the basis of some philosophical ideas. His feats during the first year of the German occupation included catching two arsonists, a woman who’d committed infanticide, one pedophile, and one pillager.

“He was lucky,” his colleagues gossiped when he was promoted and assigned the most difficult case in 1942. “It will rain on his parade,” jabbered less successful detectives from the crime division, and it appears that — at least at first — they were right.

The following article that ran in the local paper Opštinske Novine attests to this:

I, Erich Hetzel, killed Dude. What a moron — he is not guilty of anything. I have a plan to kill — one by one — all the actors in the National Theater. I’ll do it because of my wife Barbara, who has drawn me into Judaism. I am banned from further work at the theater. Elga, by Gerhart Hauptmann, was my last performance. They believe that I’ve fled to a village like a protagonist in some Russian drama, but I am still hiding in the theater building. I descend floor by floor. I am now closest to the bloody stone of the Turkish gallows upon which the National Theater was built. In old times, the Turkish Stambol Gate stood here — the starting point of the road to Istanbul — but it was also the place where criminals and rebels were hung as a warning to travelers entering and leaving the city.

No one knows as well as I do the passageways and doors of the National Theater. One of the doors is quite peculiar…

It is now 2019. The actors have just ended a big strike and replaced one director with another, who is just as disliked as the previous one, so they wonder what to do: should they go through directors like Kleenex or take charge of the situation? But how? From that deep and fruitful thought, a forgotten event (although recorded in the nation’s theatrical history) stirs them. Someone was murdered onstage.

In 2019, the role of Nikolai Ivanov, a long-standing member of the Council of Peasant Affairs, in the Chekhov drama Ivanov, was played by Svetolik Beložanski, also known as Dude. Toward the end of the play, the Dude from 2019 spoke his lines:

At that moment Nikolai Ivanov, i.e. the actor Dude, pulled out the prop pistol, placed it against his temple, and fired. A stream of real blood rushed down from his head like a fountain. A body, which at that very instant died, convincingly collapsed on stage. The audience was impressed by this realistic theater of what appeared to be a daring stage direction. The applause did not fade. Next to the dead Dude the other actors, always craving praise, kept returning to the stage. Seven curtain calls — is that not enough? Only when the curtain finally fell did someone scream. Soon word got out that an unknown individual had planted an old trophy pistol on Dude, loaded with real bullets.

The detective in 2019 was Slobodan Jovićević — he was without a nickname; a worker, a purist, quiet, assiduous, precise in accommodating his supervisors, yet talented in solving difficult cases.

As soon as he heard about the shooting, Jovićević rushed from the Majke Jevrosime Street police station, which is responsible for the National Theater district. Ivanov did shoot himself onstage, but the detective had suspicions, and immediately classified the case as premeditated murder. The question was: who killed him? Again, this time, none present were allowed to leave the theater before being interrogated. When he was done with the audience, Jovićević addressed his questions to the actors. Everyone had a good alibi. They were all gathered backstage; only the actress playing Sasha was with Dude before the audience. She had the best alibi.

Jovićević returned to the police station to think, having ordered the actors not to leave Belgrade, which some of them accepted only begrudgingly because it disrupted their plans for guest appearances in the Romanian town of Cluj. As he was leaving the theater, the detective failed to notice a shadow which quietly slipped backstage, descending underground with silent footsteps, and continuing one level farther down via metal stairs. The phantom opened a rusty door, slammed it behind him, and disappeared from this era.

Seventy-seven years earlier, in September 1942, on this very stage, another murder occurred. The victim was the actress Jovanka Dvorniković. According to the press — not only Opštinske Novine, but also Novo Vreme — this time the authorities were far more prepared. Here is what the reporter from Novo Vreme observed:

When I killed the Dude of 1942, I ran through that rusty door, but when I slammed it shut, there was no boiler room in front of me; rather, there was a door which led directly to the street. I was immersed in a strange futuristic era. I glanced at a newspaper and saw that the date was June 11, 2019. Some oddly shaped cars sped down the street behind the theater, which had been extended all the way to Braće Jugovića Street; one of the vehicles almost hit me when I, like a sleepwalker, stepped into the street despite the red light. I asked an old woman where the Germans were, and whether the curfew still existed; she looked at me in astonishment and said, “Have you escaped from a movie set or the psychiatric hospital?”

I realized that I needed to calm down and that I shouldn’t reveal who I was. I needed money — and to be honest, I stole some. I returned to the rear of the theater, and got a haircut at the barbershop, Sweeney Todd. I couldn’t place the name of the shop, so I asked. “Don’t you know?” replied the young barber. “It’s a famous film. Sweeney Todd shaved his customers and, in the end, slit their throats, turned their chairs upside down, and threw them in a pit. Ha-ha! Maybe we’ll do the same to you.”

They shaved me and didn’t slit my throat. I knew, however, that I could slit throats, poison, and kill whomever I wanted, passing back and forth through an ordinary rusty door. On the future side, the first murder I committed occurred during the twenty-sixth run of Chekhov’s drama Ivanov. I returned to 1942 and killed Jovanka Dvorniković, then again escaped to 2019. At that moment, I felt powerful, unbelievably grand. I, Dr. Erich Hetzel, assassinate people with impunity, sowing fear at the National Theater. I am not sure if I still do it because of my wife Barbara, or whether my power has become like a scar which suits my face nicely…

Whom to kill next? wondered Dr. Erich Hetzel in 1942. Should he assault the lives of the most famous actors: Olga Spiridonović, Pavle Bogatinčević, Ljubinka Bobić, Žanka Stokić, Nevenka Urbanova, Milivoje Živanović?

Or should he first check what they had achieved and what legacy they had left behind in the future? Once again, he passed through the time door, now without running away from the sound of the steps of justice at his heels. He realized that Spiridonović, Bogatinčević, Bobić, Stokić, Urbanova, and Živanović had laid the foundations for our theatrical life after the German defeat and the creation of a new Yugoslavia. What did the scar on his face tell him? To begin eliminating the most famous and, by doing so, not only avenge the National Theater but also its entire history.

Luckily for the history of theater, he stopped, mulled it over, and decided to kill those who, owing to their talents, had not deserved any recognition, including those in the audience. In 2019, he was the perpetrator of one more spectacular murder onstage; in 1942, two more, by which point the final tally of this serial killer reached six.

Confident after his sixth victim, puffed up like a bird, Dr. Hetzel believed he was God. He had no guilt; he eliminated bad actors one after the other and spared the future greats. In both time frames, he practically expected doormen to kiss his hand when he walked into the building; however, in such a state of mind, he underestimated the skill of those two detectives: Slobodan Jovićević from 2019 and Mika Golubjev from 1942.

Just like Mika the Toothpick, Jovićević also bumped into the boiler room door, only to realize that the suspect was nowhere to be found in the room where there was no way of escaping.

Jovićević thought to himself.

Mika the Toothpick thought to himself.

Unexpectedly, Mika Golubjev arrived at a genius idea.

He was unsure how it occurred to him that there had to be a time portal through which the killer escaped by the skin of his teeth. He continued this train of thought: In that future time, the killer certainly could not be content with a quiet life, as he had shown himself a person who persists to the end without fear or hesitation. That meant he killed both here and there. The detective of the future could not be aware of him, but Mika Golubjev, from the past, would somehow figure out how to warn his colleague of the future so that each of them could trap the killer on either side.

It immediately occurred to him how to do this. Today’s newspapers turn yellow after seventy-seven years, but with a little luck, they are still available. Hence, our detective of the First Belgrade Precinct placed an ad in Opštinske Novine. It read:

Initially, the night editor didn’t want to accept the ad. He dismissed the text as gibberish. Had he not been a well-known detective, moreover a relative of the frightening Sergei Golubjev of the Special Police, the night editor would surely not have run the ad. But he had to. The typesetters were laughing while piling the letters into their short rows.

“A cat who has a little house.”

“Owners to move into the house and ambush the cat.”

“Ha-ha.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But in spite of it all, I’m bored…

The Man Who Wasn’t Mars by Vule Žurić

Translated by Jennifer Zoble, Mirza Purić

Pioneer Park

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

— Mikhail Bakhtin (translated by Hélène Iswolsky)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re free to go.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan had been canceled for the time being.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We have.”

“Your name simply…”

“Came up?”

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

The notes from the interrogation proved this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even the best intelligence officers suffer from the desire to say much in as few words as possible, he thought. He struck a match, lit the piece of paper, and then his pipe with it, taking a few short, apprehensive puffs. Trying quickly to conjure a thought about silence as the only appropriate means of expression for comrades who, in the darkest basements of the Party, had been exterminating traitors hell-bent on subverting the foundations of world revolution (though it could just as well be the reverse: the basements of the revolution, and the foundations of the Party), Stalin went to the window where the vista of the war’s last winter unfurled.

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

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

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

They stood while he sat and stared at them.

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

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

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

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

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

But before that, as if to fulfill his own last wish, he recalled many men, women, and cities, and among them Comrade Mars, from whom he’d received, in this very same park, the directive that until further orders from Moscow he was to do nothing against those who’d prompted his return to Belgrade the year before.

In those penultimate moments, his life lost nothing of its purpose and meaning. He was a committed Communist who’d been given the opportunity to die honorably for his ideas, and he accepted this opportunity without hesitation, not wanting to guess who might’ve been the one to betray him.

For he didn’t see his capture as his downfall.

Sitting on the chair beneath the vast leafy branches, he didn’t just feel strongly, but knew with certainty, that this park was not the site of his death, but the place where the full potential of world revolution would slowly be achieved.

“Any last words?” asked the German commander of the firing squad.

“I wish I could stand.”

The German officer knew how to conduct such conversations, and offered a cigarette to the man tied to the chair.

“Very kind of you, but my ribs are broken. It would hurt to inhale, and there’s no need to suffer anymore.”

Helm had declared something very similar at the end of the final interrogation.

“You need not suffer anymore,” the Gestapo chief, in a spotless uniform, had told him, while his crushed, broken body had tried to arrange itself around the searing stabs of pain that day by day had transformed into a new expression of his undying faith.

I began with hope in anger and physical strength, I continued with great faith and even greater doubt in the spoken word, and I will meet my end believing only in pain. He’d drawn an invisible line under his secret life before fainting as they’d tried to lift him from the floor of his solitary-confinement cell and carry him out into the street.

It was as if the Germans had only then realized that a man in his condition wouldn’t be able to walk to the gallows.

First, they’d wanted to carry him to the park in a blanket, and then someone had suggested tying him to a chair because they could then shoot him like that.

He’d come to halfway between the prison and the park. He’d watched the sidewalk passing under him and first thought that it was all over, that he was already flying; but then he’d felt the ropes.

There was still more suffering to endure.

“Well, you’re going to your death like a king,” said Helm with just a hint of sarcasm, and he smiled back, refraining from saying that he, truth be told, had ceased to exist a long time before, and being invisible was an even greater threat to those he was still preying on.

He considered saying something witty about the king remark, but he bottled those words up forever and waited for Helm to ask him once again if he was Mars, at which he quickly shook his head, looking the gestapo chief right in the tiny metal buttons of his eyes.

And who knows what he would’ve told them had they not beaten him?! Who knows what would’ve bobbed up from the bottom of him in that icy ocean of endless silence in which he’d been floating for one whole day, between the first and second interrogations?

While he sat in his cell and ate the lunch that the waiter, Mladen, had brought from the Ero Gurman kafana along with a message from his best friend Čedo to hang on, he felt for the first time in all those years of uncertainty and conspiracy something that could have been a hint of real fear. But he wasn’t shaken by the fact that his friend had done a stupid thing, as friends do, and ultimately paid with his head for wanting his buddy to “stuff himself with the finest ćevapi even under the Krauts.” While he swallowed the last bite, he was barely able to keep from shaking at the discovery that all the torture devices had been forged for nothing.

A man should simply be left to himself and the flow of time.

What if they abandoned him to oblivion? What if they left him in peace? What if no one ever gave him a second thought? What if his terrible secrets were covered in spiderwebs and became worthless?

Fortunately, the very next day they took him from the prison and brought him once again to Helm’s office on the first floor of the police precinct across the street, right by Terazije Square.

“Are you Mars?” Helm asked him, and he told him the truth.

And as soon as they beat him in the same way he’d beaten his own victims so many times, he knew he was safe.

Instead of time killing him, he would kill time — he would have enough of it to remember, at his leisure, what was most important. Alongside Helm’s investigation, he would finally have the opportunity to investigate himself, but not in order to discover where he’d erred (because he’d made no errors), but in order to revel for the last time in everything he’d accomplished.

“I’ll ask you again,” Helm said resolutely. “Are you Mars?”

“No.” He gave the truthful answer intending, while he received all those professionally inflicted punches, to remind himself of the events in his life that had made him worthy of such an end.

That everyone must die doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has lived. But he had lived, and always at least two lives at the same time.

For while the Germans were convinced that the man they’d beaten was a black-marketeer and supplier of counterfeit passports who was stubbornly refusing to admit that he was Mars — he recalled his only meeting with the man who, under this pseudonym, had come to Belgrade in the late spring of ’41 carrying a message from Moscow about the postponement of Walter’s liquidation.

The Germans had, with the help of local scoundrels, already established their rule, but his life hadn’t changed at all. The shadows he lurked in were even deeper now, the secrets safer, but the goal remained the same.

What had changed was the world aboveground, the scenery in which he constantly moved, changing roles and clothes. For most people, losing one’s life was indeed easier than living it, but this could only help the world revolution.

The old world had literally crumbled and shown people its diabolical underside, but because of this, there were more women who experienced a completely different kind of change.

They revealed their slender necks in a novel way; they took slower sidelong glances; and their short, almost inaudible breath said more than a dozen of the most common impertinent words.

Such was the woman he’d followed home right after he’d said goodbye to Mars. Such were all the woman he’d been with, and he tried keeping the number of women he kissed higher than the number of men he killed.

“And how do you do that?” asked one of the Kamarić sisters, whose house had been his first refuge upon arrival in Belgrade.

All three of them were young, pretty, and cheerful; all three knew that Gojko Tamindžić surely wasn’t his real name and he surely wasn’t a locksmith. But they felt that this tall, powerful man who’d been brought to the house by their father’s acquaintance, a prominent Belgrade attorney, had in no time unlocked hearts in which he could leave whatever he wanted.

The lawyer told their father that he was a war buddy from Kaimakchalan, that he had a nervous disorder he was seeking treatment for in Belgrade. But it was instantly clear to everyone in the house that if someone was crazy, it was the rest of the world, and if there was someone who could heal, it was their new tenant, whom they soon stopped charging rent because his stories about Moscow, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, and Herzegovina were more valuable.

He told them about the Russian winter, the Mexican sun, the Spanish bullfights, and the Herzegovinian stećak tombstones.

And about women.

“So how many have you had?” asked Vera, and he replied that he’d left a piece of his heart with each one.

“Do we know any of them?” Nada asked, snickering, and he asked whether they’d heard of Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich.

“And how do you do that?” asked Ljubica, but their father entered the kitchen and said that an unfamiliar man had inquired as to whether they perhaps had a tenant.

Five months later they arrested them all.

It wasn’t the first time the police had surrounded a house where he’d been hiding.

He could’ve snuck out through the basement, quietly overpowered the two agents standing guard there, and found another safe haven by evening.

“Why did you surrender?” Helm asked him near the end of the final interrogation, knowing that a beaten man in his condition couldn’t answer him even if he wanted to.

“Why did he surrender?” Makhin asked Stalin as soon as he read the last page of the interrogation notes.

Stalin stood at the window and Makhin saw in the glass the reflection of his motionless face.

“He didn’t surrender,” Stalin said under his breath, and then, generously permitting the readers to imagine a newborn silence, pulled on his pipe and exhaled a fragrant cloud that soon vanished into the shadows of the chamber’s high ceiling.

“He di… didn’t?” Makhin stuttered, lacking the courage to put a simpler question behind these simple words.

“Didn’t,” repeated Stalin, looking his reflection right in the eye. “He merely carried out an order.”

“I understand,” said Makhin, though to him, as to most of us, it wasn’t at all clear what the hell that was supposed to mean.

My editor even flew into a fit.

“Man, you can’t ruin a good story like that!” He was almost screaming when I decided to respond to his call.

“You really think it’s good?” I asked after a few moments of silence.

“Excellent. But it will be mediocre rubbish if you don’t change the end,” he said in a calmer tone, justifiably afraid that I’d hang up, remove the SIM from my cell phone, delete the file, and never write another sentence.

“Listen, man…” He waited to see if I was still there.

“I’m listening.”

“Let’s meet somewhere and figure it out.”

So here I am in Pioneer Park, where I arrived ten minutes prior to our agreed-upon time. It’s a sunny day; children are playing; pensioners are sitting on the benches, reading the paper. Cars and buses speed along the boulevard, behind which sits the National Assembly building, and at the curb on the park’s edge stands an open double-decker bus that will soon take visitors on a sightseeing tour of the city.

I’ll take my editor sightseeing in the park.

I’ll show him where the Germans shot one of the most enigmatic and dedicated of Stalin’s secret agents. Then I’ll show him his grave. Later on, we’ll walk the same path that he and Mars took, and then we’ll head toward Terazije, where he’ll have to imagine buildings that no longer exist, where they interrogated the agent, and where he lay in his wounds, beaten and broken.

“That’s all well and good,” I know he’ll say, after taking his first sip of beer in the garden of some nearby café. “But, man, that part where Stalin is standing at the window saying Mustafa Golubić hasn’t surrendered but rather carried out an order — what does he mean by that?!”

I’ll look him right in the eye for quite a while, and then helplessly shrug. My editor will stub out his cigarette, stand up, put his hand on my shoulder, and leave, and as soon as I get home, I’ll write two more scenes for the ending.

The first will take place in the Kremlin, in the same room where Stalin stood by the window and stared at his reflection in the Soviet glass. This time, behind his back will stand one of his most enigmatic and dedicated secret agents, just returned from Mexico, where he’d laid the groundwork for the assassination of Leon Davidovich Trotsky, the greatest enemy of the world revolution.

The other final scene will take place in a house on the outskirts of Belgrade, which was surrounded by the German police early one morning in June 1941.

Mustafa Golubić will have shaving soap on his chin, but instead of holding a razor, he’ll be holding his revolver.

Weighing his options for escape, he’ll remember the conversation he had with Stalin after returning from Mexico.

“Joseph Vissarionovich, what are my orders?” he asked, interrupting the silence that, in his presence, was more cautious than a wild cat poised to sneak off into darkness.

“There’s only one more,” said Stalin, not daring to turn and look him in the eye.

“Yes?”

“Recognize the opportunity to go out as a hero.”

Here is that opportunity, Golubić will think brightly, already aiming for the body of the first German policeman he can see through the small bathroom window, but then he’ll realize that he’s been given the opportunity not only to die at the enemy’s hand but to be executed and buried in the very heart of the great city.

So I will never be forgotten, he thought as he rinsed the shaving soap from his face and looked in the mirror for the last time.

One could even say he was happy.