Belgrade Noir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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