Belgrade Noir

It was spring of 2014. I was forty-six years old, freshly divorced, and freshly unemployed. Fortunately, I still had an apartment. I’d recently read in some book how apartments on the ground level exude a peculiar loneliness. I’d bought the apartment on the ground floor, at the very end of Palmotićeva Street, across from the Institute for Mental Health — which taxi drivers referred to as the

loony bin — more than twenty years earlier while the war in Bosnia was still going on and Serbia was still under sanctions. It was relatively cheap — that’s how it was in those times — and apartments on the ground floor were always the cheapest. It was important for me to be in the center of the city, so living on the ground floor didn’t bother me. I even enjoyed that feeling of peculiar loneliness

I already carried with me. It wasn’t so bad that the apartment came with it.

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

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

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

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

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

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