Belgrade Noir

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

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

Like he’d said, the kafana

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

That couldn’t be the guy who had taken Nađa’s father. I lit a cigarette, and as I put the lighter back in my pocket, I felt my phone vibrate. A message from Mirko. He’d been doing an interview outside the city in Novi Sad earlier and hadn’t been able to answer. Now he was on his way to Belgrade and hadn’t been able to grab a beer. Great, I texted back and sent him the address of where I was. As time passed, the

kafana slowly filled. Petar had less time to chat, but when I realized he couldn’t help me I wasn’t really up for talking anyway. I waited for Mirko, turning to the door every time I heard someone walk in. They were the typical early evening kafana

customers from the edge of the city. Like in one of those Springsteen songs, these were people who’d lost something that was the center of their lives: sometimes a woman, sometimes family, sometimes work, sometimes an apartment — sometimes all of it at once — and they were just looking to get through the day. They bet on soccer, bummed cigarettes, drank the cheapest rakija only to pass the time faster, until it was time to go to sleep, and after hundreds and thousands of these days and nights, it came time to die.

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

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