Belgrade Noir

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.