Belgrade Noir

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.