Belgrade Noir

Before he went to the hotel, Ilija Soldo walked up and down the short street called Maršala Birjuzova — named after the Soviet general and one of the liberators of the city, who was killed in a plane crash on his way to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the city’s liberation — and recognized that the building in which Hinko Ajzler had lived no longer exists. It was most likely destroyed during the bombing during World War II, perhaps even by April 6, 1941. He peeked over a tall wall which surrounded a synagogue and peered furtively at a police officer, who had come out from the little glass house to monitor the man who kept crossing back and forth in front of him. But he let him pass, which is how the young Belgrade police officer by the name of Perica Utješanović — the son of Jova Utješanović and Stoja Utješanović, née Ćopić, who came to Serbia in August 1995 in a long line of Serbs expelled from Croatia during Operation Storm, the last major Croatian war operation, settling in Borča, the poorest suburb of Belgrade, now married, a father of two-year-old twins, a little girl and boy — would never find out that he had failed to identify a senior Croatian police officer, who in the subsequent days and months would be in the headlines of all of Belgrade’s tabloids.

Ilija Soldo suffered a serious brain hemorrhage that night and fell into a coma from which he has not awoken to this very day. For the next seven days he lay at the Military Medical Academy Hospital in Belgrade and was then secretly airlifted back to one of Zagreb’s hospitals. The Zagreb media have not reported this event, nor have they said what happened to the chief of homicide investigations in the largest Croatian police department, and what kind of a secret mission led one of the most recognized Croatian officers to Belgrade. In Zagreb, the revelations published in the Belgrade tabloids were taken as yet another, though this time quite bizarre, expression of Serbian hostility toward Croatia.

Phantom of the National Theater

by Aleksandar Gatalica

Translated by Nada Petković

Republic Square

My name is Dr. Erich Hetzel. I am a theater director. I am German, an evangelical Christian, but because I married a Jewish woman, I found myself on the Nazis’ list of seven artists at the National Theater to be eliminated in 1941. I remember it was a hot day, shortly after the German bombing of Belgrade on April 6, when our interim director Veljković summoned me to his half-destroyed office above Republic Square and said: “My dear Dr. Hetzel, you, a pure-blooded Aryan, why did you need this affair with a Jewish woman…? Well, what should I do now? You, so to speak, ‘dug your own grave.’ Here, look at Articles 18 to 20 in the decree of General Förster, the military governor of the German-occupied territory of Serbia. In Article 18 it reads clearly: A Jew is considered any person descended from at least three Jewish ancestors (this assumes the parents of both one’s father and mother).”

Veljković looked at me with a weasel-like gaze and continued: “Rather, in your case, whether or not your dad’s dad is Jewish, you fall under Article 19. Look — look what it says: In the same way, a Jew is a Jewish mutt married to a Jewess

. And there we are! What am I to do? You are married to a Jewish woman. No, no, I have to oust you from the National Theater. You’ll put on one more performance, and that will be the end. Let your Old Testament god save you, my esteemed Dr. Hetzel.”

Barbara, my dear wife, what a strong and murderous rage I felt in that moment. I thought I would become a killer that very day, as soon as I clenched my hands around the neck of that Veljković. Instead, I didn’t join the trade until 1942.

That same year, Miodrag Mika Golubjev was the detective on the job. He wore a pinstriped suit with an always starched shirt collar. He gnawed on a toothpick and had an unfilled cavity in his upper molar, which didn’t smell too bad. He was careful not to show his stubborn dandruff on the shoulders of his dark suit, which could ruin his reputation. With his mediocre education, Miodrag Mika had been known as a clever policeman even before the war. He turned down an offer from his cousin Sergei Golubjev — the Belgrade police chief Dragomir Jovanović’s right-hand man — to transfer to the Special Police Department and become “Mr. Officer who chases Communists.” Instead, he chose to stay with the Criminal Investigation Bureau, affirming: “Never will the time come when people are killed for their Communist ideas; rather, crimes of passion will rule in the new social order.”