Belgrade Noir

I’m still here. Over time, I have crawled up from the lower levels to the wall dividing the box seats of the first gallery. From there, I watch performances through the seasons. Sometimes I scare the actors during rehearsals with my mysterious sigh or roaring laughter, the source of which they are confused about.

But in spite of it all, I’m bored…

The Man Who Wasn’t Mars

by Vule Žurić

Translated by Jennifer Zoble, Mirza Purić

Pioneer Park

A new and powerful revival of the grotesque took place in the twentieth century, although the word revival is not exactly suited to the most recent forms.

— Mikhail Bakhtin (translated by Hélène Iswolsky)

A tall, portly officer in a tight and tattered overcoat stood smoking beneath the bare branches of a tree at the edge of the large park. As the two Red Army soldiers in front of him dug a hole that increasingly resembled a grave, there was not a trace of tension to be seen on his round face.

The equanimity with which he released the smoke from his Soviet lungs confirmed that this was a man who was well acquainted with the world on the other side of certainty. And for him, that world could be found, on this late October afternoon in 1944, on the other side of the fence surrounding the Old Royal Palace Garden, right in the center of the capital of Yugoslavia.

Just twenty minutes before, at the park’s entrance, there’d been an enemy fire position. The German Schwarzlose machine gun had relentlessly barked from the watchtower that, in the words of the Partisan lieutenant, had been transported stone by stone from Kaimakchalan after World War I.

“Kai… Ka…” the Soviet officer tried unsuccessfully to repeat the strange name of the mountain on the border of Macedonia and Greece, whose conquering by the Serbian army had perhaps decided the outcome of World War I.

“That’s where my father and uncle died,” added the lieutenant, who sometime after noon had received special orders from Partisan Supreme Headquarters to have his platoon “take the Red Army operational group along the shortest and safest route to the Old Royal Palace Garden and be at their disposal until they’ve completed their special assignment.”

“A good combat position is always a good combat position,” said the Russian at last, having once more surveyed the space between the Old Palace and the new Parliament building.

He would have liked to formulate a theory on how these two structures were separated not by a park, but rather by a historical period during which the seeds of poverty had sprouted another offshoot of the world revolution, but the Partisan lieutenant clearly had no feel for the rhythms of such discourse.

“With your brotherly assistance, we have once again liberated our capital,” the Partisan declared like an actor in a bad propaganda film, so for a few moments the whole scene continued to flicker in black and white, accompanied by the sounds of one of those revolutionary marches.

“The Germans are fleeing from Belgrade again, and the stone watchtower will, from this day forward, serve as a monument to yet another great victory for our side. I’ve heard it’s already been decided that this park will be renamed Pioneer Park. Young Pioneers from all corners of Yugoslavia and the entire free world will come to this place to experience the glory of our people’s revolutionary liberation war.”

The Soviet officer knew that the lieutenant expected him to offer an even more pathetic reply, in which he’d invoke Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, the great leader of the even greater world revolution, and summarize the vision of a just, classless society, but the crack of single shots and machine-gun bursts again resounded in a nearby street, while muffled detonations continued to come from the direction of the setting sun, which for some time had been hiding behind the battalion of large gray clouds sprawled across the remaining roofs.

Everything returned to Technicolor, replacing the ceremonial military music with the sound of gunfire, and the air endeavored to conceal its scent of blood and death.

A mere thirty minutes earlier the sun had warmed the battle for the city, but now the only stars that shone were those on the caps of its liberators. Darkness falls at the dawn of freedom, the Soviet officer would have mused, but clambering up his cordovan boots was the sound of a trench spade hitting human bone.

“Konačno,” the Partisan lieutenant said in Serbian from across the dug-out grave, gesturing toward a nearby fence, where his soldiers kept their guns trained on the assembly building, the main post office, and the central square known as Terazije, where, it seemed, the fighting raged on.