Belgrade Noir

Why? The world will be a better place without him, that’s why. Or maybe there are other reasons.

I know that there is a bit of evil in all of us. Hidden behind the masks we agree to wear for the sake of civilization, it is balanced by goodness, controlled by the societal conventions. Yet at times, evil turns into Evil, a fairy-tale monster that eats children alive. And with this comes the sign. Most people fail to see it, although the sensitive ones often feel a need to avert their gaze from the faces of those in whom Evil lives. I call it the sign of the beast and I saw it on the face of Viktor Marković the moment I met him.

But I needed time to convince myself of the truth. I was scared, persuading myself for months that I must be wrong. And forgetting, at that, the futility of such exertion: for Evil refuses to forgive weakness. Evil grants no favors. And Evil is contagious.

Am I not the perfect example? To liberate the world from Evil, I have to let it inside of me. That’s the modus operandi of Evil, whether we are talking NATO’s “humanitarian intervention” or me, Neda Adamović. So it is not really a surprise that it is “other reasons” that guide our actions, is it? There’s no place for noblesse in the story of Evil.

Yet, I can’t help but wonder — what would some other people do in my position? Could they really kill another human being? Pull the trigger and put a bullet into someone’s forehead — bang bang, you’re dead! Probably not: most noble, gentle people living in pain would rather kill themselves.

Until yesterday, I considered myself one of them.

Today I decided that “Neda Adamović, Everyone’s Favorite Victim” will not be my epitaph. That it is time for a bang in my life.

April 30, 1999

Whether it’s Jack the Ripper or the armed forces, the pathology is the same: the killer first objectifies the victims to obliterate their humanity, so they are not human beings anymore, just collateral damage, Neda thought to herself, walking through the strangely quiet streets of Lekino Brdo, so innocent and quaint under the April sun as if totally unaware of what could happen to it at any moment. She was still seething at what she’d just seen from her friend Mariana’s thirteenth-floor balcony: Avala — the hill which, with its meager 1,700 feet, qualified as a mountain — without its TV tower! During the night, the precisely guided NATO missile had wiped the tower out, and the resulting scenery belonged in a parallel reality. Like everything else these days, for that matter: how could Serbia, the country which had always been on the right side of history, always the good guy, be bombed by the allies? Maybe because, as the saying went, it was in a habit of winning in war and losing in peace? But who could win over NATO? Martians?

“Making war to get peace is the same as fucking to get virginity,” Mariana had said as they drank coffee made from tepid water from the water heater, since this part of town was once again without electricity.

Neda couldn’t agree more.