The two hunched, pimply kids neither moved nor spoke. I thought they might be mute. I asked the girl what her name was, she said Ira. I decided she had gotten her nickname from the Irish Republican Army, and I liked that. Kombucha had moved on to playing Bob Dylan.
Belgrade, Peppy, has become a monster. Mothers here name their sons after famous criminals, politicians have run out of neglected relatives, so they put their house pets in government positions. Now our leaders moo, baa, bark, and meow at us from their official armchairs.
Anyone who’s dissatisfied with the condition of society can complain, the counter’s open every weekday from ten a.m. to four p.m. However, there’s always a long line, plus the computer has crashed, and you can’t get anything done without the computer. They say they’ve called the IT man, but he won’t show up, he hasn’t been paid for the last time he fixed things.
Thus, no one will be surprised when I carry out a murder. It’s a firm decision, Peppy. But who should I kill? At first glance, it seems easy to choose a victim. In Belgrade, no matter who you look at it seems that you wouldn’t be wrong to kill them. However, that isn’t so. Many of them aren’t worth the time or energy…
Yesterday, the Danube tossed up the lifeless body of an opposition party leader, last night a television magnate overdosed in the Intercontinental Hotel…
A couple of police are walking in my direction: a young woman and a tall, bare-chinned young man. Pairs of handcuffs jingling against their butts, the weight of their pistols pulling down their belts.
“The authorities have a tremendous capacity!” I shout as loudly as possible. They don’t even look at me.
I can’t say anything wrong, the police never pay any attention to me, nobody mistreats me. People are tolerant of me. Both when I was shouting “Let’s clean up Serbia!” and when I stood at the intersection by the Lilly drugstore and directed the traffic, no one did anything to stop me. No one wants to get into an argument with me, Peppy. Probably because I’m crazy.
My health’s pretty good, I can’t complain. Sometimes I mix up the past and the present, but that’s not terrible.
Peppy, nothing’s terrible here, people quickly get used to everything. No one minds that they pour water in the gasoline, that they mix air into the natural gas, that they send your electric power at a low voltage. Babies don’t mind that their milk’s diluted, sick people don’t mind that their injections are diluted, drunks don’t mind that their rakija is diluted. Pedestrians don’t protest that the streets are dug up, that cars are parked on the sidewalks, they jump and fly like the Chinese warriors in the movie House of the Flying Daggers.
I asked Doctor Teodosić to prescribe me a higher dose, what I get isn’t enough for me, but he won’t. He thinks I might be selling my medication. Why would I sell my meds when I don’t even have enough? Doctor Teodosić asks me how it is I haven’t died yet — I ought to, if I’m taking everything he prescribes for me.
“Why would I die, doctor?” I act surprised. “A person quickly gets used to everything here.”
There’s always someone outside his office who’ll make a fuss that I’ve cut in line, but I don’t pay any attention to those losers. Maybe sometime I will, when I have a weapon on me. “The authorities have a tremendous capacity!”
If only Kombucha knew about all the pills I have, he’d shove me off my footstool, snatch my key, and hotfoot it to my apartment. Nothing would stop that guy, whose nickname comes from fermented mushrooms, from robbing me. As it is, whenever he lands on hard times he brings his books and sells them cheap. It’s mostly philosophy, Kierkegaard and crap like that. Sometimes I buy one of his books — to be honest, philosophy relaxes me.
The woman whose husband hit her with a beer stein has passed away. The doctors fought for her life, but the hospital didn’t have enough units of blood on hand.
Peppy, we never have enough of any of the blood types. Every day more people die a violent death here than are born. Death drives an electric lawnmower and clears out the streets of Belgrade, if you aren’t a killer then you’re a victim. Neutrality has lost its foothold, the laws are the same as on the battlefield. Perhaps that’s why I’ve succumbed to the general atmosphere, the euphoria so to speak, and have firmly resolved to kill someone. I probably won’t be punished for the crime, which gives me additional motivation to carry it out.
Peppy, the Belgrade police don’t chase criminals anymore. The detectives and killers sit in kafanas at the same table and eat dinner together, criminals practice shooting at the police gun ranges. If by some miracle a person is arrested, and at the end of a marathon trial is convicted, they don’t go to prison because there’s no room. The prisons are packed: it’s those who don’t pay off their bank loans, who owe for parking tickets, who don’t pay their cable bills, who are serving prison sentences. Farmers who didn’t respond to the order to root out ragweed are serving sentences. There’s no room for long-term prison sentences.
Last night on Vračar a well-known lawyer’s Jeep was blown up; this morning a bank guard was killed in Čukarica…
In Senjak this morning they found the lifeless body of a sixteen-year-old girl, on Zvezdara some teenagers locked a homeless guy in a shaft and left him there to die without food or water…
I can hardly wait to kill someone myself, for the adrenaline to flow through my veins. I’ve been useless for so long, it’s time for me to take my place in society and come back to life a bit. I just have to figure out what criteria the victim must fulfill; I’ve suddenly become conscious that I don’t want to spill just anyone’s blood.
A line of police cars rushes down the bulevar, the sirens wail. They’re simulating a major kidnapping.
“The authorities have a tremendous capacity!” From time to time someone looks at me in an unfriendly way, they probably take my words as a provocation. Then I start shouting with all my strength, and I myself marvel at my throat’s power. “While you were all sleeping, I guarded you!” After I shout that, one turns his head away and picks up his pace — an airplane wouldn’t be able to catch up to him, he’s so fast.
Do you remember, Peppy, how our own fighter planes accidentally bombed us, the volunteers, as soon as we crossed into Croatian territory? It happens, the commander explained to us later. The important thing was that we suffered no casualties, only that fat guy with the crossed bullet belts lost some of his hearing from the explosion. But in any case, he died in the first skirmish after that. What would good hearing do for him in the grave?
I recognized her immediately, even though this time her hair was blond with some multicolored streaks. She still wore a ring in her nostril. She stopped near me and squatted so she could look over Kombucha’s books. Her T-shirt pulled upward and on her back, just above her butt, she had a big tattoo, a five-pointed star with a hammer and sickle in the center.
The pimply teenagers were standing behind Ira, they were her bodyguards. I called them Tom and Jerry, after the cartoon characters. I wondered whether I should consider killing one of them. But I quickly rejected that idea. I didn’t want to separate them, and I considered it too much to kill both of them. It’s not good to overdo things, nor to throw your weight around unnecessarily. One dead person is quite enough, it would satisfy my requirements. Besides that, I sensed that they didn’t fulfill my requisite criteria for a victim.