Black Widow, White Russian
by Muharem Bazdulj
Translated by Jamie Clegg
Palilula
She was beautiful and instantly reminded me of Nastasya Filippovna from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. She had blond hair and dark eyes. She acted like she was thirty years old and, as it turned out, was exactly that. She looked a bit older than she was, in fact, but not in a bad way. She had a kind of alluring maturity, an aura that said that she hadn’t been a kid for a while. Said her name was Nađa. I wondered what she was doing at my apartment door.
It was spring of 2014. I was forty-six years old, freshly divorced, and freshly unemployed. Fortunately, I still had an apartment. I’d recently read in some book how apartments on the ground level exude a peculiar loneliness. I’d bought the apartment on the ground floor, at the very end of Palmotićeva Street, across from the Institute for Mental Health — which taxi drivers referred to as the loony bin — more than twenty years earlier while the war in Bosnia was still going on and Serbia was still under sanctions. It was relatively cheap — that’s how it was in those times — and apartments on the ground floor were always the cheapest. It was important for me to be in the center of the city, so living on the ground floor didn’t bother me. I even enjoyed that feeling of peculiar loneliness I already carried with me. It wasn’t so bad that the apartment came with it.
She said that Nikolina, a friend of hers, had given her my address. They’d met at some diplomatic reception, then saw each other a few days later at a café. She asked Nikolina if she knew anyone in Belgrade who could help her with an investigation. It had something to do with Bosnia, so Nikolina recommended me, since I’m from Bosnia, know half of Belgrade, have good connections, and am generally an okay guy.
In 1993, the same year I bought the apartment, Nađa’s father was killed. That’s what she told me as she came into the room and sat on the armchair I offered her. I sat directly across from her. She said that she was born in Rudo, a little town in Bosnia along the border with Serbia. The place is only known for the fact that the first brigade of Tito’s partisan army was founded there on Stalin’s birthday in 1941. That was the twenty-first of December. However, after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948, the date was subsequently changed to the twenty-second of December in our history books.
Nađa’s father, as it turned out, was a Bosnian Muslim, while her mother was originally a White Russian. Her father was a senior official during the Communist era, a true Yugoslav. When the war started, he was certain that nothing bad would happen to him. Still, a Serbian paramilitary unit raided their house in Rudo and took Nađa’s father. For years he was missing until they found his remains in a mass grave ten years after the war.
Not long after they took her father, Nađa and her mother escaped to Montenegro, where Nađa’s uncle lived. Several months later, they left for Sweden. Nađa finished high school and college there, gained citizenship, and now worked at the Swedish embassy in Belgrade. She’d been here almost a year and a half and loved it — it felt good to return to her childhood culture. And then, a month ago, as she was jogging through Tašmajdan Park, she nearly froze with terror. On a bench, in the area of the park closest to St. Mark’s Church, she had noticed an old man reading a newspaper. He looked familiar. Then she realized: it was the commander of the group that had taken her father.
When I asked if she was sure, she completely lost it. I said it was hard for me to believe that after twenty-two years she could clearly remember a face she’d only seen once. She looked at me contemptuously and said that in those twenty-two years there wasn’t a single day or night that his face wasn’t the first thing she thought of when she woke up in the morning, and the last thing she thought of before falling asleep.
I asked her if she knew anything about him — his name or something. She said she only knew that he wasn’t from Rudo but from somewhere in Serbia. Some said he was from Priboj, and some said he was from Raška. They called him Vojvoda, which was an aristocratic title often used for Chetnik leaders. I told her to describe him, and she spoke slowly but without pausing, as if she had repeated these sentences to herself over and over: “He was wearing white sneakers, light-blue jeans, and a black T-shirt. He’s balding a little in front, but barely — you could say he’s got a high forehead. Big brown eyes. A large nose speckled with capillaries, like an alcoholic. Clean-shaven. Above his left eyebrow there’s a deep scar in the shape of a rotated parenthesis. He’s slim, doesn’t have a belly. Medium height. On his right forearm there’s a tattoo of a cross.” Then she fell silent. I asked her if she remembered tattoos and scars from the time she first saw him, when they took her dad. “Of course I remember,” she said. “I remember everything.”
I looked at this young woman who every day remembered the trauma she’d experienced when she was only nine. They took her father and killed him around the same time I had returned from America. Actually, it was my second return. The first time I went to America was in 1987 when I got a scholarship to improve my English and finish high school there. I returned, served in the army, then enrolled in law school in Sarajevo. I went to America from a normal, healthy country, and in just two years — one of which I spent in America, the other in the army — the country started to fall apart and it seemed like there was no hope for it. In the spring of 1990 I went back to America, and this time I enrolled in a sociology program at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Everything there was great, while everything in my homeland was already seriously going to shit.
And although both my mother and father are Serbs — respectable and wealthy people, the director of a bank and a lawyer — I didn’t feel like a Serb until the beginning of the war. I had a Yugoslav passport, I served in the Yugoslav army, I stood for the Yugoslav anthem, and I felt proud of seeing Yugoslavia’s flag fly when our athletes won medals.
Then the country started to fall apart and everyone did some fucked-up shit. Serbs made up the country’s majority, so most likely did the most shit, but they were far from being the only ones. In America, however, and especially since the siege of Sarajevo began, a consensus was reached that Serbs were guilty for all of it, at least judging by newspapers and TV reports.
Nađa’s father was definitely killed by Serbs. I asked her what she wanted from me. She said that she wanted to find and identify Vojvoda so she could send that information to the prosecutor’s office in Sarajevo. Allegedly, there was an investigation that’d been open for a while but they didn’t have enough information to indict anyone. Nađa took out a purple 500-euro bill that the local punks call a Gaddafi because the Libyan dictator supposedly had a weakness for them, and would hand them out to waiters and musicians when he was in a good mood. She asked if that would be enough. I nodded my head and asked if she wanted a receipt. She smiled for the first time since she entered my apartment.
“No need. You look like a trustworthy guy.” She took out a business card and set it on top of the bill. “Here’s my number and e-mail address. Call me when you find anything out, but don’t mention any details except in person. When you call, I’ll come over.” Then she stood and slowly walked out.
How did she feel when she thought her father was still alive? I remember I was completely unhinged when the siege of Sarajevo began because I didn’t know what was happening with my parents. But thanks to connections and money, they were able to reach Belgrade by the summer of 1992. It’s not that as Serbs they had any major problems in Sarajevo until then, but there was suspicion and provocation. In any case, they were lucky to have escaped the city in time. Still, a lot of our relatives, like many of my schoolmates, stayed in Sarajevo.