In the fall of 1992, after two years of being an excellent student, I practically gave up on my schooling in America. I almost never went to lectures. I incessantly watched television and read newspapers, and at school I fought with colleagues who repeated stereotypes about “Balkan savages” without thinking. Ironically, I only confirmed those stereotypes with my aggression.
I drank a lot, and the American prices for alcoholic beverages took a chunk out of my student budget. In the spring of 1993, I realized there was no way I could pass my exams, nor did I feel particularly motivated to take them. When I called my family in Belgrade, it seemed like they were good: Dad was working again in some bank, though not as a manager, and Mom had succeeded in getting a job in the office of one of Belgrade’s best attorneys. I knew that they’d managed to get most of their savings out of Sarajevo. I decided to return to Belgrade — if it’s possible to return to a city you’ve never lived in, only knew from a few short visits, and knew as the capital of your home country, Yugoslavia, which no longer exists.
And yes, my parents told me that I had fucked up by coming back, but on some level they were also happy. I guess that’s why they gave me the cash for this apartment. They were living in a big apartment in New Belgrade that had enough rooms to make one mine, but they understood that at the age of twenty-five and after three years of living on another continent, I just couldn’t share an apartment with them. They gave me enough pocket money to live off of. Out of love for them, I enrolled in law school in Belgrade, though I had even less motivation to study here than I did in America.
For the next five or six years, I mostly fucked around. I found a couple of buddies, witty and smart types who, because of the general breakdown of society, had given up on their ambitions, studies, and careers. We’d get together at my apartment, listen to music, drink, and smoke. If I was alone, I would read, watch films, and wander through the city. Near my apartment, on Kosovska Street, there was a movie archive where they showed classic old films two or three times a day. I loved black-and-white crime films with Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum the most, but my absolute favorite was Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï with Alain Delon. I got a big poster of the film, framed and hammered it to a wall in the living room. I often strolled through that strange district of Palilula that leads from the city center toward distant suburbs. My favorite walk was from George Washington to Roosevelt Street. I’d go, say, past the Botanical Garden, then walk down November 29th Street, amble all the way to Pančevo Bridge, turn toward Bogoslovija, then walk down to New Cemetery, cut through Liberators of Belgrade Cemetery, pass through Professorial Colony, through all those beautiful houses where intellectuals and White Russians who escaped the October Revolution lived during the time of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, then up through Dalmatinska and back home.
There were, of course, women. I mainly indulged in brief and rather meaningless relationships, mostly with younger female students. At some point my parents realized that I wasn’t studying or doing anything, so they decided to try to discipline me by withholding money. It was sometime in the fall of 1998, a few months before the NATO bombing of Serbia began. I had just started working as a night guard. Some guy had a private pharmacy on March 27th Street near Palilula Market. Drug addicts had broken into the store a few times looking for narcotics and strong painkillers. He needed a guy on duty from midnight until eight in the morning. It was perfect for me: I usually read at night and slept in the morning anyway.
I bought a gun just to be safe, but no one actually tried to break in once they saw the light on and a guy inside. In February of 1999, I met Katarina there. She pounded on the door; she urgently needed Voltaren suppositories. Her son had a fever, and she couldn’t get anything else to work. Even though I wasn’t the pharmacist on duty and it wasn’t in my job description to sell drugs, I gave her a box. Two nights later, she came to thank me. I invited her for a coffee, and so it began.
She was four years older than me, her son was in third grade, she was divorced. We married in November of 2000, right after Slobodan Milošević fell from power and things were returning to normalcy. I was thirty-two and went back to college. It just suddenly made sense. Katarina’s husband had left her with a large apartment on Cvijićeva Street after the divorce. When we got married I moved in with her and rented my ground-floor apartment to students. Katarina was a dentist and earned good money, so she supported us financially while I, through some of my parents’ connections, got a job as a lawyer in one of the few banks that were still state-owned. The pay was good, and the position was mostly protocol. I barely lasted five years there.
Katarina supported my idea to open a kafana. I found a perfect place near the pharmacy I’d worked at as a night guard. I’d sit in the kafana, sipping a White Russian cocktail, imitating the hero of the only film from the nineties that I loved the way I loved old black-and-white films: The Big Lebowski. The kafana did quite well for some time. I enjoyed being the owner, flirting with girls who came in, treating them to drinks and all that, but I tried not to engage in full-on adultery. But then I hired Anđela as a waitress. Anđela was twenty-five and I was forty-five, but the age difference didn’t bother her. And stereotypically — in the middle of a midlife crisis — I was madly in love again, and this infatuation fucked up both my business and my marriage. Less than a year later, the kafana was bankrupt, Katarina had left me, and in the end I left Anđela too.
More than twenty years after I bought the apartment on the ground floor, and fifteen years after I started renting it out to students, I went back there. I didn’t know what I would do with myself. I had some savings because I kept the money various tenants paid me over the years in an account that I mostly hadn’t touched.
It was at that time that Nađa appeared at the door. After she left the apartment I looked at her business card. At the top was Sweden’s coat of arms, below was her name, then farther down, Embassy of the Kingdom of Sweden, while her number and e-mail address were at the very bottom. I was considering where to start.
My friend Mirko was a journalist specializing in stories about war and war crimes; I could ask him if he knew who came from Serbia to run riot in Rudo and thereabouts. At one point while owning the kafana, one of my bartenders was from Priboj. His name was Petar. He was too young to remember the war, but Priboj is a small place, and he’d know who to see about a guy by the nickname of Vojvoda.
Mirko didn’t answer the phone, so I called Petar. He still worked as a bartender, but now in some neighborhood near Bogoslovija. His shift had just started and the bar wasn’t crowded, so if I had time, he suggested, it’d be best that I come over right away for a drink.
Like he’d said, the kafana was practically empty. Petar was listening to Leonard Cohen. I sat down at the bar and ordered a whiskey. I started in a roundabout way, saying I’d recently heard from a high school friend now living in Canada that he hangs out with some guy from Priboj supposedly called Vojvodić. Petar frowned and said he’d never heard of any Vojvodić from Priboj. I said maybe I remembered wrong, maybe that’s not his last name, maybe they just call him Vojvoda. Petar burst into laughter: “Hey, now that’s a different thing. There’s a guy in Priboj who everyone calls Vojvoda, but fat chance he ever went to Canada.” I started asking questions, but the answers disappointed me. It turned out he was some village idiot, a slow kind of guy who lived on charity. He was called Vojvoda because before the war, during the rise of nationalism, he used to sing Chetnik songs in the street.