That couldn’t be the guy who had taken Nađa’s father. I lit a cigarette, and as I put the lighter back in my pocket, I felt my phone vibrate. A message from Mirko. He’d been doing an interview outside the city in Novi Sad earlier and hadn’t been able to answer. Now he was on his way to Belgrade and hadn’t been able to grab a beer. Great, I texted back and sent him the address of where I was. As time passed, the kafana slowly filled. Petar had less time to chat, but when I realized he couldn’t help me I wasn’t really up for talking anyway. I waited for Mirko, turning to the door every time I heard someone walk in. They were the typical early evening kafana customers from the edge of the city. Like in one of those Springsteen songs, these were people who’d lost something that was the center of their lives: sometimes a woman, sometimes family, sometimes work, sometimes an apartment — sometimes all of it at once — and they were just looking to get through the day. They bet on soccer, bummed cigarettes, drank the cheapest rakija only to pass the time faster, until it was time to go to sleep, and after hundreds and thousands of these days and nights, it came time to die.
At first glance, Mirko looked like a regular at one of these joints: unshaven, balding, with an eternal cigarette in his hand. Disheveled clothes. He was, however, one of the most reputable journalists in Serbia. He had been a brilliant medical student at the time the war broke out. In the summer of 1992, during the break between his third and fourth years, and after he’d taken all of his exams, he was hired as a fixer for foreign journalists reporting from Bosnia. He never went back to school, or even to his old life. The horrors he witnessed urged him toward a search for truth through writing. He became a journalist, focusing on writing about the war, war crimes, criminal privatization, and transitional theft.
He was very skinny and could drink three, four liters of beer without seeming drunk. It wasn’t clear to me how he could hold that much liquid in his body. He was on his third pint when I asked him about a guy named Vojvoda who ran around Rudo and that area.
“You know what,” he said, “that’s the thing about the war in Bosnia. It was so awful that there were some places where, for no reason whatsoever, thirty or forty people were killed, but your automatic reaction was to say that nothing notable happened there since in neighboring cities hundreds, even thousands, were killed. Same with Rudo: shit happened there, but much less compared to Foča or Višegrad. But I think I remember a few accounts of the guy you’re thinking of. He ran a small unit that mainly targeted prominent rich people who sometimes managed to survive because of their connections with local police and military at the beginning of the war, in small towns where there wasn’t any direct armed conflict. They would pay money for protection, and it would keep them safe for a few months. In addition to Rudo, I think he also showed up in Čajniče and Trebinje, all during the summer of 1992. By early fall he was gone. He was probably a careful guy, stole as much as he could, then went back to Serbia to milk it as long as possible. Yeah, he was definitely from Serbia, somewhere close to the border, like southeastern Bosnia or eastern Herzegovina, but I don’t know how you singled out Priboj and Raška — it could’ve easily been some other place. I think he had one of those generic names like loads of other Serbs — our ‘John Smith,’ if you know what I mean.”
When I asked him if it was possible that Vojvoda was in Belgrade these days, Mirko said of course it was possible; people from all over Serbia were moving to Belgrade en masse.
We parted ways around ten in the evening. I was completely plastered; he looked like he had been drinking tea the whole time. On the way out he said, “You know, if you want to find this guy, the best thing would be to check out Romanija, a hole-in-the-wall near the Pančevo Bridge run by Ranko — they call him ‘Leopard.’ He did five years in prison for crimes around Rogatica. A lot of people who fought in that area hang around there. Someone there’s gotta know him. But be careful, those guys are fucked up. And take money to buy them a few rounds of rakija. That’s the easiest way to loosen them up.”
On the way home, I went to KGB for one more drink. It was a kafana near my apartment named after the Russian secret service, an appropriate symbol of the Serbs’ ambivalent attitude toward everything Russian and Communist. With that thought in mind, I ordered a White Russian. I was resolved to only have one. It wouldn’t bode well for me to be hungover tomorrow.
My life would certainly be different if I’d been rational enough to stop drinking when I should have. And unfortunately, KGB is one of those kafanas that’s open as long as there’s a customer. So I stuck to the bar until four in the morning, drinking at least five cocktails too many.
It took me ten minutes to drag myself home, then I slept for ten hours. I woke up around half past two in the afternoon. A cocktail hangover is fucking rough, but when a man gets enough sleep everything’s better. Anyway, it was unlikely that Romanija would even open before four or five in the evening, and it was highly unlikely that the types I was looking for would come in before nightfall.
I first went to the Stara Hercegovina restaurant to eat some veal soup, pljeskavica with kajmak, and šopska salad. That combination raises the dead. I had to be somewhat fresh: in order to gain the trust of the old drunkards there, I’d have to drink too.
At six thirty p.m. I was at Romanija. The kafana was in semidarkness because only one flickering bulb illuminated it. Inside were five tables, two of which were occupied. At each sat a guy in his sixties. On the tables were checkered tablecloths and ashtrays. I sat down and ordered šljivovica, a plum brandy.
The fat, middle-aged waitress looked grotesque in a miniskirt. As she came toward me with a tray in her hands, one of the guys smacked her ass. She acted like she didn’t even notice. Another guy stared into the darkness through the window. No one here seemed particularly communicative.
After drinking two brandies alone, it turned out my lighter wasn’t working, so I went to beg a light off the guy who had unsuccessfully attempted to sexually harass a pudgy woman. I figured he was giving communication a wild shot. The whole time, the other guy stared off into the dark like a zombie.
This guy handed me his lighter without a word. When I lit the cigarette he motioned for me to join him at his table, again without a word. He waved at the waitress and said: “Give us two rakijas on his tab.” I nodded my head. He asked me why I was in the bar. Said he’d never seen me before.
He had a strong Bosnian accent, which gave me an idea: I told him, “I’m Sarajevan; the war started while I was a student in America, I lived there a long time and recently came back. Some friends from high school told me about a graduation reunion, and I only then learned that my best childhood friend had been killed in the war. His name was Bogdan and he died as a Serbian soldier somewhere around Rudo, so I’m interested in knowing more about his death, since no one in our class is in contact with his family. You know how it is in Sarajevo: before the war we were all together — Serbs, Croats, Muslims, Jews, you know — and after the war, everything fell apart.” I made up a bunch of lies from a kernel of truth, hoping it wouldn’t sound like complete bullshit.