People wrapped up in gray and black. More bombed-out buildings. New smells and sounds that were also somehow the same ones as always. There’s nothing like the fear of getting lost in an unknown city, I thought as I saw the guy’s shrewd eyes in the rearview mirror. We went past the pink police station, and for some reason I felt safer. We stopped at a light. Some way off, sitting alone on what seemed to be a Persian rug, was a kid dressed in rags, playing the accordion. Ciganin? I asked the taxi driver — I don’t know how I remembered the word — and he nodded. He said something that sounded like an insult. I gave him a bit of money and got out.
The kid was dressed up, even though everything clashed with everything else: olive green jacket, corduroy pants, green-and-blue-striped shirt, gray felt hat. I threw a coin into the little bronze pot he had by his shoes, and without stopping, he smiled with his half-rotten teeth. It was the same Gypsy music I already knew, but it was also completely different. More visceral, or maybe more rural. The tune sounded sweet and bitter at the same time. Like his face, I thought. Beneath the music, beyond the music, I could hear his little fingernails tip-tapping on the keys and buttons. I knelt down. He stopped without looking up. I threw another coin into the bronze pot and he started playing again. And we went back and forth like that for a while, like cat and mouse. Every time the music stopped, I’d throw another coin and he’d play for a bit before stopping again. At one of these moments, when the kid stopped playing, he told me something in Serbian or maybe in Romany. I just shrugged and shook my head, but the kid kept talking and laughing as if I understood him or as if it didn’t matter if I understood him. Then, still talking to me, he started to play chords that somehow accompanied what he was telling me. Sometimes it sounded like a story, sometimes like a song, and sometimes it sounded like a joke. Impossible to know. He stopped playing. He asked me something and this time waited in silence for a reply. He stood up and asked me again, impatiently, almost annoyed. I got up too.
Then, out of nowhere, a Gypsy girl appeared, a bit older and a lot darker than he was, carrying a handful of withered roses. She wore a long, flowery dress, a flowery handkerchief on her head, and a thick, moth-eaten green wool sweater. She smelled like passion fruit. She handed me a rose and I gave her a ten-dinar bill. She took the bill and then picked up the coins from the bronze pot and put it all down her blouse, although she looked too young to be wearing a bra. I took out my cigarettes, and the boy, making a sign with his fingers, asked me for one. I held out the open pack. He took five. She also took five. They both stashed their cigarettes away, took one more each, and put them in their mouths. I gave them a light. The girl grabbed my right hand and started tracing the lines of my palm with her index finger: she was reading it for me or acting as if she was reading it for me without my understanding anything. She looked delighted. Then she looked worried. She gave me back my hand and held out her own. I gave her another ten dinars. Then the boy, without taking his accordion off, rolled up the little rug, threw it over his shoulder, and the three of us started walking as we smoked.
It was like they existed outside of this world. I don’t know how else to explain it. People mostly seemed to ignore them and, in turn, they mostly seemed to ignore people. They laughed, fooled around, and smoked happily away. They didn’t bat an eyelid when a Serbian teenager spat on them. Nor when a man talking on his cell phone pushed past them. As though the two of them weren’t even there. Negligible. Meaningless. Worse than immaterial. And watching them walk under an elegant dusting of snow that I decided was appropriate, I remembered Milan’s greatest talent.
We walked a long way, I don’t know how long, with me always three or four paces behind. They knew I was there, following them, but they didn’t say anything to me, nor did they turn around to look at me except for when they felt like another cigarette. My pleasure, and we kept on walking in the same way.
It was getting dark. We entered a neighborhood that appeared more refined, less bombed-out, you could say, with restaurants and bars and little open-air cafés. The boy started playing a tune. The girl shouted something to me and grabbed my scarf and coiled it around her neck and started to twirl and dance as she skipped along, holding the withered roses out to passersby and shaking the bronze pot at them and singing who knows what words. They would make their way through the café terraces, circling around the densely packed tables, and the whole scene looked like it was taken from some Degas painting, only an aberrant and more proletarian one: Gypsy dancer instead of pompous ballerinas, Serbian workers instead of French intellectuals, and always, there in the background, an accordionist. Nobody paid them any attention, nobody gave them a penny, nobody wanted a rose, but they carried on just as lively and cheerful as before, and it occurred to me that singing and dancing mattered more to them than making money, and that money was just a pretext for singing and dancing and mocking everyone, because there’s no doubt that, in their way, they were mocking everyone. I stayed a little way off, inspecting them like an embarrassed entomologist, but whether embarrassed for them or for the Serbs in general or for myself, I don’t know.
They stopped in front of a food stall. An old mustachioed man started shouting something at them, waving his arms and shooing them away like you’d shoo away flies or stray dogs. I told him in English not to worry, that I’d pay. He seemed to understand. Still grumbling and complaining, he handed me three kebab sticks with some kind of meat on them. Ćevapčići, he said. The girl snatched them from me, and before I knew what was happening, the two of them had already disappeared around a corner with all the food. I sighed and forced a bitter, joyless smile, a wet socks kind of smile. The old man shook his head, as if to say I warned you, you idiot. I asked him for another kebab and, still feeling a little mournful, ate it standing up, with a beer that was too warm and then another beer that was also too warm. I paid. I lit my last cigarette and walked off.
When I was already in who knows what kind of taxi, on my way back to the apartment, it hit me that the little snake had gone off with my scarf as well.
The next day, the phone woke me up. It was Slavko. He said I should get ready quickly, that he and a friend would come by in half an hour so we could go and get something to drink, and he hung up.
Davor gets annoyed like a proper Montenegrin, said Slavko in English, lying in the backseat, his leg stretched right out. The great aesthetic of socialist architecture, said Davor in the cumbersome English of a tour guide. That’s what he’s like, he’s reckless, added Slavko. Square gray building, square leaden building, and oh, what have we here, said Davor with raised eyebrows and outstretched hand, a square grayish building. So don’t even think about annoying him, said Slavko. Please, Davor continued sternly, try not to be quite so enthused about the brilliance of the architects from socialist Yugoslavia. Then he said something in Serbian and sighed. His name was Davor Zdravić. He was tall, bearded, blond, already half-bald, and he worked as a notary or a lawyer or something I didn’t quite get. In the sunken contours of his eyes was the naturally ironic, gently caricatured air of one who smiles only when he is being very serious. I like García Márquez, he said suddenly. And also Cantinflas. Once, he said as he looked for a place to park the car, I slept with a girl from Ecuador, which is almost like saying Guatemala, right?