Everything was still blanketed in snow. We walked to Akademski Plato. In the middle of the square was a pompous statue of a man. I walked up to it. Ngejoš, the plaque read. The poet Ngejoš, Slavko said to me, puffing out little curls of air vapor from the effort of walking on crutches. He was a governor of Montenegro, he said. He was a priest who wrote erotic poems. He may have died of syphilis.
We went into the Plato Kafe. A guy with a milky complexion and dressed in a black jacket and black tie greeted us from the back of the room. His tousled hair gave him a Bob Dylan sort of look, but Bob Dylan in those first photos, where he seems vulnerable, almost childishly annoyed at having been woken up so early. Slobodan Vrbanović, he said, holding out his hand and telling me in English that he worked for the newspaper Danas. A fifteen-year-old dressed in his father’s suit, I thought, a suit from way back when that hung loosely over his pale and lanky body.
Slavko ordered four espressos and four vinjaks, which turned out to be a sort of cheap whiskey, and I ate a delicious pastry with cheese called kajmak. As Slavko and Davor began to bombard me with all the history and all the names and all the leaders that had paraded through this corner of the world, I tried not to think about naked women, and the boy reporter smoked in silence and bit his nails. Slavko: The word Balkan comes from the Turkish and means mountain. Davor: An important year, 1878, because for the first time, after centuries of Turkish rule from one side of the Danube and Austro-Hungarian rule from the other, Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania finally become independent. Slavko: And an autonomous Hungary is created. Davor: But all the others, meaning Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, remain under Austro-Hungarian control until the First World War. Davor again: And 1912’s another important year, because Albania finally becomes independent. Slavko: After the First World War, which was indeed triggered by a Bosnian Serb, the region is redefined and takes the name the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. Me, already half-lost and with Isabelle Adjani’s nipples sparkling at me all the way from Varennes like two rosy fireflies: What a name. Davor: But ten years later, in 1929, our king, Alexander the First, names it Yugoslavia, which means the land of the southern Slavs. Me: Much better, more poetic. Slavko: And the Macedonians assassinate him in 1934. Davor: But before that, in 1928, they also assassinated Radic, the Croatian independence leader. Slavko: The years of the Second World War are a mess. Davor, smiling: Yes. Slavko: The Italians and Albanians invade Kosovo. Davor: The Bulgarians invade Macedonia. Slavko: The Germans occupy Serbia. Davor: The Italians occupy Montenegro. Slavko, as though praying to a Superman figurine: Josip Broz Tito. And then he said: After the war, in 1945, Tito declares a socialist Yugoslavia that includes the six republics of Croatia, Montenegro, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Macedonia, and that will remain in place until 1991, when finally, after eighty-three years of an artificial union, the whole of Yugoslavia breaks up again. Davor, pressing his thumb and index finger together: Into tiny pieces. Slavko, showing me the palm of his hand: Five new countries. Davor: It could soon be six. Slavko: Or even seven. And the boy reporter, who so far had been too busy gnawing at his cuticles, raised his cigarette in the air and drew a picture with the smoke, saying: At schools all over the Balkan region they teach you to draw borders on the map with an inkless pen.
Dizzy from the whiskey, or maybe from the overdose of history, or maybe from something much more ephemeral or even erotic, I said nothing, although I probably could have said: The only way to tell a story is to stutter it eloquently, or at least that’s what a Brooklyn friend who stuttered only when it suited him used to tell me. Or maybe I could have said: Once, in a hotel in Ilhéus, Lía fell in love with a hole someone had made in the back of the door of her room, a deep, inexplicable, sublime hole that she swore kept getting bigger and deeper every day. Or maybe I could have said: My grandfather was probably trained by a Polish boxer in Auschwitz. Or maybe I could have said: I’m back in the little glass jar again, all mixed up with hundreds of little blue boys and little pink girls. Or maybe I could have said: Once, a half-Serbian, half-Gypsy boy wanted to become a Gypsy musician, and so he said goodbye to his family, did a pirouette in the middle of a forest, and disappeared forever among the trees of Belgrade. Or maybe I could have said: Epistrophy doesn’t actually mean a fucking thing. But I didn’t say anything, luckily.
Davor knocked back what was left of his espresso and, looking at his watch, said he had to go, that it was already time to stop by the hotel for another group of architectural tourists. He didn’t smile. I’m going too, said Slavko. My leg’s hurting a bit and I’d rather be lying down. But you two stay, he added, and then he said something in Serbian to the boy reporter. I asked Slobodan if he knew the bohemian quarter. Skadarlija, I read from my notes. That’s near where I live, he said. Of course, shouted Slavko with a smile, Eduardo wants to listen to a bit of Gypsy music, and my girlfriend recommended going to the cafés in Skadarlija. Really, you want to hear Gypsy music? Slobodan asked me, but I wasn’t sure if he was curious or disapproving, or both. I said I’d buy him a beer if he came with me. Slobodan started mumbling in Serbian, probably that it was already getting late, that they’d be waiting for him at home, that his father needed the suit back. Slavko said something to him in Serbian and gave him a hefty slap on the back, and it was as though he’d unjammed a robot, because Slobodan stopped mumbling immediately and said yes, of course, let’s go and hear some Gypsy music.
Skadarlija struck me as more of a decadent neighborhood than a bohemian one, but an attractive sort of decadent, a seductive decadent, like the elaborate speech of a serial killer. We walked for a while. The cold had sharpened and it was still snowing and the snow made everything nobler and more dreamlike and deceptive. Slobodan told me straight out that he hated Gypsies, that most Serbs hated Gypsies, that they were good musicians, sure, but they were also a bunch of fools and lazy slobs. And beggars, he added. Just look at that. There was an old, fat Gypsy woman sitting on the ground with a flaccid breast hanging out. She held out her hand to us while she suckled a baby girl. I gave her a coin, thinking that I’d never have given anything to a Mayan woman breast-feeding in the street, then decided it would be best to forget that thought as soon as possible. Slobodan sighed with distaste.
We went into a little café with no one in it. Then we went into another overlit café that didn’t have a name or at least didn’t have one written anywhere. The tables were empty. On the bar there were three bottles and maybe a dozen upturned glasses. Slobodan talked to the waiter for a while and then told me we should go, that there was a place farther along that had live music. It’s called Nebe-ski Narod, he said as we crossed the street. It’s a Serbian saying, he said. It means people of the heavens, he said. I thought about ethnic cleansing. I thought about racial fanaticisms. I thought about Srebrenica. I thought about the intolerance of any people who think they’re the chosen ones, an intolerance that, since my childhood, when they taught me to pray to a God that for some reason spoke only Hebrew, I knew only too well. And as we walked into the People of the Heavens, I smiled at Slobodan as sarcastically as I could.