When I got to the Lecićs’ house, a man with long gray hair and a goatee — the whole musketeer look — opened the door. I’m Neboyša Tuka, he said to me in English. I held out my hand. Have you brought the buffalo’s milk? he asked me. I didn’t say anything. Go and buy us a liter of buffalo’s milk, he said. I started to step back, a little afraid. Slavko appeared at the door on his crutches and, pushing him aside, said stop fucking around, Neboyša.
Marko had spread on the table all sorts of nuts, cheeses, sausages, hard-boiled eggs sliced in half and served with coarsely ground pepper, a tomato salad, and a casserole of chopped vegetables and something spicy called ajvar. They poured a few glasses of beer. As we ate, Neboyša talked about Vojvodina and about his chauffeur, who was waiting outside for him, and he kept glancing out the window. I think my anxiety was sparked when I tried a bite of the apple tart, although when I think about it, that’s not right at all, because the anxiety was always there, but well camouflaged. Neboyša asked me something and, I don’t know why, I said yes. I drank half a glass of warm beer as an anesthetic. I was sweating. I felt the crumpled piece of paper in my pocket and became even more anxious. Gardoš, I whispered, as though to calm myself down. While she made the Turkish coffee, Zdena asked me if I’d been to Knez Mihajlova. It’s a really lovely pedestrianized street, she said, there are loads of restaurants and cafés with terraces. I don’t know, maybe, I replied, remembering the two Gypsy siblings dancing between the tables of a Degas painting. I lit a cigarette. I think you’d like it, she said. Neboyša said something in Serbian. Everyone laughed. They’re saying, Zdena explained to me as she sat down, that Knez Mihajlova is where everyone goes to be seen, all clean-shaven and dolled up and wearing their best clothes and their best shoes, even though they haven’t got two pennies to rub together. It’s ridiculous, added Neboyša. They spend all their money on some rip-off outfit and some rip-off coffee, when they don’t even have food to eat at home. Seventy percent of Belgrade is chronically depressed, said Slavko, and I wanted to ask him how he’d arrived at that number, but Marko, who until then had been quiet and pensive, started to tell me the story of a neighbor who used to beat a chopping board with a wet rag in the evenings. What for? I asked, finishing my coffee. So that we’d all think she was tenderizing a piece of meat, he said. She didn’t have the money to buy meat anymore, obviously, but it still mattered to her that her neighbors thought she did. Just like that lot on Knez Mihajlova, said Slavko. You see them walking around and having a coffee and laughing and they pretend they’re doing just fine, that they’re happy, that they’ve got money, but the truth is, they’ve built this glittering facade of clothes and makeup to hide the fact that they’re dead inside, to look the other way from the scars left by the war. Like the bombed-out buildings, I said without thinking about it much, and everyone looked at me in silence and no one said anything else after that.
I asked Zdena to call me a taxi so I could get to Gardoš. Ah, Gardoš is lovely, she said. There’s a tower, Eduardo. Make sure you go up the tower. You can see the whole city from there. Neboyša asked for another taxi to go back to Vojvodina. I looked at him, confused, and as we both walked out, I asked him about his chauffeur. What chauffeur?
Dusk had fallen when I got to Gardoš. All the streets were narrower and steeper and the Austro-Hungarian influence was obvious on this side of the river. I was still feeling anxious, and for some reason I was expecting to run into Milan at any moment, right there, hanging around on a street corner or sitting on a bench, and I started looking closely at everyone, scrutinizing them as they walked past. I forgot his face for a few seconds and had to concentrate to recall it. Pale, I said to myself. Long, shiny black hair, I said. A nocturnal gaze, I said, and probably smiled stupidly. I passed by a landau or something that in the darkness looked like a landau. I passed by a guy dressed like a pimp, and maybe he was a pimp, but with no whores in sight. I realized then that Gardoš was a very quiet cobblestoned neighborhood, and walking among the old houses and the lights that looked like gas lamps and through a thick blanket of fog, I felt plunged into the eighteenth century, maybe the nineteenth, and I suddenly had the feeling that I was the lost one and someone else was looking for me, that someone else was following me. I stopped and rather ridiculously looked back and decided there wasn’t anyone there, even though I now know very well that there was.
I went into a bar. It was empty and the waiter didn’t fill me with confidence. Then I went into a small restaurant, but no one spoke English. I kept walking. A little way off, at the top of a steep street, a group of people stood in a circle by a lamppost. I thought that in the middle of the circle there might be a Gypsy musician, an accordionist or perhaps a violinist, and I slowly began walking over. As I approached, I could make out six or seven men, all with cropped hair, black boots, thick chains, and leather jackets. They fell quiet as they watched me walk up the street. When I was closer to them, I looked up so that I could prove my passivity with a smile, and I noticed that one of them had a green or maybe black swastika tattooed on his neck. I felt sick. I quickened my pace. They shouted something in Serbian, but I ducked into a bar and went up to the counter and asked for a vinjak, which was the cheap whiskey, and lit a cigarette. Slowly, the sickness or fear or whatever it had been started to fade. At the other end of the bar, a fat guy was drinking something and reading the paper. I asked the barman if he spoke English. He shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and started jabbering incoherently. The fat guy lowered his paper and shouted that he spoke English, then asked what I wanted. I’m looking for somewhere with Gypsy music, I said, and he translated it for the barman, who answered fully, complete with jerks and gestures. Says there’s not much around these parts, but you can try a couple of cafés where they usually turn up. And even though he mentioned the names, they didn’t stay with me. He held his arm out and said that I should turn right out of the door (the neo-Nazis were to the left) and walk three hundred meters and both places were just there, right across from each other. I thanked him, finished my whiskey, and paid. The neo-Nazis had gone, but I imagined them waiting for me around some corner, knives in hand. I followed the route and probably got lost, because I didn’t find anything. The little streets were tightly wound and they all looked alike, and who the hell’s going to count exactly three hundred meters? I went into a corner shop. I bought cigarettes and a packet of chewing gum, and a short, thin, friendly Chinese man came outside with me and showed me how to get there.
Only one of the two cafés was open. I realized as I went in that calling it a café was a bit generous. Sitting around one of the two tables, smoking and drinking Turkish coffee and talking loudly, were three Gypsy men. All wore striped polyester suits. Their three felt hats were lined up on the table. They ignored me. The woman in charge didn’t speak English either, and I ordered a vinjak. I lit a cigarette. The Gypsies were talking loudly and clapping their hands as though there was no one else in the whole world, and in their world there probably wasn’t. One of them looked different from the other two, darker or perhaps more Arabic. Suddenly, all three of them sipped from their coffees at the same moment, and I took advantage of the silence to ask them if they spoke English. The three of them, waving their hands excitedly, said they didn’t and told me not to bother them, and so, I don’t know why, I said bueno, gracias, and one of them, the more Arabic-looking one, looked up, and I knew straight away that he’d understood. Do you speak Spanish? I asked. Yep, that I do, kid, he shouted in an Andalusian accent. From Seville? I asked. No way, he said, laughing, not from anywhere. But yeah, I spent some time in a village very close to Seville. He spoke a heavy, lethargic Spanish, as though he was dragging the syllables behind him. He asked me if I was from Spain and I said no, from Guatemala. From Guatemala, he repeated with surprise, and then he told his friends and the three of them laughed for a while. And what’s a kid from Guatemala doing around here? On holiday, I said. I drank the vinjak down in one gulp and ordered another. And do you live in Belgrade? No, no. In Čukarička Padina. It’s a little way away, in the country, he said, standing up and taking one of my cigarettes without asking and without saying thank you, even though they had a few packs of their own on the table. As though all cigarettes were communal property. He stood there. They call me Bebo, he said, holding out his hand. He had a big scar on his bald head. Can I buy you a drink, Bebo? I asked, and he shouted something to the woman, who immediately brought a glass and filled it with a thick, cold vodka. Looking up at him, I told Bebo I was there in Gardoš to try to find a bit of Gypsy music. My two friends are trumpeters, he said, gesturing at them with his glass of vodka. He said something to them in Romany and then, a bit suspiciously, asked me why there, why Gardoš. I weighed my words carefully, or maybe I didn’t. I’m looking for a Gypsy pianist, I said. Petar from Sremčica sent me, I said. His two friends understood me or at least understood the name Petar and the word Sremčica and started shouting and gesticulating with annoyance. Bebo seemed to be calming them down. He asked me how I knew Petar from Sremčica, but I didn’t have time to reply. His two friends were standing now, holding their black instrument cases, which I instinctively imagined to be covered with pictures of naked Thai women on the inside. I stood up too. Please, I said, and I don’t know how, but I managed to hear the sound of myself saying it, a pathetic, foreign sound, like when you hear a recording of your own voice. He downed his vodka and started talking with them in Romany. Got any money? he asked, and I said yes, of course, however much it takes, and then I regretted saying that. All right, he said, they’re going over there, but they say you definitely won’t be allowed in. It’s only for Gypsies. I wanted to ask where they were going. I kept my mouth shut. How much money you got? I handed him a five-thousand-dinar bill. More, for my friends, he said plaintively, and I handed him another five thousand. They shared the money between them. I’m not going, he said. My friends will take you, so follow them, but they insist you won’t be allowed in, all right? Bebo shouted something to the woman and she rushed out and poured a little more of the cold vodka into his glass. There was a silence that was too long. Bebo, have you ever heard of a Gypsy suddenly doing a pirouette? A what? What does it mean when a Gypsy suddenly does a pirouette? I said. Bebo shook his head. A pirouette? I don’t know, kid. There are some Manouche Gypsies, in France, who never stop doing pirouettes. They jump forward and backward and all around, like little frogs or something. I don’t know why they do it. He asked his friends and they said something to him, laughing. They say that if a Gypsy does a pirouette, it means that Gypsy’s crazy. And Bebo laughed hard. His friends walked out. I’d like to go with you, he said, but I got a warm woman waiting for me. Yekka buliasa nashti beshes pe done grastende, we say in Romany. It means that you can’t sit on two horses with one backside.