Somewhere before Bijeljina, athletically built boys in dark gray overalls stood in the way. I recognized a Czech automatic pistol in their belt Scorpion - Warsaw Pact's response to Israel's Uzi. During a long year in Zagreb as a soldier, I learned to unfold and assemble in the early eighties M 61 Ch. I was expected to carry a Russian rifle on my shoulder during the war Arrow 2M, an anti-aircraft missile launcher. And the rules dictated that every soldier also have personal weapons. I knew that Scorpion it was not made to be aimed. During a city street fight, you put your hand around the corner and in a second you create a cloud of bullets. Black steel now glimmers ominously from the holster of the young man who pierces me with poisonous green eyes while holding my ID card in his hand. With almost no hair cut, the guy didn't say a word. He had just turned to get off the bus when, in the dead silence, a woman's voice squeaked unpleasantly from the back of the bus: Boban, is that you?
The guy turned around, approached the brunette girl who was looking at him with a smile. He tried to hide his confusion. He said something quietly to her. And she retorted loud enough for everyone to hear: What are you doing here, there is a pregnant woman and a child in Bratunac. Go to them.
Boban put his finger to his mouth, looking at her stiffly. He turned on his heel and left.
Bijeljina heavy blues
After another search at the border between BiH and Serbia - then there was no border crossing, only a bridge in front of which a car marked "militia" was stopped - the bus shakes after every pothole in the road, letting these images tremble in my head. Everything smells of motor oil, dust and human sweat. Folk thrash blares from a crackling speaker.
Cafe Istanbul passed by the window through which I was staring in Bijeljina, whose charred windows gaped at the street. Ten days ago, Seselj's paramilitaries threw a bomb at him. That was the prelude to the orgy of violence that began with the Arkanians entering the city. What I could not yet see in the domestic newspapers, I will see much later, in Germany: American photographer Ron Haviv published a video of Maks Golubović, a Belgrade DJ, dealer and member of the Serbian Volunteer Guard, kicking the murdered Tifa Šabanović. We pass by the stage of that savagery. At the station in Bijeljina, many get off, some get on. As if everything is in the best order.
Until that moment, Bijeljina had a different emotional color for me. R. was a little older than me, she studied at the same Sarajevo faculty. We had the same long hair down to our backs. She was slim and hot. We listened to the same music. I don't remember how we got along. But I remember that we broke up at the buffet just about a month later Titanik - at that time I loved symbolic gestures, so I scheduled the last meeting in that Sarajevo cafe, which I have never entered before or since. I don't know why we were together, nor why we parted. R. was from Bijeljina. Like Zićo, also a student at our faculty, with an earring in his ear. He sold me his record "Radar love" by the band Golden Earing, because he went into pop and new wave stuff and as a tapestry does, discarding a part of himself and he discarded his former taste in music. I hope they are both well. I hope that Zićo, as a rocker with a Muslim name, survived the terror. But I can't know that.
"We will flatten Sarajevo"
All this goes through my head as the bus speeds across the plain. I no longer remember the bus station in Novi Sad, nor the transfer to Belgrade. But I can remember arriving at the Belgrade bus station at any moment, as if by pressing a button. If I feel that place on my mental configuration - from the inner stock of images, several scenes that time has taken away the color but not the anxiety immediately arise.
Everything is here again. Toothless porters to grab my suitcase, an unusually large number of uniforms made of rough, green cloth. The day is sunny in memory. Suitcases didn't have wheels back then. This ordinary brown suitcase of mine, which was additionally fastened with straps, was already warning me of its overcrowding with a sharp pain in my shoulder. The wardrobe has a Roma face. A middle-aged woman with melancholic drooping eyelids. Before handing over the suitcase, I take out a passport, high school diploma, college diploma, and some underwear in one bag. I put reading glasses in the suitcase, the kind that Oliver Dragojević wore all his life. Inside, the best pieces of clothing, one winter jacket, one summer jacket, and shoes, were put together by my mother's hands. Several books with my name and surname written on their covers. I don't remember the rest. I was satisfied when I put the coupon in my wallet and walked towards the park near the Faculty of Economics. In the crowded garden of the station pub, a ragged reservist was stacking empty beer bottles on the table in front of him. Blurred vision, unshaven, matted hair. He was in his own beer nirvana. He raised his head, his dark eyes saw something that I could not: "We will level Sarajevo!!!"
This he shouted with surprising eloquence, his voice cracking with tobacco. Two young men behind me laughed as they passed. Someone called out from another corner of the garden: "Long live". The others didn't care. This leveler from Sarajevo was at the bottom of the food chain, at the very top were the dangerous Belgrade guys, the deserving freelancers of the Service with expensive sunglasses and designer clothes. Above them all was the president's face smiling from the kiosk window behind the creature that promised an apocalyptic fate for the city I loved.
Foreign exchange, foreign exchange
I decided to go up the hill to Zelenjak. Where the steep alley turns to the left, among the sellers of smuggled goods who were offering them in cardboard boxes, there were guys in tracksuits with thick gold chains glittering on their chests. Devizzzze, devizzzze, Zelenjak buzzed all the way to Knez Mihailova. I found change in my pocket and entered the booth. I called the number written in ballpoint pen on my palm.
Goran contacted me, a man whom I met almost a decade ago in Polimlje as a gifted painter and grumpy drunk. He battled painting and plans to go to Italy and study the Renaissance masters. He graduated from the Faculty of Law in Belgrade, married a woman from Belgrade, and they had a son. He got a job in a socialist company as a lawyer. We agreed to meet at Moscow.
I decided to walk to Kalemegdan. Somewhere behind the fountain near the Faculty of Philosophy, in the middle of the street, a man stands with his legs crossed. Camouflage uniform, boots, military belt, eyes hidden behind sunglasses. Parachute beret. Shouting into the megaphone. He talks about drinking Western drinks in the gardens of Belgrade taverns while the brothers from Prekodri are bleeding. His voice wavers between pleading and threatening. A circle of curious people forms around him. Most people rush through their work. I pause too. I've never seen a warmonger this close. Except for one chance meeting with Duke Seselj in a bookstore Period. Much later I found out that the street commando was my namesake, that he was a film director and that he considered himself an honest man. Thirty years later, I will regularly see him on boulevard television as an expert on everything, and especially on Serbia. He became the universal rhetorical weapon of the government, while Serbia became a majority country according to his intellectual standards.
One hundred marks
Goran arrived smiling. We loved hanging out. I described the trip to him. He listened to me carefully. He frowned and asked where I was going now. I said that I want to go to Nuremberg, there is a girl from Tuzla with whom I am supposedly in a relationship, although I have not seen her for several months, since she went to Germany with her friend Marina.
It turns out that I don't have enough money for the ticket. Goran and I moved from bar to bar, where he tried to persuade acquaintances to lend me a hundred marks. People are imaginative when they make up excuses.
He called the newly minted architect and hobby painter Dejan B. I also met him one summer in Ivangrad. During my postgraduate student days in a dormitory in Karaburma, Dejan, who married a beautiful Latin American woman and designed the first houses for the new Belgrade elite, asked me to speak at the opening of an exhibition in a Belgrade gallery. I have done that. The Montenegrin was disappointed because I did not praise him enough. Now Dejan is standing in front of me, brand-name clothes, fake smile.
- If I give you 100 marks, you will screw me, he said with a giggle, as if he had told a bad joke.
- How can you be such a rascal, Goran asked him.
And that was it. In Belgrade, for the first time, I had the feeling that the mousetrap door had closed behind me.
The thumb is a real connoisseur
I slept with Goran's family for three nights, my two-year-old son climbed onto my shoulders, I came up with a little song for him that I had to repeat until I fainted:
The thumb is a real connoisseur - it always knows where I am.
The index finger always tells who is telling the truth and who is lying.
The middle one is a real freak, he is longer than his shorter brothers.
Domali must not fail. And the little one? And the little one always complains about being so little.
His wife Jasna and he comforted me - everything will be fine. S. from Nuremberg called. They will send me 100 marks for Vesna, a handball member of the Yugoslav national team who plays in Nuremberg and comes home for a few days. I spent that April weekend in Belgrade, but I only remember Sunday. Goran's phone rang, Vesna answered, I can come to New Belgrade for 100 marks. Goran tied me up in his "jugić", we made our way through the crowd on the bridge, turned around the indicated block. The elevator stank. Upstairs, on the top floor, a pretty girl with a page haircut opened the door for me. She gave me a bill of one hundred marks and a note: "Come here, what are you going to do there, if someone kills you?!".
Nuremberg, one way
Goran drove me to the bus station. I exchanged money at the first monkey-like dealer. Then I went to the counter where tickets for abroad are sold. "Nuremberg in one direction," I said. The bus left tomorrow at 10.
I went to the cloakroom, as I did the two previous days, to pay extra for the suitcase for another 24 hours. Then Goran and I went to the city. It was already evening. Under the hotel Prague there was a night bar Cave. The beers arrived as if on an endless conveyor belt. We talked, sang "Sons of Whores", and went crazy. We got out of there before dawn. Everyone was already asleep in the studio apartment. Soon, Goran also snored slightly, his little son muttered something in his sleep. I couldn't sleep. I looked out the window, from the fourth floor, I don't remember the street, but it could have been Cetinska. Boulevard width on November 29, swarm of lights. The beast from Belgrade has reconciled. Here and there the headlights flash and chase the shadows from the ceiling, then they return. My life is about to break, and I, numb inside, accept it seemingly easily - let it be as it must be. I will pay the price of deciding not to kill and not to be killed. I will never forget Goran for holding me when I needed to. Even though they hadn't heard from each other for almost 15 years, even though he was now Milo's ambassador to a neighboring country.
I wanted to pick up my suitcase at the dressing room. There were no coupons in the wallet. I was horrified. I begged the wardrobe to at least see if the suitcase was there. I entered among the bags and suitcases, lined up on several racks. My suitcase was not there. Someone picked it up for me. Even now, after three decades, I don't know how the coupon got into someone else's hands.
I thought it was only fair that I leave the country with one bag containing documents, underpants and socks. And a book of poems by Yehuda Amihai, a man who was born in Würzburg and died in Jerusalem.
When I left it was Monday, April 13, 1992. At least that's what it says on the stamp from the Bački Breg border crossing in the old Yugoslav passport.
Bonus video:
