I hugged Slavko goodbye and then Zdena and her dad took me to the little apartment on Nedeljka Čabrinovića. Marko waited in the car. Even though I was a bit drunk, I managed to make it up the four flights of stairs and listen to Zdena as she explained how to open the door and how to turn on the water heater. It’s Slavko’s apartment, she said, but we’ve fixed it up a bit for you. I thanked her. Seriously, Zdena, I’m really interested in Gypsy music, I said with a mixture of pathos and pleading that took me right back to being seven years old, standing at the gates of the zoo, and what a tantrum I threw with my mother because I was so bent on her buying me a wrestling mask, the one that El Santo wore. Zdena just smiled. Then she wrote the addresses and phone numbers on a slip of paper and told me that I should take only taxis marked Beo or Yellow or Pink or Lux or Maxis or Bell and no others. Do viđenja, she said, which means goodbye. Do viđenja, I repeated.
I went to bed without getting undressed and without unpacking anything, and I remember that the last thing I thought of before falling into a deep sleep was the word Yugoslavia.
I woke up with a headache, but two aspirins and a long, hot shower made me feel much better. I was about to go out, when the phone rang. It was Zdena. In a sleepy voice, she told me she’d been thinking about what I’d asked her about Gypsy music and that I could walk down Knez Mihajlova Street, or through a bohemian neighborhood called Skadarlija. Write it down. Skadarlija. There are some really nice cafés there where Gypsies play sometimes. I thanked her, and in the background I could hear Slavko whispering something. Listen, Slavko says that he’s going to be here all day, working, so you can come over whenever you like. Working on what? I thought a bit apprehensively, but I just thanked her again. Before I hung up, Zdena listed the names of the genuine taxi companies again, one by one.
It was snowing softly. I was hungry and wanted a coffee, but I didn’t have any local currency with me. Dinars, they’re called. After walking down Pozeska Street for a while, I went into a bank, and a woman who I thought looked like a chubby, Balkan version of Penelope Cruz, although I’m not sure why—her mouth, perhaps—asked me to show her my passport and fill out some forms. I had to wait almost half an hour before she gave me a wad of old bills that, oddly, still said Banka Jugoslavije. What a mess of a country, I thought as I walked out. Next to the bank there was a little café. It was empty. On one wall they’d hung two photos: one of Tito and one, a little bigger, of the CHiPs cops, the dark one and the blond one, holding their helmets. Coffee, I said to the waiter, miming a huge cup of coffee. Kafa, he said, and then he said something else. I just shrugged. I pointed to some ham rolls that he had on the counter and that looked a bit stale. I finished everything quickly, gave him a few dinars, almost nothing really, and walked out. It wasn’t snowing anymore but it wasn’t sunny either. At a kiosk I bought a pack of Lucky Strikes (Slavko’s influence, of course), a lighter, and two bars of chocolate, and then, already on my way to the bohemian quarter that Zdena had made me write the name of, I felt slightly nervous as I realized I hadn’t checked the name of the taxi company. I opened the window, lit a cigarette, and put on my best murderer’s face.
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?
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 s
peech 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 Nebeski 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.
The Polish Boxer Page 11