by Reif Larsen
They pushed him out into the street. He stumbled, righted himself, and then let himself fall. He felt as if he could destroy a thousand men if only he had the strength. But he did not have the strength, and so he sat on the sidewalk next to a bright red Passat and wept. He wept for his wife, and he wept for the town that was once his home, the town that now watched him silently.
Danilo got up and began to walk through the streets of Višegrad. Only a few souls had ventured outside. He passed the Dom Kulture and the restaurant where Darinka had taken him on his sixteenth birthday. He passed the town square where his boys had put on the Christmas vertep performances. He passed the sporting goods store where Miša had bought his brother those blue trainers. It was now closed for good, its shelves overturned, its windows broken.
He came upon a woman selling ragged beets from a basket. Danilo handed her a coin and smiled through his tears.
“Be well, Danilo Danilovic,” she mumbled.
With the beet in his hand, he came around the corner, and there was the bridge. Mehmed-paša’s bridge. Empty. As always, the Drina flowed silently beneath. Not for the first time, Danilo was struck by the feat of building such a massive stone construction all those years ago. He thought of all the lives sacrificed in order to erect a road from this side to the other. Danilo made his way out to the kapija, halfway between the two banks. He did not care if they shot him. To die crossing the bridge—this could be the most noble of all deaths.
They did not shoot him. He stood with his beet and placed his hand on the cold stone of the bridge, scrubbed clean of its blood. He watched the river. A few pages from a forgotten book were floating on its surface.
“Stoja,” he said. And he knew then that she was still alive.
• • •
THAT NIGHT, HE AGAIN tried to call his son. The phone line clicked and popped, but finally, through some miracle of the wires, his call connected. Miroslav’s roommate picked up. He said Miroslav had moved out of the flat two weeks earlier. He didn’t know to where. He didn’t have a new number.
“This is an emergency,” said Danilo hopelessly. “I need to know where he lives. Who knows where he lives now?”
“No offense to you, but your son’s a bit of an asshole,” said the roommate. “He didn’t pay rent for six months, so we kicked him out.”
“He’s a good boy,” said Danilo. “It’s not easy.”
“He’s a dick. I’m not saying it’s your fault. Some people are just dicks,” the roommate said and hung up.
• • •
TWO DAYS LATER, Danilo awoke to Dragan knocking on his door.
“They found her,” he said.
“Where?”
“In the river.”
“In the river?” said Danilo. “Are you sure it’s her?”
“They say it’s her.”
“Did she suffer?”
“She’s not suffering now.”
“Oh, Stoja!” He leaned against the threshold. “Stoja, my Stoja.”
His cousin kissed his cheek, and the two men stood like this for some time.
• • •
THE POLICE, WHO SUPPOSEDLY had found the body in the river and deemed the death an accidental drowning, had sealed the body in a coffin and then delivered the coffin to the town morgue, with strict instructions to keep the coffin shut.
“I’d like to see her,” Danilo said to the mortician when he went to identify the body and sign the paperwork.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said the mortician.
“But how do I know it’s her?” said Danilo.
“She’s already been identified.”
“But what if she’s not dead?”
“She’s dead. It’s my job,” said the man. His voice turned soft and instructive as he handed Danilo the papers. “I know this can be difficult, but you must sign here, please. The signature is the first step in the process.”
• • •
AT THE FUNERAL, Danilo wore his only suit. Stoja had helped him choose it for their wedding. Only Dragan, his parents, and a handful of friends attended. Stoja’s two boys were not present to see their mother being put to rest. Their closest neighbors were also conspicuously absent, perhaps fearful of how their presence might be interpreted by Lukic and his men.
• • •
SOMEONE HAD NESTLED A vase of wild lilacs into the dirt of the freshly dug grave. The doll made of wood and string that they had seen next to the red bicycle was sitting against the vase. There was no note.
Halfway through the service, it began to rain. The priest paused in his sermon to look up at the sky. His tongue slipped out between his lips and caught a drop of water, and then he bowed his head and began again.
5
Less than a month later, as an unusually cold, early fall descended upon them, Danilo sold his last cow to Slavko Novakovic.
“Where are you headed?” Slavko asked, rubbing the side of the animal.
“To find my son,” said Danilo.
He found locks for the farmhouse and the barn. He had never locked these buildings before, and the click of the mechanism made his blood run cold. Before he closed up the barn, he stood before Stoja’s altar. The wax frozen into white rivers. He looked up and saw the elephant watching him through the dust-filled darkness. He touched its lone ear. A certain kind of warmth.
“Someday, you will walk the bridge,” he said. “I promise.”
He took down one of her icons and slipped it into his bag.
At the bus stop, two idle young men in White Eagle uniforms sat on the hood of a car, picking at the remains of what looked like a chocolate cake. They watched the line of people shuffling onto the bus. As he boarded, Danilo glanced back. One of the men blew him a kiss.
• • •
MANY HOURS LATER, after passing through what seemed like dozens of army checkpoints, in which IDs were shown and reshown and a man he did not recognize was dragged screaming from the bus by his legs, they finally arrived in the city. Rolling past row after row of tall buildings, Danilo realized he hadn’t been to Belgrade since that trip with his mother to see the illuminated manuscript forty years ago. Had it really been that long? He tried to decide what was worse: having never left Višegrad or not realizing he had never left Višegrad.
He was gathering up his two small bags from beneath the bus when he heard someone yell his name.
“Danilo! Danilo Danilovic!”
He turned and saw Ilija Dragonovic trundling toward him in a suit that could barely contain his great body. Ilija was a distant relative who had left for the city twenty years ago. Danilo had written to him about his arrival but had never received a reply.
“Danilo Danilovic!” Ilija hugged Danilo as if they were brothers. “Welcome to Belgrade. Everything is such shit, but welcome.”
Ilija was over two meters tall. He was a former basketball player who had flirted with playing on the national team before a blown-out knee destroyed his jump shot. Now he made a living selling washing machines.
“Business is no good,” he said, weaving his car through the crowded streets. “No one wants to buy a new unit. Do you want to buy a new unit? No, because maybe a bomb will fall on your house tomorrow and then your new unit is totally fucked. I understand. But I’m still pissed off—WATCH OUT, LADY!” He swerved, then smiled at a terrified Danilo. “It’s important to remind people of life, yes?”
They arrived at Ilija’s warehouse in Vracar, where Danilo would stay until he got his feet on the ground. When Ilija rolled up the graffitied garage door to the storage room, Danilo saw a small army cot among the stacks of plastic-wrapped washing machines. He could see his breath.
“There’s a shower and toilet in the back,” said Ilija. “Hold down the handle for at least three seconds; otherwise it all comes up again. It’s not the good kind of déjà vu.”
“Okay,” said Dan
ilo.
“I used to come here to think,” said Ilija, lighting a cigarette. “But I don’t think anymore, so there you are.”
“Thank you,” said Danilo. “It’s only for the time being. Until I find Miroslav.”
“You know, I was so sorry to hear about Stojanka,” said Ilija. “I always liked her. She was a beautiful woman.”
“Thank you, Ilija.”
“Shit, man,” said Ilija, shaking his head. “I just can’t believe it. One day she is here, and then she’s gone.”
The warehouse was sandwiched between a tennis club and a train yard filled with rusting boxcars. The nets at the club had all been taken down for the season, but despite the frigid temperatures, a single old man still showed up each day in tennis whites to serve a bucket of balls across the court. Danilo would watch him rumble through his routine, tightening and snapping his body like whip. The balls made a light and easy sound coming off the man’s racket. Every serve looked good, but then, there was no net to halt the ball’s progress.
It was freezing in the storage room. There was a single radiator that sputtered and spat but only grew tepid to the touch. Danilo shivered through the nights, and, in an act of midnight desperation, he ripped open a carton of hand towels and carefully spread them over his blanket in rows, like uncooked bacon. He lay on his cot in the darkness, mummified and alone.
Soon after his arrival, he took a bus over to the university at Studentski Trg. The bus was shockingly crowded. Danilo found himself standing with his face inside another man’s armpit, barely able to breathe. After two minutes he knew he would die inside this bus along with everyone else. He looked down and saw a small child crammed among a sea of legs, twirling a leaf between his fingers.
When the doors finally opened, he tumbled out into the air of the world, gasping. He vowed never to take another bus again. He would walk one hundred kilometers if he had to. Grateful to be alive, he circled the Brutalist buildings of the university square, trying to find the philosophy department and a clue to his son’s whereabouts. Next to a bookstore, there was a two-story mural of a man entering a doorway at the end of a long path. The man appeared decapitated, for his head had already disappeared into the darkness of the doorway.
Danilo asked a student lounging beneath the mural whether he knew Miroslav. Who? Miroslav Danilovic. He did not. Danilo asked another, with similar results. Maybe Miroslav had never even come to the university. Maybe he was no longer in Belgrade.
He was just about to give up when he saw a man wearing eyeliner and army fatigues, smoking a cigarette and rolling a ball across his hands, theatrically, as if he was doing it for money, though there was no place to leave money. If anyone knew where Miroslav was, it would be this man. As Danilo approached, he saw that the man was really no more than a kid.
“He’s the puppeteer, right? Who never says anything?” the kid said after Danilo asked him about his son. He did not look up from his ball play.
“That’s right,” said Danilo, wondering if this was true. “Where does he live?”
“He was in the papers for something or other,” the kid said, still rolling his ball. “He became kind of famous.”
“What do you mean, kind of famous?” asked Danilo.
But the kid didn’t know anything else. He hadn’t seem him around in months.
“When you’re in the paper, I guess you don’t have to go to school anymore.”
“But where does he live?”
The student shrugged. He stopped moving the ball across his hands. From out of his bag he produced a lackluster ferret, which he held up to Danilo, as if offering it to him for a good price.
• • •
AROUND HIM, the city practiced a restrained form of agitation. International sanctions and the toll of an uncertain war had led to a volatile hyperinflation of the dinar. Money that was worth something this morning might be worth nothing this afternoon. It seemed like every couple of months the government would revaluate the currency at a rate of 1 million to 1, so that everyone would instantly become a million times poorer than they had been the day before. The government was thus forced to issue larger and larger denominations; this culminated in “the poet of sympathy,” Jovan Jovanovic Zmaj, having the unfortunate distinction of appearing on the five-hundred-billion-dinar note. The constant uncertainty brought about by these daily fluctuations and the imminent threat of another devaluation left people in a perpetual state of apprehension, as if they were awaiting a terrible diagnosis from their doctor. They tried to go about their daily business, sipping coffee in cafés, window-shopping the wide promenade of Knez Mihailova, but no one bought anything. They were playing the role of citizens in a city that no longer belonged to them.
The little money Danilo had brought quickly evaporated, even when he was not using it. He would often see little torn-up bits of the old currency blowing through the streets like pollen; it was as if an entire civilization had once lived here but now was gone forever. One department store, in a gesture of black humor, wallpapered its window displays with the worthless dinars, a pink-and-violet iconostasis of fallen Yugoslav heroes: Zmaj, Tesla, Andric, a mournful Communist child staring into the future.
Grocery stores, more often than not, had no food on their shelves, and the little food they did have cost almost a month’s wages. Danilo stopped eating at night. He would lie on his cot wearing all of his clothes, shivering, reading from his Bible and praying as his stomach growled in protest. To think: a farmer who could not even feed himself. It was the worst humiliation imaginable.
He began to smoke. He, who had never smoked a cigarette in his life, even as every man in Yugoslavia had merrily puffed away. And now, when there were practically no cigarettes to be had, he had begun to smoke.
“It’s a beautiful habit,” said Ilija as he lit Danilo’s Marlboro. “Forget what the doctors say. They are just jealous. Smoking keeps you healthy as a bull.”
After observing others sifting through trash—respectable people, men in suits, women in hats—Danilo began to follow suit, searching for items that might be bartered for food and cigarettes. Old kerosene lamps. Broken radios. Tailors’ dummies. Cracked spyglasses. Only Gazur, the kind, paunch-laden owner of the Rijeka Café, on the River Sava, would accept his hodgepodge of defective items in exchange for a glass of black currant juice and a bowl of fish stew. It was clear that Gazur had no use for such things, but without fail, whenever Danilo showed up on the terrace, he glowed and began humming old folk songs.
“Would you like a table with a view?” Gazur would ask, relieving him of his latest tawdry procurement. All of the tables had a view of the river, the same view, but nonetheless the question gestured at a rare kind of decadence.
“Please,” said Danilo. “And a glass of black currant juice.”
“Of course! The usual!” And Gazur would go to the kitchen and order the busboy to come out with his accordion and play a song, and Danilo would sit there drinking his juice and then quickly suck on his cigarette so that the smoke entangled with the dying sour notes on the back of his tongue. Danilo could not even say he liked the flavor of smoke and currant together, but he found himself compelled to create this pairing every time, as if pressing at an old wound.
“The river’s beautiful, yes?” Gazur would say.
“Yes.”
“And the music?” The busboy was earnestly banging out the Macedonian song “Zajdi, zajdi, jasno sonce.” Darinka had sung this song to him at night when he could not sleep.
“The music is nice, thank you.”
“Eder likes the turbo-folk, but I tell him, ‘No, you must play the old ones. Play the old ones so we don’t forget.’”
Danilo often wondered, as he watched the river and thought of all that had gone on in the past year, what the source of Gazur’s kindness was. It would have been much easier to let him starve with the rest.
• • •
HE SPENT HIS DAYS wandering the city, searching the unhappy faces for a version of his son. Once, an old woman carrying a basket of stuffed rabbits came up to Danilo on the street. She touched his hand, startling him with the sudden intimacy of this contact.
“My son,” she said, peering into his face.
For a moment he wondered if this woman could be Darinka, whether there had been some colossal mistake and she had never in fact died—she could not die, because she wore the red handkerchief with the little cross. Yet this woman was not wearing a red handkerchief. And then he saw in her eyes that even as she was staring at him, she did not see him. She had the eyes of a child. She was a vagabond. A miscreant. Did others now see him this way, too? When they passed him in the street, did mothers pull their children closer and avert their eyes?
After another moment, the woman let him go. He watched her shuffle away, orbiting a telephone pole before dissolving back into the weary stream of men.
• • •
SLOBODAN FACE was everywhere. Those imploring eyes, the certainty of his uncertain gaze. You could find him splashed across billboards, newspapers, and television screens as he declared one victory after another for Mother Serbia. Yet Danilo also heard a surprising amount of dissent with ’s version of events on his little radio in the warehouse. He listened as academics and activists argued passionately about the injustice of such a war.
“We are witnessing a state suicide. The snake has bitten off its own head. These are the spasms of an animal that is already dead,” a poet said during a talk show.
One night, in a vision probably informed by his flat’s frigid temperatures, Danilo dreamed he was hiking through snowcapped mountains with . They were trying to find his wife’s body. Only knew where the body was hidden. They kept walking and walking, and —sipping from a bottomless thermos of tea—kept promising that the body was just over the next rise, but that summit would only reveal more mountains that closely resembled those from which they had just come. Eder, the busboy from the Rijeka, was also there with his accordion, trying to keep up with them. Eventually he fell in the snow, his accordion making a last gasp as he collapsed, and they left him where he was.