‘I’m worried.’ Milena was crouching on her narrow bed and was listening to Enver coughing in the room next door, as if the walls in this guesthouse consisted solely of faded wallpaper and nothing else. With a hard pillow stuffed behind her back, she continued pensively, ‘I keep asking myself: what if he does something stupid?’
‘Who?’ Vera asked unsympathetically. ‘Who are you talking about?’
‘Goran – he was standing right in front of me for a few seconds. There was panic in his eyes. And then –’
‘The son of the Višekruna woman? Did he have anything to do with his parents’ death?’
‘I think he found out something and is following some kind of lead. And that frightens me.’
‘I understand,’ said Vera, but it was clear that she didn’t understand anything.
‘Vuk and Vesna, the Serbian couple here in the village he visited earlier, they think he’s in shock.’
‘Of course he’s in shock. Who wouldn’t be? Your own parents!’
Milena blew her nose. ‘Anyway, what I wanted to say was, it’s too late now for me to make it back to Belgrade tonight. You’ve no idea how bad the roads are down here.’
There was silence on the line. Milena heard footsteps in the hallway. ‘Are you still there?’ she asked.
‘What makes you think you’ll be able to find something that the police didn’t find already?’ Vera asked.
Milena clamped the little receiver between her chin and shoulder blade and emptied her bag onto the bedspread.
‘You think you owe it to Uncle Miodrag? Is that what this is all about?’ Vera continued to probe. ‘I’ll talk to him.’ Suddenly, she lowered her voice. ‘This can’t go on. You’re swanning around Kosovo, where two Serbs have just been murdered. What has Siniša got to say about that?’
‘He’s asked Enver to be my wingman.’
‘Enver?’
‘A friend. An Albanian.’ Milena smoothed out a little piece of paper she’d retrieved from her bag.
‘Has he got something to do with the case? Is he from the police?’
‘He translates and watches my back.’
‘He watches your back,’ Vera repeated. ‘And where is this Enver now?’
Milena put on her spectacles. ‘Next door. In his room.’ Then she said quietly, ‘Udbine Street – does that mean anything to you?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Vera asked.
‘April sixth, just after nine p.m.,’ Milena calculated. ‘That must have been last Sunday. Offence against the Road Traffic Act. Listen, a ticket at that time of night. Strange. Registration number –’
‘Next time, look where you park your car.’
‘Do you know the street?’
‘No, and I’m not really interested either!’ Vera snorted in indignation. ‘I’m astonished Siniša supports what you’re doing – am I the only one here who’s still thinking straight?’
‘It’s late,’ Milena said. ‘Let’s talk tomorrow.’
‘Please don’t come back too late tomorrow. We’ll have boiled beef and carrots with horseradish. And let me know if you hear from Adam.’
‘We just talked.’
‘Tell him there’s pears Hélène for dessert. And…’
Milena waited for Vera to go on. ‘And?’
‘Promise me you’ll do just one thing for me: jam a chair under your door handle, just in case?’
Milena didn’t like to tell Vera that there was no chair in the room, and reassured her mother she’d do as she was asked. She wished Vera a good night and hung up. As she stuck the piece of paper between the pages of her diary, she thought to herself: Udbine Street – wasn’t that one of those really swanky parts of town, up in Dedinje? That would fit; all the villas there had security personnel outside, and as soon as anyone parked incorrectly, they received a ticket. No matter what time of day it was.
Her stomach was churning, trying to digest stuffed cabbage leaves, cheese and apple cake. Vesna and Vuk, the Serbian couple and friends of the Valetićs, had insisted that she and Enver stay for dinner. They had dished up generously, and not only where Serbian food was concerned. The Serbs had talked for two hours: about the Albanians, Kosovo and the burden of independence. Vuk and Vesna were a frightened old couple who had barricaded themselves into their house near the rubbish tip, and who were desperately waiting for a word from their son who had emigrated and promised to come and fetch them one day. While the old people waited, they spent their time calculating how much the Albanians would pay them for their little house, and how far that money would go in Sweden. All the Serbs who had turned their back on Kosovo had sold their property to Albanians, yet still declared those properties as war confiscations, thereby pocketing a nice compensation payment on top. But those times were over. The Serbian state now looked into these matters more closely, and the Albanians were building themselves their own houses. It had dawned on Vuk and Vesna that they had missed the boat. The time for Serbians in Kosovo was over, run out, at an end. Even though they had never dared tell them to their faces, Ljubinka and Miloš Valetić’s return to Kosovo had been a big mistake!
Vuk and Vesna told the story of another couple, Serbs like themselves, who had wanted to return to their former houses up there in Svinjare, and who had been confronted by the Albanian extended family who had occupied their house: parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren – Albanians bred like rabbits. So the Serbs had been standing there, with all their worldly possessions, and were threatened with a shotgun and chased away from their own property. Thank goodness they had filed their claim in time with the proper office, the Kosovo Property Agency, and had backed everything up with the correct paperwork. Even so, years passed before the squatters were evicted! And when the time for them to reclaim their house finally arrived, they found there was nothing left where the house had once stood; all that was left was a pile of rubble.
Vuk and Vesna would have continued endlessly regaling them with tales like this, but at one point Enver looked at his watch. An Albanian sitting at their table – that had never before happened to the old folks. But he was different, not like his fellow countrymen, that much was obvious: he was intelligent, educated, civilised and he could pass for a Serb any day, they declared. Milena wanted to make a polite objection, but Enver had winked at her to let her know it was OK and, somewhat amused, had thanked them for the compliment.
Milena lit a cigarette, picked up the hotel ashtray and walked to the window. Below, in the faint light of the street lamp, a small group of people had gathered. She exhaled. They were all men, and with their hunched shoulders and hands in their trouser pockets, they didn’t exactly instil confidence in her. News that a Serb was in town had obviously already circulated, despite the fact that she had taken care to park her Lada with a Serbian number plate out of sight in the shed by the rear entrance.
She had once had the same prejudices against Albanians as Vuk and Vesna had displayed, and she now quietly reproached herself for them. If these people were standing in front of her house in Belgrade she’d find it totally normal: a bunch of guys on a Saturday evening, getting together for a pint and a chat. Wasn’t it great that there was at least something resembling a community atmosphere down here among the inhabitants of Talinovac?
She sat down on the edge of the bed and opened her notebook. She scanned the bullet points that she had jotted down during dinner with Vuk and Vesna.
The house in the woods, the new home of Miloš and Ljubinka Valetić, in the meantime renamed the House of the Dead: Vuk and Vesna seemed to be aware that the property had always stood empty, at least they could not remember anybody ever having lived there. That tallied with what Enver had heard from the village youths.
After the initial shock, Miloš and Ljubinka Valetić had been determined to face the challenge, to try to restore the house and somehow make it habitable. The only reason they even thought they could rise to that challenge was mainly down to Miloš and the fact that he had found out that you
could get financial support for such a reconstruction project. The pot of money was meant for people like him, who hadn’t returned to the home they’d lived in before, but who wanted to start afresh in Kosovo.
Vuk and Vesna remembered that, to begin with, Miloš had come down to the post office on a number of occasions, and made lots of telephone calls. Bureaucracy, forms and deadlines had not deterred him – quite the opposite: he had been optimistic. He took the bus to Ursoševac, to Štrpce, and even to Priština. Ljubinka normally spent the days that he was away with Vuk and Vesna, because she felt ill at ease in the house all by herself. Often she sat at their table until late at night, under the light, waiting patiently for her husband to return and mending underwear in the meantime.
It was obviously not that easy to find the right people to speak to in the local authorities. Miloš reported with some bitterness how extraordinarily well equipped their offices were: the most modern furniture, and officials driving around in the latest and finest official cars, to the extent that you could never pin them down. He was seen as a petitioner, and a Serb to boot, so he was treated accordingly, being passed from pillar to post and endlessly fobbed off with yet another appointment in another location.
Vuk had advised his friend Miloš not to start a war with officialdom and to be content with what he had been given. But by then Miloš had the bit between his teeth. He had even contacted a politician and a journalist in Belgrade. Yet Miloš didn’t want to believe that a politician might just use the affair to extort money from the other side, or that a journalist would have a hard time getting to the bottom of such a story without getting his fingers burnt. He was convinced that the material he had gathered, which he kept on collecting, was his life insurance policy, and that it would mature very soon.
Milena put down her notebook. The men outside were now chanting like football hooligans. She couldn’t understand what they were shouting or singing, or what exactly they were celebrating. She closed the window, sat on her bed and pondered.
The material, the supposed life insurance, was probably inside the suitcase that Goran had taken with him. Vuk had talked about papers in clear folders, but could not say what the content was. He was no scholar, he said, he didn’t know anything about bureaucracy and in any event the content was none of his business. The papers were in good hands now anyway, namely Goran’s.
Frightened, Milena suddenly looked up. Was that a knock on her door? It was past midnight.
With her shoes off, she crept to the door and listened. ‘Hello?’ she said softly.
‘It’s me,’ Enver answered in an equally low voice. She turned the key in the lock.
He came in, and with a worried expression immediately closed the door behind him.
‘What’s up?’ Milena asked testily.
Instead of answering, he turned off the light, went over to the window and peered through the curtains. ‘What do you reckon to the party going on down there?’ he asked. ‘Or haven’t you seen it yet?’
Milena followed him to the window. All at once, she noticed what was going on.
How many men were there, she wondered? Twenty or more? Most were shouting, and some laughing, while others were just talking, but all of them kept looking up to her window – like a pop star had taken up occupancy there. Or rather more of a hate figure than that, someone they all wanted to get a good look at. And the crowd down there was increasingly getting angry because this bitch wasn’t daring to show her face. She was a monster, a hated Serb, who was sniffing around where she ought to have been keeping her nose well out of things.
One of the men was wearing fluorescent yellow sneakers; cupping his hands around his mouth to form a makeshift loudhailer, he was chanting and jumping rhythmically up and down in excitement, like he’d spotted her behind the curtain. As a Serb, she was responsible for everything bad these people had experienced in the past and for all the unrealised hopes of the present. Milena shivered. It would only take a single spark for this situation to explode.
Enver looked pale. ‘Get your things together,’ he breathed tonelessly. ‘We’re leaving.’
Packing took no more than three minutes. Milena followed him out of the room and along the darkened corridor. When they reached the stairs she went to switch on the light, but Enver held her hand and only let go of it when they reached the bottom of the narrow staircase leading to the back door. Enver rattled the handle and cursed silently.
‘Have you got a lighter?’ he asked. ‘Can you shine it here?’
Milena scanned the room with her small flame. Enver pushed aside a curtain, but it only revealed a fridge. On the other side, right next to the door, Milena discovered a small box on the wall. About a dozen keys were hanging behind its little door. Enver got lucky: the second key he tried fitted.
He stretched out his hand, and Milena responded with a high five.
Enver shook his head. ‘Give me the car keys, I meant.’
‘Of course.’ Again, she rummaged through her bag. ‘There you go.’
‘Wait here.’ Key in hand, he pulled the door shut behind him.
Obediently, she stayed behind in the hallway, listening to the fridge humming and thinking that this was all completely unreal, a groundless threat that existed only in their heads. But the men in the street were all too real. A nightmare she herself had conjured up, solely through her car number plate, a piece of metal. Her mistake was that she was one of the bad guys.
A horrible realisation shot through her head. All those men out there… but before she could properly formulate it, a bright beam of light shone straight into her face, erasing all other thoughts. She spun around.
‘Oh, it’s you!’ The man in his vest put down his torch and switched on the ceiling light. ‘I thought it might be one of those yobs from outside.’
Milena somehow wrung a smile from herself. ‘We’re just leaving.’
The man came up to her. ‘And what about the bill?’
Milena nodded and pulled out her purse from her bag.
‘I’d think twice about going out there now, if I were you,’ the landlord said.
She opened her purse and got out a large bill.
‘I’m sorry,’ the man said, trying to strike a conciliatory note. ‘It wasn’t me who called these guys.’ He held the bill up against the light and then put it in his pocket. ‘It’s all right.’
Milena heard her Lada, the familiar rattling sound of its engine, and breathed again.
‘No hard feelings, eh?’ The man scratched his head. ‘Maybe it’s really better this way.’ He held the door open for her, and watched as she got into the car.
With the headlights off and the doors locked, they drove around the house and turned onto the street. Enver drove at a snail’s pace towards the crowd, which reluctantly parted to let them through.
Milena looked into grim, set faces, expressions full of mistrust, some full of hatred. The men stared at her through the window – fathers, grandfathers and young men – and she couldn’t help thinking that every last one of them knew who’d killed the Valetićs. That some men from this group must have banded together that night and gone to pay a visit to the Serbs in the forest, that old couple up there, to teach them a lesson. All of a sudden, a fist slammed into the car. Milena jumped.
Then many fists were drumming on the car. Milena tucked her head down between her shoulders and pressed her hands tensely into her lap. The men began pummelling the bonnet and the roof of the car in their fury. It was as if every blow were a punch to Milena’s face.
18
Miss Juliana puffed as she tried to get her breathing back under control. Her pulse was racing as if she had just lugged the fruits of a major shopping trip into her larder. In fact, she’d only been on the phone, and although the call had been remarkably short, it had been momentous. Only the receiver in her trembling hand and the drawn-out dialling tone told her that it hadn’t been a dream.
It was a curious state she found herself in. She carefully put t
he receiver back onto its cradle, and looked out into the garden, at the green, yellow and blue of the tulips and irises. The colours swam before her eyes. How long had she been waiting for this day to arrive? She took two paces forward, sank into the chair next to Sophia’s easy chair and began drumming her hands on the worn armrests in disbelief.
This was where she had been sitting back then. It had been the time of year when the marigolds were in bloom, the lavender’s aroma filled the air and the cobblestones were sticky with pollen from the lime trees. The Albanian had gone home to help with the harvest and would only return again in the autumn. Sophia had travelled to the Adriatic coast with her little sister to enjoy the summer heat there, and Juliana had been left behind to keep the home fires burning. It had been a Saturday, in the early morning hours; she still remembered it vividly, as she’d been waiting for the cheese merchant. Instead of the bell, she heard someone sneaking along the passageway. Had the Albanian come back early?
She got there just in time to see Nicola, his suitcase in hand, slipping through the door. She stood paralysed on the staircase. Somewhat reluctantly, he put the suitcase down again and stepped over to her. He took off his cap and cupped her face in his big warm hands. With him standing two steps below her, they were just about the same height. With his grey eyes, he looked at her as one looks at a little child.
‘Juliana,’ he said, and sighed. ‘Little Juliana, my dear. Don’t make parting so hard for me. Don’t be sad, and don’t worry. I’m going to be back for sure!’ Then he left. Simply gone. Juliana blew her nose.
Sophia had always called Nicola a good-for-nothing philanderer, a lazy wastrel, instead of just doing as he’d been told. He had been supposed to go to Budapest – like his father and grandfather had done – and learn the leather and fur trades and become a furrier. He was to work in the Vienna and Paris branches before returning to Belgrade to take over the main shop in Queen Natalja Street. But those shoes were apparently a bit too big for little Nicola to fill, Sophia had maliciously remarked. To impress upon Nicola his responsibilities, Sophia reminded him that their papa, namely Juliana’s Uncle Lazarus, had created an astrakhan jacket for Princess Elena back in the day, a fashionable Persian lambswool coat with sable trimmings, and so made a name for himself at an early age. From then on, everyone who was anyone in high society had to have a piece made by the House of Spajić, even if it was only a muff. Nicola would have been able to continue the business without too much effort, nobody was asking the impossible of him – definitely not some major coup.
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