Belgrade Noir

During this period, Serbia was completely isolated from the rest of the planet. And as isolated turtles on the Galapagos Islands evolved differently from their fellow turtles on the mainland, the culture in Serbia developed in ways that didn’t exist anywhere else. The mobs were killing each other, dead bodies were buried in concrete, eventually becoming embedded in the foundations of buildings and bridges. Still, there were no random killings and the streets of the Serbian capital were among the safest in Europe. It should be no surprise that Belgrade is known as a city of absurdity.

Citizens found pleasure in “embargo cakes” — delicacies made from only flour, water, sugar, and any fruit you could scrounge up — and listened to turbo-folk, a synthetic mesh of techno and folk.

But this book is about a lot more than war. Alfred Hitchcock once said that certain creepy parts of Belgrade unnerved him and would be ideal settings for thrillers. Thieves, traitors, spies, corrupt doctors, psychiatric patients, former policemen, mafia clans — they all appear in the pages of this book.

Even in the worst periods of its history, Belgrade was always a multicultural, multireligious, and multinational city. This anthology illustrates that. Alongside our Serbian authors, there are stories written by Croatian, Bosnian, British, and Finnish writers. The same is true for our great team of translators, which includes Americans, Serbians, Bosnians, and an Albanian.

Herbert Vivian, a British journalist, author, and newspaper proprietor who visited Belgrade in the late nineteenth century, wrote that more often than not when a traveler visits a famous place expecting a lot, he or she leaves disappointed. “This happens with Athens, Rhine, St. Peter’s Church in Rome. But then again, I went to Belgrade not expecting anything — the decorations, the sights, not even the joy or anything interesting — and now I am a victim of its seductive charm, and I have to leave it with utmost pain. This is a new feeling: to fall in love with a city.”

Right now, you likely believe there are a number of cities throughout the world that would make better settings for good noir stories. But I am quite certain that after reading this book, you will find yourself seduced by the dark charm of the White City.

Milorad Ivanović

Belgrade, Serbia

September 2020

Part I While the City Sleeps

Underneath It All Runs the River of Sadness by Oto Oltvanji

Block 45, New Belgrade

“If I win, you’ll help me spy on the neighbor on the fourth floor,” Kozma said. Not waiting for my answer, he moved his bishop.

Not the bishop, I thought.

We sat at a concrete table in the children’s park squeezed in among three four-story buildings. If nothing else, in the blocks you were protected from the wind. When you get old, the wind becomes your greatest enemy.

Kozma and I lived in Block 45, the last one in the row beside the riverbank. After us there was only the end of Belgrade, but it could easily have been the end of the world. At night, the darkness on the other side was that deep.

Before us stretched Block 44, which was kind of logical, but it was preceded by number 70, while on the other side of the wide avenue sprawled blocks 63, 62, and 61. Someone had had a lot of fun with numbering them.

All of it was part of New Belgrade, over 200,000 souls in the country’s largest dormitory. That’s what they used to call it anyway, but now big business had found its way here too. Car dealerships, shopping malls, private hospitals, a lot of eradicated green areas. Our little park was among the few resisting rampant urbanization.

Blocks and their history was my hobby, because retirees need to have one. Well, they don’t have to, but if they don’t, they quickly go mad. It started with me wanting to know who’d built the uneven ceiling in my apartment. Every morning, I would try to imagine heroes of the socialist labor of the sixties draining the surrounding swamps, as part of the Yugoslav postwar reconstruction. I had trouble imagining it.

Just as I had trouble coming up with a defense against Kozma’s bishop. Checkmate in two moves. When I looked up, Kozma was smiling at me.

I sighed and toppled my king. “I didn’t agree to anything.”

“But you will, won’t you?” He raised his eyebrows. “Now you have to.”

I didn’t have to do anything, and he knew it. At our age, everything happens voluntarily. That’s why I loved this oasis of ours, where we hid from the world, too-frequent elections, pension cuts, and uncollected garbage. That’s why I loved this block, this park, this table. Our table.

“Didn’t I tell you not to come here anymore?” shouted the girl with restless eyes as she hurried across the park.

Kozma and I rolled our eyes. Not everyone agreed it was our table.