A Map of Absences

I want to write about Belgrade, but the first things that come to mind are those that didn't happen. This, then, is my postcard from the Belgrade I never knew.



* * * * 1

We're driving down Karadjordjeva street. The summer is one long, dusty, scorchingly hot day that never ends and promises everything. In front of the Central Train Station, which is right next to the Central Bus Station, the street is a mess of pedestrians, cars, buses, and streetcars clanging, screeching, and swaying dangerously on the rails. I keep my gaze glued to the right: I'm waiting to see the cake shop which has always been there, or at least looks like it has always been there. In a row of old, faded Belgrade stores, it has a narrow but tall display window, and never fails to impress with its pyramids of all sorts of yummy-looking, mouth-watering cakes: tulumbe, sampite, krempite, tahan alva... Particularly attractive are the tall, elegant, foam-white sampite, with a delicate crust on top. I looked at them yearningly as a student 15 years ago whenever errands brought me to this corner of the city, and I look at them with the same yearning now. I don't know why, but I never went in, never even stopped in front of the window, just looked to see it with anticipation, imagining what all those sweets might taste like. If anybody ever wants to offer me a little present one summer day in Belgrade, perhaps take me to the small cake shop on Karadjordjeva street, across from the side entrance to the Train Station...


* * * * 2


A little further down the street, towards the Kalemegdan Fortress, is the Insitute for Geology, where my grandmother Angelina, my father's mother, worked as a secretary in the 1950s and the 1960s. The Institute is in a beautiful early-20th-century grey building, somewhat worse for wear on the outside, but famous for its rich interior with intricate staircases, used as sets in various domestic films. My grandmother retired before I was born, and I never saw it from the inside, but I heard about it from her. My favourite story: this building is the very place where she started to smoke in her forties, after she divorced my grandfather Dragi. She'd always explain half-sarcastically how she thought at the time that she should look distressed and crushed by the divorce and the easiest way to build that image of herself in the public eye was to smoke at work. She'd often light up while telling the story. Sometimes, when we visit her grave in the cemetery on top of the Lesce Hill above the Danube slowly disappearing towards the east, we light a cigarette and leave it there.


* * * * 3

Still further down Karadjordjeva street, at the foot of the Fortress, is a small tangle of railway tracks where a few streetcar lines turn around and go back into the city. This is where my grandfather Dragi drove the red streetcars of Belgrade his entire working life. I was four when he died so I must have met him, but I don't remember him. I know him only from a few black-and-white pictures, as a man wearing a spotless suit and a timid smile. The Belgrade of the 50s offered at least two prime entertainments to young lads such as my father and my uncle Bata: one was the raising of pigeons on the roofs of buildings which also involved training them to fly and come back, and a street amusment for the daring which involved streetcars, and which had its own special name, kesanje (most probably a portmanteau of "kacenje" - hooking, and "vesanje" - hanging). The point, as explained once by Uncle Bata, my father's older brother, was to run up behind a streetcar, and hang on to its back as long as possible before being detected by the ticket collector or the driver (which, theoretically, may have been his own father). The 50s were also the time when my grandfather left, and went to another woman. Grandmother divorced him and started smoking; my father and uncle grew up without their father but remained on good terms with him. The last few years of his life he spent in a psychiatric hospital, for an unidentified ailment. Not knowing much about grandfather Dragi, I always linked it to an unfortunate accident which happened to him one day at work: a woman suddenly threw herself in front of the streetcar and he ran over her. I never asked where exactly this happened, but perhaps it was just here, where the Fortress runs down to meet the River Sava, rolling by steadily towards the Danube around the corner.

* * * * 4

Turning right at the end of Karadjordjeva street, we move away from the river and drive along the south edge of the Fortress, passing through the hub of pedestrian activities at the tail end of the posh Knez Mihailova street. We leave behind us the cackle and chaos of the City Zoo placed inside one corner of the Fortress, and turn into Cara Dusana street. Here at the lower end of the street is the oldest standing house in Belgrade, number 10 , built in 1727 by an Austrian engineer and colonel. The real highlight of the street for me, however, is further up: Bajloni's Marketplace, one of many such open markets in the city. This one is at a pleasant walking-distance from the place where I worked briefly -- the Kolarac Foreign Language Institute: an old-fashioned, chalky language school, occupying part of a dignified old edifice not far from the Fortress, which is also the home of the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra. I remember the Market well because I used to go there every payday to get deliciously fresh honey from a health-food store there. Having money in your pocket after the meagre student years made even more meagre by the war, gave a bounce to your step and benevolence to your manner. I would walk leisurely from the Institute through the bustle of downtown to Skadarska street casting generous looks all around, and go down the stone pavement until I reached the Market; I'd wander between the stands for the sheer pleasure of feeling my "buying power" which I could exert at any moment; then I'd go to the health-food store and get the honey. One time, however, my small ritual was spoilt. In the store, I asked for two jars of honey, and before I could tell the shop assistant that I'd put them in my backpack, she'd already placed the jars in a plastic bag. I paid, walked out, and about three meters later, the cheap plastic tore, slipped out of my hand, and with an ominous deep thud the jars hit the concrete. The thick, transparent honey was invading the remains of the bag and then the concrete with a teasing finality. I watched, bent over this mini-disaster, for a few seconds, calculating quickly and realizing that my tight monthly budget wouldn't allow me to go back in and buy another two jars. I straightened up slowly, and left it all behind, not turning once. Sometimes you just have to walk away, a friend said once. I did, and soon forgot all about it in the casual lightness of a Belgrade afternoon.

* * * *

The band was Idoli, the year was 1985, and I wasn't there, but this is exactly what Belgrade feels like in the summer: stubbornly sunny, butterfly-light, and permanently in love.