could’ve repeated ‘Address!’ with the same tone a hundred more times. I could’ve repeated it until the next morning, and Dusha knew it. She downed her large glass of water and started on her small cup of coffee.
‘Look, I know you’ll never forgive me for telling you he was dead. But I’d like to say that, in all these years, over all this time, he’s never once said he was innocent. He has never said that to me. He has also never said that he was sorry. I would like you to know that there’s a real possibility that he is guilty. I would like you to know that. Just that.’
‘There, almost done.’
Enes probably had no idea what was happening to my old wreck in his workshop, which had been left at the mercy of his cousin’s youthful exuberance. Enes, as the undisputed star of his team, had treated himself to a small beer and a Williams’s pear schnapps, while holding court, entertaining ‘our people’ with his jokes at the café he frequented and was owned and occupied by ‘our people.’
‘When can I come by?’
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Then come this afternoon.’
‘How much is this gonna cost me?’
‘We’ll arrange something, my dear Vladan.
3
The ‘youngster’ who washed the windows of my tired old car at a petrol station somewhere in the midst of a blasted heath halfway to nowhere, but approximately between Zagreb and Brčko, looked so much like Maki that he could’ve easily convinced me that he was the son Maki had forgotten sometime long ago, while moving iridescent kitsch from his stall at the market. Four toddlers lurked nearby, holding buckets of water and filthy cloths. They peeked out at me, ready to sprint for my change, which I intended to spend on a double espresso and juice at the nearby Javori Restaurant. I thought how my old man would have loved to take them on, but I didn’t inherit any useful talents from him, like wrestling undernourished toddlers. When I opened my car door, outstretched hands were suddenly upon me: a whirl of torn and dirty clothes, and they succeeded in jogging my conscience enough to relieve me of just enough change to transform my plan into a single espresso and a glass of water. Mildly pissed-off, I tried to push my way past them, to ignore them, but they did an Indian sprint so that one was always just in front of me, underfoot. They kept showing me how clean my car window was, shoving dirty palms ever nearer my face.
‘I don’t have any change!’
I showed them my empty pockets.
‘That’s okay, you can give us bills.’
‘I only have euros.’
‘Not a problem.’
Defeated, I pulled a two-euro coin from my wallet and put it in the hand of the Maki lookalike. But my battle was far from over, as the other four scrambled for their share.
‘Come on, off you go, don’t make me... ’
An elderly waiter, in a uniform left over from socialist days, stood before the entrance to the restaurant. When two of the little Gypsy children heard his stern voice, they instantly stepped back, while the furious waiter managed to grab the youngest by his frayed collar and literally flung him toward the parking lot.
‘Go fuck yourself, you little thief!’
‘Fuck you!’
‘Watch it, kid, don’t make me come over there!’
‘Suck my dick, you idiot!’
Apparently I’d found myself in the middle of an enduring siege between the uniformed army at the restaurant, and the Gypsy guerrilla children; wrestling for supremacy of the muddy path linking the improvised parking lot and the improvised restaurant. Just then a Volkswagen Golf with Bulgarian plates pulled in, and the little Gypsies forgot the unhappy waiter and ran off with their slop buckets. The waiter returned to his sentry duty by the door, and continued his smoke break.
I sat at a table covered in a white cloth, as well as aged coffee stains, which lay over an even dirtier red tablecloth. A plastic ashtray sat in the middle, alongside a vase containing plastic flowers from the Yugoslav Mesozoic period. I had to wait, of course, to earn the right to pay for a sour coffee, hand-mixed with a disposable thin plastic spoon, amidst this particular ambience. It was my first time in such a setting. The honorary waiter extended one smoke to two, spoke with a comrade who stood behind a stainless steel bar, and managed to somehow get lost on the way from there to my table.
It seemed as though I were experiencing the genuine tradition of southern hospitality that I’d heard so much about. Others, far wiser than I, had tried and failed to change this mode of behaviour, so it was futile for me to do anything but absorb it. I tried once to communicate with these local human-like creatures, asking the innocent question, ‘How far is it to Brčko?’ To which came the reply, ‘I don’t give a... ’ from one of the death row inmates working that day.
The uniformed guy with a moustache, who had taken my petrol money, seemed to have hated himself that morning, but graduated to hating the whole world in the afternoon. His spontaneous reaction to my question about Brčko, a town which history had consigned to his outrage because it had not ended up in Croatian hands at the war’s end, did provoke something in the same phylum as a smile. This was probably just to give me the false sense that he was joking, rather than intending to terrorize all passengers en route to the Serbian Entity.
I was fed up, and I had only just started.
Twenty minutes later, I was sipping undrinkable coffee at the restaurant next door, wondering why this unspoken, projected accusation could still make me feel like shit. I put my hate for moustache guy on the boil, and it bubbled into an imaginary biography, in which he was a smuggler of stoves and washing machines stolen from Serbian houses. I could picture Mr. Moustache carrying Gorenje appliances up and down the village, after his shift at the petrol station ended, offering them to neighbours, claiming that they all came from his nice Swedish son-in-law, who had just bought brand new Electrolux appliances for his holiday home and didn’t need them anymore. But when Mr. Moustache vanished into my hallucinatory Slavonian mist, several washing machines under each arm, logic settled back into place, and it seemed to me that it would be hard to find a more normal petrol station attendant in the middle of this lousy stretch of nothingness between Zagreb and Belgrade. For the locals, it was surely normal that their grasp on geography in this, their God-forsaken world, did not extend to the escarpments of misery behind the Sava River, from which I had come. It was also probable that Serbian expatriates, whose relatives in Brčko likely lived in the houses of expelled Muslims or Croats, and were none too likeable to begin with. So it was normal that he wouldn’t pretend to be professional, just to please a passers-by.
This version of normal was strange to me, but that didn’t explain why I still felt bad. I’d never thought of myself as sensitive, and barrages of swearing don’t move me at all. But I suppose I felt that all of this was somehow connected to my father’s Lazarus situation, and I wondered if Mr. Moustache could read my sense of guilt. Hadn’t my own sense of innocence, which I had believed whole-heartedly until recently, irreversibly ruptured the moment I decided to Google my dead father’s name? Was that why I couldn’t look Mr. Moustache in the eye and tell him to fuck off? Was that why I now felt like someone in the dock, judged by the self-righteous?
