30 years ago today (May, 1987): Five days in Skopje with the greatest seismologist of them all.

Previously: 1987 European Summer: "Skopje, capital city of Macedonia, is a dream world for lovers of cosmic concrete communist-era architecture."

The journey from Dubrovnik to Skopje was an inadvertent and completely ridiculous exercise -- a farce, to be truthful -- and a recap of the day is in order.

Day 41 ... Tuesday, May 26
Dubrovnik → Belgrade. 5:00 a.m. bus. K (strikeout) in Belgrade, punt ... on 11:45 brzi to Skopje (arriving Wednesday, May 27)

In route to Belgrade, there had been a brief mountain stop: Tjentište War Memorial, Yugoslavia, then and now.

At three in the afternoon on a pleasant springtime Tuesday, after a ten-hour bus ride from Dubrovnik, I was standing outside the combined train/bus station in Belgrade looking for the many enterprising Serbs who'd be competing, capitalist-style, to rent me a room in one of their flats.

I was mindful of this warning: "The difficulty of finding adequate accommodations is probably responsible for 90% of Belgrade's bad reputation among travelers."

So wrote Let's Go: Europe, which also helpfully advised bargaining with the inevitable room hawkers outside the station, and as an even better alternative, strongly recommended visiting a helpful tourist information office in the underpass at Terazije square.

The problem? There were no room hawkers outside the station -- not even one. I milled around for at least an hour, looking as cluelessly touristic as possible (it wasn't hard), and still they stayed hidden. I even asked a couple of cab drivers, who shrugged.

Nothing.

The tourism desk in the train station wasn't equipped to help travelers find lodgings. The only hotel I saw was out of my price range and had no English speakers on duty. At this point I should have walked the scant quarter-mile to the Terazije square office praised in Let's Go, and yet for some reason I refused to go there.

Why didn't I make this short trek?

Evidently I was having a bad day, and felt ready for a childish temper tantrum of the sort that always left me worse off than before.

Eventually I went across one of the side streets near the station and had a meal of leathery roasted chicken, rock-hard vegetables and wilted salad. The beer was passable, and I may have had two.

It's conceivable that I took a couple more with me in bottles.

Back at the station, stubbornly refusing to abandon the notion that someone should be offering me an inexpensive bed, I needed to use the WC. Following my nose, it soon became apparent that one of the toilets had disintegrated; a rancid mixture of water and sewage cascaded from the vicinity of the stalls, flowing across the floor, out the door into the common area and onto the train tracks.

Needless to say Belgrade wasn't impressing me, and it was time to study the rail schedule, wherein a brzi ("fast" -- a mere euphemism) train to Skopje was listed for departure later in the evening.

This idea had possibilities. After all, I knew someone in Macedonia: Radojko "Rady" Petkovski, the amiable seismologist who'd chatted with me on the train from Ljubljana to Zagreb. Surely I could find him, get some advice on cheap rooms, and hang out for a few days in Skopje.

The decision was made, and I bought a second-class ticket for the overnight journey.

(A week later, returning to Belgrade by rail from Bulgaria, I made a second and more determined effort to spend the night by boarding a tram and locating the Yugoslav capital city's only accredited youth hostel -- only to see it in the final stages of complete demolition, with a replacement structure to be built and ready for occupancy by the time of my next visit in 1989.)

In other words, welcome to breakfast in Skopje.

Day 42 ... Wednesday, May 27
 → Skopje. Bodily recovery, somewhat.

Day 43 ... Thursday, May 28
Skopje. Skopsko pivo and ćevap. Around town and to the duty free shop.

In this previous installment ...

"Skopje, capital city of Macedonia, is a dream world for lovers of cosmic concrete communist-era architecture."

 ... occasioned by the changing nature of Skopje's architectural interface from Brutalist to Walt Disneyist, during our contemporary era of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia's independence, I provided an overview of my arrival in the city three decades ago.

To be more detailed, armed with a map and Rady's business card, I elected to walk to the earthquake institute, his place of employment, which was two miles from the train station.

I must have been getting more adept at map reading, because the institute was where it was supposed to be, up there, perched on the hillside.

I presented the card at the guard shack. The incredulous booth attendant phoned, and pointed me toward the front door, where I was met by a young English-speaking colleague of Rady's named Alexander, who informed me that Rady was busy attending a meeting.

Alexander listened intently as I told my story, then surprised me by asking where in America I'd studied seismology. Taken aback, I replied that I'd majored in philosophy, not seismology, whereupon I learned Rady was somehow convinced that he'd met a fellow scientist on the train, not an itinerant Hoosier bartender.

Suddenly I was worried. There had been no intent to mislead Rady, and yet Alexander's demeanor was very serious. All I could think to say in order to lighten the mood was that while I wasn't an earthquake professional, my home was somewhat near the New Madrid fault.

The joke worked. Alexander laughed, and finally I managed to breathe. When Rady emerged and heard the explanation, he smiled, too. Soon coffee was being made and selection of delicious sweets appeared; guests in the Balkans invariably are pampered with caffeine and sugar -- and I'd had nothing to eat since the rubber chicken in Belgrade.

I agreed to meet Rady later in the afternoon at my station of arrival, where I'd left the backpack at the luggage storage room. He pulled up in a late 1970s model Zastava -- known as "Yugo" for export only, and derided in America as among the worst cars ever. It had a manual transmission, of course, and my new friend was a highly skilled urban driver.

This Google street view from 2014 may or may not show the building (on the left) where Rady lived at the time, but it's very reminiscent of the neighborhood.

And so it transpired that Rady opened his apartment to a complete stranger from America, exhausting his limited English, awarding me his couch for sleeping, showcasing the local sights during the scant free time he had, putting me on a round-trip bus to Lake Ohrid for a day trip, and finally driving me back to the bus depot stupidly early in the morning when it came time for my getaway to Bulgaria.

Most importantly, I was able to bathe and wash my clothes. It had been 48 hours since my last shower, and I felt like a complete greaseball.

---

As a city, Skopje is interested in earthquakes because earthquakes have a thing about Skopje. The most recent earthquake stuck in 1963. The old railway station (built in 1938) was one victim, along with more than half the buildings in the city and 2,000 of its citizens. The ruins were left standing to serve as a monument to the devastation of the earthquake and the lives it claimed.

On the platform: Cyrillic alphabet on the left, Latin on the right.

The inscription on the wall no longer exists.

Day 44 ... Friday, May 29
Skopje. To Lake Ohrid and back.

The town of Ohrid was a three-hour long trip each way by bus, but Rady had a long day at work, the ride was cheap, and I had ample time on my hands. One part of it that stands out in my memory was a woman listening to a transistor radio, and the song "Papa Don't Preach" by Madonna playing hourly. Apparently pop radio worked just the same way in Yugoslavia.

Ohrid's adjacent lake is one of Europe's deepest and oldest. Lake Ohrid's ecosystem is unique and much studied, and I've always been glad I endured the length of the commute. The Church of St. John Kaneo might be the most photographed man-made object in Ohrid.

Hermetic Albania was completely inaccessible, even if visible on the other side of the lake. It was the second time I could see Albania, but not touch it (spoiler alert: the time finally came in 1994).

Day 45 ... Saturday, May 30
Skopje. Discussing import/export with Rady. Fruitful day

Day 46 ... Sunday, May 31
Skopje. Evening with the boss man Rady

If memory serves, Rady was divorced or separated, and had a son, Milan, who lived with his mother. If I saw Milan during my visit, it was for a very brief time; he'd have been just a boy. There was time during the weekend to experience a bit more of Skopje, and once familiar with the location of the old bazaar area, I returned several times to eat grilled ćevap, a type of fragrant homemade sausage.

There was fish stew, too, though not the edible kind.

Riblja Čorba (Serbian Cyrillic: Рибља Чорба, pronounced [rîbʎaː t͡ʃɔ̌ːrba]; translation: Fish Stew) is a Serbian and Yugoslav rock band from Belgrade. The band was one of the most popular and most influential acts of the Yugoslav rock scene.

The poster reads 5 June 1987, which means I missed one of the region's biggest names by less than a week.

A walk along the Vardar River provided this view of the Stone Bridge, completed by the Ottomans in 1469, and a symbol of Skopje ever since.

This crazed example of concrete Brutalism captured my attention in 1987, and again in 2017 when the slides were digitalized. It's the post office complex, and the rest of the story is here.

The statue is a monument to the liberation of Skopje during World War II, and behind it can be seen the rebuilt walls and towers of the fortress, which in turn is near the historic bazaar.

Finally, one of the ubiquitous kiosks, this one located by a taxi rank. Most were clustered around transit points, and I loved them. While there might be seating space inside, most customers grabbed a beer and a sausage -- eating, drinking and smoking while standing outside.

I was in Skopje long enough for several interesting side conversations to develop. One of these was the prospect of exporting Skopsko Pivo, the local lager beer. Neither my knowledge nor resources was sufficient to achieve this, but I promised to make contacts once having returned home.

Nothing came of it, as was the case with a friend of Alexander's named Pero Dimchevski, who wanted to emigrate to the United States. Well into 1988, a correspondence managed to be kept tenuously alive, although the truth of the matter was that as with the beer importing idea, I simply didn't have the wherewithal to help.

On Monday morning, June 1, Rady dropped me off at the bus station and I took my place as one of seven passengers to Sofia, Bulgaria -- and the only American.

Time passed, and life went on. I've never seen any of these people again. Five years after my visit, Yugoslavia was in the process of consuming itself. The closest I've come to Skopje since 1987 was Albania.

Odd, the turnabout.

In 2008, it occurred to me to write about the Yugoslav segment of the 1987 trip, fragments of which made it into this 2017 narrative. The story of my acquaintance with Radojko "Rady" Petkovski on the Zagreb bound train was briefly told, wherein I mentioned searching his name on the internet and seeing a few highlights of his professional "earthquake engineer's" publishing career.

Shortly after the piece was published here at the blog, this comment was made.

I googled the internet for the same reason as you did, and I found your text. My father was Radojko Petkovski, Prof D-r. seismologist, who maybe you met in the train, probably returning from his visit to his brothers in Slovenia. It gives me a smile to see that he made an impression on you during yours short trip together.

Sadly, he passed away on 1st of June 2007.

Best regards,

His son, Milan

P.S. I can write you what happened after, since most of my youth has gone through that bloody period, but it will just ruin my smile.

It's always good to know, though knowing is sad. In the larger scheme of things, I've no idea whether Rady was a "good man." At the advanced age of 57, I'm no longer certain how we measure such things, or whether we even can.

However, for those few springtime days in Skopje during that far-off time, Rady was extremely gracious and helpful to this fumbling and disorganized budget traveler. I'll never forget Rady's hospitality.

May he rest in peace.

Next: The yellow brick streets in Sofia.

Ana Brnabić, Serbia and the novel Leeches.

Now with craft beer. Thoughts, Jon?

I saw this article about the Serbian prime minister and remembered a book I once read.

First, the article.

Ana Brnabić: 'I do not want to be branded Serbia's gay PM', by Patrick Wintour (The Guardian)

The 41-year-old who has never been part of a political party has risen from obscurity and is working to change Belgrade’s image

The appointment of Ana Brnabić as Serbia’s prime minister aged 41 was accompanied by the sound of glass ceilings being shattered all around her.

Not only is she the first woman to take on the role, Brnabić is gay and has achieved high office without being a member of a political party.

Giving her first interview to a foreign newspaper after a month in the job, she said: “Serbia is changing and changing fast, and if you will, I am part of that change, but I do not want to be branded ‘Serbia’s gay PM’. The message we need to send is about competence, professionalism and trustworthiness” ...

... She had little hands-on experience of Serbia’s unforgiving politics before becoming prime minister, a role that brings with it an imposing security detail outside her private office in Belgrade. In 2003 the then prime minister, Zoran Đinđić, was assassinated by an organised crime gang.

In her early 20s Brnabić spent six years abroad, mainly in London, from where she watched on TV as Nato planes bombed the defence ministry in Belgrade in 1999. To this day the buildings, over the road from her spartan office block, are a shell, a reminder of Serbia’s loss of Kosovo. They also highlight the dangers facing the Balkans as the west and Russia fight for strategic advantage.

I find this section interesting.

“I don’t think Serbia is that homophobic. I know that is one of the perceptions, and I understand attitudes are different in parts of Serbia. But some journalists were in a village in central Serbia where part of my family come from. They saw a couple of people just drinking beer in front of the local store and they asked them about me, and they replied: ‘Well, listen, in this part of Serbia we grow raspberries, fruit and vegetables, and we do not grow discrimination.’

“We just need to hear these kinds of people as well. The citizens of Serbia have a right not to be portrayed by a loud minority. We can have a culture where we disagree, as long as there is tolerance and no violence. We all have different views and values, but I don’t want to change people’s thinking by law.”

And finally, this.

“Joining the European community of nations is the icing on the cake, but the journey is just as important,” she said.

All of which made me think of the novel Leeches, which I reviewed here in 2011.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Leeches (A Book Review).

My only visit to Yugoslavia came in 1987, and it was an intensely evocative cultural experience for a young pup.

In fact, all those obscure parts of the Balkans (which include Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and the contemporary states succeeding Yugoslavia) I visited that summer seemed just as mysterious, foreboding and vaguely unsettling as previously reputed.

I had a blast.

Speaking in 1980’s geopolitical terms, the position of these nations as socialist buffers between East and West was only part of it. As a sometimes student of European history, I always recall the words of Metternich: “Asia begins at the Landstrasse," the road leading from Vienna eastward, toward Hungary, Romania and eventually Turkey, which during its expansive Ottoman phase controlled much of the Balkans.

Metternich may have been referring exclusively to a physical sense of delineations and differences, but his viewpoint surely also was instinctive – and straight from the gut.

Irish novelist Bram Stoker felt it, too. Although Transylvania lies slightly outside the Balkans in modern day Romania, it is where Dracula reigned. In more recent fiction, it was in the Black Mountains of Montenegro that Sherlock Holmes fathered a son and gumshoe successor, Nero Wolfe, the latter returning to his birthplace in middle age to avenge a restaurateur friend’s death, and assuage author Rex Stout’s conflicted feelings about Communism.

Memories are bizarrely long in the Balkans. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic rose to address a crowd gathered to commemorate Serbia’s defeat against Turkey in a battle fought 500 years before, and used the occasion to make a strident case for Serb pre-eminence in the province of Kosovo.

Did Milosevic release the malignant genie that Marshall Tito kept securely bottled? To western sensibilities, his nationalistic belligerence hastened the demise of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, itself an artful geopolitical creation dating from the post-WWI peace settlement, spawning the horrendous civil war of the 1990’s.

The truth is not so facile, but Americans, insofar as we know or care about modern Serbia, persist in seeing it as somewhat more sinister than other darkly cantankerous locales in Europe, if not exactly as inexplicably dangerous as Rwanda or Somethingstan.

---

In his novel Leeches, Serbian writer David Albahari offers a meandering, maddening but ultimately fascinating examination of the prevailing mood in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital city, in 1998.

There was a lull, then. The almost medieval violence of the 90’s had gradually tapered owing to the combatants’ exhaustion and belated international intervention. Yugoslavia was irrevocably shattered, and Serbia, charged with instigation and aggression, was beset with sanctions and isolated from the world.

But because the future of Kosovo remained unresolved, a final act in the tragedy lurked just over the horizon, and worst of all, in 1998, everyone knew it. The scene in Belgrade was one of tension, expectation and feigned normality. Accordingly, to reinforce the claustrophobic anxiety, Albahari’s story unfolds in the form of a continuous, uninterrupted, 309-page-long paragraph. It is a very effective device.

Loitering along the Danube River quay in Belgrade on an entirely unremarkable day in 1998, the nameless narrator, who has no visible means of support save for a topical weekly column he writes for one of several rambunctious local newspapers, suddenly witnesses a man slapping a woman.

Within days, this seemingly trivial episode obsesses the narrator, drawing him into an ever-expanding network of otherwise unconnected events and people, to which he expends much time and energy ascribing order and purpose to what others would see as random chaos.

He meets an eccentric mathematician from school days, and later falls in with the city’s few remaining older Jewish residents, including the daughter of one, for whom his sexual attraction is frustratingly unrequited.

He discovers a mysterious old water well, documented in a strange book with magical pages that seem to change with every reading, a volume filled with Jewish history, Kabalistic theorems and the recipe for an actual Golem, the latter to be called upon to assure deliverance from anti-Semitic persecution.

He suffers a requisite beating at the hands of skinhead-like nationalists as internal ruminations pass from his fevered brain to publication in the newspaper, where they inspire an angry civic reaction.

As the story progresses, and the labyrinth of conspiracy grows ever more complex, the narrator smokes steadily increasing quantities of genuine Balkan countryside marijuana with his only true friend, Marko. They meet often to get high and to lament the passing of the wonderful Serbian stoner era, now lost as the preference of young urbanites to lubricate their souls turned to valium, not ganja.

Every session with his new Jewish friends ends in a staggering brandy drunk, and as the pages turn and the never-ending paragraph trudges ahead, the conspiracies overlap and multiply amid the escalating paranoia and haziness.

The narrator’s newspaper columns grow ever more provocative as he speculates in print as to exactly why the country’s going to shit – and, non-metaphorically, literal defecations constantly turns up on his doorstep, courtesy of the vengeful thugs now stalking him.

---

All the while, the dim outlines of impending dénouement become ever more vivid, because as hindsight informs us, within a year of the novel’s conclusion, Serbia will be bombed by NATO on the pretext of saving the Kosovars from the fate of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Numerous Serbs will be charged with war crimes, to be pursued until the present day, and Milosevic himself will fall just short of emulating Hermann Goering by dying (of heart disease) before the court’s verdict is delivered.

There finally comes a juncture where Marko disappears. It will be another hundred pages before it becomes clear why, because in the end, the conspiracy actually is real, and more extensive than the reader could have imagined. A brutal murder occurs, the fix is in, and the narrator – used and abused by all and sundry – finally realizes he’ll be blamed for it.

He hops the next Budapest Airport shuttle out of the country and into exile. Following the example of Serbia’s history, the shelling soon to follow in 1999 will purge the guilt and prime the next round of anger, but the narrator will be long gone, exiled to an unnamed place, fearing his heart has died.

Maybe it has.

On June 3, 1987, from Sofia to Belgrade (and Budapest) by rail.

Previously: Sightseeing in Sofia with the ghost of Leonid Brezhnev.

On this day in 1987, I took no photos. June 3 was a travel day, and it turned out to involve a great deal more mileage than I expected at the beginning.

Pictured above is a page from the July 1992 edition of the Thomas Cook European Timetable. It's the oldest copy of those timetables still in my possession, but the schedule probably was little changed from 1987.

For those who planned on traveling by train, the Thomas Cook was a worthwhile investment. I spent hours poring over the schedules, and much later, wrote a short appreciation.

The blessed return of a personal Bible.

If my recall is to be trusted, by midday on June 2 I'd decided that while there was much of potential interest in Bulgaria, it would have to wait for next time (which unfortunately still has not arrived).

I wanted to give Belgrade (Yugoslavia) another chance, and move in the general direction of Hungary.

The ticket counter at Sofia's central station issued me a second class ticket without seat reservations, good for the 417-kilometer, seven-hour trip. The price was about $12.

Let's hope I packed sandwiches.

One memory stands out. We stopped at a station somewhere in Bulgaria, and on the adjoining track was a local train going in the opposite direction. It had a 3rd class car, seldom seen outside the East Bloc, filled with crude wooden benches without a stitch of upholstery.

It might have been 1937.

The train arrived in Belgrade before 4:00 p.m., and I was determined to improve on the muddled bearings of my previous brief visit. This time I knew where the youth hostel was located, quickly found the right tram to take me there, and arrived at the address only to find the building in the process of being demolished, a decision ostensibly made since the publication date of my guidebook.

Once again, absolutely no elderly women were waiting at the station with offers of cheap rooms. Unable to avoid hotel prices beyond my budget, and stubborn to the last, it was back to the ticket window, this time for an overnight train from Belgrade to Budapest (another 375 kilometers sleeping in a seat), then prior to departure, across the street to one of the neighborhood greasy spoons for an evening meal.

On Thursday morning, I was in Budapest. The following three weeks were spent in Hungary, and while the country may have been a socialist nightmare for its inhabitants, it proved to be budget traveler's dream playground.

Next: 30 years ago today ... experiencing Sopron, Hungary.

ON THE AVENUES: “Leeches” (A Book Review).

ON THE AVENUES: “Leeches” (A Book Review).

By ROGER BAYLOR
Local Columnist

My only visit to Yugoslavia came in 1987, and it was an intensely evocative cultural experience for a young pup.

In fact, all those obscure parts of the Balkans (which include Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and the contemporary states succeeding Yugoslavia) I visited that summer seemed just as mysterious, foreboding and vaguely unsettling as previously reputed. I had a blast.

Speaking in 1980’s geopolitical terms, the position of these nations as Socialist buffers between East and West was only part of it. As a sometimes student of European history, I always recall the words of Metternich: “Asia begins at the Landstrasse," the road leading from Vienna eastward, toward Hungary, Romania and eventually Turkey, which during its expansive Ottoman phase controlled much of the Balkans.

Metternich may have been referring exclusively to a physical sense of delineations and differences, but his viewpoint surely also was instinctive – and straight from the gut.

Irish novelist Bram Stoker felt it, too. Although Transylvania lies slightly outside the Balkans in modern day Romania, it is where Dracula reigned. In more recent fiction, it was in the Black Mountains of Montenegro that Sherlock Holmes fathered a son and gumshoe successor, Nero Wolfe, the latter returning to his birthplace in middle age to avenge a restaurateur friend’s death, and assuage author Rex Stout’s conflicted feelings about Communism.

Memories are bizarrely long in the Balkans. In 1989, Slobodan Milosevic rose to address a crowd gathered to commemorate Serbia’s defeat against Turkey in a battle fought 500 years before, and used the occasion to make a strident case for Serb pre-eminence in the province of Kosovo.

Did Milosevic release the malignant genie that Marshall Tito kept securely bottled? To western sensibilities, his nationalistic belligerence hastened the demise of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia, itself an artful geopolitical creation dating from the post-WWI peace settlement, spawning the horrendous civil war of the 1990’s.

The truth is not so facile, but Americans, insofar as we know or care about modern Serbia, persist in seeing it as somewhat more sinister than other darkly cantankerous locales in Europe, if not exactly as inexplicably dangerous as Rwanda or Somethingstan.

---

In his novel, “Leeches,” Serbian writer David Albahari offers a meandering, maddening but ultimately fascinating examination of the prevailing mood in Belgrade, Serbia’s capital city, in 1998.

There was a lull, then. The almost medieval violence of the 90’s had gradually tapered owing to the combatants’ exhaustion and belated international intervention. Yugoslavia was irrevocably shattered, and Serbia, charged with instigation and aggression, was beset with sanctions and isolated from the world.

But because the future of Kosovo remained unresolved, a final act in the tragedy lurked just over the horizon, and worst of all, in 1998, everyone knew it. The scene in Belgrade was one of tension, expectation and feigned normality. Accordingly, to reinforce the claustrophobic anxiety, Albahari’s story unfolds in the form of a continuous, uninterrupted, 309-page-long paragraph. It is a very effective device.

Loitering along the Danube River quay in Belgrade on an entirely unremarkable day in 1998, the nameless narrator, who has no visible means of support save for a topical weekly column he writes for one of several rambunctious local newspapers, suddenly witnesses a man slapping a woman.

Within days, this seemingly trivial episode obsesses the narrator, drawing him into an ever-expanding network of otherwise unconnected events and people, to which he expends much time and energy ascribing order and purpose to what others would see as random chaos.

He meets an eccentric mathematician from school days, and later falls in with the city’s few remaining older Jewish residents, including the daughter of one, for whom his sexual attraction is frustratingly unrequited.

He discovers a mysterious old water well, documented in a strange book with magical pages that seem to change with every reading, a volume filled with Jewish history, Kabalistic theorems and the recipe for an actual Golem, the latter to be called upon to assure deliverance from anti-Semitic persecution.

He suffers a requisite beating at the hands of skinhead-like nationalists as internal ruminations pass from his fevered brain to publication in the newspaper, where they inspire an angry civic reaction.

As the story progresses, and the labyrinth of conspiracy grows ever more complex, the narrator smokes steadily increasing quantities of genuine Balkan countryside marijuana with his only true friend, Marko. They meet often to get high and to lament the passing of the wonderful Serbian stoner era, now lost as the preference of young urbanites to lubricate their souls turned to valium, not ganja.

Every session with his new Jewish friends ends in a staggering brandy drunk, and as the pages turn and the never-ending paragraph trudges ahead, the conspiracies overlap and multiply amid the escalating paranoia and haziness.

The narrator’s newspaper columns grow ever more provocative as he speculates in print as to exactly why the country’s going to shit – and, non-metaphorically, literal defecations constantly turns up on his doorstep, courtesy of the vengeful thugs now stalking him.

---

All the while, the dim outlines of impending dénouement become ever more vivid, because as hindsight informs us, within a year of the novel’s conclusion, Serbia will be bombed by NATO on the pretext of saving the Kosovars from the fate of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. Numerous Serbs will be charged with war crimes, to be pursued until the present day, and Milosevic himself will fall just short of emulating Hermann Goering by dying (of heart disease) before the court’s verdict is delivered.

There finally comes a juncture where Marko disappears. It will be another hundred pages before it becomes clear why, because in the end, the conspiracy actually is real, and more extensive than the reader could have imagined. A brutal murder occurs, the fix is in, and the narrator – used and abused by all and sundry – finally realizes he’ll be blamed for it.

He hops the next Budapest Airport shuttle out of the country and into exile. Following the example of Serbia’s history, the shelling soon to follow in 1999 will purge the guilt and prime the next round of anger, but the narrator will be long gone, exiled to an unnamed place, fearing his heart has died.

Maybe it has.