THE MUSICAL AFTERNOON…
BELGRADE, 1991
Crossing the bridge was madness. For a time, it was total confusion. You couldn’t see where you were going. A dirty, grey-faced, exhausted man finally fell and was trampled. Flight, smoke, flame, shot--They ran together and made no sense. There were places on the bridge where the crowd was surely a hundred men wide, shoulder to shoulder in either direction. Government police, soldiers of all ranks, some of them deserting perhaps. A small man in a French kepi tried to knock Menninger aside with a flat of piece of iron. Fleeing the troops and the government tanks, abandoned lorries and cars had been swallowed up by masses of people who were fleeing in panic. Unable to pull forward, the lucky drivers had gotten out from behind their steering wheels and joined the crowds on foot, forsaking their cars as they fled for the lives. From behind the wheel of hers, a woman trying to open the door said, “Get moving now! You don’t understand who I am. Move along, God Damn You!” She seemed to be holding up a form of identification, a badge of some kind. A child in a peaked cap stuck out his tongue. A man told an older woman, “If you stick your hand down my pants again, you’d better mean business.” A woman held a hubcap before her the shape and size of a Mexican sombrero. A dog, a chocolate-covered Jagdhung, barked and barked. Someone held up one of those silhouettes Milosevic’s military used to remind their soldiers to be careful who they talked to, a black silhouette of a man in a snap-brim fedora pulled low across his face, with his hand cupped to his ear. Stuck with adhesive to a flat wooden stick, the placard rose above the heads of the people in front of Menninger, bobbing along a sea of people. An elderly woman with badly dyed hair held up a power plug attached to a length of electrical cord. She looked dazed. A toaster might have been wrenched from her hands only moments before, judging by the expression on her face. Still in uniform, a beetle browed man, a frantic civil servant of some kind, shinnied up one of the bridge’s suspension cables, then hand over hand he made his way forward above the crowd by negotiating the supports that held in place a huge sign commemorating the bridge’s dedication. The sign, reading BRIDGE OF BROTHERHOOD AND UNITY, had never been meant to hold a man’s weight, and it bent outward and away from the bridge, so that the man found himself dangling above the Sava River. He looked down at the water with surprise, as if he were thinking, Where did that come from, a river? Here? Menninger looked down at the water as well. The waters of the Sava were normally flowing. Today, they were inexplicably calm.
Albert Menninger looked up at the dangling man, then down to the water. To Menninger, the water appeared lucid, frugal, calmly waiting for the body of a man it expected to drown. When he looked into the dangling man’s face for the final time, the man’s eyes seemed confused. His feet flailed, as if solid footing on land were only inches away, then his fingers slipped and he plunged into the Sava. All of this took only a second or two.
In Student City, several hundred students had tried unsuccessfully to block the path of the incoming troops by commandeering buses, trucks, then mounting other forms of barricades. After several days of a stand-off, tanks were sent in to put an end to things. What had begun as an act of political courage had touched off a firestorm. Now sirens wailed throughout the city. Every few minutes, scattered explosions could be heard. Before getting to the bridge on the other side of the Sava, Menninger had faced advancing lines of government soldiers firing hundreds of rounds into cornered crowds of fleeing civilians. Now he faced a horse.
Ahead, someone wearing muddy Wellington boots was riding a dingy grey horse. People tried to give the frightened animal a wide berth when it reared, but there was nowhere they could go. It came down directly on top of them, throwing its rider clear. Further along, Menninger came face to face with a heavy-set man wearing only a short-sleeved t-shirt and American army fatigue pants. Menninger was still wearing his lab coat and the man asked, “Are you a doctor?” Menninger answered, “The University of Belgrade. I’m studying medicine.” As he tried to squeeze past, the man grabbed Menninger by the shoulder and said, “You know, I have nothing against the SPO or the students. Actually, I rather like them, they make reliable employees. Here, let me do you a favor.” He pulled up his tee-shirt and exposed his huge belly. Apparently he wanted Menninger to see his tattoo. The tattoo was of a naked woman, reclining on her back. Her feet were flat, her knees were spread. The tattoo artist had aligned the ridiculous image so that the fat man’s hairy naval became her genitalia. The fat man threw back his head and roared with laughter, wiggling her genitals from side to side. Menninger did the best he could to get past. He didn’t succeed until he was pushed forward from behind. He turned to see who had pushed him: a military officer in full-dress uniform, a formal uniform, his chest festooned with tiny medals. The officer spoke to Menninger as if he were offering some meaningful advice. “Go on,” he said.
“Get going. This is just a drop in the ocean.”
“Where did you come from?” asked Menninger.
“I just returned from the language school in Berlin,” he answered in Yugoslavian. Then, in German, he continued his thought: “Ich wusste noch nicht, dass die Stadt ein Schlachtfeld geworden war,” I did not know that the town had become the battlefield.
Menninger asked, “Do you think we’ll ever get across? I have to get across the bridge to Nyskli Hill. It’s very important. The Erdoly-Palais?”
Perhaps the officer was only at this instant getting a good look at Menninger, for he answered, “Forget everything I just let slip. Strictly confidential. Just between the two of us. Got it?”
At the edge of the bridge, the fleeing crowd spilled out onto the streets of the city There was something darkly, ludicrously festive in the air. There were occasional cheers, some singing. People who had struggled for their lives to get across the bridge now hugged one another. Menninger hadn’t the time. He hurried up a side street then crossed over to a more heavily traveled boulevard which ascended the steepest incline in Belgrade. Several months pregnant, an injured woman sat huddled in the doorway to his mother’s apartment building, her eyes averted from his own. Apparently she could walk no further unassisted. Her legs were curled up under her buttocks. Menninger paused to look at her. She assumed he was wondering if there was something he could do. Could he get her to her feet? When he bent to take a closer look, she spat directly in his face. Before he could react to this, a gang of street youth carrying clubs turned a corner and were coming his way. He flattened himself against the front of the building in order to let them pass. *
“What is occurring? Do you understand this, Albert? How could they do this, Albert?”
“Come away from the window, Mother. You can only upset yourself.”
She said, “They were beating people. They were even beating women. For no reason.” Like a child, Menninger’s mother put her hands to her ears.
“You know how the military is, dear. They love to make noise. Try not to listen. Besides, remember, they’ll tire of this sooner or later. We’ll just have to do our best, okay?”
“What are they doing, Albert?”
“Things will be soon be back to normal,” he assured her. “Milosevic’s men are rattling their sabers just now. So are the students. That’s all. They’re rattling their sabers at each other, it’s an exercise in saber rattling, so we’ll all do just what they say. The students have thrown in with the nationalists. They’re trying to establish themselves as an insurmountable force.”
His mother shook her head. “I don’t understand,” she told him.
“The SPO is being deliberately provocative,” he explained. “So is the government. Each wants to be the occupying force here. The government is trying to keep us inline. Not just the undergraduates and the SPO, not just the idealists, but all of Belgrade itself. Milosevic needs to diminish our will to resist him and his thugs.”
His mother asked, “How long will they be doing this, Albert?”
He answered, “We can expect them to keep up the pressure for a while, I imagine. Don’t worry. All they want to do is to frighten us. They don’t mean us any harm. Not if we stay out of the streets. Who are we to them, right? We’re not the enemy, we’re small potatoes.”
“You won’t go out. You won’t leave,” his mother pleaded.
A flew blocks away from the Cardiological Institute, where he was enrolled as a medical student, not far from the crumbling student dormitories, he had taken a shortcut across the outer edge of the university campus in order to get to the street. Coming from the other direction was a middle-aged man in a Chesterfield, a researcher Menninger knew by sight, a pharmaceutical chemist, returning to his office after having his lunch. Then, from over Menninger’s shoulder, came a deafening roar. The next thing Menninger knew, a government tank was barreling past him.
At the sight of the oncoming tank, an expression of surprised registered on the chemist’s face. He had time to get out of its path, and it was not as though he didn’t recognize the tank for what it was, it was a military tank, clearly coming in his direction, rather it was as though the chemist couldn’t imagine why the tank was not in the street, where it belonged: The street was the place for oncoming traffic. Menninger had a similar thought himself. He wondered what a military tank thought it was doing in the carefully manicured green of the medical fellows’ garden.
The next thing he knew, the tank had sheared the chemist in half. It didn’t leave the man mangled, or particularly bloody for that matter—divided, was all, a torso neatly severed from its lower extremities.
“No, of course not. Where were you this afternoon, Mother? I tried to phone here once I heard on the radio Milosevic was sending in his troops. At first the telephone rang with no answer, then the lines went dead entirely.”
“This was my musical afternoon,” she said. “Don’t you remember what day of the week it is?”
“Oh yes, of course. Where was it today?” Menninger asked.
“Matthias Church,” his mother responded. She held out a crumpled paper quarto. He straightened it. He stood beside a chair and read what it said. The paper was a musical program with a line drawing of a violin/cello in the center of its cover.
Each week at this time his mother and a few of her lady friends attended a chamber recital of some sort, then retired to the Café Gerbeaud where they gossiped over sherry.
“Let’s close the curtains,” said Menninger. “Would you like me to do that, dear? Would you like me to close the curtains?”
“No, but turn on electric lamps all the same. It will soon be rather dark in here—No?”
“All right, dear,” Menninger answered, pulling the curtains together. “We’ll turn on a lamp or two, if that’s what you like.”
Menninger’s mother said, “Did you speak to the doorman about that man, Albert?”
“What man, Mother?”
“The one I asked you to see to—who else? That hobo who lurks about and begs money when I pass him. You didn’t forget, did you?”
Menninger lied, “No Mother, I didn’t forget.” Menninger’s mother had pointed out a Muslim who’d begun loitering around their building. He was tall and thin wearing a turtleneck sweater beneath an old tunic. Instead of trousers, he wore plus-fours that were several sizes too big for him and fell well below the knee. He appeared to Menninger to be blind. He wore sunglasses with round, black lenses and carried a white cane. But he wasn’t blind, as Menninger’s mother pointed out. When he thought no one was watching, he changed his shaky gait to a long, confident stride, and did without the cane entirely.
“And?”
“And Alia said he’d see about it, Mother. He’s had several complaints, I understand. I wouldn’t be too worried though. He’s surely just an old man, down on his luck.”
“Does that give him the right to make a nuisance of himself? Is that what you’re saying? Then I think the opposite. No, it does not. He has no business being there. Let him go back to where he came from.”
Menninger sat down in a chair and began emptying his pockets of his wallet and keys. Without looking up, Menninger asked, “How was your recital, Mother? I don’t believe you’ve said.”
“Oh, very bad.”
“Really? Inferior musicians? That’s unusual, isn’t it?”
“Not the organist, Albert. With her I had no complaint. Very expert.”
“What then, the music they selected?”
“No, the program was fine as well. But the afternoon wasn’t pleasant. You never know who you’ll be sitting next to anymore. My generation was brought up to regard music with a proper respect. Not everyone seems to feel that today. Audiences are often very rude, very restless.”
“Perhaps they thought there was something wrong with the playing,” Menninger suggested.
“Even when they like a work, they show their pleasure coarsely. That ruins it for everyone.”
“Perhaps you should skip a week or two. Have your friends over here, why don’t you, Mother? Would you consider that?”
How could Belgrade, the Serbian capital, allow harm to come to any of its most learned and cultured citizens? That’s what she was thinking, wasn’t it. No wonder she demanded to live on the Nsykli Hill overlooking the Sava. Nsykli was a hill, a towering limestone mesa, while Belgrade itself was a lowland, repeatedly razed to the ground then rebuilt through much of its early history. Her apartment was on Mihaly-Tancsics Street in a fine old baroque building, the Erdoly-Palais. From the window of her front room, in one direction you could see a prayer house that dated back to the fifteenth century, and in the other direction, past the shattered minarets of a prominent mosque, modern Belgrade and the lights along the river. She described her home to others as “looking out over the city,” but the truth was, thought Menninger, the apartment looked down on it, particularly what went on in its streets and its ghettos. On his mother’s side of the Sava, a person of culture and means could rise above such things.
No doubt she felt like a Serb, completely at home here in Belgrade, the Serbian capital. What was the time-worn expression, “Speak Serbian so the world can understand you?” But they weren’t Serbs at all, not as Milosevic was defining things. While she’d lived here all of her life, her parents had been from Dubrovnik, in the neighboring republic of Croatia, and their parents before them. Right now it was Muslims who were being ousted from their apartments and taken to the ghettos of Belgrade, but there was no guarantee it would stop there. Already anyone of Croatian blood was having trouble getting visas, while no Muslim could travel at all. Twice he’d encouraged her to leave the city. Twice she’d said no. This, after all, was her home. She’d seen armies in the street before.
“But if people stop attending, won’t they end these series entirely?” she asked him
“What, dear? What did you say? Look, the conditions in Belgrade are very bad. I don’t have any way of knowing how long there’ll be concerts. Surely you realize that.”
“I just feel one should do what one can, Albert. By way of support.”
Menninger rubbed at his eyes with his fingers. He felt a headache coming on—a large round ball that was lodging itself directly behind the bridge of his nose. He said, “Who do you think you’re supporting, Mother? Bach? Liszt? Mendelssohn?”
“Mendelssohn is no longer played,” she reported. “Strictly forbidden.”
“I know, I know, another of the government’s master strokes. Nothing by a Jew. But that’s not the point, dear.”
“Perhaps we should talk about something else, if this upsets you, Albert.”
“Well it does seem a little obscene. Doesn’t it seem that way to you, mother? I mean, there are people down on the streets collecting twigs and sticks. They’ve been put out of their homes. You see, they don’t know where they’ll be sleeping tonight. The conditions in Belgrade are really very bad, dear.”
“Oh, very bad. Yes, there’s so much unemployment. And distress everywhere,” his mother said. “Do you think I’m blind to that? Do you think I’m unaware of the moral depravity? I see people who have lost their last scrap of dignity.”
His nerves felt raw. Menninger said, “It must seem a little obscene, then, even to you, to concern yourself with an organ recital.”
She asked, “Would it improve them one iota if we spoke of something else? I don’t see how, do you?”
“I’m simply suggesting that what’s vicious and tawdry, what’s criminal, Mother, may spring from hunger and from poverty, and most of all, from fear.”
“Really, Albert? How would you know? You received the best schooling, here and abroad. When have you been hungry? Can you remember a time when I allowed you to be cold? Was there a way to spoil you which I wouldn’t allow?”
“I apologize, Mother. I didn’t mean to lecture you.”
Menninger went to the window and saw not the Sava at the moment but billowing clouds of blackness through a parting in the curtains. He was surprised when he turned to find his mother at his shoulder. “There’s no reason to be afraid, dear, at least not as long as we keep out of their way. They won’t stay very long, the army. The government’s troops are advancing through the city. If they overcome the SPO and these others, they’ll leave an occupying force behind, little more than a handful of soldiers, while the bulk of their troops push out to the provinces. We’ll simply have to be patient. And cautious, of course. Why don’t you take a hot tub, dear? Would you like me to draw your bath and bring you something sweet to drink?”
“Yes, I’ll take a hot tub, I think, Albert.”
“Should I draw it for you then?”
“No, no. I’ll do it myself.”
“Are you certain? I don’t mind.”
His mother said, “All that lives must die. Passing through nature to eternity.”
Menninger said, “No Shakespeare, Mother. Not just now. Please. Hamlet has nothing to teach us about what’s happening in the streets.”
His mother paused in the dining room on her way to her closets. She was watching him, or facing at least in his general direction. She removed a hanky from her sleeve. Curiously, he thought, she brought her hanky to her mouth instead of to her cheeks, the way other women seemed to. She might have been bringing a napkin to her lips. She said, “You were always a cold fish, even as a child.” There was nothing critical in his mother’s tone. She seemed to be articulating a judgment she had long ago reached but never before found occasion to voice. It was possible she had not intended for him to hear at all. Nevertheless, he heard, felt stung, and he answered her in kind.
“I’m not sure I know what that means, Mother. What, precisely, is a cold fish?”
“Look in the mirror,” she answered.
They stood facing one another. She said, “I mean to take my tub now, Albert.” She waited for him to respond. When he failed to, she walked away.
He returned his attention to the window, promising himself that later he would make this up to her. He would prepare for her a favorite snack, cream of tomato soup, a cup of orange Pekoe tea, and bring it to her room on a tray she had purchased while traveling to the Orient with his father when Menninger was a child, a red lacquered tray with parasols stenciled in gold. If the students began a retreat, the first thing the soldiers would destroy would be—what? The main bridge? Yes, the Bridge of Brotherhood and Unity, he imagined. Then the ones that remained. They would push them back to the part of Belgrade commonly known as Student City. In the distance, he could hear what sounded like rockets and mortar fire, though that seemed out of the question. Everything was suddenly silent outside. He waited for the breaking of the silence, virtually holding his breath. At last he heard a drilling noise, human voices, other kinds of noise which he couldn’t identify, but human noise, crazed laughter, perhaps, then, finally, a few rounds of rifle fire, at once defiant and pathetic. He was getting used to such things.
