The motorway to the South, in the direction of Niš, had been widened so effectively that Milena managed to drive to Jagodina – a distance of almost two hundred kilometres – with her foot down the whole way, optimising the fuel consumption, in a little over an hour and a half. En route she made two calls: a short one to Adam, to check he was OK (‘I haven’t got time for this right now, Mum!’), and a relatively long one to Tanja, whom she wanted to thank for the previous evening. But she didn’t get that far. Tanja was hopping mad: Milena’s trip to Talinovac was total madness (‘What are you hoping to achieve against the Albanians all on your own?’), as well as being downright hair raising and dangerous (‘I’ll be relieved if all they do is slash your tyres!’). Then she cut to the chase: ‘The whole thing’s a complete fool’s errand.’ Milena didn’t even attempt to allay Tanja’s concerns, and instead tried to keep the conversation short, which made Tanja even more angry. Shortly after Kragujevac, Milena hung up, and she had just decided to pull into the next service area when the phone rang again.
This time it was Siniša, who had been alerted by Tanja, but before he could get started Milena pretended that the connection was breaking up – which wasn’t actually a total lie – first shouting ‘hello, hello,’ into the phone, then hanging up and switching off the device. This was not exactly polite of her, but she needed some support right then. Fifteen kilometres to the border. She indicated and pulled up to the petrol pump – the last stop in Serbia.
She asked the attendant to fill the tank and gave him a tip, which prompted him to throw in a free windscreen wash. The toilets in the kiosk were surprisingly clean, and the cappuccino she ordered at the cafeteria bar wasn’t half bad. She bought cigarettes and a map, and returned to her car.
It was warm, there was a gentle breeze and the sky with its puffy clouds looked even bluer through the freshly cleaned windscreen. Milena enjoyed the changing landscape en route: rolling hills turned into real mountains, and small brooks became torrential rivers. High up on the cliffs, she spotted an old castle that had been built by the Ottomans. For a moment, she lost herself in the scene and forgot that she was on her way to the spot where just a month ago two people had been murdered. She was driving through an area called Toplica, which was steeped in history and which would presently give way to Kosovo and then later, approaching Albania, to a region known as Metohija. Around 1100, the first Serbian national state had emerged here, finally collapsing in 1389 after its defeat by the Turks at the Battle of Kosovo. It was not until 1912 that the Serbs were able to break the hold of the Ottomans and win back their lost territory in the First Balkan War. A hundred years had passed since then, and the Serbian state had thrown it all away with its arrogant and narcissistic political adventurism. For the first time in history, Kosovo was an independent state recognised by the US, Germany and many others. Albanians were the dominant majority there, while Serbs were an unloved and in some places even deeply reviled minority.
The border check on the Serbian side of the frontier was cursory; the official checked Milena’s ID with studied indifference and handed back her document without bothering to look her in the face. The traffic jam only began when she approached the Kosovan border post.
For ages it was stop-and-go, as Milena inched forward between lorries from Bulgaria, Romania and Austria. The cars that jumped the queue in front of her all had Serbian number plates and were almost all heavily laden, weighed down with overfull boots and roof racks piled high with electrical goods, building materials, boxes and suitcases. But at the checkpoint it was Milena who was pulled aside by the guards in their black-and-red uniforms. She opened her window and handed over her papers.
‘Please step outside your vehicle,’ she was told.
She complied. While one guard leafed through her passport, two others walked round her car, inspecting it. One of them, who had a moustache, ordered her to open the boot.
Between the spare tyre and a bag of cat litter stood the bucket and the old mop that Vera and she had used last Saturday, like they did every year after the winter, to spring-clean the headstone on her father’s grave and get everything shipshape again. Among the rags were two bottles of water – a gift from Siniša – for the windscreen. The moustache looked at everything with a perplexed expression and asked her, ‘Are you carrying any weapons?’
Milena shook her head, relieved that she didn’t still have the papers relating to her postdoctoral thesis in the car that she’d taken to be scanned the other day. The title of her thesis was ‘The Criminal Prosecution of War Crimes in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia from 1990 to 1999’.
She was allowed to close the boot again, and the moustache asked, ‘What is your final destination?’
Milena thought for a split second before replying, ‘Talinovac.’
‘And the purpose of your visit there?’
‘I’m going to see… a friend.’
Her hesitation seemed to irritate the officer. ‘Name?’ he enquired.
‘Milka Bašić.’ Milena brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. She couldn’t think of anything better off the top of her head.
His colleague closed her passport and said, ‘You don’t have valid car insurance.’
‘What?’
‘If you want to enter Kosovo you have to get insurance.’ He nodded in the direction of a hut with barred windows where people were standing in line.
Twenty minutes later, Milena affixed an insurance disc to the inside of the windscreen, ensuring it was clearly visible for inspection. The whole rigmarole had cost her twenty euros, a completely spurious money-spinning scam. On the other hand, where was a small state like Kosovo, dirt poor, with an estimated two million inhabitants and with no industry or infrastructure to speak of, supposed to get hold of foreign currency otherwise? She fastened her seat belt and drove across the frontier. A sign with the coat of arms of Kosovo welcomed her: gold stars on a blue background.
Of course, the landscape did not change immediately after the border post, nor did the sky darken from one minute to the next. Most likely it was the street dust, the smoke from burning rubbish bins and the stench of the fires that contrived to put Milena in a melancholic mood – plus the view of desolate houses with boarded-up windows, obviously uninhabited and in some cases ransacked, half-tumbledown or reduced to a heap of rubble. Signs with Cyrillic letters indicated that this area close to the border had once been inhabited by Serbs, but the bakery, the ironmonger and the other shops had been forced to close. An old woman was leading a cow along the road by a rope around its neck. Stray dogs were fighting and frolicking by the roadside, oblivious to the traffic snaking in a long line along the motorway towards Priština. The checkpoint at the first junction consisted of a corrugated-iron shack, sandbags and an armoured vehicle manned by bored soldiers of the international security force. With their machine guns slung over their shoulders, they were as much part of the landscape as the derelict vehicles on the verge, which doubled up as adventure playgrounds for children.
The further inland that Milena drove, the denser the settlements became, though almost every building was unfinished, the ground floors just skeletons of iron girders, roofs only provisionally covered and external walls without plaster. These makeshift houses, so-called ‘stone piggybanks’, were typical of a young state but were a major problem – not only because they were blots on the landscape and caused towns to expand beyond their natural limits, but also because these shabby conurbations all began to merge into one another. Most of the dwellings had been put up without permission or any regard to the infrastructure that was required to support them. But the greatest damage was actually the loss to the economy of private capital, sent home by relatives working abroad and turned into these ramshackle constructions of bricks and mortar instead of productive investments. Milena looked at her rear-view mirror.
Perhaps Tanja and her scaremongering had spooked her, but she couldn’t help noticing that a little mustard-yellow Fiat 500 had been behind her for quite some time. Occasionally it disappeared from view, and she thought that it might have just been her imagination, but then it promptly reappeared behind her. Normally she would just hit the accelerator and pull away, but the dreadful state of the road here prevented her from doing that. She decided to put her hunch to the test. She turned off the road to Priština and – although it meant a detour – headed instead in the direction of Ferizaj, formerly known as Uroševac. Just as she feared, the mustard-yellow car followed, eagerly flashing its lights. Suddenly the road was empty ahead, so she accelerated, and the old Fiat fell back.
She thought what she did next would be a smart move. Beyond the next bend in the road, she rolled off onto a tarmaced area and drove past some fruit-and-vegetable stands before parking right at the back of the plot, where her car was shielded by a line of trees. A little further on, there were some wooden shacks and a pergola selling shashlik kebabs and beer. Milena disengaged the clutch and in her rear-view mirror noticed the Fiat parking behind a cabbage stall. She cursed silently. Her manoeuvre had achieved nothing.
She left the car, locked the doors and dashed past the folding tables and chairs, following signs for the toilets. From there, she observed quite a large man getting out of the little Fiat, tucking his white shirt into his dark trousers and purposefully going over to her car. He brazenly peered through the window and calmly inspected the vehicle’s interior. Then, scanning his surroundings the whole time, he made a call on his mobile phone.
Milena hid behind the wooden door. She’d never seen this man before in her life. Was he a policeman in civilian clothes? Someone from the Serbian secret service? But how could anybody have latched on to her so quickly after she crossed the border? It was insane. And in a car like that!
‘Just walk over and speak to the guy calmly and collectedly,’ Milena told herself. She washed her hands. She didn’t want to drive herself crazy, but on the other hand nor did she want any trouble with people who were out to harass her. All she wanted was to get to Talinovac and then return home without more ado.
The man disappeared under a pergola, and in that moment his car was blocked by a delivery van. It was a stroke of fate, and she spotted her chance.
To be on the safe side, she took a different route back to her car, clambering over some drinks crates and squeezing past wheelie bins. Children were beating bushes with sticks and chasing cats with plastic machine guns. She got in, started the engine and carefully let the car roll back a bit, before putting it in gear and accelerating hard.
Suddenly, the white shirt was right in front of her bonnet. She only just managed to brake in time. The shock made her exhale audibly. Flinging the door open, she screamed, ‘Have you lost your mind? I almost ran you down! Who the hell are you, and what do you want?’
‘Thank goodness I found you.’ The man had dark eyes and bushy black eyebrows. He raised both hands in a gesture of submission. ‘My name’s Enver Kurti. I’m here to look after you.’