CHAPTER 2

Belgrade, 1981

A few years later, I was seven and living in Belgrade. My father had been assigned to the embassy there. Our small stone cottage was in a quiet diplomatic enclave on the south side of the city, perched on the banks above a bend in the Danube River where yellow forsythia and chestnut trees jostled for space. From the branches of the cherry trees came the shouting of the neighborhood kids until dark, and sometimes well beyond.

My father and I walked our dog, a golden retriever called Duke, in the evenings. He did so slowly; my father liked to amble. Hands in pockets, he’d whistle through his teeth, Brahms or one of the old show tunes he’d sung as a member of the college glee club. He usually wore a brown beret and a puffy blue parka, under which his big frame disappeared entirely. Sometimes, he smoked a pipe.

He often stopped by one of the park’s giant trees, behemoths that had been there for half a century or more, and reached down to examine the ground at its base. He was looking for good chest-nuts, he said. As I played, or watched the dog, he’d root around on his knees, running his hands through the beet-coloured leaves. Sensing a hunt, Duke would come racing up, disturb the scene, and cause my father to topple over, laughing, against the tree. He’d emerge holding a chestnut out for me.

‘We used to roast these when I was a kid,’ he’d say. ‘There’s nothing like the smell of a roasted chestnut.’ He’d look around, relishing the afternoon.

Then he’d smile and off we’d go, Duke trailing behind or ahead, or spinning through the bushes. Life was an adventure, and he was my guide.

In Belgrade, I lived with my father, Janet, and Amy. He and my mother had divorced the year before, when I was six, and I had left her behind in Virginia — or she had left me (these things all depend on perspective). My father had married Janet promptly after the divorce, a circumstance that came to mean more to me in later years. Janet’s daughter, Amy, was five years older than me. The four of us were a new family, and Belgrade was our first collective home.

Children are malleable, and I no less than most, so the novelty of the situation inspired more curiosity than terror. The fact that we were behind the Iron Curtain, or at least right on its edge, had a special significance for me. I imagined a wall that stretched from the ground to the sky, a veil of rust-coloured chainlink through which the rest of the world was visible, but not reachable. My mother, I knew, was on the other side of the curtain. Little did she know how pleasant it actually was in the iron gardens of Belgrade.

At that age, I didn’t really know why I was always moving, only that it was an irreducible component of life with my father. When I asked him about it, he said he worked for the foreign service, and that was enough for me. I understood that this involved embassies and functions and parties, which was why we entertained on a regular basis, throwing cocktail parties and dinners to which large numbers of people from many different countries came. I thought it to be a rather dignified, urbane kind of job, something I might like to do one day.

One night, I snuck from my bedroom and peeked around a corner to watch one of these parties. My dad spoke Serbo-Croatian fluently, and the local ladies trilled in his presence. His eyes twinkled as he talked to them, and one eyebrow would often arch up mischievously. The other men, I thought, seemed harsh next to his charm.

After the party, my father went out with Duke alone. He did this sometimes: they’d go on long walks, much longer than the ones I ever took. I was impatient, like most boys, and if Duke veered off in one direction I’d yank him back as hard as I could until he morosely succumbed, or until I decided it was time to go home. Duke listened to and obeyed my father; he hardly had to be leashed at all.

Off they went into the woods, as I sat at the window next to the front door and watched their bodies disappearing into the darkness. I followed the last moving fragments as they deepened out of the lamplight that smeared the cobblestones. Then I went to my room to wait. I played with my Lego set and read Hardy Boys mysteries to pass the time. They were gone for so long that I became worried; the house seemed empty without him. When they eventually returned, and I heard the rhythmic jangling of Duke’s collar and his excited trot towards my room, my father came in. It was late, and he was surprised to find me awake and at my desk, but he smiled.

‘What are you working on, Scotty?’ he asked.

I made something up. He came over to investigate and I shoved some previously used paper his way as proof of my labours. But he loved me, and didn’t doubt me, or I him, and that’s the way it was. He was a magical man to me, and there was little about him that I didn’t study for clues as to how the world worked.

‘How was your walk?’ I asked.

‘Great,’ he beamed. He’d always say something like that. And because so few encounters in life were ever less than exceptional for my father, he would recount some detail that stood out: a brightly coloured leaf, a woman with one leg, some thought he’d had about a prospective trip, or some suddenly and deeply felt emotion, such as his great love for me.

‘But how do you see in the dark?’ I asked, after he’d told me about what he’d seen. I was scared of the dark, and of the woods — sometimes even in the brightness of day. I cowered at the idea of setting off alone into that particular darkness with only a dog at your side — a dog you could no longer see but only hear, as a faint jingling of metal in the void, or a panting of breath and pitter-pattering over dry leaves and broken branches. And what if Duke suddenly became vicious, rabid — werewolf-like — and attacked you on those long walks?

But he just smiled. ‘You get used to it. Your eyes grow accustomed to the dark,’ he said. ‘It’s okay out there.’

I wanted him to hug me and he did, tucking me into bed and singing to me. In the morning when he came to wake me, he sat by my side, rubbed his hands on my chest, and sang to the melody of Reveille, ‘You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up in the morning. You gotta get up, you gotta get up, you gotta get up today.’

Being seven, my universe was small. I rarely ventured too far from our little three-bedroom cottage. During the morning, I went to an international school close by, and came home again. In the afternoons, I would be out in the cherry trees with my friends playing War or Dragons or a game in which you had to get from one place to another without touching the ground, or else you’d die. I had a secret fort in the backyard, and there I waged wars and staged battles and toppled mountains or towers, or whichever other edifices could be torn asunder, and built them back up again. I played soldiers or fort at friends’ houses, or they played Lego at mine. My best friend, Zander, lived next door, and we strung up a telephone line made of string and passed secret messages to each other at night. My first semi-crush, an American girl named Kate, whose father worked with mine, lived right up the hill. Her braces and curly black hair were the closest I came to adoration for many years.

Thus the days went by in Belgrade, for two years. I didn’t know much about what was happening around me — the simmering ethnic tensions, the slow exodus from the Soviet Bloc, and what that would mean for the generation of Yugoslavs with whom, in grade two, I was now learning to add and subtract.

But those many walks through the woods, sometimes alone, sometimes together, define my experience of Belgrade. Even today, I can see the outline of my father and me walking away through that forest, his arm about my shoulder, his head swivelling this way and that, eyes scanning. I can hear his deep voice ushering me along, and the long, mournfully repeating whistle he used to call Duke. ‘Come on, Scotty,’ he’d say, ‘we better get home for dinner.’ With him, the darkness of those woods was kept at bay just as the heft of the Earth kept the sun from obliterating us for 12 hours during each 24. Then the light would begin to raze, to fray that ragged edge.

If I had looked around a bit closer, say at the base of one of those trees my father and I had been playing under, I might have noticed something different. The ground might have been loosely packed down. Whereas before we had arrived there had been nothing out of the ordinary, now I might notice a single grey branch placed loosely, almost haphazardly, against the base of the trunk. If I looked closely enough, I might see that in the dark hollow just above the roots a brown paper package had been left, and was covered with a slight smattering of debris.

But if a person wasn’t looking carefully — if, in fact, you didn’t know exactly what you were looking for — you wouldn’t notice a thing.