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Nothing matters much in Belgrade cafés |
BELGRADE HERE IN Serbia's capital, political junkies can catch the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic live every day from The Hague on TV B92, the offshoot of the renegade radio station that was shut down four times during Milosevic's tenure.
But not much of Serbia, it seems, is paying attention.
Last month, wide-screen televisions set up in cafés throughout the city were blaring the World Cup instead. For the crowds of patrons transfixed by the games, Milosevic, the self-anointed knight of Serbian
honor, was the furthest thing from their minds.
"I don't give a damn," said one 23-year-old soccer fan. "He will be in jail for the rest of his life. Why should we bother with him any more? He's not here, and that's good."
After nearly a decade of sanctions and political isolation, Belgraders are only too eager to catch up on all the fun they missed.
Leisure is almost a full-time activity here. At 2 p.m. on a working day, the patchy park surrounding the Kalemegdan, the Roman and Turkish fortress that overlooks the junction of the Danube and Sava rivers, is so crowded with amorous couples, garrulous grandmothers and shirtless old men that it's hard to find an empty bench.
Ice cream carts, popcorn stands and sprawling outdoor cafés with wall-to-wall umbrellas are jammed with trendy customers.
Securing a table is an art, because with a coffee or beer and the requisite smoke, no one is in much of a hurry to leave.
But truth be told, it's not clear what the party is all about. Unemployment is high and economic devastation is hard to ignore. The plaster on buildings throughout the city is peeling in thick, gray strips.
The sidewalks are pitted and often littered with trash and rubble and the graffiti has grown so dense after more than a decade of neglect that birthday wishes from 1987 are still scrawled near where I'm staying.
Razing most ruins left by the 1999 NATO strikes seems out of the question for the time being; the burnt-out shells, with their giant missile thumbprints, have simply melted into the downtown skyline.
Passersby don't even look up. They have other things on their minds, like how to make ends meet in a republic where the average salary is around $216 a month.
The upheavals of recent years sped up this process of decay, but by no means were they its only cause.
The foreign investors that Serbia is desperately trying to attract complain that the local work ethic was ruined long ago by the socialist system.
Redundant hiring practices made going to work senseless even before the wars of the 1990s turned the country backward politically and economically, and the effects are still apparent everywhere.
Officially, well over one-quarter of the workforce is unemployed, but in a holdover from socialist days, the other three-quarters seem hardly more occupied.
Each city bus has both a driver and a ticket collector and, at the optometrist's office in my
neighborhood, four young women lounge behind the five-foot counter.
With more people than are needed filling most jobs, extending vacations and maternity leaves, for which workers are often paid at a reduced rate, has become commonplace and even, in some cases, compulsory.
This might be expected in a transition economy, but Serbia has been stuck in its rut for more than 10 years.
And yet Belgrade has another reality, a virtual reality that suggests opulence, where little of this seems to matter.
Strolling around the city with few dinars in their pockets, the masses of unemployed can choose a different hairstylist and shoe store on every block. The youngest invest their
meager funds in two-hour sessions at the computer game
centers scattered all over town.
For the jobless with credit cards, the Visa stickers on door after door suggest a temporary solution, even if there is only an occasional correlation between the sticker and the card's acceptance inside.
(One clothing store owner on Kneza Mihailova, Belgrade's swanky pedestrian mall, told me the sticker on her door had been meaningless for years.)
With the country's wars finally receding into the past, the last thing Belgraders feel like doing is tightening their belts, however hard their own circumstances may be.
The outlook might be bleak, but there is comfort in the fact that it used to be far worse.
Bowing to the gloomy economic indicators would mean putting off life, so many people here simply ignore them.
"If you have to choose between having a coffee and saving for a car, you buy the coffee," one young man told me, his iridescent sunglasses hugging his glistening scalp.
It's difficult to say where people get the money they spend. They typically give a little shrug when I ask them how they do it.
One friend, who earns about $115 a month as a radio reporter, barely makes ends meet even with three jobs on the side. But, like almost everyone I've met here, he smokes a pack of cigarettes a day and cools down with iced coffee in the cafés most nights.
There's little point in counting pennies when there's nothing to save.
A woman I know who works in a hospital here has a theory about why so many people smoke in Belgrade. She thinks the uncertainty of life leads people to seek control over their deaths.
Certainly, the 1990s did not give Belgraders much reason to invest in their future. The same can be said about today. Considering the uphill climb facing them, it is understandable that Belgraders prefer spinning their wheels.
A particularly earnest student who had been active in the anti-government demonstrations that brought Milosevic down in 2000 told me that most of the youth movements fizzled after the dictator's removal because suddenly there was nothing left to protest.
These people want to see progress immediately, she said, gesturing around the bar where we were sitting to the teenagers swathed in bluish smoke and pounding African drums in frenetic abandon.
A turn for the better may be a while in coming. In the meantime, if one thing is certain, it is that Belgraders will pack as many beats into the minute as possible.
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Rebecca Reich is a Harvard University doctoral student in Russian and south Slavic literature who is
traveling and working in the Balkans. |
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