Slate
Five days in Serbia’s turbulent capital.
October 2000
Posted: Monday, Oct. 9, 2000, at 10:30 a.m. PT
It may not have been the polite thing to do, but I just gate-crashed a revolution. Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was not in the mood to provide journalists with invitations, in the form of visas, as his judgment day neared, so I boarded a Swissair flight from Zurich to Belgrade and hoped for the best. The options included a) being arrested at the airport; b) being allowed into the country; or c) joining a Balkan version of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. If you guessed c), you would be correct.
I was among more than 60 foreign journalists who arrived at the airport on Friday, and the police had no idea what to do. A day earlier several hundred thousand demonstrators had marched through the streets and stormed the federal parliament building and the national TV station. Now the protesters were back in the streets again, the government was collapsing, and the airport cops didn’t know whether to imprison us or serve champagne.
So, they told us to wait in the lounge. An hour passed, then two. The police were waiting for instructions from the government, but it wasn’t clear whether Yugoslavia still had a government, or if it did, who was in charge of it. Most of us had cell phones, so frantic calls were made to people who might be able to liberate us. A colleague reached Zarko Korac, an ever-helpful opposition politician, and Korac promised to do what he could but explained, speaking on his cell phone, that at that moment he was leading a march of 100,000 people, so he really had his hands full.
Few foreign journalists were in the city, so nearly everyone at the airport was receiving calls from desperate editors. It didn’t seem to matter that our main source of information was listening to hourly bulletins on the BBC World Service. A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter was called by an editor at a TV network in New York. Could she interview him about the events in Belgrade? The reporter explained our out-of-touch predicament, but that posed no problem for the editor, who read him the latest wire reports and told him she would call back in a few minutes to hear him tell her what she had just told him. Elsewhere, a British correspondent was phoning in a convincing account of the events occurring in the city, a ramparts dispatch that could at any moment have been interrupted by an announcement about an arriving or departing flight.
After eight hours, we were released into the city, and when I arrived at my hotel and called a Serbian friend, the first thing he said was, “Did you hear the news? Milosevic resigned tonight.” It was well past midnight, and I headed for the city center, where the partying was still underway. There was dancing in the streets—I mean this literally—as strangers high-fived each other and friends embraced in group hugs, whirling around like tops. Everyone was happy and drunk, which seemed appropriate after a decade of four disastrous wars and international isolation.
The last act was played out on Saturday, when the newly elected federal parliament presided over the inauguration of Yugoslavia’s new president, Vojislav Kostunica. It was a peculiarly Serbian affair in which there were nearly as many bodyguards in attendance as politicians and journalists. The nastiest ones surrounded Vojislav Seselj, a 6 foot 5 inch redwood of a man who leads a party for which the gentlest description might be “fascist,” and who has been indicted for war crimes in the Hague. There were several indicted war criminals at the session and, likely, a sprinkling of unindicted ones. If you spend much time covering Serbia, you have to find some sort of equanimity in the company of these sorts of men. I have a soft spot for them, in the way, perhaps, that an infectious-disease specialist would be fascinated with samples of the smallpox virus.
Seselj’s bodyguards have the appearance of Sing Sing parolees on steroids. As he strode past with his posse forming a tight wedge around him, I didn’t stand a chance of getting more than a question in; I was, suddenly, the Sam Donaldson of the Balkans, shouting above the roar of the metaphysical rotors. I asked for his reaction to the overthrow of Milosevic, and he looked at me as though examining a piece of gum on the sole of his shoe.
“From which country?” he said.
“From America,” I replied.
“No,” he said.
I jumped out of the path of the wedge.
I had better luck with Zoran Djindjic, who is the head of the largest party in the opposition bloc that ousted Milosevic. Djindjic has nearly as many bodyguards as Seselj, but Djindjic’s boys, like their boss, are snappy dressers; they are Armani thugs. Like almost every other anti-Milosevic politician, he no longer cares about the former president. “He was my problem during the time he was president, and he was dangerous for our security, but now he is a pensioner and a private person and I am not interested,” Djindjic said.
It is a curious position, and I wanted to discuss it in greater depth, but after a few minutes, the boss gave his boys the signal, and I was politely but firmly nudged out of the way. Later, a friend who works in the opposition told me the following story about Djindjic’s bodyguards: On Thursday, when Belgrade erupted into revolution, my friend was with Djindjic at City Hall. Suddenly, four or five of his bodyguards came into the room with several canvas bags. They closed the door and unzipped the bags, which contained an arsenal of pistols, assault rifles, grenades, flak jackets, and enough ammunition to fight a war. They stuffed the weapons into their clothes, slinging the AK-47s around their backs, under their jackets, and strode out, like Serbian terminators. Not a word was exchanged. “I thought I was watching a movie,” my friend said.
Serbia, Serbia, Serbia. It’s good to be back. I feel sorry for colleagues of mine who, having just arrived here, are suddenly packing up. The lobby of the Hyatt Hotel was filled this morning with television gear being loaded onto airport vans. Much of the pack is rushing off to Israel and Lebanon, where there is talk of war.
I hope they have visas.
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Posted: Tuesday, Oct. 10, 2000, at 12:30 p.m. PT
Isadora Sekulic is pissed off.
“These people are the worst sort of garbage,” she tells me.
We are sitting in her temporary office at Radio-Television Serbia, where she is running the newsroom of what was, for the past decade, the country’s principal outlet of nationalist and racist propaganda. Along with several other independent journalists, she has been sent to RTS by the country’s new government to ensure good behavior by the former mouthpiece of former President Slobodan Milosevic. So Sekulic, who was fired from RTS in a political purge during the early years of Milosevic’s rule, is surrounded by men and women she has despised for years, and now she despises them all the more, because instead of quitting or apologizing or attempting to continue their noxious programs—this would at least be consistent—they are sidling up to her and suggesting they always supported the opposition, and they are providing her with the names of colleagues who, they insist, were Milosevic’s real enforcers at the station.
“They were all working under the regime,” she scoffs. “They were liars, they were war mongers, they were dirty journalists—until four days ago. Now they are trying to tell me they are honest professionals.”
She glances outside her office, at the RTS journalists scurrying about, putting together an evening news program that they hope will please their new masters. I get the impression, from Sekulic’s grimace, that if she had a grenade she might roll it into the newsroom.
It was with a sense of curiosity that I visited RTS. I wanted to talk with the men and women who incited the hatred that caused four wars in the former Yugoslavia; first in Slovenia, then Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. They weren’t killers in the normal sense of the word, but they were responsible, at least in a moral way, for the killing that occurred. The questions that surround these people—what they did, why they did it, and how they explain it now—illuminate the murky intersection between human nature and state power. Why do people compromise themselves for the sake of an evil regime? These are questions that interest me, so I’m afraid today’s “Diary” is going to focus on them.
I began my sojourn at RTS with Marija Mitrovic, a leading journalist at the station.
“I am finished,” she said. “I am the face of the politics of Milosevic, and that is a problem now. People hate us, and I understand that.”
Mitrovic, a villanous yet frank lady, spent years reading news reports that glorified Milosevic and slandered the opposition. She has fared relatively well since Thursday, when anti-Milosevic protesters stormed RTS headquarters. She hasn’t, for example, been beaten by an angry mob, as happened to Milorad Komrakov, the editor in chief of RTS, nor has she been spat upon by protesters, as happened to anchor Staka Novkovic. Mitrovic continues to draw her paycheck, although she is too unpopular to appear on the airwaves any longer.
“Let me tell you, I think the Milosevic politics were wrong, and I wish that in the last few years I had said ‘No, I am leaving,’ ” Mitrovic continued. “Why I didn’t do that, I don’t know.”
Actually, I know one of the reasons why, as does everyone else in the country—the living was good. You could acquire a nice apartment if you worked at RTS, you had a reliable salary, and all you had to do in exchange was tell lies, day after day, that would lead to the deaths of several hundred thousand people. Mirkovic, who has the imperfectly dyed blond hair that is a hallmark of East European hairdressers, possesses a second home in Chicago and has pretty much kissed off her chances of continuing at RTS, so she says what many of her scurrying comrades refuse to say.
“My work here was a mistake, but more than that, it was damaging,” she said as a friend passed by and gripped her shoulder in a have-courage-we’ll-get-through-this way. “If I and my colleagues had worked the right way, Milosevic would have fallen a long time ago.”
But they didn’t, and he didn’t.
Natasha Mihailovich, who is in her 30s and, with her black clothes and leather jacket, would look at home in SoHo, is a bit less forthright. For the past five years, she has worked as a news editor at RTS, and when I met up with her, she was chain-smoking her way through the day after being told by one of her bosses that her services would not be needed for now. Mihailovich was furious because the editor who nudged her aside—trying, it seems, to please the station’s new managers by fingering her as a Milosevic diehard—was more compromised than she was. It was an odd defense, and it began with a phrase that I heard many times—”I was only doing my job.”
“In my heart I never agreed with the editorial policy, though every person at RTS was an exponent of Milosevic’s regime,” she said. “Every one of us could have quit at anytime.” She did not, and she says it was because she is a single mother with a son to provide for. I suggested that there were many ways a single mother could care for her child in Belgrade. Mihailovich replied that she did what she could to tone down her news dispatches. “I never used the worst phrases, like Clinton being a narco-terrorist. Never, never.”
I asked whether RTS was evil. There was a moment of silence.
“On Thursday, my mother called and asked me what happened in Belgrade,” she began. “I told her that RTS was attacked by protesters, and my mother said, ‘Yes, that’s good. Your company is evil.’ I told her that Milorad Komrakov had been beaten up. She asked me whether he was beaten to death. I told her no. My mother said he should have been beaten to death, because he is evil.”
She paused.
“I think our company was doing evil things.”
“Does that mean you were doing evil things?” I asked.
“In that relation, yes. But we were only workers. I am not somebody who decided about news.”
Isadora Sekulic has been hearing much of this in recent days.
“It’s the old story,” she said, in a voice as thick as the cigarette smoke that hung in her chaotic office (and hangs throughout the Balkans). “That’s the story of the Second World War, of fascism, of Nazism. Nobody was in charge. How is that possible? No, it is not true. It is only their alibi. I think all of them should be punished.”
I suppose that’s why I am lingering in Serbia after the fall of Milosevic. Crime and punishment—an old story, endlessly fascinating.
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Posted: Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2000, at 10:00 a.m. PT
I love the black market.
When I arrived in Belgrade I didn’t have a chip for my cell phone, and I needed one in a hurry. Normally, getting a chip for your cell phone can be quite a hassle in Serbia—you go to an office, you stand in line for several hours, and when you get to the front you are told that chips are not available until the next day or next week. If you arrive in the city on a Friday evening, as I did, you can pretty much forget about getting a chip until Monday at the earliest.
Unless, that is, you venture into the realm of the black market. I called a friend who I know to be capable of arranging such things. She made a call or two and soon phoned me back to let me know that she had located the required merchandise. It was in the possession of a woman who worked at a cell phone company. It is normal here for insiders to take advantage of the shortage of chips by acquiring a stock of their own and selling them for twice or three times as much as they would cost if you, the buyer/victim, went through the normal, slow-moving channels.
And so, late on Saturday night, after finishing my work, I got into a taxi with my interpreter and headed down a row of unremarkable apartment buildings. On an ill-lit corner ahead of us, an attractive blond woman in tight, dark clothes was waiting. We stopped in front of her, rolled down the window, and a brief conversation ensued in whispers, at the end of which, 100 German marks was handed, discreetly, to the lady in black, and she handed me a chip, discreetly. I snapped it into my cell phone—and presto, I am wired up. Mission accomplished.
The existence of a black market reflects a dysfunctional economy, and a dysfunctional economy is usually one in which many people are poor. In Belgrade, it’s not Third World poverty of the traditional sort but a strange version of genteel, Balkan poverty. Before Slobodan Milosevic came to power more than a decade ago, Yugoslavia was a relatively prosperous country, and Belgrade was a sophisticated, lively place. Four wars and international sanctions have ruined the economy, creating the inefficiencies and imbalances that have given life to a thriving black market.
All of which means that if you are a rich foreigner (at least in the eyes of Serbs), you can get whatever you want for a price that is a fortune to the locals but a bargain to you. And that’s how I ended up moving out of the Hyatt Hotel yesterday and into a delightful though quirky apartment in the center of town. It was, of course, a black-market transaction.
The Hyatt is nice but located across the Sava River from the center of Belgrade, so I told a friend, Ivan, that I wanted to find an apartment on the convenient side of the Sava. I know Ivan because a year ago, when he was in a financial pinch (a condition he shared with most of his countrymen), I stayed in his downtown apartment; he moved into a rented apartment that cost half as much as I was paying for his, and he pocketed the difference. (He also set off a fire in his rented accommodations after falling asleep smoking a cigarette, but that’s another story.) Ivan, who no longer smokes in bed and is in better financial condition at the moment, partly because I am employing him as my interpreter, made a few calls and announced, “I have found you a flat.”
The apartment is on Kneza Milosha, a major boulevard on which are located the defense ministry and army headquarters, which were flattened in the NATO bombing last year, and the foreign ministry, which my tax dollars helped destroy, too. It is an Ivan-style arrangement: The twentysomething woman who lives in the apartment has moved out and is staying with her parents. One of the nontraditional aspects of our rental agreement is that there is none—aside from a handshake and an exchange of 450 marks for a two-week stay, nothing else has been required. No contract, no security deposit, and I’m not sure the woman knows my last name.
It is a pity that one can do this only in places like Belgrade. Imagine, for a moment, that you could visit a wonderfully located apartment in Manhattan—let’s say a loft in Tribeca—and pay the owner less than $250 to get lost for two weeks. Alas, unless Milosevic figures out a way to ruin our economy as he has Serbia’s, it is unlikely to occur.
My new home is somewhat odd. It has no drapes at all, so everyone in the neighborhood can see what I’m up to, no matter where I am in the apartment, including the bathroom. At times I think I am participating in a Serbian version of “Big Brother,” though I have done my best to foil the game by stringing up a towel across the bathroom window. So far, no one has complained about me breaking the rules.
Another curious thing is that after opening the front door you have to walk under a low arch in the entrance hallway; the arch is narrow and has an odd overhang on its left side that can take your head off, so as a precaution I tend to duck when I walk into my new home. It’s a bit like the movie Being John Malkovich, in which John Cusack worked in an office that had ceilings no more than 5 feet high. The “Malkovich” metaphor is not entirely inappropriate for Belgrade, because I occasionally feel, especially after ducking under the arch, as though I am going through a crazy man’s portal.
I have wanted to ask the apartment owner about the drapes—why, dear Lord, are there none?—but I am hesitant to do so. I have spent a number of years living in this part of the world and learned that sometimes the explanations for strange things are stranger than the things themselves; you’re better off in the dark. At the moment, I quite like the apartment, although half of the illumination comes from bare light bulbs hanging from wires that descend from the ceiling in ways that would drive OSHA inspectors mad, and the dozen or so jugs of water under the sink indicate that I should prepare for hard times in the realm of running water. But instead of constant knocks on my door from hotel staff asking whether they can check the minibar/clean the room/turn down the bed, I am left in tranquility, listening, as I write this, to a rather accomplished pianist downstairs play a wonderful sonata.
So, the black market is treating me rather well, but I realize it exists only because the legal market is inefficient and corrupt, and for the sake of Serbia, I wish it were different. The ideal, though, would be an economic system in which you had a legal market that functioned well, as it does in America, and a black market alongside it. OK, I know that’s not possible, but getting phone chips late on Saturday nights, scoring a downtown apartment in a matter of minutes—I don’t think Kozmo.com can do that for me.
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Posted: Thursday, Oct. 12, 2000, at 12:30 p.m. PT
Forget, for a moment, where you are and who you are. For a moment, you are a policeman in Belgrade who earns a modest salary, and although you may not be an opponent of the president you serve, whose name is Slobodan Milosevic, you are not an enthusiatic supporter, either. And at this moment, you are standing alongside a nervous group of fellow policemen on the steps of parliament, facing a crowd of several hundred thousand anti-Milosevic protesters who intend to storm the building, with or without your consent. One of those protesters, a burly gentleman from the notoriously anti-Milosevic city of Cacak, is just a few feet away and, fixing his eyes on you, he says, “This morning I kissed my family farewell. I hope you kissed your family farewell, too.”
He is willing to die for his cause. Are you?
This standoff was described in a local newspaper the other day; it was just one of many confrontations that occurred as Milosevic was swept from power last week, but it sticks in my mind because within it lies, I think, a key to understanding what it takes to bring down a dictator like Milosevic. The cop on the parliament steps—this is you, remember—must decide whether the crowd can be repulsed without much trouble, and if it can’t be repulsed so easily, he must decide whether he is willing to risk his life to defend the regime that signs his paycheck. The guy from Cacak, after all, is willing to go all the way. What do you do?
The police on the steps of parliament fired tear gas but gave up when it became clear, quite rapidly, that the tear gas only enraged the protesters, who regrouped for another assault. The sound that was heard on the steps of parliament, after the tear gas failed to settle things, was the clatter of riot shields and batons falling to the ground as the police ran away, some of them tearing off their uniforms so that they would not be beaten by the protesters. You would have been wise, were you a cop on those steps on Oct. 5 (rather than a reader of Slate on Oct. 12) to do the same.
There were, at last, enough protesters in Belgrade who were willing to go all the way, and after 10 years of Milosevic, neither the police nor the psychopaths who did the regime’s bloody work in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo were willing to put their lives on the line. Perhaps it has been several years since Slobo’s enforcers possessed this minimum level of fatal enthusiasm for him, but until last week they had not faced all-or-nothing protesters who, a few hours earlier, had kissed their families farewell. For the first time in Belgrade, the enforcers were up against Serbian kamikazes.
Who were these people? They were not the students and middle-class professionals who had marched against Milosevic, fruitlessly, for much of the past 10 years. Those protesters were out on the streets again last Thursday, of course, blowing their whistles and shaking their baby rattles and wearing their irreverent stickers (“Suck my dick, Slobo”). In the last decade, they had been the most well-behaved of protesters, so Gandhi-like in their nonviolent opposition that they might as well have worn sarongs. I do not want to suggest that they should have been violent or threatened violence; I just think it is interesting to note that they are a breed apart from the angry men of Cacak, who entered Belgrade as though entering the Colosseum in Rome. They even brought a bulldozer to crash through police roadblocks (which it did) and barrel into barricaded buildings (such as the headquarters of Radio-Television Serbia). The opposition movement had found its vanguard.
“I couldn’t go back to Cacak without winning,” said Velimir Ilic, the mayor of Cacak, in an interview published by Vreme, a longtime opposition magazine here. “It was a battle of all or nothing.”
They weren’t only from Cacak, though. There were several thousand Belgrade soccer fans in the vanguard, two of whom I met the other day. I’ll use their nicknames, Joca and Tima. They are supporters of a local team (“Please don’t call us hooligans,” Joca said), and they are known, with their buddies, for brawling not only with opposing fans, but with the police. As Joca explained, modestly, “We are always in favor of action. And last week, we were going to win or we would die.”
He told me they had come with Molotov cocktails and firearms. They used some of the former (parliament and RTS were set on fire) but none of the latter, which came as a surprise to them. “We now realize that some policemen abandoned their posts,” Joca said, and I sensed a bit of wistfulness in his voice. “We expected Romania, but we got Czechoslovakia.” In 1989, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown in a bloody uprising, whereas the regime in Czechoslovakia wilted away in the “Velvet Revolution” led by playwright Vaclav Havel. The Serbian uprising fits between the two—it was almost as peaceful as the Czech example, but the protesters in Serbia were prepared to shed blood, as occurred in Romania.
The key difference between Romania 1989 and Serbia 2000 is that the police in Belgrade—regular and secret—were not willing to kill their own people. Though some shots were fired, apparently by police, when demonstrators attacked RTS, nobody was killed by that gunfire. But the resolve of the police needed to be tested. The success of the pro-democracy forces last week depended on many things—hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, a withering of support within the regime itself—but it was also necessary to have a few thousand men who had kissed their families farewell in the morning.
And a bulldozer.
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Posted: Friday, Oct. 13, 2000, at 9:30 a.m. PT
The waiter poured champagne, but we had no idea what to say as we raised our glasses in celebration of the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. “Congratulations?” offered the advertising man across from me. “Happy New Year?” suggested the psychologist on my left. We were stumped—what is the appropriate toast for a successful revolution?
Everyone at the table laughed and said whatever seemed best—Congratulations, Happy New Year, Merry Christmas, too. We were at Verdi, a popular Italian restaurant, which had been reserved for a private party by a group of longtime friends—professors, artists, entrepreneurs, actors—who were resuming a custom of assembling en masse at a restaurant. The custom came to a gradual halt in the past decade as Milosevic turned Serbia into a depressing and oppressive place. “We used to do this all the time,” said the woman who invited me. “But then people started leaving the country, and the people who stayed had less money, and if you had a big assembly like this the police would become interested. So, we pretty much stopped.”
The diners floated from one table to the next, laughing and chatting as though this were a party after the Academy Awards and there were Oscars at every table. Many of the men kissed each other hello on the cheek, two times, a charmingly Balkan custom. After a few rounds of champagne, the waiters began serving red wine from Montenegro, and after that, somewhere around 11 p.m., the first course was served; I think my main course, pesto alla genovese, arrived on the table around midnight. It seemed, in its Old World way, a very Rebecca West evening. I realized that the social atomization that is a consequence of living under dictatorship was disappearing before my eyes.
The restaurant was filled with designer jackets and dresses, mostly from Italy, I believe. I was the worst-dressed. True, anyone who is reading this and knows me will say it was no surprise I was outdressed, but when I have dinner with friends in Manhattan, they infrequently wear ties, and if they are wearing jackets, it is because they have come directly from work. This gathering, on Tuesday evening, had begun at 9:30, so everyone had changed into proper dinner attire; the jacket I should have been wearing, from Barneys, was hanging in a closet 4,000 miles away.
The advertising man had just returned from Slovenia, where he had collected an award for a political ad that recently ran in Serbia. It was a spoof on laundry detergent commercials: A woman held up a T-shirt with a picture of Milosevic and complained that it was difficult to remove the ugly stain from the garment. The miracle product that would get rid of the stain was, of course, a vote for the opposition alliance trying to unseat Milosevic. On the night my dinner companion collected his award in Slovenia, which was the first Yugoslav republic to break away, Milosevic resigned. “There were a couple of Serbs at the ceremony, and we celebrated by crashing a party given by the Croats,” he said. In 1990 and 1991, Croatia fought a nasty war to extricate itself from Serb-led Yugoslavia. “They loved us,” he continued. “Fantastic evening.”
Zoran Djindjic, leader of the largest pro-democracy party, showed up halfway into the evening, said hello to a few friends, and then disappeared upstairs into a private dining room. There was laughter at the table when we noticed the policemen loitering outside and realized they were protecting Djindjic (who also had his personal retinue of bodyguards) rather than harassing him. I asked my companions how it felt to no longer be in the opposition, and they just laughed some more. “I have only one wish,” one of them said. “I want this country to become boring. Boring, boring, boring. We have had more than enough drama in the last 13 years.”
Of course these are the sorts of people who had been needled, on the day that Milosevic fell last week, by their hardier compatriots from the provinces. When a crowd from Cacak, a deeply anti-Milosevic city that regards Belgrade as filled with sissies, marched on the federal parliament, one of the slogans they shouted out was, roughly translated, “Greetings, Belgrade cunts! We’re going to show you how to make a revolution!”
Coarse language is an inherent feature of political and social discourse in Serbia, and it is shared by intellectuals and coal miners alike. The looted shop in the middle of Belgrade that belongs to Marko Milosevic, the dictator’s son, has a veritable dictionary of profane graffiti on display that includes, front and center, the ever-popular, “Suck your father’s dick.” Mothers do not shield their children’s eyes as they walk past.
The shuttered American embassy that is down the road from my apartment has provided a perfect tabula for the Chaucers of Serbia. “I fucked your auntie, Uncle Sam,” goes one—and the genius is that it rhymes in Serbian. When I called up my interpreter this morning to double-check that graffiti, he laughed and said it wasn’t even the best one at the embassy. Another one, which also rhymes in Serbian, goes, “Give me fellatio, American nation.”
I hope that nobody of Serbian heritage takes offense at my recitation of these oaths. I have learned, in writing about the Balkans for a decade, that Serbs can be touchy when they think they are being portrayed as an uncivilized people, and that is understandable. But I think the Serbian genius for imaginative oaths is a positive attribute. In America, you don’t hear much swearing in mainstream culture, and when you do, it’s usually run of the mill stuff—the F word, etc. Very dull. Is this restraint a hallmark of a civilized culture or an anal one? After all, Serbia is the kind of place where, at dinner, a university professor will admit that one of her favorite curses is “Fuck your grandmother on a rotten board,” but in Serbia you can also see a gentleman kiss a lady’s hand. And, as readers will hopefully recall, the sartorial barbarian at Verdi on Tuesday night was the American guest.
