My lover is coming to visit me in Belgrade for the very first time. As I cannot meet him upon arrival, his initial encounters are out of my control in a way that feels like a sexual release — anticipatory, anxiety-inducing and orgasmically exciting. Be careful of Belgrade , his mamma had said. As he arrived at the Central Station, a wall of cold and erratic noise hit him hard. The internet was bad — data roaming from Europe has lost its connection to this place.
And the station is a grim sight. At the Bristol Hotel, he waited for a taxi. In the Sava Mahala neighbourhood nearby, during the 20 th century, pigs were brought and sold at market. Someone once told me that merchants would force the pigs to swim upstream from Kladovo to Belgrade and Budapest.
Left alone with my thoughts, I imagine the vortex of the city as I live it. It is a place where thin, vivacious and alluring personalities roam. Come nightfall, they attend clubs where, in hot, dark corners, death-cold fingers trace the zips of leather pants and cropped lace shirts, finding the flesh hidden within.
He missed a taxi and then another, before deciding to climb up to Gavrila Principa and Kamenicka. Nor was there an opportunity to mention the infamous adult movie cinema Partizan, its plush seats undoubtedly drenched in body fluids, which he indifferently passed by. When my grandfather was a child, he was enrolled at the school there. One of his most prominent memories from that time was of the blinding lights of the scrolling news on the adjacent Borba building.
He would stay behind all day and late into the night reading the headlines, hypnotised and fearful of missing out. For him, Terazije was the Times Square of Balkan. I try to envision what it must have been like for him to abandon his domestic existence, which was full of decorum and propriety, and enter the void in search of a liberated, hedonistic and decadent lifestyle. The writer conjures a fascinating vision of s Belgrade, depicting the city in erotic detail.
