A Man at the End of the Hallway
Early in the morning the hallways of the Cancer Institute were so empty and quiet, they seemed nowhere near the crowded city of Belgrade, but in another world. While Slavka cleaned the gray linoleum floor, she felt she was navigating a giant, unusual labyrinth where every swipe of the mop might open a passage, as happened in fantasy movies she sometimes watched with her daughters.
The Addition
Filip woke up in a sweat. He could hear his mother talking to someone at the door and his first thought was the army. They must have come to get him. They had come in person, even though his waiver was valid for a few more months and he should have been notified by mail about the next appointment. But one couldn’t really count on such procedures, not in the chaos that ruled Serbia in the 1990s.
The New Disease
It was 1986 in Belgrade, and I was cleaning the school yard on a Saturday morning, just as if it was 1946. Most of the city bathed in fall colors, but Teacher Rada brought us to a slope with bare trees, where we raked dead leaves into a grassless corner by the iron fence. We looked like some youth work brigade from a post-war Yugoslav documentary.