Sava, in the droplets of water spraying from the fountains around the church; it shone on the beggars and Gypsies, tourists and monks, on the smudged windows of the cars snaking through gridlock in the surrounding streets. Illuminated by surreal autumnal light, a morning that no longer felt like the day when he was to receive yet another literary prize, this one emanating from the warm embrace of novelist-cum-politician Dobrica Ćosić. These laudations had been easy to come by. His face was unshaven, the bags under his eyes reached down to his knees, and his eyelid twitched uncontrollably while he waited for the lowly creature in a gray uniform to come along and press the red button. He checked to see what his eyes looked like in the rearview mirror and saw red. The color of the previous night was black. Well, red at first, the red of the traffic sign with the white circle. Red announcing he shouldn’t drive the wrong way down the one-way street; he drove into a side street that he thought would take him out to the main road and the hotel. Then came the color black, darkness, the moment when he shifted the car into reverse, having changed his mind, calculating he’d be better off ignoring the red traffic sign and driving down the street the wrong way anyway. There was nobody out, after all. He glanced back over his shoulder while driving forward. When he pressed his foot on the gas to traverse the short one-way street as quickly as possible, the Volvo gave a wild lurch, noise; no color then. A thud or a bump. Noisy and fleshy, and, he could tell, alive and so fragile. And tossed to the side. He stopped for a second; his heart almost vomited, the sounds of applause and the shrill women’s voices still ringing in his ears. In panic he peered around. Should he get out and check? Suddenly sober. He thought of pulling it into the car and taking it to a forest somewhere nearer the border with Serbia. He considered the pits and water wells in adjacent villages. The Danube and the toothed carp. And how this would never occur to anybody. But death is contagious, and when he pictured the corpse in his car—first on the front seat; no, even worse, in the back; oh, definitely not in the trunk—he realized he couldn’t. He wasn’t that man. And then he thought tenderly of himself and his precious life, and again he pressed the gas. Godnar drove to the hotel in a total trance; later he had no recollection of the drive, that was the black, the hole that engulfed everything and left behind only fear for his skin or ass, depending. He swept up all his things from the room, found himself in the parking lot, and then remembered his ID card and almost shat himself while he waited at the front desk of the hotel for what seemed like an eternity, listening to the hollow instrumental music. He only came to while waiting in the access lane, a few hundred feet from the border with Serbia. He remembered he hadn’t even examined the hood of his car up close to see if there was any damage. Luckily, the damage was minimal on such a big, sturdy chassis. For the first time in the last two hours he felt a welling of sincere joy and no trace of shame. He was only the tiniest bit sheepish about the very lack of shame he’d felt.
“Good evening,” he said heartily while staring at the square-shaped light by the little gray box of a booth. The border policewoman didn’t return his greetings. Without a word she took his documents and peered into his car. Her tired gaze danced from her screen to the plastic card and traffic permit, then returned them to him a few minutes later, and he slowly crossed the bridge, driving in second gear, holding his breath, and drove up to the next border agent. An even smaller metal booth, and as he slowed, a man’s hairy arm was all that emerged and waved at him to pass. He nearly choked with joy.
Taking care to respect every single traffic regulation, driving every minute below sixty-five, he was in the Voždovac neighborhood of Belgrade within two hours, elated and trembling in his big, warm bed. He didn’t feel at all as if he’d just killed a man and fled the scene. A man he’d hugged only hours before, promising him a big interview for the next issue of Izbor. As he commented in an aside about the icy reporter lady with the little, poetically brazen tits, he realized the Izbor reporter was gay, and this put him off slightly, but still he liked the man. The different things that happened the night before had nothing, as far as he was concerned, to do with each other. He felt no guilt. Indeed, he felt as if someone had given him a new lease on life. For two difficult hours he slept the sleep of the dead and woke up early, before dawn, while the chaotic city of Belgrade was bathed in gray-lilac murky light. At first he didn’t think of all that had transpired; then he broke out in a cold sweat only a few minutes after waking. He jumped up and put water on for coffee, opened his laptop, and began scrolling for news. Nothing yet. He entered his name, and there wasn’t even a word about the poetry reading. Maybe, after all, the man hadn’t . . . He kept refreshing the page as morning dawned and then began readying to go and receive the award. He was wide awake by then, and reality had begun to sink in; he was queasy with fear of possible evidence. Having arrived too early, he first parked in the official lot of the library and then wandered the foyer, reading the posters on the bulletin
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