They all sat and smoked and watched the air fill up with gray. Every day in Belgrade the sun shone but haze clung to the ground and beat it back. We walked along the tram line out onto a flat concrete causeway over the Sava River into old Belgrade. A few hundred meters east the Sava emptied into the Danube. We stopped in the middle of the bridge to consider the history.
History is always close at hand in the Balkans.
Much of that rule was administered from the Kalemegdan Citadel, a fortress on the hilltop just in front of us, where the Sava and Danube meet. Not that the fighting is over. The police stopped them on the pavement at the approach to the bridge and bloodied some heads until Zajedna backed off. Up into the Stari Grad we walked, veering left at a narrow lane littered with that ubiquity of post-communism, the metal kiosk. Damp darkness drew around us as we found the main pedestrian street.