History is never more than a scratch beneath the surface all across these blessed Balkans. Slobodan spun tales of Knin, capital of Krajina, where he knew personally that all traces of Serbs, including a 600 year old monastery, had been burned by Croats. The Croats have had a plan to get rid of the Serbs for fifty or sixty years. The Croats burned down his house. Belgrade loves neon like Moscow, or America in the fifties.
Signs tower high over the buildings.
We found a place to sit down at the Hotel Balkan, downtown Belgrade. There is no circulation at the Hotel Balkan, but that's a universal trait in communist architecture. Cigarette haze dims vision to seventy per cent. The tablecloth was dirty mauve. The top four inches of upholstery on all the chairs were discolored, dark and greasy with the oil from hundreds of thousands of human fingers.