The Prevention of Suicide Over the Sava

I'd chosen Belgrade for the nightlife. It was famed. The clubs, the girls, the cheap booze. I was expecting non-stop party from the off.

But it didn't go as I'd expected. Instead, the highlight of my first night was confronting a sobbing Serb about to throw himself off a bridge. I wanted to party. He wanted to die. Not the best combination.

It’d taken me around 14 hours to get to Belgrade, Serbia. I’d left the shimmering shores of lake Ohrid in Macedonia early that morning, driving a tiny Suzuki stuffed with 3 adults, many bags, a small child, and an even smaller poodle. Despite not having air-con, we wound over the mountains with the windows closed in a failed attempt to prevent the child from gagging up her breakfast, rolling sweatily into the capital Skopje around lunchtime.

From there, I spent 8 hours on a couple of buses heading north through southern Serbia. Hot, squashed, stopping at every town, I was also starving because I'd forgotten to buy food. At the bus station in Belgrade, I couldn’t get a taxi as I didn't have any Serb money. So I roamed the streets hunting down a cash machine, trying to decipher the Cyrillic road signs, failing to remember the exchange rate, then taking ages to flag down a cab. I discovered via garbled emails that my friend who was supposed to join me for the weekend had missed his flight and wasn’t coming. And the owner of the flat I was renting didn't seem happy to have spent hours waiting for me. Still, he said I could join him later at one of the many barge nightclubs on the far side of the river Sava.

He didn't turn up. Of course.

Tired, hungry and semi-dejected, I walked back to town across the high Brankov bridge. It was then that I noticed him. I couldn't quite believe it. There, straddled across the railing, was a gangly local looking very drunk. He was hunched over, chin buried into his chest, crying his eyes out. He was only holding on feebly and lurched over the river way below. Alarmed, I looked around at other passers-by, but they just carried on passing.

He could fall in at any moment, I thought. I tried talking to him in English but got no response. I tried to stop some locals to speak to him in Serbian, but they were just drunken foreigners who didn’t care. So I grabbed hold of his shoulder and stopped a little guy walking by with his dog. He had to be local.

He was Belgian. And just arrived to town (and strangely looking for a club to go to with his border collie). We eventually managed to coax the sobbing Serb off the precipice after I came with the idea to take him for a drink. He swung the lanky leg that’d been dangling over the river back on to the bridge. Towering over the Belgian, he instantly took a shine to the little fella.

‘You take me for drink? Oh, you very good boy,’ he said with a smile, but the Belgian didn't seem pleased. Not that the Serb cared, or even noticed – he had problems to get off his chest. ‘I no job. No money. No education,' he said. 'My father he.. he..’ His face contorted with drunken pain as he tried to find the right word, but couldn’t. Instead, he held an open hand in front of his face and punched the other into it. ‘My mother,’ he said. ‘He,’ punch, punch, ‘my mother. Every day. No money. No job.’ Punch, punch.

The disturbing tales of misery continued and were repeated several times as we walked down to the barge clubs, but it seemed to be having a cathartic effect on him as he perked up considerably. Meanwhile, the Belgian gruffly told how he worked for the Red Cross and had just driven down from Belgium with friends who were now sleeping. He spoke in a deep macho voice reminiscent of Jean-Claude Van Damme, seemingly at odds with his diminutive frame.

'No I'm not,' he hinted darkly when the Serb continued to call him a good boy. 'You don't know me.' And when the Serb again repeated one his sob stories, Mini-Van Damme turned to berate him, 'I know. You've told us already. We don't need to hear it again.'

Slightly hurt, the Serb put his long arm around him to show some him some love. But Mini-VD took it badly. 'Don't touch me, man! Don't touch me!' He pointed his finger up to the shocked Serb's face, holding it there for several seconds before breaking into a half smile.

Fuck me, I thought. What have I got myself into?

Mini-VD tied his poor dog up outside Klub 20/44, the barge I'd previously been on, while our Serb tried to remain vertical. Unsurprisingly, the bouncer didn't want to know. 'Private party,' he said not looking us in the eye.

The barge next door, Iguana, didn't want to let our Serb in at first, but then relented when they realised he was with us foreigners. Inside, there was some generic techno thumping. 'They don't make electronic music like in Holland and Belgium, hey?' Mini-VD smirked.

We made our ways to separate ends of the small bar. I bought Vodka for myself and a beer for our Serb, who showed his gratitude with a big hug. As I peeled his sticky hands off me, I saw Mini-VD leaning over the bar and talking to the barmaid. She had a face like stone. He came over to me to complain that she'd overcharged him for his beer, then went out to chat to some locals on the floating terrace. He came back in shaking his head. 'They paid 250 dinars for their beer,' he said. 'I paid 200. Because I'm a foreigner.' And wandered off looking far from happy.

He had a point. I'd been charged 200 for the beer. But, hey, 50 dinars is about 40 pence. It's not as if they were doing prices like in Holland and Belgium.

I went outside and sipped my vodka overlooking the Sava. Our Serb seemed to be enjoying himself, but was becoming quite annoying. Too drunk. Too friendly. Too tactile. He pointed out some places twinkling salubriously in the moonlight across the river in the old town, saying that his father owned this and that. Really? And there was me imagining them all stuck in some crumbling communist-era tower block on the outskirts of town.

When he got talking to some other foreigners, I slipped inside. Mini-VD was talking to some girls on the dance floor. I decided to make a quick exit up the gangplank. Mini-VD's dog looked behind me expectantly for his master, I gave him a pat to offset his crushing disappointment, and carried on up to the bridge back to town.

Not far from where I'd found the Serb, I noticed a 200 dinar note laying there on the floor, nobody in sight, untouched by the strong breeze blowing down from the Danube. How very strange.

I stopped to pick it up. Slipping it in my pocket, I wondered if was divine payment for my half-hearted Samaritan work. If so, would Mini-VD find 250 when he came back across? Or would God pay him Belgian rates?

#belgrade #serbia #brankovbridge #riversava #sava