It was the middle of afternoon on Browder’s last day in Belgrade, before he goes to Breg to visit his family. He was back in his hotel room to look up how to take a bus there. According to its website, the central bus station will be a short cab drive from his hotel. A bus leaves in his desired direction, towards Sarajevo, every couple of hours. The trip itself would take between three and four hours.

Once that was settled, he lay back on the bed and texted Laura, and thought about texting Thea. A WhatsApp push notification rang out on his smartphone and he saw that he was now added to a chat group titled “Fairy’s Inn International Expansion”. Some marketing materials were shared and soon afterwards he connected privately with Milo, the tour guide from Chicago. After a couple of messages Milo called Browder and spoke in pure American English: 

“Hey, man, welcome to the fatherland! Hope you’re having fun.” Milo had heard a bit about Browder and was really hyped to have him on the team. He confessed that he missed hanging out in English. 

“So how’s rural tourism going at Fairy’s Inn?” asked Browder.

“Oh it’s super, I will tell you all about it.” Milo wasn’t in the mountains right now. Mondays were his days off and he was in fact in Belgrade, staying in a hotel just like Browder. 

“Hey, have you checked out the National Museum yet? I have yet to go.” Milo asked suggestively.

Browder agreed to meet Milo at the museum about an hour later. He has not been either, though he knew of several exhibits to be seen there. He listened to a few songs on his phone and then slowly got up to go. He slid on the leather shoes he had bought in Italy, cleaned up a bit, and walked out into the stone streets of Old Belgrade. After only a fifteen-minute walk he checked in his coat in the lobby of the museum. He would wait for Milo in the first-floor exhibition, which featured excavation from prehistoric and classical times. 

Browder skipped over the prehistoric section. He found those depressing. What inspiration is there in contemplating man’s apish ancestors? The caveman may have in fact had a beautiful soul. As Chesterton says, the only thing we know empirically about his proclivities is that he liked visual art. However, museums don’t focus on that sort of thing when it comes to the caveman. Instead, they show a wax figure display of a family of half-apes crouching around a smoking pile of lint, staring at the miracle of fire with expressions of idiotic excitement. Then there are all the stereotypes about clubbing and kidnapping women for mating, or stories about idiotic beliefs and bloody rituals.

All of these are merely constructs of modern liberals, thought Browder. Liberals strive to make things ugly. It may be because they are frustrated at their own physical homeliness. It may also be a twisted communistic power move by which they suck the charm out of natural life, so that the average citizen is impelled to turn towards the party for spiritual nourishment. In any case, in Browder’s mind, there was some kind of offence, and certainly some political statement in portraying the human ancestor in an unflattering light. It was an act of aggressive ugliness – an attitude through which a person attempts to spray the world at large with ugly, as it were. He thought that it’s the same kind of thing as earlobe gouging or sleeve tattoos, or the more extreme branches of modern art, like the performance art in which a woman menstruates on stage or some assholes slaughter a rabbit in public.

Browder strolled over to the section with classical busts, to see how they compare with what he had seen in Italy. It quickly became clear that the Romans kept their best work in the centre of the empire. Browder could tell that some of these busts, excavated in Serbia, lacked the detailed finish of the masterpieces he had seen at the Uffizi. Serbia was a province of Rome probably since just before the age of Christ, and in the Late Empire, before its split, its territory hosted the important military city of Sirmium, birthplace of several Emperors. Even Constantine the Great was born in Nis, in South Serbia. That city named their airport after him. But all of it was to no avail, at least as far as art was concerned. Browder found a mediocre bust of Constantine. Underneath it, he read an interpretation, seemingly written by a megalomaniacal intern:

The divine face of the emperor is depicted in ideal proportions, and its haughty eyes and tranquil expression radiate supreme confidence of a man conscious of his divine pedigree and his absolute lordship of the known world.

“I don’t know, looks like a regular face,” thought Browder.

Roman emperors born on the territory of Serbia were many, but they all ruled during the twilight of the empire. What probably happened was that the cosmopolitan Roman society was plagued with terminal-stage strife, with some intractable web of internecine violence, envy, and resentment that made it impossible for them to choose a leader among themselves. So they began inviting exotic foreigners to rule over them. This dynamic is typical of decrepit societies across time and space; in today’s globalised world it goes by the name of immigration.

Circling around towards the entrance to the museum, Browder spotted a foreign-looking man in mid-twenties hovering in the prehistoric aisle. He suspected that this was Milo. Shortly after the man tapped on his phone, Browder’s pocket buzzed. Milo greeted him with a wide American grin and wonderfully white American teeth. He was a dirty-blond and wore a hoodie, dark jeans, and a pair of green New Balance sneakers.

The two men introduced their situations in easy English. Milo was born and raised in the USA. His parents were both of Serbian extraction. His father emigrated as a young man in the seventies, and his mother was a first generation in her family born in the USA. Milo was an art history major. He flirted with a career in marketing for a couple of years but couldn’t get used to the corporate environment. He went backpacking through Serbia to reconnect with his roots, and he started having a lot of fun with locals. He met his current boss Lord after he became a regular at the Brass Hat, Lord’s tavern. Lord hired him soon after they met to bring in foreign foot traffic. A year later, he made him the International Sales manager at Fairy’s Inn. The money of course isn’t what it is at home, but he gets free lodging and gets to travel around. He’s working on a book with a friend back in the US on Serbian history; Milo is doing primary research and sending it over to the man, who is a published professor.

“I see why you would want to visit the National Museum,” smiled Browder as they strolled through the prehistoric section.

“For sure. Actually I wanted to check out the Vinca stuff.”

“It’s right here on the ground floor,” pointed Browder, and they walked to a maze of glass encased displays.

The Vinca culture is the name given to a Palaeolithic settled culture that flourished in the river valleys of the Balkans about eight thousand years ago. Its name derives from a suburb of Belgrade where its artefacts were first excavated. The region around the city features the highest concentration of discoveries so far, although there are numerous sites and significant findings in other locations in Serbia, and in neighbouring countries as well.

The museum showcased sundry utensils, tools and weapons of no particular distinction, and among them the two acquaintances easily spotted the unique Vinca figurines, reminiscent of Venus of Willendorf in the highly stylised forms of the human body. However, rather than broad hips and breasts, the Vinca figurines had oversized heads with features that uncannily match modern depictions of extra terrestrials. Less than a finger in length, they had holes that betrayed their use as pendants. 

Another highlight was the Vinca script. Some of the pots and similar utensils were inscribed with sets of pictograms that undoubtedly conveyed symbolic information. It is debated whether they constitute a script, given the limited amount of characters in each sample, but if they are a script, they are the oldest written script discovered to date, presaging Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese bone carvings by millennia. 

Milo, for his part, held no reservations on the question of the Vinca script. Eagerly snapping photos of a scribbled-up pot, he went on a lecture for the benefit of a reticent Browder.

“Isn’t it amazing that Serbs were the first nation to write? In modern times our people had suffered so much and we don’t have much to show to the world now, but you could always tell from Serbian oral traditions that the culture they stem from has very ancient roots. This professor I’m working with back in the US, this Serbian guy, he’s proven that many ancient cities were founded by Serbs. There’s for example this town called Serbogordon in modern day Turkey. And there’re Roman and Greek scholars who first referred to all Slavs as Serapi, that is – Serbs. Also a lot of Biblical places and figures were Serbs…”

Browder interrupted for a clarification. “But didn’t the Serbian nation first consolidate with the Slavic invasion of the Balkans? From the north, in the seventh century?”

Milo shook his head in a knowing smile. “And who said that? Of course they want to show that we don’t belong right here in Serbia, so that the various newly invented nations around us can claim our land and make us disappear. When you connect all the dots in Professor Maretic’s research, it becomes clear that Serbs are the oldest nation in the world.”

“As opposed to popping up out of thin air at some point in history?” Browder said wryly, but it didn’t register with his interlocutor.

Browder was now clear, he was in the company of a conspiracy theorist. Milo kept preaching, shuffling through claims that Browder had heard before. There were hills in Bosnia that were in fact ancient pyramids, there was the unparalleled genius of Nikola Tesla and the Judeo-Waspish conspiracy to steal his ideas and destroy his papers upon his death, because if uncovered, these ideas would usher free energy and destroy the current power structures. 

When he was spared their presence, Browder could feel a level of pity for conspiracy theorists. Crushed by their academic failure, conspiracy theorists are forever on the quest to make fools of the top students in their high school class, those smug cadets of the cognitive elite that would shoot, seemingly effortlessly, right up to the top of the ruthlessly meritocratic system, leaving everyone else’s petty-bourgeois parents heart-broken and disappointed in their mediocre offspring. This is harsh destiny in a society that places achievement - or “creativity” - above all values, that worships a queer and novel little demon called genius. Harsh destiny indeed in a society that raises unrealistic expectations of success, that calls itself the land of opportunity, that obsesses over fairness. 

In such an enlightened society there is no dark nook to hide one’s failures. One would have to be a minority or poor to have someone to blame - and that’s becoming hard too - or one may look for childhood trauma. But what if you grew up in a supportive middle-class family? Conspiracy theory is the last resort of the unaccomplished.  

To invert the social pyramid of which he feels to be the bottom, the conspiracy theorist builds opiate fantasies on unfalsifiable claims. In doing so he rejects validity of human consensus and begins walking towards schizophrenia. His theories invariably feature a cabal of evil geniuses whose machinations are too clever to be uncovered by decent people, among which the conspiracy theorist of course counts himself. It follows that the conspiracy theorist must assume himself to be vastly dumber than an entire other class of human beings. Such a staggering inferiority complex deeply disturbed Browder. 

The Serbian variant of the conspiracy theorist overlaps extensively with the plain-vanilla American conspiracy theorist. Both types agree that the American government is evil, that the current system of global rule by leading capitalist nations is oppressive. Your stock conspiracy tropes about aliens, pyramids, the Kennedy murder, revelation through drugs, the Catholic Church, Freemasons, Jews, and so on – are all there for both types. 

Now, the American type will promote vague notions of grassroots power-to-the-people movements as antidote to world’s problems. His Serbian-flavoured counterpart, however, will find the answer in classic, early-twentieth century fascism, with all its bells and whistles: genetic superiority, clero-fascism, eugenics, the purity of the volk, hypochondria, ethnic cleansing. In the US, Browder has witnessed Serbian-American hipster-Nazis bonding with American liberals; it was during one of those “stop the bombing” protests. The western liberals saw only the hipster side of their Serbian interlocutors because, out of political correctness, out of cultural relativism, they don’t deign to explore the dark side of a foreigner’s psyche. 

They strolled through the archeological exhibits. Browder tried to get Milo to end his exposition with polite nods and affected ignorance meant to feed his ego. Hopefully once fed, it would stop talking and go to sleep. However, Milo took Browder’s attention at face value, and understood his nods as tacit agreement. Browder was going to make an excuse and leave at some point, but for the time being he was strangely drawn to Milo. He saw in him the ugliness of North American culture that stood in contrast the the earthly sanity of Europe, and it fuelled his motivation to stick around in Serbia. As Milo expounded his world vision in one story after another, Browder put on his psychiatrist hat and played with interpreting the specific psychoses behind each. Furthermore, Browder wanted to know, how on earth did this guy get hired as the face of Fairy’s Inn to international tourists?

“So how do you like your job?” he finally asked. “What exactly do you do there?”

“It’s easy stuff. I maintain the English-language presence online. This includes updating the web pages and handling the social media. I gotta do weekly posts and take up leads on potential visitors. We also work through various travel agencies all over the world, even China. We have a photography team, have you met them? And some pretty hot models. Given my art major, I do a lot of material on Serbian monasteries. I’ve been through the American system, I know what they want. And that works for pretty much every other nationality. When the tourists finally show up, I might take them on a local trip or I might MC a show. I’ve been bringing in traditional musicians, including gusle players. It’s a bit hardcore for a foreigner but you know how it is – people come here to see oddities. Every once in a while I drive over to Kaludjer. That’s the town where my family hails from, and I made friends with some locals there. But the truth is, my relatives have mostly moved to Belgrade, so I show up in Belgrade more often.”

“So you don’t tell your clients about the real history, then?” asked Browder.

“Naw, man! I’m not an idiot. That stuff doesn’t fly with the New World Order, but hopefully that’s going to change. If our people and others like us rise again, we can reverse the degeneracy spawned by the West.”

Milo was the type of person who wears his strange heart on his sleeve, and human nature is attracted to the outspoken heart, no matter how odd. Thus it was too with trio of visitors who, after coincidentally tracing the meanderings of our two English speakers, noticed Milo’s spirits. They were two young women in slim dresses, put up as though they were going to a night club, and young man with a shy bearing and a pleasant smile. The persistent giggles of the two girls behind the English speakers were noticed by Milo early on, and at some point they made him convert his political zeal into a surprisingly gracious neighbourliness. His glistening American grin and the piercing eyes of a Balkan highlander added up to a handsome look. He turned that look around and started the merry ladies with an accented Serbian.

“Excuse me, would you be so kind to tell me if there is an English-language museum tour? My Serbian is not very good at all, I could really use some help translating all this incredible history.”

The exaggerated politeness and the accent cracked the girls up yet again, and they quickly they offered to clarify any language confusion. In the next three minutes Milo was walking from one exhibit to another surrounded by the two beauties, reading out the Serbian-language summaries in exaggerated mispronunciation, to his companions’ great amusement. Browder and the ladies’ male companion followed behind awkwardly. The man was not a boyfriend, only an old schoolmate. At some point the group made it to the art exhibit, Serbian expressionism. Milo changed key and impressed with technical analysis of the paintings. Later, first signs of fatigue began to show, and Milo asked the girls on a date.

“My Serbian is horrible; I need practice. Ya’ll been great but you would be truly generous if we could keep this going today. How about we get out of here and grab some drinks?”

“We don’t ever want you to lose your accent, it’s too cute!” answered one of the girls.

“Fine, how about we get some drinks?”

The women agreed, and their male companion made excuses. Browder gave Milo a wry look, and Milo grinned back furtively. He looked like Stifler from the American Pie. Browder was cornered and had to consent. They were going to meet that night.

As Milo negotiated what exactly they would do, Browder felt all the drink and smoke of last night hurting in his liver and lungs, but nevertheless decided to go out again tonight. It is not every day one visits Belgrade, and he was curious to learn more about the city. While Milo hit it off with the tall brunette, Browder had no chemistry with her dark blond friend; the two of them were both resigned to playing supporting roles. 

It was agreed that they would first meet at a bar on a trendy strip of the riverbank called Beton Hala – the Concrete Hall - and then head over to a party on a floating club, or splav. They then parted each their own way. Milo gave Browder another mischievous grin and a thumbs up when the girls parted. He told him to groom and wash himself as they are about to have a hell of a night and then get laid.

Back in the room, Browder sent text updates to all his family and friends, and then relaxed in his underwear in front of the TV. It would be fascinating after all, he mused, to observe once again the popular culture of the mysterious Serbian race, which according to Milo had emerged from the antediluvian mist, from an era of giants when God was closer to Sons of Adam, many of whom nevertheless chose to defy Him. 

This particular TV afternoon, Browder stumbled upon a game show with frequent breaks for songs and product promotions. The closest analogue to Serbian television, from the American viewpoint, would be Mexican and generally Latin American TV: there was a predilection for soap operas, aggressively sexy hostesses, often with surgically enhanced faces and breasts. The reserved demeanour of the hosts contrasted their lascivious getups and the lewd modern dances performed on the studio dance floor during breaks. Signalling loyalty to tradition, the show also featured an ensemble of traditional dancers in the background, teenagers decked out in woollen pants and white shirts embroidered with flower patterns. Some of the breaks in the show were reserved for them to come up on the stage and perform a circle dance. It was perhaps tossing up of everything into a single show that made it so much different than American television, in which respectability and sleaze are kept on separate shows, if not separate channels.

There was nothing to suggest a superior culture, really. On the contrary, Browder noted, the show was quite atrocious. Lip-syncing was the norm; it occasioned no embarrassment. Even the band only pretended to play instruments, which sometimes didn’t match the instrumentals of the song. An electric guitar, for example, was played even for traditional songs that featured no electrical guitar. The player, wearing an extremely blue blazer, would carry on with strumming the instrument, shamelessly, with gusto even, grinning idiotically into the camera that sometimes approached him for a detail shot. Many of the show’s tropes were lifted from American TV. But as with hip-hop the previous night, that was forgivable; the whole world copies Americans. 

Overall, Browder preferred the traditional songs because they were more genuine. Some of the modern pieces were overdone in terms of makeup and auto tune and strip-club antics. And it was true, Browder could see now, many of the women of his race looked like trannies. But like hot trannies.

On another channel he stumbled onto another game show. He remembered it from his childhood - the show must be in its thirtieth season by now. Called Slagalica, it consisted of a series of trivia and puzzle challenges. This was a purely intellectual show, analogous in spirit to Jeopardy. The participants were brainy types, focused and polite. Watching their mental acuity Browder remembered the pseudo-intellectual theories expounded by Milo, who’s definitely a racist, or at least a racialist, thought Browder, and his mind wondered into thoughts on culture and race.

An IQ study of Europeans from Finland mapped out average IQ by country. It showed developed countries having mostly the average human IQ of 100. Serbia had 90. That’s almost a standard deviation less, which translates to an order-of-magnitude handicap on the tail-end of the distribution, where one finds world-class intellectuals. The other Balkan countries scored one or two points more or less than Serbia, with Albania an outlier with 82. Considering that the Serb statistic included two million Albanians in Kosovo, a concerned Serbian racist may be comforted by the idea that with exclusion of the Kosovars and Gypsies – another wildly uneducated group – the IQ of the purely ethnic Serbs may be higher, perhaps even respectable. It was curious that the the Finnish researchers counted Kosovo as part of Serbia for this particular purpose, though they otherwise recognise it as a separate country. “That ghoul who recognized Kosovo, Martti Ahtisaari, was a Finn,” thought Browder.

Statistics have a mean habit of putting in simple numbers what we already suspect with our complex and emotional intuition. Balkans are generally not stereotyped as intelligent. And Albanians are viewed by the other ethnic groups in the region the way the region as a whole is viewed by the rest of Europe: backward and violent. The Western attitude today towards the inhabitants of this hilly peninsula are neatly summarised by what Roman historian Herodianus wrote centuries ago about the inhabitants of its northern plain: “Pannonians are tall and strong always ready for a fight and to face danger, but slow witted” [sic]. That’s at least what Wikipedia says, though you never know what kind of malice drove some shadowy cyber-nerd to edit that type of insult onto the page about Illyrians. 

There are, however, counterexamples. In Turkey, for one, there seems to be a rather inverse stereotype about South Slavs. There, they are perceived as intelligent, even competent. This surely stems from Ottoman history. Bosnia was the westernmost jut of the empire, and thus precious in the eyes of Turks, who took pride in how far into Europe their power reached. Protecting a precious frontier, Bosnian converts to Ottoman culture and religion naturally drew admiration and compliments. In addition, the Ottoman empire was a ruthless military meritocracy in which political power was held by commanders called pashas, many of whom were born among the conquered Balkan nations and then, through the devshirme system, abducted as young boys into lifelong service as elite soldiers of the Sultan himself. 

The Western and Turkish opinions overlapped in that both saw the Balkan natives as excellent soldiers. In modern times, this corresponds to the phenomenon of Balkan countries punching above their weight when it comes to producing athletes – though not teams - in popular sports.

Be as it may, the way to obtain and maintain power in Serbia today does not lead through creativity. Serbs don’t even pretend like it does. A leader there must appear certain at all times. Excessive deliberation would imply doubt, a humiliating weakness. In America they say that the best batter bats 300; in Serbia, where no one plays baseball, the best batter bats 1,000. How come? 

If old Serbia was Christian enough to accept human failure and redemption through repentance, which it probably wasn’t, then the communist era completely obliterated any such fancies. Soviet Union would never have embraced baseball. Their society strove for perfection, and 30% success rate could never look good there. You were not supposed to make any mistakes. If you were the type of decent human being willing to confess your sins, there was no absolution, you were sent to the firing squad or to Gulag. You suffered swift death and damnatio memoriae, end of story. Yugoslavia was not nearly as harsh at Soviet Union, but it belonged to its cultural sphere of influence, and in it too they didn’t see any redeeming qualities in self-criticism. 

Browder dozed off with such thoughts.

He woke up a couple of hours later, and the night was already full. Eight forty-five. He had set his phone alarm to nine, but he has a tendency to wake up before his alarm clock. It was time to head down to Beton Hala. He dressed and fixed his hair and put in his contact lenses. He brushed his teeth, mostly to rid his mouth of cigarette smell. He looked good in the mirror, though his pants were starting to feel tight after so many days of drinking and not exercising. Walking around European streets every day evidently didn’t add up to sufficient workout. He headed down from the Kalemegdan park to below its bluffs, and found the restaurant street beyond a deserted industrial lot.