Tim McGowan, Dnevnik from Belgrade

The whole two weeks before March 15: Belgrade as a city of tinnitus. The squeal of the brakes melts into the whistle of the whistle, then back into the squeal of the brakes. Even when there is no real whistle, there is in your head. Too sharp to be crickets, too tall to be frogs, too rough to be rain, too rhythmic to be anything but human: who can sleep with all that? You can't call it background noise.

A. tells me: "That's the bottom line. Yes, okay, politicians never listen. But we can hear each other and what we hear is unbearable. You feel how unbearable things have become."

A real, rendered sound bite: a great wake-up call, any time of day.

*

I'm returning from a tour of the blockade at the Faculty of Philosophy and across the road I see two buses bent into an accordion, blocking traffic. Traffic light collision - nothing serious, no one was hurt. Protest pours in, around, over, finding gaps.

At the threshold of the hairdressing salon, a woman smokes, watches them, her hair still wrapped in layers of foil. Frizer and his colleagues also watch, tossing the story around like an air hockey puck.

I don't speak Serbian, but I know what they're talking about because they're talking about what everyone's talking about: students, supermarket boycotts, falling prices, free public transport, rumors of a Nobel Prize nomination. You can't say the whistles are background noise.

*

The Belgrade Irish Festival rests on the shoulders of students who are constantly changing roles - volunteering, visiting festivals, participating in student gatherings, protests, and reading like crazy. All excited. Their movement through space: photons, neurons, the collective body, a form of vibrant, electrified light. That alone gives you hope about them.

*

B. tells me: "I wonder if things are worse or if I'm just older? And then I see the students and I realize that it's both."

*

C. says to me: "If they fail, it doesn't matter; now they are merged as a generation, and those younger than them will only continue where they left off. We also stopped, and they continued from there. It is a human chain."

*

Dawn, premature and dazzling: sharp white light, red sun, blue air. Sunset: ten minutes of red sun, then almost instant darkness. Midnight already at six in the afternoon. But not silence: the bird call of those whistles, the strange cry - Pump, pump. General strike. And the rhythmic honking of the car's horn as a sign of echo, mark the syllables: Bang-pajama, ge-ne-Ral-ni-strike.

*

Across from my building, across the entire surface of a red brick building belonging to the military, there is a huge Serbian Army recruitment poster, with a lofty slogan in Cyrillic, over a phalanx of young, masked guys in camouflage, marching in not-so-unfortunate harmony. On the other side of the street, however, there is a ruin, the result of the NATO bombing in 1999. It is difficult to look at the bombed ruins. All you see are the words "bombed rubble". You have to force your eyes to look at her. Three were torn in half, one on top of the other, all over the fourth. They look like three or four phone books that have been opened so wide that they've fallen apart, started to tear. How much power does it take to do that with just one phone book? How much force does it take to do it with three? How much force does it take to do that with a concrete floor, another concrete floor, a concrete ceiling, another concrete ceiling? The mind is blocked from the flash, from the blinding, from the thunder of these reason-defying numbers.

*

photo: from a private archive

I am talking to D. about Tishma's novels. Tishma can give you a detailed description of a person's inner life and poignant daily struggles through pages and pages, and then break it down in a single clause or a single sentence. In the rest of the paragraph he does the same for eight other people he describes with the same fullness and intensity. In the abruptness of those paragraphs, you can hear the brutal screeching of history. D. says: "We had a taste of it during the war. And this moment is the darkest since. You can't even walk into a train station and be sure the ceiling will stay in place. Pipes in the ground, power poles above us - what's next? How many walls are on the verge of falling? I love the integrity of these kids. This movement is unlike anything we've had. We had the same ideals, but everything was so dark. The movements we had were all bent by fear, darkness and rage, turned into strange shapes. The moment was so terrible that the ideals were distorted into terrible shapes, like in a nightmare, when people try to speak clearly - but some other sounds come out, and those sounds become more and more distorted the more they try to be clear." I imagine the city as it must have been then: dark, narrow streets, and then a panic attack; above, a hood of leaden darkness, patches of orange light; faces running past you, pale with fear, fleeing from darkness to darkness.

*

I love protests: you don't feel the rain, you no longer perceive the bodies as separate, we are all pulsating blood vessels of one electric body. That sting of chlorine in the air, deep in the sinuses, and the lump in the throat. The fifteenth of March was no different: of course, bigger than any I had been on; forest of people is a phrase I keep thinking about. Our number obliterates any landmark I can think of. Just square after square, narrow street after narrow street: like those ten minutes after the stadium empties, but it lasts for hours.

*

I mostly talk to the people I came with, but, huddled together like this, you end up talking to whoever you bump into, whoever you apologize to. Two Serbian students, a boy and a girl, arrived from the Czech Republic. "There were no buses," he says. "For some mysterious reason," she says. They brought three Czech friends who like this charge. A sports guy and his friend tell me that they normally don't go to protests, but they couldn't miss this one. We can hear people in red berets, old enough to have been in wars. Next to them are some serious guys, skinheads in leather jackets with black and white stripes. But the only banners they carry are in support of the students. Their chanting and kicking has that guttural echo of soccer fans. "If they are on our side, we will be fine," the athlete laughs.

*

The fog. Smog: red, white. Sparks spray like a fountain. The circular flow is tight. The students' speeches are shown on screens that chop and bug: but the crowd is patient, quiet, attentive. They sing. Voices rise with smoke. No whistles: only voices. Even the sound of rain is covered in noise. A few shots make me duck my head, but it's just fireworks – white dandelions blooming, with a yellow center, against the coming darkness.

*

At home, I'm waiting for my friends to call me. I gave people my number, my address, told them they could hide at my place if it got chaotic or if they needed a break, the bathroom, whatever. I have food, tea, towels if anyone gets wet. The crowd passes my door. Some carry the spark in them, others capture it. Sparks and screen light illuminate like fireflies the underside of the large recruitment poster that hangs across the street from my building.

*

A friend sends me a video showing the police running away from the crowd on Cvetni trg. The mass honors the victims from Novi Sad with the usual silence. And then, a fold is quietly opened in a large crowd of people. Then the screams start like from a horror movie. At the same time, I get a message from a friend who is hiding in the Teachers College because of the consequences of this panic: she says plainclothes police are roaming around in the dark hitting people at random. He says that a sound cannon was fired at the students closest to the Science Palace, or maybe tear gas, or maybe a gun that shoots a terrible sound. "Whatever happened there, it caused panic and it's just lucky that no one died in the stampede," she says. "Maybe you should stay inside."

*

Deep darkness. Well after one in the morning. The streets are coated with rain. All the whistles died down: nothing now, just the occasional car passing through blood-red lights. The recruitment poster above is not flying. Complete, defeated lifelessness. What did I want to see? Like everyone else, I'll know it when I see it.

*

In the days after that, more protests: in front of hospitals that deny that patients came with reports of damage to the eardrum, with constant tinnitus, destroyed hearing aids, interruptions in the operation of electrostimulators. Everyone blames that sound cannon. A friend tells me how he went through a series of tests to distinguish age-related hearing loss from the one he's been experiencing since Saturday. "I have to talk to these doctors like I'm a lawyer," he says. "Or, even worse, as if they were They lawyers.”

*

"A guy hands me a flyer for an anti-NATO protest on March 23rd. He explains to me that the twenty-first century began with this bombing. 'Violation of sovereignty, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, now anywhere they like: America has been practicing for it here.'

*

New Belgrade, coast. Blocks of light and shadows between large housing units. Oxyacetylene clarity: sharp light, sharp blue sky. The evening is approaching. Popcorn sellers. Elderly people on benches. Children excited, running, screaming, returning from school. Afro-Cuban musician sings in Spanish. A mixed-race boy of about six years old walks along the edge, talking to his mom. In a Brazilian accent, in Portuguese, he narrates his every step. Slowly now, slowly now. Her words seem to fall under his feet with every step, encouraging him, in holding, in standing up, in letting go, step by step.

*

The Twelve screeches and swerves under the silver lights of Adriatic Bank. The towers slowly turn and redirect. Lilac, lime green, magenta: colors of the future. But we already know what the future looks like here: housing estates, labor rights, friendship between all peoples, parks. A tram is like a louse that roams the kitchen tiles. Skyscrapers are chromed chair legs. The lights are on in the apartments visible above the billboards, but no one seems to be in them. There is not even security in the lobby.

Translation: Jana Lazarević