A few years ago, during my first trip to Belgrade, I was walking down Knez Mihailova when I passed a rustic-looking book shop.
You know the kind: wood paneling, old-fashioned windows, a pop of emerald green here and there. To top things off, it was just after Christmas β a particular time of year where everything feels softer and lovelier, if only for a few moments β so I was sold. I, the purveyor of a New England childhood and Italian ancestors, knew nothing about Serbians. And yet I had agreed to marry a Serbian man, take his Serbian last name, and maybe, in the far future, raise Serbian-American children.
So, I was determined to assimilate myself with Serbia in any way I could β even from a little white book. I remember drinking lemonade or was it iced tea? I remember the lump of sadness in my throat when a detail reminded me of Aleksa.
And I recall one confusing analogy about wives being like Chinese rice. But the chapter that stuck with me, that I ruminate on from time to time, was on Serbian women. Now, keep in mind: Kapor published this work in , so these observations may have been based on the women he saw on the streets of Belgrade in the s. He described Serbian women as feminine, but with hard edges. They smoke cigarettes like Parisians; they have dark eyes like demons.
There is something, unequivocally, erotic about the Serbian woman standing in the street. Without morals, yet innocent. Elegant, but brutish. But what do I know? So I might as well give it the old college try. Here is what I can tell you, as an American woman, about Serbian women.
