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The printout of the running order had been folded so many times it was coming apart along the creases, and Serbia kept unfolding it on the table anyway, flattening it with the side of his hand between the plate of ćevapi and the little tulip glass of rakija, as if reading it a ninth time would make the tanks newer. They were not newer. They were the same tanks they'd been in the nineties, painted, and the air force was a handful of MiGs that his mechanics kept alive the way you keep an old dog alive, with love and swearing and parts from somewhere you don't ask about. Tomorrow all of it would roll down the boulevard in New Belgrade in front of everyone, the first big parade in so long that half his cities had never seen one, and he had moved the whole thing four days early, off his own liberation day, so Russia could make it. He had told everyone it was for logistical reasons. Novi Sad had looked at him over her teacup like he'd tracked dog shit into a church.
The kafana was warm and low-ceilinged and smelled of charcoal and onions and twenty years of cigarettes soaked into the wood. Zemun owned the place, and was standing behind the bar polishing a glass that had been clean for an hour, his heavy moustache drooping over his mouth, his waistcoat buttoned wrong. Ceca was on the speakers, quietly for once, because Zemun had decided Serbia looked like a man who would throw something if it were loud. Zemun was usually right about that. A small dark icon of Saint Sava hung over the door to the kitchen with a dried basil sprig tucked behind its frame, and beside it a calendar from a tyre shop that had been on March for two years.
Russia came in late. He ducked under the doorframe with the rain shining on his coat and on the fur of that ushanka, which he wore in October because he wore it always, and Serbia's stomach did something embarrassing that he immediately blamed on the kajmak. He stood up anyway and did the kisses, left cheek, right cheek, left cheek, because that was what you did, because his mouth knew the route by now. Russia's stubble scraped his lips each time. Russia endured it with his eyes half shut and then sat down heavily across from him, and the bench complained, and Zemun brought over a second glass and filled it without a word and went back to the bar to polish nothing.
"You look terrible," Russia said, and took a piece of somun out of the basket and dragged it through the kajmak like it was his.
"I have a parade tomorrow." Serbia tapped the printout. "Which you're coming to. Which I'm doing for you."
"You said logistical reasons."
"For logistical reasons I'm doing it for you, bre." Serbia knocked back his rakija and it burned all the way down and did nothing for his nerves. "Eat. You're eating my food, at least enjoy it."
Russia chewed. He had a way of chewing that was like watching a glacier think. Then he wiped his fingers on a napkin, unzipped his coat, took out his phone, unlocked it with his thumb, and slid it across the table between the ćevapi and the onions with the screen facing up. Serbia looked down at it and his whole face went hot before he'd even finished reading, because he knew the thing. Everybody knew the thing. A yellow road sign, badly edited, telling travellers they'd entered Serbia and would have to suck Russian dicks to get through. He'd seen it more times than he'd seen his own passport. He had seen it at night in bed with the light off and the phone close to his face, and he had looked at it for longer than anyone should look at a joke, and he had told himself every single time that the heat in his face was rage.
"Slushai," Russia said. "I have a complaint."
"Put that away."
"Everybody thinks this. Americans. Croatia. Every country with internet." Russia leaned back with his hands folded on his stomach, enormously pleased with himself, the white band of his face catching the light and the red of his mouth not quite managing to stay flat. "And I have never once received. You gave me a mug. With my face. So I am thinking, is false advertising, I want to speak to the manager."
He was joking. Serbia could see he was joking; it was all over him, in the lazy drop of his eyelids and the little tuck at the corner of his mouth, the face of somebody waiting to be called a pervert and have a glass thrown at his head. Serbia knew exactly what he was supposed to say. He was supposed to say jebem ti mater and laugh and call him a pig, and he opened his mouth to say it, and what came out was "Croats make those," in a voice about two notes too high.
Russia's eyebrows went up.
"They do," Serbia said. "It's propaganda. It's not even funny. Nobody, I've never even thought about, why would anyone even want to." He picked up his empty glass and put it down. He could feel the red climbing from his collar into the white of his jaw, into the blue, his ears burning like somebody had stuck them on the grill with the meat. "It's stupid. It's a stupid picture," he said, to the onions.
Russia laughed. It came up out of him huge and rough and delighted, his head tipping back, the ushanka sliding, and a couple of tables over Smederevo and somebody Serbia didn't recognize turned around to look. "Look at you," Russia said, still laughing, reaching across to flick Serbia's burning ear with one thick finger. "Look, he's red. All talk, Serbiya. Like your air force. Very nice on posters."
Serbia went outside to smoke. He stood under the dripping awning with his back to the window and smoked two in a row and didn't think about it, and he went home and lay on his back in the dark and didn't think about it there either, very specifically, very hard, until about four.
The reviewing stand had been built in a week by Belgrade's public works department, which meant it was sturdy where nobody would look and decorative everywhere else. It ran along the side of the boulevard under a canopy hung with tricolour bunting, rows of folding chairs for the important guests and, at the centre, a podium with a sheet of armoured glass across the front and a microphone on a gooseneck stand. Behind them, in a truck nobody was supposed to notice, RTS was running the broadcast, and every so often Serbia could hear him through the canvas in his headset, fussing, "camera three, camera three, wider, no, wider," like a hen counting chicks that weren't there. Down the length of the avenue the big screens showed the stand to the crowd. The crowd was cities, mostly, and towns and villages and every municipality in the country that could get a bus, waving flags and eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells, a whole noisy sea of red and blue and white under a cold bright October sky.
Serbia was in dress uniform, buttoned to the throat, white gloves, his patch freshly straightened so the double-headed eagle sat dead centre over his blind eye. He had checked it in the mirror four times. He had not slept. He was sitting next to Russia because Russia was in the seat of honour and he was the host, and the folding chairs had been put so close together that Russia's knee was pressed against his, through two layers of trousers, the whole morning. Serbia was aware of the knee the way you're aware of a tooth that's about to go bad. Two seats down, Novi Sad sat with her ankles crossed and an EU pin on her lapel and her mouth set in a line like a stapler, and every time Russia leaned over to murmur something she shifted, very slightly, and Serbia's spine went tighter.
The tanks went past. They were loud and they smelled of diesel and they were old, and Serbia sat up straight and was proud of them anyway, because they were his and they still moved, and he dared anybody on that stand to say different. Russia watched them with his chin in his hand. "Is nice," he said, the way you'd say it about a drawing a nephew did.
"Shut up."
"I said nice."
Serbia's breast pocket buzzed. He knew who it was before he looked. Croatia had been texting since the anthem.
Croatia
📷 Screenshot — Russia circled in red on the broadcast
ur husband looks bored
📷 That STOP sign
📷 MiG photo
how many of these are actually yours lol
Serbia had stopped answering after the second one and kept reading them like an idiot, because not reading them would mean Croatia was writing things he didn't know about, and that was worse. He put the phone back. It buzzed again against his chest.
The armoured cars came, then the artillery, then a column of infantry with their boots slamming the asphalt in time, and somewhere in the middle of it was Niš, marching with his rifle on his shoulder and his face shining with pure joy, and Serbia could see from forty metres away that Niš had smuggled a little Russian flag into his sleeve and was letting the corner of it poke out. Serbia closed his eye for a second. Russia saw it too, and made a soft amused noise through his nose.
"Still waiting," Russia said, low, under the drums. "For my complaint. Is very slow, your customer service."
"I swear to God," Serbia said through his teeth, "not here."
"Not here, not there." Russia shrugged one huge shoulder, settling deeper into the folding chair with his legs spread wide the way big men sit, his knee pushing harder against Serbia's. He was still teasing. He was having a lovely time. "You talk very big, Serbiya. Big speeches, big parade, big sign on the internet. But nothing ever happens."
Something went off in Serbia's head like a fuse blowing. He had moved his own anniversary for this man. He had rolled out every tank he had, painted, in front of Novi Sad and Brussels and Croatia's stupid red circle, and here was Russia sitting in the best seat on the stand with his knees spread telling him, today, at his own parade, that nothing ever happened. The feeling that came up in him was very old and very familiar and it had nothing to do with good sense. It was the thing that made him do something precisely because someone had said he wouldn't. He felt it settle in behind his ribs, hot and stubborn as a mule, and he felt his mind go very clear.
"Flyover," the announcer said over the PA, voice booming down the boulevard. "Ladies and gentlemen, please direct your attention to the sky above the Sava."
Every head on the boulevard went back at once. Serbia heard the sound before the jets came, a rising tearing roar from the river, and then the Russian team was over them, low and fast and trailing smoke in white and blue and red, so loud that the canopy trembled and the bunting snapped and the folding chairs buzzed under him. Novi Sad had her hand up to shade her eyes. The whole stand was looking at the sky. Serbia slid off his chair.
He went down on his knees behind the armoured glass at the front of the podium, in the narrow space between Russia's spread legs and the draped bunting, the asphalt hard and gritty through his dress trousers. He did it before he could think about it, which was the only way he was ever going to do it, and when he looked up Russia was already looking down at him with his chin tucked and his mouth slightly open. The jets screamed over. Serbia watched Russia's face go through it, smug first, a lazy little curl at the mouth like he thought Serbia had dropped something, then a frown, then a blink, then the moment where he understood. He went very still. His big hands, which had been resting on his thighs, didn't move to stop anything.
Serbia undid the belt with his gloves still on, which was stupid and slow, so he bit the tip of one glove and pulled it off with his teeth and spat it into his lap and did it properly. Button, zip. His heart was going so fast he could feel it in his tongue. He hooked his fingers into the waistband and pulled, and Russia's cock came out heavy and red and already filling, thicker than he'd let himself imagine, and it bumped against his cheek and left a warm spot there. Serbia stared at it. The jets were turning over the river for another pass. Above him he heard Russia make a small noise, a single surprised "Serbiya," that the engines swallowed whole.
"Nothing ever happens," Serbia said, too quiet for anyone to hear, and opened his mouth.
The head was hot and it tasted of skin and salt and faintly of soap, and he closed his lips round it and sucked, hard, with a wet little "slk," and felt Russia's thigh jump against his shoulder. He'd thought about this. He'd thought about it so many times in the dark with that stupid sign glowing on his phone that his mouth seemed to know what to do before he did, his tongue going flat along the underside, pressing up, swirling under the ridge. He pulled off with a soft pop, spat on it, a big messy gob that ran down the shaft, and fisted it in, slick and loud, and then went down again, further this time, and further, bobbing, spit already leaking out of the corners of his mouth and running down his chin. Russia was getting harder against his tongue, swelling until Serbia's jaw ached, and his breathing above had gone ragged and shallow in a way Serbia could feel through the legs bracketing him.
He could hear everything. The jets, deafening, and under the jets the crowd cheering them, whistles and claps, and closer than all of it Novi Sad's heels scraping on the stand as she shifted in her chair, two seats down, a metre away. Every wet sound he made felt like it was coming out of a loudspeaker even though it couldn't possibly be heard over all that, and his face burned so hot he thought the eagle on his patch might scorch, and his cock had gone stiff in his dress trousers and was pressing against the seam, and that was the most humiliating part, how much he liked being this close to getting caught.
He took his hand away from the base. Russia's hand landed on the back of his head, not pushing, just landing there like it had nowhere else to go, his fingers settling over the strap of the patch. Serbia grabbed Russia's hips through the bunched trousers, dug his fingers in, breathed in deep through his nose, and pulled himself forward.
The cock slid over his tongue and hit the back of his mouth and he gagged, "ghk, glk," his whole throat heaving, and he didn't stop. He swallowed against it and pushed through, and the head forced past into his throat, a thick stretching pressure that made his eye stream and his ears pop, and he kept going, his lips stretched wide and stinging, until his nose was pressed into the coarse white hair at the root and there was nothing left outside his mouth. He could feel the shape of it inside his neck. He held there with his throat fluttering and squeezing around it in little panicked swallows, "gkhh, mmgh," spit dripping off his chin onto the starched white collar of his dress uniform, tears sliding down the blue of his face, and above him Russia said something in Russian that wasn't a word at all, just a long broken exhale, and his fingers clenched on the eyepatch strap.
Serbia pulled back with a huge wet gasp, a string of spit swinging from his lip to the head, sucked in air, and went down again, faster, fucking his own throat on it with sloppy relentless bobs, "gluk, gluk, glk, hhmm," like he was settling something. The jets were pulling away over Ušće. The roar thinned out. He knew it was thinning and he did not stop, because stopping now would mean Russia got to say he'd lost his nerve halfway, and he would rather die on his knees on this boulevard.
The last engine faded out over the river. The boulevard went quiet in that big hollow way crowds go quiet after a noise, everybody catching their breath, and into the quiet came a sound. It was wet. It was a long, thick, choking slurp, and then a gurgle, and then a small high whimper, and it came out of every speaker on the boulevard at once, because the microphone on its gooseneck stand was a hand's width above Serbia's head and nobody had switched it off.
Serbia froze with Russia halfway down his throat. Behind the canvas he heard RTS go "what is that, what is that, who's live," in a frantic whisper, and then, louder and much worse, "dead air, we've got dead air, cut to the box, just cut to the box," and Serbia didn't have to look to know the big screens all down the avenue had switched to the VIP stand. He could tell from the noise. There was a pause, a long and terrible pause, and then a murmur that started near the stand and rolled away down the boulevard like a wave going out, and then somebody laughed. Somebody whistled. On the screen, he would find out later, there was Russia, enormous and flushed to the hairline, head tipped back against the folding chair, eyes shut, mouth open, one big red hand clearly gripping something just below the frame. For about half a second it could have been anything. Then RTS, who was very proud of his zoom, zoomed in to find the action, and the angle tipped over the edge of the armoured glass and caught the top of a short red head and the corner of an eagle eyepatch, bobbing.
Russia's eyes snapped open. He looked down at Serbia in pure horror, mouth working, a man who'd come to a parade to make a joke and was now on every screen in Belgrade with his trousers open, and under the horror, just underneath it, Serbia saw his pupils go huge and black, and felt his cock jerk thick and hard against the back of his tongue. "Blyad," Russia whispered, and the microphone took that too, and sent it rolling down the boulevard, and the crowd made a noise like a stadium when a penalty goes in.
Serbia's phone buzzed in his breast pocket. It buzzed again. It didn't stop buzzing. He knew it was Croatia and he knew it was half the country and he had never in his life wanted so badly to crawl under a stand and be dead, and the thought that came straight after that one, absolutely clearly, was that if he pulled off now they'd all have seen him start and not finish. They'd say he couldn't even do that. He tightened his grip on Russia's hips and swallowed him to the root again with the whole of New Belgrade watching.
"Serbiya," Russia gasped, "the camera, they can," and his hand on the back of Serbia's head was shaking, and it didn't pull him off. It pushed. Just a little, just the weight of it, like Russia's hand had decided something without asking him, and Serbia moaned around his cock so loud and so wrecked that the PA crackled. He worked his throat around the head on purpose, squeezing, swallowing, "glk, mmhh, gkh," his nose crushed into Russia's belly, his eye rolled up and streaming, and he felt Russia's thighs lock either side of his shoulders and his whole huge body go rigid in the chair.
Russia came with a strangled roar he tried to bite down on and didn't manage, "ahhh, Bozhe, ahh, blyad, blyaaad," his hips jerking up off the folding chair, and Serbia felt it pump hot and thick straight down his throat, pulse after pulse, and he swallowed it, gulping, his throat working with these loud desperate clicks that the microphone picked up beautifully and played to everybody. When he finally pulled back a last rope of it caught on his lip and dripped ontothe white glove still lying in his lap, a pale wet splash right across the knuckles.
Serbia knelt there on the asphalt and breathed. His throat felt like he'd swallowed a drainpipe. His lips were swollen and stinging and his chin was slick to the jaw, and the starched collar of his dress uniform had gone soft and see-through with spit. Above him Russia sat collapsed in the folding chair with his cock still out and shining, his chest heaving, the ushanka knocked so far back on his white hair it was hanging on by the earflap, and he stared down at Serbia with the face of a man who had been hit by a tram and was trying to decide whether to thank it. The boulevard was dead quiet. The kind of quiet you get in a stadium right before somebody gets stabbed or somebody gets kissed. Serbia could hear the canopy flapping. He could hear RTS in the truck behind the canvas, whispering "oh no, oh no, oh no" into his headset like a prayer.
Then, from somewhere down the avenue in the infantry column, a single voice went up, cracked and joyful and completely sincere. Serbia knew that voice. He'd have known it in his sleep. It was Niš, with his rifle on one shoulder and his little smuggled flag now fully out of his sleeve and waving over his head like a man at a wedding.
"S Rusima nas je trista miliona!"
For a second nobody joined him and Serbia had a brief, beautiful hope that Niš would simply be arrested. Then Kragujevac picked it up. Then Čačak. Then a whole bus of villages from Šumadija that had been eating sunflower seeds since seven in the morning, and then it was rolling, the whole boulevard chanting it, some of them dead serious and teary, most of them howling with laughter, whistling, clapping in rhythm, and the big screens were still on the box, still on Serbia's red head and Russia's open trousers, because RTS had frozen solid at the controls and forgotten he had other cameras. Somebody near the front threw a scarf onto the stand. Somebody else yelled "Bravo, bre!" and got a round of applause for it.
Serbia wanted the asphalt to open. He wanted the Sava to come up over its banks and wash the whole stand into the Danube and out to Romania. His face was so hot the blue band felt purple, and he could feel the red creeping all the way down his white neck into his ruined collar, and the worst thing, the thing he'd take with him to his grave, was that his cock was still rock hard in his trousers and twitching every time the chant came round again.
He looked to his left. Novi Sad was sitting exactly where she had been, ankles crossed, EU pin gleaming, and her stapler mouth had come completely unstapled. It just hung open. She had one hand frozen halfway to her phone. Serbia watched her close her mouth, open it, close it again, and then very slowly, very deliberately, take the phone the rest of the way out and start typing something with both thumbs, and he knew with total certainty exactly who it was going to.
His own phone was still going in his breast pocket like a trapped bee. He fished it out with his bare hand because he didn't have the strength not to. Croatia had sent one thing. It was a screenshot of the big screen, Serbia's head and the eagle patch and Russia's flushed face tipped back, with the yellow STOP sign pasted crookedly over the top and no caption at all. He didn't need one.
Croatia
📷 Screenshot — STOP sign pasted over the live broadcast
Under it there was a message from a number Serbia had saved under a little black eagle on red.
Montenegro
brate
wtf
👍
Montenegro's last message was a single thumbs up, and Serbia could not tell, and would never be able to tell, whether it was sarcastic. He locked the phone and put it face down on his knee.
"Serbiya," Russia said hoarsely, fumbling at his zip with fingers that wouldn't work. He'd got himself mostly back in his trousers and the ushanka mostly back on his head and he still couldn't look at the screens. His voice had gone small for a man that size. "I came to make a joke."
"Znam," Serbia said. His own voice came out like gravel in a bucket. "You said nothing ever happens."
Russia opened his mouth and then shut it, and something went across his face that was mostly shock and partly wonder and a little bit, just a little, the look of a big man who has just found out the thing he joked about wanting was real, and wanted him back. Serbia didn't have time to deal with that. Down the avenue the drums had started again. The honour guard was coming, his own boys in their grey and blue with their bayonets catching the sun, marching straight for the stand in tight lines, and the chant was still going round them, and they were going to pass the box and look up at their country, and their country was going to be there.
Serbia got up off his knees. They cracked. He stood behind the armoured glass with his face wrecked and his mouth swollen and a shine still on his bottom lip that he could feel drying, and he pulled the wet glove back on over his hand without looking at it. He fixed the patch with two fingers, sliding the eagle back to dead centre over his blind eye. He wiped his chin on his sleeve. Then he squared his shoulders, lifted his chin at the whole chanting, laughing, whistling boulevard and every screen in Belgrade, and as the honour guard drew level with the stand he brought his gloved hand up sharp to his brow and held the salute, burning red from his collar to his hairline, with Russia's come still drying across the knuckles.