Belgrade, three in the morning, winter sharp enough to hurt. He gets in at the station with a coat older than my taxi and a face that had stopped expecting things sometime in the eighties. Wants Zemun, the riverside.
Forty years at the ironworks, he says. Pension. He says the word pension the way some men say the name of a dead ex wife. Politely. With damage.
He was there in ninety three. Salary in the morning, wheelbarrow by noon, sugar and cooking oil by evening. Money back then aged like milk. His wife papered the bedroom wall with banknotes. The paper was finally worth something.
His grandkids still play shop with a brick of five hundred billion dinar notes. Real money, real zeros, worth less than the toy money beside it. He lets them. Best economics teacher in the country, he says, and it works weekends.
In Zemun he pays in euros. Crisp, foreign paper, in his own city. Even money flees home sometimes. It keeps habits.
Inflation never left, he tells me from the curb. It just learned table manners. The rude one kills you overnight. The polite one empties your pockets over forty years and thanks you for your service.
I watched him walk toward the river, upright and unhurried, like a man who had already survived every kind of theft there is.
None of this happened. All of it is true.
#nightfare #belgrade #fiat #inflation #balkans
