People in Belgrade nowadays often complain about the swarms of mosquitoes that spoil many a summer night. The underlying assumption is that the pesticide raids of the good old days have been curtailed due to the economic austerity measures. But such complaints are one-sided. What they tend to neglect is the bulging supply of fresh blood and tender skin in the public parks, where swarms of homeless or roomless Belgraders neck and fornicate at will each night when it does not rain. The mosquitoes are the hidden beneficiaries of the long-term housing crisis, which has anteceded the period of austerity by a couple of decades.

Addendum I (March 21, 1994)

Ružica, the woman behind this piece, came to my parents’ flat in Belgrade to pick up a portrait of my mother painted by her aunt’s husband, a well-known albeit pathetic Yugoslav painter, who was having a retrospective in one of the most important Belgrade galleries. The painter was an old friend of my parents, and the portrait was to appear in the exhibition. Ružica was quite beautiful, but she was a bit odd. There was much feminine affectation about her, but she simultaneously appeared remote and untouchable. This first impression had turned out to be correct.

Although I had another lover that summer in Belgrade, I was immediately attracted to Ružica and I made an attempt to chat her up. When I escorted her to the elevator I managed to get a nice kiss from her. She also agreed to go out for dinner with me. For a few weeks we would be meeting in her place or mine, we would be going out quite often, and so on, but she would not make love with me. I could do whatever I pleased with her, but fucking was apparently out.

The night before I wrote this piece we were together at Kalemegdan. This had turned out to be our last time together, but we did not know it at the time. I must have fondled her for a few hours before Ružica finally let me put a finger up her vagina. A minute later she got anxious about this infraction, though. Realizing that her protections were faltering, she would not lie on the grass or sit down on a bench any longer, and I proceeded to suck her nipples and squeeze her thighs under her skirt as we were walking around the park.

It was past one o’clock in the morning when she at last let me insert a few fingers up her vagina again, and we stopped on a deserted path for a finger-fuck. We must have looked quite pitiful in our awkward embrace—me with my hand up her skirt, and she with her hands around my neck. I had an enormous erection as I was rubbing myself against her hip. Very soon she started coming and she simply slumped onto my hand. This caught me off balance and we almost fell to the ground, but I managed to prop her up and to keep her going. All my fingers were now in her, working frenetically in all directions at once. She kept coming for a long time, in waves. Ružica’s orgasm was so exciting that I came, too. This had happened to me only once before, when I was still a virgin and when I was necking with Darja, soon to become my first woman. My orgasm was blissful, too. Later on I discovered that my underwear was all glued together with what appeared to be a large amount of semen. Just as Ružica was beginning to come, it started to rain. By the time we put our clothing in order and ran to the nearest street to catch a taxi, we were completely wet. Ružica was angry with me on account of the rain, but she was livid about the fact that I have finally managed to fuck her, albeit with my fingers.

The next morning I established that I was bitten all over by mosquitoes. Ružica’s tender skin must have been covered with bites, too. Either the same day or the next I went away—perhaps to the coast, where I would have joined my parents on my father’s sailing boat. When I returned to Belgrade for a week or two before my return to the States, I just did not feel like calling or seeing Ružica.

As time went by I often thought of her, but I never really wanted to see her again. My thoughts of her would usually drift toward that wonderful orgasm at Kalemegdan. I could feel her contractions in my hand for a year or maybe two. Whenever I would ask my mother about Ružica, she had very little to tell me. But two years ago I learned from my mother that Ružica had killed herself. She jumped out of her window on the forth floor of a tenement building not far from Slavija, one of the important transportation nodes in the center of Belgrade. She died in the hospital a few days later.

Addendum II (March 25, 1994)

My other girlfriend at the time was Suna, a beautiful albeit breastless woman of Montenegrin origin. She was a daughter of very close friends of my parents. She was dark, tall and elegant, graced with a proud face and wonderful eyebrows. She was strong, too. The first time we made love was the previous summer. I escorted her home after a genteel dinner party at the home of some friends of our parents, and I followed her into the lobby of her building just off the Marx and Engels Square. It was quite late at night. Before the elevator arrived I kissed her for the first time. Suna was eager. Even though she lived alone, that night we did not make it to her apartment. Instead, we ended up fucking on the first-floor landing of a dark stairwell. I was leaning with my back against the elevator cage while she was hanging from it on her hands and her bare feet, her long legs bent in the knees, and she was slamming herself onto my prick, like an ape in heat. It was hot, so both of us were almost naked. Later on, when I was kissing her goodnight, she apologized for her unprecedented behavior. She told me that she had never felt such desperate passion as that night.