A diplomatic mix-up takes a travel journalist on an unexpected press trip to Serbia that feels like no other, leaving him and his fellow journalists to uncover the details of what is ominously named “The Project.”
Part 1: Voćnjak
I was in the middle of the Pannonian Plains when everything started to go wrong.
“Epple,” said the farmer, handing me a crisp, green apple.
“Yes,” I replied.
He jousted the apple into my chest. I took it, primed it against my incisors, and bit. A gleek-spray of cidery juices spurted out and the acid washed over my tongue, boiling my teeth as it went.
“Mmm!” I lied. This pleased the farmer, which pleased the Two Gigantic Serbian Women, who stepped forward from the shadow beneath an apple tree.
“Mmm!” They replied in unison, grinning from ear to ear. “Good, come now, we show you more. The Project.”
The Project, The Project. All day they’d been talking about The Project. Had I missed something in the itinerary? I turned to the other travel journalists, hoping they might look as confused as I did, but their stoic expressions said nothing. I couldn’t ask them and risk looking unprofessional. All I could do was follow the Two Gigantic Serbian Women and piece it together as I went.
We went with them through the orchard to the only building on the infinite green prairie, a tea-stained iron shack with a crooked cupola and a weathervane pointing directly to hell. “Here!” Cried the less blonde woman. “Come! We see… The Project.” Inside, we discovered a vast network of conveyor belts rolling apples from carousel to carousel and dropping them into cardboard boxes. When a box was full to bursting, a broad-shouldered, brick-skinned man hulked it onto his shoulders and hurled it into the back of a lorry.
Oh my god, I thought. Is this a fucking apple packing warehouse?
“Is this a fff… is this an apple packing warehouse?” I asked.
“Yes!” Cried the Two Gigantic Serbian Women, still grinning madly.
The silence that fell over our group told me that the other journalists were not, in fact, clued in.
Part 2: Mlekara
The journey to Novi Sad was two hours by road. There were eight of us squeezed into the minibus, including the driver and the Two Gigantic Serbian Women. We–the four journalists and our PR agency representative–sat behind them in silence, afraid to speak lest the Two Gigantic Serbian Women figure out that we had absolutely no idea what The Project was, and therefore no idea what we were doing in Serbia.
I tried to ward off my drowsiness by reading the itinerary, but the place names were in indecipherable Serbian. I could not make out a Voćnjak from a Mlekara, and had no idea what a Fabrika Džema might have been. I gave up, and instead gazed out at wild Serbia as we plunged headlong into the Fruška Gora forest. The promise of Novi Sad, one-time Capital of Culture, gave me reason to suspect the apple packing warehouse would go down as nothing but a blip in an otherwise successful press trip.
As twilight mixed wisps of peach into the ocean blue sky, we burst from the rugged jungle back into civilization. Novi Sad unfurled across the river valley beneath us like a blanket of cinnabar roof tiles interrupted only by the occasional needle-sharp steeple of a cathedral. We fluttered past the Petrovaradin Fortress and over the Tito Bridge, hurtling around corners with reckless abandon until, suddenly, we stopped at a charming town square.
“Out!” Barked the blonder Serbian woman, and instinctively we obeyed. The square was pinched at one corner, forming a pathway between two rows of pastel-painted houses dressed in a pan-European style. “Come!” Ordered the less blonde woman, and we marched behind her.
At last, my travel glands started to secrete. Novi Sad’s central boulevard roared with the toing and froing of Serbia in action. Tacky tourist shops bayed for our business; cafés and restaurants crammed themselves into secret, tree-shaded alcoves; every pub seemed to be showing Only Fools and Horses to a full house of cheering punters.
As our posse trundled through the urban chaos, I committed myself to the travel journalist act, tucking myself into the anonymity of the city. Alas, this was to be a momentary pleasure, as at the opposite end of the street I found myself back at the minibus, which had circumnavigated the city via the backroads.
“Back in car now!” Called the blonder woman, shepherding us into our designated seats. We reluctantly obliged, and the door slammed shut behind us so that our last view of Novi Sad was through tinted glass.
The driver did not care for our disappointment, and soared relentlessly along his set course. The dusk was rolling in, and the clouds were turning bronze. The city faded away on a long gradient until we found ourselves back on the open steppe.
I drifted off for a moment and came back around with a jolt. The minibus was passing over sludgy terrain. My half-unconscious brain foraged for clues as to where we were, and whether I might be in any danger. I consulted the itinerary. After Novi Sad was Mlekara. But what was Mlekara? Out the window, I could see a tin shack, a row of sheds, and a grain silo, and it became abundantly clear that while I was not in any danger, I was, for the second time that day, on a farm.
The minibus pulled to a stop. I opened the door and stepped out, straight into a pile of cowpat.
“Velcome.” A man in dungarees had been waiting for us to disembark. He proceeded to engage in an intense conversation with the Two Gigantic Serbian Women. They smiled and laughed as they screamed into each other’s faces. Then he turned back to us with a tranquil smile. “Heff questions?”
I turned to look at the other journalists, wondering if perhaps they knew where we were, assuming that I had once again missed something from the itinerary. Their dumbfounded expressions told me we were all thinking the same thing. We looked to our PR representative, but she too was paralysed with confusion.
“Yeah, uhh… where are we?” Piped up the bravest journalist. The Two Gigantic Serbian Women grinned, the scleras of their eyes turning red with quiet rage. The man in dungarees turned to them, then back to us.
“Is Mlekara, of course. In your language is milk farm, yis?” Just as I thought. “You come with me now, yis?”
All we had was quiet resignation. In loose formation, we trudged in the shadow of the dungarees man.
Part 3: Belgrade
That night, on Belgrade’s hardest mattress, I dreamt of pregnant cows pissing onto concrete floors and the man in dungarees forcing me to drink his milk. Behind him, I could hear the monotone chants of the Two Gigantic Serbian Women: “Project. Project. Project. PROJECT.”
I awoke in a cold sweat, which was refreshing, because the room itself was stifling at almost forty degrees. It was coming up to 6 a.m., and I decided to look for inspiration in the waking city.
Our hotel was wedged into a high-density quadrant of commercial units on the edge of a roundabout, near a neoclassical bungalow that proudly declared itself Serbia’s first McDonald’s. I flaneured with anticipation, but after 30 minutes realised the city was nothing but an Escher staircase, a Möbius loop of crumbling, Yugoslav-era concrete towers in every shade of beige. I sulked back to the hotel using the graffiti as a wayfinder.
I arrived to find my fellow journalists at breakfast, all at different tables. They had each opted for the safe familiarity of the croissant, rather than trying their luck with any of the local fare, which consisted of white cheeses, purple hams, sugary breads, and pastes of every colour.
As I stood by the buffet table analysing a curiously straight and skinny sausage, I felt a shadow looming over me. “HEY-LO, good morning.” The Two Gigantic Serbian Women had caught me.
“Morning,” I muttered back.
The less blonde woman leaned over me, her steely blue eyes staring directly into mine. “Tell us, Janjo. You are enjoying The Project, yes?”
“Oh, yes. Very much so. That was very interesting last night, the, err… the milk farm.”
The Two Gigantic Serbian Women looked down at me with deranged smiles. “Is very important to Serbia,” said the blonder woman. “You are very important, Janjo. To be part of… The Project.”
I gripped my sausage tight with fear. “Yes, well, it’s a pleasure to be here and to be part of, err, The Project.” In the corner of my eye, I could see the other journalists staring silently into their empty breakfast plates, refusing to look up and risk eye contact. I turned back to the Two Gigantic Serbian Women and smiled. They seemed satisfied and walked away through the breakfast hall. The other journalists shuddered as they passed.
Part 4: Fabrika džema
The minibus had left Belgrade a lifetime ago and was now in an unfamiliar landscape. We were driving along a dirt road atop a heroic, emerald-green mountain. With no guardrails to separate us from the vast chasms on either side, our driver crept along the mountaintop trail with uncharacteristic cautiousness. The other journalists had turned ghost-pale, the veins of their knuckles pulsing as they gripped their seats. The Two Gigantic Serbian Women sang a hymn in the front seat. Suddenly, it all made sense. The Project. It was surely a conspiracy to have us all murdered.
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and accepted my fate. I tried to drift off, thinking it would be nicer to die in my sleep.
“Janjo. Wake now.”
I came to in a godforsaken place. The horizon was trees in all directions except one, where the mountainside hurled itself down a giant’s staircase and off towards the Dinaric mountains, and I knew that must have been west, for that was where the sun was setting. In the distance, the occasional chateau nestled in the shapely bosom of Serbia’s immense landscape glowed fiery bronze as the waning sunlight hit it just so. The minibus was empty, except for me, and the blonder of the Two Gigantic Serbian Women was leaning over me. How nice of them to kill me last, I thought, but how rude to wake me up first.
I stumbled out of the minibus and found myself in a high-altitude industrial estate. The Two Gigantic Serbian Women ushered me through the front door of an unmarked unit where a young stranger was waiting to greet me. Without saying anything, he dressed me in a hairnet, a white lab coat, and a facemask, then hurried me through a PVC curtain into a factory unit that was empty except for the other journalists, who were still alive for now and dressed in the same sterile smocks as I was. There was a lonely machine in the corner of the room, barely the size of a small person and connected via a funnel to a chrome vat.
“You are journalists, yis? From England?” The young man skulked up behind us. He looked too childish and skinny to be a killer.
“Where are we?” Demanded one of the journalists.
The young man squinted. “Džem,” he replied sarcastically, pointing at the machine. I was growing tired of this act. If he was going to kill us and feed our bodies to that machine, could he at least make it quick? He strolled over to it and produced a glass jar from his pocket, which he placed beneath the funnel. “You want try?” He asked, looking directly at me.
I stepped up. Beside the machine was a glistening silver lever with a black rubber ball at the end. I cranked it and watched as a stream of thick, red, chunky viscera churned out of the nozzle and filled up the glass jar, each dollop landing with an abominable plop. Dear God, was this what they did to the last poor sod who took part in The Project?
“Džem,” the young man repeated as we watched the mush fill the jar.
“Džem,” I echoed. And then it dawned on me. “Džem. Jam. This is fucking jam.”
Part 5: Return to Belgrade
Our anger reached a boiling point on the journey back to Belgrade. It was our last night in Serbia, and we were facing the reality of heading home without a story. The minibus dropped us at the front door of the hotel, but in our hedonistic fervour, we ran from the Two Gigantic Serbian Women and headed in the other direction, into the seedy underbelly of Viline Vode, where we found Drugstore, a nightclub established in a former slaughterhouse beneath a motorway junction.
The evening’s playlist was composed of British and American indie chart-toppers from the late 2000s, which the locals danced to with such passion that it was as if they were hearing these bands for the first time, which indeed they might have been. We huddled around the bar, accosting our PR representative as we knocked back shots of rakija, the local moonshine.
“Just what the hell is going on?” Demanded the bravest journalist. “I’ve got to go back to my editor tomorrow and I’ve got nothing to write about, except apple packing warehouses and milk farms and fucking jam factories!”
“I dunno what to say,” the PR representative slurred. “The itinerary changed at the last minute. We were supposed to be going to, like, churches and that. But then my boss… he changed it around and added in all this shit.”
“And The Project? You got any idea what that’s about?”
“No idea. Never heard of it ‘til those two women turned up.”
I took another rakija, then another. I kept taking rakija until I felt as tall and macho as a Serb, and then I moved into the centre of the dancefloor and contorted my body into various ugly shapes. This attracted the interest of the Serbs, who put their arms around my shoulders and yelled pidgin English lyrics into my face. I danced and shouted, and as I did, I found the heartbeat of Serbia, and finally, I understood what The Project was all about. You see, The Project had been in me in the whole time, in fact I am The Project, we are all The Project, and really this whole chaotic world and especially Belgrade with its brutalist buildings and the wide open Pannonian Plains and the Fruška Gora forest and Novi Sad and the Dinaric mountains, they’re all The Project, and that’s it. I completed it. I survived. I won.
And then I threw up everywhere and blacked out.
Part 6: Zbogom, Serbia
The next morning, over burnt coffees and bland cheeseburgers, we tried to piece together the night before. We ruminated on our misfortune: the final tragedy of Serbia was that we had finally managed to embrace the awesome culture of this glorious country, only to lose those memories in the process. But we had four hours left until our flight home, which meant there was still time for one last tragedy.
The Two Gigantic Serbian Women arrived at the table, flanking a balding man in a business suit. “HEY-LO! We hope you enjoyed The Project.” They said.
We sniggered. “Oh yeah. Loved it.”
“Good! Then please, let us introduce you–he is British, like you, yis? This, Sir Donald Quelm.”
The man in the suit straightened his posture and went around the table, handing out business cards. “What a pleasure it is to have you all here,” he bumbled. “I’m sure my colleagues have told you everything about The Project and what it means to Anglo-Serbian relations. And I hope that in discovering this country first-hand, you will be inspired to write some wonderful things about the ongoing development of—”
“Can I stop you there?” The bravest journalist interrupted. “To be honest, we’re not totally sure what this Project is. Why are we here?”
Sir Donald looked to the Two Gigantic Serbian Women, who stared back in horror. Then he rounded on us again and spoke softly. “Why, The Project is about demonstrating Serbia’s readiness to emerge as a key trading partner for the United Kingdom after Brexit. Since Serbia herself is not part of the European Union, we believe our two countries are perfectly poised to form a strong, lucrative partnership–and as you’ve seen, Serbia produces so many high-quality commodities.”
I gargled into my coffee as I stifled a laugh, and as I did, I looked at Sir Donald’s business card. It read:
SIR DONALD QUELM
DIRECTOR, ANGLO-SERBIAN TRADE CONSORTIUM
Sir Donald rounded on me. “What’s so funny?” He snapped.
“Oh, nothing,” I chortled. “It’s just… do you know who we are?”
Sir Donald hesitated.
“Well, I’m Jonjo. I’m from PA Media’s travel desk.”
“Travel…?”
We went around the table introducing ourselves one by one. There was Beth from Wanderlust, Angie from Time Out magazine, and Peter from Viva Media.
“So you’re… all… travel journalists?”
We nodded.
“Not… business correspondents?”
We shook our heads.
“We came to Serbia looking for stories about travel, tourism, leisure, hospitality. Things to see, places to go, hotels, restaurants, that sort of thing.”
Sir Donald looked to our PR representative, who looked to the Two Gigantic Serbian Women, who looked back to Sir Donald, who gritted his teeth. We were in Serbia on his dime, and in return for his investment, he had expected a series of articles highlighting his achievement in building an international import-export pipeline. Instead, he would receive a load of tosh about popular tourist sites, up-and-coming restaurants, and nightclubs in slaughterhouses underneath motorway junctions.
I smiled as I watched Sir Donald’s face grow ever more sour. “Now what’s so funny?” He snarled.
“Oh, nothing,” I said, nibbling my terrible cheeseburger. “It’s just, I think I’ve finally found my story.”
