Good times with Serbia’s finest

Most of the time I’ve been in Serbia, I’ve simply been staying on a standard 90 day tourist visa, with a quick border run to renew it when it expires. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass, but it’s also been a good excuse to get out of Belgrade and see other places in the Balkans.

For this border run, I had gone to Sarajevo with a then-girlfriend for a few days. The visit there was lovely, strange and interesting, but that’s another story. The overall main point of the trip was to get that oh-so-precious stamp in my passport.

I came back into Serbia late at night, around 2am, on full bus of about 100 people. Long story made short, they somehow neglected to stamp my passport going back into Serbia. Now my visa was expired, I didn’t have a new one, or even any record that I had left the country, except for a bus ticket.

Ok, so this had happened once before coming back from Montenegro, and somehow I hadn’t had an issue with that (the tricky part comes a day later, whenever you enter Belgrade, foreigners have 3 days to register at the local police station…that is actually why you need that stamp). But that time, I’d had other stamps from Croatia & Montenegro confirming my various border crossings around the same dates, along with the bus tickets, and no one asked anyway. This time, I had no indication of any border crossing at all, in or out of Serbia, and I was not going to make another trip out just to get a damn stamp.

So the next day, back in Belgrade, I consulted with my very close friend Igor, who happens to also work as a lawyer, and has helped me out of many a sticky bureaucratic situation. We discussed this new problem, and decided that the best course of action was simply to go down to the main police station and explain what had happened, and let them figure out a solution, which we figured could only be to grant me a visa outside of the regulations or whatever. After all, I had done nothing wrong, as much as they were going to want to frame it that way at the station (they’re really not so big on being helpful to foreigners there, especially when you come from my country). It was their problem to figure out.

We had been there a few times before, for similar visa-type stuff, and handled all obstacles with grace and aplomb. It was kind of fun, really; we’d barge into offices, cut in front of lines of hapless Chinese and Italians, flirt with the women at the various desks, make a few big theatrical scenes, and always emerge victorious, feeling like dashing swashbuckler pirates of bureaucracy.

I must confess, we were woefully unprepared for the perfect storm of shit that was waiting for us this time.

It couldn’t have come on a better day. I was working as a language teacher in those days, and Igor was working at his law firm; I had a seriously important first class scheduled for later that morning, with a VIP student (who shall remain unnamed, but let’s just say that if you watched Eurovision, you saw/heard the results of my teaching along with millions of other Europeans). Igor had some case or something to handle in the afternoon, so we showed up bright and early at 8am to get the whole mess out of the way quickly.

[8am]- No one was around to even deal with us or direct us (always the first step when you embark on a bureaucracy quest in Serbia) to whatever desk we needed to check out. Eventually we went to one desk, where a sleepy and grouchy guy looked at my stuff, and decided it wasn’t his problem to deal with. Go upstairs.

We go upstairs. Again, wrong office. Go to office number whatever. We go there. Nope, not here, you gotta go downstairs to XYZ. But we were just there?!

Wait here, let me check . We wait. And wait. And wait.

[9am]- Ok, you need to go upstairs to talk with the “Boss”.

The “Boss”? That sounded ominous. Office 616, I believe. It’s actually pretty well known among foreigners, I would later find out; many are those who’ve had the pleasure of “quality time” with “Ze Boss”.

[9:15am]- We go to said office, knock on the door. Someone growls at us to come in. We meet a heavily muscled, completely bald, immaculately dressed gentleman with all the charm of a pit-bull. I kid you not, this man could make paint crumble off walls with his intense, penetrating stare of psychotic death. I’ve seen the same look on drugged child soldiers in Africa right before they decide it’s a good idea to blow your face off, or prison inmates right before they’re about to shank someone (both stories for another time ).

So the introduction was a bit rough. Still, this was the man we’d come to explain my woes to, so Igor did his best authoritative lawyer routine while I did my best I’m-so-booored-with bureaucratic-incompetence-and-I-really-have-better-things-to-do-so-can-you-please-hurry-this-up routine, a combo that is surprisingly intimidating and effective at getting results, when delivered right. Most of the time.

This man was having *none* of that. He cut us off almost immediately, and told us to sit our asses down with the authority of a school principal and made us repeat the story three times over, listening carefully with utter contempt and, somehow, fascinated boredom, if that makes any sense.

He then ordered us out of the office into the hallway for a moment. By a “moment”, he apparently meant an entire HOUR. He even walked out of the office at one point with his briefcase and came back with breakfast, never even acknowledging our presence. It was all psychological mindgames, I would later learn.

[10:30am]- We go back into the office. He grilled us again on everything that had happened (because, you know, it was *such* a shady story…). Then, somehow, the conversation turned to my work and what I was doing in Belgrade. What school was I working at? What did I do there (I teach… go figure)? Who’s the head of the school? Where do I live? Who’s my landlady? Who are my students? How do I get paid? Who pays me?

The man was a maestro of conversational misdirection and evasive tactics. Igor had met his match; anytime we tried to bring the topic back to the visa/border situation, he somehow enlarged the issue to something peripheral, unrelated, and personally invasive.

[11am]- At the conclusion of that conversation, he demanded to see my pay receipts from the school (which, by this time, coincidentally, I had had to call, to cancel my VIP class… “yeaaaah, this is awkward, but umm, I’m not going to be able to make it to the class with [VIP], I’m, ahh, stuck at the police station, you see… It’s a long story”).

Time was short and we’d already wasted 3 hours of the day with this monkey business, but it looked like some sort of resolution might come of this demand, a reward for our cooperation and goodwill and whatnot. So, Igor and I were “released” (I wasn’t aware up until that point that we were being detained, apparently) so that we may grab a taxi, race back to my apartment, grab said pay stubs, and race back to the station.

We had to wait another 45 minutes in the hallway because it was lunchtime when we got back.

[1pm]- He was not happy with the pay stubs when he got them. Why?

-“There’s no stamp on any of these!! What kind of school do you work for?!”

More questions. He was joined this time by two assistants, who were much more sympathetic characters, but painfully dimwitted. They all started grilling me about the school, how I got paid, how much, by whom exactly, names, dates, etc. I realized what was going on, and this was *not* a good situation. I was being full-on interrogated/investigated because:

- I was a foreigner who apparently had not crossed their radar before, and a semi-suspicious one at that, I admit. I came to Serbia with no particularly good/logical reason or excuse, I have a bizarre, highly international background, and I come from a country that has, ahem, “politically tense” relations with Serbia, so they probably were at least mildly suspicious that I was some kind of spy or dubious character on the run from something.
- I was working for a very big, successful language school, that owed some of its success to, let’s say, dubious business practices, what with registrations, paying its teachers (mostly cash under the table), taxes, etc. I knew this going in to the station, which was why I realized from the get-go that probing questions about my work were not really a good direction for things to be going in. Now, here we were, deep into it, and I was looking more and more guilty by the minute of… something?! I hate cops.

So they grilled me for an hour, and it was getting really stressful. I knew we were in trouble when Igor asked if he could smoke a cigarette. There was a “no smoking” sign prominently displayed on the desk, but in Serbia, most of the time those are put there as ironic humor.

They brought us an ashtray and a bottle of water. This meant we were going to be here doing this for awhiiiile.

[2pm]- After that grueling interrogation session, we were banished back into the hallway while they checked up on all the facts and information I had given them. I was starting to freak out at this point that I was going to be deported or something, and that I had sold out my language school up the river to boot. Not that I particularly cared about their well-being, but they were my main source of income at that point. Igor was just confused about what the hell was going on in there and why they were doing all of this.

[Whothehellknowshowmuchlater, pm]- Eventually, we were summoned back in. This time, Mr. Bulldog told us that he was going to go check on something, while his “assistants” would fill out some statement on me.

That was the key moment. Igor and I both caught just the slightest sneer or twitch on the face of one of the dimwitted “assistants”, when that word was used. Something was fishy, and we shared a knowing look.

So, while one of the guys, who spoke decent English, asked me a bunch of the same questions again (name of the school, name of the boss, basic things) to fill out a report, Igor made small talk and bonded with the other guy. They started to hit if off relatively well and we just played it cool. Cigarettes were smoked, coffee was made, Igor chatted, I cooperated with all the questions.

Igor then cleverly made some small remark like “Man, your boss is a real hardass” (he’s a sharp fellow, and this is why he is my lawyer). At that point, assistant #2’s ego couldn’t handle it anymore and he let the cat out of the bag.

-“ Ahhh, that guy… He is not boss, you know. He has same rank as us!” he pointed out, somewhat indignantly. “He just like to make big theatre spectacle, it is boring job here sometimes.”

Ooooh? Reeeally now, you don’t say?

Suddenly it all made sense. Ze Boss was not some higher authority, had no special power, and ultimately couldn’t really do anything about my situation except give me the damn visa. What we had calculated going in that morning had actually been correct. Mr. Bulldog, a nonetheless highly clever foe, had immediately seized upon the fact that we figured him to have more authority than he did, and he had decided to enjoy the power trip as much as possible, laying out a full battery of devious police interrogation tricks and psychological intimidation tactics to keep us disoriented and squeeze me for information in the process. I later learned, through a completely different story, that he had years ago likely worked for Tito’s secret services and had been trained by old-school KGB, which would explained how good he was at what he did and why we bought into it all hook, line, and sinker.

Once we learned this though, we knew we were in the right, and were just being jerked around. Assistant #1 finished his report/statement, and when Mr. Bulldog came back, an emboldened Igor caught him by surprise with bunch of nice lawyer-babble insinuations about intimidation, unjust interrogation, and brought the topic back to the damn visa and basically laid it out for him. We had cooperated with him all day, jumped through all his hoops, and had done nothing wrong, and we both had had quite enough of the bullshit and wasted time and would like to just get the issue resolved so could we just get on with what we all knew was going to happen and get me the damn visa?

Well, not exactly, but it turned out even better in the end. Knowing the game was up, Mr. Bulldog said that he couldn’t give us a 90 day stamp, but that he’d open a special file for me to start the application for a real working visa, which was worth much more and good for a longer period of time. This was most satisfactory.

After it was all over the mood lightened, I got all the necessary paperwork and everyone left on good terms. They’d had their bureaucratic fun with us, and we couldn’t be all that mad about it because Mr. Bulldog had been a most worthy opponent (Igor and I enjoy psychological games) and we’d been bested fair and square for most of the day.

In the end, I walked out with a better visa deal than we’d hoped we could get, so all is well that ends well. I had the interesting experience of being on the receiving end of a Serbian police interrogation (not my first police interrogation, but it was very different than how it happens back home… I digress again, different story), Igor got to practice flexing his argumentative muscles with a valid foe, and a good time was had by all.

Oh yeah, and I learned that *everything* in Serbia depends on STAMPS. Reports, documents, pictures, whatever, none of them mean a damn thing at all if there is no stamp. You must have the holy stamp. Word from the wise.

I just thought I’d write up this long day as a fun little scare story to any other foreigners who may have to venture over to office 616 or whatever it is. When you meet Mr. Bulldog, you’ll know ;) Good luck, suckers! Haha.

So, thanks for the memories Mr. Bulldog, even though they weren’t that great.