Leeches

Serbia, late 1990s. Our hero, a single man, writes a regular column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking weed and talking about sex, politics, and life in general. One day on the shore of the Danube he spots a man slapping a beautiful woman. Intrigued, he follows the woman into the tangled streets of the city until he loses sight of her. A few days later he receives a mysterious manuscript which seems to mutate each time he opens it. To decipher the manuscript's arcane contents he contacts an old schoolmate, now an eccentric mathematician, and a group of men from the local Jewish community. As the narrator delves deeper, he begins to see signs of anti-Semitism, past and present, throughout the city and he feels impelled to denounce it. But his increasingly passionate columns erupt in a scandal culminating in murder.

About David Albahari