BELGRADE — Call it a Riviera or call it a lake, call it whatever you like but be careful -- the pebbles are hot, the drinks are pricey and the laid-off security guard, the one with pink skin and a cross around his neck, needs a wide berth when he slathers on his suntan lotion.
The man is a greasy mess, a two-tone walking finger painting. But with the sun on his face and the water at his feet, Mario Kostic has found repose amid girls in bikinis and silver-haired men eating sandwiches wrapped in tinfoil and speaking of those days when the trains ran on time. Yes, they did. The buses weren't so rusted and jam-packed, either.
"This lake is our little treasure, shall we say," says Kostic, his blanket unfurled on the shore near blue umbrellas he can't afford to rent, the ones where women with waterproof makeup sip Campari and play chic in the shade. "At the moment, I'm unemployed. The financial crisis, you know. The mountains are a bit expensive for a vacation. This is a beach for those who have no money."
Wander through Belgrade and you'll see and hear much the same: the ruins from NATO bombings a decade ago, half-finished churches, a woman doing tricks with a python and grim men who look like gangsters out of a Dick Tracy comic shooting bubbles from toy guns they are trying to sell to children whose parents are perusing used books near a Gypsy girl playing a violin.
Cross into New Belgrade, past the shopping center and the arena advertising a Leonard Cohen concert, and there on the right is a Balkan oasis for the troubled spirit, the lake known as Ada Ciganlija. It's been here since they built a dam decades ago at the confluence of the Danube and Sava rivers.
Cafes, loudspeakers blaring turbo-folk, and a water fountain shooting a crystal stream toward the sun have recently appeared. Those with waxed cars and tinted windows do not swim here, but they bike and rollerblade on bows of asphalt at the edge, a spandexed procession of haves.
It is the not-so-well-offs carrying bag lunches and bus passes who plop on the pebbles and dive into the water. The lake is a class dividing line; those closest to the shore have less in their pockets. But it is also a reminder that Serbia, the most stubborn chunk of the carved-up former Yugoslavia, remains isolated on a continent that regards the Balkans as unrepentant for the wars and crimes of the past.
