"I have no idea where this country is headed now," he says. "I'm not optimistic. The problem is leadership. There's a world economic crisis, but we've got our own problems too."
He crosses his legs, shifts the direction of his thought. His passport -- and the free train tickets the railway gave him -- once took him all over Europe. The former Czechoslovakia was his favorite destination.
He remembers, slipping briefly away from the conversation with the gaze an old man sometimes gets when lost between sentences about the past. Communism collapsed and the troubles began. His passport won't get him too far these days and the rail system has gotten clunky and creaky.
"No one invested in tracks and trains," he says. "It's terrible."
A few tables over, in another patch of shade, Jovan Mrksic sits near a packed lunch. He seems reticent, but that's just a front; once you get him going, Mrksic can talk like a man giving a speech. He's a retired tele-optics technician with combed-over gray hair and a firm belief that the best years of his life ran between 1965 and the mid-1980s, before, as he says, "wars were imposed upon us."
"Serbs don't need visas for Russia," says Mrksic, who comes to the lake six days a week. "But we still need one to get into the West. It's all political. The West is mistaken about Serbia. It's punishing us. . . . But I've lived a fine, solid life. I have no big demands. I don't have or ask for much."
A girl in a swimsuit leans over the edge of a platform with lights pointing toward her and a photographer clicking away. She seems a yellow angel, or maybe a dragonfly, lost between the water and the blue sky.
A jet ski zips beyond the buoys, and on the distant shore, near the weeds, fishermen drop their lines. Guys are changing in shower stalls and girls are checking themselves out in mirrors pulled from purses. The scent of coconut fills the air.
Kostic is a pale ghost on the pebbles. What he brought to the beach fits in a small canvas bag that has "Yugoslavia" printed on it in white letters. It's an artifact, like an icon from a monastery or a poem about the heroic 14th century Prince Lazar that reminds Serbs of who they are, even if the world around them has changed and the lines that held Yugoslavia together got all blurry and then finally vanished.
Why bother about that now? All a man wants to do on a day like this is sit in the sun and let the hours pass.
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jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com
