Carp, Perch, Sturgeon and People
Renato Grbic's fish story is better than your fish story.
Bob Garfield is spending his summer in Serbia, the beginning of a self-imposed semi-exile from the United States, which, to hear him tell it, has broken his heart. While there, he’s writing a book tentatively titled BALKANIZED: My Curious Travels Through the Historic, Dysphoric Republic of Neverland. This dispatch is drawn from one of his encounters there.
PANCEVO, Serbia – In November, 2010, Ljiljana Mitic was distraught, desperate and unhinged with rage and grief. Her 18-year-old son, Andrije, had died of a drug overdose. The young man’s father, her ex-husband Ljubomir Dapcevic, she felt certain, was to blame. So she stalked him to the lovely, but winter-bare, Tasmajdanski Park. In front of the posh Madera restaurant, she found him with his 21-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Milica. Ljiljana shot Milica in the head. Then she shot Ljubomir.
As the police sirens began to wail, she fled the scene. At first she climbed onto scaffolding surrounding the reconstruction of St. Mark’s Orthodox Church. She thought to fling herself onto the street, ending her misery. But the police were closing in, and so she clambered down and staggered for 30 minutes toward the Branko Bridge, and from there leapt into the River Sava.
This was a frigid November day. The water was extremely cold, yet she clung to life as the current drew her, semi-conscious, to its confluence with the beautiful, brown Danube and thence downriver for 5 kilometers toward the Pancevo Bridge.
Renato Grbic, fourth-generation fisherman, was nearby in his cun, a shallow, 20-foot flat-bottomed skiff in which he lived half his life setting nets for alasi, river fish, and hauling them to the surface. He hadn’t been in the water that afternoon. He’d been at his restaurant, Konoba (shack), listening to a broadcast about a horrendous double murder in Tasmajdanski Park. That’s when his phone rang. It was a friend, breathless: “Come quick. Someone’s under the bridge.” He rushed to the makeshift wharf on the riverbank below Konoba and yanked the cord on his outboard motor. Two minutes later he was under the bridge, fishing a killer out of the frigid water. He covered her with blankets, but — mortally shocked with hypothermia — she died in the hospital within 10 days.
Now, you may wonder, why would his panicked friend call him, of all people, into action. Oh, because over 20 years, Renato Grbic has rescued 30 jumpers, all seeking to end their lives in the storied Danube. Thirty. For a bit of perspective, I have spent a lifetime of every now and then angling for sport. In that time, I’m certain I haven’t reeled in 30 fish.
Grbic, a thick and fit 60-year-old, has, like his grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren, cast his nets in the Danube for perch, catfish and the small sturgeon which — though depleted in population — manage to migrate from the Black Sea. Older than many species of dinosaurs, but overfished for caviar for centuries, sturgeon are now endangered. People, too, evidently.
The first time he pulled someone into his boat was 20 years ago. He was fishing with his brother when they heard a loud splash. At first they assumed it was junk, illegally but routinely dumped from the Pancevo Bridge. But junk doesn’t pop up to the surface crying “I want to die.” The voice was of a 30-year-old man of disordered mind, bobbing in an overstuffed parka. Grbic reached over the gunwale, grabbed the flailing man’s hand and hoisted him aboard. Stuffed in his jacket were wet copies of his discharge papers — dated the same day — from a psychiatric clinic. The brothers took him ashore, outfitted him in dry clothes and watched in amazement as he smoked an entire pack of cigarettes, one after another, over the course of an alarming, manic hour. Strolling with the jumper in the woods above the riverbank, “He asked me to hit him over the head with a tree limb.”
Grbic, having found the limits of his hospitality, declined.
Back then, Renato and Goca Grbic’s Konoba was still a shack for the day’s catch. But even then, a decade into its operations, it had begun to grow, bit by bit. Nowadays it is a sprawling, magic garden. You enter through a brick and stone archway along a flagstone path lined with apple trees, rose bushes and hanging baskets of begonias. Then comes another arch, this one displaying a carved wooden fish, past which opens an outdoor patio of varnished picnic tables, an open air space giving way to a huge pavilion, itself filled with 50 large tables and a brick and stone patio. Billowing from the roof beams are fishing nets and pendant light fixtures dangling on thick nautical rope. It’s now one of the largest restaurants in the region, with a menu to match. The fresh catch is augmented with market-bought sea bass, trout and ligne, which is calamari, which is squid. Until recently that was an Adriatic staple, but it, too, was overfished. “I get it from California,” Grbic says. Where he gets the beef, chicken and spaghetti carbonara we did not discuss, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t the Danube.
The Pancevo Bridge is a conduit for both cars and trains, which cross the span in the shadows of diagonal struts. From the distance of the restaurant, the iron crossmembers carve the structure into parallel rows of triangles. Like a haunting Edward Hopper painting, somehow both stark and soft, its overhead lights punctuate the skyline like a column of lightning bugs. The illuminated windows of the passing trains imply, but don’t actually reveal, the human lives wayfaring within. From that bridge — sometimes at a dusk like this one, sometimes in the cold light of day — the people jump off, with the expectation of once and for all ending their pain.
Most of the would-be suicides, Grabic says, are jilted young lovers and shattered divorcees, plus some tortured souls simply crushed by depression. All day, in his boat or in his shack, he keeps an eye open for the next one. Most recently, in December of 2022, he plucked a 62-year-old woman from the water. He saved her, warmed her with blankets, and very soon she had regained her life but ceased to be in his. They are one moment soaked to the skin in his boat, gasping for breath, the next vanished into the world to soldier on. In two instances, though, he has over the years stayed in touch. One was an 18-year-old girl, who later invited him and Goca to her wedding. They attended, and celebrated with emotions he chooses not to describe, but which I can scarcely imagine. Another girl was 16. Every year, on the anniversary of her leap, she comes to the restaurant to dine with the Grbic’s and celebrate her “second birthday.”
He is not much forthcoming with his emotions, but the accumulation of 28 saved lives (two jumpers died) has clearly found its way into the man’s identity. On his forearm is an elaborate tattoo. It shows an arm, outstretched from a boat, grasping another that reaches upward from the water. I remark about the ink, and ask him about destiny.
He is not an emotive serial lifesaver, but a thin smile crosses his face, “My name is Renato. It’s from Latin, renatus. It means ‘renewal.’”
At this point, a fellow can get a bit gauzy-eyed, and for at least a moment I wondered if I was speaking with a living saint. Then I remembered the menu. $38 for sea bass — so, you know, unless he’s the patron saint of expensive entrees …
Nonetheless, destiny is a compelling proposition to ponder. I ask him, considering all the trauma he has witnessed along the way to being a national hero, if he ever wished his grandparents and parents had been farmers, cultivating fields where nobody ever leaps in spasms of suicidal hopelessness. He chuckles ever so slightly at the meager joke, but then his face is the picture of earnest reflection.
“No,” he says. “My life is the river.”
And from that river, into his rough-hewn cun, so many other lives preserved.
Thank you, my friend
Huh, I was born and lived in Belgrade half of my life, but I haven't heard this story. Thank you for reporting it!