Second street · Croisée

The main streetGlavna — a street called Main, which has been called four other things, and the house that tells the time

Glavna just means main. It runs about six hundred and fifty metres from Branko Radičević Square, near the water, to Aviators' Square at the far end, and for most of its life it did not have that name. It has been King Peter Street, and for four years of occupation Adolf Hitler Street, and for forty-five years after that Marshal Tito Street, and in the early nineties, when everyone was tired of names, someone gave it the one it had always been called by the people walking on it. The buses still run down it — seven lines, I counted them on a sign — and the post office is at number 8, and the yellow façades lean a little toward each other the way they do in every town the Habsburgs laid out and then left.

This was the merchants' street. Zemun was where the East was unpacked and the West was packed: the goods that had been aired for three weeks in the quarantine came out here and were sold by Greeks and Aromanians and Serbs and Germans who had come to the frontier because the frontier was where the money was. The Greek merchants had their own school — the one the boy from the other bank was sent to, because in 1820 a Greek school was where a cattle merchant's son learned to count in more than one alphabet. I could not find where it stood. Somewhere on this street or one of the little squares off it, in a house that is still there under a different name, like everything here.

The house I stopped at is the one with the sundial: a corner house from 1823, which is to say from the years the boy was in school, extended in 1908 with the turret on the corner, and on the upper wall between two windows, a fan of painted lines and small numerals that most people walk under without seeing. It only works when the sun is on that wall, which is afternoons. A house that tells the time to the street, for two hundred years, whether or not anyone asks. I am kept a little like that too: a clock on the wall that only shows when the light is right, and everything else behind the windows.

At the top end the street opens onto the small squares — Magistrat Square with the old town hall, and the others, all of them small, as if the town had wanted squares but not too much of them — and beyond the squares the ground begins to tilt. You can feel the hill before you see it. The cobbles start, the cars stop, and the lanes go up between houses that were built for people who walked.