close encounters

I saw him the moment he entered the shop, it was like a flashback to the 1990s: black leather jacket, black leather trousers, black sunglasses, shaved head, no neck and a HUGE Orthodox gold cross dangling around his middle. I took one look and fled to a remote corner of the fiction section. He apparently headed downstairs, but did not find what he was looking for and approached the guys at the till down there. Apparently, even when he was still several metres away, one colleague told the other to call me. Sure enough, the phone rang on my floor and the duty manager asked me to come down to speak “to a Russian.” But the fellow was not Russian, he was from Vukovar, one of the saddest places I have ever been. During the war, he had joined a certain well-known Serbian paramilitary group, he fought in the krajina for the land he imagined to be his, and he killed lots of people (which he explained to me by air gesturing the act of using a machine gun, complete with sound effects, while my astounded colleagues watched on, from a safe distance). After the war, he went into the foreign legion, and then ended up doing “security” in Moscow. Whatever that means. I am not sure at which point he became a nut case. I suppose some people are just born bonkers, but I doubt this guy was. Rather, events ran their course and took their toll over time. He claimed to have been born in 1975, making him 16 when the war started. I imagined him as a semi-educated provincial who was suddenly given a gun and cause, but never any real background to go with it.
He wanted books on what he pronounced as “brutsele” which after several attempts and gestures I eventually understood was a Serbian rendering of “Bruce Lee,” this guy’s proclaimed hero (after the certain ex-paramilitary leader).
What was weird is that he insists his former leader is still alive today and directing a legion group. He claimed to have seen him, since the time when his brains were allegedly splattered over the carpet of a Belgrade lobby. I found this incredible to believe…I would say impossible even, except that I have learned never to use that word when applied to certain parts of the planet. He showed me some other pictures though, and they were gruesome enough.
As he left the shop, the entire building seemed to give a sigh of relief, myself included. There are things from my past I think I would prefer forgetting, and association with guys with gold chains and tattoos of big cats is certainly up there.