The Red Colored Grey Truck

Set in June 1991, just days before the Yugoslav War erupts, the story follows Ratko, a Bosnian Serb who escapes a Belgrade prison and steals a red Mercedes-Benz truck. His almost pathological passion for hijacking trucks and driving them—paired with a stubborn color-blindness—lands him behind bars in the first place, a detail that colors his choices as the occupation of the region edges closer to chaos. As fate intersects with his path, he crosses paths with a young urban Belgrade woman, Suzana, who has just learned she is pregnant and is weighing an abortion. Her father, convinced the upheaval won’t last, diverts their money into speculative schemes, pushing her to travel to Dubrovnik to raise funds for the procedure.

After nearly running her down while hitch-hiking, Ratko gives her a lift, and what begins with awkwardness and wary distrust gradually deepens into tenderness. Their differences in background—his rural, rough-around-the-edges outlook and her cosmopolitan city experience—give way to a surprising, and for a time hopeful, bond as they travel together through a country on the cusp of fracture. Along the way, they encounter a mosaic of people from almost every ethnicity, as well as soldiers of the JNA, smugglers, gunrunners, foreign mercenaries, petty thieves, and militias operating on the fringes of legitimacy. Each encounter testifies to a society seeping toward conflict and exposes the fragility of ordinary life when war looms.

As their journey unfolds, Ratko learns that Švabo—one of his old friends—has become a weapon smuggler. He decides to seek him out to secure two passports and a cache of weapons that could help him bribe the various militias they might meet along the route, a desperate move to keep their fragile escape alive. The couple presses on toward the border, only to discover that sovereignty itself is fraying: the crossing is controlled by Slovenian Territorial Defense Forces, and the JNA has been ordered to reclaim it. A tank roars onto the scene, and Ratko’s truck is blown apart, yet the two manage to slip across the frontier and begin anew in Italy.

Time passes, and Suzana gives birth to a black boy. Ratko accepts the child as his own, insisting that color—like fate—means nothing in the face of family and love. In the end, the pair’s odyssey across a region at war’s brink becomes a quiet testament to the unpredictable bonds that can form when two people choose to lean on each other rather than apart, even as a larger conflict threatens to erase the lines that divide them.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 16:35