Belgrade Noir

The Knez had once been the best street in Belgrade, but it had lost much of its sheen when it was pedestrianized in the 1980s. Yokels started circling, munching popcorn and eyeing up contraband for sale in improvised cardboard stalls. No one had the money for the expensive shops whose pastel racks of cashmere and silk glared emptily over the wet sidewalks.

What passes for today’s Serbian elite had abandoned the Knez soon after the death of socialism. The nouveaux riches want their properties detached and surrounded by bulletproof walls, and their drinking dens accessible only by armored vehicles. Nonetheless, there were still suckers moving in from the suburbs, or retiring to Belgrade after decades abroad, in numbers sufficient to keep property prices around here high enough to merit my three years with Oggy Schmoggy. A peach of an apartment, you could say, a fine salon with all the original features intact: I am speaking about quality workmanship which predates the shoddy half a century of the Yugoslav workers’ paradise. But no feature could justify a fourth year with the wretched babushka. I was beginning to feel restless.

During that third autumn on the Knez, I spent more and more time in bed, watched over by myriad photographs of the old hen’s family. Olga represented the narrowest point of a vast familial hourglass opening back in the mists of nineteenth-century Serbia as it emerged as an independent kingdom and then widening again in the global diaspora of the current century as those who could abandoned our Marxist paradise for opportunities abroad. Her World War I general father was executed by the Communists more or less as they entered Belgrade in 1944. Her mother lingered on in widow’s weeds for another forty years. That’s where the crow got her genes from.

Her twin sister escaped the country with the first Western diplomat she managed to meet and seduce: the fourth secretary of the Swiss embassy. There was something in that undistinguished catch that made me relate to the sis. When I smoked — and I had to blow the smoke through an open window, forty times a day, košava or not, or I’d never hear the end of Olga’s nagging — I used the sister’s photograph, in its silver frame, as a makeshift ashtray. I meditated on the winds of fate. The twin looked almost indistinguishable from Olga, but there was a slutty touch around the curled upper lip which made all the difference. You could see that the mouth was bloodred even in black and white.

Meanwhile, my Olga never married because no man would have been good enough for her and her mommy. So there were no direct descendants, or I would not be here, but the twin was fertile enough to compensate for Oggy’s celibacy. There were grandnephews and grandnieces in numbers sufficient to populate a dozen picture frames. The sis and the Swiss had hatched a vast opportunistic brood which proliferated across the globe as though bent on some Darwinian world domination: half-Serbs, followed by quarter-Serbs, followed by eighth-Serbs, et cetera. They smiled at me from Boston, Cologne, Perth, and Vancouver. They loved Olga sufficiently to mail photographs as tokens of hope that they might inherit the property, but not enough to visit or really care. They wouldn’t know what hit them until they read the will, silly fools.

And the will, signed by my dear little Olgica and witnessed by two of her neighbors and her cheapskate lawyer, Stanojlo Stanojlović, stipulated that her dwelling, with all its contents, down to the last silver frame, would one day soon — and I do mean soon in spite of everything — belong to the girl from the provinces. Me.

I know. I am less provincial than any of the brats on the walls. I am Belgrade born and bred, which is more than anyone could say about Olga’s wider family, in their second- and third-best Western cities. But in the business of offering care in exchange for lodgings, one has to pretend that one is from some godforsaken Serbian hovel five hours on a slow train from the bright lights, or the gig ceases to make sense. I’ve done it before: thirty-six years old, and on my third property. An annual income to beat Boston salaries if you work out the hourly rate as spread over three years — but never four, let alone five.

And it’s not as though I am short of job offers in a town chock-full of fossils with émigré children. Instead of doubting my nursing skills, whenever I mentioned my past “ladies,” old biddies took me to be a woman of experience, an angel of mercy: so much so that I could pick and choose my real estate. They did not care about property. They were old enough to know that they couldn’t take a square meter of it with them. So long as there was company willing to don a pair of rubber gloves when necessary, they chose not to worry that the angel might speed them along on their way to hell. Belgrade is a trusting sort of town, in spite of everything that has befallen it this side of the fourteenth century.