Belgrade Noir

“Katya!” Olga shouted. “Katyusha! Would you be so kind as to…?”

I pretended not to hear. It was four a.m. and the hag could not know that I was awake. Gusts of the košava

rattled the windowpanes with a force gathered from as far east as fuck knows, in squeals almost as high-pitched as Olga’s. Knez Mihailova sits on the brow of the highest hill between here and Russia, at the rim of a vast Pannonian plane. We’re talking about a hundred meters above sea level, but you’d have to hit the Ural Mountains before you found anything to rival the Knez in terms of altitude.

As the shutters shuddered and the curtains billowed in spite of the double glazing, I carried on pretending not to hear Olga’s clucking: a couple more minutes, just for fun. I opened the window a centimeter, shook the ash off the photo, and flicked the butt sideways, in the direction of the university building where I would teach a class, beginners’ Russian, later that afternoon.

That was my other occupation, my cover if you will: an adjunct lecturer, with a decade’s worth of waiting for a permanent teaching post, working four hours a week at a rate barely sufficient to buy a pack of cigarettes. Most people around here held two or three jobs, and often in combinations much odder than mine. A medievalist whose desk I kept borrowing for my office hours drove a taxi at night, while his tax-inspector wife moonlighted as a babysitter. My academic speciality was Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky: there was no money in FMD, not enough for a pack of cigarettes. Even Russian language was a tough sell, now that English killed all others like a giant rhododendron sapping the life of any plant that comes near it.

“Katya, Katinka…” Olga called me by a selection of Russian diminutives in implicit affinity with my academic interests. A vicious Serbian nationalist in most respects, she also fancied herself Russian and saw no contradiction in that. Her father had studied in St Petersburg long before the revolution, and he brought her Russian mother back to the Serbian sticks, along with his diploma from the military academy.

“Would you be so kind as to give me a hand here, KA-TA-RI-NO-CHKA…?” she yelled from the kitchen. I finally got out of bed and shuffled over in my nightshirt as slowly as I could.

She was wiping her greasy claws on her pinafore, having already deboned a large chicken. The skeleton was sitting on the sideboard waiting for me to wield a meat cleaver. She believed that bones had to be broken in order to add a je ne sais quoi to the broth. She thought chicken soup a cure for all known ailments, possibly including all those I had ever had in mind for her. And she liked to cook at dawn on the lower nighttime electricity rate. We had performed this act before.

I tied an apron over my nightshirt. It was a birthday present from Olga, which had the English words Take That

written on it. She’d purchased it from one of the contraband pop-ups in the street below. Have I mentioned that she was a cheapskate?

“Thank you, Kitty,” she cooed as she watched me drop bits of carcass into the large cauldron of boiling water. Carrots and parsnips floated in the liquid like amputated fingers. Kitty — not quite a Russian diminutive, but a Tolstoyan one nonetheless — that’s what she called me when she was trying to use her dusty charm on me. She was too transparent to be efficiently manipulative, but it never stopped her trying.

She switched the lights off as soon as there was a faint promise of gray dawn outside. In the Serbian Academy building across the street, one or two windows were still — or already — lit: an early cleaning job or a sleepless geriatric trying to save the nation. I am not sure which is deadlier in its dotage, the male or the female of the Serbian species.

I took my apron off and shuffled back to bed. Olga turned the burner down, put the lid on the pot, left the soup to simmer, and followed me into my room. Annoyingly, she proceeded to lift the blanket and squeeze in next to me, fully clothed and without asking my permission. We had been here before too, in bed together, and not in any improper, sick way, but just her wanting to talk. I never knew which was worse, her cleaving to me like a barnacle, or hovering above me by my bedside, with her bony little bat shoulders and her straggly hair all messed up, while she rabbited on and I pretended to be half asleep. The woman had no notion of privacy, insofar as the concept even existed in the Serbian language. Privacy was for those who had something to be ashamed of, and she was shameless.