Belgrade Noir

“And then the gate opened and on the other side was my father in full dress uniform, holding his ceremonial sword right up in front of his face… What do you think that means, Katinka?” She tended to describe her dreams so intricately that it was possible to fade out for three or four minutes and still catch her drift. The sword, in all its gem-encrusted glory, was worth a pretty packet. She kept it tucked away under her bed. I am not sure if she was hoping to protect her inheritance or her virginity from nocturnal intruders by hiding it there.

“Money?” I tried feebly.

She was not pleased. One-word dream interpretations were blatant shortchanging. My analysis should have been at least as detailed as her account. Was I not a literary critic of sorts? And the linking of her dearest daddy with something as vulgar as money was inappropriate, the very opposite of noblesse oblige. She kicked me in the shin with her dry hag-hoof.

“Do be a dear and fetch that Sanovnik from my bedroom, Kitty darling.”

She possessed a six-hundred-page dream dictionary precisely for occasions such as this, and she studied it every morning, while the images were still fresh in her failing mind, with all the fervor of the most dedicated yeshiva student. Variants of father dreams alone, I knew already, had a dozen pages to themselves. Swords, four pages. All of it fortune-telling, not Freud. This could take several hours. The shorter her future became, the more she wanted to know about it in advance.

And she was equally interested in my dreams. I never remembered any but I occasionally indulged her by inventing one. Making a wreath of marigolds, for example: I came up with that only last week. I have no idea where the marigolds came from, but I was pleased to catch a glimmer of greed in her little eyes when she found, in her dream book, that these flowers portended a large fortune. She seemed almost jealous that she had not dreamed of marigolds first.

“Unless,” she went on, “unless the flowers were wilted, in which case, Katyusha, your dream means exactly the opposite. You will lose a fortune. Except,” she giggled with childish pleasure and jabbed me in the chest with a bony finger, “you have nothing to lose, do you?”

I left her searching for dead fathers and silver swords and got out of bed to sort out her medication. Olga consumed her medicine by the kilogram and religiously, the way vegans munch their granola. She had a pillbox from Switzerland consisting of sixty-three chambers: nine largish compartments for each of the seven days of the week, their names inscribed in three languages. The damn thing was bigger and, once loaded, heavier than the stone tablets Moses received from God on Mount Sinai. Some of the medication was Serbian and cheap, some Western and expensive. The list of her health conditions was long — what can you expect at ninety-two?

One of my regular weekly duties was to place the pills in their proper sections and ensure that they were taken at appropriate times. I always had to find a good moment to complete the task of sorting, an occasion when Olga would be distracted and preferably elsewhere in the apartment. What she got from me were placebos, if that indeed is the proper word. Placebo means something pleasing in Latin, I believe, and I hoped my pills would have the opposite effect.

I had long collaborated with a chemist in Mirijevo, one of those suburban hells which cluster around Belgrade like cold sores and in which a house built with official permits was rarer than a lottery jackpot. The man was a sort of illegal legal drug dealer, whose business, based in the garage of his concrete suburban house, was flourishing amid medical shortages. He was happy to sell off the genuine stuff, particularly the Western kind, so long as it came in its original boxes. If she knew what I was doing, Olga would have admired my entrepreneurial spirit. She was all for waste not, want not.

The replacement capsules I doled out contained harmless substances. I was too good at my job to risk imprisonment for poisoning. I made her take camomile extract, essence of chrysanthemum, yeast, bicarbonate of soda, natural cake dyes — whatever looked right, happened to be approaching its best-before date, and was available at the Chinese supermarket amid the tower blocks of New Belgrade.

I had assumed this regime would have killed her by now, this non-taking of crucial medicines for chronic conditions, as it had finished off my previous two ladies — each within a couple of years, give or take a few months and a few extra nudges from me. Olga, however, seemed healthier than when I moved in. More than that, she appeared to flourish.