Belgrade Noir

“You have a magic touch, Kitty,” she cooed as I returned with her morning pills: a fig-based laxative, a couple of beetroot compounds, and a milk-thistle lozenge. She opened her mouth and extended her bird tongue toward my left hand which held the capsules, and then to my right which proffered a glass of water. A gust of the košava rattled the window.

“That silver sword, Katya, it’s no good, I found. No good at all,” she said. “Double betrayal. Someone is plotting against me. I am thinking of missing my mah-jong party this evening.”

“You shouldn’t read too much into your dreams,” I said.

She shouldn’t have, perhaps, but she did, and then I started reading into them too. The more impatient I became to see her off, the more meaning I found in the messages Olga received from the other side.

I began planning a weekend away after the old fowl had told me about a dream in which she and I were engaged in pickling cabbage on her balcony — an activity her social standing and her low salt diet made most unlikely in real life. And anyway, we were hardly going to keep a barrel for just the two of us, adding to the briny smell which pervades Belgrade’s inner courtyards in the six months of the year between the last grapes and the first strawberries.

The Sanovnik

suggested that Olga’s sword dream meant losing one’s head, and in ways which seemed less and less metaphorical with every interpretative permutation she read out loud. She chose to ignore the warnings: she wanted sauerkraut and she wanted it homemade, not store-bought. Appetite so often seems to be the last form of lust to survive.

Strangely enough, given its ubiquity in Serbia, there was no mention of pickling cabbage in the dream book. A flicker of an idea lit my neural pathways.

“I know what we’ll do,” I said. “My parents! They produce the silkiest, palest pickled cabbage in Serbia. I will take a weekend off and bring a few heads back with me. I haven’t visited my people since, what, April? As for having days off, I’ve forgotten what that even means.”

Oggy shrugged. She never thought of what I did for her as work. On the contrary, she was such a peerless narcissist that she sometimes came close to suggesting that I should pay her for her company. But she liked the idea of free cabbage: organic, grown in fine Serbian soil, pickled by the witless peasants who had engendered me.

My reference to April was a lie. I hadn’t visited my parents in fifteen years and had no plans to do so anytime soon. They were a couple of misery guts who did not deserve to be visited and they lived nowhere near a cabbage patch — if they were still alive, that is. Their stinginess was epic: it made Olga’s nighttime activities in the kitchen seem extravagant by comparison.

Thereafter, I encouraged her to imagine the magnificent lunches we would prepare with our home-brined leaves: goose on sauerkraut, sauerkraut with dumplings, every variant of choucroute known to woman, and, above all, our Serbian sarma, those majestic cabbage rolls. Normally short of conversational topics, Olga and I spent hours discussing the exact proportions of rice, mince, and smoked meat we might fold into the leaves as soon as I got hold of a properly brined head of cabbage.

When I first offered to bring the cabbages from home, I had no plans other than taking a short break from Olga’s claustrophobia-inducing company. If I let this continue, I realized, I’d be with her in a decade’s time, an old crone myself, still dropping harmless lemon-balm supplements or whatever into her pillbox. And she would be getting more and more youthful until there was not a whisker of difference between us. Apart from those few hours I spent teaching, she and I were so welded to each other that I was beginning to find her unfailing mean-spiritedness a touch simpatico, in a way that made me understand the Stockholm syndrome.

I found myself complaining about her oppressive good health to my chemist in Mirijevo. I cited her robustness as a reason for divesting myself of her medication while secretly wondering if my strategy was not in fact counterproductive. The pills Olga was meant to take might have been more harmful than my substitutes.

“I’ve decided to leave her on her own for a couple of days next weekend, Živorad,” I said. “Let her taste life without me. Let her see how much I do for her each and every day.”

Živorad shoved his hand into the front of his tracksuit bottoms and scratched himself pensively.

“I see your point, Kaća, but you should not leave an old woman all alone overnight. Belgrade is full of opportunistic scum, keeping tabs on people like her, always ready to rob or burgle. Those old folks are like fruit ripe for the picking. They mistrust the banks. They have mattresses stuffed with money, don’t they, Jovo?”