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.
“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 wilclass="underline" 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.