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.
“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.
“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.