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?”
He turned to his Montenegrin assistant who was sitting quietly in the corner, sucking a cigarette propped in the gap left behind by a missing molar, and packing what looked like multicolored aspirins imprinted with smiley faces into plastic pouches. Živorad’s business was clearly diversifying.
Jovo emitted a croaky laugh. “You should give the lady one of these just before you leave.” He laughed some more, then snorted through his broken nose.
“She does sleep on one of those mattresses,” I said. “Full of Swiss francs. But I’m not worried about her safety. She has a gem-encrusted saber under the mattress. There would be slaughter if anyone tried to enter the property while I was away.”
Jovo and Živorad winked at me in unison. I did not at first think they believed a word I was saying, yet halfway through my little speech I saw a glint in Jovo’s bloodshot eyes.
I felt guilty about all that laughter after I left Mirijevo. And I almost shed a tear a day or two later, as I wheeled my small suitcase along the Knez. I turned back to see Olga in the kitchen window, still waving at me, rocking what appeared to be an imaginary baby in her bony arms, but what must have been an ethereal, golden head of cabbage.
I wasn’t going very far. I owned a small apartment some fifteen minutes’ walk away, just below the Kalemegdan citadel which stood between the Knez and the Danube, and so close to the zoo gardens that you could hear lions roar if you kept your windows open on a summer’s night. I had bought the place from the proceeds of my previous property sale. Indeed, I had been planning to retire when Olga appeared on the scene, scared of the big nine-oh alone and practically begging me to take her on. Just one more lady, she said. She had seen a glowing report from my long-deceased first employer.
“Katya, my dearest child, I hope you will consider me,” she pleaded at the end of the interview as though I was about to hire her and not the other way around. “I am sure we will get along very well, and you will want for nothing. And I am very easy to get along with,” she added, with an absence of self-awareness that was beyond spectacular. The memory of our first meeting is almost touching.
I managed to shed more than a few tears in Olga’s apartment when we gathered there to hear her will. It was the morning after the forty-day memorial service in the family crypt at the New Cemetery, Belgrade’s oldest burial ground. The Orthodox believe this to be the day when the soul of the departed finally leaves the earth, but Olga’s presence among us was still palpable.
The assembled company included Stanojlo Stanojlović, eleven of the twelve grandnephews and — nieces, a total of three nephews and one niece, and a couple of Olga’s fellow crones who had served as witnesses when the final version of the will was signed two years previously and who were also, as it happens, the first to find Olga dead. Stanojlo was wearing his best, grotesquely ill-cut brown suit with his best green tie. The young were in denim, the old in black.
The crones got the crochet collection. The nephews and niece got the sword, split four ways. The youngest generation got nothing. Do I need to say who got the apartment?
The way Olga had met her maker was as dark and violent as the weather that autumn. Two elderly women had found her spread-eagled on the terrazzo floor of her vast hallway just an hour before I returned to the apartment. She was still lying there when I stepped in, looking small and deflated in her quilted dressing gown, like a chalk outline on the site of her own murder. Her head was turned to one side, a semblance of a wry smile on her lips and a meat cleaver in the back of her skull, the same cleaver I had often used to dismember those chicken skeletons at dawn.
The two elderly women had known that I was away and they hoped to entice Olga to attend the evening prayer at the old cathedral down the road. She had failed to open the door on either Saturday night or Sunday morning, and she wasn’t answering her phone. They became convinced that she had suffered a fatal stroke and were about to call the police to force open the door when they tried it again and found it unlocked, and Olga just a few feet beyond it.
“Like that,” one of them said, nodding toward the corpse as though Olga had rammed the cleaver into the back of her own head and arranged the dressing gown to reveal her skeletal knees when she fell.
“And she had not seen a priest in years,” the other added, sobbing. “Her mother would have been appalled.”
They had called the police, and they knew enough from watching endless whodunnits on television not to touch anything at the crime scene. For there was no doubt that it was indeed a crime. One of Olga’s checked house slippers sat accusingly next to her hip, like a failed weapon of defense. I was holding a plastic bag containing three smelly heads of cabbage in my left hand, and the pull-out handle of my suitcase in my right, not quite knowing what to say or do. The poor thing looked awful with that cleaver in her head. I did want her dead, I admit, but this was a touch too dramatic.
The policeman seemed nonplussed. He had unbuttoned his thick blue winter coat and just stood there, speaking into a walkie-talkie and waiting for reinforcements. It was an emergency, obviously, but not that much of an emergency any longer.