What a find, Mom said when Una excused herself. Una didn’t sit back down but told us that for her it was all settled. Her lifelong dream was about to come true, and all she needed to do was go back to the city to sell her apartment and organize a few other things. Then she’d return for the wedding. She only had one condition: she wanted to spend the wedding night in her old apartment in the city. She wanted to have one last fond memory of the place where she’d thought she’d die an old maid. Mom didn’t agree freely. I don’t know, she said. The poor boy hasn’t even seen Belgrade during the day. He won’t be able to sleep there. Would be best to come back right after the wedding.
That’s when I opened my mouth. I don’t know what possessed me to make that mistake, I was so taken by Una’s clothes and hair and cat’s eyes and tongue. Please, Mom, let me do it this once, I said. Since we’ve found such a good wife at last. Mom stayed quiet for a long time and I could nearly see the steam coming out of her ears as she was thinking. Una did the correct thing with Mom. She didn’t start pleading or reassuring. She just waited patiently, calmly looking out of the window. It took a long time until Mom finally agreed, this once. Una started laughing and sounded so happy that I couldn’t help but laugh too. I had to clap my hands and jump up and down a couple of times, I felt so good. Fine then, said Una. She promised to take good care of me and to bring me back the following morning when she would also move in. She said that she’d drive Mom to the shop or even into the city if Mom wanted. No more schlepping heavy bags. That sealed the deal for Mom.
As I said, we were married yesterday. Mom took the bus home from the courthouse and Una and I came to her apartment. I thought about how my life had changed completely, and so suddenly. The day before I’d never even been to the city and now I’d spent a whole day there with my wife. My head was swimming from all the cars and crowds and noise and the closeness of Una. Outside the courthouse, she took my hand and kissed me so hard that my lip bled a bit. Don’t worry, she said, I’ll take you home tomorrow. I love you. It must be real love, this, I thought — I’d never felt anything as lovely even though my lip was awfully sore. I wanted to tell her I loved her too but I didn’t have the nerve.
This apartment must be far from where we got married because we drove for a long time — at one point we even changed cars. I was nervous because I’d never been alone with a woman except for my mother, but she didn’t count, and hadn’t been in a car that often. But then on the side of a wall, I saw a large painting of two men whom I recognized from the news, probably presidents, and somehow they made me feel safe. I thought nothing bad could happen if those two were watching. We drove around until it got dark and started raining. The city lit up with a thousand lights. I saw tall houses pass outside the window, one after another, one street after another, the windshield wipers made screeching noises and puddles reflected the streetlights. Finally, we stopped in front of this building and took the clanking elevator to the sixth floor. There was no name written on her mailbox and I wanted to ask what her full name was, but I still didn’t have the courage to speak.
When we were inside the apartment my anxiety took over. My little mickeybob was dead stiff and achy in my pants. I did know what you’re supposed to do on your wedding night, and that’s what made me so nervous. Maybe I wouldn’t know how and she’d lose interest in me. I started making the bed with Mom’s sheets to give me something else to think about. Una stood in the doorway of the bedroom. She was wearing a black sheer lace dress and tight red boots. She was so devastatingly beautiful I could barely put the pillowcases on the pillows — I was so distracted. My wife!
After I finished making the bed, she told me in a low voice that it was time for us to start, that for years she’d dreamed of this moment. She told me to lie down on the bed and clicked my hands into the cuffs and then to the headboard. Then she took out an ugly rubber mask from under the bed, I’d seen them in old war films, as well as a long, thick whip and knives wrapped in soft velvet. She licked her lips with her red tongue, smiling and breathing heavily. She told me again that she loved me, then she put on the mask and began.
How To Pickle a Head of Cabbage
by Vesna Goldsworthy
Knez Mihailova Street
The temperature had been hovering around freezing for days, dipping below for a few hours at a time, just long enough to turn relentless rain into milky, snotty sleet. Even at midday, it was so dark you might believe that Belgrade was somewhere above the North Pole, and not in so-called Southeastern Europe. People bolted out of doorways and scurried along under the eaves like wet mice. It was the sort of weather that would drive an Islamic holy man to slivovitz. The few fools who bothered to open their umbrellas found them instantly turned inside out, like black flowers, unfurling only to be broken by the icy gusts of košava, the worst of Serbia’s meteorological horrors. There are many more destructive winds around the world, but none that can match its malignant squall.
I spent my spare time smoking, feeling even more claustrophobic than usual, and daydreaming about Olga’s demise. All that black ice, a town full of slippery slopes, and who could guess where her osteoporosis might take the two of us? A broken rib, a pierced lung, acute pneumonia, then goodbye world: mission accomplished. Or, days of changing smelly adult nappies and wiping her shriveled little ass while she smiled quasi-apologetically and I thought of a plan B.
This particular contract was taking its time. Three years into it and dear old Oggy was beginning to seem indestructible, while I edged toward two packs a day, hypertension, and permanent irritability. Every sound she made infuriated me — even something as quiet as the shuffling of cards, an activity she indulged in for at least four hours a day — yet I had to pretend I enjoyed her company. That was the deal. My line of work, looking after old crones in exchange for an eventual right to their property, consisted of a species of tantric prostitution for hors d’oeuvres, and death and housing for dessert. In this impoverished city where the distressed elderly had only their homes to offer, lots of people dabbled in the business. Very few were my equals.
Olga owned an apartment in Belgrade’s epicenter, three floors above Knez Mihailova Street, on a block situated more or less diagonally across the road from the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Her building was pretty enough on the outside, with a faux-Habsburg yellow facade and chubby cherubs holding garlands of flowers above each window, oozing Central European ideas of grandeur. Inside, it was a honeycomb of crumbling passages and Dostoevskian courtyards inhabited by geriatrics who had known each other since they were toddlers, long before the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. I am exaggerating, but not by much. You have to see the funny side when you are dealing with Dracula’s little sisters.
The Knez had once been the best street in Belgrade, but it had lost much of its sheen when it was pedestrianized in the 1980s. Yokels started circling, munching popcorn and eyeing up contraband for sale in improvised cardboard stalls. No one had the money for the expensive shops whose pastel racks of cashmere and silk glared emptily over the wet sidewalks.
What passes for today’s Serbian elite had abandoned the Knez soon after the death of socialism. The nouveaux riches want their properties detached and surrounded by bulletproof walls, and their drinking dens accessible only by armored vehicles. Nonetheless, there were still suckers moving in from the suburbs, or retiring to Belgrade after decades abroad, in numbers sufficient to keep property prices around here high enough to merit my three years with Oggy Schmoggy. A peach of an apartment, you could say, a fine salon with all the original features intact: I am speaking about quality workmanship which predates the shoddy half a century of the Yugoslav workers’ paradise. But no feature could justify a fourth year with the wretched babushka. I was beginning to feel restless.