Belgrade Noir Page 4
* * *
Then one day everything changed. It was one of those hot days where the air moves slowly, the cornfields breathe heavily, and the sun’s your enemy. I’d stayed in all day. Mom had gone to the shop and I was waiting for her to come back with sweet treats. I was sitting in the kitchen listening to the radio, without a care in the world. As soon as Mom came back I knew something had happened. Her hands were shaking as she spooned coffee into the džezva and she had a big smile across her sweaty face. I’ve got a great idea, she said, putting a cup on the plate.
Mom had heard the shopkeeper gossiping with Jovanka next door, telling her about going to her cousin’s wedding in the city that weekend. I kept munching on my šampite and said nothing even though I was getting slightly worried. Guess how this cousin found her husband, Mom said to me, her face glowing and red. I couldn’t guess, I had no idea how to find a husband. I knew something was up. The woman replied to a personal ad in the paper, Mom said, nearly shouting. The man, her future husband, put an ad in the paper looking for a wife, and she read it and felt in her heart that this was the one. And now they’re getting married! Just think about it. Pastry crumbs were flying from her lips as she excitedly told me the story. We’ll do the same, she said. My dear boy, we’ll run an ad. I’ll write it so you don’t have to worry about mistakes. Think! All the women of Serbia are going to read it. Your wife won’t be someone from our tiny little circles who could end up being a distant relative, yuck. The whole of Serbia will see our ad and there’ll be someone who realizes right away that this is her man, the only one for her. This is how we handle it. This is how people do things now.
She wrote the ad and I didn’t object. I couldn’t, even though I had a bad feeling from the start. I should’ve paid heed to that feeling. Maybe she would’ve listened to me if I’d protested enough. I could’ve stopped eating. That would’ve shown her how serious I was. But I couldn’t. And I thought to myself, Mom is wiser and more experienced and knows what’s best for me. Plus, I don’t like to starve myself.
The ad ran in the July 15 issue of Večernje Novosti.
Women of Serbia! I am looking for a wife for my 42-year-old son. Only hard-working, honest women with serious intentions. “Country Mouse.” (D094109)
And that’s how we found a wife. She was from Belgrade, short and compact, like her name, Una. She called us two weeks after we’d posted the ad. I knew Mom was already worried after no one called even though she tried to hide it and pretended to be cheery and hopeful. We’ll find you a fine wife, my dear boy, she said every night as she tucked me in. There’ll be a call tomorrow, I just know it. A week later I felt secretly relieved. That’s when I was sure I wouldn’t find a wife, neither a fine nor a bad one, and was happy. I didn’t want one. I wanted to be left alone with Mom. And then one night Una called. It was after my bedtime. Mom was watching a crime show she wouldn’t let me watch. I heard the phone ring and Mom getting up from her chair.
They spoke on the phone for half an hour. I couldn’t properly hear what Mom was saying but I realized something was going on. After the call, she was full of energy. She rushed into the bedroom, switched on the light, and told me with a shaky voice that it was my wife who called and that she’d be here tomorrow. She wasn’t even angry that she’d missed some of the crime show. She started cleaning the house in the middle of the night, like a crazy woman. She rummaged around so that it was impossible for me to sleep. After she calmed down and laid down next to me, she proudly declared that it was now time for me to have my own room. For me and my wife, that is. You’ll move into the sewing room, we’ll make a nice nest for you, she said. I started worrying and wanted to cry. I didn’t want my own room anymore, and I definitely didn’t want to sleep with a stranger in a stupid nest, and besides, where would we put Mom’s sewing? She told me to be quiet. She told me we’d just rearrange things, a bed by each wall and the sewing machine between them, where the window is. That’s not my own room then, is it? I was about to say, but I didn’t have the nerve. You can always sleep in my bed if you feel like it, she said before she finally fell asleep. I didn’t sleep at all that night.
* * *
Una arrived the following morning. Mom opened the door as we’d planned and I peered through the curtains in the kitchen. I tried to be careful not to brush the curtains. Mom had told me to wait in the kitchen and only come into the living room when she called for me. Sweet suffering Jesus, Una was pretty. She and Mom talked for a long while on the steps and at times she’d glance at the kitchen window as if she knew I was there. She swayed around very slowly, and her long dark hair swayed too. I’d never seen anything like her. Her clothes were special, not at all what other people wore. Her shiny dress was skintight, like someone had doused her in oil. Her eyes and lips were painted black. No one in the village looked like that, not even in the magazines I sometimes secretly skimmed in the shop. As I saw her swaying on our doorstep, I started to think it wouldn’t be too bad to have a wife of my own. My little mickeybob, which is what Mom called it when she was washing me, started to swell inside my pants and I became short of breath. I had to rub myself through my pants when they went into the living room and continued talking. I did feel a bit ashamed and dirty. Mom would’ve thrown a fit if she’d seen me like that, but I couldn’t show up in front of my fashionable wife with bulging pants. She would’ve thought I was a fool and Mom had warned me time and time again that I shouldn’t look like a clown. Hair combed, no staring with an open mouth, no picking your nose, and whatever you do, don’t fart, is that clear? she’d shouted at me repeatedly that morning. Best to keep my mouth shut and let Mom do the talking. I said I’d try my best.
After Mom and Una had chatted for a while, Mom came into the kitchen and put the džezva on. She told me in a low voice that after the coffee was ready I could join them and that it seemed promising, she was really interested in me. Mom was not pleased that Una was forty. She wanted me to marry somebody much younger. But then again, she said, best not to quibble when you’ve got a good one. An older woman could be better than a young thing, might have seen the world and wouldn’t be after something impossible, would understand how the world works. Well then, she said as she was putting down the sugars next to the cups and biscuits, now it’s time to meet our Una.
Una said nothing to me and I was pleased because I was so scared my stomach was doing somersaults. She kept staring at me with her black-painted cat’s eyes, and my cheeks started to flush. She looked at my crotch and I saw a flick of her wet, red tongue. Thank Jesus I’d sorted out my mickeybob, I thought, and remembered to shut my mouth. I felt sweat starting to run down my brow but I didn’t have the gall to wipe it off because my hands were shaking something awful. Sweet Jesus, they were already planning for a wedding and life after that. Yes, yes, Una nodded, and promised to do Mom’s washing too, and of course let the poor guy go sleep with his mother if ever there was a thunderstorm. It was okay with her that Mom would be in charge of cooking, no one else would understand what my appetite was like, but Una would help her with the chopping and peeling and slicing when needed. And wash the dishes. Una didn’t seem to mind that I wasn’t very talkative, she said she liked quiet men who weren’t always blabbing. No, she didn’t seem to mind that Mom would live in the room next to ours and would occassionally use it to sew in. Yes, she’d pull her weight when it came to living expenses like electricity and gas and water and could even pay Mom some rent. That’s when Mom started to smile very broadly and asked Una if she wanted more coffee.
The earliest possible date was set for the wedding. Papers wouldn’t take longer than two weeks and the ceremony would take place in Belgrade with official witnesses. Mom and Una agreed that there was no need to organize any sort of celebration, much less invite guests.
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.
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 W
ar 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.