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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 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 will: 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.

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.

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.

“Bloody Montenegrins,” he said. “I bet you it’s them.”

One of the old crones crossed herself. She looked as though she might faint. The scene before us represented every Belgrade old lady’s nightmare. Cases like it were reported in the popular press all the time, or so it seemed. Serbian hacks loved milking the drama. The country may be going to the dogs, but that story is not nearly as vivid as a nonagenarian meeting a violent end, however timely that end might be.

There was always a brutal man, or a whole gang of them, keeping an eye on your movements, and then, the moment they knew you to be alone . . . whack. It was a meat cleaver in this case but it could equally well have been a Black & Decker drill. They threatened and prodded you until you told them where the money was. Most of their victims talked sooner rather than later, but Olga was a general’s daughter, made of sterner stuff. Dear old Oggy, in cold blood, lying on the cold floor, murdered, robbed, and God knows what else.

Finally, as if coming out of a delayed shock, I let out a little shriek and dropped the bag. The policeman turned toward me as though he hadn’t noticed me before. The cabbages fell out and bobbed along the floor wetly until one of them rested between Olga’s dead feet, as though she had just given birth to it. Like something in one of her dreams, I thought.

* * *

You may complain about the Serbian police as much as you like, but they can be scarily, even brutally efficient when they want to be. And a little bit of criminal thoughtlessness goes a long way in these parts. They caught up with Jovo barely a week after they found Olga’s body, on the Serbian–Montenegrin border. He was on his way to Podgorica with that sword and with two buckets of top-grade Colombian powder in the trunk of his Benz. He was either unbelievably blatant or unbelievably stupid, the hacks reported, leaving no one in any doubt that the latter was more likely.

There is nothing as cute as a handsome, well-spoken Montenegrin man in a finely tailored suit, with an expensive watch on his wrist. Jovo was not one of those. I can’t say that I felt guilty about the fool.

Živorad will have to find a new assistant, but I won’t be going to Mirijevo again. I have other plans, businesswise. A woman knows when to stop tempting fate.

Anyway, here we are. The paperwork is a nightmare, as it always is with property in central Belgrade. The lease changes hands with every war and revolution, and there is no shortage of either, so you never know what lurks in the land register. I’m not worried. I’ve been here before and I have a lawyer much better than Stanojlo. I stand in my kitchen and I watch the lights at the Serbian Academy go out.