A Partisan's Daughter (4 page)

I leaned back and watched the reaction on his face.

FIVE

The Girl from Belgrade

R
oza told me that she was born in a little village near Belgrade, not far from the Danube, and quite close to Avala. There’s a huge monument there, to the Unknown Soldier. The climate is extreme and often hostile, and people dream about the Dalmatian Coast in the same way that cold Americans are supposed to dream about California. Just across the Dinaric Mountains it’s more like Italy; a land of wine, olives, figs, aromatic shrubs, and Aleppo pines. I went there several times later on, but before Yugoslavia fell apart. It was a kind of pilgrimage.

Around Belgrade, people suffocate in the heat of the summer. The road tar gets sticky and glutinous, the leaves wither on the trees, fires light themselves in the fields, and mirages shimmer above any patch of flat ground. There’s an old fortress called Kalemegdan, and it’s a relief to go in there and cool down in the great stone rooms. There are thunderstorms so immense that water runs off the ground in sudden floods because it can’t soak into the baked earth, and you get floods caused by the melting of the Alpine ice. It wells up from under the ground and fills lakes even in places where there’s been no rain. People have to work continually on the irrigation canals, not just to keep the land watered, but to prevent the settlements from submerging.

Roza said that her father hated the thunder because to him it sounded like an artillery attack. He would go into a kind of rage, and she and her mother would lie sweating upstairs with the electricity prickling on their skin. He would go out into the torrential downpours and stagger about, shaking his fist, shouting, and firing both barrels of his shotgun into the sky. I said, “That must have been worrying,” and Roza said, “No, it was just my papa.” Once her mother went out to try to bring him in, and he accidentally struck her on the cheek with the butt of the gun, so that it came up in a terrible livid bruise, and after that she left him alone to rage in the thunder showers. The day after the accident he came home with a ring for his wife and a doll for Roza, and he said, “I try to control it, but it’s difficult sometimes.” Roza said that she thought he was going to cry, because his lower lip was trembling and his eyes were moist. I can’t imagine my own father crying. British fathers don’t weep in front of their children. Her mother said to her, “Printzeza, whatever your father does, remember that he is a brave man who has been to hell and stayed there for a while, and then come back again.”

In the summer they would yearn for the icy winds that come in from Hungary, but in winter when the Hungarian wind was sawing everything in half, and they were floundering about in the snow, they would long for the roasting of summer. Only in the spring and autumn was it possible to live a life that wasn’t a hostage to the climate.

More importantly, in that region it isn’t ever possible not to live a hostage to history. They’re all possessed and tormented by it. It takes the logic and humanity out of their souls and gives them heroic stupidity.

SIX

The Secret Policeman

After he was a partisan, my father was a secret policeman.

T
hat’s what I told Chris. I liked to tease him with more and more stories about my father, because he was fascinated by the idea that I slept with him and wasn’t bothered about it. I kept him in suspense by telling him a lot of other things about my father first.

The truth is that I was getting very fond of Chris, he was becoming a dependable and happy part of my life, I looked forward to his visits, and every day I made myself look nice and thought about what I’d say, just in case he turned up after seeing Dr. Patel or one of the other doctors. I thought that if I kept from telling him about all the details of the incest for a while, he’d keep coming back. Once I’d divulged them, I’d be forced to tell him the other stories.

So I told him that after he was a partisan, my father was a secret policeman. In those days the secret police was called
UDBA
. In 1966 it turned out that they’d had listening devices even in Tito’s own office, and he realised why it was that his plans were always getting blocked. He subjected it to a reform from which it never recovered, but just after the war it did help to keep Tito in power, making sure that Yugoslavia didn’t fall apart again.

My father had a busy time, because there were hundreds of war criminals on the loose, plus a great many people who were conveniently considered to be so: fascist Ustase from Croatia, royalist Cetniks from Serbia, Albanians from Kosovo who were just a general nuisance and wouldn’t cooperate with anyone. I said that one of my father’s first jobs was to help gather evidence against the Cetnik commander, Mijailovic, and he was also involved in the prosecution of Archbishop Stepinac, a Croatian who had busied himself with suppressing Serbian orthodoxy. Everyone said he was a Vatican stooge.

In the ten years after the war Tito was imposing strong party discipline, and wasn’t allowing any latitude. That was when the ideological enemies were being pursued. Now that communism’s all washed up, it seems odd to remember all those class enemies: revanchists, recidivists, liberals, reactionaries, a big list of traitors. My father particularly disdained the bourgeoisie, and anything that irritated him, such as a wheelbarrow whose wheel had fallen off, or his beloved car when it broke down, would be denounced as a petit bourgeois reactionary. It was just snobbery really.

I said to Chris, “My father was always certain about everything,” and I was laughing about it.

Chris said, “That’s probably where you get it from.”

It’s true that I’m opinionated. I believe in good and evil, and I know which is which, and I know that sometimes you do evil to do good. Chris was more subtle than me. You could just see him longing to tell me that life was more complicated than that, and restraining himself because it’s bad English manners to patronise, and back then it was getting extra dangerous to patronise women. Men got their balls bitten off.

I’d already realised that Chris wanted to sleep with me, but I wasn’t sure what to do. He’d got off on the wrong foot by trying to pick me up when he thought I was a streetwalker, and I’d got off on the wrong foot by telling him I was worth five hundred pounds. He was married with a daughter too. Not that I was particularly worried. He said that a wife eventually becomes a sister or an enemy, and I knew for sure he was right about that. It was what every married man used to tell me. It’s one of nature’s jokes, making most men out of fire and most women out of earth. Chris said that his wife had skimmed milk in her veins instead of blood.

I was trying to work out whether Chris was falling in love with me, and what it would be like if I were his wife or his mistress. I was frightened that if I slept with him he might not come back. It was a big risk.

SEVEN

Bivouac on a Bombsite

I
suppose that if you have clear beliefs it helps you to fight and survive a war, and then endure the memories afterwards. That’s probably what got Roza’s father through it. My father got through it by being an old-fashioned patriot. When I think about Roza being a communist, I remind myself that for a long time it was very easy to be one, because for such a long time the communists managed to conceal the fact that their system was an economic and humanitarian catastrophe. It was one of the greatest and longest self-deceptions in history, and you can’t blame people for falling for it when none of us is any good at perceiving the present, let alone the future. It might even be wrong to suppose that Yugoslav communism actually failed. It more or less worked for a long time, by sitting on everyone equally heavily, and then it just stopped. I thought that Roza’s communism was very like the Catholicism of people who cross themselves when they pass a church but never go into one, and who don’t know anything about theology. When I suggested this idea to her, she admitted that I was probably right.

The problem for Roza’s father was that Tito really did believe in the eventual withering away of the state. He gave workers control of factories and permitted the republics greater autonomy, and Roza’s father thought it was a terrible mistake. He found himself more and more sidelined, and he had fewer and fewer important things to do. Apparently he fell into melancholy, and was sometimes very angry. Roza thought that, in addition, he eventually started to feel remorse for things he had done in the war.

I don’t know if he felt remorse about anything else. Roza said that as a father he’d behaved in a way that seemed pretty outrageous to me, but she herself wasn’t at all bothered. In fact she even seemed pleased about it. Now that so many years have passed, I can still hear her voice going through my mind like a record that repeats itself over and over, romanticising about her father. I always loved the sound of her accent.

“My father was very tall and thin, and he had dark skin and he looked like a proper Slav. He had one eye left, that’s all, but it used to burn all on its own, and with that eye he saw the future of the world that was going to be beautiful, and with it he looked with anger on anyone who was going to stand in the way. Someone knocked out two teeth with a steel helmet during the war, and he had gold ones that sparkled and made him look sinister and romantic. When I was little we had a game which was like a pirate taking over a ship, and I would make him stand in the garden, and I would climb up him, and when I was at the top I peeled up his top lip and made him face the sun, and I was delighted by the way his teeth flashed, and he said, ‘What’ll we do when I die?’ and I said, ‘We’ll take out your teeth and sell them and we’ll be rich forever,’ and he’d say, ‘What a horrid Printzeza you are,’ and he’d swing me round and round and round till I thought I was going to be sick, and then he’d be dizzy and fall down, and I would jump on him and kiss his face.

“He met my mother at the great victory parade on 27 May 1945, which was when the partisans marched into Belgrade with the Red Army.”

She laid a circlet of flowers about his neck, and he took her hand and kissed her on the lips. It was all very romantic, and fully consonant with the general euphoria of the times. She spent the night with him in a bivouac on a bombsite, and Roza said it might have been because in those days only the partisans had a reliable source of food, and other people were even eating grass. That one night stretched into decades, not least because Roza’s brother soon made his presence evident. He was called Friedrich, but Roza hardly ever mentioned him.

She said she wished that her parents had never been married. They weren’t compatible. She was an old-fashioned Orthodox Christian and that didn’t go down very well with the atheist expartisan. Roza thought that he married her perhaps because of honour, or because he wanted a housewife for the dilapidated farmhouse that the party gave him. Perhaps she in her turn thought that life would be easier as the wife of a rising star in the party. In any case, everyone rushes into fecundity after a war.

She had apparently been a striking young woman with black eyes, dark hair, and sensual lips, which is not how Roza remembered her, because it wasn’t long before she was grey and worn out. She had a problem with chewing and sucking on her own lips, so that they would bleed, and she had a preoccupation with trying to get around the house as quietly as possible. It occurred to me that she must have been mentally ill, but Roza’s opinion was that you had to be a lot madder than that.

They had been happy to begin with. He was delighted with his son, and she had enjoyed being a housewife, up until the time that the boy was old enough to go to school. Then she decided that she wanted to get work and become a teacher, but he couldn’t agree. He thought it reflected badly on him if his wife went out to work, and he thought there was enough to do at home anyway. The fact was that she did not want any more children, and she wanted money of her own. He, on the other hand, had grown up in a huge family that was a positive deluge of brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts and relations so distant that no one could work out the details of consanguinity any more. Of this happy clan he was the sole survivor, as they had all perished at the hands of the Bulgarian Army, and no doubt he wished to recreate the conditions of his early life. He did not want her to use contraception, and Roza said she thought that her parents’ sexual relations degenerated into something like rape. She’d lie awake at night listening to the thuds and raised voices from their room, without understanding what it was all about. Roza thought that her mother probably had several abortions, because sometimes she was in bed for days at a time, and a grandmother would come to look after the children. Perhaps Roza’s father knew what his wife had done, but hadn’t been able to prove it.

There was one night when it all boiled over, and her father lashed out. Roza was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, and she saw her father strike her mother across the mouth, so that she spun backwards into the corridor and fell heavily to the floor of the landing at the top of the stairs. She hit her head on the banister.

Roza was very small at the time, but she said that she always remembered vividly the horror of thinking that her mother was dead. She soon got up, however, but her two front teeth were broken and had gashed the insides of her lip, so that blood was running out of the corners of her mouth. She put her hands to her face and ran downstairs and into the garden.

At that point Roza attacked her father. He was standing absolutely still, appalled by what he had just done, and Roza flew at him, and flailed at him with her fists. She was trying to scream, but she couldn’t make a sound. She was hammering at his thighs with all her strength, and when he put a hand down to stop her, she bit it. When she left Yugoslavia, he still had the scars of her teethmarks on his hands. He’d show her the marks and say, “Look how you punished your daddy, little Printzeza.”

Roza said that the incident was the end of all the love in the marriage. He was contrite, but the mother was embittered and hardened, and consequently he found reasons to stay away from home. He’d be back for weekends and holidays, and slept in the spare room, exhausted by unhappiness, anger, and guilt.

To begin with, Roza thought it was her fault that her father had gone away, and she’d bitten her own hand to punish herself. She tried to show me the scar once, but I couldn’t see anything. However, her father was soon giving all his affection to her and there was something about his resigned sadness that made her pity him, and made him approachable. She said that she and her father began falling in love very early in her life, and it was just something that happened, like an earthquake, or a tree falling down.

As for me, I sat listening to all this, to the rhythm of her voice with its strange accent, husky with smoke, and I felt a charge passing through me almost all the time. I couldn’t help imagining what had happened with her father, and the mental images agitated me. They played themselves on a loop at night when I was trying to go to sleep. I also thought that it might have made her attracted to older men, and that might be to my advantage. It occurred to me in a moment of hopeful stupidity that I could sell my car and get a cheaper second-hand one, and put the money towards the five hundred pounds that by now I realised I wasn’t ever going to offer her. I didn’t do it, of course. I wasn’t quite stupid enough. I just carried on saving five or ten pounds at a time, because I’d got into the habit.

I sometimes think that I know Roza’s stories better than I know my own. My background was modest and sane, and there was plenty of love simmering away serenely under all the polite English restraint. I had a friend in the late fifties who used to play comic songs on the piano, and every now and then he’d stop dead in the middle of a number and sing, “Thank God I’m normal.” He always stopped and inserted “Have a banana” at some point as well. Anyway, my family was quite normal, and I’ve always been normal, sad to say. It didn’t leave me with many stories. It was all so normal that I didn’t know whether to thank God or curse Him.