A Partisan's Daughter

by Louis de Bernières

  “My father was like a mountain,” I said. “He was a monolith. He was somewhat awe-inspiring…He could eat enormous piles of food and never get fat, and he sat at mealtimes with his fork and knife in his fists, and just talked about the war. He was like a lot of people of his generation. The war came, and then afterwards the survivors could never stop talking about it because they were so amazed to be still alive. He was fond of saying, ‘My life is a damn epilogue, and the epilogue’s a whole lot longer than the damn story.’ He’d raise his glass and say, ‘Here’s to a long and happy epilogue, and here’s to all the poor bastards who didn’t make it…’ ”

  I told Chris I was brought up to be a communist. If you were Yugoslavian you had to be, back then, in the same way that some people have to be Muslim or Catholic, just because of the accidents of birth. I didn’t have to know much about it. In London in those days lots of people were going around saying they were communists. A certain kind of person thought it made them seem heroic. Archway was full of communist factions that truly despised each other. In Yugoslavia we used to have a saying that when communists had to make up a firing squad, they formed a circle. Anyway, nobody believes any of it any more, but back then in Archway we had the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party, every possible kind of revolutionary and socialist this and that, and then there were various kinds of anarchists. Everyone knew that half the people at the meetings were from the British secret services, and they were just spying on each other. Nobody with any sense believes any of it any more. I wouldn’t bother now, but I did defend Tito. It was a matter of being loyal. Chris never argued with me about it very much, and I bet he was really a Conservative. He once told me he was a Liberal, and even put up the posters in his window and went canvassing. When he was faced with that box in the polling station, though, I bet his little cross went beside the name of the Conservative. He moaned like everyone else when the Conservatives got in, but you couldn’t help noticing that even though Mrs. Thatcher won three elections you hardly ever met anyone who admitted having voted for her.

  My father was a proper communist though, an out-and-out Stalinist, and it didn’t do him too much good after the war, when it turned out that Tito wanted to do things his own way. My dad was like a sailing ship that gets a great start in a race because there’s a brisk wind, and then the wind drops and all the rowing boats overtake.

  My father was fifteen when the war started, and at first he joined the Cetniks on the Ravna Gora plateau. I don’t know how much of this meant anything to Chris. He just wanted to be with me, and I could see he was happy admiring my body and listening to my voice. I liked it because it made me feel like a hot girl.

  Anyway, the Cetniks were royalists and the royal family was in London at that time, I believe. My father had fun with the Cetniks to begin with. It was a big adventure, wading through mud, swinging on ropes, crawling through pipes, sticking bayonets in sandbags.

  The trouble was that he didn’t give a damn about the King, so it was difficult being a royalist. The Cetnik officers were all Hapsburgish aristocratic types, and they liked their drills and their polishing. Meanwhile, the men were getting into feuds with each other, like proper Balkan bandits, and the officers didn’t know how to keep discipline, and so one day he defected to the communist partisans because he was fed up with skulking in the forest with a bunch of disputatious royalists.

  There were plenty of people to fight. The place was crawling with Romanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Germans and Hungarians, and there were some Croatians who became Nazis too. If you want to speak insultingly about Croatians you just refer to them as Ustase. When they want to insult Serbs, they call them Cetniks.

  There was a lot of talk and rumour. People were saying that the Cetniks were colluding with the Nazis to wipe out the communists, and even collaborating with the Ustase. The Ustase liked to get rid of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies by drowning them. They had an extermination camp at Jasenovac that was even condemned by the Gestapo for its cruelty. I heard that 1.7 million Yugoslavs died in the war, and one million of the deaths were fratricide. We didn’t need Germans and Italians to come and kill us, because we could manage it on our own, thank you. Chris said, “Hey, Roza, I’m going to have to stay on your sweet side,” and I said, “Balkan girls have a big sweet side.”

  My father defected to the communists when he was supposed to be taking part in an attack on them. He made sure he was out on the edge of the flank, and when the column approached he slipped away and joined them, and told them about the impending attack. So they ambushed the ambushers, and my father helped to wipe out his former comrades. During the battle he got the tip of a bayonet in the eye, and so he had to learn to shoot left-handed. It was quite a romance.

  The communists were pretty successful as resistance fighters. They even set up schools, and rifle and cigarette factories. They were fighting not only the Italians and the Germans, but the other resistance groups as well, except that towards the end of the war enough Italians changed sides to form a whole battalion that fought for us.

  I knew a great deal about the Second World War in Yugoslavia. It was an area of expertise that I had, because of university, and I was quite clear about who was who and what was what, and when everything happened, but I’ve no doubt that Chris was having trouble following it. He said it was very interesting, and he said his wife had got puzzled by the reading matter at his bedside. Before he mostly used to read Louis L’Amour novels and DIY magazines, but now he had started reading the books about Tito and Fitzroy Maclean that I was lending him.

  It was fun telling Chris gory details, such as that my father once had to eat his own horse, and Tito’s life was once saved because his dog took all the force of a bomb that fell beside him, and that collaborators used to get thrown out of trucks with their first finger cut off at the first joint, the second finger at the second joint, and the third and fourth fingers cut off altogether. They’d sever the tendons of the thumb and staple their lips together, plus the other lips if they were women.

  He used to shudder and say how awful this was, but I didn’t see it. I thought they deserved it, and I said, “I hate people like that.” I have the attitudes of an Amazon, and maybe that made me even more wonderful for Chris.

  Chris said, “I don’t hate anyone. I couldn’t be bothered. I think my wife hates me, though.”

  I said, “I hate lots of people,” and when he raised his eyebrows in enquiry, I numbered them off on my fingers. “I hate Croatians, Albanians, Muslims, Russians, and Bosnians, if they’re not Serbs. And there’s an Englishman I hated, but he died, so that’s OK. I’ll tell you sometime.”

  He looked puzzled and said something like “You don’t strike me as a wholesale hater. You can’t hate such an awful lot of people. It’s unmanageable. It takes up too much emotion. It’s bad enough being hated. Nothing makes you feel so weary as living with someone who hates you.”

  And I replied, “Oh, it’s OK, I like Slovenians and Montenegrins. And maybe Greeks. At least Greeks are Orthodox.”

  “Who was the Englishman?” Chris asked.

  “I’ll tell you sometime, but maybe not yet. You know, I like it, being the daughter of a partisan. I say to myself, ‘Hey, Roza, you’re a partisan’s daughter.’ That’s how I explain myself when I think about me and I wonder why I’m doing things. I’m not the same as everyone else, because I’m a partisan’s daughter.”

  “Your father seems very important to you,” Chris said to me, in his bland fashion, and I shrugged and replied, “Sure. For every little girl, her father is the first one she falls in love with.”

  “I don’t think my daughter was ever in love with me,” Chris said. “I wonder what was wrong with me.”

  I said, “You never got a chance to be a partisan.”

  I felt sorry for Chris. Actually he was very vulnerable, and here I was playing games with him, even tormenting him a bit, and it was am
using, and I laughed at him, but not with any cruelty. I leaned forward in my armchair and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I tell you something else,” I said. “My papa was the first one I slept with.”

  Chris didn’t know how to react to that. He was shocked. His eyes went wide. But I was smiling, and it confused him. In the end he said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Why sorry?”

  “Well, it must have been terrible. To have your father do that to you. I can’t imagine how bad it must be.”

  “You’re funny,” I said, enjoying myself. “It was like I said. Papa is the first man you fall in love with.”

  “Even so…to do that to your daughter?”

  It was fun. I breathed out more smoke, and stubbed out my cigarette. I went over and knelt before him where he was sitting. He practically jumped, looking scared and delighted at the same time, and it occurred to me that he might be thinking that I was about to do something.

  But I beckoned for him to lean down, and I put my lips next to his ear. I could smell his aftershave. It was that Old Spice stuff. I wanted to charm and shock him. I giggled, and then whispered, “He didn’t do it to me. It wasn’t poor Roza. It was poor Papa. It was me. I took my daddy into bed and I got him to do it.”

  I leaned back and watched the reaction on his face.

  FIVE

  The Girl from Belgrade

  Roza 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.

  That’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<
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  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.