A Partisan's Daughter

by Louis de Bernières

  “I couldn’t bear to lie, so I said, ‘Maybe I’ll try to get to England.’ He said, ‘Ah, I’ve always wanted to go to England. Winston Churchill. Big Ben. White cliffs. Spitfires and Hurricanes. Why don’t you wait till my leave comes up? Maybe we could all go. We could take Tasha. You can’t have enough money to get to England anyway. I’ve hardly got enough myself, and I’ve been working for years.’

  “I said, ‘Papa, I’ve just got to go,’ and he said, ‘You can go as far as you like, but a broken heart travels with you.’

  “ ‘It’s only a holiday,’ I said. Then I asked, ‘Who is Slavica?’ and I gestured to the photograph.

  “ ‘She got killed,’ he said. ‘I expect we would have got married.’ I looked at the picture of the lovely smiling girl and said, ‘Maybe you would have been happy,’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t have had you and Friedrich though.’ I thought, ‘Shit, I owe my existence to the death of a pretty partisan sometime in the war.’ It made me think that there must be millions of people like me, whose parents ended up with a miserable second choice. My daddy said, ‘She was rather like Tasha. She had the same kind of personality. I always have funny feelings when I see Tasha.’

  “ ‘What happened to her?’

  “ ‘The Ustase got her. You know what those people were like. Anyway, they wrecked her like you’d wreck a doll with a hammer, and they just hung the body over a fence. There wasn’t anything they hadn’t done.’

  “ ‘Did you ever love Mama?’

  “ ‘There are different kinds of love.’

  “It was a nice photograph of Slavica. She had a thin neck and eyebrows like little arches. Sad eyes. Her hair was in a ponytail. I could just imagine her voice.

  “My daddy took me to the bank and got some dinars out for me, and then he came with me to the bus station and bought me my ticket. He said, ‘You might miss the big event.’

  “I said, ‘What big event?’ and he replied, ‘The Old Man’s dying.’

  “ ‘Oh,’ I said. I had always thought of Tito as immortal.

  “ ‘Yes,’ said my daddy, ‘and then everything will go to hell. Everything we fought for. I get lots of information coming through my office. The vultures are gathering. All the nationalists and the religious crazymen. They can see their chances coming. I don’t give this country ten years when the Old Man goes. With any luck I’ll be dead, because I don’t want to live to see everything being shat on by shitheads. And you know what? The Old Man’s been devolving power away from the centre. You’d think he’d know better than that.’

  “I said, ‘Don’t be silly, Papa, everything’ll be fine,’ and then I had to kiss him and say goodbye. I said, ‘Listen, Papa, I am really sorry,’ and he said, ‘Me too,’ and we both knew what we were talking about. I wasn’t sorry for myself, just for what I’d done to him.”

  NINETEEN

  Satisfaction

  There aren’t enough rhymes for “love.”

  The next time I saw Roza I was feeling uneasy because the Yorkshire Ripper had just killed another woman in Halifax. It wasn’t a prostitute this time, though. Every time I heard about another victim, I thought about what could have happened to Roza if she’d stayed at the hostess club. I sometimes meant to ask her about it, but it seemed inconsiderate to mention that someone was going round cutting up prostitutes. She didn’t bring it up, so maybe she wasn’t even aware of it. She didn’t follow the news much. She was interested in politics in a rather abstract way, but until I told her, she hadn’t even known that the government had lost a vote of confidence and Callaghan was about to call a general election. She lived in her own little world, and it didn’t include Mr. Callaghan and the Yorkshire Ripper.

  I brought her some chocolates, and she ate all of them, one by one, as she told me the next bit of her story. She let me have the ones with hazelnuts in, though. She had slightly gappy teeth, so she avoided nuts, or so she said.

  The storytelling had become quite formal by now. I was just turning up for the next instalment. I simply had to say, “You were going to tell me how you got to England,” and she was off into the next episode. I just sat there looking at her and thinking how much I wanted her. I’d found a five-pound note on the pavement in Seven Sisters Road, and I’d saved another twenty-five pounds, for my Premium Bond fund, and I was feeling optimistic. She said that she liked it when I was cheerful.

  “If I’d had any sense,” she began, “I would have just gone to Dubrovnik. It would have been a lot quicker and easier. But I’d decided to go from Trieste, and now I think the reason is that we had to go through Zagreb. It was because Alex was in Zagreb.

  “You know, it was April, and the whole country was covered in flowers. It was beautiful to see, and the road was mostly following the Sava River, and that was very beautiful too.

  “It was fun on the bus in Yugoslavia. It was like a picnic, and everybody brought too much food, and it got shared around. Some people had wine, and they were talking too loud and telling jokes. You didn’t go on a bus for peace and quiet. Some people played chess. The driver had a tape of frula music, and one of a brass band, but he had another one too, and he played it over and over again all the way to Zagreb. It was ‘Satisfaction.’ Do you know that one?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I expect my daughter knows it. I’ll ask her when I get home.”

  “It’s the Stones,” said Roza. I could see she was incredulous that I didn’t know it. I said, “You mean the Rolling Stones?” and she said, “Yes, the Rolling ones,” and rolled her eyes just as my daughter used to. “How does it go?” I asked, and Roza looked at me as if I was mad and said, “I can’t do singing. You really want me to sing like Mick Jagger for you?”

  “Oh well, I know about Mick Jagger,” I said.

  “Oh good. Well, the thing is, the song goes, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction.’ ”

  “That’s awful grammar,” I said. “That really means I have no alternative but to be satisfied at all times.”

  “You complain to Mick Jagger, OK? Anyway, everyone was singing along, and some of the men were doing Mick Jagger impersonations, you know, leaping about in the aisle and pretending their Fanta bottle was a microphone, and so the driver kept rewinding it, and the men were puffing out their lips. Then we got stopped by the traffic police, and they told the driver off for allowing people to dance about in the bus. After that we all sat nice and quiet for half an hour, and then it all started again. You know what? Not many people were satisfied in Yugoslavia back then. For us it was a good song.

  “Anyway, when we got near Zagreb and I saw the nice villas in the suburbs, I began to feel sick. At the bus station on Drziceva Avenue, I thought, ‘OK, I’ll get the bus to Trieste in a couple of hours, so I can go for a walk around.’ I thought, ‘Maybe I’ll go and see Fatima,’ but then I realised no, it was Alex I wanted to go and see. I walked past one of the hotels and it had those prostitutes in the lobbies who only did it with tourists for dollars and Deutschmarks. I was walking by the cathedral when I thought, ‘I’m not going to go and see Alex.’ I’d been having this idea that maybe I’d go to his place and wreck it all over again, but now I thought, ‘I’m just too tired of all this stuff,’ and then I said to myself, ‘Come on, Roza, you’re a partisan’s daughter, you don’t take any shit.’ Even so, I sat on the cathedral steps for a while, and then I went and had a coffee in a place I never went to when I was a student. Then I went and sat on the steps of St. Mark’s and watched the pigeons and smoked lots of cigarettes. I had all these tears that wouldn’t come up, and my stomach was turning round and round. In the end I just went back to the bus station, and when we left for Trieste I was thinking, ‘Well, OK, Alex, fuck you forever.’ It was sad to leave Zagreb again, though.

  “On the bus to Trieste an old man sat next to me. He said, ‘I hope you don’t mind, but someone pretty like you will make me feel happy for a while if I sit next to her.’ I could tell he was a nice old man. He had those Drina cigarettes we were all killing oursel
ves with in those days, and he gave me some. He wanted to talk about whether or not there’d be another drought, because he’d lost all his aubergines in the last one. Then he asked me if I was scared of dying.

  “I just wanted to be left alone, and to think about Alex, and I was feeling very nervous about going away without any plans, but I couldn’t escape him. He just wanted to talk and talk and talk. But he said some things I remembered. He said that life was a walk through the cosmos, and at the end of the walk you’re so tired that you don’t really mind dying, all you want is a sleep. You know, I feel like that a lot, and I’m not even thirty. He told me he’d been an intellectual before the war, but now nobody listened to him any more, and he was just an old peasant. He said he’d fought in the Spanish Civil War, and if I ever went to Spain, would I please spit on Franco’s grave for him? Then he said that one reason he wanted to go to Rome was because he wanted to spit on Mussolini’s grave. I said I thought he didn’t have one. I thought they’d just thrown him away or something. He said that mankind would never give up its suffering, because it liked suffering more than anything else, and that’s why he’d given up being a communist. He said that each one of us was just a tiny molecule of snot up the great nose of life, and that he could die happy because at least his fields had more horseshit on them than they had when he started.

  “I was just looking out of the window, wondering how a land as beautiful as Croatia could have produced a man like Alex.

  “Then the old man fell asleep, and it gave me the same fear that I always used to have when my grandmother fell asleep in a chair, you know, the fear that she was dead. I kept listening to see if the old man was breathing or not. But he kept waking up at crucial moments and saying things like ‘Over there where you can’t see it is a very pretty castle with six towers’ and ‘Over there there’s a village where a German general was assassinated, so they killed every male in the place, and now it’s populated by old crones dressed in black, who don’t let any men near the place. They look like ravens. Also the Germans removed the eyes of all the corpses and delivered them back in a basket. And you know what? They don’t tell you this, but we Yugoslavs spent more time fighting each other than fighting the Axis. In the end I just went home. You know what? I had a wife and a daughter and a little son, and I just hid in a field when they were being killed. I could hear the screaming. All I had for a weapon was a spade.’

  “I said, ‘Why are you telling me this?’ and he said, ‘Because you don’t know me.’ He started to cry very quietly, so I just held his hand until we got to Ljubljana. It was dry like paper, and a bit twitchy. After Ljubljana he recited bits of his poems that he’d written before the war, and he told me a few jokes about Albanians, and he said there weren’t enough rhymes for ‘love’ and ‘beauty.’ I don’t know why I am telling you all this. It’s not important, it’s just memories.”

  I was surprised when she interrupted herself, and for a moment I couldn’t think what to say. “Obviously he made a big impression. I don’t mind, I just like to listen to you. Maybe one day I’ll tell you everything that’s happened to me. If you can put up with the boredom.”

  “I think about him a lot,” said Roza. “I expect he’s dead by now.”

  “I suppose you last saw him at Trieste?”

  “Yes. We said goodbye at the Piazza Libertà, you know, where the coach station is. He kissed me on both cheeks, and he said, ‘Remember about Franco, if you ever get the chance.’ He said he was going to go to a place nearby where there was a concentration camp in which twenty thousand got incinerated. That was his kind of tourism. He wanted to travel around being reminded that humans are basically shit. He said, ‘You make me wish I was twenty-five,’ and I said, ‘You make me wish I was seventy.’

  “You know what? I felt bad crossing the border. I’d never been abroad before. I suddenly felt like a traitor. I thought I’d go to the harbour, and if my courage failed me, I’d just go home again.”

  I said, “I’m amazed your father let you go off like that,” and she said, “If your daughter was twenty, could you stop her going away if she wanted to?”

  I shook my head. “But you didn’t have a proper plan. You had nothing arranged.”

  “I think my father had no authority. I took it away from him because of what happened. I think maybe he was relieved.”

  “It sounds crazy to me.”

  She laughed and looked at me coyly. “But, Chris, you know I’m a crazy girl.”

  “So did you get a boat in the harbour?”

  “Not straight away. It was raining cats and dogs, as you people are always saying, and it said in my guidebook that there was a convent which made a living by having women and married couples to stay. I walked there in the rain. It was very cheap. There was a Virgin Mary statue everywhere you looked. You could hardly move for Virgins. I got depressed because of all the crucifixes with little Jesus Christs hanging on them. I don’t like it, all those little skinny men being tortured, hanging up on the wall. Anyway, the nuns were very nice, and they gave me some pasta without any meat in it, and I went to bed and couldn’t sleep.

  “Trieste is just like Ljubljana. It didn’t feel like abroad. It smelled of coffee, though, the whole town smelling of roasted coffee. It was lovely. You know what? They put ropes along the streets so you can pull yourself along when the wind’s too strong. They’ve got a wind called bora, and it blows you over.

  “You know what I did in the morning? I bought proper tampons, and toilet paper that doesn’t scratch. Then I went down to the harbour, and I saw lots of big ships in the port, but everything else was a car park. I thought, ‘Shit, I should have gone to Dubrovnik,’ but then I found the place where the yachts were, all pretty and elegant, with their little flags and their wires slapping, rising and falling on the water. I sat down on my case and it made me feel happy just looking at the boats, and the sunlight on the water, sparkling, and if you looked out to sea you couldn’t tell where the sky stopped and hit the water.

  “Anyway, I walked around all the boats and if I saw someone I asked them if they wanted anyone to crew on the boat. I had to ask in English because I didn’t know Italian, and nobody knows Serbo-Croat. I learned a little English in school, but it was crap. I learned things like ‘Oh what delightful weather’ and ‘Do pass the sugar’ and ‘Excuse me, but where can I find the library?’

  “Nobody had any work, and I was thinking, ‘Shit, I’d better go home,’ when a man on a boat said, ‘I don’t need anyone, but I think that Francis does. This is where his crew got off.’ I said, ‘Francis?’ and he said, ‘You go a couple of quays along. It’s an old boat called Sweet Olivia Bunbury.’ I said, ‘Where’s he going?’ and the man said, ‘Back home to England.’ I thought, ‘Yes! Maybe just this once God exists for Roza.’

  “I found the boat, and it was a nice old one, all dark wood covered in varnish, and sparkly brass things. There was a man winding a rope up on the deck, and he looked at me, and I said, ‘Are you Francis?’ except that my English was much more crap back then, and I probably said, ‘Are you being Francis?’ or something like that.

  “He said, ‘That’s me. Who’s asking?’

  “I said something like ‘I am being told that you have work. I am wanting to go to England.’

  “He said, ‘Have you got a passport?’ and I showed it to him, and he said, ‘Have you got a visa? Don’t you need a visa for Great Britain?’ And I said, ‘Not if you’re a Yugoslav.’ Really, I didn’t know, but I said it anyway.

  “He said, ‘What’s your experience?’

  “I didn’t know the word, so he said, ‘Have you worked on a boat before?’ and I said, ‘No, but I am not stupid. I learn.’

  “He looked at me as if I was mad, and said, ‘Sorry. I need people with experience.’

  “You know, I was so disappointed I sat down on my case, and I started to cry. And then he started cursing, and he carried on working on the boat, and I carried on crying. In the end he said, ‘Look, are
you any good at cooking?’ and I looked up and said something like, ‘I am a delightful cook,’ and he started laughing. He said, ‘OK, you cook something delightful tonight, and if you’re any good I’ll think about taking you on.’

  “I said, ‘What have you got?’ and he said, ‘Look in the fridge.’ So I came up the gangplank, and he looked at my shoes before he’d allow me on deck. It was flat shoes only. Anyway, I went down and looked in the fridge and it was crap in there. Old stuff, and tins of old shit half eaten. I said, ‘You don’t eat?’ and he said, ‘Not if it’s me cooking.’ I said, ‘You give me money, I’ll go and buy food.’ He said, ‘You want me to give you money?’ and I said, ‘Look, I’m leaving my case here. I don’t go and be buying food with a case, do I, sir?’ So he gave me some lire and I went away and I bought two mullet, and lots of nice vegetables, and rice and garlic and new bread, and proper food like that, and in the evening I made the mullet with the liver still in for the extra flavour, not overcooked like English fish, and I made prawns with lemon and garlic, and potatoes cooked very slow in olive oil and oregano, and I made a proper salad with olives and red onions in, and I found some nice wine. He ate all that, and he said, ‘Jesus Christ, Roza, I don’t care if you don’t know how to sail.’ You know, that’s how I first learned about Englishmen and proper food. That’s how you get what you want. They never ate properly when Mama was cooking, because English mamas can’t cook, so if you cook a proper meal they’re amazed and impressed. Anyway, that night I didn’t go back to the convent, I slept in that little narrow bit right up at the pointed end.”

  “And that’s how you became crew?”

  Roza nodded smugly. “I learned sailing pretty bloody quick. He got somebody else as well, it was an Australian man with long blond hair and big muscles. He was nice. He had a mouth full of big white teeth. It made me think good things about Australia. He stayed as far as Palma, and by then I knew how to do it, mostly. Francis didn’t find anyone else in Spain, and anyway it was too late.”