I had crossed the dark city to get to his study and would have to cross it again to return home. The journey was my parting gift. We both knew that I was never going to visit him again. Not because of that kiss: it was one of the gentlest I have ever received. I was the upstart demigod in a Greek story, standing in the door frame with the fire I had stolen. In my dreams, I had tried being both Andrei’s wife and his lover, and neither seemed possible at all, but as his student, God, yes, as his student, I was beyond compare.
I’ve always had a certain chameleon quality, which came from never really knowing who I was. If I fell in love, I’d tackle the man as a study project and begin emulating everything he did. I’d catch up with his favourite films and favourite books – however stupid – and start watching, and indeed sometimes even playing, his favourite sports. I’d adopt his taste in music and food, his way of dressing and his accent. I can still remember the look of horror on my parents’ face one summer, when – because of a blond air-traffic controller from Dubrovnik – I suddenly began to elongate my vowels in the way they do on the Adriatic coast. For a long while, it seemed that only by becoming someone else could I truly be myself. Wise men found this unnerving, simpler ones admired our uncanny similarities.
Until I started growing that wild piece of flesh in my breast – my tumourchich – I was always happy to turn into a lizard or a leaf, as the situation required. Then, at forty-one, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I suddenly felt too tired for such games. I no longer really cared whether anybody liked me or not. Then I discovered I was no longer able to change colour at all. I stretched my white body on my big green leaf, a bald, wounded caterpillar. I was free.
In the early eighties, Petar was one of the top students of economics at Belgrade University and a prominent member of the Socialist Youth League. He was two years older than me, thin and tall, with curly black hair and a melancholy, narrow face which could have been painted by El Greco. There was an intensity about him which was difficult to pin down. I called him Pierre, after Pierre Bezukhov in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which means – very approximately – Peter the Earless. This name suited him very well. Bezukhov was a loser, and I sensed the same instinct for losing a game in Petar, even though, superficially, one might have said just the opposite. He was a political star in the making and I was a flighty kid, dreaming of literary fame. Underneath, however, he was as vulnerable as a reed and I had a steel armature.
Belgrade University, 1930s
I first met Petar at a local poetry competition. I remember being struck, as if by a flash of recognition, by a long, clever face in the audience. I’ve only ever felt that sort of thing – hinges closing, a complicated piece of jigsaw falling into its proper place – two or three times in my forty-odd years, and each time it happened, I was sure I was never going to feel anything like it again. We took the tram back into town. Halfway down the Boulevard of the Revolution, the longest street in Belgrade, Petar put his hand on my shoulder. It was as simple as that.
He called me Françoise, which was only in part meant to reflect my incorrigible pomposity. I took myself very seriously indeed. In fact, the name was much more the product of circumstance. Most of our evenings began at the gate of my French school on top of Prince Milosh Street, from where we walked slowly downhill towards the ugly spaghetti junction which separated central Belgrade from its southern suburbs.
Speaking French for a couple of hours, in a converted bourgeois apartment in a mansion block overlooking one of Belgrade’s busiest intersections, always made me unaccountably happy. My chameleon nature simply shone when it came to learning foreign languages, which I seemed to master without effort, as if by osmosis. Before I was twenty-five, I had studied Latin, Greek, Old Church Slavonic, English, French, Russian, Bulgarian, Italian and Japanese, with varying degrees of determination and success, but I loved speaking French more than any other language. After each class, I practically glided down the grand marble staircase to meet ‘Pierre’. The only foreign language he spoke was Russian. This fitted the roles I saw us in – the princess and the commissar – very well indeed.
My French teachers, Madame Mimitza and Madame Foni – the former blonde and almost Scandinavian in appearance, the latter Athenian by birth, with glossy dark hair and black-rimmed glasses – both seemed fantastically, unattainably French to me. In fact, they were more French than most French women ever manage to be. It takes a certain je ne sais quoi which only elegant women in the East seem to possess to attain that kind of Frenchness, like the teaspoonful of sugar which makes savoury foods taste more of themselves.
At one stage in my teens, I made conscious efforts to be more ladylike myself. I cut my hair in a straight bob and wore twinsets, tartan skirts and little ballet pumps in a way which pleased my mother immensely. Then I began seeing the captain of my school basketball team and went back into jeans and trainers. The captain was six foot six. I can still remember burying my nose into the middle of a big fleecy number on his team shirt smelling deliciously of sweat when we embraced after his sporting triumphs. One December evening, while I was suffering from a very bad episode of pneumonia, he came to visit me at my bedside with a fragrant little posy of dwarf violets in his enormous hands, and enquired whether I was planning to be back on my feet in time for the New Year. When I told him that such a speedy recovery seemed highly unlikely, he suggested that it might be better if we parted at that point. He wanted a girlfriend for New Year’s Eve and, as I was obviously not cooperating, there was just enough time to find a new one. I was so feverish I couldn’t even summon the strength to get up and kick him out of the house. One learns a lot about fair play by dating sportsmen.
I went back to French bobs and twinsets and gave up my own, admittedly not at all promising, career in high-school basketball. In the best traditions of socialist education, my school encouraged sporting prowess as much as any scientific or artistic skills. Even at the university, one couldn’t sign up for exams without proof of participation at the weekly skating or swimming sessions and the annual two-kilometre race at the hippodrome. I chose shooting practice, which was more useful than skating and lacked the painful associations of basketball. By the time I met Petar, I was quite a markswoman.
My French school was, in many ways, one of the most selective institutions in socialist Belgrade. Parents were interviewed and vetted as thoroughly as prospective students. To get me and my sister a place, my father expended his entire reservoir of charm upon Madame Dora, who was in charge of admissions. He knew that his work for the army might be a drawback (it was that kind of institution), but his handsome manner won the day.
Somewhere in Europe
The school’s recitals were legendary and quite a few of our classes were devoted to rehearsals and preparation. One year, I polished the lines from Aragon’s La Rose et le Réséda until each elision and each emphasis fell in its proper place, and Madame Mimitza told me that I sounded ‘almost French’, the greatest compliment of all. The French ambassador and the cultural attaché always sat in the first row with representatives of the old, French-educated Belgrade elite. Even the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, turned up with his wife at one of our performances. Each vase in the school was full of gardenias and there were trays of pastel-coloured almond mignons on every side table. The grand piano was tuned and polished for the occasion. Overexcited boys and girls in starched white collars and patent-leather shoes responded to the President’s questions in deliberate, careful French. Madame Mimitza and Madame Foni hovered behind smiling anxiously.
After my first stay in Paris, paid for by the French Ministry of Culture as an award for an essay in French entitled, appropriately, ‘Why I love France’, I affected a Parisian accent and said things like shai pas instead of je ne sais pas, as though I was brought up in an apartment on Ile de la Cité and had not just spent three weeks in a hostel opposite Père Lachaise cemetery. How I loved France! There was never any aplomb in my boring English school, where my Angloph
obe but practically minded parents sent me twice a week from the age of seven to the age of eighteen. We were confined to dire pieces about Stratford-upon-Avon and Stonehenge and the same old excerpts from Dickens again and again. The teachers did not seem to care that most of the students were interested only in things American and were adopting the most implausible American accents, picked up in local cinemas. How come I ended up on this island, speaking English all the time?
Quite what Petar, a socialist and a true egalitarian, saw in my breathless, Francophone snobbery is anyone’s guess. The two of us walked, argued about politics and occasionally stopped to exchange passionate kisses. You hardly ever see people kissing like that on the streets of London, but in southern Europe, where young people continue to live with their parents throughout the years of yearning, it is a common sight. The thick, dark crowns of lime trees which lined Prince Milosh Street were full of sparrows chirping dementedly, and the windscreens of cars parked underneath were dotted with guano, like oversized snowflakes. In late spring and early summer, the smell of exhaust fumes from battered buses mixed with the sickly fragrance of lime blossom. The street was a canyon, its walls made up of large, ugly edifices: embassy buildings, ministries and government headquarters. It was about as intimate as walking down Whitehall in London or Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. Numerous little guards huts, no bigger than telephone boxes, lined the pavements. In some of these, policemen in tight blue uniforms sat listening to their radios or eating hotdogs. In others, young soldiers in heavy grey overcoats stood forlornly with guns on their shoulders.
Embassies of the more or less friendly socialist countries had large panels with photographs showing off economic and cultural achievements. Everyone on those panels seemed blissfully happy, but the cumulative effect was always depressing. Western embassies tended to have a folded flag in the lobby, like a forgotten beach parasol, and a large photo of their president. If the country in question was a monarchy, the display seemed more familiar: a painting of a glum middle-aged woman with a tiara, very much like Comrade Jovanka, or a finely manicured chap in an elaborate uniform, like our own Comrade Tito. Ideological differences notwithstanding, these were fellow Ruritanians.
On one of our walks, I entertained Petar with a theory, tailored entirely to suit my Francophilia, that ‘nice’ countries had red, white and blue flags, while ‘nasty’ ones always included yellow. This theory reflected my political maturity. I was one of those people who always read the newspapers from the back, stopping two-thirds of the way through, just after the book pages. I made a conscious effort to know as little about politics as possible.
Petar was the exact opposite. He didn’t just read the newspapers, he read them. He knew what each minute shift in government signified, and why – in a well-rehearsed speech – Comrade So-and-So described someone as a demagogue, a technocrat or an opportunist. He knew why pauses for applause were scheduled after particular rhetorical flourishes in the speech but not after others. In those days, the most inconspicuous turns of phrase hid major power struggles. ‘There are doubters in our society,’ someone would announce grandly, and suddenly – as if on cue – doubters would be rooted out, fired from their jobs or sent to prison, as appropriate to the magnitude of the doubt they harboured.
Petar was also one of the first people I knew to mutter darkly about unseen powers which were working to break Yugoslavia apart. He seemed very fond of Yugoslavia. I liked the place too – it was my country, after all – but cared much less about whether its constituent parts remained together or not, so long as Belgrade went on more or less as usual. At that stage, I still believed that given the freedom to vote most Yugoslavs would vote Green and focus on cutting petrol emissions. I could not have imagined that, soon after I left the country, it would be in the hands of people like Slobodan Milosevic or Franjo Tudjman. I was barely aware that such men existed. I didn’t think that anyone could be so foolish as practically to ask to be bombed by the West. Nor did I assume that the Western armies would oblige. I’d underestimated the whole lot of them.
Given that members of my wider family – to count just the non-combatants – had been murdered by soldiers belonging to at least five different nationalities in the past hundred years or so, my optimism was astonishingly naive. I never paused to worry about my relations in Sarajevo, for example. What could happen to my uncle Mladen and his Croatian wife, or my cousin Danny and his Muslim wife? My plans for the future somehow always allowed for winters on the snow slopes around the Bosnian capital, followed by baked apples with walnuts and sour cherries in ‘Egypt’, the best patisserie in town.
It was in ‘Egypt’ that one of my cousins once exclaimed, laughing, ‘I have a fine lot of Belgrade girls here, mash’Allah.’ His moustache tipped with icing sugar spread across his face, revealing a row of shiny white teeth. ‘And how much do you ask for those two sweet apples? I’ll take them to Istanbul, so help me God,’ retorted another beaming, moustachioed man. We tugged our cousin’s sleeve in panic, worrying that he might really sell us. I now wonder whether we sold him in the end.
One evening, Petar and I stopped in front of Belgrade’s River Navy headquarters at the bottom of Prince Milosh Street. We kissed until every one of the buses home went by. ‘We can’t go on like this, Petar,’ I said, my voice breaking down after only seven words, although I had practised the speech all day. ‘I am leaving you.’ I opened my satchel full of French textbooks and, by way of explanation, produced a letter, or rather a collection of moderately censored extracts copied from my diary. I had suspected all along that I wouldn’t have the nerve for an exegesis of what exactly had led me to this fork in the road, yet I felt I owed it to Petar.
He stood and read my document for the best part of ten minutes, giving very little away, then hugged me wordlessly – in what already felt like a different kind of embrace – and I caught my bus home. It then took me nearly a year before I stopped wanting to dial his number and to take every one of those 2,000-odd words back.
I recalled this particular evening as I watched the buildings between which Petar and I had stood burn on Channel Four News in 1999. They were hit by precision bombs, together with almost all of the government headquarters but none of the many embassies on the street, in what seemed like the military equivalent of dentistry. My friend Ana, whose house stood just up the road from the Foreign Ministry, rang me in London the following morning – as I was leaving for a day of research at the British Library – to say that she had been woken up by rays of sunshine playing on her face. She was just thinking that she had left the blinds up when she realized that overnight a crack wide enough to let the light through had opened up in one of the walls.
The bombing had apparently sent her whole neighbourhood on the move downhill, towards the river. ‘You must write to every British newspaper about this,’ Ana said, displaying an astonishing lack of understanding about the way real democracy works. Fissures of this kind only ever feature on local news. Given that her building insurance excluded acts of war, that the bank which had underwritten it was bankrupt anyway and that her salary at Belgrade University amounted to just under thirty pounds a month, paid in two instalments – well, one could understand the state of mind she was in.
Ana’s call had interrupted a chain of reminiscences brought about by aerial destruction, a very Balkan à la recherche. The girl who abandoned Petar might or might not have been me. Like a premeditated murder, it was an act both planned and sudden. Until it happened, I never thought I’d be able to go through with it. This is not to say that I have ever, for a moment, regretted my departure; just that I have, in the intervening years, lost touch with that girl who could – like NATO – destroy and create on a large scale while following an instinct no stronger than a distant whistle. I now wanted to know her again.
Petar and I were from different backgrounds. I never met either of his parents. In Petar’s world, being introduced to your boyfriend’s parents signified a stage in a relationship which we di
d not quite reach, the point of no return. He met both of mine. In my circles, meeting someone’s parents was of relatively little consequence (even if they were inclined to weigh the pros and cons of even the most unlikely spousal ‘candidate’). Mother and Father simply happened to be en route to the record collection or the kitchen. Mother, in particular, always made sure that she was en route. If all else failed, she’d turn up, without knocking, just inside my room door, with a silver tray. She usually couldn’t knock because of her burden of homemade biscuits and heavy Bohemian glasses filled with Coca-Cola.
Mother taught us early on that the simpler the offering the more ornate the presentation needed to be. Hence crystal for Coke, a drink she despised, whereas caviar was best eaten off the back of your own hand. Not that any of my boyfriends were ever offered caviar, on or off the hand. Our occasional supply of Caspian Beluga, which often came in tins bearing the stamp of the Romanian diplomatic stores, was set aside for New Year’s Eve, halfway through our Christmas fast (Orthodox Christmas being on 7 January). Since we were allowed no meat or dairy food, we relied on caviar and champagne – even if only Russkoe Shampanskoe – and this seemed the best way of fasting that anyone has ever come up with. My sister and I were permitted small glasses of sweet champagne as far back as I can remember. She got drunk on a thimbleful of Russkoe Shampanskoe when she was six, and sang her way into the New Year.
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