“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.
EIGHT
Apple
Dreams are the same always.
I came by on the day that Airey Neave was killed by the IRA, and found Roza in a penitent mood because she had been horrible to the Bob Dylan Upstairs. She was consoling herself with a bottle of white wine from the fridge, and she offered me some, so I said, “I’d love one, but don’t ever let me drink more than a glass and a half!”
“Why not? It’s good for you. Without wine there is no civilisation,” said Roza, and I replied, “Well, it isn’t good for me. It makes me go very strange. I’ve almost had to stop, so a glass and a half’s my limit.”
“Ooh, what does it do to you?” she asked, her eyes bright with a sort of delighted curiosity.
“Do you know that story about Jekyll and Hyde?”
“Who?”
“Jekyll and Hyde. I don’t suppose there’s any reason why you would have heard of it. It’s about a doctor who takes a potion and it turns him
into a murderer until the potion wears off. Well, that’s what happens with alcohol and me, except that it’s me who usually ends up nearly being murdered. I suddenly get in a terrible rage, and more often than not I get in a fight. Afterwards I often don’t really know why it all happened. The last time, I picked a fight with a damn great Irish hod-carrier in a pub in Watford, and it was a very bad idea, I can tell you. I miss not being able to drink, but really I’ve got no choice. I have to watch what I do. I haven’t made an idiot of myself for about ten years now, thank God.”
“You get in fights? I can’t imagine you in fights, Chris. You always seem so sweet and nice.”
“Well, I am nice until I’ve had too much. Just give me half a glass, I’ll be happy with that, and there won’t be any danger. So, what was this quarrel with the Bob Dylan about?”
Apparently he had brought in a young cat, having offered to look after it for someone, and she had thrown a fit and started shouting at him to get rid of it. He must have been made of sterner stuff than me, because he told her to get lost, and took the cat upstairs to his room. He probably hadn’t heard about the filleting knife in her handbag yet.
She said she had a phobia about cats, but she hadn’t meant to shout and scream at the Bob Dylan, because the Bob Dylan was very nice and would listen to her poetry. “Poetry?” I said. “What poetry? I didn’t know you wrote poetry.”
She said, “I didn’t tell you. You’re not a poem type.”
I was offended by this aspersion of philistinism, but actually she was right. Until I got to know Roza I never did give a damn about poetry. I couldn’t see what it was for. It was never anywhere inside my horizon. I once asked the Bob Dylan what Roza’s poetry was like, and he said, “It’s in Serbo-Croat, so I don’t really know, but when she translates it into English it’s like Chinese poetry.”
I wasn’t enlightened, so the Bob Dylan said, “It consists of strings of apparently disconnected observations linked together by the last line, which is a kind of comment.”
Talking to the Bob Dylan made me realise that there was an awful lot I didn’t know, and it was embarrassing that he was giving me information when he was only half my age, but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that ignorant people have no idea that that’s what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you’re a genius. If you’re stupid you can always blame miscalculation on bad luck. Anyway, the fact that Roza wrote poetry raised her further in my estimation, even though I didn’t care about poetry itself. I just knew that one was supposed to. I liked reading western novels, people like Louis L’Amour, that was my idea of a good read. Roza made a big difference, she did make me improve my quality control, and I do enjoy reading a little poetry these days, but now that I am an oldish man, it’s probably too late to develop decent literary tastes, although my daughter is still doing her best to educate me. She wants me to read Middlemarch, but it’s so damned big that I just don’t have the heart. She sent it to me for Christmas, all the way from New Zealand.
I hadn’t expected that a prostitute would be a writer of poetry. You don’t think of them as proper people. You don’t think of them as people who might shop in a supermarket or go for a swim. Roza always surprised me by being a human being, just as I surprised myself by getting so enmeshed with her. It was stupid of me not to realise that prostitutes go to movies, and walk in the park like anyone else. We all deceive ourselves with simplifications, and so you can’t imagine a prostitute going shopping any more than you can imagine a soldier being interested in lepidoptery, or a monarch sitting on the loo.
Roza always said that she’d been happy as a child, and there wasn’t much that bothered her about her memories, apart from finding a corpse in a hayrick, and the occasion when her father struck her mother.
“It was good to be a solitary child in that criss-cross of wheat-fields and ditches. I was solitary because my brother Friedrich was born in 1946. They gave him that name in honour of Engels. I waited until 1954. My mother said I was a nice accident, but for all I know it was because of a night when my father made her do it and she never got round to getting rid of me in time.”
Her brother Friedrich used to come home with his friends and tease her by saying things like “What’s a titty, Roza? How many tits does a girl have?” and she would guess and say, “Three or four,” thereby providing the boys with some congenial hilarity. When they laughed they used to pummel each other. Friedrich used to apologise afterwards for teasing her, but he didn’t stop. Later on he became an officer in the federal army, and she saw very little of him after that.
Roza was named after Rosa Luxemburg, even though the latter was very ugly and came to a nasty end. She was a communist heroine, or so Roza told me, but I can’t now remember what it was that she was supposed to have done. I saw a photograph of my Roza as a child, and she was far from ugly. She looked sturdy, but pretty and sweet. When I looked at the picture I got a pang of regret in my stomach for what Roza had turned into, but that didn’t stop me from fantasising about her.
Roza had Gypsy eyes, her hair was very black and shiny, and parted down the middle. She had a soft full mouth, and it looked to me as if her complexion had been pretty good until she had started to overdo the alcohol and cigarettes. She told me that she used to look at herself in a mirror and do pirouettes, and wonder if she’d ever be beautiful enough to be carried away by a prince. I said, “That doesn’t sound like a very communist line of thinking,” and she just shrugged and said, “Dreams are the same always.”
Even when I knew her, Roza was somewhat obsessed with counting things, but she was a lot worse as a child, apparently. She’d count her fingers even though she knew she hadn’t lost one, and as she counted them she folded them back to make sure that she hadn’t counted a finger twice. When we went for walks she would count railings, or the number of people with hats on. She was distressed by falling snow, because snowflakes were innumerable. She had a philosophy of numbers. One was the number of her father’s eyes, two was the number of her own, and the number of his gold teeth. Three was the number of swings of the starting handle that it took to start her father’s car, and four was the number of its wheels. Five was the number of fingers on one hand, and six was the age when she got her first pocket money. And so it went on. She hated the number seven because there wasn’t anything it could stand for. I once tried to tease her clumsily by saying, “So what’s special about five hundred?” and she looked at me with disdain, dropped some ash into the ashtray, looked away, and said, “It’s what I said I used to fuck for.”
I said, “And what do you do it for now?” I said it lightly, as if I were joking, but she replied, “Why are you saying this?” so I fell silent. I felt hot with embarrassment and was thinking that I had made a terrible mistake, but then the Bob Dylan Upstairs came in and told us his latest stupid joke, so the situation was saved.
Roza didn’t have an imaginary friend. I didn’t either, come to that. She used to talk about all the characters in the folk tales that her grandmother told her. This grandmother was bald and used to hide it by wearing a shawl. She wore widow’s black, and had the kind of shoes that you can put on either foot, to save trouble. I have never come across this kind of shoe in my life and now I wonder if Roza was making it up. The grandmother, according to Roza, had a great hairy wart on her right cheek, so that to kiss her cheek was like kissing a man’s. She told stories about a great-uncle who won a fight with a bear, and about her own grandmother’s sister who escaped from a tyrannical husband by crossing the Dinaric Alps in the company of some brigands. Then she sailed to Cephalonia on a fishing boat, and set up house with a man called Gerasimos. Years later she came back with two grown-up sons as big as houses, in order to demand a divorce. It seems that she wanted to legitimise the boys and make Gerasimos an honest man before he went to his grave.
I liked Roza’s stories, but now I am confused as to whi
ch ones were supposed to be historically factual. There was someone called “Black George,” I remember, and someone called Matija Gubec. She knew very bloodthirsty stories, always about Turks, which she told with great relish and some show of righteous horror. One story was about an emperor who blinded all his prisoners except for one in every hundred, who was supposed to lead the others home, and when the opposing king saw what had happened to his troops, he died of the shock. Then there was the story about Prince Michael’s tragic love affair, and another one about how Gubec was taken to Zagreb Cathedral and crowned “King of the Peasants” by having a white-hot circle of iron placed on his head while the crowd stood there cheering and waving their hats. Roza often got angry when telling these stories, and they explain why she hated so many different peoples, Turks, Croats, Albanians, just about everyone else in the region. I once heard a joke about Irish Alzheimer’s disease, which is when you forget everything but a grudge, and if Roza was anything to go by, I would say that that would be a pretty good description of Balkan Alzheimer’s too. I tried telling her all the favourite British national myths, like King Alfred and the cakes, and Robert the Bruce and the spider, but somehow they never quite matched up to stories about people being crowned with white-hot circles of steel. Many years later my daughter told me that King Edward II had been killed by having a white-hot poker pushed up his backside, and I thought that that was exactly the kind of story that Roza might have appreciated. I felt sorry that she wasn’t there for me to tell her.
Roza was able to make friends with wild animals. She said she’d go out into the sunflower fields and flatten herself a little space that could only be seen by birds, and then she’d sit so still that the animals would start to get used to her. She laughed at herself when she told me this, but she said that she would think of mice as her messengers, and she thought of rabbits as lords and ladies. Beetles were Russian spies or Turkish assassins, if I remember rightly, and foxes were princes and princesses. Roza herself had a fantasy about being a princess, and she was uncommonly obsessed with royalty for someone who said she was a communist. I knew her before the days of Princess Diana, but I’ve no doubt that she must have enjoyed that phenomenon while it lasted. I remember having to have conversations with her about Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, and the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson, and finding that she knew much more about them than I did.
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