A Partisan's Daughter

by Louis de Bernières

  Roza said she’d get very brown in the summer, and her hair would lighten to a dark reddish brown. I could see it when we went for walks in the summer. She liked walks. She said that if she ever left London the thing she would miss most would be the parks with their gaggles of ducks being fed by old ladies. I once said to her, “If rabbits are lords and ladies, what are ducks?” and she said, “They are the stupid ones who tell the king how great he is,” and I said, “Oh, you mean courtiers.”

  In the winters of her childhood Roza would be wrapped up and sent out to get some colour into her cheeks. In hard winters the snow was six feet deep, or even deeper where the wind had drifted it, so you could jump up and down on it and then disappear when it gave way. Roza was fond of sitting in front of the fire with her feet in a bowl of hot water as she thawed out, feeling hot and cold at the same time. I liked her description of doing that, because it was just like my memory of staying in Shropshire with my grandparents, where it was so cold at Christmas that there’d be frost on the inside of the windowpanes in the mornings, and you wore jumpers and a woolly hat and socks in bed. When it snowed and gathered into drifts, you could cut tunnels into them and make little dens. One collapsed on me once, and I suppose I was lucky to get out, but in those days we were a lot less precious about children taking risks. My mother used to say, “Go out and play, and don’t come back till it’s dark.” We’d stay in the woods all day, making dens, climbing trees, and trying to dam streams. My brother and sisters and I made an igloo once with the help of our mother. People always said that Eskimos were very warm inside them, but we were bloody freezing. The snow wasn’t right for the job, either. When you cut it into bricks it fell apart, so we made our igloo by whacking the snow with a shovel to pack it tight. When we were building it I thought I’d never seen my mother looking so young and happy. Her cheeks went red as apples, and her breath was sending puffs of vapour into the air, and when it was finished we went inside and she made a pot of tea. We sat in there shivering and drinking tea until we couldn’t bear it any more. I’ve never had tea that tasted hotter and sweeter. I hope that my daughter has memories of me as sweet as the ones I have of my mother. Roza said that the partisans in the war sometimes made ice houses in the forest, and you could mould little shelves inside them out of the snow, and you’d hang a canvas flap over the entrance, and use kerosene lamps for light. All I can say is, I’m glad that someone did it, and that it wasn’t me. I’m probably like any other travelling salesman; I regret my lack of natural heroism and adventurousness, but in the final analysis I’m damned if I want to do anything about it. I wouldn’t want to be a partisan unless I got weekends off and all missions were optional.

  I realise I have digressed rather a lot from the story of the Bob Dylan Upstairs and Roza’s cat phobia, but I am getting there eventually. She assured me that she was truly an animal lover, the sort of person who feeds apples to horses and throws sticks for other people’s dogs. In fact she used to do that when we were in parks, so I know that’s true.

  What happened was that one day her father came home with a muddy canvas bag in his hand, and said, “Look what I found.” He put it on the table, and they all looked inside, and there was a ragged little kitten whose eyes were barely open. Her father had heard it mewing by the river. Someone had tied up the neck of the bag, and thrown it in, and it had floated down the river and caught on something at the bankside. He’d hooked it out with a stick.

  Roza’s mother said, “It won’t live. You should have finished it off.”

  He said, “What do you think, Printzeza?” and Roza had touched it with the tip of her finger and said, “I want it.”

  He said, “Will you be upset if it dies?” and she said, “Yes,” so he answered, “You’d better look after it well, then.”

  The kitten grew up at first with a litter of rabbits, because rabbits allegedly can’t count, and a mother rabbit doesn’t mind if one of her babies doesn’t look quite like the others. Oddly enough, I have heard of rabbit kittens being brought up by a cat whose real kittens have been drowned.

  Anyway, the kitten suckled alongside the little rabbits, pumping away with its paws, and purring no doubt, until it was old enough to abandon rabbithood and become a cat. Roza carried it around inside her shirt, and called it Apple. She said that it tried to suckle at her nipple, and it was a delicious but alarming feeling. I felt a mild sense of injustice because I had never been invited anywhere near her nipple.

  I get tired of people telling me how wonderful their pets are. Somehow I do believe that my own dog or cat is truly exceptional and marvellous, but I become impatient and sceptical when I hear it of other people’s. I had to listen to Roza telling me about how sweet Apple was, how she would press her ear to the cat’s flanks to listen to its heart, or let it under the blankets at night, so that it would suck at her nightdress, and how the cat never quite gave up being a rabbit, and would perch on top of the rabbit hutch, and how it was a retrieving cat, and she would roll paper into a ball and flick it across the room, and the cat would go and fetch it and bring it back and put it into a shoe so that she had to dig it out before she could throw it again. Roza’s favourite story about it was that once she had placed some gristle in the cat’s bowl, and the cat had picked it out and left it in her shoe, so that it had squished against her foot when she’d put the shoe on in the morning.

  The cat came to a gruesome end because Roza’s grandmother gave her a pet linnet. I believe it’s still quite common in that part of the world to keep wild birds as pets. I had a raffish magpie when I was a child, but I don’t think anyone would keep ordinary British songbirds these days.

  Roza was as romantic about the linnet as I might have expected. I listened to how the bird had a handsome red breast, and red splashes on its forehead. When it was discontented it would call, “Soo-eet, soo-eet.” When it flew about the house it dropped guano on everything indiscriminately, which is what all birds do without exception, as far as I know. It must be nice to be shamelessly incontinent without having to suffer the consequences.

  In spring the bird tried to mate with Roza. It drooped its wings, spread its tail and shook its feathers. It turned in little circles and called in low sweet notes, and then it hopped onto her finger and beat its wings, and lo and behold, it would leave a drop of milt on her finger. I felt that sense of injustice again, every time she reminisced about it.

  Well, I almost knew in advance what Roza was going to say next. If you have a linnet flying about the house, and a cat sleeping on a windowsill, and the linnet flies into the window and drops on the sill, you can’t blame the cat for what happens next. Roza said that she was only a little girl at the time, and didn’t really understand about the icy indifference of nature.

  Apple ran under a chair with the bird flapping in her jaws, and Roza screamed and tried to take it from her. The cat retreated further under the chair, and Roza tried to pull the bird away from her, only to find that she now had its headless body in her hand. Apple slashed at her arm and left on it a row of stinging parallel cuts, and then went into a proper attack, biting into her arm and raking it with her hind claws.

  Roza started screaming, and tried to shake the enraged cat off. I didn’t quite get the details, but I think that Roza shook her arm too violently, and the cat went flying across the room, with the consequence that she ended up with two dead pets.

  Her father came in and tried to console her. She said that he smelled of tobacco and eau de cologne and that it was very comforting. They collected up the two bits of the bird first, and its eyes were still bright, which upset her a lot, but that didn’t upset her as much as finding that the cat had broken its neck.

  Most people have had beloved pets die suddenly, so anyone can imagine what Roza felt, bearing in mind that she was only a little girl at the time. She thought she was a murderer and got frightened that she was going to be put in prison.

  She buried the cat and the bird side by side at the end of the garden, and then
she was sent away to stay with her bald grandmother for a couple of days. Unfortunately, when she got back she went straight to the grave and found that she hadn’t dug it deep enough. The linnet had gone completely, and the cat had had its stomach eaten out. The cavity was dark red and jagged, and the stink was awful because it was summer. The maggots had already got busy too, especially at the mouth and back end, so it looked as if her teeth were in motion. Roza reburied it as deep as she could dig, and afterwards never could face having another cat.

  When Roza told me this story, she concluded by saying that she was horrified by cats because she was frightened that she would hurt them, and that’s why she’d wanted the Bob Dylan Upstairs to keep the cat confined to his room.

  I did my best to listen carefully and to express my sympathy, but to be honest I was more overtaken by the violent curiosity to know about her life as a prostitute. I was a prurient voyeur, I suppose.

  As she got fonder of me she’d give me a little hug at the door when I left, and a kiss on each cheek, French-style. Once she let her hand rest on my arm, and she said, “I like you because you listen to me. You make me feel that I’m interesting.”

  I said, “I’ve never met anyone more interesting,” and she kissed me again.

  NINE

  Survivor of Jasenovac

  I couldn’t stay away from Roza, not that I tried very hard.

  I couldn’t stay away from Roza, not that I tried very hard. I’m one of those people who’s like a cat, who only feels guilty if it gets caught, and in any case it was so easy to stop off on my way home from my journeys, or even make a detour to call in on her. There were three practices in the vicinity, and I was covering a huge area of southern England, so I had no regular hours anyway. Sometimes I’d phone to make sure she was there and was feeling sociable, so I often spoke to the Jewish actor, who was the only one there with a telephone. He didn’t seem to mind being my messenger, and Roza hardly ever told me not to come. When I arrived she used to kiss me on both cheeks, which I enjoyed even though it wasn’t very British behaviour back in those days. Of course everyone’s gone Continental now, and you even kiss your mortal enemy.

  Roza would make strong black coffee on that appallingly filthy stove, and off we’d go to the living room and sit either side of the gas fire while she smoked and told me more stories about her life. It amazes me now that I sat so patiently and listened to it all, but in fact I was just as interested in the stories as I was in Roza herself. I felt I was learning a great deal. I’m surprised that my wife never noticed that I smelled of cigarette smoke when I came home, but in truth she had stopped noticing me at all many years before. She spent my money, but apart from that she had no interest in anything I said or did, and it never mattered how generous I was, I was still just a ghost in my own house.

  I am glad to say that I never did smoke; I tried it at the age of twelve, and I vomited. I’ve known so many people die of it, in so many horrible ways, that if I was a dictator I’d round up everyone involved in the trade, charge them with mass murder, and have them shot.

  It would have turned out better if I hadn’t become so crazy about Roza. If I wasn’t in love, I wonder how else you would have described it. I don’t have any understanding of what being in love is, though I think it’s happened to me a few times, and especially with Roza. You can’t look it up in medical encyclopedias, and you don’t get documentaries about it on the television. I have been thinking recently that it’s learned from films and novels and songs, and there’s probably nothing natural about it. How do you disentangle love from lust? At least lust is comprehensible. Perhaps love is the torment that dammed-up lust unleashes against you.

  I don’t have the confidence to know what the right word is, but I was certainly entranced. Perhaps it was to do with her having been a prostitute. In my little world, that was fantastically exotic. It was like being friends with a cobra or a cougar. I admired myself for my daring. I thought I was somewhere out on the far side.

  The odd thing is that I’ve become her surrogate, and now it’s me who relates her tales. I have become a virtuoso Roza substitute. I have a compulsion to tell people everything I know about her, as if it were important to anyone but me. I even know her house near Belgrade as if I had lived there myself. I haven’t been there, but I retain Roza’s memories as if they were my own.

  It was two kilometres outside the nearest village, and was originally very shabby, with only undercoat on the window frames, and unpainted lime-mortar walls. They had long fissures in them, one so wide that it had owls living in it until it was patched up. The roof had heavy red tiles, and it was so distorted by age that for a long time there had to be buckets placed at various strategic points. It was one of those places where in the old days people would have kept animals on the ground floor in order to warm the humans on the floor above. In Roza’s time, downstairs was where the kitchen was, and there were two rooms that an estate agent would describe as “reception” areas, but which weren’t used much because the family mainly inhabited the kitchen. It had flagstones that were strewn with matting, and Roza used to express retrospective exasperation with how often she used to trip on their upturned corners.

  Upstairs were three little bedrooms and a creaky landing, whose walls were decorated with the portraits of old partisan comrades, all of them very young and thin and apparently without a care, posing alongside Italian tanks, or sitting in a row on the barrel of a field gun. There was a picture of Marshall Tito shaking hands with Roza’s father, and a picture of Winston Churchill waving a cigar. There was one of Stalin, and one of Fidel Castro with his own huge Havana and prophetic beard. These four men were her father’s heroes.

  Roza says that she didn’t like to throw anything away, so her room was a complete mess. She collected clockwork toys, dolls, and things like slide rules. She says that she had Das Kapital on her bookshelf, alongside the works of Shakespeare, books about folklore, and pre-communist children’s books detailing the activities and adventures of various rabbits and kittens who dressed in human clothes and carried loaves of bread around in baskets. There was a row of machine-gun bullet holes stitched diagonally across the wall, left over from the Battle of Belgrade, and there was an Ottoman musket ball embedded in the woodwork of the windowsill.

  Roza was fond of remembering her bed, and often wished that she had it with her in London. It was well moulded to her body, she said, and excellent for prolonged hibernation, surreptitious naps and general escapes. She would go to sleep at night with the dim light filtering up from downstairs through the interstices of the floorboards, and the frightening shrieks and whoops of owls and foxes coming in from outside. The bedhead had brass bars that you could tap with a fork or a pen, and play parts of melodies out of tune.

  Roza’s bedroom in that shambolic house in Archway was quite a contrast. She’d done the best she could, given that the plaster was falling off the walls and the wiring was draped about in festoons. What I remember most is that almost everything was dark pink. Perhaps “puce” is the best word. She’d found a puce carpet, a puce coverlet for the bed, puce curtains and puce cushions. It was either very bold or in very bad taste, depending on your inclination. I imagine that people like Barbara Cartland would have had decor very similar to that. It gave me the impression of exaggerated and oppressive femininity, especially when you took into account the heavy smell of perfumes and soaps and lotions. Maybe it was just the ambience of whores.

  The most amazing thing about her bedroom was that she’d stacked the legs of the bed up on bricks so that she could put a large trunk underneath it. She told me that this trunk contained all the cash earnings from her years on the game, that it was completely full, and now that she’d retired, she was going to live off it for as long as she could, preferably forever.

  I was shocked and angry that she’d let me know, because she shouldn’t have told anyone at all. It exposed her to too much risk. She was very surprised when I said how foolish she was to go round tellin
g people, and she said, “But I’m telling only my friends.”

  “You shouldn’t have told me,” I said. “I don’t want that kind of temptation. I don’t even trust myself that much.” And she replied, “But I know you wouldn’t steal it.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t. But you shouldn’t trust me, nor anyone else. It’s stupid!”

  “Oh, sorry,” she said, but not as if she meant it. She was just trying to close the conversation.

  I said, “Think what someone might do to you if they came here and decided to rob you when you were in the house!”

  “OK, I’m stupid,” she said, with equally cool insincerity. “I do stupid things. I’ve done lots of stupid things. Maybe I always will.”

  If Roza’s bedroom in Archway was quite a contrast with her one at home in Yugoslavia, the garden must have been even more so. In Archway there was a concrete yard laid at the level of the basement doors, which should have opened but didn’t, until the Bob Dylan Upstairs managed to unstick them. There was no light in this yard, and its walls were exceedingly high on account of its having been sunk so deep. Over the years people had dumped mattresses and fridges and all sorts of rubbish over the walls. I often saw rats through what had once been the French windows. There was one skinny buddleia poking out of the brickwork halfway up the wall. It produced three token purple blossoms every summer. In years past it had probably been a very lovely courtyard indeed.