A Partisan's Daughter

by Louis de Bernières

  “ ‘Here’s the rules for the girls. Number one: no bleedin’ taxman, no national insurance, payment cash-in-’and only. Rule number two: no bleedin’ ’anky-panky on the premises. If you want a bit of extramarital that’s down to you, some of the girls do and some of them don’t. I got birds here earnin’ a couple ton a night, catch my drift? But you go to a bleedin’ hotel or something. I don’t wanna know. I don’t want the filth up ’ere chargin’ me for bein’ a ponce or something.

  “ ‘Rule number next: drink as much champers as you can ’old, and pour the rest down the plants when the punter goes to the lavvy. Rule number whatever: strictly don’t get pissed, cos it’s embarrassing, and that’s how you get fired. You gotta wear our little uniform. We give you one, but you go out and get your black tights and your high heels all on your own, and make sure they make yer arse wiggle, nice and sexy. Rule number wotsit: if yer gonna smoke, smoke classy ones, nice and long, white filters, dinky little gold band. No Woodbines, and strictly no bleedin’ roll-ups.’ ”

  I sat down again, and Chris said, “You should have been an actress; that was pretty good.”

  “Anyway,” I said, “Bergonzi gave me ten pounds to go out and buy the shoes and stockings, and he didn’t even know me. He was nice, really. He said, ‘Thank God for Bob, because the girls keep buggering off and marrying the bloody customers.’

  “I nearly didn’t go back. I thought maybe it was bad work for someone like me. You know, I should be in a university somewhere, not in a shitty club dressed up like a cat. It was…how do you say it?”

  “Demeaning? Beneath you?”

  “Yes, beneath me. It was just a stupid job, you know, nothing important, but I thought, ‘OK, it’s plenty of money, and I don’t have to stay long, and it’s a good way to practise English.’

  “Next morning I went to Oxford Street, and I bought shoes and stockings, and I looked at all the shops with nice things in, and I thought, ‘Lucky Roza, you can buy these things before too long.’ I went and looked at Leicester Square and Piccadilly, and I looked in the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. I was killing time, as you say. And I had a pizza, and I saw a man who had a big board, and on the board it said that you shouldn’t eat meat because the protein makes you lustful, and if you’re lustful you go to hell. I followed him around a bit because I thought, ‘I never saw anyone like him in Yugoslavia.’ I looked at the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, and I listened to some people playing violin and guitar together at St. Martin’s, on the steps, and then a bloody policeman came and told them to go away, and everyone who’d been listening started shouting at the policeman and telling him to piss off, and I enjoyed that. In Yugoslavia no one tells the police to piss off. Then I got my portrait done by a hippy person who was working on the pavement by the National Gallery, and he made me look like a film star or something. It was nice, I killed a whole day.

  “I went to the club at half past nine, and Grill let me in. Bergonzi came and said hello, and he introduced me to a thin woman with red hair called Val, and this Val said she was manageress and she looked after all the girls. After a while I realised that Bergonzi and Val were having an affair, and his wife didn’t know.

  “Val was nice. She helped me put on the pussycat suit, and I looked in the mirror and I didn’t know whether to laugh or be angry. I said to Val, ‘I don’t think I want to do this.’

  “She said, ‘Bloody ridiculous, innit, love? If I was you I’d just have a good laugh about it. There’s worse things; you could be shagging lepers in the Congo or cleaning bogs in China.’

  “I said, ‘I feel stupid,’ and she said, ‘It ain’t you wot’s stupid, it’s the bleedin’ punters who get a kick out of it. What you ’ave to do is say, “It’s them that’s daft, and me wot’s making idiots out of them by lifting their cash.” Simple really.’

  “I said, ‘I still don’t think I can do it,’ and Val said, ‘Well, just try it once. If you can’t stand it, don’t come back. Shall we do the make-up?’ And I ended up with great big pussycat eyes, and these whiskers glued to my face.”

  Chris laughed and said, “You must have looked very sweet really,” and I said, “You know what? I got to like that pussycat suit. Mine was black with a white front, and it had a sort of hood with ears on, so you only saw my face. It was quite comfortable really. I had to wear white gloves.”

  “I dressed my daughter up as a squirrel once,” said Chris. “It was for a fancy dress party. She looked so adorable that I almost couldn’t stand it.”

  “She probably wasn’t in her twenties,” I said. “Anyway, after a while I realised what the real advantage of the suit was.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “It was a good disguise. You could be anyone you wanted dressed up like that. You could talk any old shit to the punters. When you changed back into your normal clothes, it was like washing your hands. You went home with a clean mind and you were normal again. I liked that. The only thing I never liked was those stilettos. You know, I had sore feet all the time and they never got better till I left.”

  “What were the other girls like?” asked Chris.

  “Not too young, but not old either. They were all shiny, as if they polished themselves a lot. A bit too thin. Lots of foreigners like me. Two of them were junkies and it was how they got enough money without being prostitutes. They had awful scars on their arms, so it was lucky about the pussycat suits. A lot were fucking the customers for money. One of them was married and her husband made her do it so he could stay at home and watch football. A lot of them had children and no husband, and they had to get home so they could get the children up and take them to school, and then they came home again and went to bed. You know, they all fell down somehow, and didn’t know how to get back up. I heard sad stories, sad stories all the time. I was the only one with no sad story. You know, God didn’t shit on me yet. He was just waiting, I found out. Some of them were clever like me, and some of them had no brain at all. A lot of them didn’t stay. I’d get to know them, and then they’d leave. I don’t have any friends left out of all those girls. They were like birds with broken wings, and they stayed while they waited for the wings to get repaired, and then they flew away.”

  “What about the men? What were the men like?”

  “The men? OK, thirty-five to sixty years old. Rich. Frigid shitty wives, if you believe them. They drank too much. They told you unbelievable secret things, like you were the best friend or the psychiatrist. The nice ones, they came often, and when they saw you they gave a little kiss on the cheek, and you got fond of them, and that’s how a lot of the girls got away. The bad ones, you know, there were some bad ones who got too drunk and they got loud and wanted to fight or put their hands up your pussycat suit, and if it got too bad, the Grill just threw them out and threw their entrance money down the stairs after them. Normally you could get them so drunk that they got ill, and that was the best revenge. Sometimes you got gangsters, and you couldn’t get the Grill to throw them out because they might send someone to bomb the club, so Val put something in their drink, and they’d wake up on the floor in the morning and not remember anything.

  “Everything was fine, you know. I worked six months and I had some nice conversations and some stupid ones, and I smoked too much and drank champagne, and I liked the girls, and Val and Bergonzi, and lots of the regulars. It was a little family. No, it was a big family, you know, the kind of family with lots of cousins who keep coming round, like bloody Greeks. It was a weird life, Chris. I never saw daylight, hardly. I was eating nothing but rubbish, crisps and sandwiches and things, and I was sleeping all day. I forgot about trees and the sun. I laughed a lot, but I never had anything to remember, every day the same but just a bit different. I don’t remember anything. I got so much money, so much money, and I never got to the shops to spend it. Then the Big Bastard came in.”

  “The Big Bastard?”

  “The Big Bastard.”

  “So, what happened?”

  “He was this big gu
y, lots of money. He never said what he did. He said ‘international businessman.’ He never came before. Bergonzi didn’t know him. He paid a year’s membership straight away, five hundred pounds. He was all pleased with himself, that’s for sure. He walked in like he was Mussolini or something, like he just won the Nobel Prize for being a hotshot.

  “He came to my table and he interrupted me when I was talking to someone, and he said, ‘Hey, pussycat.’ He had a funny accent, I don’t know if he was American or South African or English from somewhere I didn’t know about. He sat down next to me, and the man I was talking to looked very surprised, but in the end he just got up and went and talked to a Bulgarian girl. The Big Bastard said, ‘So where are you from?’ and I said, ‘Yugoslavia,’ and he said, ‘So where’s that?’ and I said, ‘It’s a little place in the middle of France where everyone’s a millionaire and no one pays tax.’ He said, ‘Well, I never knew that.’

  “He told me about his houses and his swimming pools in different shapes, and his two Bentley cars and a Daimler and a Rolls-Royce, and his chain of burger shops, and he told me about all these famous people he was personal friends with, and all the beautiful women he’d had and how they all wanted him back. Anyway, I just got him as drunk as I could, so he’d get ill. And he was smoking these big horrible cigars that Bergonzi was selling, and he still didn’t get ill, and he just kept talking and putting his hands on me, and all the other girls were looking at me and making sympathetic faces, and finally it was two o’clock in the morning.

  “I went for a pee, and I found Bergonzi and I said, ‘Look, I’ve really got to go home. I can’t stand this man, and I don’t feel good.’

  “He said, ‘Sorry, doll, but you don’t leave till the punter does. That’s how it is, that’s the deal.’

  “I said, ‘Oh please, Gonzo,’ and he said, ‘No, I’m really sorry, love, but that’s how it is.’

  “So it got to half past three and it was if I’d been in hell forever and ever, but then the Big Bastard said, ‘I expect you’d like to get home, eh, pussycat?’ and I said, ‘Well, I am tired,’ and he said, ‘OK, me too. I’ll be going myself.’ So he got his coat from the Grill, and he went. I went for another pee, and on the way out Bergonzi said, ‘OK, love, it’s not busy now, you might as well go home,’ and he gave me the money for that night, which came to quite a lot. Just before I went Bergonzi said, ‘Mind how you go, you get some right dodgy sods around here.’ So I went down into the street, and that’s when it happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “Look, Chris, it isn’t easy, you know?”

  “Well, you don’t have to tell me.”

  “I ought to tell someone, Chris. I never told anyone else, and it’s a big thing. It’s lots of big things.”

  “Just tell me one thing, and maybe you’ll tell me the next thing later.”

  “OK. I went down to the street, and I was just smelling the air because it was all fresh and damp, even though it was Soho. It was raining when I was inside talking to the Big Bastard. I was thinking I’d get a taxi, because the nice thing was I could afford a taxi every night. I thought I’d find one in Leicester Square, no problem.

  “I’d just started off when this big black limousine came along, and it slowed down, and it had two men in it. One was driving and the other was in the back, and it came right next to me, and this electric window came down, and it was the Big Bastard sitting in the back and waggling his fingers and his gold rings at me, and he said, ‘Hey, pussycat, guess who’s coming for a ride.’ ”

  “Oh shit,” said Chris.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Prison

  She lost hope even though she was a partisan’s daughter.

  I’d finally saved the five hundred pounds. It was in its Manila envelope, in the breast pocket of my jacket. Every now and then I took it out and looked at it, avoiding the temptation to count the money again. I’d done that several times, and used up a number of envelopes. It was certainly five hundred pounds. It gave me an odd sense of reassurance. Theoretically I now had enough money to go to bed with Roza, if she had still been doing that sort of thing.

  It occurred to me that I could go and spend it on some other woman from somewhere like Bergonzi’s Pussycat Hostess Paradise, but I knew straight away that it wasn’t what I wanted, no matter how lonely and sex-starved I was. After so many years of that marriage to the Great White Loaf, I didn’t think that I had any attractions to make a woman want me, my mouth was full of dust, and I didn’t have any confidence, but even so, my dreams had settled on Roza. I knew that she was fond of me, but I wasn’t sure what kind of fondness it was. I was frightened to broach the subject in case her affection was of the kind that the girls of my youth would call “platonic.” The disappointment would have been crushing.

  At about this time, Roza told me of the worst experience of her life, about being abducted by the “Big Bastard” and his accomplice.

  The two men forced her into the car, and the man she called the “Big Bastard” sat in the back with her, holding a knife in his hand. She thought that they drove her for at least two hours, but it was still just dark when they arrived somewhere and she was told to get out of the car.

  They took her down some steps into a sort of furnished basement. It even had a shower and a lavatory, but no windows, and the door was locked at the top of the steps. It was the kind of door that had steel sheeting nailed to it. Roza said that she thought it had been specially adapted by the Big Bastard and his friend, precisely for this kind of thing, that they did it as a sort of hobby. She said that if you looked carefully, you could see places where bloodstains had been cleared up, and there were rips in the furniture. There was a light that you couldn’t turn off unless you stood on a chair and unscrewed the bulb.

  Roza said that she hadn’t kicked or screamed or fought, because a kind of fatalism overcame her, a combination of fatalism and terror that makes you paralysed. I’ve never been in a situation like that. I like to think that I would put up a fight, but maybe I wouldn’t. You never know till it happens to you, what your reaction will be. I remember I came across a blind rabbit once, on a walk in the country, and it knew I was standing over it, but it didn’t know what I was. It was terrified but it couldn’t do anything, so it just hunkered down in the grass at the side of the path. It laid its head down, straight ahead, just as the aristocrats lay their heads on the block in films about Elizabeth I, and waited for me to kill it. I stroked its nose and said soothing things, and then I picked it up and put it further from the path. It kicked when I was carrying it, but when I put it down it adopted the same attitude of waiting for execution. I suppose it was like that for Roza. She lost hope even though she was a partisan’s daughter. She said she’d discovered that even atheists pray when they’re desperate.

  They kept her there for four days and fed her on sandwiches and chocolates with nuts in. They weren’t just rapists. She showed me a burn on her upper arm the size of a shilling, and said, “They didn’t stub out cigarettes like a normal torturer; they stubbed out a cigar.”

  Apart from the rapes and all the other sexual humiliations, they beat her and cut her, and even bit her. She had bruises on her neck like big fingerprints, because they liked to throttle her until she fell unconscious, and her wrists and ankles had red rings round them from when she had been tied down. She said she had injuries all over, but the abductors had paid special attention to hurting her in the places you’d expect. At that point I didn’t want to hear any more details.

  To begin with I had been listening to her in horror and consternation, but it rapidly got worse. I had such a sick feeling in my stomach that I stopped drinking the tea she’d made for me. Then I started to shake. She said, “Chris, you’re so pale, are you all right?”

  I tried to speak, but it was impossible. I was thinking about the horrible things that she had suffered, and it was breaking my heart.

  It was the first time I’d cried since I’d arrived at the hospital
and found that my brother had already died, and I was too late.

  I had huge tears running down my face, and I couldn’t stop them. I was holding the cup of tea in one hand, and some of the drops fell in it. I felt ridiculous, but I was overwhelmed.

  Roza just looked at me for a few moments, and then stopped talking. She came over and put her arms around me, and that made me weep even more, as though the contact was the trigger to release all that agonising sympathy. She went round the back of the chair and put her face next to mine. I could feel her thick silky hair, and smell her familiar flowery scent, a combination of soap and face cream and perfume. I will always remember it, the wonderful feeling of her embracing me like a mother or a sister, her cheek against my cheek. I sometimes wonder whether she was crying too. Her face was wet, but the tears were probably mine. She squeezed me very tight and started to rock me a little bit. She was saying, “Oh Chris, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Please, I’m so sorry.”

  For ages after that I looked for literature about the psychological effects of rape. I wanted to understand what it might be like, being Roza. I mean, I had no idea.

  The odd thing is that I found almost nothing, there was no information at all. I got in touch with a group called WAR, but they weren’t much use. Being a man didn’t help, and they probably thought I was a pervert. One book I found eventually was by that girl who got raped in a vicarage. I read it twice, but I wasn’t sure that it was any use to me, because Roza wasn’t exactly a vicar’s daughter.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  After the Big Bastard

  I used to wake up in the afternoon, and I was crying.

  I felt very bad about Chris crying like that. I didn’t think he would be so affected. I often cry out of sympathy, when I see the news of a disaster on the television, and sometimes I cry out of happiness, such as when I saw the wedding of Princess Anne, and when I heard that Juan Carlos had become King of Spain. It wasn’t that I particularly like kings or anything, it was just that I was happy for them. Maybe I’m odd.