I woke up in the morning, stiff and aching as if I had been run over, just when everyone was going to work. I sat up in the back, and was astonished to see the Bob Dylan Upstairs walking past in overalls, carrying his blue box of tools. I realised after a few moments that I’d parked right outside the scruffy little Morris Minor garage where he was working.
I didn’t want him to see me, so when he’d gone in, I hurriedly got out of the back, and into the front. I drove as far the Wington Green roundabout, and on a strange impulse turned off into Mildmay Road. There I parked up in a resident’s space, dropped my forehead onto the steering wheel, and wept.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Holes in My Guts
When the Bob Dylan Upstairs answered the door, he said, “You’d better come in.”
I had left it a week. I knew perfectly well that I should have come back immediately to apologise, but such was my humiliation and mortification, and such was my shame, that I just couldn’t bear to face her. Now I’d come at last, cringing inside, my hands trembling, my cheeks burning with embarrassment. In my arms I bore a huge and overpoweringly fragrant bunch of fifty red roses.
I went inside and apprehended it all as if with new eyes, the wires hanging off the walls, the crude dusty bathroom with no plaster on the laths, the creaking carpetless staircase down into the basement, the weird swirling graffiti left by former occupants.
I said, “Where’s Roza?”
“I don’t know,” replied the Bob Dylan. “She’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“She left at the weekend. This big van turns up, and she and this tall man just load it up and leave. I haven’t a clue where’s she’s gone. What I do know is that she just sat in her room crying.”
“Crying?”
“She wouldn’t open the door. I brought her tea and things, but I had to leave them outside the door. The sobbing was very hard to listen to, I can tell you. I don’t know what you did to her, but anyway, now she’s left, and she was still crying when she went.”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” I protested.
“Obviously you did. The one thing she told me was that you’d come round drunk in the middle of the night and been vile to her.” He looked at me very coldly, and added, “She was very fond of you. She often told me.”
“Did she leave a forwarding address? Anywhere I can write to?”
“No. Some things arrived in the post and I don’t know what to do with them.” He gestured towards a small heap of letters on the floor of the hallway. I picked them up and looked through them. I was puzzled. I said, “This one’s for Dubrovka, and this one’s for Josipa, and this one’s for Sacha.”
“Well, they’re all Roza. There’s one for Marija as well.”
“Why so many different names?”
“Well, do you know who she really was?”
“What do you mean, ‘who she really was’?”
The Bob Dylan looked at me wryly, and said, “Well, I never assumed that I knew exactly who she was. She was Sharon Didsbury for the purposes of the rent book. As you know, I’m supposed to be someone called John Horrocks. And the sculptress who’s supposed to be upstairs and no one ever sees is supposed to be Ruthie, but her real name’s Amanda. This is a whole house full of people who are up to something. All I know about Roza is what she told me.”
“Did she tell you the same things as she told me?”
“Well, how would I know?”
“Did she tell you about sleeping with her father, and the black trunk under her bed, full of money?”
“Oh yes, she told me about that. I never looked inside it to check, though.”
“Did she tell you about being abducted?”
“To the special raping house? Yes, she told me that one as well. Did she tell you about murdering one of the men who did it?”
I shook my head. “She told me she bought a knife to do it with, but she never saw him again. She never said she’d killed him.”
The Bob Dylan laughed. “Well, she told me that he eventually came back to the club, and she got him very drunk and took him in a taxi to a disused warehouse in the docks, that she’d already reconnoitred, and she stuck the knife in him just when he thought she was going to give him a blow job. That was how she got the correct angle to get it under the ribs. She was very keen on getting the right angle. She mentioned it quite a lot. It was something her father told her about, apparently.”
I was stunned. “She told you that? Maybe she didn’t want to shock me. Maybe that’s why she didn’t tell me. She showed me a knife.”
“That was a very sharp knife.”
“Didn’t you think that you ought to go to the police?”
“Only for a second. I looked into myself and couldn’t feel sorry for him, if that’s what really happened.”
It suddenly occurred to me to doubt everything she had told me, and the implications of that doubt began to carve holes in my guts. I didn’t know what to do or say. The Bob Dylan said, “You can’t know anything about anyone in this house except what you get told. I could tell you I was the illegitimate son of the Shah of Iran, and you wouldn’t know whether I was or not, would you?”
“But why would you tell me that?”
The Bob Dylan looked at me pityingly, and said, “You might be a whole lot older than me, but you have a few gaps, haven’t you? People tell stories to make themselves more interesting. Sometimes they do things just so they can tell the story afterwards. I’ve done that myself. If Roza kept you intrigued it was because she wanted you to keep coming back. I sometimes thought that she told them all to me as a dress rehearsal for telling them to you. Maybe you can work out for yourself why she did that.”
“I’ve never talked to you properly before, have I?” I said.
“I’ve got some stories,” he answered, “but you probably wouldn’t fancy me enough to want to hear them.”
“I was just thinking,” I said, “that it’s a pity that I can’t really introduce you to my daughter. She loves Bob Dylan, for one thing. You’d be a boyfriend I could put up with. I could introduce you if you promise not to tell her that I ever came here.”
He smiled and said, “I’ll take that as a compliment, but honestly I’ve got plenty to worry about without your daughter. It’s hard enough coping with Sarah.” He handed one of the letters on the floor to me. It was the brown Manila envelope with the five hundred pounds in it. She’d written “Chris” on the front.
Inside with the money was a note written neatly in blue ball-point on the kind of pink paper covered in tiny squares that you use for mathematics. It just said, “Mislila sam da me volis.”
I showed it to the Bob Dylan, and he shrugged and said, “It must be Serbo-Croat.” I said, “Don’t the Serbs use the same letters as the Russians, though? This is in normal letters.”
“I think the Croats use Roman script,” he said.
“She used to say how much she hated Croats.”
“Well, sometimes I hate the English. I am one, though. Anyway, any educated Serb would know how to use Roman letters, wouldn’t they?”
I went back there many times to ask the Bob Dylan if there had been sight or sound of Roza, but there was never any news. Her pile of letters got larger and larger. I wish now that I’d taken some of them away and read them, or got them translated. I didn’t, out of belated respect. Then finally I went back one day and the Bob Dylan had gone as well. I have no idea where he went or what happened to him. I don’t even know his real name, just that he was pretending to be someone called John Horrocks for the purposes of the rent book, and sometimes wore his predecessor’s huge moccasins.
So many years went by, with me looking futilely for Roza, making enquiries, writing to embassies and even to Zagreb University. I easily spent a lot more than the five hundred pounds in searching. Half a dozen times I took my wife to Yugoslavia just to poke around, and she just thought we were having strange holidays. I got to know a very great deal about the place, and after a
while I started to feel like an honorary Yugoslav. I felt a deep pang when Tito died, and wondered how Roza must be feeling. Eight years later I was thinking of her again when Albanians started attacking Serbs in Kosovo, and everything over there began to fall apart like a house of cards. I worried in case she had got caught up in all the furore, or dived into the great national depression afterwards, as Serbia became the world’s fastest-shrinking country. I wondered if she remembered me with any affection.
As for me, I always thought of her as my one great last chance. After Roza I never had the heart to try again.
Of course, I went and got her note translated immediately, but I have pondered for years the meaning and ramifications of the message that she had written in Serbo-Croat just so that I would have to go to some trouble to find out what it meant. I went to the Yugoslav Embassy at 28 Belgrave Square, and the woman at reception translated it for me, raising her eyebrows archly as she handed the paper back to me, and commenting, “Well, that’s very sad and pathetic.”
I am an old man now, and that tongue of flame leapt up a long time ago, but I have never lost the pain in the chest and the ache in my throat that Roza left behind. I’ve lived with it, without it ever getting any smaller or less painful. It’s been like a metaphysical cancer. Never for a moment have I forgotten her soft sweet voice as she told me all her stories, but sometimes it’s hard to remember what she looked like, because I never even had a photograph. The sorry thing is that if we passed in the street nowadays, we probably wouldn’t even recognise each other. I do look at everyone, but I’ve stopped looking with any expectation. I may have stopped searching, but I haven’t given up hope. Sometimes, just when I think I’ve stopped at last, the hope surprises me by coming back.
I know approximately how much time I have left. My hands are becoming a little more weak every day now, and it is possible to calculate the rate at which the disease spreads.
As I said, my wife’s dead. I do think about her a great deal, and I surprise myself sometimes by how much I miss her. I loved her very much to begin with, for the first four years or so, but then I came to resent her very angrily and bitterly. In the end I mainly felt sorry for her, because she had just existed from day to day, had never really done her best, lived her whole life without passions, and didn’t understand why anyone else might have any.
I can’t work out why she chose me in the first place. What was she thinking? That anyone would do? Why did she take it as a matter of course that she was entitled to appropriate my life, and waste it? Did she never feel the slightest twinge of regret on my behalf? She should have found someone more like herself, instead of leading me by the nose into the dismal unlit tunnel of her superfluous life.
I’d love to pass the last days of my life with my daughter. She’s a fireball, completely unlike her mother, and she’s the one great thing that I’ve contributed to the world, but she’s in New Zealand, and the last thing I’d want is to be a burden to her when she’s just becoming successful and making a name for herself. New Zealand is a lovely place. It’s just like England was when I was young, full of quiet, decent, humorous people who eat bread and butter and whose clothes don’t quite fit. She’s on her second marriage now, and I’ve only met the new man once.
I’m thinking of selling the house in Sutton, so that I can afford the care I’m just about to need. These days I can’t hear very well, either, and when you can’t hear properly you get very isolated. You find yourself pretending to understand what people are saying, when really you don’t. You are never sure what’s going on, and it can be very tiresome for other people, having to shout at you or write things down.
I have happy memories of things that happened a long time ago, at the childhood house in Shropshire, with my brother and sisters, or when Roza was telling me her stories in front of the gas fire in that derelict building.
I’m still the kind of man who doesn’t go to prostitutes and, as it turned out, I never did resort to one in all my life.
The Bob Dylan Upstairs must be in his fifties. I wonder if he ever made anything of himself. I thought he probably would. I doubt he turned out quite as unconventional as he might have wished, but he was bright, and people like that get to the summit by unexpected routes, in my experience. I wonder if he’s still playing “Für Elise” on the electric guitar. I wonder if he’s still got the giant moccasins.
I kept Roza’s last message to me. The paper became very dirty and flimsy from being kept in my wallet, and it began to tear along the folds. I put tape on it to keep it together, and when eventually the tape went yellow and inflexible, I went to the library and had it laminated. Now that everyone’s gone, and I’m living by myself, I have it stuck on the wall above my desk with Blu-Tack. From time to time I put on my glasses and look at the looped Continental handwriting across the pink squares of that mathematical paper. I try to imagine her face, and her mouth saying just those words. I think I can see the reproachful expression in her eyes, and feel the stab of pain that she must have felt. After Roza I lived my life with a deep sense of shame that I have never been able to shake off.
I think about my last meeting with her, about how she never had the opportunity to say whatever it was that she’d been working herself up to telling me, about how she cried for days afterwards, and then packed up and ran away. The more I think about it the more I think it can only have meant one thing. It’s the only way to make sense of what she wrote.
The message was: “I thought you loved me.”
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Louis de Bernières is the author of The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best First Book Eurasia Region, 1991), Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book Eurasia Region, 1992), The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Corelli’s Mandolin (Commonwealth Writers Prize, Best Book, 1995), Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World, Red Dog, and, most recently, Birds Without Wings. He was selected by Granta as one of the twenty Best of Young British Novelists in 1993.
ALSO BY LOUIS DE BERNIÈRES
Birds Without Wings
Red Dog
Sunday Morning at the Centre of the World
Corelli’s Mandolin
The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord
The War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Parts
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2008 by Louis de Bernières
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in Great Britain by Harvill Secker, an imprint of the Random House Group Ltd., London.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
De Bernières, Louis.
A partisan’s daughter / by Louis de Bernières. — 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. Young women—Fiction. 3. Serbs—England—London—Fiction. 4. Nineteen seventies—Fiction. 5. Storytelling—Fiction. 6. London (England)—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6054.E132P37 2008 823'.914—dc22 2008017773
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27032-0
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