In Yugoslavia they’d had a little wilderness of poorly tended fruit trees, and long grass that was kept in check by moving the rabbit and chicken pens around. Roza told me the names of the herbs and wild flowers that grew there, but she didn’t know them in English, and in any case I am not a great one for flowers. When she was talking about them, I just nodded and thought about something else. One of the very few things that my wife did was tend the garden, but I had to do all the heavy work of course. I can recognise a rose and a daffodil, and that’s about it. Roza said that their garden was very beautiful. She was nostalgic about the big vegetables they used to grow, and for the sunflower seeds that you could eat like sweets. She said that English vegetables compared to Yugoslavian ones were like the balls of a little boy compared to the balls of a bull. It was an unexpectedly picturesque analogy.
They had a well in the garden that you could yell or throw stones into. When she was small Roza thought there were serpents down there, and she had nightmares about falling into it eternally, without ever hitting the water. I used to have nightmares about having petrol poured over me, and being set on fire, and nowadays I have nightmares that I have wooden teeth and that they are continually falling out, as if I had an infinite number of them. It seems that everyone has their own inexplicable fear to have nightmares about. We need nightmares to keep ourselves entertained, and fend off the contentment that we all fear and abhor so much.
She liked the rabbits, even though the does sometimes ate their babies, and she hated the chickens because of their stupid violence, always pecking at each other’s rumps and tearing each other’s feathers out. She threw a dead sparrow into their pen one day, and they tore it to pieces. She maintained that chickens were like the Balkan people in general, with their constant and implacable pecking at each other’s bloody backsides.
The hens were kept mainly for their eggs, and generally you ate the old cockerels unless you had visitors. Roza had a farmyard folk tale about an old cockerel that was replaced by a new one. Realising that he might soon be eaten, he challenged the young cock to a race, specifying that he wanted a start, in order to make fair allowance for his age. The young cock was agreeable, and so the older one began to run off, soon to be followed by the younger one. The farmer saw this out of the window, and the upshot was that the farmer ate the younger one, on the grounds that no one needs a homosexual rooster. I was never any good at telling jokes.
“One good thing about growing up in the country,” said Roza one day, “was that I learned to kill things, and it was OK. I broke the necks on rabbits.”
She looked at me with a sinister and knowing expression on her face, and I felt distinctly uneasy. I took the remark as a vaguely intended threat, especially after she told me about the knife in her bag.
For years Roza’s family had an outside privy that stank in the high summer, but was otherwise a good place for contemplation and seclusion. It was a brick lean-to, much deformed by subsidence, and its seat was a thick wooden plank with an oval hole cut in it. If you shone a torch down there, you could see thousands of big white maggots, and if you dropped anything in it by accident, you just had to forget about it. It was frightening to have to go there at night, because of the scuffling and grunting of nocturnal animals. In a little girl’s mind they were easily magnified into tigers and bears. Roza said that the very worst thing was having to sit there in the winter, when it felt as though the skin was going to be torn off the backs of the legs. Her brother told her that if your backside froze to the board, they’d have to cut your bum off to free you, so in winter she’d lie awake all night trying to hold it in. Funnily enough, I remember all these kinds of things from the house in Shropshire. In that place there was an outside loo with three holes cut in a row so that people could be sociable. It’s probably illegal nowadays. I expect that it’s been outlawed by the European Union.
Roza’s father used to warm up the seat with a methylated-spirit blowtorch, and it wasn’t until that packed up that he installed a proper system, with a pipe into the bottom of the well that fed a tank in the roof space, so they wouldn’t have to break ice or melt snow any more. A water heater was put in, the lavatory moved indoors, and the old one was covered over to serve as a cesspit. Roza said that after all this, life lost some of the element of struggle that had made it fun. You didn’t have that delicious sense of anticipation as a big cauldron of water heated up. Her father said that it was strange not having to live like a partisan any more, and complained about everyone getting soft.
They had a car that had been liberated from the Germans at the end of the war, an old Mercedes staff car with red seats that smelled wonderful and made you feel very lordly and disdainful when you drove about in it. It was powerful, but too grand to drive fast, and Roza’s father used to sit at the wheel looking straight ahead while he got overtaken by Skodas and Voskhod mopeds. He used it daily to go to his offices in Belgrade, and after work he would quite often be irritated to find it surrounded by tourists posing for photographs next to it. If anything went wrong, a tremendous fuss would have to be made before spares could be found or made up, and in the meantime they would have to use public transport, which Roza alleged would always smell of goats, baby vomit and raw onions. She was like a lot of the Labour politicians we used to have in Britain back then, such as Anthony Wedgwood Benn: she was a toff who approved of the common people as long as she didn’t have to mix with them.
She told me that there was an orchard nearby where she used to climb trees, and that was where she first started trying to write poems. I once sat for hours while she solemnly read her poems to me in Serbo-Croat, and then explained what they meant. It was pleasant watching her face as she read, because she was experiencing the emotions, her spirit shone out, and I liked being able to stare at her for a long time without her realising that I was admiring her. What struck me was how strange language is, when you don’t know what it means. She told me that the Bob Dylan Upstairs also wrote poetry, and I thought, “Oh dear.” Since I’ve known Roza I’ve struggled with modern poetry from time to time, but I confess that it often seems just like ordinary language cut up, or lists of cryptic crossword-puzzle clues. I need someone in the know to explain it to me. When I was at school we learned lots of poetry, but it was the dumdedum kind, with lots of rhymes, and the lines all the same length. I wasn’t kitted out for the modern stuff at all. Anyway, I never did read or hear any of the BDU’s poetry. He could be famous by now, for all I know.
I can understand why Roza might have wanted to spend hours up a tree, however. I did a lot of that when I was a boy. I went back recently and saw that the little tree I used to climb up has grown into a fairly large oak. I haven’t felt such a pang of lost time and painful nostalgia in many a year.
Anyway, once Roza got into trouble for cutting open hundreds of apples in this orchard after her bald grandmother told her a folk tale about an apple with a diamond in it. She was made to gather up all the dismembered fruit in a wheelbarrow and take it down the road to a piggery. Roza liked the same things about her orchard as I did about the one in Shropshire. Sunlight coming through the leaves. Field mice. Sparrows mating. Starlings or fieldfares settling all around you because they hadn’t noticed you. I said to Roza, “One day I’ll take you to the house in Shropshire where I spent a lot of my youth.” She was pleased by that, but in fact we never did get round to it. It’s difficult to get time off with a young retired Yugoslavian prostitute when you’ve got a Great White Loaf at home expecting you to lay paving slabs and take your daughter to the cinema while she knits. Everything that happened with Roza and me occurred in that derelict and filthy house in Archway, mostly in the basement, always before I went home to Limbo in glamorous Sutton.
One day Roza had an experience that she found very shocking, and it was brought about by a horse.
She was picking up windfalls when she felt a nudging at her shoulder, and then a tugging at her jumper. She cried out with shock, and the equally startled horse shie
d and cantered away, kicking up its hind legs and whinnying. It was a very big carthorse, and it had a mouthful of red wool that it had detached from Roza’s jumper.
She decided to run away, but a peasant woman turned up at the gate, huffing and puffing, and wanting to know if she had seen a horse, which was quite conspicuously nearby, eating apples.
The upshot of all this was that the hairy-faced old lady offered Roza a ride on the horse, and she was too terrified to refuse. It was difficult to mount such a big horse, and it had to be done by climbing on a gate first, but she was determined not to panic, and she stayed up there by clutching on to the mane. She thought it was trying to bite her feet, but the old lady said that it was just sniffing her to see who she was.
Off they went along the road, with the horse farting on account of the apples, which made Roza giggle, but did not impress the old lady, and they had gone quite a way before she said that she thought that this was probably far enough, otherwise it would take too long for Roza to get home, and anyway, it was about to rain.
Roza didn’t want to go, and she made the woman promise to let her ride the horse again. It was apparently called “Russia” because it was very big, a complete liability, and always going where it wasn’t wanted. She sprained her ankle getting off, and after the tears were duly wiped, she started to limp home.
She was only halfway there when the wellhead broke with a clap of thunder, and down fell the rain. Her ankle hurt too much to run, and the water was beginning to fall very heavily, so she made for a little barn that was at the side of the road. It was heaped with bales of straw, and she climbed up on them despite being frightened of rats.
She said that she mostly felt very disappointed about having to get off the horse, and annoyed about being caught in the rain, and at first was more puzzled than alarmed by catching sight of a hand sticking up out of the straw. It was like a yellow claw, with papery skin.
She moved some straw away, and the long and short of it is that she found a dead tramp. Fortunately she thought he was asleep, and her first instinct was not to wake him up, as that would have been bad manners. He was wearing a placard around his neck, on which was scrawled: “Survivor of Jasenovac. Hero of the Resistance.” He had a medal with a red ribbon pinned to his chest, his mouth was open and his lips were blue. He had a white beard, speckled with vomit. Next to him was a brown bottle, which later turned out to have had carbon-tetrachloride industrial dry-cleaner in it. Roza said that when she sniffed at the empty bottle she thought it smelled very nice. Luckily it was all gone, so she didn’t get to take a swig of it.
She tried conversing with him, but did eventually realise that he was dead. At that point she went out in the rain and limped home, regardless.
Her parents were furious with her, mostly because of their own anxiety. They were in their coats and hats and were just about to set out looking for her. It was particularly bad for her father because thunder made him feel as if he were back under bombardment. It took her a little while to persuade them that there really was a dead man in the barn down the road, and they accused her of telling tales and told her to stop telling lies. What ultimately persuaded them was her odd assertion that the dead man’s name was “Survivor of Jasenovac,” since she couldn’t possibly have thought that one up on her own.
When the police took away the body, they finally identified it as being indeed that of a beggar and one-time resistance fighter, who had been captured and put into the extermination camp at Jasenovac. I looked it up and discovered that this was a place where the Croats had killed about thirty-five thousand Serbs. The Gestapo had inspected it and been shocked. Some of the staff were Franciscan monks. When Yugoslavia finally fell apart, I was one of those people who weren’t particularly surprised. Roza always said that it would, after Tito died. I didn’t believe her at first, though; we’d all been told that it was a multicultural paradise, positively purulent with harmony and sweet understanding.
Roza said that the reason she still got upset about the tramp was that you could be a hero and survive in hell, and get awarded the Partisan Star, and then still die like a rat, and it’s just another day, and nothing’s changed. Roza said that the episode gave her horrible feelings about the futility of life’s struggles. I remember another time when she said that if you felt that life was futile, it had a liberating effect, because then you were prepared to do almost anything. I remember talking to a philosopher in a bar once. He was another one who was delaying going home to his wife. He advised me that I should never be frightened of failure, because one day I was going to die anyway.
I told her, “I found a dead man once. It was under an archway in King’s Cross.” I don’t know why I told Roza that. It wasn’t even true. I don’t often tell lies on impulse. There was a song that all the kids with guitars were singing at the time, and one of the verses was about “one more forgotten hero, and a world that doesn’t care.” It was called “The Streets of London,” or something, and it was all about derelict old people. I must have got the idea from that.
She exhaled some smoke and said, “I saw another dead man. He was only just dead.”
I didn’t ask her to explain. Just then I had to get home to Sutton. It was my wife’s birthday, I hadn’t yet finished my rounds, and I was running out of reasonable excuses. I only remembered her remark later. When Roza said goodnight at the door she put her hands on my shoulders and briefly laid her head on my chest. I thought, “I’m making progress,” and I went away feeling pleased with myself. I’d saved about a hundred pounds by then, and was still wondering what to do with it. I was feeling disgusted and irritated with myself that I had ever thought of offering it to Roza.
TEN
Miss Radic
Beware of getting a disengaged heart.
I had an embarrassing encounter in the local library. It was a little dingy place, which is how I like libraries to be. I’d gone in to read up about Yugoslavia, and I found a book called A Concise History of the Yugoslav Peoples. I was going to read it in the library, because I wasn’t a member yet, and couldn’t take it away. I had a notebook with me so that I could record the more interesting details and memorise them.
The newspapers were full of stuff about the Yorkshire Ripper, but I was sitting at a table reading about the Battle of Kosovo.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder. When I looked up, I saw it was Chris, and my face started to burn. I was so confused and embarrassed. He kissed me on the cheek. “Hi,” he said. “I called round at your place, but you weren’t there, so I thought I’d come here and while away the time. I thought I’d pop in and see if they’d got anything on Yugoslavia.” He leaned over and looked at my book, and said, “I see that you’ve got just the thing.”
I was expecting him to ask me awkward questions as to why I was reading about my own country, but he didn’t. It probably didn’t strike him as strange at all. I suppose that lots of people read histories of their own countries. It was just me feeling as though I’d been caught out, looking for stories. It also seemed strange to come across him out of context, like meeting one of your teachers in the street at a weekend.
“I’d better let you finish it first,” he said. “I can always order it from the library in Sutton.”
I said, “Well, let’s go back to my place, now that we’ve met up.” We went for a stroll first, and watched old ladies feeding birds. He said, “Have you ever noticed how many city pigeons have only got one foot, or have a foot that’s mangled?”
I said that I hadn’t, but from that day to this I’ve noticed it a lot.
I used to enjoy teasing Chris by being very frank. I think he was often appalled. I was testing him, to see how far I could go. I wonder if he was ever puzzled about why I told him personal things in such detail, things that normal people would keep to themselves, or that girls would only tell to their best friend or their sister. More often than not I’d mix up these revelations with the sort of information that people bore you with at parties.
Once I told him about my favourite teacher, who was called Miss Radic.
I was the kind of pupil who always knows everything already, so I got easily bored in class. I could read before I even went to school, and was always putting my hand up and going, “Me, Miss! Me, Miss!” every time the teacher asked the class a question, and when I got told off for overeagerness I’d go on strike and cross my arms and sulk, and then the teachers would tease me and say, “What? Don’t you know the answer, Roza?”
I mostly enjoyed school. It was nice being delivered there in the big Mercedes when not many other people had cars at all. My father used to make me empty out my pencil case every morning before we went, to make sure that I had the full complement of pencils and things. He used to say, “The more you work now, the less you’ll have to work later.”
At school I got thrown in the prickly hedge, and people took rubber bands and fired folded paper in class, and there was a fashion for punching people in the upper arm to see if a big bruised area could be created. Once there was a spastic boy who was so cruelly teased and persecuted that he took to injuring himself so that he wouldn’t have to go to school. Chris said to me that it sounded as if my communist Yugoslavian education had been exactly the same as his capitalist English one.
“What are those things that you make points on pencils with?” I asked him once, because my English had some gaps in it. I didn’t learn it in the usual way.
A Partisan's Daughter a Partisan's Daughter Page 6