“He got a motorbike and we went out to the Zagrebacka Gora. It’s all mountains and forests, and you go with a gun because there are still bears and wolves and big wild pigs. We used to go to Sestine and then into the remote places, so we could make love on a rug. If I ever got bored making love with him, I just imagined it was my father.”
When she said that, I winced. She just blew out some smoke, and smiled. “You’re funny,” she said. She paused. “You know what, Chris? After my parents separated, Alex asked me to marry him.”
“What did you say?”
“I said ‘yes,’ I didn’t know he was fucking around. I don’t know why he asked me.”
“You can love someone and still want to sleep with other people,” I said. “It’s normal. It isn’t romantic, but it’s normal.”
“I was a romantic when I was young,” she said, and I thought, “How romantic is it to seduce your own father?” but I didn’t say anything.
“Anyway, when I said ‘yes’ it put him in a panic. I think he’d been hoping I’d refuse.”
“Why did he ask then?”
“People like things in theory,” she said. “Maybe I want to go to the Amazon, look at all those parrots and trees. If I got the chance, I’d say, ‘Oh how wonderful,’ and then I’d be working out how not to go there, because really I don’t want to go to the Amazon and get too hot and be eaten by mosquitoes after all. Maybe I’d rather be in Archway in this little shithole.” She took a sip of tea, and lit another Black Russian. “Anyway,” she said at last, “it was then that everything went wrong. Fatima said it would. She said he’d end up marrying a nice Catholic virgin, and he’d be unfaithful all his life, and he’d die wishing he’d married me after all. I told her to shut her mouth, what did she know? And then we had the summer holidays.
“I went home and saw what was happening with my father. He was living like a pig. Dirty clothes everywhere. Dust and filthiness. All the cupboards with everything emptied out and not put back. Grey sheets on the bed, and bottles outside the door, and piles of newspapers. I tell you what, my father was defeated, and it made me feel very bad and very sorry. He was eating only sandwiches, and when I made him papazjanija, he ate it like a wolf. I said to him, what happened to the old partisan who knows how to live off rats? And he said, ‘I was alive back then.’ I was showing him how to pick up dust with a damp cloth, and how to boil up kitchen cloths, and how to use lemon and salt to clean brass. I showed him how to choose the good fruit in the market, and to look at the eyes of a fish to see if it’s fresh, and how to tell the weight of things, and I said to him, ‘You lived with Mama all that time and you never saw what she was doing?’ I said, ‘Listen, Daddy, you should invite friends for a meal one evening every week, and that’ll force you to clear up a bit,’ and you know what? That’s what he did. And I got a job in the little tourist office next to the Albania building, and I spent the summer being too hot and trying to understand people with all sorts of accents. And one night I came home and my daddy said, ‘Do you remember when you were about six, I made you stand out in the snow in your nightdress, because you scribbled on some documents?’ And I said, ‘I thought I was going to die,’ and he said, ‘Printzeza, I’ve always meant to say I’m sorry,’ and I said, ‘I’ve got things I’m sorry about,’ and he gave me a hug and went and stood outside in the garden in the dark, and I looked through the window and saw him standing under the cherry tree with his cigarette end glowing. I told him I was getting married to Alex, and he just said, ‘Try and live somewhere nearby. For God’s sake don’t stay in Croatia,’ and I said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, it’s not far on the train.’
“I went into the village and hired someone called Mrs. Kidric to come and clean the house one day a week. I went home and told my daddy he’d have to pay her, and that was that. She was good, she made a big effect. She was like a weightlifter and she walked like a goose, she had moles and a beard, and she had the Partisan Star because she’d strangled a German soldier with her bare hands during the Siege of Belgrade. When she’d done the house she used to take a drink with my father at the kitchen table, and they talked about the war and sang old songs.
“Sometimes I went to the place by the river where Tasha and I used to swim and fool around with no clothes on. I felt some sweet nostalgia. One day I saw her old boyfriend, and he said he used to go there with her sometimes, and I thought, ‘Shit.’ It was his special place too, and I didn’t like it. That’s when I heard she’d gone off with the handsome cavalry officer. He said, ‘I’m just a trainee manager in a canning plant,’ and shrugged his shoulders. I thought he was nice. I said, ‘Tasha wouldn’t ever hurt anyone on purpose, you know,’ and he just snorted.
“I went to see Mama quite a lot, but there wasn’t much point. She’d decided to get old as quickly as she could, and she just wanted to dry out and disapprove of everything. That was her pleasure, to disapprove of things. She’d become very religious, and she gave me a Bible, and I got halfway through all the lists of atrocities in the Old Testament, and gave up. I thought, ‘I can take it when some politician says we’ve got to go out and kill people, but I’m not taking it from God. He ought to know better.’ What do you think, Chris?”
After such a long speech, I was surprised to be addressed. I said, “God and I have an agreement to leave each other alone. I don’t bother Him and He doesn’t bother me. If we meet in the street we raise our hats and smile and give each other a wide berth. So what happened when you went back to university?”
Roza pulled a wry face, and said, “I was phoning Alex all summer and hardly ever got through. He didn’t like phoning anyway. Men don’t like phones. When I got back I discovered he had a new girlfriend, and she looked just like me, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘What? What is this man, that he gets another one just like me?’
“Anyway, I was happy at first when I got back to Zagreb, and I got a bottle of wine, and I thought, ‘We’ll drink this in bed and make love till we can’t do it any more.’ I got some flowers to take to my room, and I phoned him up and I waited for his footsteps outside in the corridor. He put his right foot down much harder than the left one, so he wore out the right shoe first. You knew it was him from the rhythm. When he arrived I threw my arms around him and kissed him all over his face, and I put my hand in his trousers and dragged him into the little bed, and I gave him a blow job and he fucked me twice before he told me about the other girl.”
At this point Roza fell silent. I said, “I’m very sorry. It must have been completely awful.”
“Fucking bastard,” she said, “fucking fucking bastard. You know what he said? He said I was too good for him, and I should get someone better. He said I was too much for him, like I was a hurricane or something. He even cried a bit. Bastard. You know what I did? I walked around the city every night and I didn’t eat, and I got thin like a ghost, and I was biting my lips and making them bleed, just like my mother, and he sent me a little note that said, ‘Roza, I am very sorry. Thanks for all the good times. Alex.’ You know what? I wanted to kill him. That was all I could think about. If I saw him at the university I wanted to stick my fingers in his eyes. In the end I called round at his place, and I went in and wrecked it.”
“Wrecked it?”
Roza smiled with satisfaction. “I broke it all. Everything. Everything smashed.”
“Didn’t he try to stop you?”
“I was a hurricane, just as he said. He just stood there and couldn’t do anything, and then when I left I picked up his favourite record, and I went outside and I broke it into four pieces and I posted them back under the front door. It was the Rolling Stones. ‘Honky Tonk Women.’ ”
“I must remember not to annoy you,” I said.
“I went home and cried in my room, and then decided to leave. I had an idea I must go to England.”
“You didn’t finish your degree?”
“My professor begged me. He said I was the best. I said, ‘I’m going anyway,’ and he s
aid, ‘Your place is open. Come back soon.’ The day before I left he made me a chocolate gateau and left it outside my door, and there was a note saying, ‘I bet you can’t eat it in one go. My wife helped me make it.’ I took it to Marulicev Park, and I did eat it all in one go, except I gave some to the birds. I’ll tell you one good thing that happened because of Alex.”
“Oh, what was that?”
“It made me write poems. I was a mathematician, but I wrote lots of poems and I never stopped, and one day I’ll go home and I’ll get them in a book. Then I’ll be a poet, and every day I’ll be thinking, ‘Thank you, Alex, you fucking bastard.’ Anyway, I went and drank lemon tea with Fatima for the last time, and I never saw her again. She gave me a gold bangle and a gold ring, and she said they were from her dowry, but it didn’t matter, she wanted me to have them. I don’t know what happened to her. She was married to a nice Muslim man and he probably turned out to be a fucking bastard like Alex.
“You know what? Leaving Zagreb was the stupidest thing I ever did in my life.”
EIGHTEEN
Leaving
A broken heart travels with you.
The next time I saw Roza there was a lot to be depressed about. The Ayatollah Khomeini was saying that there wasn’t going to be any democracy in Iran. Everyone was still on strike for preposterous wage rises, and the only good news was that Idi Amin had absconded. Everyone was singing some bloody song that you couldn’t get out of your head called “I Will Survive,” but not many of us reckoned we would. Seeing Roza cheered me up, though. It was like visiting a butterfly house on a rainy day. The daffodils were coming up too, in between all the uncollected rubbish.
When I called round I could hear music coming from upstairs, and I recognised it as something my daughter was listening to at home. She made me listen to it, the way your children sometimes do, and there was a long and complicated guitar part, and I said, “This man is a real musician.” She looked at me and said, “Don’t like it too much, Dad, or you’ll put me off it.” I wish I could remember the name of the group, but the song was something about some jazz musicians called the Sultans of Swing. I still hear it on the radio sometimes, and it takes me back to those days, because for ages when I went round to see Roza you would hear the Bob Dylan Upstairs trying to work it out on an electric guitar.
I said to Roza, “So what happened next? Did you come here straight away?”
She laughed a little bitterly and said, “I went to bloody Bosnia.”
“Why?” I was trying to imagine a map of Yugoslavia, and to visualise where Bosnia was. It didn’t work, so, as often before, I had to look it up when I got back to Sutton.
“I had big trouble at home. Both of them telling me I was crazy, and didn’t I know I was messing up my life, and all those kinds of things. I just wanted to go away somewhere. I thought maybe if I went away I could leave myself behind. Flying away is for people who want to do a suicide without killing themselves.”
“It doesn’t work?”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t bloody work. You have to take yourself along when you go. It didn’t work in bloody Bosnia.”
“I thought you wanted to come to England.”
She pulled one of her wry expressions. “I went to the embassy on Generala Zdanova. It works like this: you don’t get a visa without a work permit, and you don’t get a work permit without a visa, and you don’t get either of them without a job, and you don’t get a job without both of them. It’s simple. Everyone said, ‘Look, Roza, what you do is go there as a tourist, and you spend time in a language school, and they give you permission to stay if you’re studying English. Then you find some work because sooner or later somebody likes you and gives you a job.’ So I decided to do it like that, but I had to save up money first, and that’s why I went to bloody Bosnia, because I got a job in a timber yard, working in the office.
“It was a shitty little place, like a village on the side of a hill with nothing but trees. Every morning at dawn the bloody muezzin woke me up and drove me crazy with all that wailing. I’d never had to live with Muslims before, and these ones weren’t sophisticated like Fatima. I like it when you go to Sarajevo, they’re modern people, but these ones, I didn’t understand them, and they thought that I was shit. Some of them spat in the path of infidels. I thought, ‘Shit, I’m living with savages.’ All those years of living under Tito, and it hadn’t made any difference.
“I had a little room above a bakery, and I was there all alone every evening after work, with no one to talk to and nothing to do except get angry with Alex. I couldn’t go out because all the men thought I was available for a fuck, and I realised that the men called me ‘the cat’ because of how I kept fighting them off, and the women called me ‘the bitch’ because they thought I was trying to screw their husbands. I used to get men offering me money because they thought that if I was an infidel woman I must be a whore.
“Then one day something happened. It was on a public holiday, and I was just walking in the street when somebody shouted at me from the other side, and this skinny Albanian guy just ran over and started trying to kiss me. Anyway, I hit him. He said, ‘Your anger makes you more beautiful.’ I said, ‘Get lost,’ and he said, ‘When I saw you from across the street, I knew I had to make love with you. It was fate.’
“ ‘Oh bullshit,’ I said, and he said, ‘No no no, it’s true. It’s God’s will. Can we go and talk somewhere? It’s very necessary.’
“I looked at him and thought that actually he looked quite nice. He had warm eyes. He said, ‘Where do you live?’ and I made the mistake of pointing to my little room above the bakery. He just grabbed my arm, and he dragged me in there, right past the owners of the shop, and they did nothing at all even though I was in distress and it was bloody obvious. He said, ‘She’s my little sister,’ and they just gawped like a couple of fish.
“Upstairs he pushed me into a corner with one hand, and he was trying to undress himself with the other, and he was talking all this rubbish that he must have got out of a poetry book, about how it was destiny, and I was one line in space and he was another, and now we were meeting because the lines were always bound to meet. I was just trying to get his hand off me, and I was thinking that I ought to scream for help, but somehow I was too embarrassed.
“Then he had to let go of me so that he could get his trousers off, and I took the chance, and I grabbed a lamp from the bedside table, and I was waving it at him and telling him to get out.
“He just looked at me and put his hand in his pocket and he brought out this big dirty roll of money. He offered it to me and said, ‘Look. For you.’ I tried to hit him with the lamp, but he got out of the way. He put his clothes back on and he just said, ‘Mad bitch, me and my brothers are going to come back and teach you something. You’re not going to be waiting long, so don’t worry, mad bitch, don’t worry.’
“In that kind of place those Albanians all have twelve brothers, and they all carry hunting rifles in public. They get into blood feuds and they do honour killings, and they live up to their threats, so I didn’t sleep all night, and in the morning I packed up my things and I took the first bus to Sarajevo and then the first bus to Belgrade. Before I left I confronted the owners of the bakery. I said, ‘Why didn’t you help me?’ and the man said, ‘We stay out of things,’ and it was then that I realised that even for them I was just a piece of Christian shit even though I’d been paying rent and I wasn’t actually even a Christian. I said, ‘You disgust me,’ and then I left. Ever since then I started hating those people, because it gives you no choice if they just think you’re shit. I did two months in that shitty place, and if I never go back, it’s a good reason to die a little bit happy.
“When I got home I went to see Miss Radic, and Tasha, and I went into town to see my mother a few times. I was waiting for my passport and exit permit, and I got my father to sign the papers because he thought I was only going to Italy. Alex and me, we used to have this fantasy about going to Dub
rovnik or Trieste and getting work on a rich man’s boat, and getting around like that. Lots of young people were doing things like that. I thought, ‘I’m going to do it anyway.’ As the Albanian said, I was just a mad bitch.
“One morning I got up after my father went to work and I tried to write him a long letter about what I was doing, but somehow I couldn’t express myself. It was all covered with crossing-out, and the words and feelings got all jumbled and I kept wanting to cry, so I gave up. I went upstairs and I put my fingers in the bullet holes just as I did when I was little, and I looked at the bed where Tasha and I used to giggle all night, and I looked at my teddy bears, and out in the orchard I could see the old carthorse eating fodder, and I told myself, ‘It’s OK, you’ll be back in a year.’
“I went into Belgrade to see my father, and I found out that it’s difficult to get into an office when it’s to do with state security. I could hardly get past the policeman at the door, and then the receptionist didn’t want to phone up to my father’s office. When I finally got there I was shocked by how small and cramped it was. I always thought my daddy was more important. There were piles of paper everywhere, and it hadn’t been painted in years, and the filing cabinet had a drawer that wouldn’t close. On the wall there was the usual picture of Tito, but it was all faded and the corners were turning up and a bit torn. There was a big black-and-white photograph of a beautiful young woman in partisan dress, and across the bottom, in big confident handwriting, it said, ‘With all my love forever, Slavica.’
“My daddy pointed at my suitcase and said, ‘I didn’t know you were going today.’ I said, ‘Neither did I.’ He said, ‘I wish you would stay. You do know you’ll get practically nothing for dinars, don’t you? It’s Italy, is it?’
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