A Partisan's Daughter a Partisan's Daughter

by Louis de Bernières

  “What I did was, I sat in front of the mirror and I talked to myself. I said, ‘Roza, you’re a stupid bitch,’ but I didn’t say it in an angry way. I said it as if it was a matter of fact. I said, ‘Hey, Roza, you fucked up the best years of your life.’ I said, ‘Your brain’s half dead, you stupid bitch.’ I thought of this excuse, I said, ‘Yeah, but you were fucked over by the Big Bastard and his shitty friend,’ and I shrugged, like this, and I replied to myself, ‘Well, tough shit, Roza. With any luck they’re dead. People like that don’t get to have long lives.’ I said to myself, ‘Hey, Roza, you haven’t got any friends except the ones at the club, and you haven’t got any dreams, you’re just a stupid bitch who crapped on herself.’

  “I talked with Val and Bergonzi that night, and Bergonzi said, ‘Well, doll, I wouldn’t want to see you go, but enough’s enough, innit? This place does you in after a while. Better get out before you ain’t got no life left.’ I said, ‘I don’t really want to go,’ and Val said, ‘Well, darlin’, it comes sooner or later for all the girls. There’s that moment, and they just know they gotta go. We wouldn’t take it personal. Between you and me, darlin’, we’re thinking of selling up and going somewhere nice anyway. There’s this little place in Devon we’ve been thinking about.’ ‘Ten years here, and I’ve got brain damage,’ said Bergonzi. ‘You and me both,’ said Val.

  “So I left, and they had a party for me and gave me presents. I cried when I walked out for the last time, and even the Grill gave me a hug. And then a very nice thing happened, because the Bob Dylan Upstairs moved in, and it gave me someone to talk to. I talked and talked until my face nearly fell off. He was building engines up in the top floor because there’s no proper roof up there, and he was making big meals in a wok, and he put garlic and onions and tomatoes and oregano in everything, so it reminded me of being in Dalmatia. He got the downstairs toilet working, and he put the doors back on straight, and he found wood in skips and mended the stairs, and he filled up the holes in the walls with white stuff, and he put flowers in tubs out in the backyard, and he cleared away all the chip wrappers from the front. I looked at him and his improvements, and thought, ‘There’s always something to do.’

  “After we became friends I made him listen to all my poetry.”

  “Just as you did with me?”

  “Yes, Chris. It was the same. You and the Bob Dylan are the best friends I ever had. You know, I got better because of you and him. He planted sunflowers for me once. He told me all sorts of things about himself. You know, he’s always been in love with Françoise Hardy because she reminds him of the first girl he was in love with. He listens to Françoise Hardy when he’s not listening to Bob Dylan.”

  I couldn’t remember who Françoise Hardy was, and once again I had to go and find out later. Apparently Mick Jagger described her as “the ideal woman.” I suppose there must be such a woman, somewhere. Anyway, it sounded like a good recommendation, and I found a cheap record in WH Smith. I didn’t understand the French songs well, but it was all very pleasant and sad. My daughter caught me listening and said it wasn’t cool to like Françoise Hardy these days, and I just said, “Well, I’m not, am I? Dads aren’t supposed to be with it, are they?” and she replied scornfully, “Dad, no one says ‘with it’ any more. And while I’m on the subject, nobody says ‘square’ or ‘groovy’ either.”

  I said to Roza, “I liked listening to your poems, even though I didn’t understand a word. It sounded like waves breaking.”

  “They’re shit,” said Roza, “I know they are. But all foreign poetry sounds good as long as you don’t understand it. Did I ever tell you about the Bob Dylan and the dog?”

  “No,” I said, feeling another twinge of jealousy.

  “We had this dog next door that was barking and barking and barking, even at night, and we got very annoyed. It was keeping us awake, and you had to keep turning up the television. Anyway, we encouraged each other, and we got more and more angry, and so we went round next door to complain, and we found it was a sick old man who couldn’t go out any more, and he had this Alsatian that was just dying of frustration, so we started taking it for walks.

  “It was a nice dog, really friendly and silly and bouncy. We threw sticks for it. It smelled very sweet behind the ears, like toast with honey. We took it out at half past five every day, when the Bob Dylan came back from the garage, and in the end the old man just let it out at twenty past five and it came and waited on our doorstep. We took it to the park where there were ducks and little old ladies with bags of bread, and dogs. I got excited about seeing flowers and squirrels again for the first time in years, and I loved those fat bees with their furry backsides sticking out of the bells. If it was sunny we lay on the grass and ate ice cream. When we came home I made Viennese coffee and we carried on talking. In the end the old man died, and the son took the dog, but we still went out in the park.

  “You know, going out with the dog was one of the things that brought me back to living. When I leave London I’ll miss the little parks with the ducks forever and ever. That’s what I love the most.”

  I said, “You’re not thinking of going, are you?” The thought made me feel a little desperate, as if I had lost her already.

  “I’ve this idea,” she said. “I’d like to go back to Zagreb and finish my degree, and I want to make it up with my father.”

  “Don’t go,” I said, and she smiled and squeezed my hand. She said, “You’re so sweet.”

  I said, “Do you fancy the Bob Dylan?” and she replied, “Oh no, it’s not him I’d like. He’s too young, and he’s always sad about something, and he’s like a little brother. I want someone more grown up.”

  I said, “Do you still have a disengaged heart?”

  “Oh,” she laughed, “you remembered about Miss Radic.”

  I said, “You’re avoiding the question.”

  “No. I don’t really know. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t think I have. I feel better about it all now.”

  “Do you think you’d ever do that again?”

  “What?”

  “You know, sell yourself.”

  She looked at me very straight and said, “No, of course not. But anything’s possible, isn’t it? Even you might do it if you were desperate. There are men who hang about at public toilets. They’re junkies, and they’re selling their mouths and backsides, and they’re all people who thought they’d never do anything like that.”

  “Are there?” I said. “Really?” and she laughed at me incredulously. “Maybe I haven’t been to the right toilets.” I felt like an innocent.

  “Nobody sees what they don’t know,” said Roza. “Maybe it’s better like that.” She paused, smiled coyly, and said, “Next time you come, I’ve got something I want to tell you.”

  “Have you? What is it? Can’t you tell me now?”

  She raised a teasing eyebrow, and smiled coyly again. “I’m not telling you now. I’ve been bursting to tell you for ages, but I didn’t have the courage. Now I think I do, so come back in about…five days. By the way, I think I’ve completely run out of stories. I hope it doesn’t matter too much. You will come back anyway, won’t you?”

  I had never seen her more bright-eyed and animated. I left that Monday with the five hundred pounds still nestling in the breast pocket of my jacket, and went to call on Dr. Patel, who’d just got excited about a new drug he’d heard about. I said I didn’t have a clue when or if it would become available. Doctors are like everyone else, always waiting for miracles.

  TWENTY-SIX

  A Malign Part of Myself

  You don’t have to be mad to long for someone as much as I longed for her.

  I was still enduring the sleepless nights and the tormenting desire that didn’t even go away when I took direct action or dosed myself up with whisky. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Roza sitting in front of me, talking and smiling. In my imagination she was still smoking, even though she’d given it up. I could see with my mind’s eye every curve of
her body, and I thought I could imagine perfectly what she looked like when she was naked, especially as I had had glimpses of her in her window, late at night. I could feel her hands and lips on me. I had pretty reveries about marrying her and taking her away and starting a new life with her, full of interest and good conversation, and inexhaustible, languorous sex. I think I was half mad. If I’d been American I probably would have gone to see a psychiatrist. We all get passions, though. You don’t have to be mad to long for someone as much as I longed for her. I did what you do: I made her into my entire world, and she became the world in which I lived. I didn’t have any plans or hopes that didn’t have her in them.

  The next time I called in it was the day that Sebastian Coe broke the record for the mile. I’d just heard about it. I remember thinking that there wasn’t really much point in running, unless you were being chased. I was glad I wasn’t him, doing all that running just for the sake of it. How would it feel to be him as an old man, looking back and realising that he’d spent his entire youth hurtling around running tracks? He could have been learning the piano or something.

  Before going to her house I got drunk. It was accidental, in the way that getting drunk often is. I’d gone to the pub at lunchtime with one of my doctors, so I was already primed, and then later on in the evening I’d run into an old friend in Highgate. He was a Cypriot called Alejandro, and we’d been in the school soccer team together. I was the left back and he was the goalkeeper, and he could do the most amazing leaps and dives that were rather more theatrical than effective. I’d seen him from time to time ever since. He had a garrulous wife, five kids, and a job importing all manner of things from Greece and Cyprus, including bouzoukis, pistachio nuts, and impoverished relatives. He had a convertible Mercedes, so he took the mickey out of me for having a shit-brown Allegro, and then he persuaded me that we should go out for a meal in a Greek restaurant, so I rang home and said I was going to be late. I could just imagine the Great White Loaf lying in bed snoring when I got back, in a nylon nightie and her hair in curlers, with She magazine open at the problem page.

  Al had turned into quite a hedonist since I last saw him, and somehow I got caught up in his mood. I don’t drink much usually, because it gives me insomnia and tends to make me aggressive, and I hate the feeling of being out of control, but for a while I wasn’t too badly affected. I wouldn’t normally have had an aperitif, and nor would I have got through that amount of wine, or topped it all off with that Greek brandy. Al was a lot of fun, he knew hundreds of stupid jokes, and being with him was just like being young again. The evening became hilarious, and the Greek waiters made it even worse by giving us a lot of free top-ups, plus plates to smash. Then the patron came and joined us because Al was an old customer, and vaguely related, so the flow of booze became unlimited. I know they were just being hospitable, and I don’t blame anyone except myself for what happened afterwards.

  Looking back on it, the events that followed had a terrible inevitability about them. I should have taken a taxi home, because I was far too drunk to drive. I turned down Al’s offer to sleep at his house, partly because I was frightened of having to explain myself to the Great White Loaf when I finally did get home, and partly because I baulked at the cost of a taxi all the way to Sutton. It was very late, and I thought there wouldn’t be much traffic anyway. I did what drunks always do: I underestimated the degree of my drunkenness, and I overestimated my ability to drive.

  It is easy enough to drive through Archway if you’re going home to Sutton from Highgate. You just go down Highgate Hill. After that I should have gone down Junction Road towards Kentish Town and Camden, but when I got to the big roundabout, I thought, “Why don’t I just drop in on Roza? Yes, I want to see Roza. I want to see Roza and give her a big hug, and tell her just how wonderful she is.” I remember those words that I was going to say: “Roza, you really are wonderful.” I went down Holloway Road and turned left into her street. I had only driven a short way, but it was a miracle that I even got that far. I was leaning forwards, staring pop-eyed at the road ahead, and blinking and shaking my head so as not to become hypnotised by it. The wipers were squeaking on the windscreen because it wasn’t raining. I think I must have turned them on, thinking that the switch was the one for the lights. That means that I probably didn’t have my lights on at all.

  When I got to my destination I went and had a long pee in the doorway of one of the boarded-up houses, and I seem to remember not being able to get the zip done up again because my shirt had caught in it. It was a two-handed job to sort the problem out, and I needed one of my hands to hold onto things so that I didn’t keel over. My flies must have been undone during everything that ensued. I pressed the bell for quite a long time before I remembered that it had never worked. I banged on the door with my knuckles, and when that didn’t work, I started shouting. “Roza! Roza! It’s me! Roza!”

  Someone opened a window opposite and a coarse woman’s voice said, “Fuckin’ belt up, will you? We’re trying to get some bleedin’ sleep.” I turned and nearly fell down the steps, but I managed to wave a Harvey Smith at her and say something intelligent like “Fuck off, you slag.”

  Then Roza opened the door. She was dressed in white pyjamas printed with roses, and a fluffy pink dressing gown with matching fluffy pink slippers. “Roza!” I said, and lunged at her trying to take her into my arms, but I missed and fell forward into the hallway, so that she had to step back smartly. I got upright by scrabbling at the wall. I leaned against the doorpost of her room, and looked at her with what I fancied to be doggish devotion. I was sweating, my hair was dishevelled, and my tie at half mast. I discovered in the morning that it had long streaks of congealed taramasalata and hummus down it.

  Roza said, “You’re drunk, Chris,” and I said, “No, I am not, I am not drunk, no, I have never, never, never been more sober in my life.”

  She said, “It’s quarter to two in the morning,” and I said, “Is it? Is it? Really quarter to two? I thought you were used to it.”

  “Used to it?”

  “In that knocking shop, you know, staying up all night.”

  “It was a hostess club,” said Roza.

  “It was a knocking shop,” I said, suddenly feeling angry. “It was a bloody knocking shop. Course it bloody was. What else was it?”

  “You’re drunk. Just go home, Chris. I’m going back to bed.”

  I made an effort to retrieve the situation by being humorous. I went down on one knee and spread my arms, as if pleading. I said, “Take me with you, Roza, take me to bed with you.”

  She looked down at me sternly and said, “No, Chris, you’re drunk. Come back when you’re feeling better.”

  I felt another surge of rage. In retrospect it’s easy to make excuses. I had a lot to be enraged about. I had endured all those years of being taken for granted and being given less and less in return by the parasite at home. I’d been through years of disappointment and self-hatred for never having amounted to anything. I’d seen people all around me apparently living purposeful and happy lives, but all I had managed to achieve was the despair of the common man who lives in a vacuum.

  She repeated, “Go home, Chris,” and I just exploded. All that bottled-up anger and resentment suddenly welled up out of me. I called her a bitch, among other things. I was reeling about in her hallway, saying, “Bitch, bitch, you bloody fucking bitch.” Then I heard my own repulsively whiny voice saying, “Why can’t I come to bed with you? Why can’t I?”

  “After calling me a bitch?”

  I swayed on my feet, trying to look her in the eyes, but the effort was too much, so I had to lean back against the wall. I was breathing heavily, and I was just beginning to feel sick. It was then that some malign part of myself made me reach into my breast pocket and take out the Manila envelope full of the crumpled fivers and tenners of the Premium Bond fund that I’d stowed away over the past few months. I waved it in her face contemptuously, and said, “What about this then? What about thi
s, eh? Does this make any difference? Does it?” I thrust it into her hands.

  Roza looked perplexed and said, “What is it?”

  “Five hundred,” I said. “Five hundred quid. Or has it gone up like every bloody thing else?”

  Her face went blank, she looked down at the floor for a very long while, the envelope in her hand, and then she lifted her head and said very softly, “I always thought you were a very lovely man.” There were tears in her eyes, and they were just beginning to trickle down her cheeks.

  That stopped me in my tracks, and my rage abruptly vanished. A great cloud of weariness came down and swallowed me up. I felt so sick at heart that I couldn’t say anything at all. I went to the door, paused to get my balance, and then stumbled down the steps.

  I drove some way, thinking that I could get home, but then realised that I didn’t have a clue where I was. I was also feeling extremely nauseous. I managed to stop the car, and I got out just in time to vomit through the railings of what must have been Clissold Park. I’d been there a few times with Roza when she was on one of her gleeful missions to see old English ladies feeding bread to ducks, and bald deserted middle-aged men throwing sticks into the water for their mongrels.

  I was sick for quite a long time. It felt as though I was being kicked in the stomach. I had the horrible acid taste of bile burning in my throat, and thick strings of bitter saliva hanging from my lips. My eyes watered, and my head broke out in a cold perspiration that ran under my shirt collar and down my back.

  When it seemed that nothing more would come, I relieved myself through the railings and went back to my car. As I was about to get in I noticed my new tyres, shining in the yellow lamplight, and remembered that I’d bought them with money from the envelope. The thought of her counting it made me wince. I started up the Allegro and got as far as the end of Clissold Road before I realised that there was not the slightest chance of my ever getting home. I ran the car up against the kerb and turned off the ignition. I managed to clamber into the back of the car, wrapped the rug around me and fell into a stupor.