‘But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!’
At the first sign of trouble the German singers stopped singing and hurriedly evacuated the room, leaving behind the victorious international choir, a dissonant but as democratic a group as you might find, formed spontaneously by all those who had something against Nazism, and they were many. They sang their hearts out.
‘Hitler has only got one ball,
Goering has two but very small
Himmler has something sim’lar
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!’
The situation resolved itself when Mr Black stepped into the middle of the room and addressed the guests in his usual, calm voice.
‘I’m sorry for the trouble, ladies and gentlemen. It’s all over now. Everything is all right. Enjoy yourselves. Have fun!’
The pianist played a light American tune, the theme song of a new American film that the censors in Portugal had banned. Slavcho the Bulgarian from the band took over the microphone and started singing:
‘You must remember this.
A kiss is just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh.
The fundamental things apply.
As time goes by...’
* * *
By the time Inspector Cardoso arrived half an hour later, having been informed of what was going on, the band was playing to a half-empty room. The happy, tipsy crowd had withdrawn, some retiring to bed, others choosing to move on to the casino, bars and brothels.
The inspector took his regular seat at the bar. He did not want to talk to anyone until he had had at least one more glass of Scotch on the house. Then, when the evening programme was over, he asked Mr Black and the bandleader to come to the card room.
He started off in a self-pitying voice:
‘Tell me, gentlemen, what did we need all this for?’
Like schoolboys, the two men looked down at the floor. Even Mr Black did not have the courage to meet Cardoso’s eye. As a result, the policeman had no other choice than to continue.
‘You should be ashamed of yourselves, making me work at this hour of night. It’s not right, gentlemen, it’s really not... You got me out of bed, for God’s sake...’ He heaved a sigh. ‘You’re in charge, Mr Black, so tell me, how did you allow such a public disturbance to happen?’
‘I didn’t think they would take the song so personally... But no need to worry. Everything is under control now.’
The inspector turned to the bandleader.
‘And who ordered the controversial song to even go on the programme?’
The bandleader was so terrified that he immediately went on the defensive.
‘It’s not a controversial song. It’s a love song like any other. Except it’s German... It wasn’t on the list of banned songs... How was I to know...?’
‘Never mind, it doesn’t matter now. That’s all water under the bridge. Let’s see, what conclusion can we draw? There would not have been an incident if you had not forgotten a very important detail, and that is: where you happen to be.’
Here the inspector paused for dramatic effect, looked at the one and then at the other, before addressing himself mostly to Mr Black, even though he knew that none of this was news to him.
‘You forgot that this is Portugal. It is not Germany, or England, or France, gentlemen. I don’t want to have to keep repeating it like a parrot, so never forget that this, for better and for worse, is P-O-R-T-U-G-A-L... Portugal is the land of the Portuguese and we may have our faults but one thing is for certain: we don’t like war and we don’t like trouble. Some people think war is normal, but we, you see, give ourselves the right not to share that opinion. Some people even say that we are cowards. So what, even if we are?! Better a live coward than a dead hero. Right?’
The two men nodded and the inspector continued with his speech.
‘Because of that, because of our love of law and order, we do everything we can to make sure that we have law and order here. And we intend to continue that good tradition. I don’t know if I have made myself clear but there will be no fighting here! Full stop! Who is fighting abroad is of no concern to us at all. AT ALL. What is of concern to us is our PEACE and our EQUIDISTANT NEUTRALITY.’
The policeman spoke with such conviction in the truth of his own words that you had to believe him. But he was not satisfied with the dejected nods of his audience so he went on.
‘It’s true that we are a hospitable people, but only as long as our guests behave decently. We do not support the excessive, we avoid the extreme. Everything can be done nicely, decently, through compromise. And if we can do it, so can foreigners in our country. The moment somebody goes over the top, we say Adeus.’
The poor bandleader, a refugee himself, a Slovak or maybe a Slovene, suddenly thought that he and his colleagues were being threatened with expulsion, and he started fidgeting nervously. Cardoso adopted a more conciliatory tone now.
‘Come now... Let’s put that in the past. There’s nothing we can do about it now. Nobody died. It’s just that I have enough worries without you adding to them so I’m going to ask you for one more favour. Draw up a list of all the songs you play and give it to me by Monday, so I can send it to the censors. If they approve it, you can play all of them. If there’s a problem later, nobody can hold me responsible.’
The meeting was over and Mr Black accompanied Cardoso to the door.
‘These things happen,’ Black again said in his defence.
‘Allow me to remind you, Sir, that all your hotel guests pay a lot of money to have their peace and quiet. It’s not right... It’s really not...’
WHERE THE LAND ENDS AND THE SEA BEGINS
(Notes from exile)
SPECIAL SPANISH RAILWAY TRAIN NO. 2002
1 MAY 1941
Our train is carrying one hundred and twenty lost souls through lands where we don’t belong. Less than a month ago we were diplomats of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia serving in Italy, Albania, Germany. Now we are the banished citizens of a non-existent country protected under international conventions.
‘We’re on a journey with no end in sight,’ said Crnjanski, a colleague from Rome and a poet.
‘A telegraph pole, a telegraph pole, a frozen field, and a view unremittingly dull, and no will to live,’ I said, quoting another poet, Cesarić.
ON THE TRAIN TO LISBON
4 MAY 1941
Without too much wrangling, neutral Portugal granted us a group transit visa on condition that we ‘remain no longer than necessary’. In London our government guaranteed that ‘we would not, under any circumstance, be a burden to the host state’ and that we would leave Portugal ‘as soon as the conditions presented themselves’. And so, we headed westwards.
We arrived at the frontier on a sunny morning. The Portuguese customs officers in their dark blue uniforms and white gloves asked each and every one of us to declare how much money we were carrying. I have eight hundred dollars, that is as much as I managed to save. My older colleagues declared bigger amounts. I heard with my own ears Ambassador Hristić declare twenty-five thousand dollars! The words twenty-five thousand, twenty-five thousand, twenty-five thousand spread from mouth to mouth, compartment to compartment. That same afternoon we continued our journey westwards, across the plain.
ESTORIL
17 JUNE 1941
The strawberries were over, it was the cherry season now, and I had moved to Estoril, to the Hotel Inglaterra. It wasn’t one of the top hotels but it was clean and reasonably priced. Quite by chance I ran into the writer Miloš Crnjanski and his wife Vida. They were staying at the same hotel but because they had too much luggage for one room, they took separate rooms and visited each other.
Waiting is stressful and boring, so to kill time Miloš and I, neighbours now, take a stroll in the park and by the sea every day, and we talk. He is dejected and unhappy. The stench of the dung used to fertilize the rose beds in the park disgusts him. He complains that it’s always hot here, like in Africa, and that the mosq
uitos are bloodthirsty like in the Amazon, that the noisy croaking of the frogs keeps him awake at night and that the birds wake him up too early with their song. He complains that only hot water comes out of the taps in his bathroom but he does not want to sleep in his wife’s room because, he says, the smells wafting in from the hotel kitchen are even worse.
‘I’m lucky. Downstairs in the cellar it’s cool and I don’t hear the birds,’ I said.
ESTORIL
22 JUNE 1941
Some people say that they never bought gold and jewellery for so little; others complain that they never sold them for so little. I see that everybody around me is coping as best he can. I hear horrible stories about young girls and boys from once wealthy families selling their bodies just to survive.
We haven’t received our salaries for three months now. We are living off our savings. Luckily, life here isn’t expensive. The price of a meal for two with good wine in the restaurant is the same as the price of an imported toothbrush in the shop next door. For now, I can make ends meet.
Crnjanski tells me that his wife Vida is selling some of the clothes she bought in Italy. The daughter of the former President of the Republic of Spain and her husband are staying in the room opposite. They are refugees but they have money, and since the two women are the same size, she often comes over to Vida’s room and buys some of her dresses, shoes and leather bags. Miloš doesn’t like it, but he tells himself that maybe it is better to sell their extra clothes now than do it in a rush before they leave. The only thing we still don’t know is if, when and where we will go.
ESTORIL
22 JULY 1941
Yesterday morning Crnjanski said: ‘Please, my friend, come along with me to see Dučić in Lisbon. Vida is indisposed.’ My ear caught the word friend. In the course of these last few wasted months in Portugal, the two of us have spent quite a bit of time together, but friends? I don’t know. I don’t know if he has ever even had any friends.
On the train, Crnjanski told me that Dučić was staying in the city centre, in an elegant hotel on the broad Avenida da Liberdade.
Dučić welcomed us nicely. He was happy, he said, that he could talk to someone in his language. He missed it. In fact, we were a convenient shoulder for him to cry on.
He is a man of deep feeling and he has a dramatic way of speaking, like delivering a soliloquy on the stage. He had not a kind word to say about anybody. He railed against everybody: the English, the Russians, the king, the government, us.
He calls the embassy ‘a grotesque vestige of a non-existent country’. After the embassy in Madrid closed down, he became, de jure, the Yugoslav royal government-in-exile’s accredited ambassador to Portugal. De facto, the embassy is now run by people who are profiteering from the situation. There was an incident when he tried to persuade Kojić, the chargé d’affaires, to hand over the embassy’s cash-box.
He admits that he was the first to raise his voice and call Kojić an ingrate, and the latter, who is certainly thirty years his junior, responded by shouting and hurling crass insults at him, calling him ‘a decrepit old goat’ and a ‘senile old fogey’, saying that he was ‘a shit of a man’ and that he ‘shits in his ambassadorial robes’. The old man, vain as he is, grabbed an inkwell to throw at him but he was so worked up that he dropped it. Then Kojić grabbed a chair, wanting to hit the ambassador with it, but the others stopped him. Ever since, the chargé d’affaires and the downgraded ambassador have been communicating exclusively via the chauffeur. Dučić complains that, to the shock of the Portuguese and contrary to all protocol, he had to go to the Foreign Ministry himself to get his exit visa.
Lastly, some good news. He is thinking of going to America and wants to know if we would go with him. He says that a relative, a prominent man who lives there, could send us a letter of invitation. My friend and I said nothing.
When we were leaving, the ambassador embraced us warmly and again invited us to come with him. Miloš said: ‘The great republic of the United States of America has just one condition for entering the country. You have to show them that you have four thousand dollars.’ To which Mr Dučić replied with surprise: ‘It’s a pity, Crnjanski, that you didn’t manage to save at least that much... A pity.’
ESTORIL
28 JULY 1941
Crnjanski invited me to go for a walk with him last night. ‘Let’s go to the sea, my friend. I find the sea air recuperative.’ We took off our shoes and walked along the beach when suddenly, off in the distance, we saw a man sitting in the sand. ‘Look at Hristić,’ said Crnjanski, ‘sitting and watching the waves roll in.’
Our diplomatic colony is slowly beginning to melt away; one person after another is leaving for England. Hristić is still very much out of favour. He is dogged by rumours that he is working for Germany. But the Germans aren’t asking for him and the English don’t want him. Despite all that money, he’s not welcome anywhere. We walked over to him. ‘There’s no ship and we can’t swim across,’ he said, his eyes glued to the horizon.
‘The Turks say: “Allah gives soup to the one and a spoon to the other”,’ said Crnjanski.
IT’S A SPORTS CAR
It’s a sports car – Bavarian make, white, roof down. It left a cloud of dust in its wake. It hurtled along the narrow roads between the stone walls of the olive groves and the cabbage fields. The young man at the rosewood wheel was racing along as if driving at a rally; too fast for this old, narrow, rutted road.
It was hard to keep up with him. The black Citroën a few bends behind on the road was trying not to lose sight of the white car, without getting too close.
The BMW slowed down; the driver was searching for a road sign. But the sign he was looking for had not been at the last crossroads and was not at this one either. Some men were standing in front of a tavern. It was Sunday, and they had come after church for a quick glass of wine and a chat while the women finished making lunch. When the car pulled up by the side of the road and the driver beckoned to them, three or four of the men ran over, saying ‘Good afternoon’. The others followed to get a better look at that wonder of a car.
‘Quinta dos Grilos?’ the driver with the dark glasses and leather gloves asked. You could tell from the way he pronounced it that he was foreign.
The locals were happy to be of assistance. They removed their caps while talking to him. Everybody knew where the property that used to belong to the viscount was and that some foreigners were living there. They replied loudly, gesticulating, the way people do when talking to somebody who doesn’t speak their language.
Following their directions, the car drove through the freshly cut fields. At the end of a dusty road it came up against a white wall with an iron gate. The gate stood wide open. They were expecting him, as he had told them he was coming. The sign said: ‘Beware of the Dog’. But there was no sound of barking. Not far off a small herd of sheep was chomping at the yellowed grass under the shade of a tree.
Past the gate the car reached an archway made of palm leaves and twigs that let in barely a ray of light to dilute the darkness. A rabbit was faster than a sports car on this rough terrain and the low car had to proceed very, very slowly. Coming out of the tunnel was like emerging from a cave into a sun-drenched, stone-flagged clearing. Above him a blue sky, in front of him an elegant two-storey villa, as big as the chancellery of some impoverished kingdom, its walls painted pink and fronted by a family crest carved in white stone.
He left the car in the shade, next to the sculpture of a Roman soldier. A trickle of water as thin as the thread of sand in an hourglass poured out of the moss-covered stone well into the granite goldfish pond.
Dogs barked at the newcomer, jumping at the iron gate from inside the courtyard. A servant appeared out of nowhere, calmed down the dogs, opened the gate for the visitor and relieved him of the huge bouquet of flowers and prettily wrapped presents he had brought. Running out to welcome him was a long-legged young man, a first year student at best.
‘Duško!
’
‘Look at you, Grada! You’ve grown! Fucking anything these days?’
The men embraced like old friends, as if to test how strong they each were. Two girls were waiting for them at the front door. They kissed him, each on one cheek. Gordana was older than Grada; Lila was the youngest. Duško somehow pulled free and, as good manners dictate, turned to their mother who was standing there waiting for the girls to finish. She was delighted to see them so happy and looking so pretty. Duško moved to kiss her hand, but she stopped him and embraced him instead, clutching him to her breast as if he were one of her own, kissing him on the forehead the way you do only with somebody you’ve known since he was a child.
Their friendship went back several generations and they were part of each other’s family history. Such a display of joy would move anyone, for it was a reminder that we all have or would like to have somebody somewhere who wants to see and hug us. Such encounters are rare anywhere, let alone here in exile, under these circumstances.
They asked after each other’s health. Everybody was alive and well, thank God.
‘How is your family?’ they asked him.
‘Hopefully they are out of danger too, now,’ Duško replied.
They sat down for lunch in the dappled shade of the vine arbour. The smell of home cooking and the sea air, the sound of the ever-present nearby crickets, brought back memories of family gatherings on the terrace of Duško’s house in Dubrovnik.
‘Help yourselves, children. Eat the pie while it’s hot.’
*
They caught up over lunch. Duško started with his own family’s war saga. For a long time, he did not know what had happened to them, he received letters from them erratically and hadn’t talked about them to anybody until now. Who else but close friends would care about such things? He told the Bajlonis everything he knew, just the facts, without embellishment or drama.
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