In April, when the war started there, none of his family happened to be in Belgrade. He was here in Portugal; his older brother Ivo had been drafted as a doctor and was on the Albanian border. After the capitulation, rather than surrender, Ivo changed into civilian clothes and trekked across half of the Balkans to get home.
The rest of the family was in their Dubrovnik villa when the war broke out. With the division of Yugoslavia, Dubrovnik came under the Independent State of Croatia, which treated minority groups brutally, and the Popovs were Serbs and indecently rich. Luckily, their neighbours warned them in time that they were on the list to be murdered. They left to take the night train to Belgrade but were intercepted at the railway station by the Ustasha. His youngest brother, who was still a student, used his best Italian to speak to the Italian soldiers who were there as back-up. That persuaded the commander, if any more persuasion was necessary, that these people were not the sort that should be arrested. After lengthy wrangling with the Ustasha, their necks were saved but they missed their train. The Italians secretly took them to the port where a friend was waiting with a boat and took them to the island of Mljet. There they hid for almost six weeks. In the course of their escape his sister had lost her milk, but her baby survived because the grandmother fed him fish that she had chewed into mush. From Mljet they headed for Belgrade. For a whole week they were on the road, moving sometimes on foot, sometimes by truck and sometimes by ox-cart, but always following the rule that money talks. And finally, one day, they made it home. Duško had no news of them for almost two months. The letter he got from them through the Red Cross said that they were in good health and safe. Not everybody was so fortunate. Duško’s uncle and cousins refused to leave Dubrovnik; it was their home. All three were strung up on a pole in front of their house. His aunt survived. She, too, was saved by the Italians.
Everybody knows that in wartime people die, but when it is someone you know, when it is someone from your own protected circle of people, when there is no rational explanation of the person’s guilt and why they have become a victim, you realize that no one is immune and it makes you very afraid.
‘Oh, children, we’ve become such animals,’ Aunt Radmila said.
For them the war started early Sunday morning on 6 April, when the Luftwaffe bombed a largely defenceless Belgrade. It brought terrible devastation; more than a thousand people were killed. She mentioned several mutual friends who perished and whose houses and property were razed to the ground. One wing of the palace was destroyed and the State Mortgage Bank on Theatre Square was badly damaged; the National Library went up in flames and a bomb fell on the Church of the Ascension, killing people as they said their prayers, people who had sought safety in the house of God.
‘There is no military justification for destroying Belgrade so ruthlessly,’ Duško said shaking his head. ‘Nobody in his right mind would waste so many bombs on us. But our people pretended to be a big power, and Hitler wanted to remind us how little we are. He’s a despicable lunatic. And we, pardon my French, like giving the finger.’
The young ones at the table giggled, and Radmila shrugged her shoulders, because she didn’t like swearing but she could not think of anything better. She went back to telling them about what they had gone through, about the deserted streets as columns of German soldiers entered Belgrade. She talked about how civil war had immediately broken out in the mountains, where people of different religions turned against each other, some taking the side of the occupying forces, others, call them patriots, divided between the monarchists and communists, and a war of all against all.
‘Peasants killing each other with axes, slaughtering each other,’ Radmila said.
The Gestapo moved into the Officers’ Club, right across the way from Sava, their family bank, where Gordana worked. The club was turned into a prison and all day long you could hear screams from the basement. One day, at the start of summer, two prisoners garrotted the guard and escaped. In the bank they saw the young men running through their premises; they did not help them but they did not stop them either. That same day the Gestapo took all the bank employees and lined them up out in the street. The law stipulated that for every German soldier killed, one hundred people were to be executed. Fortunately, the guard they had killed was a Serbian policeman so the rule was not applied, but the staff were terrified. Gordana, as she herself admitted, resorted to her feminine charms. She kept looking the German in the eye until he relented and spared all their lives; he released the women and sent the men to a camp. The German, an officer, finally came to their house to apologize and was invited to stay for tea. It was when he found himself in their family circle, and especially when he saw their late father’s diploma on his office wall showing that he had a doctorate from Berlin, that his apologies started to sound sincere. The German was particularly attentive to Gordana. He called on them several times, always bearing presents. He complained that he had too much work because so many people were denouncing each other that the Gestapo lacked the manpower to check them all out. It had reached the point where they had been obliged to put up a bilingual sign on the door of the occupying forces’ central administration office in Belgrade warning that it was a crime to report on a fellow citizen without credible grounds for suspicion.
‘When I heard that I realized that the world had gone mad and that it was time for us to get out,’ Aunt Radmila said. ‘You, my boy, have studied history more recently than me so you know that every generation of ours goes through a war. It’s like part of our lives. We’re not surprised when war breaks out. I’ve already got three of them under my belt. I wouldn’t be able to bear a fourth.’
They left the properties in the care of friends and family, and put their most valuable paintings in a safe. She talked about the people who had helped them, some out of pity, others for money; about how they had greased palms to obtain visas and passes; about how, encountering all sorts of problems along the way, it took them over two months to get here.
They took the family icon with them when they left, in case anyone thought they were Jewish. They wired whatever money they had in Switzerland to Lisbon. They smuggled in the jewellery.
‘I hid the gold coins in the biscuits I had baked. I made a basketful. The longer you keep them the better they are, so they are perfect for long journeys. I placed the ordinary biscuits on top and the ones with the coins on the bottom. Whenever we were searched Lila would offer the soldiers biscuits. That’s how we got through.’
Radmila mentioned the part about the money only in passing, so that Duško would not worry. She did not dwell on it because, being the daughter of one millionaire and the widow of another, she had no sense of money and anyway thought it was impolite to talk about it.
‘Have you been thinking about where to go from here? And what to do?’ Duško asked.
‘We wanted to move on, but they won’t let us. Nobody seems to want us,’ Radmila said sadly.
When they moved on to practical matters, it was Gordana they turned to.
‘We have submitted all the necessary papers for entry visas to England and America, but again they won’t have us. I think it’s because of my late father. He was friends with former Prime Minister Cvetković who was supposedly close to Hitler. I met with Jovanović, the Prime Minister of the government-in-exile, when he was passing through Lisbon. I asked him to press our case with the English and he promised he would do everything he could. And that was it.’
‘I have the impression that you can kill time and stay here a little longer without worrying about it,’ said Popov.
‘We certainly won’t sit here twiddling our thumbs. We’ll work,’ Gordana said.
There was something Duško seemed not to understand.
‘Who will work?’
‘We will. That’s to say I will,’ Gordana clarified.
‘You? And what exactly will you do?’
Gordana did not hesitate.
‘We are renting the property from an older woman, a vis
countess. We pay her by the month. We’ll see how long that will last. We’re in no hurry, it’s quiet, we have our own springs of water and over twenty hectares of arable land. We won’t go hungry even if the country is occupied. And it costs us only a little more than room and board at the hotel.’
All this was of little interest to Lila, who was only eighteen. She wanted to know more about Duško. They had heard he was in Portugal from Mr Dučić, the ambassador, whom they had run into on the street in Lisbon.
‘What about you? You haven’t told us anything about yourself. How did you get here and what are your plans?’
‘Don’t make me talk about work right now,’ Duško beseeched her.
‘Mr Dučić couldn’t tell us anything about you except that you are a great success when it comes to matters of love. He says you’re twice as good as anybody else,’ said Gordana.
Popov could not but smile. It was no small thing when an old lascivious smooth-talker like Dučić spoke to young girls about romantic affairs, which was as close as he would ever get to love.
‘I don’t know what Dučić told you but I do know that one should never trust writers; they are liars by trade. As for the rest, do you know that I have had a law firm since even before the war? Do you know that?’
They nodded.
‘Well, last summer I came up with an idea for a big project with the English. That’s why I am going to London and in a week or two I am off to America to see if I can do something there.’
But most of their conversation was about what refugees really like to talk about: what they had left behind. With old friends one can talk about it for hours. They asked each other about common friends and acquaintances, recalling the past; they did not have to explain anything to each other.
They took their visitor on a tour of the property. The shed with the cows, the dairy farm, the cellar where the cheese was left on the shelves to age, the chicken coops, the beehives, the granary. The dogs followed them as they walked through the parkland on that summer’s day. They sat in the shade by the lake, eating cake made with fruit they had grown. It was like a Russian novel; the only difference was that they did not drink tea, but Turkish coffee.
Duško did not leave until late in the afternoon. Before going, Radmila put her hands on his shoulders and looked him up and down.
‘How old are you now?’
‘Twenty-nine,’ Duško said.
‘I remember when you were knee high. You were so lively. But so cute.’
* * *
Duško enjoyed seeing them enormously. It was different from all his other recent encounters. He was glad to have somebody nearby who could testify to the existence of such a life. He was happy to have a door he could knock on at any hour and find somebody here, away from home, who was like a close relative. Suddenly he felt an odd pressure in his chest. He was overcome with a strange wistfulness. He did not feel like going back to his hotel room. He looked at his watch. It was too early for the casino, and he was still too full from lunch to go out to dinner. He stopped at an intersection where two signs pointed in opposite directions, one to the right and Cascais, and the other to the left and Lisbon. He stopped for a moment, thought about it and decided to drive towards Lisbon and the onset of nightfall.
Duško found his way around town easily. He drove to the old quarter and its little, dimly lit streets. He parked in front of a building he would have been hard put to find had he not been there before. He climbed up to the first floor and knocked at a door that had no name plate on it. The bolt moved, an eye peered out at the visitor, and the door immediately opened.
A middle-aged lady, once a striking beauty, dressed in a long piece of dark blue silk, greeted him. Her eyebrows were like raised thin arches, her cheeks powdered and she wore eye shadow and lipstick. Strings of pearls hung down her neck and breasts, and big pearl earrings were suspended from her earlobes.
She was happy to see him. She called him by his name, speaking in a slow, soft, husky voice. She led him down the narrow hallway to the sitting room. The visitor opened the curtains just enough to peek out of the window. It was dark; under the flickering streetlights the white marble cobblestones glistened like fish scales. He could not see the black Citroën but he assumed it was there somewhere. He stretched out on the brocade divan. The etchings on the blood-red velvet wallpaper were such as you would not find in a family home. Gold-framed mirrors hung in places where no decent house would have them. The big ceiling mirror reflected the same thing, only upside-down: Japanese screens, Indian drapery, Asian furniture, bouquets of peacock feathers, illustrations of couples in the throes of love, lampshades softening the light, tassels the colour of old gold, and the metallic sheen of silk. A thin, bleating voice coming from the gramophone horn was singing a pre-war Argentinian hit song. A bottle of champagne on ice arrived by his side.
‘I won’t drink tonight,’ Duško said, signalling to the woman not to remove the champagne. ‘No, Madame. Leave it. The girls will need it.’
‘It’s early. The girls aren’t ready yet... You tell me which one you want and I’ll hurry her up...’
‘No need to hurry. Any of them who feel like company can come when they’re ready. As for me, bring me a hookah and some good hash. I feel like some company,’ he said with a wink. ‘I haven’t come here today for gymnastics. I’m feeling wistful. I just need company.’
THE GRAND CASINO ESTORIL
THE SCENT and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling – a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension – becomes unbearable and the senses awake and revolt from it.
Ian Fleming, Casino Royale
He opened his eyes to darkness. He was lying on his back among the crumpled sheets and crushed scattered pillows. He did not know whether it was the church bells that woke him up or the blackbird singing in the laurel bush under his window. He did not even know what time of day it was; he was still too dazed to count the bells, and since there was no light he could not see the dial on his wristwatch. Judging by the sound of the voices in the hallway, of the distant murmuring and doors opening and closing, he guessed the day was well under way.
He moved carefully to get out of bed, the way you do when you get up in the dead of night; he sat on the edge of the bed for a few seconds, his feet planted on the floor, and tried to pull himself together. Afraid that if he put it off for much longer he might have a change of heart and go back to bed, he mustered all his strength and stood up. He teetered the few steps to the window and pulled back the curtains. The little light that managed to seep through the cracks of the closed shutters sufficed for him to look at his watch. There was no need to hurry; he had slept through breakfast and it was still too early for lunch. He opened wide the wooden slats of the shutters.
Blinding sunlight poured in and the rhythmic chirping of crickets seemed to pulsate through the air. Wisps of a breeze wafted into the room, replacing the stale air, diluting the bad breath of the man who had sobered up in his sleep, alleviating the stench of tobacco smoke that permeated his clothes and hair after a heavy night. Vestiges of the recognizable smell of recent love-making and traces of perfume disappeared in an instant. Slowly, unsteadily, he made his way to the bathroom. Sometimes you find that in the morning the room tends to sway a little.
*
Not half an hour later, Duško was sitting in the half-shade of the hotel garden’s pergola, freshly shaven, perfumed, immaculately dressed, a flower in his lapel and, most importantly, smiling. The waiter wished him a good morning.
The tinge of empathy in the waiter’s smile only showed that there were no secrets at the Palácio. His smile proved that the waiter had sensitive information about this guest. Colleagues from the night shift had told him that Popov had again been observed in the early hours of the morning, returning from the casino in the company of not one but two ladies, and it was not until dawn that they emerged from his room. There was that genuine respect t
hat men naturally feel when they recognize a great military leader, hunter or charmer.
Popov was a regular guest. Without even ordering he was served a black coffee, à la turque, to clear his head, and a glass of water to quench his thirst from the night before. The waiter tried to leave a bread roll on the table as well, but the guest waved it away as if the very sight of it made him sick. The waiter then discreetly suggested that while waiting for lunch the gentleman might at least have a little snack. Fruit perhaps. The offer was met with a smile and polite shake of the head, and the waiter, seeing that his efforts were in vain, bowed and withdrew. He did not even offer to bring the guest the newspapers; he knew there was nothing in the news that would amuse him.
You know that feeling when you think that somebody is looking at you? Sitting in that same translucent shade, just a few tables away, was another guest: a tall, lanky man, around Popov’s age, maybe a year or two older. He was wearing a superbly tailored navy blue suit that was too warm for the weather, and reading an issue of the London Times that was several days old. He appeared to be taking a keen interest in Popov; he kept peering from behind his newspaper. Although sitting sideways, Popov could feel the man’s eyes on him.
Popov paid little attention to men, but he could hardly be unaware of the long-legged Englishman. On the second day, the new guest followed him wherever he went. Popov’s demeanour and attitude had always attracted attention; he was used to being an object of curiosity and it did not bother him. But having somebody’s eyes obsessively trained on him like that had only happened to him a few times before, always with women, and he knew how to handle women, even obsessive ones. Whether the Englishman was crazy or simply did not realize that he appeared aggressive, the point was that he kept looking around and glancing at Popov. For want of a better solution, Popov pretended not to notice.
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