A Partisan's Daughter (3 page)

I shrugged. At that time I only wanted to sleep with her, really, but when you’re fascinated by a woman you’ll settle for her stories, because that’s how you stay en route.

“My whole life, one shit thing after another,” she said, blowing out smoke and laughing. “Still, you know, I like it when I think about it. It was my life, and I like it. I had adventures.”

FOUR

This Father of Mine

My father was a partisan with Tito.

T
hat’s what I told him. I liked to talk about this father of mine. I never spoke harshly about him, and Chris found that surprising, in view of what I said about him. The thing is, if you want to seem to be interesting, you shouldn’t be predictable.

I said my father had an eyepatch that made him resemble a pirate, and he had five bullets left in him from the war. Every year he went to the hospital for an X-ray, and he’d come back and pin it up against the kitchen window. He’d check up on the meandering of the bullets from one part of his body to another. What he was hoping was that one day they would start poking through his skin so that he could pull them out and keep them, all in a line on the mantelpiece. That was his ambition. He liked to say, “One day one of these bullets might stray into my lungs, and I’d be dead, just like that,” and he’d raise an eyebrow and snap his thumb and forefinger.

He taught me a little routine about how he might die. I acted it out for Chris once when we’d had some wine and got a bit merry and I was going on about my father again.

“
OK
,” I said, mimicking this father of mine, “the bullet goes into my lungs, and I get a pain. It’s a big pain. I put my hand to my chest, and I go, ‘Aahhhhh,’ and then I wave my hands, like this, and then I cough, Uh! Uh! Uh!, and suddenly I get blood out of my mouth,
OK
? It goes down my chin, and my mouth fills up, and I am coughing and coughing, and Mama comes out,
OK
? And she says, ‘Husband, you’re spoiling that clean shirt that I just washed,’ and I am lying on the floor dying and Mama is sprinkling salt on the bloody shirt to try and soak it out.”

By then I was on that greasy floor pretending to die, with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of wine in the other. I said, “And then my father he always said the same thing, he said, ‘They’ll take me away wrapped up in the national flag, and I’ll go and be made into meat pies at the factory, and Marshall Tito, he’ll serve me up to the President of the United States who’s come on a visit, and my bones they’ll grind up and spread on the fields, and some bones will be made into glue for sticking books together, and that’s how I’m going to be useful when I’m dead.”

Chris looked down at me, and there was real affection and enjoyment in his eyes, and he said, “You did this every year when he came home with an X-ray?” and so I said, “Also at parties for his friends.”

“You must have been a sweet little girl,” Chris said, and I replied, “Even inside every damn fucked-up woman there’s some sweet little girl.”

Chris said I should have been an actress, and it was a miracle that I’d managed to put on that dying act without spilling any wine.

I said that my father liked to frighten me by raising his eyepatch so that I could see the eyelid sunken into the socket, and then he’d chase me about the house pretending that his hands were claws, and making animal noises. After he’d done it enough times, it stopped frightening me, and it was just another game that ended in tickling. My friends and my brother’s friends never stopped being impressed by the eye socket, however.

Chris liked me telling these tales about my father. He was a patient person and he thought that I really needed to talk about this other man who was such a big thing in my life. I kept telling him these stories as if they were the most important in the world, and he sat in the filthy armchair and sipped my coffee and just looked at me with his eyes full of pleasure. I probably could have been saying anything at all. I’d hooked him almost straight away, and I was giving myself a problem, wondering what to do with him now that I had him dangling on the line. I had to think about what it was that I wanted from Chris.

“My father was like a mountain,” I said. “He was a monolith. He was somewhat awe-inspiring…He could eat enormous piles of food and never get fat, and he sat at mealtimes with his fork and knife in his fists, and just talked about the war. He was like a lot of people of his generation. The war came, and then afterwards the survivors could never stop talking about it because they were so amazed to be still alive. He was fond of saying, ‘My life is a damn epilogue, and the epilogue’s a whole lot longer than the damn story.’ He’d raise his glass and say, ‘Here’s to a long and happy epilogue, and here’s to all the poor bastards who didn’t make it…’ ”

I told Chris I was brought up to be a communist. If you were Yugoslavian you had to be, back then, in the same way that some people have to be Muslim or Catholic, just because of the accidents of birth. I didn’t have to know much about it. In London in those days lots of people were going around saying they were communists. A certain kind of person thought it made them seem heroic. Archway was full of communist factions that truly despised each other. In Yugoslavia we used to have a saying that when communists had to make up a firing squad, they formed a circle. Anyway, nobody believes any of it any more, but back then in Archway we had the Revolutionary Communist Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the International Marxist Group, the Socialist Workers Party, every possible kind of revolutionary and socialist this and that, and then there were various kinds of anarchists. Everyone knew that half the people at the meetings were from the British secret services, and they were just spying on each other. Nobody with any sense believes any of it any more. I wouldn’t bother now, but I did defend Tito. It was a matter of being loyal. Chris never argued with me about it very much, and I bet he was really a Conservative. He once told me he was a Liberal, and even put up the posters in his window and went canvassing. When he was faced with that box in the polling station, though, I bet his little cross went beside the name of the Conservative. He moaned like everyone else when the Conservatives got in, but you couldn’t help noticing that even though Mrs. Thatcher won three elections you hardly ever met anyone who admitted having voted for her.

My father was a proper communist though, an out-and-out Stalinist, and it didn’t do him too much good after the war, when it turned out that Tito wanted to do things his own way. My dad was like a sailing ship that gets a great start in a race because there’s a brisk wind, and then the wind drops and all the rowing boats overtake.

My father was fifteen when the war started, and at first he joined the Cetniks on the Ravna Gora plateau. I don’t know how much of this meant anything to Chris. He just wanted to be with me, and I could see he was happy admiring my body and listening to my voice. I liked it because it made me feel like a hot girl.

Anyway, the Cetniks were royalists and the royal family was in London at that time, I believe. My father had fun with the Cetniks to begin with. It was a big adventure, wading through mud, swinging on ropes, crawling through pipes, sticking bayonets in sandbags.

The trouble was that he didn’t give a damn about the King, so it was difficult being a royalist. The Cetnik officers were all Hapsburgish aristocratic types, and they liked their drills and their polishing. Meanwhile, the men were getting into feuds with each other, like proper Balkan bandits, and the officers didn’t know how to keep discipline, and so one day he defected to the communist partisans because he was fed up with skulking in the forest with a bunch of disputatious royalists.

There were plenty of people to fight. The place was crawling with Romanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Germans and Hungarians, and there were some Croatians who became Nazis too. If you want to speak insultingly about Croatians you just refer to them as Ustase. When they want to insult Serbs, they call them Cetniks.

There was a lot of talk and rumour. People were saying that the Cetniks were colluding with the Nazis to wipe out the communists, and even collaborating with the Ustase. The Ustase liked to get rid of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies by drowning them. They had an extermination camp at Jasenovac that was even condemned by the Gestapo for its cruelty. I heard that 1.7 million Yugoslavs died in the war, and one million of the deaths were fratricide. We didn’t need Germans and Italians to come and kill us, because we could manage it on our own, thank you. Chris said, “Hey, Roza, I’m going to have to stay on your sweet side,” and I said, “Balkan girls have a big sweet side.”

My father defected to the communists when he was supposed to be taking part in an attack on them. He made sure he was out on the edge of the flank, and when the column approached he slipped away and joined them, and told them about the impending attack. So they ambushed the ambushers, and my father helped to wipe out his former comrades. During the battle he got the tip of a bayonet in the eye, and so he had to learn to shoot left-handed. It was quite a romance.

The communists were pretty successful as resistance fighters. They even set up schools, and rifle and cigarette factories. They were fighting not only the Italians and the Germans, but the other resistance groups as well, except that towards the end of the war enough Italians changed sides to form a whole battalion that fought for us.

I knew a great deal about the Second World War in Yugoslavia. It was an area of expertise that I had, because of university, and I was quite clear about who was who and what was what, and when everything happened, but I’ve no doubt that Chris was having trouble following it. He said it was very interesting, and he said his wife had got puzzled by the reading matter at his bedside. Before he mostly used to read Louis L’Amour novels and
DIY
magazines, but now he had started reading the books about Tito and Fitzroy Maclean that I was lending him.

It was fun telling Chris gory details, such as that my father once had to eat his own horse, and Tito’s life was once saved because his dog took all the force of a bomb that fell beside him, and that collaborators used to get thrown out of trucks with their first finger cut off at the first joint, the second finger at the second joint, and the third and fourth fingers cut off altogether. They’d sever the tendons of the thumb and staple their lips together, plus the other lips if they were women.

He used to shudder and say how awful this was, but I didn’t see it. I thought they deserved it, and I said, “I hate people like that.” I have the attitudes of an Amazon, and maybe that made me even more wonderful for Chris.

Chris said, “I don’t hate anyone. I couldn’t be bothered. I think my wife hates me, though.”

I said, “I hate lots of people,” and when he raised his eyebrows in enquiry, I numbered them off on my fingers. “I hate Croatians, Albanians, Muslims, Russians, and Bosnians, if they’re not Serbs. And there’s an Englishman I hated, but he died, so that’s
OK
. I’ll tell you sometime.”

He looked puzzled and said something like “You don’t strike me as a wholesale hater. You can’t hate such an awful lot of people. It’s unmanageable. It takes up too much emotion. It’s bad enough being hated. Nothing makes you feel so weary as living with someone who hates you.”

And I replied, “Oh, it’s
OK
, I like Slovenians and Montenegrins. And maybe Greeks. At least Greeks are Orthodox.”

“Who was the Englishman?” Chris asked.

“I’ll tell you sometime, but maybe not yet. You know, I like it, being the daughter of a partisan. I say to myself, ‘Hey, Roza, you’re a partisan’s daughter.’ That’s how I explain myself when I think about me and I wonder why I’m doing things. I’m not the same as everyone else, because I’m a partisan’s daughter.”

“Your father seems very important to you,” Chris said to me, in his bland fashion, and I shrugged and replied, “Sure. For every little girl, her father is the first one she falls in love with.”

“I don’t think my daughter was ever in love with me,” Chris said. “I wonder what was wrong with me.”

I said, “You never got a chance to be a partisan.”

I felt sorry for Chris. Actually he was very vulnerable, and here I was playing games with him, even tormenting him a bit, and it was amusing, and I laughed at him, but not with any cruelty. I leaned forward in my armchair and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I tell you something else,” I said. “My papa was the first one I slept with.”

Chris didn’t know how to react to that. He was shocked. His eyes went wide. But I was smiling, and it confused him. In the end he said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Why sorry?”

“Well, it must have been terrible. To have your father do that to you. I can’t imagine how bad it must be.”

“You’re funny,” I said, enjoying myself. “It was like I said. Papa is the first man you fall in love with.”

“Even so…to do that to your daughter?”

It was fun. I breathed out more smoke, and stubbed out my cigarette. I went over and knelt before him where he was sitting. He practically jumped, looking scared and delighted at the same time, and it occurred to me that he might be thinking that I was about to do something.

But I beckoned for him to lean down, and I put my lips next to his ear. I could smell his aftershave. It was that Old Spice stuff. I wanted to charm and shock him. I giggled, and then whispered, “He didn’t do it to me. It wasn’t poor Roza. It was poor Papa. It was me. I took my daddy into bed and I got him to do it.”