A Partisan's Daughter (9 page)

“But he’s my father!”

“Yes, but listen. You love him and he loves you, and you’re very pretty, and you’re in the same bed. What do you expect? He had to throw you out, and obviously he couldn’t explain why. If I were you I’d go home and take him a present, and stop getting into bed with him.”

I bought him a calculator. They were a novelty back then, and hadn’t been in the shops at all long. They were still quite expensive. He said, “I’ll always treasure this, even if I never find out how to use it.” In fact his favourite use for it was to prove that he could do the sums quicker by mental arithmetic than I could by pressing the buttons. It became something that we did in order to impress visitors.

He bought me a tape of Françoise Hardy, saying, “I don’t know what kind of rubbish you youngsters are listening to these days, but this might help improve your French.”

I said, “But I’m doing English and Russian,” whereupon he replied, “In that case your French could do with a lot of improving.”

Over the years I got to love that tape, even though I didn’t understand the songs until the Bob Dylan Upstairs talked me through them as we played it one day. Anyway, I liked the sweet sorrowful voice, whether I understood it or not. In the end the tape got chewed up in my cassette player, and I buried its remains in the park because it was too precious to throw away.

When Tasha found the boyfriend, it became difficult for us to spend so much time together. She sent me numerous confidential progress reports, and we spent long hours on the telephone, but I knew that she’d been stolen away, and that her beauty and humour belonged to someone else. The Bob Dylan Upstairs once played me a French song where the singer says that solitude is his most faithful companion, and will be his last, and I recognised the feeling.

I worked hard at my exams, and I went out looking for dogs to throw sticks for, but after Tasha I was very empty in the heart.

THIRTEEN

Poor Daddy

I just didn’t want to be a virgin any more.

W
hen I next visited, the door was answered by the Bob Dylan Upstairs, who by now had stopped wearing his black armband, but was still very morose. I’d just heard on my car radio that President Bhutto had been hanged in Pakistan, but I was right to assume that it was something else that was bothering the BDU.

Roza told me that the
BDU
had invited a beautiful and original and athletic girl to dinner, and had made her something special in his wok. I thought it would have been hard to have a romantic dinner in a house where the wiring was hanging off the walls, there were stair treads missing, the carpets were congealed with grease, and there wasn’t a proper roof, but those kinds of young people had different standards, I suppose. It turned out that after dinner the girl had said, “I hope you’re not expecting any gymnastics, because Moira’s my lover.”

The Bob Dylan had assumed that this Moira was just a flat-mate. He had been very besotted with his dinner guest, and had definitely been hoping for some gymnastics. I know the feeling, I thought.

Roza, on the other hand, chose this day to tell me about some gymnastics of her own.

She said that she’d entered into a period when she was very depressed. It happens to lots of teenagers, I told her. My own daughter gets like that sometimes. No, said Roza, this was particularly horrible, because life lost all its meaning.

She stopped doing anything very much, became surly and hostile, and spent all day in bed, so that at night she had insomnia. The world was two-dimensional, like a cinema screen, and she became detached from it.

She told me that she kept thinking, “What for? Why bother?” and started to write poetry all about suicide and nothingness. She visualised what it would be like having her parents and Tasha standing by her graveside in the rain. She took to wearing nothing but black, and was very peeved when her father said that it suited her. She painted her room dark purple, and painted a mushroom cloud on the wall, around the bullet holes left over from the war.

She ostentatiously read Baudelaire in front of her parents’ guests when they were expecting her to be sociable, and read books about psychology. I’d heard the name but I didn’t know anything about this Baudelaire, so I went and found out afterwards. I am afraid I like best the poems about cats, and there’s a very striking one about a corpse. She started reading Freud, and accused her father of being an anal retentive. He just said, “Come into the toilet when I’ve had a shit, and I’ll show you something to the contrary.” I had to look up “anal retentive” as well. It’s not a phrase or concept for which I have subsequently found much use, I have to say.

I said to Roza, “What you’ve described is just a typical teenager of a certain type.” She looked at me with some irritation, because no doubt she’d been expecting me to take her afflictions seriously. “It was a crap time,” she insisted. “I never felt so crap in my life, not even when I got raped.”

“Oh God,” I thought, but I knew her well enough by now. I knew she’d tell me sooner or later, so I didn’t press her, even though she must have wanted me to. I definitely didn’t want to ask her about being raped. The thought of it made me feel sick inside.

She went and fetched some more cigarettes, and I looked at the way that the paper was peeling off the walls. It was probably a pattern from Edwardian times, I thought. It must have been quite smart, once. The cracks on the ceiling made a map of the Isle of Wight. When she returned, clutching her pack of Black Russians, I said, “So how did you get out of the depression?”

She lit up and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She looked at me coquettishly, tilted her head, blew out some smoke, smiled, and said proudly, “The night before I went to university, I went into my father’s room, and we had sex.”

“Oh Christ,” I thought.

She said, “It was my idea. I got into his bed and cuddled up to him just like the old days. But this time I knew what I was wanting. He couldn’t help himself. He never got over it, I don’t think. It was very mean of me. Poor Daddy.”

FOURTEEN

University

You’ve got to be careful of strangers.

T
he next time I saw Roza, she seemed very pleased with herself about something, but I didn’t know what it was. As for me, I’d sold a walnut dresser for fifty pounds.

After what she’d told me I was beginning to wonder whether I wasn’t risking too much. Someone who seduces her own father and thinks it’s amusing is a dangerous person. Even so, I couldn’t get over the fascination, and if anything it was getting worse. I was lying there sweating every night, and sleep was almost impossible until I was utterly exhausted. I’d be playing in my mind, over and over again, a sort of film in which I was both the actor and the director, and I was making love to Roza, and she was doing things to me that my wife had irrevocably given up fifteen years ago. The constant state of arousal was unbearable. It was a kind of dizziness.

I’d done something I wasn’t proud of, but I was very glad it had happened. I’d been to practices in Watford and all sorts of places like that, and then I’d dropped in to see a friend of mine in Muswell Hill. It was late, and I was on my way home to the slumbering Great White Loaf. I made a detour, and late at night I’d gone and stood outside Roza’s house, on the other side of the street. It was May, so it wasn’t too cold, and I just skulked in a doorway, in the shadows, as if I was a private eye. What I expected to come of it, I don’t know, but I felt a certain satisfaction in seeing her shadow moving about behind the curtains. They were pink, and they can’t have had any lining.

She started to undress. I saw all her characteristic movements, in silhouette. Then she pulled her sweater over her head, and I saw her reach behind to unhook her brassiere. She slipped it off and then she came to the window. I could see the silhouette of that curving, well-built body, approaching the curtains. To my amazement, and even to my horror, she opened the curtain and looked out over the street. For a moment I was frightened that she’d seen me, or knew I was there, but she just looked up and down the street. I saw her upper belly and her breasts very clearly in the light of the street lamp, heavy and rounded, and they became another reason not to sleep. I discovered before long that she went through this little ritual every night at about the same time. I was surprised that I was the only one who’d found out. I would have expected a whole crowd of us to be hiding in the shadows. I didn’t want to become a pathetic peeping Tom. I felt I was being disrespectful to Roza, and I managed to stop myself from going too often. In fact I made a point of getting home early sometimes, so that it wouldn’t look so bad when I was out late.

Roza told me that the Bob Dylan Upstairs had had another misfortune. He’d started seeing a pretty little blonde called Sarah, but this Sarah was living with a Dutch alcoholic called Hans. Sarah and Hans supposedly had an open relationship, but Hans had gone to pieces as soon as he’d heard about the Bob Dylan, and was drinking so much that Sarah was talking about ending their little fling, so the Bob Dylan was quite despondent again.

Roza was very chipper, however. “Where did I get to?” she asked, and I said, “You were just going to university.”

“After I slept with my father?”

“Yes,” I said, “after that.”

“I had a shit time in Zagreb,” she said. “The university was quite nice. It was a huge brown rectangle with wide corridors, and it was full of staircases. I wish I’d gone to Belgrade though.

“My father didn’t come to the station. He couldn’t even look at me when I went in to say goodbye to him. He was completely wordless, and he couldn’t raise his arms to give me a hug. I hugged him, though. Tasha and my mother saw me off from the platform, and Tasha gave me some little handkerchiefs that she’d embroidered herself. My mother gave me a little parcel with the most amazing variety of foods in it, including a jar of preserved plums, in case I got constipated.

“On the train I started to cry, and an old man gave me his handkerchief. He said, ‘Keep it, my wife has been trying to throw it away for years, and I’m tired of fishing it out of the bin.’ I’ve still got it for crying into.

“I remember looking out over the fields of maize and sunflowers, and seeing herds of horses galloping, and sometimes a terrible smell of pigshit came into the train, and you’d look out, and you’d see all sorts of different-coloured pigs.

“You know what I wanted from university? I wanted parties, and rock music, and lots of intellectual things. I thought maybe I could be a professor myself one day. And I wanted a proper boyfriend, now that I wasn’t a virgin.

“Well, I didn’t get much of parties and rock music, and I didn’t get much intellectual stuff, but I got the boyfriend straight away.

“When I got to the station I didn’t know what to do, and it was dark, and I had all that luggage and food. I just wanted to go home again. I felt as if I’d landed on the moon. All the writing on the public spaces was in Roman script instead of Cyrillic.

“But I saw someone using a public telephone, and he looked quite nice, and I thought, ‘I bet he’s a student.’ He was a bit thin, but he had lots of dark hair, and he wore a leather jacket. I went and stood nearby, but not so as he’d think I was eavesdropping, and when he’d finished on the phone I said, ‘Excuse me, but do you know where this is?’

“He took the paper and looked at it, and said, ‘Hang on a minute, I’m not used to joined-up Cyrillic. Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’

“I said, ‘Isn’t that supposed to be a very corny line?’

“ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I shall withdraw it then. I thought it was worth a try. Anyway, I am Alex, second-year engineering, and your hall of residence is right next to mine. It’s just a question of catching the right bus. Shall I take one of your bags?’

“I said, ‘Oh, no, please don’t worry,’ and he said, ‘I know I’m a Croat, but you don’t have to suspect me of anything.’

“ ‘I don’t care what you are,’ I said, because in those days I really didn’t. ‘You’ve got to be careful of strangers, that’s all.’

“He got out his identity card and his student card, and showed them to me. I gave him a bag, and he picked it up and said, ‘Jesus, what have you got in here, a corpse?’

“ ‘I bought books in advance. I’m doing maths.’

“ ‘That’s a bonus. You can help me out. I’m not much good at it, but I can’t do engineering without it. Come on, it’s not far to the bus.’

“He came all the way to my room and carried my bags up the flights of stairs, then he stood at the doorway and said goodbye, and I saw that he had a very beautiful smile.

“I unpacked all my things and hid the cases under the bed and on top of the cupboard, and I sat at the little table and played with my pen, as if I was practising being a scholar. I went into the kitchen and introduced myself to all the other girls I was sharing with. I thought they were all very friendly and nice, but in the morning I found a bit of paper that had been slipped under my door, and it said,
‘Dirty Serb go home.’
”