A Partisan's Daughter (5 page)

EIGHT

Apple

Dreams are the same always.

I
came by on the day that Airey Neave was killed by the IRA, and found Roza in a penitent mood because she had been horrible to the Bob Dylan Upstairs. She was consoling herself with a bottle of white wine from the fridge, and she offered me some, so I said, “I’d love one, but don’t ever let me drink more than a glass and a half!”

“Why not? It’s good for you. Without wine there is no civilisation,” said Roza, and I replied, “Well, it isn’t good for me. It makes me go very strange. I’ve almost had to stop, so a glass and a half’s my limit.”

“Ooh, what does it do to you?” she asked, her eyes bright with a sort of delighted curiosity.

“Do you know that story about Jekyll and Hyde?”

“Who?”

“Jekyll and Hyde. I don’t suppose there’s any reason why you would have heard of it. It’s about a doctor who takes a potion and it turns him into a murderer until the potion wears off. Well, that’s what happens with alcohol and me, except that it’s me who usually ends up nearly being murdered. I suddenly get in a terrible rage, and more often than not I get in a fight. Afterwards I often don’t really know why it all happened. The last time, I picked a fight with a damn great Irish hod-carrier in a pub in Watford, and it was a very bad idea, I can tell you. I miss not being able to drink, but really I’ve got no choice. I have to watch what I do. I haven’t made an idiot of myself for about ten years now, thank God.”

“You get in fights? I can’t imagine you in fights, Chris. You always seem so sweet and nice.”

“Well, I am nice until I’ve had too much. Just give me half a glass, I’ll be happy with that, and there won’t be any danger. So, what was this quarrel with the Bob Dylan about?”

Apparently he had brought in a young cat, having offered to look after it for someone, and she had thrown a fit and started shouting at him to get rid of it. He must have been made of sterner stuff than me, because he told her to get lost, and took the cat upstairs to his room. He probably hadn’t heard about the filleting knife in her handbag yet.

She said she had a phobia about cats, but she hadn’t meant to shout and scream at the Bob Dylan, because the Bob Dylan was very nice and would listen to her poetry. “Poetry?” I said. “What poetry? I didn’t know you wrote poetry.”

She said, “I didn’t tell you. You’re not a poem type.”

I was offended by this aspersion of philistinism, but actually she was right. Until I got to know Roza I never did give a damn about poetry. I couldn’t see what it was for. It was never anywhere inside my horizon. I once asked the Bob Dylan what Roza’s poetry was like, and he said, “It’s in Serbo-Croat, so I don’t really know, but when she translates it into English it’s like Chinese poetry.”

I wasn’t enlightened, so the Bob Dylan said, “It consists of strings of apparently disconnected observations linked together by the last line, which is a kind of comment.”

Talking to the Bob Dylan made me realise that there was an awful lot I didn’t know, and it was embarrassing that he was giving me information when he was only half my age, but then the general trouble with ignorance is always that ignorant people have no idea that that’s what they are. You can be ignorant and stupid and go through your whole life without ever encountering any evidence against the hypothesis that you’re a genius. If you’re stupid you can always blame miscalculation on bad luck. Anyway, the fact that Roza wrote poetry raised her further in my estimation, even though I didn’t care about poetry itself. I just knew that one was supposed to. I liked reading western novels, people like Louis L’Amour, that was my idea of a good read. Roza made a big difference, she did make me improve my quality control, and I do enjoy reading a little poetry these days, but now that I am an oldish man, it’s probably too late to develop decent literary tastes, although my daughter is still doing her best to educate me. She wants me to read
Middlemarch,
but it’s so damned big that I just don’t have the heart. She sent it to me for Christmas, all the way from New Zealand.

I hadn’t expected that a prostitute would be a writer of poetry. You don’t think of them as proper people. You don’t think of them as people who might shop in a supermarket or go for a swim. Roza always surprised me by being a human being, just as I surprised myself by getting so enmeshed with her. It was stupid of me not to realise that prostitutes go to movies, and walk in the park like anyone else. We all deceive ourselves with simplifications, and so you can’t imagine a prostitute going shopping any more than you can imagine a soldier being interested in lepidoptery, or a monarch sitting on the loo.

Roza always said that she’d been happy as a child, and there wasn’t much that bothered her about her memories, apart from finding a corpse in a hayrick, and the occasion when her father struck her mother.

“It was good to be a solitary child in that criss-cross of wheat-fields and ditches. I was solitary because my brother Friedrich was born in 1946. They gave him that name in honour of Engels. I waited until 1954. My mother said I was a nice accident, but for all I know it was because of a night when my father made her do it and she never got round to getting rid of me in time.”

Her brother Friedrich used to come home with his friends and tease her by saying things like “What’s a titty, Roza? How many tits does a girl have?” and she would guess and say, “Three or four,” thereby providing the boys with some congenial hilarity. When they laughed they used to pummel each other. Friedrich used to apologise afterwards for teasing her, but he didn’t stop. Later on he became an officer in the federal army, and she saw very little of him after that.

Roza was named after Rosa Luxemburg, even though the latter was very ugly and came to a nasty end. She was a communist heroine, or so Roza told me, but I can’t now remember what it was that she was supposed to have done. I saw a photograph of my Roza as a child, and she was far from ugly. She looked sturdy, but pretty and sweet. When I looked at the picture I got a pang of regret in my stomach for what Roza had turned into, but that didn’t stop me from fantasising about her.

Roza had Gypsy eyes, her hair was very black and shiny, and parted down the middle. She had a soft full mouth, and it looked to me as if her complexion had been pretty good until she had started to overdo the alcohol and cigarettes. She told me that she used to look at herself in a mirror and do pirouettes, and wonder if she’d ever be beautiful enough to be carried away by a prince. I said, “That doesn’t sound like a very communist line of thinking,” and she just shrugged and said, “Dreams are the same always.”

Even when I knew her, Roza was somewhat obsessed with counting things, but she was a lot worse as a child, apparently. She’d count her fingers even though she knew she hadn’t lost one, and as she counted them she folded them back to make sure that she hadn’t counted a finger twice. When we went for walks she would count railings, or the number of people with hats on. She was distressed by falling snow, because snowflakes were innumerable. She had a philosophy of numbers. One was the number of her father’s eyes, two was the number of her own, and the number of his gold teeth. Three was the number of swings of the starting handle that it took to start her father’s car, and four was the number of its wheels. Five was the number of fingers on one hand, and six was the age when she got her first pocket money. And so it went on. She hated the number seven because there wasn’t anything it could stand for. I once tried to tease her clumsily by saying, “So what’s special about five hundred?” and she looked at me with disdain, dropped some ash into the ashtray, looked away, and said, “It’s what I said I used to fuck for.”

I said, “And what do you do it for now?” I said it lightly, as if I were joking, but she replied, “Why are you saying this?” so I fell silent. I felt hot with embarrassment and was thinking that I had made a terrible mistake, but then the Bob Dylan Upstairs came in and told us his latest stupid joke, so the situation was saved.

Roza didn’t have an imaginary friend. I didn’t either, come to that. She used to talk about all the characters in the folk tales that her grandmother told her. This grandmother was bald and used to hide it by wearing a shawl. She wore widow’s black, and had the kind of shoes that you can put on either foot, to save trouble. I have never come across this kind of shoe in my life and now I wonder if Roza was making it up. The grandmother, according to Roza, had a great hairy wart on her right cheek, so that to kiss her cheek was like kissing a man’s. She told stories about a great-uncle who won a fight with a bear, and about her own grandmother’s sister who escaped from a tyrannical husband by crossing the Dinaric Alps in the company of some brigands. Then she sailed to Cephalonia on a fishing boat, and set up house with a man called Gerasimos. Years later she came back with two grown-up sons as big as houses, in order to demand a divorce. It seems that she wanted to legitimise the boys and make Gerasimos an honest man before he went to his grave.

I liked Roza’s stories, but now I am confused as to which ones were supposed to be historically factual. There was someone called “Black George,” I remember, and someone called Matija Gubec. She knew very bloodthirsty stories, always about Turks, which she told with great relish and some show of righteous horror. One story was about an emperor who blinded all his prisoners except for one in every hundred, who was supposed to lead the others home, and when the opposing king saw what had happened to his troops, he died of the shock. Then there was the story about Prince Michael’s tragic love affair, and another one about how Gubec was taken to Zagreb Cathedral and crowned “King of the Peasants” by having a white-hot circle of iron placed on his head while the crowd stood there cheering and waving their hats. Roza often got angry when telling these stories, and they explain why she hated so many different peoples, Turks, Croats, Albanians, just about everyone else in the region. I once heard a joke about Irish Alzheimer’s disease, which is when you forget everything but a grudge, and if Roza was anything to go by, I would say that that would be a pretty good description of Balkan Alzheimer’s too. I tried telling her all the favourite British national myths, like King Alfred and the cakes, and Robert the Bruce and the spider, but somehow they never quite matched up to stories about people being crowned with white-hot circles of steel. Many years later my daughter told me that King Edward
II
had been killed by having a white-hot poker pushed up his backside, and I thought that that was exactly the kind of story that Roza might have appreciated. I felt sorry that she wasn’t there for me to tell her.

Roza was able to make friends with wild animals. She said she’d go out into the sunflower fields and flatten herself a little space that could only be seen by birds, and then she’d sit so still that the animals would start to get used to her. She laughed at herself when she told me this, but she said that she would think of mice as her messengers, and she thought of rabbits as lords and ladies. Beetles were Russian spies or Turkish assassins, if I remember rightly, and foxes were princes and princesses. Roza herself had a fantasy about being a princess, and she was uncommonly obsessed with royalty for someone who said she was a communist. I knew her before the days of Princess Diana, but I’ve no doubt that she must have enjoyed that phenomenon while it lasted. I remember having to have conversations with her about Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, and the Duke of Windsor and Mrs. Simpson, and finding that she knew much more about them than I did.

Roza said she’d get very brown in the summer, and her hair would lighten to a dark reddish brown. I could see it when we went for walks in the summer. She liked walks. She said that if she ever left London the thing she would miss most would be the parks with their gaggles of ducks being fed by old ladies. I once said to her, “If rabbits are lords and ladies, what are ducks?” and she said, “They are the stupid ones who tell the king how great he is,” and I said, “Oh, you mean courtiers.”

In the winters of her childhood Roza would be wrapped up and sent out to get some colour into her cheeks. In hard winters the snow was six feet deep, or even deeper where the wind had drifted it, so you could jump up and down on it and then disappear when it gave way. Roza was fond of sitting in front of the fire with her feet in a bowl of hot water as she thawed out, feeling hot and cold at the same time. I liked her description of doing that, because it was just like my memory of staying in Shropshire with my grandparents, where it was so cold at Christmas that there’d be frost on the inside of the windowpanes in the mornings, and you wore jumpers and a woolly hat and socks in bed. When it snowed and gathered into drifts, you could cut tunnels into them and make little dens. One collapsed on me once, and I suppose I was lucky to get out, but in those days we were a lot less precious about children taking risks. My mother used to say, “Go out and play, and don’t come back till it’s dark.” We’d stay in the woods all day, making dens, climbing trees, and trying to dam streams. My brother and sisters and I made an igloo once with the help of our mother. People always said that Eskimos were very warm inside them, but we were bloody freezing. The snow wasn’t right for the job, either. When you cut it into bricks it fell apart, so we made our igloo by whacking the snow with a shovel to pack it tight. When we were building it I thought I’d never seen my mother looking so young and happy. Her cheeks went red as apples, and her breath was sending puffs of vapour into the air, and when it was finished we went inside and she made a pot of tea. We sat in there shivering and drinking tea until we couldn’t bear it any more. I’ve never had tea that tasted hotter and sweeter. I hope that my daughter has memories of me as sweet as the ones I have of my mother. Roza said that the partisans in the war sometimes made ice houses in the forest, and you could mould little shelves inside them out of the snow, and you’d hang a canvas flap over the entrance, and use kerosene lamps for light. All I can say is, I’m glad that someone did it, and that it wasn’t me. I’m probably like any other travelling salesman; I regret my lack of natural heroism and adventurousness, but in the final analysis I’m damned if I want to do anything about it. I wouldn’t want to be a partisan unless I got weekends off and all missions were optional.