The Woman from Bratislava (5 page)

She stopped, drank the last of her wine, and I squeezed a few more drops out of the little bottle for her.

‘And?’ I said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘And then what happened?’

‘After that came everyday life, the sort of life that’s so hard to describe simply because it’s so ordinary.’

I stared at her. Here was this half-sister, suddenly showing up out of the past; to some extent we were related by blood. That in itself was a strange thought, but I was having trouble digesting her story. Possibly because I found it hard to comprehend. Or possibly because it simply had not sunk in. I said:

‘Tell me a little bit about that everyday life. What did he do for a living, for example?’

‘Baked bread, naturally. He was a baker, after all, and a baker he remained until he retired. He was a good baker.’

‘How come he was allowed to stay in the country? I mean, he was a former Nazi. And an SS soldier. At Nuremberg men like him were condemned as war criminals, for God’s sake.’

‘There were several reasons,’ she said. ‘In Croatia, even under Tito, not everyone regarded the Germans and the Ustashi as
fascists
. To many people they were patriots, fighting for a free Croatia. For the Croatian nation and its culture. It was not as simple as the propaganda made it out to be. Some were punished, of course. Others took over the reins of government, but in some part of them they were always Croatians first and socialists second. Look at our President, Franco Tudjman. Wasn’t he a socialist once? And didn’t he shape the new, independent Croatia fifty years later? Who can say what he was thinking in his heart of hearts, all those years when he served socialism and Yugoslavia. And anyway, my father had taken a different name. Later he became a Croatian, or rather, Yugoslavian, citizen. Learned our language. Became one of us.’

‘But how was he able to do all that?’

She considered me for some moments with those strangely blank, glacial eyes before replying:

‘He never said. His old comrades fixed things for him, that was all he would tell us. After the war they helped one another. The losers helped each other to make new lives for themselves.’

The old SS network, about which so much had been written, I thought. That mysterious brotherhood of old Nazis and war
veterans which had discreetly organised visas, jobs, houses. I had never really believed in it. It sounded a bit too far-fetched: the idea that the losing side should be in a position to pull strings in the ruins of post-war Europe. And once the economic boom of the sixties came along no one gave any more thought to a bygone war, apart perhaps from some old freedom-fighters or nostalgic SS veterans.

But you never could tell.

Maybe that was how my real father had come by his first bakery in Denmark. I had sometimes wondered how he and my mother had found the wherewithal to set it up. My mother said they had borrowed the money. That was why they had gone bankrupt so quickly. They had had nothing to fall back on. But strictly
speaking
it could also have been funded by profiteering money. There were a lot of shady goings-on just after the war ended. To put it mildly. And there was a good deal of unaccounted-for cash in
circulation
. Those five years were not the most illustrious in Danish history. Nor, indeed, was the period that followed them.

‘Do I have any other brothers or sisters?’ I asked.

‘You did have,’ she said, and her eyes darkened slightly. ‘My father and mother had twins. Two boys. They were born in 1956. They died in 1995. Within two days of one another, at Krajna when the Croatian army drove out the Serbs.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said and meant it.

‘The Balkans is a sorry place,’ was all she said, and we fell silent once more. All was quiet in the hotel. We heard the drone of a solitary car on the street outside and a plaintive cry that ceased as abruptly as it had begun. As if some desperate individual had given momentary vent to their pain by screaming out loud.

‘Do you have children?’ I said.

‘I have two girls, I’m glad to say. They were spared having to fight. I have two grandchildren. Both strong and healthy.
Compared
to a lot of others I got off lightly. One of my sons-in-law will have to spend the rest of his days with only one leg, but that you
can live with. The Serbian mine left his manhood unscathed. One of my daughters is expecting another baby. So the past ten years of war in my country have not been too hard on me. But it is a war that is still going on. In Kosovo now. And now your country, my father’s native land is at war with Yugoslavia.’

‘With Serbia,’ I corrected her. ‘I thought you were a Croat.’

A flicker of uncertainty passed over her face, as if she had somehow given herself away.

‘I grew up in Yugoslavia,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m glad we’re independent, but I worked for many years in Belgrade and I have a lot of Serbian friends and colleagues. I find it hard to get used to the idea that we are now enemies.’

‘What did you do there?’

‘Moved papers around in one of the ministries,’ she said. ‘Now I move papers around in another ministry.’

‘Why are you telling me all this,’ I asked, and was surprised by the vehemence with which it came out.

‘It was my father’s last wish. Most of this story is new to me too. My parents’ wartime romance has always been a part of the nice myth of my family, but I did not hear the rest of the story, about the other family in Denmark, until very recently. It was our father’s last wish. And I believe that one ought to honour a dying man’s last wish.’

‘One doesn’t have to know every damn thing,’ I said. ‘Why the hell does everybody have to go confessing their sins. What you don’t know can’t hurt you.’

‘I understand this must be hard for you.’

‘I don’t think you understand a blind thing,’ I said. I, for one, did not understand any of it. What, I wondered, was I supposed to tell Fritz and Irma, never mind my elderly mother, who was probably too senile to grasp the fact that her runaway husband had not died in a bar in Hamburg in 1952, but had led a productive and seemingly happy and respectable, if bigamous, life in Croatia. That this whole story, in all its glaring banality, came down to love.
That my father had fallen in love with and had an affair with a young woman in a village in Yugoslavia. And that his love had been so strong that it had conquered all. That for decades he had lived happily with the same woman. On some level every modern individual aspired to that same commonplace, conventional ideal of happiness. Or hoped, at least, to find their perfect mate. They never did, though. I spoke from some experience, with three
marriages
under my belt. In the dead of night, when we are alone, we all dream of unconditional love. We don’t ever expect to achieve it, but we dream about it. This is what we are seeking every time we look into another person’s eyes. In the cold light of day we
recognise
the futility of the dream; when night comes we dream again.

I was very tired by now, and both my tooth and my head were aching. I could not take any more. I wanted to sleep. I wanted to go to Budapest the next day, ponder this story and try to figure out what it meant. Because that was my intellectual forte, I told myself: I was bloody brilliant when it came to thinking things through. I could analyse anything, from emotions to international politics, but just at that moment, in the middle of the night in that hotel room, my head was in a whirl.

‘I’d like you to leave now,’ I said.

She looked a little hurt, but her eyes still had that blank look to them which made it hard for me to gauge her actual frame of mind.

‘I would like to show you some more pictures. And some letters which my father wrote, but never sent. He felt very bad about leaving his family in Denmark. Especially his little boy.’

‘My father’s name was Poul. He was a schoolteacher and he loved me as if I was his own son. He adopted me. To me, this ghost from the past that you’ve called up is not my father. He may have endowed me with a glob of genes, but feelings don’t come with the sperm. They are born out of the life we share with others. And now I’d like to be alone, please.’

I was actually quite surprised to be able to express myself so
clearly, bearing in mind the hour and the state I was in, but she was not impressed.

‘He wanted your forgiveness,’ she said.

‘What about my brother and sister?’

Without a word she removed another photograph from the manila envelope. It was an ordinary, amateur colour snap, but the image was sharp enough. It showed a group of people at a funeral. They were standing with their heads bared in bright spring
sunshine
, watching as a simple pine coffin was lowered into the
darkness
of the grave. This picture shocked me more than everything she had told me up to this point. Because in this group of people, which looked, in all other respects, exactly like any funeral party in the Balkans, I saw my sister Irma. She stood with her head bowed alongside four elderly men. The photo had been taken from so far away that I could not make out the facial features of the mourners, but I was sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was Irma. It was something to do with the way she held herself, the rather boyish haircut and the pointed nose.

‘He thought about them too, but you were the one he thought about most. Maybe because you were the youngest. He asked to be forgiven.’

‘What about my big brother?’

‘I think it was him who took the picture.’

‘When was it taken?’

‘On February 17th of this year,’ she said. ‘He did not live to see one last spring.’

‘Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

‘It didn’t involve you in the same way. You’re not a child of the war,’ she said.

‘So why drag me into it now?’ I retorted angrily.

‘Is it so strange that a man anxious to make his peace with God should also wish to make his peace with the people in his life. To receive the forgiveness which we Christians are taught to grant?’

‘I can’t answer that right now,’ I said. Although it would have
been easy to do so, and I could probably have got rid of her without any more debate. But I was not going to give her, my siblings or my real father that satisfaction. They could stew in their own
treacherous
juice as far as I was concerned.

‘Would you please go,’ I said, far too imploringly, instead of simply kicking her out.

‘Of course,’ she said politely, getting to her feet. She offered me her hand and I took it. My own felt cold and clammy, hers was dry and cool.

‘Might I see you tomorrow?’ she asked, letting go of my hand.

‘We’re off to Budapest tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Give me a call. I need some time to think about what you’ve told me.’

‘Fine. I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

‘Yeah,’ was all I said.

She slipped the last photograph carefully back into the manila envelope and placed the envelope on the tiled table.

‘Have a look at that once you’ve had time to digest it. You’ll find my address and telephone number in Zagreb there, too, along with our father’s letters. His thoughts about you and about the past.’

She crossed to the door. She looked disappointed by my rebuff, and by the fact that I had not given her my phone numbers, addresses and so on. That all I wanted was to get rid of her. But she did not fool me. She had followed me more than halfway across Central Europe. If she wanted more of me then there was nothing to stop her following me to Budapest. I did not know whether I wanted to speak to her again. All I knew was that I did not want to speak to her any more that night. In the doorway she turned, as if about to say something else, but I shut the door on her, turned the second lock and put on the chain, loudly and clearly.
Now
did she get the message?

I went into the bathroom and sat down on the toilet. The pain hit me utterly without warning, like a knife being driven into the small of my back, just above the right hip, and twisted around. I had never known pain like it. I had no idea that anything could
hurt so much. A white-hot tongue of flame shot across my back and up to the nape of my neck. I thought I was going to die; not quietly and peacefully in my bed, but locked in a loo in Bratislava with some new knowledge about my past which I could happily have done without.

THE NIGHT WAS HORRENDOUS
, the morning worse. Can there be anything more ridiculous than lumbago? Because that was what I was suffering from. A perfectly common, perfectly awful case of lumbago. But one which was to have serious consequences. I have little memory of how I got to bed. The pain encircled my lumbar region like a barbed-wire belt, but that was not the worst of it. It was the helplessness, the fact that the most ordinary,
everyday
actions were now almost impossible. I managed to brush my teeth, got myself undressed and onto the bed and lay there, flat on my back, staring at the ceiling and feeling downright sorry for myself. I ought to have been thinking about the story I had just been told, but I had no thought for anything but the pain. Anyone who says you can’t hurt in two places at once is talking through a hole in their head. My teeth ached, and so did my back.

I woke as usual around six thirty and thought for a moment that it had all been a bad dream, both the story and the pain, but my relief was short-lived. I went to swing my legs out of bed, but could not. I lay there under the sheet and bedspread in nothing but my underpants, unable to get up. I could hear the sound of the morning traffic in the street below, the singular racket produced by the mix of modern cars and noxious old Central European rust buckets driving along the broad thoroughfare which ran from the Hotel Forum to the Presidential Palace. There were other people in the world. Lucky people. Free to move around. Driving to work without giving any thought to how privileged they were. While the great university lecturer with so many academic works and lovely women behind him was helpless as a baby. He could not get out of bed. He could only lie staring at the ceiling, wracked by the
pain in his back, wracked by self-pity, and thinking of himself in the third person, like an actor in a second-rate movie.

How I did it I’ll never know. I remember nothing but the pain, but I grabbed hold of the bed-head and hauled myself into a sitting position, while three or four torturers who had learnt their trade from the grand masters of the Gestapo and the KGB drove ice-picks into my back. This manoeuvre took some minutes, then I sat for a few minutes more with my feet on the floor, bringing my breathing under control. I felt utterly ridiculous. I considered calling Lasse, but that would have been even more ridiculous. No grown man wants anyone to see that he cannot get out of bed unaided, or take a shower and dress himself before duly
proceeding
to pack his case and catch the bus to Budapest. It really was too stupid for words.

I sat for a moment, bracing myself for the pain. And it was every bit as bad as I had feared when, by using both hands, I first managed to hold myself upright on the edge of the bed and then, as I started to keel over like a drunk after a long night’s journey into oblivion, clutched at the bed-head and hauled myself onto my feet – my torturers laying into me all the while with sadistic glee. There I stood. In my underpants, with a roll of flab around my middle, almost weeping with rage and mortification. But it helped to stand up, and it helped to have the hot water from the shower massaging the small of my back. The indignity of my handicap hit me again when I tried to get dressed. The socks were the worst. Who would have thought it could be such a long stretch to one’s feet, even when seated. By some miracle I succeeded in getting into my uniform: trousers, shirt, tie, grey merle jacket. Mr Nice, Old-Fashioned Tweed. The lecturer in Russian history ready for the day. For some time he stood there, with pains shooting up his back like fiery dragons. And he could not help laughing at himself and the whole situation. Now he needed cheering up.

Slowly I bent down to reach the telephone and keyed in my own home number. I pictured the phone at home in our beautiful,
tasteful, well-proportioned five-room flat in Østerbro, in Good Queen Margrethe’s lovely Copenhagen. The morning rush would be in full swing, a pandemonium which I usually hated, but which at this particular moment I missed with a fervour that surprised me, in spite of my pain. Janne would be in the midst of the great morning ritual of getting the kids to eat their breakfast, put on their clothes, brush their teeth and get out the door in a reasonably orderly fashion. I always left her to see to things in the morning. While I sat in the kitchen in my dressing gown, with the paper, coffee and a ciggie, and endeavoured to ignore the inexplicable uproar that small children are capable of creating in the morning. How is it possible to fight and eat cornflakes at the same time? Janne was as grumpy – or quiet, as she put it – in the mornings as I was, but she was also a mum, so she bustled about, dishing up breakfast, making packed lunches, chivvying and chiding, and almost every morning I found myself wondering why the hell they didn’t just get up earlier. I had actually come right out and said this once to Janne, a couple of months after she moved in. She had not spoken to me for a couple of days. ‘Why don’t you just lend a hand instead?’ she had hissed. ‘That wasn’t part of the deal,’ I replied. ‘I’ve done my bit with my own kids.’ Which wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to say, either.

Amazingly, every morning the operation was successfully accomplished and the little darlings were escorted to school along with all the other poor beggars. Sometimes Janne returned home after seeing them through the perils of the morning rush-hour. Then she would sit down and have her coffee, read her section of the newspaper and we would have a nice, quiet breakfast together. Being a lecturer I earned more than Janne who was only an
assistant
lecturer. She, on the other hand, had more duties to attend to at the university. My lectures to the few classes I now took did not make for too heavy a workload. So she was often the first one to leave, off to join the daily migration that is the lot of your normal wage slave, while I poured myself another cup of coffee before
repairing to my desk to write or do some research. Although if the truth be told, lately I was more liable to end up gazing at the big poplar tree outside the window. It is amazing how long one can spend watching a little squirrel scurrying about in some bare branches, thereby managing to put off working on a project in which you really have no faith. The writing had to be done, though, if my petty, jealous colleagues on the Research Council were to be persuaded to allocate funding to me rather than to their cronies.

But with my back on the rack I missed my mornings in Denmark. How nice it would have been to feel a tender hand on the small of my back, to be kissed and caressed. How nice it would have been to be surrounded by the morning chaos of normality instead of being here alone in a modern hotel room in a city which most Danes could not have found on a map. I let the telephone ring until I heard my own voice on the answering machine, then hung up without leaving a message. Why weren’t they home? Where the hell was my family? My indignation may have been irrational, but I felt they ought to be there when I needed them. As if I was ever there when they needed me. And anyway, what could they do? Give me a few words of comfort. Tell me they loved me. Isn’t that what we are all looking for in our dealings with other people? To find love. To
be
loved.

I ran an eye around the modern hotel room. I was in Bratislava. I could have been anywhere in the world, wherever today’s hotel chains have moved in with their professional smiles and
tasteless
, efficient interior designers and decorators. Fresh colours. Fresh furniture. The only thing that wasn’t fresh was the smell. Slovakia might have been in the process of putting its past behind it, but the place still smelled of the old days. Just like the
memorial
that towered over the city, testifying in all its socio-realistic monstrosity to the erstwhile Soviet Union’s liberation of
Czechoslovakia
. Another country which no longer existed. Otherwise Bratislava displayed all the other chaotic signs of the transition
from communism to democracy. Mildewed concrete tower blocks rubbed shoulders with McDonald’s and stolen Western cars. Newly renovated houses with beautiful, freshly painted ochre walls were not to be deterred by their neighbours’ dirty-grey walls: the
symbolic
reflections of a lifetime of communism’s physical squalor. This was how my thoughts ran: from backache to mornings in Copenhagen to the shambles that was Bratislava. I couldn’t think straight for the pain. I stood by the telephone, trying to weigh up my options. To get some kind of grip on this godawful morning. If I could do that I would never complain again.

The room was like a tip: strewn with clothes, books,
overflowing
ashtrays, empty glasses, old newspapers. One unpacked
suitcase
, half-open, putting me in mind of a gaping mouth. The fat manila envelope lay where she had left it. My so-called half-sister, who had introduced herself as Maria Bujic. But did she even exist? Or had she merely been some bizarre vision. A pyschedelic image, the mind’s way of giving me a warning: something dangerous and unpleasant is about to happen. Right now it’s your back that’s given out, the first part of your fifty-something anatomy to do so, but that is only the start – because, Mr University Lecturer, sir, it’s downhill all the way from here. Which was also, of course, a load of garbage. The envelope was right there, after all. Stiff-legged and with my hand pressed to the small of my back I tottered over to it, picked it up and peeked inside. Sure enough. There was the concrete proof: photographs, some handwritten letters, a handful of newspaper cuttings and a few typewritten sheets of paper. That turn of the wrist, slight and subtle though it was, proved to have been a bad move. The torturers returned, digging their red-hot knives into my back, causing me to drop the envelope as if it was on fire and had burned my hand. There was nothing for it but to give in, so I did, and called Lasse before my self-pity could
incapacitate
me completely.

Good man that he was he came right away, quickly sized up his ailing friend’s situation and showed himself to be both capable
and reasonably sympathetic, although even he could not hide the fact that he felt, as we all do, that there is something rather funny about a grown man with a bad back. It is not as if there is
anything
to see. It is not like an open wound. He could tell that I was in agony, but I knew he was thinking: it can’t be that bad. Lasse’s experience of illness did not extend beyond a dose of the flu, and I was well aware that he viewed the rest of us, in whom the first warning signs of old age were already being felt, pretty much as hypochondriacs. Strong, healthy individuals who do nothing in order to keep themselves strong and healthy but simply are so, are a downright pain in the neck. Lasse was that sort of person. But he was a good mate for all that. I was just in pain and feeling sorry for myself. None of my wives have ever really seen eye to eye, but one thing on which they are all agreed is that if the martyrs of the world were ever to form a club I would be the obvious choice for chairman.

Lasse packed my suitcase deftly and efficiently while I sat bolt upright on a chair next to the small desk. I had not told him about my mysterious night visitor and when he picked up the envelope I merely motioned to the suitcase. I wanted to have as little hand luggage as possible. I had a hell of a job getting back onto my feet, pain shot up my back again. It was the last straw. My mind was made up. When he was finished packing I said:

‘I’m not going to Budapest.’

‘Oh?’ the heartless bugger said, ‘Aw, it’ll pass, don’t you think?’

‘It’s sheer agony, Lasse. I can’t stand the thought of sitting for hours in a bus and then having to spend several days in Budapest, with all those lectures and rotten chairs.’

‘It’s only for two nights.’

‘I’m going to book a seat on a flight home, so just leave my case here, I’ll get one of the hotel staff to help me.’

‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but maybe it is the wisest thing to do. And Janne and the kids’ll be pleased. They must be feeling so bad for you.’ 

‘I can’t get hold of them!’

‘Oh? Where are they?’

‘That’s the problem – I don’t bloody well know!’ I snapped at him with undue testiness.

‘Sorry, Teddy,’ he said.

‘No, it’s me that’s sorry. But I really would like to talk to Janne.’

‘Do you normally call home regularly?’

‘Do you?’

‘Every day. When Lisbeth’s at home, that is.’

‘Every day! I’ve called home once. I can’t afford to be on the bloody phone all the time.’

He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder from force of habit, but it felt as though someone had kicked me in the back, I swore so loudly that Lasse looked quite alarmed.

‘Oops, sorry Teddy. I didn’t mean to hurt you.’

‘That’s okay. Come on, let’s go down and have some breakfast,’ I said and attempted to take a couple of faltering steps while still trying to hang on to some shred of dignity. He put a hand gently under my arm to support me.

‘Why don’t you get a mobile phone?’ he asked.

‘Janne doesn’t feel it’s necessary. All folk use them for anyway is to phone home from the supermarket to check whether there’s enough milk in the fridge.’

‘Well, it’s a good thing to have,’ the practical old sod remarked as I hobbled off. Downstairs, at the lavish breakfast buffet, I had a couple of cups of coffee and some juice, but left my plate untouched. I had filled it, a mite optimistically, with scrambled egg, bacon and chipolata sausages. I never eat much in the morning, but one feels almost duty-bound to help oneself to all sorts of things merely because they are included in the price. Lasse tucked in with gusto: egg, bacon, bread and sausages, which he would normally never touch, while he read the previous day’s
Herald Tribune
which the hotel took along with a whole range of other Western newspapers. CNN in the rooms. The
Trib
in reception. There was no reason to
miss the old days, when there was nothing to be had but
communist
mis-information, and happiness was a two-week old copy of the daily
Land and Folk
or
The Morning Star
.