Contents
Title Page
Epigraph
1 The Girl on the Street Corner
2 The Man in the Shit-Brown Allegro
3 The Princess on the Dungheap
4 This Father of Mine
5 The Girl from Belgrade
6 The Secret Policeman
7 Bivouac on a Bombsite
8 Apple
9 Survivor of Jasenovac
10 Miss Radic
11 The Betrayal
12 Natalja
13 Poor Daddy
14 University
15 Alex
16 Can You Fall in Love If You’ve Been Castrated?
17 Breaking Up
18 Leaving
19 Satisfaction
20 Voyage
21 Getting In
22 Bergonzi’s Pussycat Hostess Paradise
23 The Prison
24 After the Big Bastard
25 Hostess
26 A Malign Part of Myself
27 Holes in My Guts
A Note About the Author
Also by Louis de Bernières
Copyright
Le mariage bourgeois a mis notre pays en pantoufles, et bientôt aux portes de la mort.
—ALBERT CAMUS, La Chute
ONE
The Girl on the Street Corner
I am not the sort of man who goes to prostitutes.
Well, I suppose that every man would say that. People would disbelieve it just because you felt you had to say it. It’s a self-defeating statement. If I had any sense I’d delete it and start again, but I’m thinking, “My wife’s dead, my daughter’s in New Zealand, I’m in bad health, and I’m past caring, and who’s paying any attention? And in any case, it’s true.”
I did know someone who admitted it, though. He was a Dutchman who’d done it with a prostitute during his national service. He was in Amsterdam and he was suffering from blue balls at a time when he was on leave and had a little money in his pocket. He said she was a real stunner, and the sex was better than he had expected. However, the woman kept a bin by her bedside, the kind that is like a miniature dustbin, with a lid. You can still get them in novelty shops. Anyway, after he’d finished he eased off the condom, and she reached out and lifted the lid off for him out of good manners. It was packed to the brim with used condoms, like a great cake of pink and brown rubber. He was so horrified by that bin of limp milky condoms that he never went to a prostitute again. Mind you, I haven’t seen him for twenty years, so he may well have succumbed by now. He liked to tell that story because he was an artist, and probably felt he had a bohemian duty to be a little bit outrageous. I expect he was hoping I’d be shocked, because I am only a suburbanite.
I tried to go with a prostitute just once in my life, and it didn’t work out as I had expected. It wasn’t a case of blue balls so much as a case of loneliness. It was an impulse, I suppose. My wife was alive back then, but the trouble is that sooner or later, at best, your wife turns into your sister. At worst she becomes your enemy, and sets herself up as the principal obstacle to your happiness. Mine had obtained everything she wanted, so she couldn’t see any reason to bother with me any more. All the delights with which she had drawn me in were progressively withdrawn, until there was nothing left for me but responsibilities and a life sentence. I don’t think that most women understand the nature of a man’s sexual drive. They don’t realise that for a man it isn’t just something quite nice that’s occasionally optional, like flower arranging. I tried talking to my wife about it several times, but she always reacted with impatience or blank incomprehension, as if I was an importunate alien freshly arrived from a parallel universe. I never could decide whether she was being heartless or stupid, or just plain cynical. It didn’t make any difference. You could just see her thinking to herself, “This isn’t my problem.” She was one of those insipid English-women with skimmed milk in her veins, and she was perfectly content to be like that. When we married I had no idea that she would turn out to have all the passion and fire of a codfish, because she took the trouble to put on a good show until she thought it was safe not to have to worry any more. Then she settled in perpetuity in front of the television, knitting overtight stripy jumpers. She became more and more ashen-faced and inert. She reminded me of a great loaf of white bread, plumped down on the sofa in its cellophane wrapping. Englishmen don’t like to talk about their troubles, but I’ve had enough conversations with other men like me, usually at a bar somewhere, usually trying to delay their homecoming, and always reading between the lines, to know how many of us get clamped into that claustrophobic dreary celibacy that stifles the flame inside them. They get angry and lonely and melancholy, and that’s when the impulses come upon them. I sometimes wonder whether the reason that puritanical religious types are so keen on marriage is their certain knowledge that it’s the one way to make sure that people get the least possible amount of sex.
The woman was standing on a street corner in Archway, looking as though she was pretending to wait for someone. She was wearing a short skirt and high boots, and her face was made up too much. I remember lilac lipstick, but I may have invented that image subsequently. It was winter, not that you’d ever know what season it was in Archway, because in Archway it’s always late November on a good day, and early February on a bad one.
In fact it was during the Winter of Discontent. The streets were heaped high with rubbish, you couldn’t buy bread or the Sunday Times. and in Liverpool no one would bury the dead. You couldn’t get heating oil, and even if you had cancer you were lucky to get into hospital. The comrades in the trade unions were trying to start the revolution, and our particularly hopeless Prime Minister’s ship was holed beneath the water. I’ve always liked being British, but that was the worst time I can remember, and the one time when it was impossible not to be depressed about living in Britain. Back then we all needed some prospect of consolation, even if you weren’t married to a Great White Loaf.
The girl wore a fluffy white fur jacket. She had litter whirling about her in the cold wind, and she was like a light glowing in the fog. She seemed a well-built girl, and I felt a lurch of attraction that I couldn’t help. There was a buzzing in my groin and a slightly sick feeling in my stomach.
It was the first time I’d ever knowingly spotted a prostitute, and I realised that I should just drive on. What if you get taken inside and someone mugs you for your wallet? You’d probably be too ashamed to go to the police. Even so, after I got to the end of the road it was as if my willpower had been mysteriously cancelled out. Something took control of my hands, I did a three-pointer at the end of the street, and came back down. I found myself stopping beside her, and winding down the window. It was all against my better judgement, and I could feel palpitations in my chest, and sweat forming on my temples. It occurred to me that I would probably be too anxious to manage anything anyhow.
I looked at her and she looked at me, and I tried to say something, but nothing came out. She said, “Yes?”
I wasn’t sure of the formula, so I said, “Have you got the time?” because that was suitably ambiguous. She looked at her watch, shook her wrist and put it to her ear. She said, “Sorry, it stopped. I get bad luck with watches.”
She had a nice voice. It was soft and melodious, with quite a strong accent that I couldn’t place.
I tried again, and said, “Are you working?”
She looked at me with a puzzled expression, and then enlightenment dawned. A whole gallery of expressions crossed her face one after the other, from indignation to delight. Finally she laughed and put her hand to her mouth in a way that was really very sweet and ch
arming. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, you think I’m bad girl.”
I was appalled, and started gabbling, “Oh, I’m so sorry, really I’m very sorry, I didn’t know, I thought, oh dear, I am so sorry, it’s so embarrassing, forgive me, please forgive me, a horrible mistake, a horrible mistake.”
She continued laughing, and I just sat there in my car with my ears burning. At that point I should have driven away, but for some reason I didn’t. She stopped giggling, and then to my surprise she opened the passenger door and got in, bringing with her a tidal wave of heavy perfume that I found very unpleasant and stifling. It reminded me of my grandmother in old age, attempting to disguise the odours of incontinence.
The woman sat next to me and looked at me with a pert expression. She had dark brown eyes and had her shiny black hair done in the kind of style that I believe is called a bob. It suited her very well. As I said, she was a well-built girl, with wide hips and large breasts. She wasn’t the sort I would normally have taken a fancy to.
“I called cab,” she said, “but it didn’t come, and I waited long, long time, so you can take me home, but I regret I don’t sleep with you just now.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s not far,” she said, “just few streets, but I don’t like to walk. This place is full of bad ones, bloody allsorts.”
I was shocked. I said, “You shouldn’t be getting into cars with strange men. Something might happen.”
She shot me a contemptuous look and said, “You wanted me in your car just before, when you thought I was bad girl. Before you didn’t tell me not to go getting in car.”
I said, “Yes, but—”
And she interrupted me with a wave of her hand: “But nothing. No bullshits now. I live down that way. You give me lift and that’s how you say sorry. And you protect me from other strange men. OK, let’s go.”
I delivered her to a place that doesn’t exist any more. It wasn’t far from that bridge at the top of the hill where alcoholics from the drying-out clinic used to commit suicide by throwing themselves down to the road below. It was a whole street of semi-derelict terraces that must have been grand once, but back then it was full of abandoned cars and litter. Not many houses had intact window frames, and nothing can have been painted for years. There were wide cracks in many of the walls, and you could see that there were tiles missing or broken on almost every roof. All the same, it seemed quite a friendly and unthreatening sort of place, and that was indeed what it turned out to be. It was a street full of poor people and transients who wanted to live in peace and for whom decorating would have been expensive and pointless. It all got demolished and redeveloped during the Thatcher era. I was sad about that, but it needed doing, I suppose. I passed by when they were wrecking it, and I asked the demolition men for the street sign. I’ve still got it somewhere in the garage.
When I stopped the car she held out her right hand very formally, and said, “Roza. Nice to meet you. Thank you for the lift. I hope you find someone nice to sleep with.”
I took her hand and shook it. I thought I ought to give her a false name, but couldn’t think of one. I was embarrassed by my name anyway. I’m not from a well-to-do family, and I always thought it sounded pretentious. “I’m Christian,” I said, having been reduced by confusion into telling the truth.
“Christian?” she repeated. I suppose it must have been a name that she thought didn’t suit me.
“My parents thought it sounded posh. Everyone calls me Chris.”
Just before she left she leaned down to the window and smiled at me seriously. “So, Chris, how much were you going to give me?”
“Give you?”
“For the sex, you know?”
“Oh,” I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know what…I have no idea…”
“So, Chris, you never been with bad girl before?”
“No, I haven’t.” She looked at me with sceptical indulgence, and I felt my ears begin to burn again.
Roza said, “They all say that. Every one. Not one man has ever been with bad girl before. Never never never.”
I was thinking over the startling implications of this when she added, “When I was bad girl I never took less than five hundred. I didn’t do cheap.”
With that, she turned and climbed the tilting steps to her door. She waved at me gently, with a strangely old-fashioned circular movement of her hand, and before she went in she said, “You come by sometime and I give you coffee maybe, I don’t know.”
I just sat there for a while with the motor turning, and the Archway rain began to fall more heavily. I’d worked out by then that Roza must indeed have been a prostitute, but wasn’t any more. I wondered if I had offended her at all, or if I had merely amused her. It felt as though she had been teasing me.
I don’t know how to classify my falling in love with Roza. I’ve been in love often enough to be completely exhausted by it, and not to know what it means any more. When you look back afterwards, you can always find another way of putting it. You say, “I was obsessed, it was really lust, I was fooling myself,” because after you’ve recovered from being in love, you always decide that that wasn’t what it was.
Every time you fall in love it’s a bit different, and in any case love is a word that gets used too lightly. It ought to be a sacred word that’s hardly ever used. But it was then, when I was sitting there in my car with the engine running and the wipers slapping, that I began at the very least to fall into fascination. You can call it love, if that’s what suits. I think that that’s what I would call it.
TWO
The Man in the Shit-Brown Allegro
When I went out it was just one of my strange urges.
I didn’t need any money and I’d never tried getting it from streetwalking. Perhaps I was bored. I used to get bored with myself sometimes. I’d get this feeling that I ought to be running down mountains and singing, like in The Sound of Music, waving my arms about and being joyful, and instead I’d realise that I was sitting in front of a quiz show in a condemned building, smoking cigarettes and drinking black coffee that made me feel bitter in my mouth. It wasn’t my ideal life. So I’d get an impulse to do something to put the flavours back on my tongue.
Pretending to be a streetwalker is something that maybe you’d do with a friend at university when you were a bit drunk and hysterical, and then when the first car drew up alongside, you’d run away laughing, and shouting, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
I did it this time because I suppose I’m not exactly normal anyway, and besides, I don’t even know if any of us understand our own reasons. The important thing wasn’t what was happening in my head, but what I went out and did. I put on tarty clothes—a short skirt with glittery gold threads, and some high-heeled white boots, and a little blouse. I had some disgusting perfume that some hopeful cheapskate had given me once. I’d had it for years, and every time I sniffed it, I thought, “This must be eau de streetwalker.” I splashed it on and practically made myself dizzy. I thought, “Why not?” and made my face up like I was some vamp from a French novel. I even had some weird lipstick.
When I went out it occurred to me that my neighbours would notice what I was up to, but the fact is that it wasn’t a neighbourhood in any proper sense. All the houses were condemned, and we were all tramps. The place was full of do-it-yourself revolutionaries, hippies, guys who played bass with imaginary bands, scarecrows, girls in ethnic skirts, amateur dope dealers, actors adrift, 1970s orphans with troubled minds and vague big ideas, all looking for the authentic life and wishing they were really in New York, hobnobbing with Andy Warhol and Lou Reed, or in Paris throwing cobblestones at the CRS. In my house there was a Jewish actor, there was a boy pretending to be someone else, but who really wanted to be Bob Dylan, and there was a sculptress who made little ceramic things. There wasn’t anyone on the top floor because there wasn’t a roof to speak of. The Bob Dylan used to build car engines up there.
I dare say there were some real ordinary citizens in the
neighbourhood, but I didn’t know any. There wasn’t anyone there who I’d feel reluctant to startle, but even so, I went a couple of streets away, because in London every street is a village, and you only know the people in your own street.
I think that while I stood there play-acting the streetwalker, leaning against a corner and smoking, and showing off my legs, I wasn’t really expecting anyone to stop. It wasn’t a red-light district, so why would anyone kerb-crawl by? I felt quite safe, just enjoying the fantasy, and doing a role-play, like in a drama class. It started to drizzle a bit, and I was thinking of packing it in, but I couldn’t stand the thought of going back in and watching more quiz shows while I waited for my life to amount to something, so I stood there imagining what it was like to have to stand out in the rain, really doing this job to keep body and soul together. I was watching the litter blowing about, and thinking that it might have been pretty if only it wasn’t rubbish. I noticed two rats, and I watched them for a while. Back then, it was a happy time for rats, because no one was collecting the rubbish.
When a shabby brown car went past me and did a U-turn, I was completely unprepared. The poor man was very embarrassed, and for a few moments I didn’t even realise that he was trying to pick me up. As soon as he spoke to me I forgot what I’d been pretending to be, and told him my watch didn’t work very well. When I started to realise what he was thinking, I was halfway between embarrassed and entertained. I was pleased that my ruse was successful, but then I was horrified by what I could have got myself into.
Fortunately he was a very nice man, the kind you like immediately, someone a bit like me, who would have been better suited to more exciting times, and was whiling away an ordinary life in resignation. He said his name was Christian, which struck me as funny for a man trying to pick up a streetwalker, but then I never did notice religion having any good effect on anyone. Look what it did to my country. Everyone called him Chris, he said, which seemed reasonable to me. I called him Chris until I came up with a pet name.