She once explained to me why she behaved as irrepressibly as she did. She said, “I was born to be young. In fact I was born to be exactly the age that I am now, and that’s why I want to make the most of it, because I know it can’t last. One day I am going to have to make grown-up decisions, and be sensible. I’m going to have to find work and a flat to live in, I’m going to have to count the coins and pay the bills. One day I’ll see wrinkles appearing around my eyes, and my breasts will start to sag, if they ever get to grow big in the first place, and sometime I’ll have to find a promising man to marry, and the man will want me to iron his shirts, and then the part of me that tells me to be crazy will die so slowly that I mostly won’t notice it happening, and then one day I’ll look in the mirror and see my mother looking back at me, and then these times with you will seem like a beautiful dream that happened to someone else.”
As for me, I was too sensible already. I worked hard at school. I liked learning a lot more than I liked doing. I looked at the world through a sheet of glass.
One day she kissed me for a second time. She leaned over me, so that her blonde wavy hair fell about my face, and her skin was very hot from the sunshine. She touched my lips with hers very softly, and then pulled away, sitting up and clasping her knees in her arms. She said, “There’s so much to find out. The question is, is it all worth knowing?”
We lay side by side on the rug, Tasha lamenting the passage of time. We heard a bird singing nearby, and she said, “It’ll probably die of starvation in the winter.”
I said, “Tasha, don’t cry.”
We used to walk home in the evening, carrying the basket between us, and at night she slept in bed with me. Those were more innocent days, and no one thought anything of sharing a bed with someone of the same sex, if there weren’t enough beds to go round. My parents thought that we looked very appealing curled up together. She was sweet and warm, her hair tickled my face, and when she was asleep she was so limp that I could move her into any position that was comfortable for me. I felt very safe with her, and I began to experience her fear of passing time, because when a friendship is so sweet and close, it always opens up the possibility that it will not last forever. Sometimes I felt sad when she fell asleep before I did.
Yes, those were more innocent days, perhaps, but we were lovers of sorts for about a year. We both knew that we weren’t lesbians, but we did all the things that lesbians do. It was a question of pleasure and affection, and learning. I don’t regret it and I don’t look back with any shame. I don’t feel turned on when I remember the details, but I do remember the fun and the passion.
She found a boyfriend, of course, and our affair ended very suddenly. We both thought it was natural and inevitable, and for a while we carried on just the same, but without the sex. I was looking forward to trying it with a man one day, myself. I found out later that she’d introduced her new boyfriend to our place by the river, and I assume that they made love there. Years later I met him by coincidence in Split, and he told me that she’d eventually dropped him for a cavalry officer who’d then become a politician. He was still very melancholy about losing her, which I could well understand. If I had been a man I would have been mad with love for her.
I told Chris that it had been Tasha who was wise enough to see what was eating at my father.
Ever since I was little, I always used to crawl into my parents’ bed first thing in the morning, and soak up the family warmth, and if I was having nightmares I’d sleep the whole night with them.
After my parents stopped being a couple, my father sometimes slept in the spare room. I used to get in with him if he was home, because my mother could have me for the rest of the time, and I didn’t want my poor father to feel left out.
One morning when I was cuddled up next to him, kissing him on the cheek, I felt his whole body go rigid, and saw that he’d begun to sweat. I think that I’d been crying about something. He suddenly sighed and said, “Roza, please don’t come into this bed any more. You’re no longer a little girl.”
“But, Papa,” I said, trying to protest, and he stopped me: “Just go back to your room, and don’t argue.”
I felt utterly miserable. At the door I turned to look at him, and my eyes filled with tears, but he’d turned over and was facing the wall.
After that I felt wounded and rejected every time that I saw him, and I sat for hours biting my knuckles and wondering what it was that I’d done wrong. My mind went blank and I couldn’t come up with any answers, but I felt that everything between us had been spoiled.
I poured my heart out to Natasha, and she immediately jumped to the correct conclusion: “Well, you aren’t a little girl any more, and you’re very pretty. Your father may be your father, but he’s still a man. If you put a pretty girl in bed with a man, it’s like putting food in front of a dog. I mean, it’s a temptation.”
“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.
When 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.
The 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 s
tood 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.’ ”
FIFTEEN