A Partisan's Daughter Read Online Free PDF

my fingers. “I hate Croatians, Albanians, Muslims, Russians, and Bosnians, if they’re not Serbs. And there’s an Englishman I hated, but he died, so that’s OK . I’ll tell you sometime.”
    He looked puzzled and said something like “You don’t strike me as a wholesale hater. You can’t hate such an awful lot of people. It’s unmanageable. It takes up too much emotion. It’s bad enough being hated. Nothing makes you feel so weary as living with someone who hates you.”
    And I replied, “Oh, it’s OK , I like Slovenians and Montenegrins. And maybe Greeks. At least Greeks are Orthodox.”
    “Who was the Englishman?” Chris asked.
    “I’ll tell you sometime, but maybe not yet. You know, I like it, being the daughter of a partisan. I say to myself, ‘Hey, Roza, you’re a partisan’s daughter.’ That’s how I explain myself when I think about me and I wonder why I’m doing things. I’m not the same as everyone else, because I’m a partisan’s daughter.”
    “Your father seems very important to you,” Chris said to me, in his bland fashion, and I shrugged and replied, “Sure. For every little girl, her father is the first one she falls in love with.”
    “I don’t think my daughter was ever in love with me,” Chris said. “I wonder what was wrong with me.”
    I said, “You never got a chance to be a partisan.”
    I felt sorry for Chris. Actually he was very vulnerable, and here I was playing games with him, even tormenting him a bit, and it was amusing, and I laughed at him, but not with any cruelty. I leaned forward in my armchair and blew out a cloud of smoke. “I tell you something else,” I said. “My papa was the first one I slept with.”
    Chris didn’t know how to react to that. He was shocked. His eyes went wide. But I was smiling, and it confused him. In the end he said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
    “Why sorry?”
    “Well, it must have been terrible. To have your father do that to you. I can’t imagine how bad it must be.”
    “You’re funny,” I said, enjoying myself. “It was like I said. Papa is the first man you fall in love with.”
    “Even so…to do that to your daughter?”
    It was fun. I breathed out more smoke, and stubbed out my cigarette. I went over and knelt before him where he was sitting. He practically jumped, looking scared and delighted at the same time, and it occurred to me that he might be thinking that I was about to do something.
    But I beckoned for him to lean down, and I put my lips next to his ear. I could smell his aftershave. It was that Old Spice stuff. I wanted to charm and shock him. I giggled, and then whispered, “He didn’t do it to me. It wasn’t poor Roza. It was poor Papa. It was me. I took my daddy into bed and I got him to do it.”
    I leaned back and watched the reaction on his face.

FIVE

    The Girl from Belgrade
    R oza told me that she was born in a little village near Belgrade, not far from the Danube, and quite close to Avala. There’s a huge monument there, to the Unknown Soldier. The climate is extreme and often hostile, and people dream about the Dalmatian Coast in the same way that cold Americans are supposed to dream about California. Just across the Dinaric Mountains it’s more like Italy; a land of wine, olives, figs, aromatic shrubs, and Aleppo pines. I went there several times later on, but before Yugoslavia fell apart. It was a kind of pilgrimage.
    Around Belgrade, people suffocate in the heat of the summer. The road tar gets sticky and glutinous, the leaves wither on the trees, fires light themselves in the fields, and mirages shimmer above any patch of flat ground. There’s an old fortress called Kalemegdan, and it’s a relief to go in there and cool down in the great stone rooms. There are thunderstorms so immense that water runs off the ground in sudden floods because it can’t soak into the baked earth, and you get floods caused by the melting of the Alpine ice. It wells up from under the ground