A Partisan's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

and fills lakes even in places where there’s been no rain. People have to work continually on the irrigation canals, not just to keep the land watered, but to prevent the settlements from submerging.
    Roza said that her father hated the thunder because to him it sounded like an artillery attack. He would go into a kind of rage, and she and her mother would lie sweating upstairs with the electricity prickling on their skin. He would go out into the torrential downpours and stagger about, shaking his fist, shouting, and firing both barrels of his shotgun into the sky. I said, “That must have been worrying,” and Roza said, “No, it was just my papa.” Once her mother went out to try to bring him in, and he accidentally struck her on the cheek with the butt of the gun, so that it came up in a terrible livid bruise, and after that she left him alone to rage in the thunder showers. The day after the accident he came home with a ring for his wife and a doll for Roza, and he said, “I try to control it, but it’s difficult sometimes.” Roza said that she thought he was going to cry, because his lower lip was trembling and his eyes were moist. I can’t imagine my own father crying. British fathers don’t weep in front of their children. Her mother said to her, “Printzeza, whatever your father does, remember that he is a brave man who has been to hell and stayed there for a while, and then come back again.”
    In the summer they would yearn for the icy winds that come in from Hungary, but in winter when the Hungarian wind was sawing everything in half, and they were floundering about in the snow, they would long for the roasting of summer. Only in the spring and autumn was it possible to live a life that wasn’t a hostage to the climate.
    More importantly, in that region it isn’t ever possible not to live a hostage to history. They’re all possessed and tormented by it. It takes the logic and humanity out of their souls and gives them heroic stupidity.

SIX

    The Secret Policeman
    After he was a partisan, my father was a secret policeman.
    T hat’s what I told Chris. I liked to tease him with more and more stories about my father, because he was fascinated by the idea that I slept with him and wasn’t bothered about it. I kept him in suspense by telling him a lot of other things about my father first.
    The truth is that I was getting very fond of Chris, he was becoming a dependable and happy part of my life, I looked forward to his visits, and every day I made myself look nice and thought about what I’d say, just in case he turned up after seeing Dr. Patel or one of the other doctors. I thought that if I kept from telling him about all the details of the incest for a while, he’d keep coming back. Once I’d divulged them, I’d be forced to tell him the other stories.
    So I told him that after he was a partisan, my father was a secret policeman. In those days the secret police was called UDBA . In 1966 it turned out that they’d had listening devices even in Tito’s own office, and he realised why it was that his plans were always getting blocked. He subjected it to a reform from which it never recovered, but just after the war it did help to keep Tito in power, making sure that Yugoslavia didn’t fall apart again.
    My father had a busy time, because there were hundreds of war criminals on the loose, plus a great many people who were conveniently considered to be so: fascist Ustase from Croatia, royalist Cetniks from Serbia, Albanians from Kosovo who were just a general nuisance and wouldn’t cooperate with anyone. I said that one of my father’s first jobs was to help gather evidence against the Cetnik commander, Mijailovic, and he was also involved in the prosecution of Archbishop Stepinac, a Croatian who had busied himself with suppressing Serbian orthodoxy. Everyone said he was a Vatican stooge.
    In the ten years after the war Tito was imposing strong party discipline, and wasn’t allowing any