Alex
He took me to a place that was complete shit.
I heard that the Russians have a proverb about us Yugoslavs. It goes, “Where there are two Yugoslavs there are three factions, and that’s just the communists.” They say we’re all just bandits and we’ve only got loyalty to our relatives, and we make pacts with our enemies just to take advantage of our neighbours. Anyway, someone once wrote “Long Live Ustase” on my door, but I didn’t have too much trouble after that. I never had any time for all that tribal crap until I realised that all the other tribes hated me, no matter what. My best friend was Slovene, Tito was a Croat, my father’s car was German, my watch was Russian, my camera was East German, and it was the British who freed us in the war. That’s how I saw it back then. I thought, “Who cares about all that stuff in the past?” Then the past jumps up and bites you in the leg, the moment you step back towards it. Nowadays I hate lots of people, but I don’t do it seriously. I mean, I hate the Croats now, but I’d be happy to meet one any time, and I hate the Bosnians for breaking up my country, but I had a lovely friend who was Bosnian.
She was called Fatima. It was on the guided tour that they make you go on to acquaint you with the university. There were lots of us. All the boys had brand-new military haircuts from their mothers, and the girls all had new plastic shoes that squeaked. I don’t think any of us managed to remember all the historical facts they were telling us, and we still got lost for weeks afterwards.
Fatima had gold bangles on one wrist, and a shirt with no buttons, an embroidered waistcoat, open sandals, and those huge baggy trousers that you tie round your waist with a sash. She had her hair tied up in a scarf, and she had big gold earrings. She was the only one there who had any colour to her, and I thought she was very exotic. To be honest, I was surprised to see her at university because the Muslims usually kept their girls at home. I think it was much harder for Fatima at Zagreb than it ever was for me. She got pictures of pigs passed under her door at night. For a long time it was almost impossible for me to say anything to her without her thinking that I was insulting her in some elaborate and indefinable way. I suppose I persisted because I was naturally drawn to her. She once told me that what mattered wasn’t religion, it was class. She was setting up a business with her husband, and so she’d come to get qualified in economics and administration.
I was a true communist back then, and I said I didn’t believe in class. Fatima said, “You want us all to be serfs and factory workers. I want us all to be aristocrats.”
Fatima and I spent a lot of time in the botanical gardens. We did all the tourist sites, and sat in all the right cafés. She smoked one cigarette a day, in a state of near ecstasy. She said she got the idea from reading an article about an American film star.
We liked the upper city. It had eighteenth-century mansions and palaces, and the Lotrscak bell rang every day at noon. We sat on the cathedral steps, and talked about Matija Gubec, the one who got killed there when they crowned him with a white-hot circle of iron. Fatima said that the man who did it had a tomb in Stubica that is always damp because it drips with his sweat as he burns in hell. I said I didn’t believe in hell, and Fatima tutted with her tongue and waved her hand dismissively. I think that she would have become an even better friend than Tasha, but what happened was very similar. Tasha got taken away from me by a boy, and that’s how I got taken away from Fatima.
I was in the library when someone behind me said, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
He was still wearing his black leather jacket, and his hair still wasn’t washed. He said, “I knew I’d bump into you again. Listen, would you help me with a problem?”
I thought, “Oh God, he wants to tell me something personal,” but he put a book down in front of me and said, “It’s problem three. It’s to do with mechanical stresses when you’ve got three different forces acting in different directions. I don’t really understand the formula for working it all out, and I thought that you might be able to help. My brain is turning into a walnut.”
I said, “You’ve got to use differentiation with this problem. Do you know how to do that?”
“Not really. But if you show me I’ll buy you a drink.”
He was smiling ironically, and I suddenly realised what he was up to. I said, “You know perfectly well how to do this, don’t you?”
“I had to have some excuse to approach you. And you do owe me a favour. For carrying your cases.”
He took me to a place that was complete shit. It was a sort of old cellar, and on the floor there was a thick slime of beer and ash. The toilets were all overflowing, and there were so many people that you had to hold your drink over your head. We had to shout to hear each other, and the smoke was so thick that it choked you, even if you were a smoker of Drina cigarettes, which I was at the time. It was the kind of cigarette that performs a tonsillectomy all on its own.
There was a band playing, and they were so loud and so bad! Later on, when I heard punk in England, it sounded very familiar. Someone threw their beer over the singer, and the singer hit him with the microphone stand. Then all hell broke loose, and soon there was a complete brawl. I wanted to get out, but Alex wanted to watch the fight, so I went outside and waited for him. The cold fresh air was like a kiss from an angel. I felt angry and pissed off, but on the other hand it had been quite an adventure.
When Alex eventually came out, his eyes were shining, and he said, “Wasn’t that brilliant?”
I said, “No, Alex, it was pure crap. If you ever take me to anything like that again, you can consider me an ex-friend.”
“It was a bit alternative,” he conceded.
That night I went to the window of my room and saw Alex down below, hanging about underneath a street lamp, smoking a cigarette. I was touched, because it was a bit like Romeo and Juliet, and I waved to him. He waved back, and I realised afterwards that by then I’d already taken my top off. I just hoped that I’d been in shadow and that he hadn’t seen anything. He certainly never mentioned it. I got a little kick out of it, though.
Alex brought me flowers to make up for the awful concert, but I didn’t sleep with him for two months. Fatima often came with us, which I suppose might have annoyed Alex a lot, but he never showed it. We went to museums, and once we went to the opera, but it was obvious that Alex hated it. Anyway, I came to trust him, and I thought we were good friends.
One evening we were out in the snow, in the lamplight. I was wearing his hat, and he was doing a stupid dance as he pretended to be avoiding my snowballs. My hands got so cold that they started to ache, and I said I thought they were going to drop off, so we went indoors to my room, and just when he was rubbing my hands to warm them up, there was a standard government-issue power cut.
It went completely dark, and we started stumbling around looking for candles. Every time I lit a match to look for them, he’d creep up and blow it out, and we were laughing like idiots. In the end I lit a candle, which gave off a soft yellow glow. Normally the room seemed too small, but now it seemed intimate and very comforting. The peeling paint cast small flickering shadows behind the torn bits, and it seemed very bohemian and romantic.
I said, “This is nice,” and he said, “Now we can’t do any work. Let’s say thank you to the electricity man.”
“Thank you, electricity man,” I said. There was an awkward silence because we both knew what was likely to happen. Just for something to do, I went and put on the Françoise Hardy tape, but of course the player didn’t work, so I switched it over to run on batteries. When I turned round, he was right behind me, and he caught me and kissed me very softly on the forehead. I let myself sink into his arms, and laid my head on his chest. I had the feeling that he was taking in the smell of my hair. After a while I lifted my face, and he kissed me properly. He had his eyes closed, but when he opened them they were glowing.
He went to the bed, sat on it, and held his arms out. He was smiling. I thought I ought to resist, but it di
dn’t seem right somehow. I went to him, and he said, “I adore you, Roza. I’ve been burning up inside ever since I saw you at the station.”
It was love at first sight, so I was flattered and pleased. He started to undo my buttons. It was leisurely. He kissed every new bit as he exposed it. He kept saying, “You’re so beautiful.” Eventually he was kissing me all over, and I felt I was in a delirium. He’d got all my clothes off without me even realising it properly, and I was beyond help.
He stood up and took off his clothes very quickly and efficiently, and then he was beside me, with his hands all over my body. He turned me over and stroked my back and the backs of my legs, and then he turned me onto my back. I said, “I don’t want to get pregnant.” My voice seemed very small and distant to me.
He got up and went and fumbled in his trouser pocket, and came back with a little packet. He said, “I won’t tell the new Pope if you don’t.”
I felt a terrible disappointment. “You were expecting me to sleep with you? You were counting on it, so you got one of those?”
“We were both expecting it,” he said, “or am I mistaken?”
“It’s still not very nice. It makes me feel cheap.”
He came back to the narrow little bed, and said, “Well, we can wait. Next time. Some other time. I don’t want to spoil it.”
He took my right hand and started to stroke himself with it. I’d never have expected such a thing, but I didn’t think of stopping him. I didn’t want to. It was as if he was showing me how to please him. My hand took in all the beautiful textures and temperatures. He told me that my hand was cool and delicious. In the end I said, “Let’s not wait.”
When he was on top of me I was watching his face. He had his eyes closed, and I would have said that he’d turned into someone else, or was possessed. I liked the power I had. When he finished he slumped on me for a moment, and then he went back up on his arms and said, “Christ, I felt like a god.”
The power came back on and spoiled the moment, but he turned off the lights to restore candlepower, and for a while we slept in each other’s arms. We made love two more times that night, but it was quite a while before I learned to come with him, maybe three months. Alex was very good.
I always think that it was with Alex that I really lost my virginity. Everything else, Tasha and my father, was just practice.
SIXTEEN
Can You Fall in Love If You’ve Been Castrated?
CHRIS: I felt diminished when Roza told me about her romantic experiences. I think perhaps she didn’t realise how much I wanted her. If she did, then she didn’t have any regard for my feelings. It was my fault, I suppose. I could have stopped her, but I was fascinated. I was a voyeur with pangs of jealousy. It was foolish, because no one is without a past, but maybe it’s better to pretend that every beginning is the first one. I would think about Roza being in love with Alex and having wonderful sex with him, and it made me think that I was an old nobody by comparison.
ROZA: I was watching his reaction when I was telling him the Alex story. He was uncomfortable, but I quite enjoyed that. It was fun tormenting him a little. I was stirring him up, and it was having a similar effect on me. When I said goodnight to him he was very subdued, and I kissed him on the cheek and gave him a medium-length hug, to keep him encouraged. He went home to his wife, and I wondered once again what it was like being married to him.
CHRIS: Next time I went I took her some flowers, and I think she was really quite touched. It was only a bunch of yellow chrysanthemums, but her eyes lit up and her lip trembled a little. She was confused by it, and didn’t know what to do. She glanced around that filthy hallway, as if she were looking for a vase, and then she clutched them to her chest, and said, “You’re so nice. You make me feel very good.”
I shrugged, as if to say, “It was the least I could do.”
ROZA: I suppose it was cruel but when we were sitting downstairs in the basement I told him that Alex used to bring me yellow chrysanthemums. It wasn’t true, though. I don’t think he ever gave me much. Looking back I think he was probably screwing lots of women, and I doubt if any of them got much. I may be talking like a prostitute, but I don’t really see the point of screwing someone who never gives you presents. Maybe it’s because it gives you the feeling that you’re still being courted, even though you’ve already been fucked half to death, and there’s not much more to look forward to.
CHRIS: Roza kept telling me about her old boyfriend Alex. I don’t know if she was tormenting me on purpose, to make me jealous, or whether she was just treating me as a confidant, a kind of tolerant uncle.
She said that her friend Fatima used to keep warning her about Alex, but she put it down to Islamic puritanism, and just ignored it. As for me, I think it’s all very well getting moralistic about other people’s sexual behaviour, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to use one’s principles as an excuse for cowardice. Now that I’m old I just wish I’d been more of a rake when I was young. I wish I’d just followed my balls into battle, instead of sitting about thinking of reasons not to take risks and make memorable mistakes. I didn’t even make a tentative start until middle age. You can’t make love to beautiful girls when you’re dead. When I lie dying I ought to be mulling over my most dramatic and ecstatic memories, but I hardly have any. I’ve wasted my life being sensible when I should have been cavorting and gallivanting. I haven’t had enough bliss, I’ve just had one damned day after another, nice and calm, and now I’ve got bugger all to remember.
What I mean is that I don’t blame Alex for whatever he was doing. I just wish that Roza hadn’t made me suffer so much jealousy when she talked about him, especially as I was still reeling from what she’d told me about sleeping with her father. My feelings were boiling inside, and they were all contradictory.
ROZA: Alex used to arrive every evening at about nine o’clock, with a bottle of wine. We’d drink it side by side in that little bed, and then we’d make love. The other girls had to get used to him using the bathroom and making spaghetti in the kitchen. We used to talk for hours, setting the world to rights, just like proper students. I thought he was an idealist, and I admired him for it. I suppose I was too.
I told Chris that making love with Alex was like being God, because I could control him completely. I knew how to give him every kind of pleasure, so much pleasure that it almost made him suffer. I could make him moan and writhe about, and I could make him go wild, and he could do it to me too. I thought there’d never been lovers like us. Lovers often think like that.
It made my brain work better, all that sex. I did immense calculations and wrote long and complicated essays, and the professor said, “One day you’ll be after my job.” Once I even tried to read Einstein’s little book on relativity, and I understood it at the time, even though I forgot what it had said the moment I’d finished it. It’s funny to think that I could have been teaching at a university, instead of ending up with a life like mine, in a shitty slum house with no roof and half the stair treads missing.
CHRIS: Roza once asked me about my parents, and then told me about hers. That was the pattern of our conversations, really. Any curiosity about me was brought about by something that interested Roza in herself, and I sat listening so that I could just carry on appraising her body, looking at her in her tight white jeans, and wondering what her breasts would feel like if you cupped them, and whether she had big dark nipples or small delicate pink ones. If there’s anyone who knows how to distinguish sexual obsession from love, they’re a lot wiser than I am. If you had no sexual impulses, let us say, or if you had no hormones, would it be possible to fall in love? Can you fall in love if you’ve been castrated?
SEVENTEEN
Breaking Up
People like things in theory.
She was in the middle of telling me about her university lover when she excused herself and went upstairs. When she came back down she showed me a letter. It was very old and yellowed, and the ink was a little faded.
“This is the letter my father wrote,” she said.
“I can’t read it,” I said, perplexed.
“The point is,” said Roza, “it’s got splash marks on it.”
“Splash marks?”
“When he wrote it he was crying. You don’t expect old partisans to be crying.”
“What does it say?” I asked.
She took it off me and translated: “ ‘Dearest Printzeza, your mother and I have decided to divorce. I know that this will not come as a surprise to anyone, as we have not been happy together for years, but now that you and Friedrich have left home, it would seem to be the right time to make the break and start again. We are both getting older, and it will be difficult for both of us, especially for me, as I know that this failure is largely my own fault. Your mother is also writing to you, and I know that she will be able to express things better than I can. I will be staying at the house, and she will be moving into town so as to be closer to her friends. Dearest sweet Printzeza, there are so many things for which I beg you to forgive me, things that should not have happened. You know what I am talking about. Be assured that your mother and I will always continue to be united in our love for you. Your loving father.’
“I got one from my mother, and that had tears on it as well,” she said.
“What happened to your father?”
Roza smiled and said, “He did what Serbs always do. He got very depressed, drank slivovica, and tried to kill himself with cigarettes.”
“I don’t know anything about Serbs,” I said. “You’re my first one.”
“We get depressed, drink slivovicam and try to kill ourselves with cigarettes,” said Roza. “It’s our national way of life.”
“What did you do?”
“I got depressed and tried to kill myself with cigarettes. I missed out the slivovica. I went and talked a lot with Fatima, and she gave me lemon tea and a lot of talk about fate. She was a proper Muslim. Everything was God’s will. I thought, “No, it’s not,” but Fatima was good with me. Alex was OK as well. He was nice to me. I didn’t know he’d been seen kissing some other girl on Beogradska Avenija, because no one told me till later.