Part 44 (1/2)

camilla.

chapter 45.

Once Camilla eavesdropped on two women sitting behind her in the bus. In the middle of their gossip, one of them said, You know, shes one of these women who always pick men wh.o.r.e bad for them. Camilla has forgotten whatever else they were talking about, but that phrase stayed with her.

She met Dragan almost ten years ago, at a party given by Lena, whos in the choir. Camilla had turned up in the afternoon to help Lena and Simo, her husband, arrange the furniture, make the salads, and set out the food. By seven oclock, Camilla was eager to start getting ready for the party. She put on a freshly ironed, loose-fitting dark blue s.h.i.+rt and an ankle-length skirt in a shade of light brown that matched her hair clothes that flattered her figure. Lena had noticed that she was getting fl.u.s.tered and told her not to worry. Simos friends always came b.u.mbling along at any old time. Simo was an electrician from Yugoslavia but had moved to Denmark long before the civil war started in his homeland.

Lena was right. Most of the Yugoslavs turned up really late, and their behavior at the party was something of a shock to Camilla. The drinking was much heavier for a start, the dancing was wilder, and the music louder. And all of them seemed to feel that parties were not only for chatting about this and that but also an outlet for their emotions.

At one point during the evening, a dark-haired man with a square jaw stood outside on the balcony and shouted incomprehensibly at people in the street. In the apartment everybody laughed, as if the mans behavior were a normal part of their Sat.u.r.day-night fun. Some of his friends made him come back inside and sit on the sofa. Camilla started talking to him. His English was very good. He said that his name was Dragan and he had been a schoolteacher in Bosnia. He had come to Denmark a month ago and lived near Lyngby, in a refugee camp for Yugoslav asylum seekers. He looked to be in his late twenties, roughly the same age as she, but he didnt mention anything about a wife or children.

They got up to dance, but it went badly. The music was unlike anything Camilla had ever heard before, a surreal mixture of gypsy melody and punk rock. Dragan was dancing about wildly, with big leaps and flailing arms, but even in all the noise and under the low lights, Camilla couldnt let herself go.

Later that night she went to the kitchen to rest her legs. Two friends from the choir were there too. While they were talking, a spat broke out in another room. There was a terrific crash.

They hurried to find out what was going on. A group of angry Yugoslavs had gathered around Dragan. Someone explained that Dragan had gotten into an argument with a buddy who had locked himself in the bathroom. After some shouting at each other through the door, Dragan had kicked it down. Some of the guests seemed very frightened.

Dragan himself was still very agitated about whatever the man in the bathroom had said and wouldnt stop yelling. Something made Camilla walk toward him. She heard Lena saying to her husband that she was going to throw Dragan out. Simo replied that he didnt want her to.

When Camilla stopped in front of Dragan, he took her in his arms. They stood together for a while. Quite still. He stopped shouting. Then they went off to dance.

A few minutes later Lena came up to them. She said she wanted to thank Camilla for calming Dragan down. She asked if he had ruined the evening for Camilla and if she would like Lena to ask him to leave. Camilla told her no.

They kept on dancing and talking. Later on they made love on his large black coat, spread on the ground in the shrubbery behind a large upmarket block of apartments in Frederiksberg. He walked her home afterward and seemed so different from the way he had acted at the party. He recited long Serbian love poems, which he knew by heart, and spoke about the ideas and characters in books written by Russian authors a hundred years ago.

The next few weeks were special. Camilla had suddenly become a member of a circle of Yugoslavs that included both recent refugees and older immigrants who had come to live in Denmark before the war. She went to dozens of their wild parties, as well as to little get-togethers in asylum camp rooms and down-at-heel apartments with a decidedly Balkan decor. Since the refugees had plenty of spare time, there was a gathering almost every evening.

An apartment belonging to Goran, a stage technician at the Betty Nansen Theater, was a favorite meeting place. Evening after evening Gorans hallway was full of his guests black jackets, frequently smelling damp because even when it rained his friends would walk everywhere to save money.

They got along well together, the Serbs and Muslims and Croats. Back in the old country, their brothers, fathers, colleagues, and schoolmates were busy killing one another, but here they worked hard to form a community that would help them live with some dignity in what they hoped would be their new homeland.

Apart from Camilla and three Yugoslav women, everyone in the group was male young men with strong features and, sometimes, muscular bodies shaped by military training. They hung around Gorans, ate hearty soups in his living room, and teased one another. When they watched television, they would become very serious and discuss everything under the sun. And when they thought of something to celebrate, they would pour out shots of slivovitz, a plum brandy that Dragan explained was mostly a drink for old people in Yugoslavia.

Camilla noticed that the others had respect for Dragan. They regarded him as wise and well read. Only when he had too much to drink would his personality change. He would pick fights with the others, shouting abuse and calling them names. Once he threw a television set through the window because of something that was said on the news.

All the same, everyone seemed genuinely fond of him. This was something Camilla realized was part of their culture: you stood by your friends no matter what. You gave each other s.p.a.ce to be wrong and explode, unlike the Danes, who would have run the other way. Such resolute loyalty was something Camilla would come back to again and again when she told her friend Anja about her new boyfriend and his world. Camilla heard of only one person who could never be forgiven. That man was Mirko Zigic. In those days she didnt have a clue why Zigic was such a reviled figure. The others never said more than Zigic enjoys the war, while everyone else suffers. Dragan said hed kill Zigic if they ever met again.

Dragan moved into Camillas little apartment just two weeks after the party at Lena and Simos. Every morning she woke feeling happy and somehow cleansed. s.e.x with him was wonderful and washed away her past, because he came to her with the same pa.s.sion that seemed to drive his rage.

He usually stayed in bed while she flew through her morning routines. Often maybe a little too often she arrived late at the City Post Office, where she was working as a junior secretary.

One day a friend told her that during his escape from Bosnia, Dragan had lived for a while in a dumpster. He had put a mattress in it and slept there at night, after bolting the lid from the inside so that no one could rob or kill him. Someone else told her what had happened when Dragan had taken a train from Banja Luka. A group of Serb militiamen had stopped the train and ordered the male Muslims to get out and pile into large, locked vans. They also took the young male Serbs, forced them to join the militia after a short period of military training, and informed them that any deserters would be shot. Thats why Dragan had been a member of the uniformed militia.

She made attempts to unravel Dragans past, but every time she tried to ask him about it, he became annoyed and told her to mind her own business. Yet she felt that, as his girlfriend, she had a right to know.

One evening over supper she decided to push again for answers. He started to shout at her and throw things about. Although he didnt hit her, she knew he would have if he hadnt checked himself and rushed out the door into the street. By ten oclock he still wasnt back. Worried, Camilla called Goran to find out if Dragan was there. Gorans girlfriend, Natasa, said he wasnt. She could hear how upset Camilla was and urged her to tell her the whole story. Natasa rea.s.sured her. She had lived and worked in Denmark for ten years and knew both cultures well.

Camilla, I want you to know that Dragan cares for you very much. It means a lot to him that you appreciate what a warm and wise man he is.

Oh, I do.

But, you see, if your relations.h.i.+p is to last, you must also respect him as a man.

I do, honestly.

Its hard for him to believe that you do. There he is, living in your apartment without paying anything himself. Just two years ago he was a schoolteacher with good prospects. He had done well for himself in a country that in many ways was rather like Denmark. He wants you to see him as the kind of man who can quote by heart from Dostoyevsky and Borges and Kundera. It was humiliating to have to live in a dumpster. It was humiliating to be unable to stand up against men who marched him off a train and into an army truck. And it is humiliating to live off handouts from the Danish state and not be in your own country, defending yourself and your family.

Camilla understood all that perfectly well, but she still couldnt grasp why he was being so secretive.

Later, Natasa came back to this issue: Perhaps it has something to do with defending your family or not.

What do you mean? Camilla knew instantly that she was about to hear something shed rather not know.

Camilla, there isnt one of our friends who hasnt experienced something truly horrific. We dont talk about it, but we all know.

Yes?

Natasa took a deep breath. I havent spoken about this with Dragan, but everyone in our little group seems to know about it. At one time or another they heard, in confidence from someone else, that Bosnian Muslims raped and then killed Dragans three sisters.

A silence followed. Camilla couldnt think of what to say. Someone knows that for sure?

Yes. You must remember that everything in Dragans life would have been different, if only he had been free to decide. Everything!

When Camilla came home from work the next day, a delicious smell of cooking met her on the landing. Dragan had taken possession of her kitchen after borrowing money from a few friends to buy the ingredients for a ca.s.serole and a good bottle of wine.

Neither of them referred to the night before. During the meal, Dragan recited verses in Serbian for her. He explained that they were from a poem written in the 1950s, or maybe the 1960s, by an exiled Serb poet. He had left Yugoslavia because of its Communist government and gone to live in London. The poem was very long, and was ent.i.tled Lament for Belgrade. In it, the poet described his travels to the most beautiful capitals of the world. Regardless of whether he was in Paris or Rome or Lisbon, the foreign cities only reminded him of death and emptiness. He longed to leave those places and return to the Belgrade of his youth, the city between the rivers, full of light and a steely will to fight for self-preservation.

Dragan quoted from the English translation of this tribute to Belgrade: Your blood, like dew, has fallen on the plains again, To cool the breath of all those whose quietus nears.

In bed that night, they impatiently made up for the twenty-four hours that they had been apart. Afterward, Dragan lay with his hands behind his head and spoke to her quietly. Ive escaped. Thats the most important thing. I risked my life to leave. Whats done is done. I must learn to put the past behind me. From now on Ill live properly, like you do. Youre so good.

She moved closer to him and kissed his cheek, but he didnt turn his face toward her. In the dark she watched the reflection of a streetlight, like a glowing dot, in his pupil. He was lying absolutely still, staring at the ceiling. She kissed him gently once more.

The last time Camilla had spoken on the phone to her parents, her father handed the receiver to her mother much too quickly: a bad sign. Whenever there was a need for white lies, her father usually let his wife handle it. They all knew she was better at pretending than he was.

Camilla had already drawn the conclusion that they wouldnt like Dragan. Never mind that they had never met him: her parents had disapproved of all her boyfriends. Each time she had taken their dislike to heart. She simply could not escape from wanting to please them.

After she and Dragan had been living together for almost two months, she felt he must meet her parents. They invited Camilla and Dragan for Sunday lunch. Her parents apartment was in Vanlse and Camilla still hated the place. For the rest of her life she would always drive long, roundabout routes just to avoid having to pa.s.s within sight of her old school. Their home was crammed with every sort of bric-a-brac, which, in a strange way, made it appear vaguely reminiscent of the old Yugoslav immigrants apartments.

Her parents welcomed them, smiling. Both Camillas father and mother did not speak English well, but they tried hard, since Dragans Danish was even worse. It went well enough. They showed Dragan into the living room first and then led the way to the lunch table. The meal started with toasts of aquavit and explanations about Danish schnapps and its different flavorings.

Camilla knew she had been right all along. Everything was so obviously orchestrated, so perfectly smooth, that there was no way of knowing what they were truly thinking.

During the meal they exchanged the names of various foods in English and Danish and Serbian. Camillas parents seemed to be endlessly surprised by how different the words were for the same thing and kept bringing up other dishes to talk about.