Wicked Women (11 page)

Up there in the Castle that day a newly elected government was trying to piece together from the flesh of this nation, the bones of that, a new living, changing organism, a new constitution. New, new, new. I wished them every luck with it, but they could not make Milena’s bad teeth good, or stop her smiling at me as if she wanted something. I wondered what it was. She’d used not to smile like this: it was a new trick: it sat badly on her doleful face.

We reached the Processional Bridge, which crosses the river between the Palace and the Cathedral. “The oldest bridge in Europe,” said Milena. We had walked across it many times before. She had made this remark many times before. Look left down the river and you could see where it carved its way through the mountains which form the natural boundaries to this small nation: look right and you looked into mist. On either bank the ancient city crowded in, in its crumbly, pre-Disney form, all eaves, spires and casements, spared from the blasts of war for one reason or another, or perhaps just plain miracle. But Emperors and Popes must have somewhere decent to be crowned, and Dictators too need a background for pomp and circumstance, crave some acknowledgement from history: a name engraved in gold in a Cathedral, a majestic tomb in a gracious square still standing. It can’t be all rubble or what’s the point?

I offered Milena my coat. It seemed to me that she and I were at some crucial point in not just our story, but everyone’s; that the decisions we made here today had some general relevance to the way the world was going. I could at least share some warmth with her. My monthly Western salary would keep her in comfort for a year, but what could I do about that? Not my doing. If she wanted a new coat from me it would have nothing to do with her desire to be warm, but as a token of my love. She didn’t mind shivering. Her discomfort was both a demonstration of martyrdom and a symbol of pride. “I am not cold,” she said.

The city is a favourite location for film companies. The place is cheap; its money valueless in the real world and its appetite for hard currency voracious, which means good deals can be had. The quaint, colourful locations are inexpensively historicised—though the satellite dishes are these days becoming too numerous to dodge easily. And there are few parking problems, highly trained post-production technicians, efficient labs, excellent cameramen, sensitive sound-men, and so on—and cheap, so cheap. Those who lived in the city had escaped the fate of so much of the hitherto Russian-dominated lands—the sullen refusal of the oppressed and exploited to do anything right, to be anything other than inefficient, sloppy and lazy, in the hope that the colonising power would simply give up and go away, shaking the dust of the conquered land from its feet. And the power it had amassed lay not of course in the strength of the ideology it professed, as the West in its muddled way assumed, but in the strength of arms and organisation of that single, colonising, ambitious nation, Russia. Ask anyone between Budapest and Samarkand, Tbilisi and the Siberian flatlands, and they would tell you who they feared and hated: Russia, the motherland, announcing itself to a gullible world as the Soviet Union. Harsh mother, pretending kindness, using Marxist-Leninism as the religious tool of government and exploitation, as once in the South Americas Spain had used Christianity.

In the city they kept their wits about them: too sophisticated for the numbing rituals of mind-control ever to quite work; the concrete of the workers’ blocks to quite take over from the tubercular gables and back alleys, to stifle the whispers of dissent, to quieten the gossip and mirth of cafe society. McDonald’s has achieved that now with its bright, forbidding jollity, and who in the brave new world of freedom can afford a cup of coffee anyway, has anything interesting or persuasive to say now that everyone has what they wanted? Better, better by far to travel hopefully than to arrive, to have to face the fact that the journey is not out of blackness into light, but from one murky confusion into another. Happiness and fulfilment lie in our affections for one another, not in the forms that our societies take. If only I was in love with Milena, this walk across the bridge would be a delight. I would feel the air bright with the happiness of the hopeful young.

Be that as it may, the city was always better than anywhere else for filming, Castle and all. Go to Rumania and you’d find the castles still full of manacled prisoners clanking their chains; try Poland and you’d have to fly in special food for your stars; in Hungary the cameraman would have artistic tantrums; but here in the city there would be gaiety, fun, sometimes even sparkle, the clatter of high heels on cobblestones, sultry looks from sultry eyes, and of course nights with Milena in the fringy, shabby apartment, with the high, white-mantled brass bed, and good strong coffee in porcelain cups for breakfast. Milena, forever languidly busy, about my body or about her work, off to the Institute or back from it. Women worked hard in this country, as women were accustomed to all over the Soviet Union. Equality for women meant an equal obligation to work, the official direction of your labour, sleeping with your boss if he so required, the placement of your child in a creche, as well as the cultural expectation that you got married, ran a home and emptied the brimming ashtrays while your husband put his feet up. Joanna would have none of that kind of thing; for the male visitor from the West the Eastern European woman is paradise, if you can hack it, if your conscience can stand it: if you can bear being able to buy affection and constancy.

I hadn’t been with Milena for three months or so. Now, like her city, I found her changed. I wondered about her constancy. It occurred to me that it was foolish of me to expect it. As did the rest of the nation, she now paid at least lip service to market forces; perhaps these worked sexually as well. Rumour had it that there were now twenty-five thousand prostitutes in the city and an equal number of pimps, as men and women decided to make the best financial use of available resources. I discovered I was not so much jealous as rather hoping for evidence of Milena’s infidelity, which would let me off whatever vague hook it was I found myself upon. Not so difficult a hook. She and I had always been discreet: I had not mentioned our relationship to a soul back home. Milena was in another country; she did not really count: her high bouncing bosom, her narrow rib cage and fleshless hips vanished from my erotic imagination as the plane reached the far side of the mountain tops—the turbulence serving as some rite of passage—to re-imprint itself only as it passed over them once again, on my return.

The cleaning processes had not yet reached the bridge, I was glad to see. The stone saints who lined it were still black with the accumulated grime of the past.

“Who are these saints?” I asked, but Milena didn’t know. Some hold books, others candles; noses are weather-flattened. Milena apologised for her ignorance. She had not, she said, had the opportunity of a religious education: she hoped her son Milo would. Her son lived with Milena’s mother, who was a good Catholic, in the Southern province—a place about to secede, to become independent, to ethnic-cleanse in its own time, in its own way. “I didn’t know you had a son,” I said. I was surprised, and ashamed at myself for being so uncurious about her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It’s my problem,” Milena said. “I don’t want to burden you. He’s ten now. When he was born I was not well, and times were hard. It seemed better that he go to my mother. But she’s getting old now and there’s trouble in the Southern province. They are not nice people down there.”

Once the city’s dislike and suspicion had been reserved for the Russians. Now it had been unleashed and spread everywhere. The day the Berlin Wall fell Milena and I had been sitting next to each other in the small Institute cinema, watching the show reels of politically sound directors on the Institute’s books, in the strange, flickering half-dark of such places. Her small white hand had strayed unexpectedly on to my thigh, unashamedly direct in its approach. But then exhilaration and expectation, mixed with fear, was in the air. Sex seemed the natural expression of such emotions, such events. And perhaps that was why I never quite trusted her, never quite loved her, found it so easy to forget her when -she wasn’t under my nose—I despised her because it was she who had approached me, not I her. If Joanna and I are apart it’s because, or so she says, I’m so conditioned in the old, pre-feminist ways of thinking I’m impossible for a civilised woman to live with. I am honest, that is to say, and scrupulous in the investigation of my feelings and opinions. “Why didn’t you put the child into a creche?” I asked. It shocked me that Milena, that any woman, could give a child away so easily.

“I was in a creche,” she said bleakly. “It’s the same for nearly everyone in this city under forty. The creche was our real home, our parents were strangers. I didn’t want it to happen to Milo. He was better with my mother, though there are too many Muslims down there. More and more of them. It’s like a disease.”

I caught the stony eye of baby Jesus on St. Joseph’s shoulder—that one at least I knew—and one or the other sent me a vision, not that I believed in such things, as I looked down at the greeny, sickly waters of the river. I saw, ranked and rippling, row upon row of infants, small, pale children, institutionalised, deprived, pasty-faced from the atrocious city food—meat, starch, fat, no fruit, no vegetables—and understood that I was looking at the destruction of a people. They turned their little faces to me in despair, and I looked quickly up and away and back at Milena to shake off the vision; but there behind her, where the river met the sky, saw that nation grown up, marching towards me into the mists of its future, a sad mockery of those sunny early Social Realist posters which decked my local once-Marxist, now Leftish bookshop back home: the proletariat marching square-jawed and determined into the new dawn, scythes and spanners at the ready, only here there were no square jaws, only wretchedness; the quivering lip of the English ex-public schoolboy, wrenched from his home at a tender age, now made general; the same profound puzzled sorrow spread through an entire young population, male and female. See it in the easy surface emotion, the facile sexuality, the rush of tears to the eyes, uncontrolled and uncontrollable, pleading for a recognition that never comes, a comfort that is unavailable. Pity me, the unspoken words upon a nation’s lips, because I am indeed pitiable. I have been deprived of freedom, yes, of course, all that. And of proper food and of fancy things, consumer durables and material wealth of every kind, all that; but mostly I have been robbed of my birthright, my mother, my father, my home. And how can I ever recover from that? Murmur as a last despairing cry the latest prayer, market forces, market forces, say it over and over as once the Hail Mary was said, to ward off all ills and rescue the soul, but we know in our hearts it won’t work. There is no magic here contained. Wasted lives, lost souls, unfixable. Pity me, pity me, pity me.

“I think the fog’s coming down,” said Milena, and so it was. The new dawn faded into it. A young man on the bridge was selling black rubber spiders: you hurled them against a board and they crept down, leg over leg, stillness alternating with sudden movement. No one was buying.

“Well,” I said, “I expect you made the right decision about Milo. What happened to his father?” I turned to button her cardigan. I wanted her warmed. This much at least I could do. Perhaps if she was warm, she would not feel so much hate for the Southern province and its people.

“We are divorced,” she said. “I am free to marry again. Look, there’s Jesus crucified. Hanging from nails in his hands. At least the communists took down the crosses. Why should we have to think about torture all the time? It was the Russians taught our secret police their tricks: we would never have come to it on our own.”

I commented on the contradiction between her wanting her son to have a Catholic upbringing, and her dislike of the Christian symbol, the tortured man upon the cross, but she shrugged it off: she did not want the point pursued. She was not interested in it. She saw no virtue in consistency. First you had this feeling, then that: that was all there was to it. No parent had ever intervened between the tantrum and its cause; no doubt Milena along with her generation had been slapped into silence, when protesting frustration and outrage. She was wounded: she was damaged: not her fault, but there it was. What I’d seen as childlike, as charming, in the early stages of a relationship, was in the end merely irritating. I could not stir myself to become interested in her son or in a marriage which had ended in divorce. I could not take her initial commitment seriously.

“I’m pregnant,” Milena now says. “Last time you were here we made a baby. Isn’t that wonderful? Now you will marry me, and take me to London, and we will live happily ever after.” Fiends come surging up the river through the mist, past me, gaunt, thin, soundlessly shrieking. These are the ghosts of the insulted, the injured, the wronged and tortured, whose efforts have been in vain. Those whose language has been taken away, whose bodies have been starved: they are the wrongfully dead. All the great rivers of the world carry these images with them; over time they have infected me by their existence. They breathe all around me. I take in their exhalations. I am their persecutor, their ruler, the origin of their woes: the one who despises. They shake their ghoulish locks at me; they mock me with their sightless eyes, snapping to attention as they pass. Eyes right! Blind eyes, forever staring. They honour me, the living.

“Is something the matter?” asks Milena. “Aren’t you happy? You told me you loved me.”

Did I? Probably. I remind her that I’ve also told her that I’m married.

“But you will divorce her,” she says. “Why not? Your children are grown. She doesn’t need you anymore. I do.” Her eyes are large in their hollows: she fears disaster. Of course she does. It so often happens. I can hardly tell whether she is alive or dead. To bear a child by a ghost!

Milena is perfectly right. Joanna doesn’t need me. Milena does. The first night I went with Milena she was wearing a purple velvet bra. It fired me sexually, it was so extraordinary, but put too great an element of pity into what otherwise could have been love. There seemed something more valuable in my wife Joanna’s white Marks & Spencer bra with its valiant label, 40A. Broad-backed, that is, and flat-chested. I supposed Milena’s to be a 36C. English women lean towards the pear-shaped; the city women towards the top-heavy. It’s unfashionable, dangerous even, to make comparisons between the characteristics of the peoples of the world, this tribe, that tribe, this religion or that. The ghouls that people the river, who send their dying breath back, day after day, in the form of the fog that blights the place, mists up the new Disney facades with mystery droplets, met their end because people like me whispered, nudged and made odious comparisons, and the odium grew and grew and ended up in torture, murder, slaughter, genocide. Nevertheless, I must insist: it is true. Pear-shaped that lot, top-heavy this. And if I suspected Milena’s purple velvet bra of being some kind of secret police state issue, or part of the Film Institute’s plan to attract hard currency and Western business, an end to which their young female staff were encouraged, even paid, it is not surprising. Had I been of her nationality, I knew well enough, her hand would not have strayed across my thigh in the film-flickering dark. I was offended that the Gods of Freedom, good health, good teeth, good nourishment, prosperity and market forces, whom I myself did not worship, endowed me with this wondrous capacity to attract. I could snap my fingers and all the girls in Eastern Europe would come trotting, and fall on their knees.