Free A Partisan's Daughter by Louis De Bernières Page A

horse, and she was too terrified to refuse. It was difficult to mount such a big horse, and it had to be done by climbing on a gate first, but she was determined not to panic, and she stayed up there by clutching on to the mane. She thought it was trying to bite her feet, but the old lady said that it was just sniffing her to see who she was.
    Off they went along the road, with the horse farting on account of the apples, which made Roza giggle, but did not impress the old lady, and they had gone quite a way before she said that she thought that this was probably far enough, otherwise it would take too long for Roza to get home, and anyway, it was about to rain.
    Roza didn’t want to go, and she made the woman promise to let her ride the horse again. It was apparently called “Russia” because it was very big, a complete liability, and always going where it wasn’t wanted. She sprained her ankle getting off, and after the tears were duly wiped, she started to limp home.
    She was only halfway there when the wellhead broke with a clap of thunder, and down fell the rain. Her ankle hurt too much to run, and the water was beginning to fall very heavily, so she made for a little barn that was at the side of the road. It was heaped with bales of straw, and she climbed up on them despite being frightened of rats.
    She said that she mostly felt very disappointed about having to get off the horse, and annoyed about being caught in the rain, and at first was more puzzled than alarmed by catching sight of a hand sticking up out of the straw. It was like a yellow claw, with papery skin.
    She moved some straw away, and the long and short of it is that she found a dead tramp. Fortunately she thought he was asleep, and her first instinct was not to wake him up, as that would have been bad manners. He was wearing a placard around his neck, on which was scrawled:
“Survivor of Jasenovac. Hero of the Resistance.”
He had a medal with a red ribbon pinned to his chest, his mouth was open and his lips were blue. He had a white beard, speckled with vomit. Next to him was a brown bottle, which later turned out to have had carbon-tetrachloride industrial dry-cleaner in it. Roza said that when she sniffed at the empty bottle she thought it smelled very nice. Luckily it was all gone, so she didn’t get to take a swig of it.
    She tried conversing with him, but did eventually realise that he was dead. At that point she went out in the rain and limped home, regardless.
    Her parents were furious with her, mostly because of their own anxiety. They were in their coats and hats and were just about to set out looking for her. It was particularly bad for her father because thunder made him feel as if he were back under bombardment. It took her a little while to persuade them that there really was a dead man in the barn down the road, and they accused her of telling tales and told her to stop telling lies. What ultimately persuaded them was her odd assertion that the dead man’s name was “Survivor of Jasenovac,” since she couldn’t possibly have thought that one up on her own.
    When the police took away the body, they finally identified it as being indeed that of a beggar and one-time resistance fighter, who had been captured and put into the extermination camp at Jasenovac. I looked it up and discovered that this was a place where the Croats had killed about thirty-five thousand Serbs. The Gestapo had inspected it and been shocked. Some of the staff were Franciscan monks. When Yugoslavia finally fell apart, I was one of those people who weren’t particularly surprised. Roza always said that it would, after Tito died. I didn’t believe her at first, though; we’d all been told that it was a multicultural paradise, positively purulent with harmony and sweet understanding.
    Roza said that the reason she still got upset about the tramp was that you could be a hero and survive in hell, and get awarded the Partisan Star, and then still die like a rat,