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 rubbish skip. 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, 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. That’s why Dragan had been a member of the uniformed militia.
She made attempts to unravel Dragan‘s 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 didn’t hit her, she knew he would have if he hadn’t checked himself and rushed out of the door into the street. By ten o’clock he still wasn’t back. Worried, Camilla called Goran to find out if Dragan was there. Goran’s girlfriend, Natasa, said he wasn’t. She could hear how upset Camilla was and urged her to tell her the whole story. Natasa reassured 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 relationship is to last, you must also respect him as a man.’
‘I do, honestly.’
‘It’s hard for him to believe that you do. There he is, living in your flat 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 skip. 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 couldn’t grasp why he was being so secretive.
Later, Natasa came back to this question: ‘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 she’d rather not know.
‘Camilla, there isn’t one of our friends who hasn’t experienced something truly horrific. We don’t talk about it, but we all know.’
‘Yes?’
Natasa took a deep breath. ‘I haven’t 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 Dragan’s three sisters.’
A silence followed. Camilla couldn’t think of what to say. ‘Someone knows that for sure?’
‘Yes. You must remember that everything in Dragan’s 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 casserole 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 entitled ‘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 a famous poem:
Belgrade, your blood, like dew, has fallen on the plains again To cool the breath of all those whose quietus nears.
The sun is rising in my dreams. Now shine! Flash! Roar!
Your name, Belgrade, rings out, like lightning from a clear
blue sky.
In bed that night, they impatiently made up for the twenty-four hours that they had been apart.
Afterwards, Dragan lay with his hands behind his head and spoke to her quietly. ‘I’ve escaped. That’s the most important thing. I risked my life to leave. What’s done is done. I must learn to put the past behind me. From now on I’ll live properly, like you do. You’re so good.’
She moved closer to him and kissed his cheek, but he didn’t turn his face towards her. In the dark she watched the reflection of a street light, 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 wouldn’t 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’ flat was in Vanløse and Camilla still hated the place. For the rest of her life she would always drive the long, roundabout routes just to avoid having to pass 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’ flats.
Her parents welcomed them, smiling. Both Camilla’s father and mother did not speak English well, but they tried hard, since Dragan’s Danish was even worse. It went well enough. They showed Dragan into the drawing 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 flavourings.
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. Camilla’s 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.
She watched them. They avoided eye contact with each other and took care never to leave the room at the same time: they knew she would think that they were criticising Dragan behind her back.
Previously she had told them about the way Yugoslav homes were full of handiwork, so her mother had covered the table with a white-lace tablecloth, a family heirloom made by her great-aunt. Dragan praised the fine lace and told them about the different lace-making techniques that had gone into the tablecloth.