Slavenka Drakulić - A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

Thanks for the peanuts; pumpkin seeds are also okay. Listen, today you could hire that very car for five hundred dollars an hour. Isn’t that great? Ah, yes, Koki forgets that you don’t have that kind of money… too bad. This was a unique chance for you to slip into his role!

Yes, it all happened right here, in front of this cage, because he was showing Liz this Koki person. The Marshal was showing off his talking parrot that could swear. But imagine what happened? Koki was so taken by Liz, so confused, that he could not say a word! Much less a bad word in front of such a lady. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Koki was speechless. It took him a while to pull himself together and sing “Jingle Bells,” because he could not remember any other song in English at the moment. It was in the middle of the summer when she visited us, and Koki couldn’t do better than to sing that stupid Christmas song. How embarrassing! But she was delighted; she kept saying, “Bravo, bravo!”

Liz was so veeery beautiful. Her beauty left many men, let alone this parrot, speechless. It all happened when that husband of hers (was he the fifth? Liz had a tendency to marry many times, just like the Marshal) came here to act in a movie about the German military’s attempt to capture the Marshal during World War II. The husband actor, Richard Burton was his name, was playing the role of the Marshal himself, the commander of his partisan army. Koki heard from the Marshal’s chambermaid that the Marshal was rather pleased with the film. Later Koki saw the film for himself. Dressed in a well-fitting uniform, Burton really resembled him. Burton was good-looking in a rough kind of way. Pity that he was such a drunkard.

As Koki already told you, he was privileged; he talked freely to the Marshal—as opposed to many of the parrots around him. For example, he would tell him: “Hey, you! Get serious!” Or, “Attention, attention!” That was when his wife was approaching while he was flirting with this or that lady. This often happened when the well-known Italian actress Sophia Loren visited us here. The Marshal loved such fancy company, and she came to Brioni more than once. Whatever the reason for her visit, they enjoyed cooking together. Yes, food, that was another of his favorite pleasures, and if he could combine a beautiful woman with good food—nobody could be happier. The secret with Sophia, besides her long legs, small waist, and big boobs, was that she could cook. They would enjoy preparing food together and his fat wife would kind of supervise them, although she herself did not have the habit of spending time in the kitchen. Later he would eat the pasta that they had cooked together, even if pasta was not his favorite food. Neither was fish. Or vegetables, for that matter. Sophia cooked with olive oil. We have excellent olive oil here, produced on the mainland, but it was one of the very few things he could not stand. He was a true son of Zagorje, which is where, on festive days, people eat pig, turkey, chicken, and the like. Oh, he loved to eat roast suckling pig, the ears especially! But chicken, too—grown only for him, it goes without saying. Yet, while cooking with Sofia, he even used to dip his bread into the olive oil and eat it, just to please her. You should have seen his Madame reproaching him for that, telling him, “But you don’t like olive oil.” “What do you know?!” he would grumble, dismissing her while knowing full well that it was dangerous to do so. Madame could turn his life into hell.

She knew how to make him miserable, and she did it quite often in his old age. Koki knows that for a fact. Madame was his fifth wife, although I heard that this is disputed. There are stories that he had some seven wives and nineteen children. Koki finds such gossip unconvincing. And by the way, Where are his children now? Did they disappear? His Madame was jealous, that was the problem. Who knows, she might have good reason—and not only regarding film stars. For example, there were two sisters, both his masseuses. They took turns massaging the old man, because he needed a massage twice a day in his old age. These young women did not look bad at all, if you know what Koki-birdie means. Curvy they were, yes! He certainly enjoyed the company of the young ladies. But it was much more important that they had daily access to the Marshal. They had a chance to catch his attention—his ear, as it were. Do you understand? Can you imagine how valuable this was on the favor-exchange market? How many people asked them to speak to him? They could talk to him, tell him this and that, express their opinion about a person or even about politics, why not? They had his attention, which is the only thing that counts. Many courtiers were jealous of this, most of all Madame herself. Koki remembers one particular scene with one of the Marshal’s masseuses. Madame raised her voice at these sisters more than once. Koki even heard her screaming once, “Get out, get out you dirty bitch!” She did not choose her words carefully on that particular occasion.

From Lanka, the elephant in our zoo, I heard that once upon a time Madame had been a well-built young beauty who did not know how to swim and had not seen the sea until she came to the Brioni archipelago. At the beginning of their relationship she was an unassuming peasant girl of exotic beauty—her thick, shiny black hair was particularly beautiful—who adored the Marshal. At that young age (she was twenty-three years old when they met, while he was fifty-five) she was totally dedicated to him. However, Lanka told Koki that with time she developed into a not very pleasant or charming or even interesting character, and Lanka should know—she lived in Brioni longer than Koki. Yet people say that often the Marshal was not nice to his wife either. He could be cynical or humiliate her publicly, telling her to “just shut up and smile.” She did have a dazzling smile, though.

Koki thinks that it must have been difficult to be his wife. For one, she wanted children, but he did not. She also must have become aware of the fact that, without him, she was just a nobody. With time she probably grew bitter and disappointed in the deity she had devoted her life to. On the other hand, she must have been taken in by that glamour and power of his. With the passing years, as Madame became fatter, her ambitions grew accordingly. Koki developed a theory that her body mass was somehow related to her desire to rule in his place. But perhaps Koki is wrong! Anyhow, it was not enough that she ruled him through his trust in her. She also ruled his office, and without her approval no one could get a job there. She laid off people as she pleased; Koki remembers how she chased away our cook. The woman left in tears, and the Marshal was very unhappy about the incident. But Madame managed to replace his security advisers, attachés, and even a longtime secretary, a very reliable man who did not give her any reason to do that. Except that he was too close to the Marshal. If he was aware that she wanted to control the controller the Marshal did nothing to prevent it.

Then, in the seventies, there was a rumor that she had political ambitions. Madame insisted on having a seat in the Central Committee. The only grounds for such a decision was the fact that she was the Marshal’s wife. But apparently, as Yugoslavia was not Romania, where Elena Ceausescu even formally shared power with her husband (as a member of the highest party and state institutions), Madame was flatly refused. After that the gossip was that Madame, with a few officers, had even contemplated a coup d’état! If this were true, it would have made Koki wonder if this kind of hunger for power was maybe contagious. But was it true? Koki can only tell you that after 1975 Madame was no longer seen here or in the Marshal’s vicinity. Not that Koki was sorry! You see, when Koki met her for the first time, he was just a little birdie, and everybody was nice to him, held him, patted him on his little yellow crest, and played with him. But not her, no sir! She was indifferent to him. Probably in her village in Lika they shot at birds. For Madame, Koki was just that, a bird to shoot at. Oh poor, poor Koki, he could have lost his little head… When he inquired among the personnel—Koki always had his trustworthy sources—he heard that she had been removed. Koki swears to you that this was the word they used, removed from the palace.