Comrades & Lovers

As a pale, peaked schoolgirl in the Serbian market town of Bagrdan, Ljubinka Milosavljevic, according to one of her teachers, "never particularly distinguished herself in anything." But the necessities of war and the peculiar demands of Communist ideology brought out unsuspected talents in this rural railroad switchman's daughter. By 1941, at the age of 24, mousy little Ljubinka had become one of the chief organizers of Communist partisan resistance in her home area, and, as the years passed and Tito Communism became the law of the land, Ljubinka's gifts carried her to loftier and loftier posts in the party and the government. She became Minister of Education in the Serbian government, a member of the local party's Central Committee, with final authority over Communist newspaper editors, and head of the powerful Control Commission, whose job it is to keep party members in line. Close by Ljubinka's side during much of her rise to power was another promising young Communist, Momcilo Cupic. who had been one of the first to join her partisan organization in Bagrdan. Ljubinka helped push Cupic forward in the party hierarchy, and Cupic responded by remaining her devoted lover for ten years. Once, before Tito's break with Russia, Ljubinka was sent off to Stalin's old villa on the Black Sea to recover from TB. Even that lengthy separation did not weaken Cupic's ardor. But what time and distance failed to do, party discipline at last accomplished. In 1951 the Yugoslav party (always more puritanical than its Russian counterpart) ordered both Ljubinka and Cupic to clean up their love lives. Cupic, by then an up-and-coming diplomat, married another woman and started raising a family. Ljubinka, still unmarried and still suffering from her old ailment, doggedly went on with her work, showing more and more signs of strain. Two weeks ago, for the first time in nearly four years, Ljubinka and Cupic met again, at a friend's home. Throughout the evening they chatted pleasantly together, and when the party was over Cupic offered to walk her home. Ljubinka accepted, and together the former comrades and lovers strolled the few blocks to her home. At the doorway, when the time for goodnights had come, Ljubinka reached into the pocket of her coat, pulled out a gun and fired on Cupic until the piece was empty. Momcilo Cupic died almost instantly. His forsaken love was carried, struggling and sobbing, to a mental ward, where she sat last week, mute.

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