Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  ‘I carried you on my back on the way down.’

  So he had. ‘Not all the way, though.’

  Exhausted though she had been, she had insisted on getting down and walking through the village and then up the path between overgrown banks to the farmhouse. She knew Guido had thought it was because she had regained her strength but the real reason had been because she wanted people to believe she had been all the way to the top and back without help.

  Now memory was displaced as her mount pricked its ears.

  ‘Listen!’

  The creak and clang of the labouring cart came clearly through the wet air. Soon they saw, cresting the rise, the lop-eared mules, the open cart heaped with vegetables, the driver hunched on the bench, the reins jerking as he harried the team onwards through puddles that gave rain-pocked reflection to the grey sky. They could hear the creaking of the wheels and the old man’s harsh voice urging the mules. Between them they made enough noise to drown the distant sound of the guns. Perhaps that was what Michelangelo meant to do, Helena thought: to use routine to shut out the reality of the war. Neither guns nor war existed because he willed them not to exist. She was the same. Shielded by the same wilful disregard of reality, she was returning to a world where there were neither guns nor danger, soldiers nor war, because she refused to acknowledge them. ‘We must go on. That’s it. We have to deny any other possibility. Then, perhaps, it won’t exist for us at all.’

  She saw Guido’s expression and realised she had spoken aloud. No matter; she was determined that her own reality should overcome that other reality of battle and guns and death.

  Neither of them moved as the cart trundled towards them. Helena did not look at Michelangelo, whom she had known as long as she could remember or even longer. The old man, creased face and hunched shoulders on the driving bench of his laden cart, was as much a part of her awareness as the mountains, pine woods and fields that gave expression and framework to her life, all of them part of both past and future, of the unceasing circle of lives and seasons that made up eternity. Nor did Michelangelo look at her. Faded eyes fixed somewhere in the distance, he seemed not to see her at all. Nevertheless the mules drew to a standstill and were at once asleep, like identical pieces of brown rock.

  Helena dismounted, took the reins forward over her horse’s head and handed them to Guido. She unfastened the leather straps that secured her suitcase behind the saddle, then lifted it into the back of the cart among the cabbages, Michelangelo not raising a hand to help her. She did not kiss her cousin but touched his knee before climbing onto the bench beside the driver. Michelangelo flicked the reins against the necks of the mules, who stood for a moment longer, seemingly inert, before breaking once again into their hypnotic gait. The cart settled to its rhythmic clatter. Guido, motionless in the saddle, hand raised to the broad brim of his hat, was gone. Helena did not look back.

  ‘Guns.’ She did not look at Michelangelo as she spoke.

  ‘For three days now.’

  ‘Any fighting?’

  He did not answer, as though the concept were beyond his ability to comprehend or discuss.

  Instead his gaze settled upon the white-capped mountains blocking the distant horizon. His cape sheltered all of him save the rain-dewed moustache drooping low over his mouth. From beneath his hood he cocked an eye at the downpour, daring it to dispute his assessment. ‘Cold winter coming. No fun being a soldier in the snow.’ He cackled a little, seemingly delighted by the misfortunes of others. ‘Not any time, I’d say.’

  Helena did not answer, nor did he speak again. The mules drew the cart ever onwards. The rain-shiny track pointed the way towards the valley still partially hidden behind the shoulder of the mountain. The steady creaking of the cart enclosed them, cutting them off — cart and mules, man and woman, cabbages, potatoes and cauliflowers heaped in the wooden bed behind them — from a world inconceivable and outrageous. The cart crested another rise. Ahead of them the flank of the mountain drew back like a curtain to reveal the ordered shapes of cultivated ground, the bare soil darkly furrowed and gleaming in the rain.

  ‘Your folks’ll be glad to see you.’

  Helena was not so sure, her father was not a man to be crossed even in something like this, but she said nothing. Again Michelangelo cackled, a man who knew her father as well as or perhaps better than she did.

  ‘Onion tarts tonight, I shouldn’t wonder. Maybe pork dumplings, too, if you’re lucky.’

  These were the things they understood, the things that mattered: the possibility of early snow, the moist furrowed earth, the long gun that had been her great-grandfather’s, its barrel tightly bound with wire, standing ready as always behind her father’s chair, the food in the warm kitchen to welcome her return.

  Pork dumplings, Helena thought. A shift in the wind threw a splatter of rain into her face. For the first time since leaving her aunt’s house, she felt hungry. Perhaps they would have them, at that. Onion tarts, too, as Michelangelo had said. If she was lucky.

  The track had straightened. Now they were heading up the final slope before the descent to the village, with her father’s farm standing on the crest of the hill above it.

  Michelangelo said: ‘Be there directly.’

  She had been away many times before, yet something — perhaps the proximity of the war, perhaps the constant squalling with her aunt — gave her a sense of added urgency, as though now she was so close she could not bear to contemplate the last half-hour before she would be home. Memories …

  She thought of the wood fire burning on its platform in the farmhouse, above it the cavernous chimney with a copper cauldron full of water suspended from chains. In the winter, when the world outside the farmhouse walls was white, the fire burned all the time, the flames forming a red and gold barrier against the frost, and the room was acrid with wood smoke. The stone floors scrubbed white, the brass-ornamented door of the big cooking stove gleaming. In the furthest recesses of her memory Helena could just recall the figure of her grandmother, dressed in black — headscarf, gathered skirt very full, satin apron — sitting as stiff as starch with her knees almost touching the brass rail around the stove. In her memory the old woman never moves or speaks, a ghost-like image, a face carved in deep furrows by eighty years of weather. It is a face of mystery and silence, stern as the countryside itself is stern. Stern and bitterly cold, with the burja, a wind so ferocious that it has been known to upset carts. People said it would cut the eyelids off anyone left to face it overnight. As a child she was always being threatened with that: to be locked out in the burja, to face the bitter morning with eyes staring and filled with blood, her eyelids sliced away, her cheeks brittle with ice. But her thoughts lingered in the kitchen now, its smell — of polish, warmth, food, life — contrasting with the seldom used and forbidding parlour, its high-backed chairs as cosy as carabinieri, the air stiff with probity and dust.

  All of it the recognition of who, and what, she was.

  Even the individual rocks along the sides of the track were familiar to her now. That slope there, with outcrops of rock like grey teeth through the turf, was where she broke her wrist one winter’s day when her sledge overturned. That corner beneath the overhang was where she found the orchids. There …

  While the cart seemed to stand still behind the swaying rumps of the mules, the crest itself advanced towards them as though it and not the cart were in motion. Four hundred metres. Three. One. Through her skirt Helena felt the sharp edge of the bench cutting the underside of her thighs as she leaned forward, waiting for the moment when absence would be repealed at last and she would be able to see …

  Pork dumplings, she thought, then shook her head. Anyone would think she was the biggest glutton in the mountains, yet she hardly ever thought about what she ate or when. It was not the food itself; it was the idea of the food in the polished and wood smoke-smelling kitchen that brought to her on the rain-drenched mountainside the security and continuity of home.

  Fifty me
tres.

  The mules had been labouring doggedly, their feet splashing and slipping in mud that was more water than soil. Now, as they crested the rise, their movement eased and Helena saw the ground fall away in front of her, the valley lying open at her feet.

  Afterwards she always remembered how her first sight of home had been the valley, inert and sombre in the rain, the stillness of the countryside familiar and unchanged, tranquil, when all the while …

  Michelangelo was looking ahead of the cart as he had since the moment she had first climbed up beside him yet now there was a new quality to his regard, an alertness in the way he sat forward abruptly on the bench, that drew her questioning eyes first to him, then to the valley to seek out what it was that he had seen. Even then she did not see it at first, obvious though it was, as though mind and therefore eyes refused to take in what lay before them.

  Michelangelo pointed.

  ‘Smoke!’

  The village was burning, the fire consuming the buildings not in explosive excitement but slowly and implacably, the surly flames orange and black-edged beneath the blows of the rain. Many roofs were already gone, walls had fallen here and there, while smoke rolled in an ominous cloud above the gutted buildings. There was no sign of movement, either of animals or men.

  ‘There’s no-one there. No-one’s fighting the fire at all.’

  There was outrage in Helena’s voice, as though the absence of the people was more monstrous than the fire itself. For the moment her only concern was how such a thing could be. She had still not seen what reason told her she must see. Then Michelangelo’s hand gripped her arm tightly and instinct told her she could defer reality no longer.

  She turned her head to look at the knoll above the town where her parents’ farmhouse lay hidden behind a screen of trees and saw a column of smoke standing, rain-smudged, above the foliage.

  A silence akin to disbelief fell not so much upon her tongue as her spirit, yet it was not disbelief she felt but the cold certainty that her home, like her village, was on fire, that everything that it represented was gone, that belief in her own inviolability was lost with the burning buildings and the people who had lived in them. With the silence came rage and the wish to kill.

  At her side, Michelangelo was on his feet, lashing the reins against the necks and backs of the mules. Responding to his sudden fury, they picked up their feet and galloped down the hill with the cart clattering and swaying behind them.

  2

  Marija’s sharp features were smeared with soot and tears, her torn dress pocked with brown-edged holes where the sparks had fallen on her. Dark eyes working constantly, the nine-year-old child tried to tell Helena what had happened.

  Her own mother had been working in the farm kitchen, giving Helena’s mother a hand as she did every day. The child had been at the back of the chicken house when she had first seen the men.

  ‘In grey uniforms. With guns and helmets. Like this.’

  With her hands she sketched the outline of a helmet around her own head, the shape low across the neck and covering the ears.

  ‘Germans?’

  It was the first she had heard of German troops being in the district but the helmet shape was unmistakable.

  ‘They were on bicycles. They came into the chicken house.’

  ‘Did they see you?’

  ‘No. I hid in the hay shed.’ Her furiously blinking eyes were shadowed by the memory of what she had seen, then and later. What she still saw.

  The men — tall, purposeful, clattering in heavy boots — were in a hurry. They snatched at eggs, at the hens that exploded about the shed in an outrage of squawks and feathers. They grabbed what they could and ran. Through the shed’s open doorway Marija saw the bicycles stacked in the hedge. The men went to them, hens dangling from their fists. There was a sudden gunshot, a spurt of grey smoke as, from the open window of the house on the other side of the cobbled yard, someone fired at the soldiers. One of the men cried out, staggered, then fell. The other soldiers threw themselves down, sheltering behind this wall or that. With the same purpose they showed in the hen house, they returned the fire, chips of stone flying from the walls of the farmhouse as the bullets struck. The soldiers ran full-tilt, they crashed through the door, there were screams, shouts, a rattle of shots, a window exploding outwards. Silence, while Marija watched in terror from the shadows. Afterwards …

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Try.’

  Weeping, face screwed up. ‘I can’t.’

  The evidence before Helena’s eyes said it plainly enough. What was left of Marija’s mother lay sprawl-legged, eyes staring, skirt yanked high. Blood had pooled between the naked thighs. She had been used, no doubt more than once, then shot.

  The farmhouse, roof fallen in a debris of sparks and burning rafters, kept its secrets. But Helena knew, while the flames consumed what was left of furniture, of memories, that her parents, too, were gone. The flames were consuming her future as well as her past. Because where could she go?

  The war was nothing to do with her: she had said it and believed it, as had everyone she knew. So stupid! Look what had happened: the village gone, the farmhouse gone, the people gone. The Helena who had believed herself insulated from the processes of war was also gone, with the self-deception that had created her.

  What remained was an eighteen-year-old woman, alone and unprotected, seeing before her the evidence of what happened to unprotected women in times of war.

  I must get out of here.

  Then she saw the frightened face of the child and at once amended her thought. I must get us both away. Because there was no limit to brutality in this new and terrible world where the safety even of children could not be taken for granted. She would go to the village where there might, perhaps, be survivors. Where there might be soldiers, too. Her eyes did not wish to see, yet were once again drawn to the blood-caked thighs. No, she would not dare go to the village. She thought: Michelangelo. She took out of her suitcase the few possessions she could carry and put them in a cloth bag that she hung about her neck. She led Marija away down the lane. The child did not ask where they were going, nor did Helena tell her what in any case she did not know. Two zombies, they walked side by side from lives that existed no longer: from the burned house, her dead parents, Marija’s dead mother, themselves. Into emptiness.

  As though they had planned it, she met Michelangelo’s cart coming back up the hill. Again he seemed not to see her. He said nothing but drew to a stop at her side. She lifted the child into the back of the cart still full of the vegetables that he had intended to sell in that world that now was gone for ever. She climbed onto the driver’s bench. It was as though she had never been away at all, yet in that interval the world had changed. She had seen neither soldiers nor villagers, she had received no explanations of any kind, yet life …

  What life?

  Behind them, on the far side of the valley shrouded in rain and smoke, the invisible artillery roared its challenge at the world.

  3

  The highlands into which they now came were a wilderness of stone, a land seemingly far older than the soft lands of the valley. The scattering of people, semi-nomadic like the black-faced flocks they herded across the steep slopes, were hard; as the crags like eyries, the gorges shrouded by mist, were hard. Hard and old. Here, even the children were old, as wild as the sheep, with the secrets of the centuries locked behind their eyes. They climbed until it seemed their heads must touch the rain-swollen clouds. The clop of hooves, the clatter of the swaying cart that before had seemed so loud, were lost in the indifferent vastness of peat and rock and water, as the humans themselves were lost. Helena found herself watching from the corners of her eyes a desolation whose very emptiness was a threat, while Marija whimpered, pressing herself against the back of the driver’s bench. Only Michelangelo, who lived on a patch of fertile ground in one of the alpine coombs ringed by hills, was at home here. He spat over the side of the cart. ‘Have to eat m
y own vegetables for a bit.’

  Water and cabbages and maybe an occasional cut of lamb: Helena could believe that others in this region were used to less.

  ‘You and the child can stay overnight, if you want. Have to sleep on the floor, mind.’

  Which was his way of saying they could stay no longer. They were into the cloud now. They passed a group of shepherds, as wild-looking and ragged as their flocks. The men stood at the side of the track and did not acknowledge the cart’s presence in any way. Then the cloud swallowed them and they were gone. Helena thought that they had looked savage enough to eat them all alive. Alarm overwhelmed the stunned disbelief that had paralysed her since her first sight of the burning farmhouse. She wondered how she and the child, strangers in this wild place, would get on in the morning, yet the anxiety did not last. She was too tired to worry about such things. They would go on, because they must.

  4

  Soon the track began to go down. The mules picked up speed over the descent, sensing a full hopper at journey’s end; Michelangelo brought them to a halt before the stone dwelling and the darkness of its open doorway, the door itself battered and devoid of paint, giving no hint of what lay within. He turned, looking for the first time directly at the face of the young woman seated on the bench beside him. ‘Get on into the house. You’ll find my woman in there. She’ll see to you while I deal with the mules and these cursed vegetables.’ It was the first Helena had heard of any woman.

  ‘I wouldn’t want to be any trouble.’

  His voice overrode her objection: ‘Go. Go!’

  Inside, lamplight formed a tranquil pool amid the darkness. Helena and the child stood side by side near an ancient bed, while Michelangelo’s woman stood at the stove, ferociously attacking the steaming contents of a metal pot. Michelangelo followed them in with a load from the wood-pile in his arms. He tipped the logs into the corner and the woman spoke at once, without turning her head. ‘Good. We needed some.’ She bent swiftly, taking two logs and pushing them into the glowing firebox.