Voice of Destiny

by JH Fletcher

  I can protect Marija, she thought, because she trusts me. But how, when I am so full of doubt, do I protect myself?

  5

  Away from its edges, the wood became easier. In its depths, brambles no longer spiked their path, the open spaces between the trees granted them passage. They saw squirrels putting the final touches to their winter stores of nuts but there was no other movement. Whatever trolls there might be remained hidden.

  Walking ever deeper into the wood, Helena felt her confidence returning at last. The old legends of forest and wickedness ceased to frighten her. She was a new woman in what had become her new reality.

  On they went until, after walking without pause or food for most of the day, she saw ahead of them a lessening of the shadows and realised they were coming out of the wood at last. As they emerged into the open, Helena saw that once again the rain clouds had gone. Afternoon sunlight the colour of honey lay upon the countryside. Behind her, the trees marked the boundary between the present and the lost world of the burnt-out farmhouse, the woman lying sprawl-legged on the cobbles, from all the things and people of her past life. She was a willow wand peeled and white, new, a woman fully grown yet newborn, too.

  Hand in hand with the child who was her sole connection with the vanished past, Helena Sforza walked forward, her sapphire eyes staring steadily into the future.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1

  She saw the open field in front of her, the spindly uprights of a wire fence and, beyond it, the flat roofs of a few shack-like buildings. In front of the buildings were objects that she had never seen properly before but that she sensed held a special significance, their outlandish forms and chequerboard colours holding the future that she had embraced even before she knew what form it would take.

  They crossed the grass towards the fence. The aircraft parked before the buildings had men working on them. The engine cowl of the nearest machine was open; a truck was feeding what she thought were belts of ammunition to a man standing inside the cockpit. It was this man who now turned and, no doubt seeing the approaching woman and child, called out something in a sharp voice. A man wearing a round steel hat, rifle slung from his shoulder, came running and shouting in excitement as though the arrival of two unarmed girls threatened not only the aeroplanes and progress of the war but the world itself.

  ‘Oywheredyouthinkyouregoineh?’

  The bellow consisted not of words but a flow of incomprehensible sound that Helena recognised must be another language without knowing which one it might be.

  Armoured by incomprehension, she walked on.

  ‘Halt!’

  The man — sentry, if that was what he was — unslung and cocked his rifle, pointing it at her through the wire.

  ‘Donyoucomenocloserorright?’

  Another man appeared from the far side of the aeroplane. He took a look at her through the wire before saying something to the sentry, who lowered his rifle while still keeping it ready for any antics the foreign woman might be planning. The second man came forward and took hold of the wire, towards which Helena and Marija were still walking. They walked right up to him until the wire was the only thing keeping them apart. Helena stared at him appraisingly. He was tall and lean, with fair hair blowing in the wind, a man a few years older than herself, his face tanned but tired-looking, lines beginning to score the corners of his pale eyes. ‘What do you want?’

  He was articulating clearly, breaking the sound into what she recognised must be separate words, but she had no idea what they meant.

  ‘Food. Something to drink. Shelter.’ It was what they wanted so she asked for it, determined somehow to overcome their mutual incomprehension.

  ‘Dunnowotyoretalkinabout.’

  And he turned away, leaving her with the taste of hunger and loss in her mouth. He walked to one of the buildings that appeared flimsier even than the aeroplanes they existed to serve. Within minutes he was back with another man, short and dark, beside him. This man wore civilian clothes and spoke to her in Italian, with a strong Udine accent.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Something to eat. Some place where we can rest.’

  ‘Out of the question.’

  The full lips sneered in the pudgy face. The man was turning away, dismissively, but the blond airman stopped him.

  They talked while Helena watched through the wire, uncomprehending. She thought they were arguing, in which case the tall man must have had the better of it, because eventually the Italian speaker turned to her again with unconcealed impatience.

  ‘Both of you go down there.’

  For the first time she saw there was a gate further along the wire, with another rifle-carrying man beside it. Helena looked at gate and sentry, then back at the Italian.

  ‘Who’s going to let us in?’

  ‘We shall.’

  And they did so, sure enough, but then neither man seemed to know what to do with the woman and child. The Italian was still strutting.

  ‘This is a military base. You have no business here.’

  ‘We need food. We have been walking all day, and yesterday —’

  ‘Nor is it a restaurant.’

  Again the blond man intervened, seeming to press for replies to questions that he threw out quickly, one after the other, and to which eventually, scowling, the Italian responded.

  ‘He says, if you and the child are hungry, he will get you coffee. Bread, too, maybe. Then you must go. Understand?’

  The blond man walked with them to the nearest building where he spoke to another, older man, seeming to explain their presence. The interpreter did not conceal his satisfaction.

  ‘The officer is unhappy you are here. This is an airfield. Military operations take place here. There is no room for civilians, or women.’

  ‘Aren’t you a civilian?’

  ‘I am an official. I keep the records. Important war work.’

  A clerk, Helena thought. That’s all he is. A puffed-up clerk.

  The tall man brought coffee and bread, a few slices of cheese. While they ate he spoke to her again through the officious interpreter.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘How did you get here?’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  How are you going to survive?

  The last question he did not ask but it underlay everything he said. It was a question to which she did not know the answer. Finally he went away and spoke once again to the officer. When he came back he said: ‘We need some cleaning done, washing plates, that sort of thing. The woman we had before went off two days ago and never came back. We don’t know what happened to her. The pay isn’t much but —’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  ‘We’ll have to find somewhere for you to stay.’

  It was apparently out of the question for them to stay at the aerodrome; the war, or perhaps the Italian official, would not permit that.

  ‘There may be something in the village.’

  Which it seemed was just down the road.

  ‘I shall ask.’ She was determined to find somewhere, whatever she had to say or do to get it: she wanted no more experiences like the one they’d had the previous day, lying terrified in the meadow while the soldiers ran riot through the farmhouse. ‘I shall find somewhere.’ Speaking as much to herself as the two men.

  The Italian warned: ‘There is nothing for the child to do. If she makes mischief …”

  ‘She will be no trouble.’

  Nor would she be: Helena, who had taken care of them so far, would take care of that, too. She began straight away, washing and drying dishes, sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows. Until it occurred to her that, if she were too quick to do all there was to do, there might be no job left for her in the morning.

  2

  That evening Giovanni, the officious official, accompanied Marija and herself to the village, half a kilometre from the aerodrome.

  ‘Do the airmen stay here?’

  What she meant was doe
s the blond man stay here?

  ‘They all live at the camp. There is no room in the village for them. It is a very small village. There will be no room for you or the child.’

  She saw that Giovanni was determined to make things as difficult for her as he could. Let him. As determined as he, she intended to make sure he did not succeed.

  He insisted on accompanying her to all the houses where accommodation might be found. It did not take long. As he had warned her, the village was very small. He invited her to speak to the cottagers herself.

  ‘Perhaps you can persuade them.’

  She tried, explaining that she had been offered work at the airfield if she could find somewhere to stay. It would mean money to anyone willing to take her but it seemed that Giovanni had been right: no-one was prepared to admit they had any room for them.

  When they had been everywhere, Giovanni, punctilious in ensuring that not one cottage was omitted from their search, spread his hands in what might have been a gesture of regret, or triumph.

  ‘You see?’

  It was obvious that he did not want her here. Helena could not think why. Could it be because the airman had been willing to give her a job after Giovanni had tried to send her on her way? Was that all it took? She and Marija could die in a ditch because Giovanni thought he had been slighted? She could not have imagined such behaviour, would have gone back to the airfield to speak to the blond man had she been able, but with no common language, that was impossible. Giovanni watched her, smiling.

  ‘There is nothing I can do. There is no place for you here.’

  It seemed so, certainly.

  ‘Perhaps you will find somewhere in Udine. Or further away still. You should try Verona, perhaps. That might be best. These are dangerous times. We are very close to the front line here. People are afraid of strangers and no-one knows when your friends the Germans will come.’

  ‘My friends? I know no Germans.’

  He gave the smile of one who knew better. ‘So you say.’

  ‘It’s the truth!’

  ‘And you with your Slovene accent.’

  She came close to spitting at him. ‘My name is Helena Sforza and I am as Italian as you are.’

  He eyed her spitefully. ‘You are a liar. The Sforzas are big farmers near Gorizia. Members of that family do not tramp the roads. You were their kitchen maid, perhaps.’

  ‘My parents are dead. The farm is burned. There is a war. Or perhaps you hadn’t heard?’

  It was the first time she had put her bereavement into words. It gave her the keenest pang, not so much of loss or even sorrow but of anger. There would be time for sorrow later; now she felt fury that her parents were dead, her home burned, for no reasons that made sense. Because of that she was indeed forced to tramp the roads, as Giovanni had said. Now this no-account being, whom in the old days her father would have whipped without thinking twice about it, had both the obtuseness and power to deny the truth. Because of him and his disbelieving contempt she would have to go on with the child, to die even, because — ‘Wait a minute!’ She had something. She scrabbled in her little bag, found what her mother had given her on the occasion of her first communion: a prayer book with her name and an inscription in her mother’s hand and a photograph of herself, ethereal in a white dress.

  She thrust it at him.

  ‘Look at it!’

  He did so, uncertainly, frowning at her vehemence. He stared at the portrait and its inscription, then at her again. Still he said nothing.

  Again she was close to spitting at him, afraid he might try to deny the evidence of his eyes.

  ‘Read it! If you can read. A Slovene, am I?’

  He, too, began to spit with rage and what she thought might be fear. ‘How was I to know? Your accent is different.’

  She snatched back the book that she had almost forgotten she possessed but that now might prove a passport to renewed hope. She thought how this was the type of man who had to be kept in his place, that he would continue to bully if he were not himself bullied.

  ‘I shall say no more about it if you find somewhere for us to stay.’

  She saw he might have hit her but was afraid to do so.

  ‘I was not to know. You should have explained properly.’

  ‘Just find us somewhere to stay. That’s all you have to do.’

  3

  He managed it somehow, talking and laughing with a woman who had earlier refused them but now, it seemed, was willing to change her mind. Laughing … A man like this would always find something to laugh at, not from happiness but out of contempt for the world and himself. Yet she knew that now things would be all right. Treat him like a dog and he would respect her for it.

  So she worked at the aerodrome, as she had determined she would, and at night she slept with Marija in the single narrow bed in the attic room of the widow Gambetta’s house. She did what she could to learn English so that never again would she find herself unable to communicate, however hesitantly, with the men who had the power to control her future. She found she had a knack for it. The discovery neither pleased nor surprised her. It was a fact to be accepted with all the other facts that made up her new life, where everything was unknown. The pudgy clerk had tried to drive her out. Now Giovanni changed his tune, telling her she should be grateful that he had fixed things up for her. Helena laughed scornfully. He raised his hand to threaten her. If he had thought to frighten her she soon put him right. ‘Just you try it.’

  4

  The war went on. The rumour was that the front had stabilised. It was certainly true that the Germans never came. The fliers knocked down several enemy aircraft and lost a few themselves, although the blond airman survived.

  The months passed: the frosts and brittle stars of winter, the irony of spring with its promise of life in a world of endless death, the yellow blaze of summer when, under a mad August moon, the farmers went out with their horse-drawn machines, the revolving cutters slashing the grain that, war or no war, must be brought to barn. Helena’s ferocious determination not to be driven out had found them a haven. They were safe here, as far as anyone could be safe in a world where violence could consume them at any time. The airman, whose name she had discovered was Ted Fisher, showed in a dozen ways that he liked her and Signora Gambetta liked her, too; there was once again a place for laughter in her life.

  And yet.

  Loneliness became an agony. She had come to accept the reality of her parents’ death, the destruction of her home and past, her youthful expectations for the future. It was a painful process yet somehow she managed to overcome the pain so that her daily life went on, more or less uncrippled. Yet only in part. In coming to an awareness of her parents’ death, she had to accept that the void in her life would have to be filled if she were ever to be whole again. How she would do it was another question.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  There was a blurring in Ted’s life, an awareness of distraction from the hard-edged realities of flight and death. After two years in the air he had learned only two things, each indistinguishable from the other. Day after day, men flew. Day after day, men died; other men, so far, although he had known for a long time that the daily witnessing of death was itself a form of dying. Concentration — on flying, on killing — was the key. Now he found he could do it no longer. During off-duty hours he walked for miles through the countryside, no idea where he was going, lecturing himself about the need to regain the focus that offered the only hope of survival. Still he couldn’t do it. The world pressed about him, reminding him there was so much more to life than fearing and inflicting death. Once again his overstrained nerves tightened to breaking point.

  A member of the flight, a recent arrival whom he had barely known but who had been a man, nonetheless, a comrade, burned to death before his eyes when tracer from an Albatros ruptured his fuel tank. Ted was horrified yet felt something like envy for the man whose anguish was now over.

  One evening in August 1918, a
day when the mingled scents of harvest and heat overcame even the petrol and hot oil stink of the engine, he came back from an uneventful patrol. The crews were debriefed, they washed and changed into fresh uniforms, they ate what little their jangled nerves would accept. Afterwards the others headed for the room that served as a bar, there to get comprehensively smashed in the only ritual that offered them even the possibility of sleep. Ted considered joining them but recently had found that even a skinful of hooch worked its magic no longer. Instead he walked through the camp past the skeletal shadows of the aeroplanes. He put up his hand to touch the fabric-covered fuselage of his own machine. Gotta be round the twist to go up in somen as wonky as this.

  Although it hadn’t let him down yet. He patted one of the slender struts. Just as bloody well, mate.

  He walked past the sentry and through the gate into the lane. Without conscious decision he turned away from his normal route and headed down the hill towards the village. Preoccupied not so much with images as a lack of them, increasingly detached from a world where even the realities of life and death had lost their meaning, he found himself walking along the single street of houses before he had even realised it was there.

  His pale eyes studied the dwellings that lined the rutted street. Most were thatched, with wooden window frames, and doors chipped and broken; in the gathering dusk they looked as though they had seen neither paint nor maintenance since Italy had entered the war.

  There was no-one in the street but here and there the doors stood open to the summer evening. He heard the liquid sounds of Italian voices and saw shadowed figures moving in the candlelight. He reached the last buildings and stopped. In front of him the darkness of the countryside was broken by the yellow gleam of lanterns as farmers headed homewards, creaking wagons piled high with sheaves of grain. Back home he had spent weeks without need or even thought of other company, yet here the awareness of other humans accentuated his loneliness. Even the imperatives of death and flight had become unreal to him. He wondered whether he really cared whether he lived or not. Death, after all, was inevitable: perhaps not tomorrow but certainly one morning, perhaps on a day bright with sunlight, in the future unfolding of a war that seemed destined to go on for ever.