The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  To remind him of his perilous situation, Amber poked Stimmer gently in the ribs with her pistol, causing him to scowl at her.

  The bay’s rider cursed silently. ‘A deer,’ said one of his companions, a young man on a grey.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’ The bay’s rider held his horse in check, humming a tune to calm the animal. The cold seeped through the layers of clothing Amber wore, the blood pooling in her legs as they waited for the riders to leave.

  Ana watched the young man intently as he rode off.

  ‘Ana?’ Amber whispered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The way you looked at him . . .’

  ‘An interesting reaction,’ Stimmer said quietly.

  Amber had heard that hummed tune before, but the concentration needed to keep to the steep track drove the memory out of her. Trees were fewer now and those that remained wore patches of snow that spring had not yet melted. Light was fading and birds made roosting sounds. Occasionally bushes and stones moved as small animals came out to hunt. At least, Amber hoped they were all small. Bears, lynxes and wolves were known to inhabit this part of Croatia.

  ‘It’s just ahead,’ Ana said. ‘There might even be wood for the stove if we’re lucky.’ She stooped at the edge of the track and stuck a hand under a rock. She pulled out a large key. ‘Good. I feared we might have to break in.’

  Amber made out the outline of a small hut. To one side there was some kind of little outhouse, probably the privy.

  ‘Watch him while I open up.’ Ana twisted the key in the lock. A minute later, a glow of light appeared through the open door as she lit a lamp.

  The mountain hut was simply set out: two iron-framed bunks on opposite walls each side of a fireplace hung with cooking implements, a table and a pair of chairs. ‘I’ll handcuff him to a bedhead while we bring logs in from the woodpile outside,’ Ana said.

  In silence the women walked back into the dark to the lean-to that housed the logs. ‘I should have left you inside with the prisoner.’ Ana shook her head. ‘As I child I was scared of the dark. I think the fear’s gone, but sometimes it reappears and I don’t like to be alone.’

  ‘You are scared of the dark?’

  ‘No need to sound so surprised.’ Ana turned the beam of her torch towards the woodpile. ‘I’ll load you up with logs.’

  ‘You seem so fearless.’

  ‘I’ve had to pretend since my . . . when Branko was little. If you’re a mother you can’t show fear in front of a child. Then the pretence became real.’ She gave a low laugh. ‘These days there are plenty of other things to be scared of, so it’s not so bad. But I might as well make use of you to help with the logs.’ She put a finger to her lips, frowning. Amber heard a rustle. They stood in silence.

  ‘Just a fox,’ Ana said.

  Or a wolf?

  Ana must have seen something in Amber’s expression in the torchlight. ‘Wild animals didn’t trouble us,’ she said. ‘When we came here . . . before.’

  Amber pictured the three of them heating a simple meal on the fireplace in the evening and drinking slivovitz. Perhaps they sang folk songs; Branko had a fine voice, Amber recalled from their march from the drop zone.

  Inside the hut the women stacked the logs by the fireplace and Ana lit a fire, observed by Stimmer.

  ‘There’s a spring just up by the pines,’ Ana said. ‘Fill the pots with water.’

  Amber gave her a long look.

  ‘I know you don’t mind the dark.’ Ana’s eyes showed a sly humour.

  Amber found the spring and filled the pots, before splashing her face with chilly water. She pulled down her breeches and undergarments, scooping up handfuls of water to apply between her legs. The cold stung but anaesthetised her. She pulled her clothes on quickly, feeling vulnerable, listening out for sounds, but hearing only her own heartbeat.

  When she returned to the hut, Ana was sitting at the table, the Walther she’d taken from the Ustaše officer in front of her. ‘We are doing all the work while our prisoner rests,’ she said. ‘Unlike the Nazis, who like their prisoners to work.’

  From the bunk came a sigh. ‘I’m no Nazi.’

  Ana snorted.

  ‘I’d suggest a game of cards while we wait for supper,’ he said. ‘But it might be difficult in my present position.’

  ‘Hold your tongue,’ Ana told him.

  Stimmer looked down at her intently. ‘Or we could sing. The folk music of this part of the world is rich with meaning and memories, isn’t it?’

  She pushed her chair back. ‘You want to spend the night tied up outside?’ He looked away. Ana turned to Amber, her voice low. ‘I kept some ointment here for treating injuries, just a simple thing for preventing infection, but the herbs take the edge off the pain.’

  It must have been obvious to her medic’s eye or by the way Amber walked that she still hurt.

  Ana went to a cupboard built into the wall beside the fireplace and took out a small stone jar, along with a clean piece of muslin and some other piece of folded fabric. ‘Take these with you into the privy.’ Amber remembered similar jars from childhood visits to pharmacies. She went outside again and did what Ana had told her. The second piece of fabric was a pair of women’s underpants, presumably a spare pair Ana had kept here at the cabin for her own use. She felt better when she put them on.

  Stimmer sat up on the edge of his mattress to eat, managing to handle a bowl and spoon with his left hand, employing a deftness Amber had to admire. The women ate too, and afterwards Amber uncuffed the German and took him out to the privy, wishing she had a toothbrush, left behind in the cave. The women washed in turn by the fire, making Stimmer stand facing the wall, hands cuffed behind him.

  ‘We leave at dawn,’ Ana told them. ‘I will take first watch, Amber.’

  Amber found Stimmer’s deep breathing in the bunk above her curiously reassuring. She had spent an entire night in Peter’s bed often enough, but never in Robert’s, had never listened to his breathing while he slept, never woken up to feel the warmth of his body beside her. By now, Robert might have found another woman to keep him company during the sultry Cairo nights. He’d never given her any reason to believe the relationship would be long-lasting. Yet she had hoped, without acknowledging it to herself, that he might miss her, might make arrangements to see her when she was back: assuming she did come back? Robert would do what others did: line up the next girl.

  Hadn’t she behaved a little like that herself in London: not really expecting an RAF boyfriend to return? Keeping half an eye out for the next boy? Reprehensible but understandable, she’d told herself at the time.

  Picturing Robert with someone else made her feel nauseous. Would he have the same confiding conversations in the dark with her replacement? Would the next woman feel that Robert was the only person on earth who could understand her?

  She was probably just a single piece in the jigsaw of his work. She still had the silver lighter in her breeches pocket; Stimmer had let her replace it when he’d searched her. She wrapped her fingers round it, feeling it warm in her hand, thinking of Robert choosing it for her, having that little bird engraved on the side. He hadn’t given a similar lighter to Naomi, though there might be operational reasons for that, she reminded herself. But still, it had to have meant something. Feeling foolish and glad of the darkness Amber pulled the lighter to her lips and kissed it before replacing it in her pocket.

  Amber slept, dreams twisting through her sleep, scenes in which one of the limestone rocks out on the karst metamorphosed into Robert and tapped out a rhythm on the window. He walked through the door, dressed as a Ustaše militia officer and told her she’d disgraced herself and would stand trial in a London nightclub, in front of all the pretty women and their officer boyfriends, for sleeping with the enemy. Then he became softer in tone, telling her nothing had changed, it was just war. Nothing has changed . . .

  Amber awoke properly and sat up. And there he was, sitting at the table with Ana, talking to her i
n a low, urgent tone. He wore a Yugoslav army greatcoat. On the table in front of him sat a cap with a double-eagle silver badge on it. An enemy, a Chetnik, the young rider she’d heard humming a familiar tune.

  The rustling of the straw mattress made the Chetnik turn. His hand went to his holster. ‘It’s all right,’ Ana told him urgently.

  Amber pulled her pistol from under the pillow. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘My son,’ Ana said. ‘Branko’s younger brother, Miko.’

  11

  June 1947

  ‘The boundaries were blurred,’ I tell Dr Rosenstein. ‘I thought I understood that Yugoslavia wouldn’t be entirely black and white, all those competing factions wanting their bit of the country. But I didn’t really comprehend it. Not fully.’

  ‘Ana . . . She wasn’t who I’d thought she was.’ The fierce, patriotic medic who seemed to detest everyone who wasn’t a Partisan had vanished. She was just a mother, a parent of a son who’d chosen the wrong side.

  ‘How did that realisation make you feel about yourself?’ she asks.

  ‘Confused.’ I half-close my eyes and see myself back in that mountain hut, uncertain as to whether I was still dreaming, blinking to see whether the image vanished.

  ‘Put your gun on the table and your hands on your head.’ Amber swung her legs out of the bunk. ‘Now.’

  The young man looked at Ana.

  ‘Tell him to do as I say before I shoot him.’

  The Chetnik did as she ordered.

  ‘Stand up. Where’s your horse?’

  ‘Tied up in the trees. I came the last bit on foot.’

  So he’d be quieter. With her left hand, Amber patted him down quickly. No other weapons.

  ‘How many others did you bring with you?’

  ‘I came alone. To see my mother.’

  ‘Turn round. Walk towards the door.’ She’d drive him away. If he resisted, she’d shoot him. Would Ana try and stop her? She’d need something to muffle the shot in case there were others outside. With her left hand, she pulled a pillow off the bunk.

  ‘No.’ Ana pushed herself between the gun and her son. ‘You’re wrong about him.’

  ‘You’re the one who was so adamant that the Chetniks were bad news.’

  ‘But not him, not my boy.’

  ‘How can you be certain?’

  ‘He doesn’t collaborate with the Germans,’ Ana said urgently. ‘His unit has rescued Allied servicemen.’

  ‘We’re the most successful courier line in Yugoslavia for retrieving your personnel from the interior and escorting them down to the coast,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve had contact with Allied combatants?’

  He smiled. ‘I have an invitation to spend time on Long Island and a pilot from Michigan is going to give his first son my name.’

  ‘But . . .’ She tried to push away her drowsiness and concentrate. Robert had told them that the Chetniks had been the side favoured by the Allies before the switch to the Partisans; had some of the Chetniks failed to understand that they had been abandoned?

  ‘Let’s sit,’ Ana pleaded. ‘Let him explain. Please Amber.’

  Her finger tightened on the trigger.

  ‘Please,’ Ana said again. Amber felt her head nod. She loosened her grip on her pistol. The three of them sat down.

  Miko was pulling a photograph out of his inside coat pocket: a middle-aged man, who must have been Ana’s husband and Branko and Miko’s father. Ana, in Croatian national costume: white embroidered linen dress, with a lace panel and a brocaded black waistcoat. Her hair was tied back into a sleek bun, a small red cap on the back of her head. Miko wore what looked like the uniform of the pre-war Yugoslav Royal Guard. Branko and his father were both in neat suits. ‘The diplomat, the lady doctor, the lawyer-to-be and the soldier boy,’ Miko said.

  Ana took the photograph from her son. ‘You always gave me trouble, Miko,’ she said. ‘But even then I was surprised when you joined the Yugoslav army.’

  ‘I thought it would be fun. Before the war, it was. Strange that old Branko turned Communist, though. I remember him as a boy, saving up all his pocket money to launch some chocolate-selling scheme with his school friends. Strange that you took the Marxist route, too, Mama.’

  ‘The Partisans are the only ones who can free this country.’

  ‘Put it in the hands of Stalin’s supporters, you mean.’

  Ana handed his photograph back to him. ‘You should be careful whom you show that picture to.’

  ‘Why is your son here?’ Amber asked Ana.

  ‘We saw each other by chance on the mountain track,’ Miko said. ‘It was hard, not to react. I couldn’t let my companions see you.’

  ‘See your Partisan mother?’ Amber said. ‘Very dangerous for you.’

  He gave her a long, silent look.

  ‘I knew it was you, my son, even before you started humming,’ Ana said. ‘You sit a horse like nobody else. You may put on a different uniform, grow a beard, but I was the one who taught you to ride, when you were four.’

  Miko put his hand on hers and turned to Amber. ‘The Chetniks are not all as you imagined. But there isn’t time to go into all that now. I must return to the others. And it’s snowing, which will slow me down.’ Amber glanced at the shuttered windows and made out the silvery gleam of snow through the slats.

  ‘I do not know how it has come to this.’ Ana no longer spoke like the brusque, efficient Partisan medic, but like the sorrowful mother of a divided family.

  Amber closed her eyes. Always keep your objectives in mind. Find downed airmen in Croatia and Bosnia and get them to the coast for rescue, using the established courier lines. Work closely with the Partisans and identify airstrips. Signal all this to Cairo, arranging air drops of essential supplies at the same time. And here she was, approaching the Slovenian border. Three valuable days had passed and she had made no progress towards fulfilling her objectives. Everything had started to go wrong as soon as the German had appeared in the Partisan camp.

  ‘To prove my good faith, I can tell you there are escaped British prisoners of war not far from here,’ he told his mother. ‘A least half a dozen of them who came south from a work camp in Slovenia.’

  ‘Where?’ Amber asked.

  ‘Do you have a map?’

  Ana pulled Naomi’s map out of her rucksack.

  ‘We’re here.’ Miko turned himself away from the bunk on which Stimmer lay, blocking the German’s view of the map. ‘They’re down in this valley, in a farmhouse.’ He pointed at the spot. ‘About sixteen kilometres away.’

  ‘Are they secure there?’ Could they continue the pursuit of Naomi, see her safely into Hungary and return to retrieve the POWs? Amber tried to calculate distances and time needed.

  ‘For a day or two. The Germans have stepped up their patrols around the valley. We need to move them out soon.’

  Amber looked at Ana.

  ‘If you could call off your Partisans so they’re not harassing us, it would be easier to devote our resources to protecting the prisoners of war.’

  ‘I don’t have the authority to make such a decision,’ Ana said.

  ‘You have to do what my brother says, I suppose. Or what the commissar orders.’

  Ana flushed.

  ‘How do we know you really have those men?’ Amber asked. ‘You might just be claiming you do to reduce Partisan activity.’ She hadn’t let go of her gun and felt her fingers tighten on its barrel.

  ‘You can trust Miko,’ Ana said. ‘He’s made poor choices, but he’s never been a good liar.’

  ‘Yes, you can trust me. The farmer who took them in doesn’t have any argument with the Partisans. But he’s married to a Chetnik’s daughter.’ The young man paused.

  ‘What?’ Amber asked.

  Miko steepled his fingers and looked through them at the table. ‘I’m not sure. It’s just a feeling I have.’

  ‘A feeling?’ Ana said.

  ‘Or more of a warning.’ He spoke slowly. ‘A young w
oman came through this afternoon. A stranger. She asked for water at a farm we know. She barely knew enough of the language to do so.’

  Naomi? Their instinct had been right: they were on her trail.

  ‘Someone was following her.’

  Amber sat straighter. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Our people have noticed signs of someone living rough, using a cave we know of.’

  ‘An escaped POW or downed airman?’ Amber asked.

  ‘He’s not in uniform, apparently.’

  ‘But you haven’t seen him yourself?’

  ‘I know nothing more. There are other Chetnik groups up here. They may know more.’ He laid his hand flat on the table. ‘I must go.’

  ‘At least you’re alive,’ Ana said. ‘I am grateful for that. We can settle our differences after the war.’

  ‘I hope so,’ Miko said.

  ‘Yugoslavia can work,’ Ana said fiercely. ‘When I was a schoolgirl they sat us down, Serbs and Croats, and showed us how to write one another’s alphabets. The words meant the same in both languages, we just couldn’t read them.’

  ‘I know, the Partisans are beacons of brotherly love and internationalism,’ Miko said. ‘Unless you’re a devout Catholic or a factory owner who’d like to keep his family business.’ Miko stood up. He looked at Stimmer, eyes narrowing, before turning to his mother. ‘Let me have a closer look at the map, Mama.’

  She pushed it across the table.

  ‘There was a small airfield south of here, before the invasion.’ He took a pencil stub from his pocket and marked the map. ‘It’s not far from the farmhouse.’

  He picked his cap up off the table. Ana seemed to forget the presence of Amber and Stimmer for a moment, letting herself be folded up into Miko’s embrace. ‘Remember,’ he whispered, ‘the three of us promised Papa we’d look after one another. I swear that I will come to you, if you or Branko need me, Mama. No matter what.’

  Ana dropped her head onto his shoulder. ‘And I, too. If you send for me,’ she whispered. ‘I will come, my boy.’ Amber turned herself away, allowing the pair a moment to themselves.