In the Light of Morning

by Tim Pears

  In the distance far below he can now see the fires marking the drop area. The noise of the aircraft engines dies away, and so too does the wind. There is no sound except for the rustle of air against the silk parachute. Tom hangs, motionless in the black night. The ground rises towards him. The earth tilts fast on its axis. The fires disappear from view around the crest of a hill.

  In training they had been instructed never to anticipate landing, especially at night: reflexes are conditioned to the speed of a jump off a rock, and you expect to hit the ground a fraction of a second earlier than it actually happens. Legs are broken by this misjudgement. Instead keep your legs together, knees slightly bent, arms on the risers of the chute; relax, and roll with your fall when you reach terra firma.

  Tom sees what he takes to be a pool of water some distance away, reflecting stars. Just as he is trying to make out other features of the landscape below, he hits the ground.

  May 16

  TOM HAS SURVIVED the drop. No broken bones. As he unbuckles the parachute he becomes aware of whooping and yelling in the darkness. Suddenly, he is seized by two sweat-smelly, rough-shaven young men. They hug him, and kiss him, then take him one by each arm and lead him he knows not where. There is a faint yellow light. A window. A peasant house. Jack Farwell is already there. Tom is given a shot of liquor that scalds his throat, but does not clear his head.

  ‘Slivovka, they call it,’ Jack says, grimacing. ‘A rough plum brandy. I’ve an awful feeling we’d better get used to it, Freedman.’

  Sid Dixon is brought in. They are given more glasses of slivovka by men who propose noisy toasts. To Tito! To Churchill! Jack appears to have learned not a word of Slovene. Tom translates as best he can, though hardly well, his first day on the spot, throat burning, brain throbbing. Does Farwell expect him to hang on his shoulder and act as his interpreter? Of course he does.

  While their arrival is celebrated in this manner, other members of the Partisan detachment bring in the containers scattered around the drop zone, and divide up the contents. Tom staggers outside. As he stands pissing against a tree he looks across and can make out a couple of fighters cutting a silk parachute into strips.

  In the first light of morning they leave the house and enter a world taking shape before them, green meadows in high valleys speckled with wild flowers. Crocuses grow right up to the snow’s edge. Birds awaken and fill the thin air with their song.

  The supplies are loaded on farm wagons that are pulled away by oxen along white chalk roads. The Englishmen are led on a shorter route, accompanied by half a dozen men in assorted clothes, the only sign of a uniform a red star sewn into whatever headgear each sports. Around them are mountains.

  Tom turns to Sid Dixon behind him. ‘So this is where we are,’ he says. ‘This is where we shall be.’

  Dixon nods. ‘It’ll do me, sir.’

  The meadows are surrounded by dark pine forest. The outer tips of each sombre tree’s branches are a light, luminous green. In a pasture stands a twin-towered gateway facing the forest like the entrance to a great castle that has vanished. There comes the sound of bells, a flock of sheep ahead. Loath to pause their grazing, the greedy beasts scatter at the last moment to let the single file of men through. A young shepherd watches, never takes his eyes off them. They pass a tall stone tower with a conical roof, a fairy-tale tower. Tom sees Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty. They are being led not towards war but away from it, into an entrancing idyll. His head is thumping, his throat is dry, he has a terrible thirst but they do not stop.

  Instead, three of the Partisans take the packs off the backs of the Englishmen, put them on their own, and up the pace.

  They walk past white peasant houses with red tiled roofs. Children pause to gape at them: if greeted they wave back, shyly, or turn away. Women do not see them. An old man limps across from a barn to waylay them but the Partisans do not tarry and the old man fails to intercept the crocodile formation of ragged soldiers. He beseeches and complains with the tongue of a toothless mouth, lips working over his gums like a baby. Dixon breaks rank, runs across to hand the dotard a cigarette, then trots back to catch up with his companions.

  To Tom’s surprise they do not stop: the march seems like a stroll to the Partisans, it costs them less effort than it does the Englishmen to haul their weight across the rolling surface of the earth. Neither do they speak, for while the foremost man in particular scrutinises the way ahead, the others too remain in a state of high alert. Jack Farwell, crimson-faced, breathes heavily, he takes off his jacket and ties its arms around his waist; ties his pullover around his neck. He looks like a kidnapped cricket umpire. Sweat darkens the armpits of his shirt, but he does not complain.

  They descend into a boggy, marshy valley that is cool and dank. Tom listens, and realises the high-pitched calls of alpine birds have faded away. They approach the entrance of a cave out of which a brownish stream flows. As they pass he sees the slimy stream is made of frogs jumping and sliding over each other, hundreds and hundreds of common frogs, emerging from their winter home, out into the open.

  They climb again, through a strange wild garden full of orchids. Above them are flashes of gold in the morning sun: the dipping flight of yellow wagtails. Tom feels nauseous from thirst and headache and tiredness but they do not stop. They emerge into still higher meadows. His gaze lowers from the mountains to the ground and he sees it is alive: the grass is seething. He blinks, wipes sweat from his eyes. There are black beetles on the stalks, and grasshoppers green as chlorophyll.

  They stop at a place where water comes out of the hill from a spout of rock. The Partisans bid them take it in turns to fill their bellies with the cool rust-coloured water that leaves a taste of metal on the tongue. When their turn comes the Slovenes grunt with pleasure.

  ‘The best mineral water in Yugoslavia,’ one of them proclaims, rubbing his stomach in a circular motion, and Tom translates. ‘Very good for the liver.’

  They walk between peaks in another meadow where the petals of wild flowers take off and fly in the air from one to another, flower dancing to flower. Drawing closer, Tom sees they are not petals but butterflies, blurs of crimson, yellow, violet. Electric-blue dragonflies, too, and other insects, vibrant and buzzing with a gorgeous satiation of spring.

  They descend steeply into a snug valley, and move towards a village. As they approach, the Partisans take up their weapons, though they barely slow and do not stop. At a certain distance it becomes apparent there are no roofs on the houses, or on the church. A smell of charcoal comes to Tom’s nostrils.

  Every building is open to the sky, blackened by fire. The village is deserted. Houses are pockmarked with bullet holes. On a blank wall a half-washed-out inscription, Il Duce ha sempre ragione. Across it scrawled in red paint, Smrt fašizem – Svoboda Naroda. Death to fascism – freedom to the people. Zivio Tito.

  Again they climb, into wooded hills, the ground is chalk and flint beneath their aching feet and the trees are beech now. Once, they pass a tiny stone forester’s hut, like the home of a troll. The smooth younger beech trunks reach from the earth like the slender limbs of young women, as if this were a place in nature where vegetable aspired to animal. Tom is reminded of strolling in the Chilterns with the family dogs. He has a memory of drinking bitter: yeasty and leaving the taste of hops to linger on the tongue. These beech forests, though, unroll on and on through the afternoon, with no tarmacadamed lanes to cross, no country pub in which to slake one’s thirst with a pint of warm beer. No, there is nothing here but ridge after ridge of beech trees across an endless corrugated escarpment.

  Tom remembers his mother on those walks, how the dogs went sniffing after their own adventures but kept coming back to her; to check they hadn’t lost her. When his attention returns to his surroundings, he finds that the trees have turned from beech to pine. The scent of sap mixes with the smell of needles mulching underfoot, and they walk without cease for two more hours.

  And then at last, just a
s the light is fading in the woods, they are precipitously descending and begin to glimpse through the trees an open vista. As they come out of the forest the Partisans relax, light cigarettes, ease out of the single-file formation, let the pace slow, a little, as they walk down off the hills. They drop through orchards of fruit trees, the highest still with pink and white blossom, petals falling upon them as they descend, now – the Englishmen are assured – in safe territory.

  They are greeted by the senior British liaison officer, Captain Wilson. He puts Jack and Tom up in a peasant hovel that serves as British Mission in a hamlet half a mile from the small town of Semic, home of the Slovene Partisan Headquarters. They have walked for fifteen hours; they have not slept for forty-eight. Sid Dixon does not want to rest until his radio equipment arrives; the officers do not wait.

  We are here, Tom thinks, as he puts his head down. We have made it.

  May 17

  BREAKFAST CONSISTS OF tea and porridge, on which Tom pours fresh creamy milk, still warm from the cow’s udder.

  ‘We’re well supplied now,’ Wilson says. ‘Here, that is. Not where you’re going, I’m afraid.’

  The small room is furnished with a table and four chairs. Kit bags, files and attaché cases are piled in corners. When the table has been cleared Farwell and Wilson lay out their maps. ‘So here’s the Ljubljana Gap,’ Jack says. ‘Cut through the Alps.’

  ‘A double-track railway line runs through it,’ Wilson says, stuffing his pipe with black tobacco. ‘It was built by the Habsburgs to connect Vienna with Trieste, their port in the Adriatic.’

  ‘You want to listen to this, Freedman,’ Farwell says, as if Tom were not already intent on every word.

  ‘You’re being sent into the German-occupied zone – they call it Styria, the Jugs call it Stajerska – to supply Slovene Partisans with the means to attack rail lines running to and from the Gap.’

  ‘To block the movement of German troops to the Italian front?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Very good, Lieutenant,’ Wilson says.

  ‘Or,’ Farwell adds, ‘as we prevail in Italy, to stop them retreating to deploy elsewhere.’

  ‘You’ll move around,’ Wilson says, waving his pipe at the map, ‘coordinating drops of explosives.’

  ‘How much ease of movement will there be?’ Tom asks.

  Wilson lights his pipe. The smell is less of tobacco than of a garden fire. ‘The total strength of the Liberation Front in the Fourth Zone,’ he says, ‘is, as far as I can gather through the fog of their exaggerations, some two thousand men. They’re in small companies or tiny groups, odreds, scattered across three thousand square miles of mountains and valleys. Most are poorly armed. They’ve attacked the odd road convoy, retreated into the woods. Been living hand to mouth, most of them, reliant on peasants who are terrified of reprisal.’

  ‘And what do they face up there?’ Jack Farwell asks.

  Wilson does not look up to meet Jack’s gaze but continues to peer at the map. ‘A force of thirty-five thousand, if you add together the Germans and their Slovene Home Guard quislings.’

  Tom catches Jack’s eye. Jack frowns, his lips tighten. ‘I rather like long odds,’ he says. ‘At the racetrack, the longer the better.’ He lights a cigarette, takes a deep drag, lets out a long plume of smoke. ‘In war one’s a little less fond of such a gamble.’ He lifts his shoulders. ‘Well, gentlemen, we’d better get going.’

  ‘Not right away, I’m afraid,’ Wilson says. He tells them that a German offensive is in progress in the Fourth Zone, and it’s not possible to take them there for the moment.

  ‘Don’t they know,’ Jack snaps, ‘what’s going on at Monte Cassino?’

  Tom finds Sid Dixon, so they can report their safe arrival. First the message must be enciphered. This was the part of his recent training Tom had most enjoyed, using the Worked Out Key system: from a thick paper pad he takes out a page of letters set out at random; the base in Bari will have an identical copy of this page to decipher the message. Above the letters Tom writes the letters of his message, making of each one a pair.

  Now he takes a small square of silk which has the alphabet across the top and down the side, and in the middle a random jumble of letters. He finds the first letter of the first pair along the line at the top of the silk, and the second letter down the side, and finds the random letter at their intersection in the middle. This is the first letter of his message, which he writes on a fresh piece of paper. Tom continues. It is painstaking, concentrated work that suits his studious temperament. At one point something causes his attention to waver: he looks up and sees Jack watching him, shaking his head.

  ‘Do you want to check these?’ Tom asks.

  ‘Good heavens, no,’ Jack replies. ‘I have complete trust in you, Freedman. You remind me of my Cassie doing the Times crossword puzzle. Plodding work. Admirable!’

  When the message is complete, Tom gives it to Sid Dixon, who makes radio contact with base and then taps out the Morse code with nicotined fingers on his brass key.

  Captain Wilson obtains an audience with the Partisan military leadership, and takes Jack Farwell in to Semic. Curious to explore the town himself, Tom follows after them, stiff from yesterday’s march. He passes squat wooden houses, surrounded by orchards with different varieties of tree, and open ground on which animals are tethered to stakes in the grass. A cow and goats graze. A boy leads a pig by a long rope, the end attached to a ring in its nose. A jeep passes Tom on the rough road. Clouds intermittently block the bright sun, but the morning is warm. Two children, a boy and a girl, stand and watch him: they are so immobile it is as if they believe that, should they be able to contain the least twitch of movement, they may remain invisible to him. Even when he has walked twenty yards past them and glances back he sees that they have not shifted an inch. Yet they do not look as though they are straining to achieve this effect: their shy country stillness is natural, effortless.

  There are, among the orchards, vegetable plots from which green shoots and leaves are burgeoning. In one, a thin woman bends and hoes between lines, with swift rhythmic repetition.

  Tom makes his way towards the pewterish bulbous top of a church tower. The houses are built of stone now, painted pastel colours, with red tiled roofs. They stand closer together; their orchards and gardens have shrunk. Horse chestnuts stand at the sides of the road, graceful candelabras of pink and white blossoms rise from their green-leaved branches. Wild asparagus grows at the verge.

  Chained dogs emit low snarls of welcome. Tom admires the overhang of a wooden porch, finely proportioned yet by its marks rough-hewn. He inspects an icon of the Virgin Mary in a wall niche, her shoulders dolorously rounded and her eyes cast downward. ‘For he that is mighty hath magnified me,’ Tom whispers to himself. ‘He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.’

  There is one dog unchained: a scrawny black mongrel, whose legs look too long for his terrier-like body, walks with a high-stepping gait, as if he’s on his way to market. He pauses, observes Tom with an air of snooty appraisal. When he has seen enough to satisfy his curiosity he turns and resumes his progress.

  There is little sign of artillery or military vehicles. This is not a garrison town but a large country village that has found itself at the centre of events. Two men in uniform trot past on sturdy ponies. A peasant woman walks beside an old nag drawing a tiny cart. As it overtakes him, Tom sees the bed of the cart is filled with jars of something, he cannot tell what. A white-haired man is clearing the road up ahead with a shovel and wheelbarrow. The town’s street cleaner? As Tom gets closer he sees the only refuse the man is collecting is horse dung. The dense globules of digested grass are halfway back to mud already; they will soon be dug into the old man’s garden. Tom overtakes him, inhales the sharp sweet odour of the ruminant’s ordure. The day is warm, the air thin and clear. There is a buzzing of insects in the background.

  Around the square in the centre of the village, clusters of oddly uniformed men, and a f
ew women, bristle with intent, speaking to each other loudly and decisively. Tom tries shyly to eavesdrop, but understands little of what the jabbering soldiers say. Ignoring him, they come to mysterious decisions, part from one another at purposeful speed. One jumps onto a motorbike, kicks the stand away and pushes off in a single flurry of movement; he veers off out of the square in a plume of dust. The smell of petroleum is different from that in England; less chemical.

  The army and the townspeople appear to coexist, in parallel. Like those childish notions of ghosts, Tom thinks, who linger beside us but in an alternative dimension, unseen except in queer atmospheric conditions. Soldiers and civilians, trying to ignore each other.

  Around noon, in a birch grove on the east side of the village, Tom comes across a group of a dozen British officers and men. They sit dazed and stupefied in the grass, eyes closed or gazing into space like long-demented men. He gets talking to them. They are escaped prisoners of war who have slogged down through Austria and Stajerska, over the mountains, evading German patrols. Half of them wear ragged civilian clothing; most of their boots are broken; the men are in bad shape, with sores and abrasions that will not heal because of their poor diet. They are waiting to be escorted further, into Croatia and on to the Adriatic coast.

  A young Slovene appears with a gaggle of children bearing food: bread, cheese, three bottles of thin red wine, which they pass around. The youth introduces himself to Tom. Pero has guided the Brits along the last leg of their journey here. He is a Slovene student from a town called Celje. He has a Scottish mother, he says, explaining his fine English. He is being assigned to Tom’s group as their courier and interpreter. He is a tall, willowy youth with a broad peasant’s face yet fine features, giving the impression of both solidity and subtlety; his movements are quick and keen.