by Tim Pears
‘The nurses drove the heavy ambulances,’ Jovan continues. ‘They performed miracles. My father claimed that, in an emergency, one of the Scottish nurses commanded a battery of artillery.’
‘In their great retreat through Albania,’ Marija interjects, ‘the Serbs were running so fast, who knows what they saw?’
Affecting to ignore her, Jovan continues, ‘Incredible women. Warriors. Like Marija here.’
‘We are all obliged to play our part,’ Marija says. ‘Our great army has failed us. You know what they say, Tom? That one Serb general serves under Mihailovic´, four joined the collaborationist government, and the other thirty are sitting out the war in the drawing-rooms of their homes in Belgrade.’
Jovan shakes his head. ‘I cannot disagree with this woman,’ he admits.
‘He would like to,’ Marija tells Tom.
Jovan and Marija speak in this way, not directly to each other but through a third person, in this case Tom. It is very odd. Jovan watches Marija intently, then looks away; Marija tosses her head like a young horse. It occurs to Tom there is something going on that he cannot quite grasp. A language, a code, he does not read.
They leave the farm as darkness falls. Linden trees in blossom smell like jasmine. After three hours they meet the third unit at the designated drop zone. There are thirty or forty soldiers. For the first time all are in some semblance of uniform; their leader is a lieutenant. He reveals that the boy who led them there is his son. ‘I did not doubt he would bring you here safely,’ he tells Jovan and Tom. ‘I hope he did not march you too fast.’
His unit has already prepared the ground. At midnight they hear the single plane and light the fires. The canisters fall out of the sky, and the soldiers gather them up with great efficiency, four men to each item, plus two to deal with the parachute, as if this is something they do every night and is not the first such drop they have ever had.
The unit commander gives Jovan’s odred a different boy to act as their courier up the mountain, and they climb higher. At dawn they stop to watch through binoculars as the unit they supplied attack a small bridge on the branch line that spans a narrow gorge far below. From their vantage point, panning the glasses to the left, they can see too the German barracks, a mile away. The bridge is taken, explosives attached even as vehicles full of enemy reinforcements stream out of their garrison and speed along the road.
How strange it is to watch from so far away: the landscape a model one; people, objects, miniaturised and unreal, moving surely not by their own volition but by some guiding hand. Men fall like toy soldiers. The middle of the bridge throws up a little plume of dust; a few seconds later there is a faint, muffled thud. When the dust clears Tom can see that the central span is buckled, twin tracks of the single railway line twisted like wire. He wonders if those tiny dull pinpricks of sound at the edge of his hearing are rifle shots.
‘I would place our gun there,’ Marija says, standing beside him, pointing to a ledge halfway down the hillside. ‘I would kill many of them if Jovan would let me.’
The Partisans are on the run now, beating a retreat from the soldiers pouring from the garrison. Jovan taps Tom’s arm, points to the barracks. Tom shifts the binoculars: some of the unit have skirted around the emerging Germans and are now approaching the virtually unmanned barracks. ‘Hyena tactic,’ Jovan says. ‘One of our favourite manoeuvres.’
Now the enemy are scrambling back to their vehicles. The barracks take fire in two, three toy explosions: orange flames brighten the colourless morning. The Partisans at either end of this panorama vanish into the trees. Jovan orders his odred to move again. Pero embraces their courier, who sets off to rejoin his surviving comrades.
Tom and the others climb higher, out of reach. They climb where beeches no longer grow. In amongst the pines are daisies, buttercups, a profusion of wild flowers. There are so many flies and midges and bees, their buzzing is a mesh of sound in the atmosphere. Then they are up in thin air and wind where the only trees are stunted firs, they are like shrubs, standing no taller than a man with branches candelabraed in all directions. There are no mosquitoes here. A little higher even the smallest trees do not grow: the Partisans cross white rock. Here it is dangerous, exposed, the ragged line of indigent soldiers could be seen and picked off by a plane. They run and scramble towards the next cover.
The day clouds over, it is a great relief. Tom has come to share the guerrilla fighters’ schizophrenic relationship with the weather. He lives outside, and longs for clement weather like a tourist. But at the time of an attack, a manoeuvre, a march, such an attitude is turned on its head. For then there is nothing worse than a clear day.
How a partisan loves the mist out of which and into which he comes and goes, a deadly ghost. How he loves the fog that muffles his approach, the dusk into which he retreats, the falling rain that covers his tracks. Then nature at her most spiteful becomes a comrade in his righteous acts. Jovan tells him that the word partizan came from the Russian winter of 1812, when the French troops in retreat from Moscow were picked off by marauding Cossacks in white astrakhans on white stallions, swooping with their curved sabres out of the snow.
On they go. They move every day out of necessity, yet their mobility, Tom thinks, gives them a strange conviction of superior intelligence. For they are always one step ahead – a disembodied threat the enemy cannot really grasp. Every now and then he sees where they have been and must tremble, like one who has found the footprint of a cloven hoof in the forest.
The country is large, the Partisan forces small and nimble. They strike and disappear, infuriating the occupiers, who chase after them into the wilderness. Tom is reminded of Low’s cartoon in the days of the Abyssinian crisis, of Haile Selassie’s troops ‘provocatively retreating’. He understands how much the Germans must hate these people they regard as inferior Slavs; this place in south-eastern Europe that they’d wanted only to police with a few old Wehrmacht veterans.
The Fourth Unit
July 7
THEY LOOP BACK on themselves. They are heading not across the Pohorje range but up through its eastern foothills, to supply a unit north of the first one they supplied a week ago. As they walk, Tom thinks of their group as a single insect, a centipede of men and women wriggling across the ridges and hills, from one unit to another; from one unprotected stretch of rail track to the next.
They tramp through dark forest, walking back towards the first farm they stayed at after leaving the main body of Partisans. The sky is hidden by branches overhead. Dawn becomes apparent uncannily: tree trunks and branches dimly discernible. The walkers begin to take shape. The light that illuminates them could be coming from the ground, or from the trees themselves.
At the edge of the forest Pero waits for Jovan, who is at the back of the line. The others see Pero’s worried expression. Franjo nods to Nikola, jerks his head to indicate direction; father and son fan out, one on either side. Jovan gazes across the hillside at the tiny settlement.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.
‘Nothing,’ Pero tells him. ‘I mean, something, but I can’t see it.’
They all peer through the diffused early-morning light. A skein of mist draped across the hillside like a white scarf dropped by a giant in the night. There is a faint smell of burning in the air, the day after a bonfire.
‘Shall we go in?’ Pero asks.
‘No.’ Jovan tells Stipe to set up the machine gun and train it on the house. Marija kneels behind it. Marko falls back into the forest, alert, as if he’d heard something there. Jovan looks at his watch.
‘What’s up, sir, you reckon?’ Sid Dixon asks.
‘Trap, perhaps,’ Tom whispers. ‘Ambush. I’m not sure.’
From the barn to the side of the farmhouse a small, thin cow – one of those farting beasts of their night in the barn, no longer pregnant – emerges, udder swaying between its spindly hindlegs. It ambles across to the door of the house and stands there, a regular visitor, expected at this hour
. No. It possesses a kind of docile bovine impatience, is tired of waiting to be served.
Ordering Pero and Francika to accompany him, Jovan strides out of the trees, towards the farmhouse, his gun slung over his shoulder. Midway there, under the broad branches of a pear tree, they pause, and look down upon the ground. Jovan resumes his walk towards the farm, Pero at his shoulder. Francika turns to the forest and nods before trotting after them.
Tom, Sid and the others gather their equipment and follow their comrades. At the base of the trunk of the pear tree they find the body of a boy, a youth, the son. He’s been shot in the back of the head, the bullet coming out under his right ear, opening a huge wound from which his brains trickle out beside him, on the grass. The sight of his hands preoccupies Tom: they are already as large as a man’s, a peasant’s hands, fingernails dirty with soil from the fields.
Attached to the front door with a kitchen knife is a poster with the drawing of a hand, filled in with black ink. Inside they find the old man, wandering from one room to the other and back again, among overturned furniture and broken crockery. He seems to be looking for something, pottering about the devastated little house. He is oblivious to their presence, one after another of them pressing through to see what there is to see.
In the kitchen lies the elder daughter, the twin of the boy outside. Her skull has been crushed, her body hacked with an axe.
In the other room beside the hearth lies their mother, the old man’s daughter-in-law, her throat cut. They can see the white of her gullet in the wound. She has blood smeared over her chin and face, blood smeared by the hands of one who held her. Her own small, plump hands are greasy, Tom sees, as if she has just come from milking the cows.
Then the old man becomes all of a sudden aware of them. He begins smiling, and jabbering words in a dialect Tom cannot understand, until he sees that none of the Slovenes understand either. The old man babbles, smiling, and gesturing to some place other than where they stand.
Tom steps from the house. It occurs to him to wonder what he thinks and feels, but he discovers that he has no thoughts at all. The mechanism of his mind has ground to a halt. If he feels anything, it is only that he is a little cold.
Outside, he finds Francika squatting by the ashes of a fire, stirring the ashes carefully with her knife. As Tom watches, she finds small bones, lifts them on the blade and begins to build a little pile off to one side.
Dixon stands in the doorway of the barn from which the cow had come. Tom walks up behind him. Inside, the second cow and two calves lie shot. The old woman, the old man’s wife, lies curled up in the straw beside them. Her limbs, head, neck all bent at wrong angles, as if stretched in a hideous parody of sleep. Sid turns away and Tom sees tears slide down his face. ‘Bastards,’ Sid says. ‘Fuckers,’ and he wishes to curse some more but cannot do so for weeping and goes away from his colleague and officer to grieve alone.
Tom leans against the wall of the barn. Jovan comes out of the house and shoos away the cow that still hangs about, and he goes over to Francika raking about in the ashes, extracting the small child’s bones with her knife.
Still Tom feels nothing, though his hands shake a little, he notices, as he lights a cigarette. But his mind is turning once more, slowly. These people have been betrayed for helping them. By a jealous neighbour with an eye on their land? Or had one of the children told a friend of the night the Partisans and foreign soldiers were given food and shelter?
While four of them keep lookout the rest dig five graves, picking and shovelling furiously, without pause, sweating and grunting with the effort. Jovan and Tom take their turn. Francika and Marija are permitted a stint, while Stipe, Pero, Franjo and Nikola reluctantly assume sentry duty. When the graves are deep enough they lower the bodies into the ground, and shovel earth upon them. Then Tom takes it upon himself to say a few words. Not prayers as such, but snatches that he remembers from his grandparents’ funeral: in English, which Pero translates.
‘Lord, I am a stranger, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. Spare me a little, before I go hence, and be no more seen. For man that is born of woman has but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He comes up, and is cut down, like a flower. He flees like a shadow.’
So they bury the family who have been slaughtered, by those searching for Tom and his companions. And he would take revenge if he could, he would gladly kill those who had done this. Life is not worth living in this world while there are men who commit such atrocities. He now understands, in his guts, the meaning of occupation, and of civil war. It is a fight to the death. There is no alternative: them or us.
July 8
THEY WALK WITHOUT stopping, with insufficient food, but they endure, fuelled now by anger as well as fear. Tom forces his body up and down steep slopes, straps cutting into his shoulder, knees burning, muscles beneath the skin apparently forming themselves for the express purpose of bearing pain. Walking at night, branches swipe him in the darkness like the whips of a gauntlet they suffer, self-punishing mendicants on their endless march.
‘This is nothing like the desert, sir,’ Sid Dixon tells him. ‘At night the sky was all alight. Tanks burned. Even when it was quiet in our sector there was always the distant rumbling of guns, and you’d look out into the desert, see these little flashes on the horizon. The enemy was in front of us: we advanced, or retreated. Here they’re all around. We don’t know where they are.’
At dawn they stop. Sid Dixon fetches water for Francika; he helps her roll the grey balls of zganci meal. Sid and Francika speak in occasional, single words, teaching each other the Slovene and the English for objects. It is their one mode of conversation; it seems sufficient for them. A word – flour, moka; water, vode – carries the meaning of other thoughts or feelings between them. Or else they do not need more than what is apparent. Solid objects, and a growing affection, a wish for the other’s presence. Sid helps Francika serve the food.
They eat in silence.
‘At school,’ Francika announces, in time, ‘we had one spoonful of cod liver oil, each day, to prevent rickets. The only animal fat we ever had.’
Tom grimaces at his own memories of such fish oil, administered for constipation.
‘No, no,’ Francika insists. ‘Oh, it was delicious.’
‘Surely you,’ Tom asks, ‘as country people, ate a good deal of meat?’ He knows it is a conversation they have begun in order to try to take people’s minds off what they dwell on.
‘No,’ Francika says, frowning as if this were almost too obvious to be stated. ‘Maybe a sliver of chicken on a special day. But even then the adults, the men especially, not the children.’
The conversation stops, again there is silence. It will take a great effort to speak. Eventually Stipe is the one to make it.
‘You know what I once saw?’ he asks, in his deep growl. ‘Once I saw an orange.’
Marko is sceptical, since Stipe has been to neither a city nor the sea, but Stipe will not be denied. ‘A real one,’ he says, with finality.
Marija throws her plate to the ground. The others’ attention turns towards her. ‘They are looking for us? Good! Let us go and meet them!’ she demands.
There is a murmur of agreement.
‘I want to kill them, German or Slovene, I don’t care,’ Marija says.
They wait for Jovan to say something. ‘We cannot,’ he says. ‘We must follow our orders. We are not to engage the enemy. We must guard our British allies and their wireless.’
‘Do you think they will be in a small party of ten, Marija?’ Francika asks. ‘They are cowards. There will be fifty of them, at least.’
There is a long silence. Then Marko says, ‘In my village there were two thugs. Good for nothing but drinking and fighting. When the Germans came, this pair rushed into Celje to join whatever bunch of killers they could. The last I heard they were in the Black Hand; they led their unit back to the village to round up communist sympathisers – or so they claimed. In reality, anyone they
had a grudge against. Including my old uncle, who had no interest in politics but had once rebuked one of them for stealing milk.’ Marko looks at Jovan. ‘I tell you, and I don’t care who hears it, if that pair survive the war I myself will track them down. I will find them, whatever hole they have crawled into. Even if they go and hide in Hitler’s arse!’
There is laughter. They throw their experiences, rumours they have heard, opinions, into the circle. Someone asks Jovan what they will do about murderers and collaborators after the war.
‘In Serbia,’ he says, ‘the Germans declared that they would carry out reprisals: for every German soldier wounded they would execute fifty inhabitants of the population; for one killed they would execute one hundred. In the towns of Kragujevac and Kraljevo they shot all the adult males. Thousands.’ Jovan pauses. He removes his battered cap, runs a hand through his thick, dark hair. ‘In Montenegro we attacked a column of Italian trucks. We took money, weapons, food, even good Italian wine. And we captured fifty Italian officers and men. The following day an Italian unit arrived on the scene and executed ten peasants from the nearest village. We heard this news, and knew we had to shoot our prisoners. But it was not so simple.’
‘Why not?’ Stipe asks.
‘Yes,’ Marija says. ‘It could not be more simple.’
Jovan sighs. ‘The soldiers had mingled with our soldiers. They had, after all, carried the booty from the road up the mountain; they had shared food, cigarettes. The officers remained aloof, in a clearing. While we discussed how to carry out the execution, the Italian soldiers realised what was going on. They began to beg and weep for their lives, clasping our men around their knees. Our own men then begged us: “We cannot kill them. They are ordinary soldiers, not Blackshirts. How can we kill them when we have broken bread with them?”’
