by Tim Pears
‘And what can we do without explosives?’ The man nods towards where Tom lies. ‘Where is the British dynamite?’
‘We have to show these Allied soldiers that we can do something even without their help.’
Marija has been hovering close by, agitated, and now she steps forward and joins in. ‘You call yourselves men?’ she says.
The leader glares at her. Jovan watches her, smiling.
‘You think if we ignore the fascists,’ she says, ‘they will be so upset that they will creep back to Germany?’
‘The Americans,’ the man says. ‘The Russians.’
‘Incredible,’ Marija says. ‘To have lost so much pride that you fear death like rabbits.’
‘All right, Marija,’ Jovan says.
‘My men are tired. If we do as you ask, the Germans will be all over this mountain. We would have to leave this place. We are peasants. If we lose our lives we want at least to know that we will be buried in our own village cemetery.’
‘This is how we live now,’ Jovan tells him. ‘We are Partisans. Gather any picks or tools that you have. You will lead us to a stretch of unguarded line. We move out in two hours. Prepare your men.’
Tom can see the mutual suspicion between the members of each group. As they climb down the mountain he realises he is doubly alert: danger might come from the enemy, or from these men around him. He’s counted their number: there are twenty of them; ten in his own unit. The man with the poisoned hand walks behind Tom. Every now and then he lets out a moan of pain. The lame man limps in front.
In the forest there is always movement. Creatures that watch them from the shadows. Sunlight, dappled through the leaves or needles, always changing. If there is no movement their own ambulation creates it, the triangulation of trees and the ever-shifting perspective.
His vigilance. Senses tuned to the tightest pitch, on the verge of snapping.
Suddenly Tom notices something on the inside of his retina: scintillae dancing upon the orb of his vision, red and black motes, crawling across the bumpy grass and weeds. No. Ladybirds. Yes, that is what they are. Tens, hundreds, of ladybirds on the ground. He doesn’t want to step on them with his clod-hopping size-nine boots. There would be carnage. He makes a great effort to avoid them, or as many as he can, seeing them as his booted foot comes down to earth and tripping himself to one side or the other, but the effort costs him. And the tiny lives he saves are few. He gives it up and raises his eyes so as not to see, and walks on.
Jovan posts his own soldiers as sentries along the line, Marija and Marko at one end, Francika and Franjo at the other. He doesn’t trust these people, Tom can see. Using picks, shovels, poles for levers and the brute force of their combined human bodies the rest of them rip up the track for more than a hundred yards. They stack the wooden sleepers and balance the metal rails on top. Dusk. The sleepers, suffused with creosote, burn intensely. The rails, red hot, soften, and the ends bend down under their own weight. They will be no further use.
‘The Todt Organisation will have a work gang out here in less than half a day,’ Jovan reckons. ‘They rebuild their rail lines as fast as we destroy them. Leave two snipers behind,’ he orders the unit leader, ‘to deter the Slovene repair crews.’
The rest leave, all together still, walking uphill for two hours until they reach a hamlet of three, four farmhouses. They sleep in different barns, breathing the pungent smell of manure.
July 13
IN THE MORNING Tom walks out from the barn to shit in the woods. On the way back he is diverted by the sound of buzzing, to a collection of half a dozen beehives above the farm. The end boards of the wooden hives are brightly decorated with peasant scenes. ‘They are painted for the bees,’ he hears. It is Marko. ‘To help each bee locate its own hive.’
They make their way to the largest farmhouse. Franjo and Nikola stand outside, along with some members of the indigent band. No one speaks. There is something wrong. Francika and Marija come out of the house carrying rough wooden trays of food. The men follow them over to a table in the orchard. They help themselves to food. There is cornmeal boiled into a mush and cut into wedge-shaped pieces, along with raw onions, cut in half.
‘What’s going on?’ Tom whispers to Marija.
‘One of these bastards has raped a girl here,’ she tells him.
‘Last night?’ he asks. He is incredulous. Not only has a crime been committed, and a first rule of hospitality desecrated; but Tom cannot imagine a man having the energy to do such a thing. He and his companions fell asleep exhausted last night as soon as they lay down.
‘Last night?’ Marija repeats. ‘Of course.’
‘Does anyone know which one it was?’
‘He’s in there now.’
‘What will happen?’ he wonders.
‘Jovan is the commanding officer,’ Marija says, as if that were all the explanation that is needed. She looks up to see Tom’s puzzled frown. ‘If the scum has a God to believe in, he had better be saying his prayers.’
Nothing is said, no explanation given. Twenty minutes after they have eaten Jovan and the unit leader escort a young man, the one who can only see out of one eye, out of the house. He is weeping silently from his good eye. Stipe, Marko and two members of the other unit accompany them, carrying shovels and Marko’s Sten gun. None of the members of the family show themselves. The soldiers disappear around the side of the hill. Four shots are heard in quick succession.
They leave in the early afternoon, the two groups heading in opposite directions. As Jovan’s odred walk away Franjo and Marko keep glancing back over their shoulders, wary of parting shots. To be so mistrustful of their own side makes Tom’s flesh crawl. Once they are out of sight, the relief is acknowledged: Tom’s gaze meets Jovan’s, who shakes his head.
They walk in the afternoon, west. Some plant gives off a sharp, familiar, peppery smell. Yes, that flower, he sees, with five pink-purple petals. Some kind of cranesbill, is it? A word he has heard spoken, from his mother’s mouth.
When they have stopped, and are preparing to eat, Tom sees Marko off on his own in the trees, muttering to himself. He clutches something in his fingers, is it a bracelet? He feeds it through his fingers. It is a rosary. He is praying.
‘In the south,’ Marija tells Tom, ‘the Catholic church cooperated with the occupiers. Most priests advised their people to join the Home Guard: they hated communists more than their Italian fellow Catholics. But here in the north the Germans treat the Church like another of their enemies. It is said that six hundred priests have been deported.’
Marko wanders back, pocketing the beads.
‘Sometimes the Church is on the side of good, at others on the side of evil,’ Tom reflects. ‘Christianity seems able to turn its face in any direction.’
‘Our Bishop of Ljubljana,’ Marko says. ‘He told us to defend our nation against the wolves and jackals who are poisoning our souls with their atheistic communism.’
‘The Catholic Archbishop of Sarajevo went further,’ Jovan tells them. ‘He said that it was stupid and unworthy of Christ’s disciples to think that the struggle against evil can be waged in a noble way and with gloves on. Saric is his name. We know him as the Hangman of the Serbs.’
There is a bitterness in Jovan’s voice; against the bishop’s cloth, or his anti-Serb, anti-Orthodox, affiliation?
‘The gospel of Christ,’ Tom asks Jovan, ‘is it so far from your own vision? Must you reject it all?’
‘History is a ruthless force,’ Jovan says. ‘If there was ever a possibility of a leftist, socialist Catholicism here in Slovenia, or anywhere else in Yugoslavia, it has been lost. The majority of Catholics collaborated. Those who have joined our movement have been assimilated amongst us.’
‘You?’ Marija asks Tom. ‘Do you have religion?’
Tom considers the question for some time. ‘I thought I did,’ he says at length. ‘Now, I am less and less sure. How about you, Marija?’
‘Me?’ She laughs. ‘
No. No. There is only this, Tom,’ she says, plucking a stem of grass. ‘What we can touch. And us. Men and women.’ She looks at him. Their eyes meet. ‘This is all there is,’ she says.
They avoid rivers, running water no ally, muffling as it would the approach of an enemy. Even, or especially, if a good path runs beside it. But this afternoon they approach a stream. Jovan brings them to a halt. He posts lookouts up and down river and motions to the group to drink. They lie and lap like animals, sating themselves on water, filling their bellies while they can. Today there is no rush to move on. They rest by the stream, stretched out along its banks. After they have eaten, and are ready to sleep, Nikola, the youngest among them, prevails upon his father to sit on the bank. The boy steps barefoot into the stream, turns, and takes off Franjo’s boots and socks. He washes his father’s feet in the cold mountain water. Then he dips his fingers in a small tub and rubs what it contains into the soles of his father’s feet, the heels, the toes. Some kind of grease, or fat?
Jovan has been watching this filial massage, as have all the others. He asks Nikola something, then says to the group, ‘Who’s next?’
One after another Jovan and Nikola wash their companions’ feet, and rub the unguent into them. The cold water, then warmth rubbed into tingling skin. No one speaks as this ritual is carried out. When it is Marija’s turn, Jovan spends longer than on those who have gone before. Tom’s turn was pleasurable, but brisk. Now he watches Jovan massage Marija’s calves with his strong hands. He rubs her feet with a slow deliberation. She closes her eyes.
And then Jovan and Nikola wash each other’s feet. Dusk falls.
The Fifth Unit
July 14
A NEW COURIER leads them on a two-day slog high into the mountains, towards the fifth unit. She gives Jovan the latest information on enemy movements. Sid Dixon makes contact and gives new coordinates to base.
In the woods are thirty men and women, and youngsters. The men are well-shaven, the women clean. They have shelters constructed out of long, interwoven poles of hazel, covered with bracken. Caps, jackets, are hung on branches cut close to tree trunks, a living hat and coat stand. Ropes are strung from one tree to another, blankets hung on them to air. These Partisans seem quite at home in the forest; their clearings are like rooms in a tidy house.
‘We came here two days ago. We could move at five minutes’ notice,’ their leader responds to Tom’s admiring observation. ‘Each person has his job to do.’
‘You may have to move,’ Jovan tells him. ‘The Black Hand are not far behind us. An SS patrol was sighted to the east two days ago.’
The cook works surrounded by utensils hung from cord or branch hooks; food hangs, too, in canvas bags. A meal is served to Jovan’s odred: a buckwheat mush, similar to but tastier than the cornmeal polenta they have sometimes been given, and a roasted meat Tom is, for a change, not the only one unable to identify.
‘It is pork,’ Stipe declares.
‘No,’ says Francika. ‘This is beef. I tasted it once before. How did they get beef?’
‘Young pork,’ Stipe insists.
Marija shakes her head. ‘These peasants,’ she tells Tom, nodding at Stipe and Francika, ‘eat more meat in war than in peace. This is goose. There would be more fat on pork.’
The cook of the unit reveals that they are eating badger. Jovan wrinkles his nose. Those who had not committed themselves, Marko and Nikola, nod sagely. Franjo does likewise.
‘Of course,’ Marija reckons, ‘by October it would be much fatter.’
‘My father,’ Marko tells them, ‘used to give our mother badgers’ teeth to use as buttons.’
‘Where I live,’ Sid says, ‘they say tis good luck if a badger crosses your path behind you. But if it crosses in front, you can bet your britches sommit bad’s goin a happen.’
Tom translates for him. Francika, sitting beside Sid, nods. ‘When I was a girl, my mother told us that if you hear a badger bark and an owl hoot, one after the other, it is time to ask God to make peace with your soul.’
Sid proceeds to give a demonstration of what he claims are some of the many different sounds a Devon badger makes. He begins with the wail of an infant in distress, and then a growl of warning. But as he proceeds, so the behaviour, and the sound accompanying it, become increasingly ludicrous. ‘This is the sound old jazbec makes when he’s climbing down a chimney after Santa’s milk and biscuit.’
Tom translates, not sure whether what he says makes sense to them, then Sid makes a crazy sound halfway between a retch and a yelp. The Partisans enjoy his humour. By the time he has added movement to the noises, mimicking a badger’s rolling gait, laughter from the two units drowns out Sid’s voice.
This time the planes come, on time. The fifth unit collect the supplies. Tom gives thanks to stores. In addition to the explosives specifically requested, they have provided other useful things: weapons, food, medicine, clothing; chocolate, cigarettes. These items are invaluable to mountain guerrillas. With them everything becomes possible.
At breakfast, the unit leader briefs his soldiers: they are to attack the branch line, at a certain time and place already known to them all and closely reconnoitred. They pack up their camp. When they are ready to leave, there is little discernible evidence of their stay.
Down the mountain they trek in the morning, carrying explosives to the branch railway line. They descend through orchards groaning with fruit – apples, pears, even peaches ripening. Sid picks perfect specimens for Francika, presents each one as a princely gift. Tom teases him. ‘Good to see you’re doing your bit for relations between our armies, Dixon.’
Sid grins. ‘She’s a good soldier, sir.’
Since Sid’s recovery from dysentery he and Francika are inseparable. Wasps are everywhere, devouring fermenting windfalls, buzzing with a demented, delirious greed.
Tom finds himself assailed by a memory out of the blue. His mother had made gooseberry crumble and placed it proudly on the table. ‘I think you’ll like this,’ she told her two men. ‘I found the idea in a recipe.’ Tom looked at the crumble and saw she had laid sprigs of elderflower over it. The first mouthful – as the subtle taste of elderflower rose through the stringency of gooseberry – was a kind of revelation on his tongue.
What was she doing now, his dear mother, Tom wonders, back home? There is a perfume of elderflower in his nostrils. The power of the human imagination, Tom considers, is extraordinary: he has a memory, and one of his senses is awakened. Just then he glances aside and sees an elder tree close by, spread with creamy white lanterns of flowers, source of the scent that had – of course – provoked the recollection; his own madeleine, a thousand miles from his home being left further behind with every step.
‘What are you thinking, Tom?’ Marija asks him.
She walks beside him. ‘Home,’ Tom says. ‘I suppose I was a little homesick. But I was also wondering what, or where, home was. My parents’ house is no longer mine. I shall return to my college and probably stay there. I can’t see how a college could be a real home. Perhaps home will be not a place but the realm of ideas one inhabits.’ Pleased with this notion, Tom looks up and sees Marija’s response. ‘You think that’s funny?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘It is not funny, it is stupid. Home is where you plant a tree.’
They make their way to where the main line snakes through a valley between a river and a road that according to the unit commander is little used. Their engineers lay explosives under sleepers. Most of the plastic has been left with Jovan’s group, watching from high up the hillside; Tom can see they are using only a few pounds, a fraction of what they’d been given. He wants to go down and see what they are playing at but Jovan will not allow it. The whole of their odred stand around him on a grassy ledge on the hill fifty feet above the track.
The engineers and escort withdraw, and they wait. After twenty minutes they hear a locomotive chugging south towards them. As it crosses the mined point, on the outside rail of a curve, the lo
comotive’s weight sets off the detonator. Tom can just make out the rail buckle and snap: the wheels of the train, which might have jumped the gap in a straight track, spin in a void; the momentum of the train pulls it further off the bend, and off the rails. It is a goods train. One wagon after another slides gratifyingly clear of the track. It comes close to turning over; teeters but does not fall.
The train makes a tremendous sound, hissing and screeching like some beast being brought to an agonising halt. It takes Tom a moment to realise that this noise is not followed by silence but that there is another sound – which, if he had been aware of it at all, he had presumed to be an undercurrent of the train’s derailment. In fact, it was separate, and indeed is now getting louder. Still he cannot identify the cause, until he receives a visual clue: a motorcycle appears on the road below them. Behind it come other vehicles: more motorcycles, then infantry-carrying trucks.
It is as if the enemy had known in advance of this sabotage. Or are they accompanying their trains now by road, so far as they are able? But while Tom is trying to make sense of events, a mine at the side of the road is blown up beside a truck. The tyres of other trucks are blown, causing them to veer and skid to ungainly stops: tyre-busters must have been spread. Did the saboteurs know of this convoy, then?
By this time the bullets of the Partisan machine guns are singing through the air. Everybody blazes away and there is a terrific racket, with the machine guns stuttering their killing clatter, and volleys of rifle fire, all of it greatly magnified by the echo from the steep rock on the other side of the valley.
The Germans try to reply, but their fire is so dispersed that they search in vain for any one spot to attack. Tom sees a Partisan boy creep down from the rocks and throw a Molotov bottle at a truck. It bursts into flames. The valley is full of smoke and the stench of burning oil. Another truck is afire, grey-uniformed soldiers leap from its floor where they had been taking shelter. Out in the open they fall like ninepins. But there are so many of them. The boy who threw the Molotov has been hit and lies in the road. It is clear from the growing impunity with which the Germans counter-attack that other Partisans are dead.
