by Tim Pears
The group descend, towards Mislinje. Tom thinks he sees black squirrels. Weren’t they? They are gone. Was he dreaming? They were black as moles. The pace is too fast for conversation; he cannot ask Marija, ahead of him. It is clever, he considers, to have women in the odred: they keep up the pace, though it must be more difficult for them; and so the men keep up too, out of pride. But how extraordinary, really, to have been a wealthy and glamorous, upper-class Jewish intellectual, passing her time between Ljubljana and Belgrade, and now be thrust into this vagabond life.
The day is hot. They walk among trees, passing through little swarms of midges and gnats that stick to their perspiring skin. The earth, too, is sweating: odours rise from the soil and from the plants of the soil, aromas commingling into so pungent a smell that Tom imagines the forests they walk in as the armpits of the world.
As they cross high meadows the air carries the sound of cowbells. And then Tom is aware of unpleasant sensations on his neck, his arm. Something is biting him.
‘Horseflies, sir,’ Sid Dixon declares, with a rare vehemence. ‘Can’t stand the little bastards.’
There is the smell of new-mown grass. They see ahead of them an old man cutting hay. He does not pause in his rhythmic labours when they approach. It is easy to imagine, as they pass, that he is less reaping fodder for his animals than releasing this smell, this essence of grass, into the atmosphere, for the benefit of the passing Partisans.
What minute grains of dust bear the aroma? Tom wonders. How full is the atmosphere of unseen grains of soil, specks of mud, the landscape airborne; of invisible pollen and spores, nature’s life-bearing seeds seeking wombs for their growth? We breathe them in, all the time, he realises. They are part of what we are. We are made by the land we are living in, and are surely altered by it.
They cross the high meadows of an alpine landscape in the evening – white isolated houses with orange tiled roofs – and then drop through the trees. When they come out of the forest they can see the lights of the town, Mislinje, and the courier is very apologetic. He tells Jovan they are going to reach the sixth unit later than he had thought. Perhaps not before midnight.
‘Then we must walk faster,’ Jovan tells him.
They press on into the night. When they meet the sixth unit there is little time to prepare the pasture where the drop is due to land. Jovan tells the commander – who has thirty men at his disposal – that, of course, it would be best to explain what is needed and to leave him to organise it, but there is no time. Jovan orders all the unit members to gather, with his odred, and takes total command, designating who will build fires, and so on. The sky is clear. The sound of engines are heard, the fires are lit, the plane drops its load. Jovan watches from a distance. The unit commander tells him he should go. The enemy are too close. He and his men know these hills, every hidden fold, every deep copse.
Before they leave, Sid cuts himself a section of parachute. Tom asks him why.
‘Rather not say, sir,’ Dixon answers. ‘May not work at all, see.’
Tom does not push it. ‘You’re a riddle wrapped in a mystery, Dixon,’ is all he says.
The Seventh Unit
July 18
AS TOM LIES in his sleeping bag, he hears a sound in the woods, an unearthly high-pitched cry. It is different from those he has heard before. He thinks it must be an owl but it is unlike any owl he has heard in England. It comes again: an almost human shriek, both anxious and threatening. It takes him a while to fall asleep.
When they wake, there is nothing to eat except for a few berries. You have to consume so many to get any goodness. Marko finds some grey mushrooms, which he gobbles up raw, but no one else is quite hungry enough to trust Marko’s assurance that they are perfectly safe to eat.
Tom believed he possessed control of his appetites, and desires. He is undone by hunger after another hard day and night march. He feels weak, and has lost interest in the day ahead. The body craves fodder, like a beast.
But they gather their equipment together, shoulder their rucksacks and weapons, and move on.
‘Guess we’ve got to go, sir,’ Sid Dixon says, cajoling himself or encouraging his officer, and the others, into action. Stipe shoulders the LMG, Nikola the wireless, Franjo lifting the pack onto his son’s back. Tom takes a deep breath, and sets off. And that is the thing: you come to the limit of your inner resources, you reach the end of your tether – drained, wretched, spent. And then you carry on. Each time. And gradually you get used to this recurring condition, it becomes familiar. You have nothing left, but there you are – you watch yourself, surprised – putting one foot in front of the other. You refuse to throw up the sponge; you carry on, all of you. Not one of you would quit, now, you’d be failing not only yourself but your comrades, your companions, and that would be unthinkable. He is one of a band of soldiers whose commitment to each other is total.
When they rest, rather than try to take their minds off the sorry lack of food, Jovan does the opposite.
‘My grandfather, my mother’s father, the head of a large Serb household in Herzegovina, liked to eat alone in the evening,’ he tells them. ‘His wife, my grandmother, served him, scurrying to and fro between the kitchen and his room. First she brought a little bottle of plum brandy, seventy per cent proof, as an aperitif. Then she would bring meze: a few slices of pršuta ham, kacˇkavalj – strong white cheese – and some pickled gherkins.’
Tom is surely not alone, he thinks, looking round, in salivating at the prospect of these delicacies; his stomach grumbles and aches.
‘Then the main dish, bosanski lonac, made by his wife herself because it was too important to leave to the cook. Three different types of meat: fat spring lamb, rich pork and tender beef, cooked for eighteen hours with onions, parsnips, leeks, carrots.’ Jovan recites this list of vegetables with slow relish. ‘Red peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, garlic, celery and peppercorns. My grandfather ate this dish with a warm pogacˇa, our rich home-made bread.’
As Jovan continues his description of this Bosnian meal, Tom notices that the pangs of hunger it has exacerbated are abating – as if perversely soothed by the memory, or imagination, of food.
After Jovan has finished, Marko asks him, ‘You know why the Turks eat their meat before their soup?’ He nods, as if giving himself approval to tell the story. ‘When they were besieging Vienna they started to eat their dinner one night. They were just finishing their soup when the Poles came up from behind and bit them on their arses. The Turks fled, leaving the meat behind. That is why, ever since, Turks eat their meat first, just to be on the safe side.’
This anecdote brings much appreciative laughter from Marko’s comrades. Marija tells Tom that despite the fact that their country has once again been annexed, it is hard for the Slovenes to shake off hundreds of years of antipathy to the Ottoman empire – or of deference to German-speaking powers to the north.
‘The Germans regard the northern half of Slovenia as an integral part of their new Reich,’ she says. ‘All place names and family names have been Germanicised. Over the last two years Germans have been brought in to staff local government offices and to teach in the schools. Ninety per cent of the intellectual and professional classes have been sent to prison or labour camps.’
‘Farms have been left uncultivated,’ Stipe joins in. ‘The German government has promised these to veterans of the Wehrmacht when the war is over.’
‘I heard,’ Jovan says, ‘that when the Italian blackshirt battalions entered Ljubljana they were met with total hostility.’
‘But it is true,’ Stipe admits, ‘that a few politicians, frightened old men, offered their services to Mussolini.’
‘Politicians!’ Marko exclaims, and spits onto the pine needles on the forest floor. He is damned if he wants anyone to rule his country except the rascals and fools who have a native right to do so. ‘What do you expect?’
‘Did you know, English friends,’ Pero says, pausing and translating his own words for Dixon, kee
n that Sid be included, ‘that on the birthday of our great poet Prešeren, word was passed round Ljubljana that everybody was to stay indoors? And sure enough, in the whole of our capital city, not a single Slovene stepped out of his house. And the Italians had no idea why. They thought a great plague had descended.’
They pass through an area where blood-sucking parasites, clinging to leaves and branches, attach themselves to bodies that brush against them. Now, like mothers with their children they check each other for ticks, then exchange roles, as always in the same pairs: the two women; the two officers, Tom and Jovan; father and son; Pero and Sid Dixon; Marko and Stipe.
Tom and Jovan sit a little way away from the nearest pair. Jovan takes off his shirt. He is leaner than he should be: there is a slight looseness to his skin, over wasted muscles. The privations of guerrilla warfare. Tom guesses that before the war Jovan must have been a couple of stones heavier. And it is strange how people’s body odour ceases to be objectionable. Or is it only Jovan’s? People smell simply as human animals. Each one is different. Jovan’s odour is tinged with sweetness.
There are half a dozen of the insects attached to Jovan’s torso, their bulbous little bodies filled with his blood. As he attends to them, Tom hears himself say, ‘Tell me, Jovan. I understand that sex is banned. I understand why, in an army, at war. But can love be prohibited?’
‘It must be ignored,’ Jovan says. ‘There will be time enough for that after the war.’
‘Do you love Marija?’ Tom asks.
Jovan pulls away. He reddens, his eyes flare. With hostility, Tom thinks, as much as embarrassment, and he regrets again speaking so openly of such things. He had no permission to. It is the liberating effect of speaking in another tongue; he would not be so indiscreet in English.
Jovan smiles, a wry and bitter smile, eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, Englishman,’ he says. ‘Can’t you see, Tom, you’re the one she has feelings for?’
Tom takes a sharp breath, as if Jovan’s words had administered a slap to the back of his neck. It is a shock. Yet not at all.
‘There are more,’ Tom says, and pulls Jovan gently back towards him. They continue the job in silence. They cannot pluck the ticks out for that would leave the insects’ jaws buried in the skin: they have to unscrew them, slowly, then gently pull them free. This Tom does, and then he squeezes them, gleefully, and watches the hideous creatures perish in tiny eruptions of his companion’s blood.
July 19
THEY WALK THROUGH the night, at a steady pace. A nail in Tom’s boot begins to bother him soon after they set off, but there is no question of stopping to deal with it. He can feel the blister form. He tries to ignore it, and does so for minutes at a time, but the pain keeps reasserting itself. It becomes the hot centre of his consciousness. How paltry one’s will! No wonder spiritual disciplines demand mastery over the discomforts of the body: the monk kneeling on a stone floor; the yogi walking over hot coals.
He is diverted by a sound that chills him to his bones: a dog barking, not far from them in the woods. A night patrol? Does it have their scent? They have all stopped, and stand rigidly still in the darkness. There is movement behind. Tom turns, sees Marko making his way up the line, having a word with each in turn. He speaks to Francika, then comes to Tom. ‘Fox,’ he says. ‘A lonely male. Telling the vixens he is here, if they want him.’
They resume, and within moments Tom’s foot once more has his attention. How pathetic he is, he considers, unable to rise above this trivial concern, his entire existence no longer a part of this great enterprise but reduced to a tiny blister on the little toe of his left foot.
Or maybe both the pain and the reproof are ways to avoid Marija? When, at dawn, they camp, Tom keeps his distance from her. He watches her when he can do so unobserved. What a strange creature she is. Does she not reciprocate Jovan’s feelings? Is Jovan right, that it is he, Tom, she prefers? How is that possible?
Jovan tells them they will spend the day here, and meet their next courier in the evening, a mile away. Sid Dixon is delighted at this news. ‘Sir,’ he tells Tom, ‘I think this place will do.’ Without further explanation he lies down and goes to sleep.
Tom wraps himself in his blanket. He looks across and sees Marija is looking in his direction. She smiles, a private communication between them, an intimate signal. He reciprocates as best he can, then closes his eyes. It seems there is a current between them now, something that for her is understood.
They wake, one after another, in the late morning, and in silence rise and walk towards the edge of the forest, fifty yards away, drawn out of the gloom of the trees to the light. It is as if a signal has alerted them though none has been given: they move like somnambulists or shades impelled by they know not what. They stop and look beyond the shadows. Out in the meadow Sid Dixon is dancing, barechested, darting about in the long grass, pouncing among the flowers, swooping upon some unseen prey. It could, Tom thinks, be a theatrical performance of a kind he’s seen given by young women in student productions, of the Bacchae by Euripides, the Antigone of Sophocles. But this is a tough young English corporal, a long way from home, in hostile country, who is not acting but really has gone insane. What on earth is Tom to do with him?
Dixon brings his private performance to an end, and comes towards the forest. The skin of his torso is pale and muscular. Halfway there he pauses, and peers into the trees. Presumably he can just begin to make them out now, though they each stand embarrassed, motionless as tree trunks.
Dixon has removed his shirt, and this, Tom sees, he holds in his left hand. He’s tied the cuffs and the bottom of the shirt, the buttons are done up, he clenches the collar tight. There is something inside, that is clear from its shape, something light and formless. Twigs, perhaps. Dixon enters the forest with the shirt held up like a trophy, and grins. The Yugoslavs turn, and walk back to the encampment, leaving Tom to deal with his eccentric compatriot.
The shirt, Tom sees as Sid comes closer, holds something alive: the twigs prod and poke against the material, they are confined against their will.
Dixon raises the shirt once more. ‘Grasshoppers,’ he says. ‘Way I figures it is this, sir: the stream comes down from the mountains, then meanders through the meadow. Plenty of grasshoppers will a tried to jump it and fallen short, ended up a nice meal for many a trout. Trout used to ’em, see? Make a fine bait.’
‘Bait?’ Tom asks stupidly.
‘Oh, got worms as well, sir, don’t you worry. Dug ’em up earlier.’
The two men walk back to the bivouac. ‘Found some canes yonder, reeds I should say more likely, should do us for rods.’
‘Rods?’ Tom says.
Dixon looks at him askance. ‘I’m hoping you’ll come with me, sir. You have done a bit of angling, have you?’
No, Tom Freedman has never fished before, beyond a spot of shrimping on seaside holidays, with a bucket and net. He watches what Sid does and copies him as best he can.
By the time they’ve tied the silk lines to the rods, and baited the bent pine that serves for hooks, the sun is high and the sky blue and cloudless. They begin in the meadow, where clear water runs over smooth stones and clean gravel. The men stand by the stream, looming hulks any fish there shrink away from, under the banks, into the shadows. They catch nothing. Stipe wanders over, observes their prowess. Marija watches them. Under their eyes Tom perceives the absurdity of such futile patience.
He and Dixon manoeuvre downstream, less by design than repetitive admissions of failure. Changes of mind. No, not here, after all. Perhaps there.
Towards noon they quit the meadow, as it gives way to undergrowth on the banks, and trees, too, birches and oaks. Here the air is soft and tinged with the smell of wet earth and standing water, breathed up from the river edge. The river is murkier, there is mud at the banks, and moss on shapeless stones. Like a dreary pungent stretch of England transplanted.
Tom comes to a bend, which makes a kind of pool. He sticks a worm on the hook, unwinds the silk
off the wooden peg Dixon has fashioned for a bobbin, and drops the hook into the water. It settles slowly out of sight. There is a ripple on the surface. Tom feels a pull on the line. He strikes, and then there is a tug.
With no reel, but a makeshift rod barely longer than his own height, and the same again of line, Tom can play only the most facile of games with the fish. Yet it is small, and tired, and comes to him, and he sees its shape rising to the surface, and all the speckles of its coat. He shelves it out with his left hand. A pound, he reckons, perhaps a little more.
It is the first trout of many. He and Dixon, a little way ahead of him, move downstream, and they hang the fish that they catch on twigs and branches of the trees.
In a while the stream comes out of the trees, the smell of earth dissipates, Tom finds himself back in the open. The water, brown and clear as ale, babbles shallow over pebbles. Tom crunches across the gravel-bed to a little island above a deep, round pool that is stirred by a circular eddy which swings bubbles and streaks of spume into narrowing whorls, so that the pool might be polished ammonite come to liquid life.
A breeze comes up from the valley below and the day clouds over. Suddenly it is ideal: grey, with a little purl upon the water. Here is a fine spot. Tom gazes into the pool. The clear water, the turning currents, the dappled light, make for a captivating image. He sees a big trout nose out from under a ledge. So, Tom thinks: the pool belongs to this old fellow. A cannibal trout who’ll eat other fish to keep his pool cleaned out. Tom’s father, he recalls, told him of seeing a squirrel that had fallen in a river being carried downstream; flailing vainly to reach the bank. Brought into a pool like this, it was dragged under by the resident. A grinning pike. One of his father’s stories. Was it true?
This big old trout studies the worm on Tom’s hook a while, then he backs under the ledge like a submarine reversing into dock.
