‘No,’ Elena said. ‘For God’s sake, no. The very thought makes me feel sick.’
She was actually speaking for all of them, himself included, but he also knew that by the next day they would be ravenous, so he stored the food in the town hall.
Then they returned to the hut they had shared before. Their blankets were still there; they stripped off their wet clothes and all four of them huddled together for warmth and comfort, sinking almost immediately into a deep sleep composed as much of emotional as physical exhaustion.
When Tony awoke it was just past dawn; the others were still sleeping. His hunger – as well as his thirst, after all the brandy and wine he had consumed – had induced several dreams during the night. One had been an erotic dream, no doubt brought about by the naked woman on either side of him. In an earlier nightmare, he had kept opening doors only to have dead bodies tumbling out on him.
He eased himself out from the blankets. His clothes were still damp, so he left them and went outside. The rain had stopped, and it was a crisp and clear morning, with nothing but blue sky above. The air was almost clean now; nothing was escaping from the sealed-up tavern, although he dared not think what conditions might be like inside it.
There were so many things to think about.
He left the village and went to the stream to bathe. Inquisitive goats peered at him while uninquisitive hens clucked around him, searching the ground for food as a cock crowed in their midst. He found it amazing that, having witnessed so much human death over the past few weeks, and having contributed himself to the mortality rate in no small way, he could yet feel an extreme repugnance at the thought of having to kill any of these essentially harmless and innocent creatures. Yet here was an almost inexhaustible source of food.
He heard splashes, turned round, and found Elena behind him; she also had not bothered to dress. Now she put her arms round him for a long kiss while she rubbed her breasts against his chest.
‘Is it not wonderful to be alive, when . . .’ She gave a little shudder.
‘Snap.’
‘I wish to have sex.’
‘Now?’
‘You always say that. Did you say that when Sandrine came to you?’
‘As a matter of fact, I think I probably did.’
‘And then you fucked her anyway. Come.’ She held his hand and they crawled out of the water and lay on the bank. ‘This is necessary.’
‘I am sure it is.’ In fact, he was anxious for it too, coming as it did on top of his dream.
‘It is necessary,’ she said, ‘here and now and in the open air, to remind us, remind the world, remind the universe, that we have survived, and that we will survive. Now, now, now.’
He had hardly had the time to caress her, but yet they were both ready. It was, as she had said, necessary.
*
They were still gasping their climaxes when Sandrine joined them. She did not say a word, just got into the water and bathed herself, as usual paying special attention to her hair, which she rinsed again and again.
Elena sat up. ‘I suppose you want your turn.’
‘I am never going to have sex again,’ Sandrine said. ‘I could not bear the thought of it.’
Tony wondered whether she was referring to Pavelic or the dead bodies.
Elena snorted. ‘That I have heard before. I am starving. And I want something clean to wear.’
‘We’ll find you some clothes,’ Tony said. ‘Although you will probably have to wash them. As for food . . .’
‘Not that stuff you took from the tavern after we put the bodies in,’ she said.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll look in the other houses. There’ll be food.’
Ivkov appeared. ‘Why do we not kill a goat?’ he asked.
‘We might come to that,’ Tony agreed. ‘Once we have worked out how to do it.’
‘Before I became the bath-keeper,’ Ivkov said, ‘I was a butcher.’
‘Ivkov,’ Tony said, ‘you’re a man of hidden depths.’
‘I shall never eat meat again,’ Sandrine declared. ‘I could not.’
‘Wait till she has a goat chop put in front of her,’ Elena said.
*
Suddenly they all worked with a will. Tony supposed there were several reasons for this. It was just sinking in that they were alive, and that over the past three weeks they had survived just about everything the war had been able to throw at them.
They had established an intimacy he would never have imagined before, although he was still anxious to find them some clothes as rapidly as possible. Looking at the two extremely attractive female bodies was keeping Ivkov in a state of continuous arousal, and although this did not appear to embarrass either of the women, it bothered him; unlike Tony, Ivkov had not had access to any relief since they had got together.
Finding clothes turned out to be a relatively simple business; there were some in every house. Soon Elena and Sandrine were both dressed in skirts and blouses, and had tied their hair up in bandannas; as the boots they had been given by Mrs Dukic were still usable, they looked almost decent, even if they had not found any underwear which either fitted or they were willing to wear next to their skin.
Ivkov quickly found pants and a shirt and even a jacket to fit. Tony gave him the knife and let him go off in search of food. They had found a considerable amount of bread and goat’s cheese for breakfast, as well as several boxes of matches, and when Ivkov returned with a dead goat slung across his shoulders, they lit a fire and roasted the meat while the women went into the field to cut cabbages. They had an excellent lunch; the food was even washed down with some wine.
‘We could live here forever,’ Elena said.
‘If it wasn’t for that,’ Sandrine said, looking at the tavern even as she munched on a piece of goat. Her refusal to eat meat, as Elena had suggested, had been very temporary.
‘They are not troubling you,’ Elena pointed out.
Sandrine made a face.
After the meal, Tony let them spend the rest of the day lounging. He had no doubt they needed it, as they had been through a great deal. Moreover, he was the only one who had been the least trained for this kind of life. Besides, he needed to think.
It was very tempting to take Elena’s suggestion seriously. Because, apart from this village, their situation was absolutely desperate. As he had outlined to them the previous day, there was simply nowhere for them to go, no haven for which they could aim – at least as a group. Of the four of them, only Sandrine, being neither Serb nor Croat, Fascist nor Communist, and possessing a neutral nationality, was outside the immediate political situation. But she had managed to create quite a few enemies, and as a most attractive woman was perhaps the most vulnerable of them all.
But just staying put and hoping that the tide of war would pass them by was not really an option either. Someone, some time – and probably quite soon – was going to come to the village; it had not been cut off from the rest of the country. Were any visitors to be killed, to preserve their secrecy? That would have to depend on how many came at once, and whose side they were on. It was still a pretty devastating thought.
There was also the constant nagging reminder that he was a British officer, that his erstwhile comrades were fighting a war for survival against the Nazi threat, and that for him to sit on his backside doing nothing was at the very least a dereliction of duty. Against which was the reflection that anything he did try to do would necessarily put at risk the lives of Elena and Sandrine, who had become the two human beings he most valued in the world.
He wished he could be certain which one was the more important to him.
Besides, what could he do? Divitsar was miles from anywhere, and he had no transport – and limited arms. That was the most insidious reflection of all.
*
They very rapidly settled into a peaceful, relaxing routine, which consisted mainly of doing what they had done while living with the Communists; Elena and Sandrine did the house
work, the vegetable-gathering and the cooking, and Tony did the watch-keeping. He relieved Ivkov of this duty, as the bath-keeper was now the butcher as well as the handyman.
Even socially they adopted a pragmatic routine. The only fire Tony would permit them was in the town-hall kitchen, and this he would allow only at night, so that the smoke from the chimney would not be visible. They gathered here in the evenings, both for their meals and for company, although conversation was limited; they all had pasts that were too different to be easily acceptable to the others – and in more than one case, Tony suspected, contained secrets that were worth keeping – and they all had visions of the future which were equally individual and mutually unacceptable.
Elena had now fully accepted that she and Tony would marry, but she had no wish to try to fill in the details of when and where and how, and even less wish to consider where and how they might live. Her view of the future of Yugoslavia was equally vague. Tony had more than a suspicion that she supported the idea of an independent Croatia, even if this had to be achieved under the Fascist, Italian aegis. Yet she was wholeheartedly against the Nazis, and she certainly appeared totally to condemn the Ustase.
He came to the conclusion that her future – and by extension, his – might depend very much on whether any of her family had survived, or would survive . . . and what their situation and political outlook might be when the shooting stopped.
Emotionally she was a far more serious problem. He was sure she claimed her rights as his woman – which she did with great regularity – more because she needed constant reassurance that she was his woman than from any great sexual urge. The tragedy was that, however necessary he felt it was to do his duty, he no longer had any great sexual urge for her. He had fallen in love with Sandrine. And, as with every other aspect of his situation, there was damn all he could do about that either, for several reasons. One was that sense of duty. He was well aware that being betrothed to a woman in Yugoslavia was the same thing as being married to her, and even if the mould of conventional behaviour, whether British or Yugoslav, had been shattered by the War, he still felt it necessary not to let her down: as regards their relationship, she was blameless.
He also knew that to change partners now – were he that kind of man – would be to split their fragile unity, and leave him with a yet more insoluble problem.
And finally he was faced with the fact that he was quite uncertain of Sandrine’s feelings towards him. If he was sure she found him attractive, and, like the others, was relying entirely on him to get her out of this mess, that was a long way from the sort of love he wanted. And if she had come to him, so hungrily, on their first night in this very village, he still didn’t know whether that had been alcohol or just a hunger, for any man.
There was so much he didn’t know about Sandrine. She never spoke of her background. He estimated that she had been born and brought up in some French provincial town, her childhood as distorted as that of any other contemporary French child by the Great War – he reckoned she was about the same age as himself. If she had attended church regularly enough to have been seduced by a choirboy, he could presume that her upbringing had been both gentile and perhaps even bourgeois, judging by her care for her clothes and her appearance, her constant desire to be clean. No doubt she had attended college of some sort, graduated as a journalist, and got herself on the staff of Paris Temps. That, at the age of twenty-five or so, she had got herself posted to Belgrade as an editor, even if a junior one, indicated that she had both talent and ambition.
He could not fault her behaviour under the kind of stress she could never have expected to experience; even her somewhat over-feminine reactions to the various physical misfortunes she had been forced to undergo were attractive. But the woman herself was wrapped up in a shroud of mystery, which he doubted even Elena knew anything about. Were her parents still living? Did she have any siblings? And what of her abrupt changes of mood and intention? She had revealed enough – as in her reaction to her rape by Pavelic – to indicate that she could be quite ruthless, and yet not ruthless enough to kill . . . at least in cold blood.
Perhaps it was her mystery, apart from her looks, that made her so attractive. But it was that attractiveness, when combined with the easy sense of intimacy she allowed to the three of them, that was the big problem. Tony had an idea that all of them – Elena included – from time to time had the urge to sweep the Frenchwoman into their arms for a few moments of desperate passion. That they did not was because of the presence of the other two. He and Elena had each other when they needed to let off steam; Ivkov, large and slow and brooding, had no one. His passions were kept in check only by his anxiety to please Tony, a man he clearly both admired and feared.
All matters that required continuous consideration. But the Germans came first.
*
Tony was sitting up on the hilltop overlooking both the village and the slopes down to the valley when he heard the drone of the aircraft engine. It was mid-morning and he quickly sighted the machine, glinting in the sunlight and flying quite low. They had now been living in the village for some two months, and in all that time had neither seen nor heard any enemy activity. It seemed very unlikely that the plane was specifically looking for them after so much time, but even if it was on a routine patrol it represented a threat.
There was no time to get back down to the houses, but he had issued positive orders that in the event of the approach of any possibly hostile units, and in his absence, they were to conceal themselves immediately and allow no sign of life to be revealed. He had to believe that his orders were now being carried out.
He concealed himself behind a couple of boulders. The aircraft did not pass immediately overhead, and gave no indication of having seen him, and although it circled the village twice, it did so from its maintained height; had it seen any movement he would have expected it to sweep lower.
He remained where he was until the plane was out of sight, then returned down the slope to the village.
‘Did you see it?’ Elena asked.
‘Of course I saw it. The important thing is, did it see you?’
‘I don’t think so. The moment we heard it, we went inside.’
‘Hm.’ He inspected the village, and suddenly realised where they had made a potentially fatal mistake.
‘What is bothering you?’ Sandrine asked.
‘We must assume that Pavelic and his men returned to Belgrade, or some point of civilisation, and that Pavelic reported what he had done to some German command.’
‘Would he dare do that?’ Elena asked. ‘It was an act of genocide.’
‘In which he had been encouraged, if not directed, by the Germans. The point is, if he reported what had happened here – that the entire village had been wiped out and then left exactly as it was – that aircraft would have expected to find the corpses still lying on the street.’
Sandrine cast a glance at the still sealed tavern. ‘Those people will be nothing but bones by now.’
‘They are all still dressed.’
‘That plane did not come low enough to see,’ Elena argued.
‘They certainly would have had binoculars.’
‘So what are we going to do?’ Sandrine asked.
‘Sit tight, I suppose. And keep our fingers crossed.’
*
That evening Elena walked with him when he went a little way down the road. ‘Do you think that plane suspected something?’
‘As I said, we must hope not.’
‘But if they did . . .’
‘We may have to clear out in a hurry.’
‘And go where?’
‘I wish I knew.’
‘If we went to Zagreb . . .’
‘That’s Pavelic’s home town. And the headquarters of the Ustase.’
‘But if we could link up with my parents . . .’
‘Do you seriously suppose that your parents could protect us from the Ustase?’
She sighed. ‘I supp
ose not.’ Her head jerked. ‘What was that?’
‘That was a scream.’ He began running back up the road to the village. It had actually been less of a scream than a shriek of outrage and anger, and he knew it had come from Sandrine . . . just as he knew what had caused it.
With Elena at his heels, he pounded along the cobbles between the houses, and saw Sandrine running towards them. She was naked, her hair streaming behind her, and had clearly been having her evening bath. Now she ignored them, and instead ran into the house.
‘Shit!’ Tony muttered.
But the catastrophe had been waiting to happen.
They reached the door of the house as Sandrine re-emerged. She had not dressed, but was carrying her tommy-gun.
‘Sandrine!’ Tony tried to hold her arm, but she wriggled past him, his fingers slipping on her still wet skin.
‘Don’t try to stop me,’ she said. ‘I am going to shoot that bastard.’
‘Sandrine!’ Elena had caught them up and now she threw both arms round Sandrine’s waist. Sandrine tried to wriggle free, but Elena was the stronger woman by far.
Tony took the tommy-gun from Sandrine’s fingers. ‘What happened?’
‘What do you think happened?’ She spat the words at him. ‘That bastard—’
‘It’s your own fault,’ Elena said. ‘Wandering around naked.’
‘You bathe in front of him. He’s never tried it on you. Give me back my gun.’
‘Not until you simmer down,’ Tony said. ‘Did he, er . . .’
‘No, he did not,’ Sandrine said. ‘I kicked him in the balls.’
‘Ah.’ Tony looked up the street and saw Ivkov coming down. The bath-keeper was fully dressed. He waited until the big man was close to them, then he asked, ‘Why did you have to do that?’
Ivkov licked his lips. He looked apprehensive, but not repentant. ‘I need a woman,’ he said. ‘I have to have a woman. You have a woman, Captain, sir. Why can I not have a woman?’
‘He has a point,’ Elena muttered. ‘Ow!’
Partisan Page 18