Under an Amber Sky

by Rose Alexander

The cover groaned slightly as she opened it and the translucent tissue that covered the first page wafted in the breeze. Sophie pulled it back to reveal a picture of a young man and woman, dressed in wedding clothes, with what were presumably their parents standing each side of them. The handwritten captions were in the Cyrillic script so she couldn’t make head nor tail of them. Recognizing her dilemma, Pavle stepped forward.

  ‘It’s my grandmother and grandfather on the day of their marriage,’ he explained. And here is my great-grandmother who Mira and Dragan lived with in Prcanj – she was Dragan’s mother. Dragan’s father died not long after this picture was taken.’

  Sophie stared closely at them, looking into their eyes, tracing their shapes with her fingertips, trying to imagine them as real people. The old, faded black and white pictures lacked the sharp focus of today, making the inhabitants seem transparent somehow, barely there, transient. But even so, she could still see the love shining out of Mira’s and Dragan’s eyes and the pride that was evident in the postures of their parents.

  ‘Why are the captions in Cyrillic when Mira wrote using the Latin alphabet?’ she asked. She had tried so hard to learn the Cyrillic letters, apart from anything else because in out-of-the-way places, you would more often than not find this alphabet used on signposts. So if you wanted to know which way to go, you had to know it. But the learning didn’t stick, slipping out of her mind as melting ice cubes fell through the fingers. It was so frustrating. Now she knew how her pupils had felt when they couldn’t grasp a concept, however simple it seemed to her, however hard she tried to hammer it home to them.

  ‘The Cyrillic alphabet was banned during the period of Italian control,’ explained Pavle. ‘I think using it in the album, something private, never seen outside of the house, was a silent protest. Of course, this picture you are looking at now was taken before the war, in 1937, their wedding day – but you’ll notice she uses Cyrillic throughout.’

  ‘She comes across as so sweet and gentle in the letters,’ mused Sophie. ‘But she was strong, wasn’t she? Nobody’s fool and not a pushover, either.’

  Pavle smiled ruefully. ‘She had to be, I guess,’ he replied.

  Sophie, already engrossed in the next page of photographs, neglected to enquire as to why it was that Mira had needed to be tough. The fuzzy pictures she and Ton were now looking at showed Mira and Dragan in various poses in a cobbled street of tightly packed, picturesque stone houses.

  ‘I believe they had a very short honeymoon – three days maybe – in Dubrovnik,’ said Pavle. ‘They must have paid someone to take the pictures because I’m sure they wouldn’t have had a camera themselves. They were not rich people.’

  They leafed on through the book – there were a few photos of family events such as a cousin’s wedding and an uncle’s birthday party. Pavle didn’t know who these people were, but simply read what was written in the captions. And then Sophie turned the page and there was a picture of a tiny baby, dressed in a white Christening robe, gazing angelically into the camera.

  ‘Ah!’ she cried out. ‘Is that you, Jelena?’

  She looked up and Jelena smiled and nodded.

  ‘Jelena’s baptism, the Thirty-first of December, 1943,’ read out Pavle. ‘And underneath, Mira has written a little verse.’ He coughed to clear his throat. ‘On a day in the month of gathering, a beautiful baby was born, her cries like a tinkling mountain spring, her eyes clear and bright as the dawn.’

  The tenderness of the lines, the heartfelt way in which they had clearly been written, took away any possibility of mawkishness or sentimentality.

  ‘What a gorgeous poem,’ murmured Sophie, imagining Mira penning it with so much love in her heart, just as she had written all the letters to her missing husband. ‘How lovely to have something so unique and special to remember your mother by – something that was just for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied Jelena, simply. ‘My mother, though practical because of necessity, was a dreamer, really. A thwarted poet, I always thought.’

  Sophie thought of the lines from the letters that had so touched her, and stayed in her mind with no effort at all when all her attempts at language learning failed.

  Wisps of mist float off the water, separating into delicate filigrees that part and reform into elaborate patterns in the air.

  The clouds drift by so slowly. In every one I see your face: your laughing eyes, the creases in your cheeks that deepen when you smile …

  Mira had written beautifully, no doubt about that.

  ‘Did your father encourage her in her writing?’ she asked, feeling sure that Dragan would have been nothing but supportive.

  ‘I’m sure he would have done,’ answered Jelena, her eyes focused somewhere out of the picture window, her voice quiet. ‘If he had known about it.’

  Chapter 28

  Sophie’s breath caught in her throat and her heart seemed to momentarily stop beating.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Her tone was low, her words forceful as if being hammered out of her with a desperate urgency.

  ‘You don’t know?’ Jelena sounded puzzled, and then she smiled a sad smile of recognition. ‘No, of course you don’t.’ She looked towards her son and he moved towards her, taking the seat next to her and putting his hand into hers, protectively.

  Jelena took a deep breath. Sophie could see tears welling in her eyes and was worried that she was getting too upset and that Pavle might call an end to the meeting at this crucial moment. But then Jelena started to speak.

  ‘He didn’t survive,’ she said blankly, a bleakness crossing across her face. ‘A failed escape attempt. We are short on details and all the information we have has come from other prisoners held on the island. It seems that he tried to swim to the shore.’

  Sophie remembered their visit to Mamula, the huge agaves with their overly thick, voluptuously ugly leaves that seemed as if they could grab you and suck you into the plant’s dark centre. The silence. The waves buffeting against the rocks, swirling into eddies between and among them. She recalled how, standing on the grassy plateau above the subterranean cells of the fortress, the shoreline had looked so alluringly close, so easy to reach. Who could have resisted the temptation of trying to escape? Someone like Dragan would never have sat and waited to die a slow death.

  ‘In the dead of night, he escaped his bonds and leapt into the sea, aiming for the mainland,’ continued Jelena, trancelike, as she recounted what she knew. ‘But the searchlights spotted him and the guards picked him up.’ She sighed and fingered the letters in her still-dainty hands. ‘He had no chance.’

  Sophie felt drops land on her trouser leg; she was crying. So it was the case that Mira’s marriage, the family life she had dreamt of, the future she had looked forward to, had all been irrevocably altered that day the Blackshirts came calling for her husband.

  ‘And … and what happened then?’ Her voice was faint. She wanted to know but didn’t want to know. Knew that she had to know.

  ‘He was shot. There was only one consequence of that kind of insurrection. A summary execution, in front of the other male prisoners. To serve as a deterrent, I suppose.’ Jelena’s eyes flickered around the room, as if to signify the incomprehensibility of what had occurred on Mamula island. ‘At least it was a quick end – although we think he was tortured beforehand. Many of those incarcerated were.’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’ Words seemed inadequate, otiose. What could sorry do?

  ‘He died on Mamula, within a few months of being taken there. We don’t know exactly when, the precise date.’ Jelena sighed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. ‘My mother wrote most of her letters to a dead man.’

  No one spoke for long minutes and the silence, quiet at first, soon became deafening.

  ‘Mamula was a terrible place; surviving there was a feat of endurance that we can only imagine today,’ Pavle broke in. Sophie was grateful; she couldn’t bear the horror that seemed to burgeon and thrive in the atmosph
ere when no one was speaking. It was better to know the truth than imagine it.

  ‘As I’m sure you know, the fortress was never meant to hold prisoners. There were no facilities, no sewers, no running water. Prisoners did their business in buckets and chucked it into the sea.’

  This was all as Darko had told her, information no less awful for already being known.

  ‘Many were shot for not saluting to the Duce,’ continued Pavle. ‘Instead of crying “Viva il Duce”, some rebellious souls shouted out “Death to Duce!” But the executioners didn’t have to waste too many bullets as starvation, helped by a bit of casual torture, was the primary cause of death. No one was spared. Food was so scarce that one inmate, a man, talks of boiling up his shoe leather to make gruel.’

  ‘I can’t believe all the things I hear about Mamula,’ whispered Sophie, her voice low with shock. ‘Or at least, I suppose what I mean is that I can’t understand why nobody knows about it. When I think of the Italians in the war, it’s the ouzo-sipping soldiers of the film Mediterraneo that come to mind – benign, indulgent, not really bothering to fight a war they don’t regard as their own.’

  ‘The Italians have indulged in some careful manipulation of their war record,’ interjected Ton, softly.

  Pavle shrugged and held tighter to his mother’s hand. ‘You are right,’ he agreed. He turned to a stack of scrapbooks beside the photo albums. ‘I’ve collected as much of the press coverage, then and now, as I can. Despite the terrible conditions and the lack of food, many people did survive Mamula. After the Italians capitulated in 1943, there was absolute chaos. No one knew what was going on. Some people from the mainland risked taking a boat over there. They returned with as many as they could fit on board but were too fearful to go back again. After that, the escapees organized the evacuation of the island themselves. They knew that they needed to get everyone out before the Germans arrived to take charge and locked the doors again.’

  Pavle paused. Jelena’s hands were tightly clasped around the box of letters on her lap as if she needed to hold on to something to stay stable.

  ‘The thing I don’t really understand,’ ventured Sophie cautiously, mulling the words over before saying them. She didn’t want to probe too deep and upset Jelena but she also didn’t want to leave Belgrade with unanswered questions. ‘There are only six letters in the box,’ she said, inclining her head towards it, ‘and that doesn’t seem very many. I imagine Mira would have written at least every week, if not more than that. So what happened to the rest of them, do you think?’

  Pavle shifted on his chair and glanced at his mother to make sure she was bearing up.

  ‘There were probably many more. The Skojevska tried to organize shipments of supplies – water, food, cigarettes. Letters.’

  Sophie nodded. Again, this was as Darko had informed her. She also recalled that he had said women and girls ran it. She hoped that she would be that brave, if the need arose.

  Pavle was still speaking. ‘But they rarely got through. It’s probably the case that these six were given to a certain person to deal with and then found when the occupation ended. The girls had items stashed in homes and offices throughout the town and beyond, distributing any one person’s mail into many different locations in an attempt to keep it out of sight of the soldiers and carabinieri. I guess much got lost, mislaid, thrown out. Just these six seem to have survived and been returned to Mira.’

  The sun had moved in the sky whilst they had been talking and its rays were now pouring directly through the picture window. It was suddenly very hot in the room. Sophie coughed and tried to wet her throat with saliva. She was desperately thirsty.

  ‘Could I possibly have some water?’ she asked, not wanting to interrupt the conversation, all the knowledge and information Pavle was imparting, but feeling rather faint. Jelena, too, looked overly warm, a slight slick of sweat on her forehead.

  ‘Of course!’ Pavle leapt to his feet and went first to the air-conditioning unit above the door, reaching up to switch it on. ‘The remote is lost and we’re waiting to get another one sent over,’ he explained. ‘Now – I will get water, and perhaps some tea?’

  ‘Let me help.’ Without waiting for an answer, Sophie followed him out of the room and back down the dark corridor to where the kitchen lay beside the front door. Checking her watch on the way, she saw that it was nearly 4 p.m. They had been there for two hours already.

  ‘Thank you so much for giving us such a lot of your time,’ she said, as she put the glasses that Pavle handed to her onto a tray. She was always amazed by how readily people gave of their time over here, how happy to help people were, for the most part expecting nothing in return.

  Pavle poured water into a teapot and replaced the lid. ‘It is no problem,’ he replied. ‘I’m happy to share my mother’s history with you. Plus she has nothing to remember her father by except those few photographs you saw and the stories my grandmother handed down to her. Now she has the letters and I know that means so much to her. So we should be thanking you for coming all this way to return them.’

  Sophie thought of the very first time she had seen the box, on the crowded, untidy bureau, the mother-of-pearl catching the sun as if it were crying out to be noticed. How fascinated she had been to open the box and discover its contents. Something about the box and the letters, although she’d known nothing of what they were, had led her to falling in love with the stone house and buying it.

  Though she had had her moments of doubt, the occasions when she had wondered what on earth she had done and whether she would survive her self-imposed exile in a little-known country far from home, she knew in her heart of hearts that she had made the right decision. Helped by her friends, old and new, she had begun to take the tentative steps that might free her from the shackles of grief that had disabled her for so long.

  Pavle took the tray in his giant hands and Sophie went in front of him, opening and closing the doors. In the sitting room, it was much cooler already and Pavle turned the air-conditioning down a bit before handing around the tea. There was so much more that Sophie wanted to ask Jelena but the tea-drinking moment seemed to preclude it and they made small talk for a few minutes, Ton asking about Pavle’s work and his family. He was an architect in a city-centre office in Belgrade. He had one daughter aged six and his wife was heavily pregnant with a second, a boy, due in the next few weeks.

  Jelena finished her tea and Sophie took her cup and replaced it on the tray. She smiled at the woman, so dignified, so elegant with her black hair that must surely be dyed but didn’t look it.

  ‘What happened to your mother, to Mira?’ she asked, trying to hide her desperate curiosity from her voice. ‘Did she marry again?’ She thought of Mira’s expressed wish in one of the letters that she would have lots of children. She didn’t like to ask if that had come about or not. Instead, she continued with, ‘How come she ended up here, in Belgrade? It must have been so different from her life in a sleepy fishing village on the shores of Kotor Bay.’

  Jelena emitted a short, ironic laugh. ‘Yes, certainly different. But that’s what war does, doesn’t it? It changes everything.’ She sighed. ‘Life was very difficult for my mother. She had little money and jobs were scarce in Montenegro. When the war ended, she set her sights on Belgrade as somewhere she might find work – and the rest is history, as they say.

  ‘She did marry again, but not until the 1960s and she was in her forties by then. She had no more children. The marriage wasn’t a happy one and she divorced ten years later. She never wanted to return to Kotor; the memories were too painful, she always said.’

  Sophie wiped the sides of her eyes with her fingers. Crying again. But who could not, at the thought of poor Mira, who’d had her heart set on a tribe of children, on a life filled with their laughter, and yet had lost her beloved husband so young. Because of war and grief and loss she had had to turn her back on her dreams, her country, and the bay that she loved so deeply.


  ‘Have you ever been to Montenegro, Jelena? To Prcanj?’ It suddenly struck Sophie that perhaps Jelena did not even know the beauty of the place her mother had written about so eloquently in her letters. If Mira had left very soon after the Second World War had ended, Jelena would still have been too young to remember much, if anything.

  Jelena smiled, a quiet, thoughtful smile. ‘Only once.’ She pulled out her tissue and dabbed at her eyes, though Sophie could see no tears falling. ‘That seems odd, doesn’t it? But – well, you know how it is. I had my work, my husband to care for, my sons to bring up. I was very busy. My mother wouldn’t accompany me and perhaps by the time I really understood how much I yearned to know about the place where I was born, it was the 1990s and a new war was raging. One would have been a fool to travel anywhere unnecessarily.

  ‘So, as I say, I have visited on one occasion only. My mother’s dying wish was for her ashes to be scattered in the sea around Mamula island and I did that, about ten years ago now. My husband and I went together – only a few years later he died of lung cancer, but thank goodness he was still alive then – and I remember that it was a blustery day, with the boat bouncing on the choppy waves. The boatman wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to pull up to the island’s landing stage, but I think he saw my desperation and managed it in the end. We looked around the fort but the presence of all the ghosts frightened me and I had to leave, quickly.’

  Tears were coursing down Sophie’s cheeks now, although Jelena remained remarkably dry-eyed, a mere gloss of moisture covering her dark irises. Ton, who up ’til now had remained still and wordless, reached out and took Sophie’s hand. She held it, grateful for its solidity, its cool warmth.

  ‘I went to the house in Prcanj but all the doors and windows were barred and shuttered and there was no one there. An old man with a long white beard who was fishing on the pier told me that the owner lived in Zagreb and only visited in the summer.’

  A smile of recognition spread over Sophie’s face at this. So her fisherman had been there, just as he always was, dispensing information and gossip and jokes as he did to her on a daily basis, although she couldn’t understand any of it.