Zadruga

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Xan is not Zorka’s first cousin,’ his mother had said practically. ‘His mother was neither a Karageorgevich nor a Vassilovich. She was a Greek. I think their falling in love is absolutely wonderful.’

  Later, Zorka had said to him, ‘Mummy wants me to have a splendid wedding to compensate for the fact that her wedding to Daddy was apparently pretty makeshift. It’s the last thing Xan and I want but I haven’t the heart to tell her so.’

  He turned left into Parkgate Road, keeping his pace leisurely out of consideration for Rosie. Whether the eventual wedding was sumptuous or simple one thing was certain. It wouldn’t take place in Belgrade.

  Not until he was fifteen had his father explained the reason why Natalie never accompanied them on visits to Yugoslavia. Only then had he realized the pain she must have suffered when his aunt had married Max Karageorgevich and his father had taken both himself and Zorka to the wedding in Belgrade. There had been other celebrations too, which she had been unable to attend. Alexander’s marriage to Princess Marie of Romania; her cousin Vitza’s marriage to a White Russian old enough to be her grandfather. He had been too young to remember King Peter but he remembered his mother’s tears when news came that he had died, and he remembered her telling him that the king’s body would be taken to Openlats in Shumadia, the traditional burial place for all direct descendants of Karageorge.

  He stepped into Battersea Park and let Rosie off her leash. Even now, nine years later, there were times when he could scarcely believe the story his father had told him. To him, Gavrilo Princip was a name from a history book. It seemed beyond belief that his still ravishingly pretty, warm-hearted, vibrant mother could have been one of Princip’s personal friends. It was even harder to believe that anyone could have thought her capable of being involved in the plot to kill Archduke Ferdinand.

  When King Alexander had been assassinated by Croat nationalists in Marseilles in 1934 his first reaction, when he had recovered from his outrage and shock, had been to wonder whether his mother’s long banishment from Yugoslavia might at last be at an end.

  Both he and his father had attended the funeral in Belgrade. Accompanied by their Karageorgevich relations they had walked with bare heads behind the bier. It had been an emotional experience. Alexander had been only forty-six years old and the manner of his death had been hideously violent. His cousin and closest friend, Prince Paul, led the mourners. King Carol of Romania and the Duke of Kent, representing King George V, walked beside him followed by a score of other statesmen and minor royals.

  Afterwards, Alexander’s body had been taken by train to Openlats and Prince Paul had been declared Regent for the duration of eleven-year-old Prince Peter’s minority.

  ‘Will Prince Paul allow Mummy to visit Belgrade?’ Stephen had asked his father while they had been seated at the dinner table with his grandparents and aunt and uncle.

  The tension around the table had been palpable and then his father had said quietly, ‘I hope so, Stephen. I’ve already asked for an interview with him so that I can request she be allowed to do so. Grandpa and Uncle Max are going to accompany me.’

  His grandmother had excused herself from the table and Stephen had fervently regretted asking his question in front of her for he knew she was going to her room to cry.

  All their hopes came to nothing. Prince Paul was deeply unhappy at becoming regent. He had never been a politician, never even been a soldier, and he was profoundly unsure of his ability to govern. In an effort to make no wrong decisions he chose to make as few decisions as possible and he adamantly declined to overrule any decision Alexander had ever taken.

  As Stephen made his way towards the boating lake, Rosie gallantly keeping pace with him, he marvelled at his mother’s lack of bitterness. Though she had been devastated with disappointment she had not uttered one word against Paul, just as she had never uttered a word of criticism against Alexander.

  He took a ball out of his pocket and threw it a short distance across the grass, hoping to lure Rosie into a little exercise. She wagged her tail and ignored it. Realizing he had been expecting too much of her he walked across and picked it up, still thinking of his mother.

  Ever since he could remember she had been the centre of his life and he had adored her, and still did. As a small boy he had been aware that his friends’mothers were all tediously elegant, tediously conventional and tediously dull. Natalie was never dull. She possessed a fizzing, magical quality that made the most mundane of activities seem full of fun. Zorka possessed the same bouncy effervescence. Whenever he had brought girl friends home, no matter how wonderful he had initially thought them, he had quickly realized that in comparison to his mother and sister they were grey and uninteresting and not special at all.

  He began to walk towards the north-west exit from the park. Although Zorka had inherited Natalie’s innate gaiety and reckless impulsiveness he was well aware that he had not done so. Like his father he was quiet in manner and though his hair was darker than his father’s, he was still unmistakably English. Zorka did not look at all English. Her hair was so glossily dark as to be almost black and she wore it shoulder-length, held away from her face by heavy tortoiseshell combs. It wasn’t only her colouring that was so startlingly different from their father’s. Her high cheekboned face was unmistakably Slav, as was her outgoing, animated temperament. Ever since she had been a teenager there had been a constant stream of admirers in her wake and he was sure the young man his mother had earlier referred to as being merely a work colleague would have preferred it if the description had been different.

  His assumption was confirmed that night when they all dined together at the Dorchester and he saw the expression in the young man’s eyes whenever he looked towards Zorka, which was often. Zorka was as obviously uninterested as he was interested and Stephen wondered whether it wouldn’t be a kindness to take the young man aside and have a few frank words with him.

  Just as he was making up his mind whether or not to do so the young man turned to Julian, saying in genuine puzzlement, ‘What I don’t understand, sir, is why Yugoslavs have always been so at odds with each other, with Croats at the throats of the Serbs and vice versa.’

  Natalie’s eyes flashed fire and before she could launch into a heated, subjective explanation Julian said, ‘To be able to understand the divisions that cleave Yugoslavs you have to understand a little of their history.’

  He laid down his knife and fork, raising his voice slightly so that it could be heard above the band music and the distant boom of the Hyde Park guns. ‘The problem goes back to the Middle Ages when the entire peninsula came under alien domination, the south and east being occupied by Moslem Turks, the north and west being occupied by Austrians and Hungarians. Slavs under Turkish rule looked culturally and spiritually towards Constantinople and were Eastern Orthodox in religion. Those under the Habsburgs looked westwards, towards Vienna, and like their rulers were fiercely Roman Catholic. This cultural, political and spiritual divide went very deep and it’s a divide more recent history has done nothing to resolve.’

  He leaned back in his chair, pushing his plate away from him. ‘The first Slavs to achieve freedom from alien rule were the Montenegrins and Serbs, but even when the peninsula was free of Turks, Habsburg rule in the north and west remained. The majority of Slavs under Habsburg rule wished to be free of it and they looked to Serbia to help her. When Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb who fiercely resented the Austrian misrule of Bosnia, assassinated the heir to the Habsburg throne and precipitated the First World War, Serbia fought with the Allies, her aim being to free her fellow Slavs and to create a united kingdom of all South Slavs.’

  He paused, looking towards Natalie. At the mention of Princip she had gone very still. Sitting next to her, Stephen instinctively covered her hand with his.

  ‘But when they finally achieved unity, they still scrapped and squabbled,’ Zorka’s friend pointed out, spearing a Brussels sprout with his fork. ‘Instead of living under a European de
mocracy, King Alexander ended up as a royal dictator.’

  ‘Think of the problems he had,’ Julian said dryly. ‘Serbs who had fought with the Allies were deeply resentful of being joined in union with Croats who had taken the side of Austria-Hungary. The Croats in their turn regarded the Serbs as being their cultural and spiritual inferiors and resented being ruled not from Zagreb, but from Belgrade, a city they viewed as being little more than an Oriental fortress. Given a choice they would have preferred to form their own separate state and if they had done so it wouldn’t have been a monarchy, but a republic. The western powers, however, felt that the end of the war had brought enough new states into being and refused to support the idea, leaving Croatia with a choice. Union with Italy, Roman Catholic like themselves but racially very different, or union with fellow Slavs of a different religion. They chose union but they didn’t do so whole-heartedly. The political unrest that followed made democratic rule impossible and it was only after a Croat politician was shot dead by a political opponent during a parliamentary debate that Alexander dissolved parliament and began to rule without it.’

  ‘And you think his decision was wise, sir?’

  ‘I think it was understandable. Unfortunately what it did, of course, was to drive opposition groups underground. One such group, a Croat nationalist group, re-christened themselves Ustasha, became openly terrorist and were responsible for King Alexander’s assassination.’

  Julian took another sip of his wine. ‘In March 1941 Nazi Germany presented the Yugoslav government with an ultimatum demanding the incorporation of the country in the Nazi New Order. It was a question of either complying or being annihilated and the Regent, Prince Paul, complied. As soon as news of the deal became public knowledge there was a huge outcry of protest. A coup d’état by the army deposed Paul, put eighteen-year-old Prince Peter on the throne and denounced the agreement with Germany.’

  ‘And the Germans attacked?’

  Julian nodded. ‘It was, as Prince Paul had known it would be, annihilation. King Peter and his government left for Cairo; the remnants of the army headed into the hills to form a national resistance movement, and Germany occupied and dismembered the country.’

  ‘And it was then that the Ustasha came into its own,’ Zorka said, the lovely triangle of her face very pale. ‘They were allowed to form an independent Fascist state and if the rumours coming out of Yugoslavia are true, they’re vying with the Germans in acts of actrocity against non-Croat Slavs.’

  ‘Add to that the differences in ideology between communists and monarchists, with the communists determined on bringing about a complete social revolution in the country, once the war is over, and you can see why unity in Yugoslavia is in such short supply,’ Julian concluded, bringing his potted history lesson to a close.

  Looking across at him, Stephen could see that he was regretting ever having embarked on it. The mood of light-hearted gaiety had been entirely dissipated. The expression in his mother’s eyes was abstracted and it was obvious that Zorka was thinking of Xan and wishing her present companion a million miles away.

  ‘Let’s dance,’ he said to her as the band began to play a quickstep. ‘It will be ages before we get the chance again and I want to put a suggestion to you.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said queryingly the instant they were out of hearing distance of her parents and her friend.

  ‘There’s just a chance, a very faint chance, that I might run across Xan some time in the next few months. If you want me to act as a mailman I’ll be happy to oblige.’

  Later, when they had returned home and he was in bed, reading, his mother knocked on his door as he had known she would.

  She was wearing a heavily flounced and totally impractical rose chiffon nightdress and negligée and her hair was loose, making her look years younger than forty-six.

  She sat down on the edge of his bed, saying as if he were still a small child, ‘You won’t let anything awful happen to you in Yugoslavia, will you, darling? Promise me you will be careful.’

  He took her hand comfortingly in his. ‘Nothing is going to happen to me. Only the good die young, remember?’

  She smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. They were still troubled and anxious. ‘It’s just that I know you won’t be able to keep in regular touch any more and it’s bad enough not knowing if Mama and Papa and Katerina and Max are safe, or where Peter and Xan are. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to you.’

  ‘Peter and Xan will be fighting with the Loyalists,’ he said reassuringly, wishing he could breach security and tell her he knew categorically that Peter was doing so.

  ‘If there’s any chance at all of you getting to Belgrade … of making contact with your grandparents or Aunt Katerina, you will do so, won’t you?’

  ‘You know I will,’ he said gently.

  She squeezed his hand tightly and then said, ‘There’s something else I would like you to do for me if you can. If you find yourself in Sarajevo, will you visit the cemetery for me? Gavrilo and Nedjelko and Trifko are all buried there and I would like you to put some flowers on their graves.’

  As she saw the rather startled expression on his face, she said defensively, ‘I know your father and Aunt Katerina don’t think they were true friends to me, but they’re wrong, Stephen. Gavrilo must have been questioned about being seen with me and he obviously denied doing so. In shielding me he must have suffered, for it’s common knowledge now that all three of them were tortured during questioning.’ Her voice had become unsteady. ‘So you do understand, don’t you, why I still regard them as friends, especially Gavrilo? And if you can, you will take flowers to their graves for me, won’t you?’

  He nodded, his throat tight.

  She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. ‘Always remember how much I love you and how proud I am of you,’ she said huskily. ‘Good night, darling. God bless.’

  When she had gone he had lain awake for a long time, doubting that any other British officer parachuting into Yugoslavia would be doing so entrusted with such an odd extra-curricular assignment. Then, fiercely looking forward to his reunion with Peter, he turned off his bedside light and tried to sleep.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Stephen had plenty to think about on the flight out to Cairo. For the past two years he had listened assiduously to every BBC news report concerning General Mihailovich, certain that Peter and Xan would be fighting with him. Now he was being asked to verify or disprove the rumour that much of the sabotage being carried out in Yugoslavia was not, in fact, being carried out by Mihailovich and his men but by the communists.

  If it were true, it would be a very hard pill to swallow. His mother’s loyalty to the monarchy was such that she would view British support of the Partisans as unforgivable treason and, out of respect for her feelings, he had no desire to be partly responsible for the British government deciding on such a course of action.

  The problem was, of course, that his mother could never be objective where her homeland was concerned. She had always been totally uncritical of King Alexander’s royal dictatorship seeing it not only as understandable, as his father had done, but as being also morally acceptable, which his father had most certainly not done. Where Prince Paul was concerned she had been equally blinkered.

  ‘Paul isn’t a leader,’ his father had said to him heavily after Alexander’s funeral. ‘He isn’t going to be able to command respect in the way Alexander commanded it. Things aren’t going to improve in Yugoslavia. They’re going to get worse.’

  They had. Though Paul valiantly struggled to bring about a reconciliation between Serbs and Croats, he failed miserably. His capitulation to the Germans, though made out of concern for his country’s welfare, finished him utterly in the eyes of his subjects. Even those who had been critical of King Alexander knew that he would never have done such a thing. And the thought of old King Peter capitulating to anyone without a fight was unimaginable.

  It was as if all real hopes of unity in Yugosl
avia had died with Alexander in Marseilles. Despite striving to do so, Paul had not advanced them and at eighteen and head of a government in exile, King Peter was too young and in no position to do so.

  ‘And even if he were, I doubt he has the ability,’ Stephen could remember his father saying to him after he had visited Peter when he first arrived with his ministers in London. ‘His head is full of cars and girls, not politics.’

  Peter’s immaturity certainly didn’t bode well for Yugoslavia’s future and as the plane droned eastwards Stephen wondered, not for the first time, if his mother’s homeland wouldn’t be better off as a republic.

  His briefing in Cairo did nothing to reassure him. ‘It all boils down to one thing,’ his superior officer said brutally. ‘Who is killing most Germans? If it’s Tito and his Partisans then we’re going to have to overlook their political persuasion and give them whatever logistical and air support they need. Your task is to evaluate Mihailovich’s effectiveness. You’ll be going in alone, not as part of a three-man team as was first planned. We don’t want your credentials marred by your having companions Mihailovich might not trust. You can operate a wireless transmitter, can’t you?’

  Five days later, accompanied by portable wireless transmitting and receiving sets, batteries and charging engines as well as a dizzying array of equipment ranging from explosives to louse powder, he left Cairo by train for the SOE airfield at Derna, Tunisia.

  The train was slow and once again he had plenty of time for thought. This time he didn’t reflect on the murderous complexities of Yugoslav politics, but on the very special nature of his relationship with Peter.

  Nice, 1919; though he had only been three and a half years old he could remember it clearly. The excitement his mother’s excitement had engendered in him, even though he didn’t fully understand the reasons for it. His wonderful, miraculous first glimpse of the sea and then, after he had been petted and fussed by his aunt and grandmother, his meeting with Peter.