‘You’d never be unnoticeable, Naomi.’ She was so pretty, but seemed to have no idea. She hadn’t noticed how the RAF sergeant had looked at her when he’d fastened the parachute straps around her, or how the men here seemed to blink when they saw her for the first time. Amber prayed Naomi’s looks wouldn’t draw attention to her at border crossings.
‘I’ll scrub off the lipstick if I’m in danger. I also have these.’ From a pocket of the rucksack she pulled out a pair of round spectacles.
When she put them on, Amber had to smile. ‘You look like a filing clerk. But won’t border guards and police wonder why you didn’t have your specs on in your identity photo?’
‘I’m taking two identities.’
‘Two?’ Additional identity cards were supposed to be hidden away, only taken out with them in extreme circumstances.
‘They won’t find the other one.’ She looked Amber in the eye.
The additional identity would be in a skirt lining or in the side of the rucksack, undetectable unless you knew where it was. Robert had shown them half a dozen places where they could hide dangerous documents. For a man who was casual enough to smuggle her into the villa, Robert was meticulous when it came to his work. Those who design your rucksacks and prepare your clothes know that they do so with me standing over them, asking them if they would send their own wife or daughter into enemy territory with the equipment they have provided.
‘I’ll find our contacts in Hungary and get a signal to Cairo as quickly as I can, so they can tell you that I’m all right.’ She spoke with a quiet confidence.
‘What will the others do?’ Amber asked.
‘Wait for instructions from Cairo. When his ankle’s better, Samuel can follow me over the border. The others will continue the objective of aiding Allied airmen, and identifying and clearing possible landing strips.’
‘So you’re off?’
Amber blinked at the sound of the voice at the cave entrance. Once again, Ana had appeared out of nowhere. ‘You think you can navigate in the dark?’ she said in English. ‘With bands of Chetniks still around?’
‘I have no choice. If you were listening in, you will know why.’
Ana nodded. ‘I would probably want to do the same thing in your position. But before I did, I would want to be absolutely sure I knew all the risks. You do not know as we do what some of the people, if you can call those animals people, out there are like.’
‘We were briefed,’ Amber said. ‘They told us about the Ustaše militia, they—’
Ana raised a hand. ‘Hearing about it and seeing it are two different things. We have seen the bodies of some of those they have tortured and killed. Your friend has not.’
A coldness filled Amber. She wanted to beg Naomi, plead with her not to go when they’d only just arrived among a group of strangers. The fleeting sense of this being just another camp in the hills was a mirage. It was a temporary Partisan base, housing many seriously wounded fighters, and surrounded by people who wished to kill them. She needed Naomi. But this wasn’t about her feelings, was it?
Ana shrugged. ‘As long as you know. I do not understand all the elements of your operation, but suspect there is another objective that is personal to you. That’s fine. This war is personal for me, too, at times. But I’m a Partisan. I work with my comrades. The collective objective always comes first.’ With a curt nod Ana was gone.
Naomi took off the spectacles. Her hand found Amber’s. ‘I wish I didn’t have to leave you so soon, but it was only ever going to be a short time together, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘I’d have left for Hungary soon anyway. But I’ll miss you, Amber.’ She grinned. ‘Back in the gym in Cairo, I never thought I’d say that.’
‘I was a brat at first.’
‘And I was a bit of a prig.’
‘Just a little, even if you were right. I’ll miss you, too. I hope you manage to do, well, what you want to do.’
Naomi’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’ve heard stories about what will happen to the Jews of Hungary if the Germans get hold of them. I cannot get these stories out of my head.’
Amber forced herself to take a breath, to try reason. ‘But you must be exhausted. Why not wait until morning?’
‘I’ll sleep when I’ve regained some of the mileage we lost this evening.’ She put a finger to her lips. ‘I’ve left a note for Samuel. He’ll find it in the morning. I don’t want to tell them or Branko this evening.’
‘Ana will tell Branko.’
‘Which is why I really do need to slip away now.’
‘Good luck.’ Amber said it flatly.
Naomi smiled as she swung her rucksack on to her back. ‘We’ve changed roles. You’re playing the sensible one now, Amber. You’ve become a real leader.’
‘Have I?’
‘Attacking those Chetniks at the bridge on the way here? That could have been a serious misjudgement, if you hadn’t stopped us. And you persuaded us to take a turn carrying the stretchers and made the Partisans trust us.’ She touched Amber’s hand briefly and straightened the beret on her head.
For a second they stood together in the dark cave. Then Naomi vanished into the darkness outside, silent as a cat. Amber sat on her outspread sleeping bag staring at the cave entrance as though she could still make out the girl’s slight outline. The cold feeling in the pit of her stomach didn’t leave her. Ridiculous to feel alone when Samuel, Daniel and the others were still in the camp. But they weren’t women. Strange, she’d never seen herself as a woman’s woman before, finding men the easier companions. School had often been miserable. But she and Naomi had found an understanding, a sympathy. A comradeship. Now it was gone.
You will feel isolated at times. It is natural. Find something to do. Amber set her shoulders. Make a start on writing out tomorrow’s wireless transmission. She found her notepad and pencil and began to compose the message, which would have to be précised and turned into Morse. Her head began to nod. Time to turn in. She stashed pad and pencil in her rucksack and went out to find water to wash in.
She must have slept almost immediately after climbing into the rucksack because it was light when raised voices woke her. Amber pulled her legs out of the sleeping bag, reached for her pistol and ran to the entrance. Branko stood, taking the Beretta from his holster, calling softly but decisively to his people. The Partisans, employed in everyday, almost domestic duties until a second ago, were suddenly warriors, on guard, alert. Amber cocked her own gun.
Intruders.
9
June 1947
I’d felt exposed as those intruders invaded the Partisan camp. I feel almost as vulnerable this morning, going for my next session with Dr Rosenstein.
There’s nothing about Dr Rosenstein’s appearance that should make me fearful: her brown hair that is never entirely contained by its bun, her long, slender fingers that surely must have played a violin or piano.
I’ve watched those hands as she’s swept files left and right across the desk, looking for a slip of paper. Jim, who seems to know everything about everyone here, told me Dr Rosenstein escaped from Berlin with her family in 1938. They don’t always tell you much about themselves, these psychiatrists, but she has photographs on her desk. Once, she told me about her daughter eating a banana for the first time. She looked a little guilty, as though she weren’t really supposed to confide in patients.
But I’m not like all the other patients, not like those ones behind the baize door. I don’t insist on eating my food from a bowl on the floor, or wear my dress back to front like that woman who saw her husband and children burn to death in an air raid.
She listens to me recount what I’ve written in my journal about how it felt to fly away from Robert and nods when I’ve finished. ‘There’s obviously much more we need to talk about where he’s concerned. But for now, tell me about your arrival in Croatia.’
I tell her about the anxious wait above the bridge while the Chetniks lingered below, about the prickl
y Partisan medic, Ana. I tell her about Naomi leaving: how lonely that made me feel. And I describe how I’d awoken on the first morning to find the camp in uproar because intruders had come in.
‘You’d been training for such an event, but it must have been daunting. However, you didn’t panic and start shooting before you ascertained what was going on, did you?’ she asks.
Of course not, I want to retort. ‘There was discipline on our side, and on the Partisans’.’ The previous evening I’d been worried about some of the men who’d come over with us, they’d wanted to rush into things, but they had followed Branko’s orders.
‘You felt, what? Afraid?’
‘There was no time for that. My response was automatic. We’d had so much training on how to respond that I barely had to think.’
‘You could control your fears?’
‘Yes.’
‘What we’re planning is for you to show us that we can trust you to leave this . . . institution and live a life that doesn’t pose a threat to any other person.’
She means living alongside people without trying to kill them.
‘I want you to show yourself and everyone else that you are a measured, reasoning person. That you aren’t suffering from some trauma that makes you dangerous to others.’
‘Do I have shell shock?’ The words burst out of me. I think of young men shaking, hands on ears, because they were in trenches for too long. I have never done that, but perhaps the trembling part of it is not universal. They used to give them tap-dancing lessons. At Woodlands, we play badminton. Jim is teaching me bridge, too. I suppose it helps.
Dr Rosenstein taps her fingers on the black notebook before she answers. ‘It’s not what I’m thinking, no. You saw awful things, of course, and they may have affected you afterwards. But you were chosen for the work and carefully vetted.’ Her gaze lifts from the notebook to me. ‘Are you all right, Maud?’
My attention has drifted. ‘I was just . . .’
She waits, pen in hand.
‘Sorry, my mind has slipped back to something that’s just started to puzzle me, something from the beginning.’ It’s so frustrating, I get so far in remembering my past and then something from earlier on will trip me up and demand that I examine it.
She looks at me encouragingly.
‘You said I’d been chosen. Some kind of distant memory has come to me.’
Dr Rosenstein observes me patiently.
‘I think they came out to the mine before the war started, just before my father was sent to Belgrade.’
‘Who do you mean by “they”?’
‘Robert Havers and a colleague.’ Something about me had caught their attention. My languages? I’d been packing up Dad’s mineral cabinet at the time, but I had probably been as quiet and precise in my movements as I’d been in everything I did as a child. ‘Two men came out to talk to Dad about security at the mine; I think I told you about them? I only met one of them. The other one didn’t come inside. I wonder if he was Robert.’
‘Impossible to know,’ Dr Rosenstein says.
‘The one who came into the house,’ I say. ‘Something about him . . .’ I shake my head. ‘My mother had baked some cakes and he was very keen on them.’ I remember him brushing the crumbs off his face.
‘You think this man is important to your story?’
‘I don’t know. It was such a long time ago.’ Centuries ago.
‘Keep working on it,’ Dr Rosenstein tells me. ‘Keep writing things down, Maud. You’re stimulating your memory in two ways: by talking and by writing. We’ll go on with your story in the next session.’
As I leave the office two of the servants are escorting a new guest upstairs. Nobody introduces you, so I can’t even greet him properly. When they reach the top of the stairs I turn right towards my bedroom, but the staff take the man by the arm and lead him through the baize door. These are not servants, I remind myself. They are nursing staff. This is a psychiatric hospital. An asylum. Bedlam. A madhouse. Just because it doesn’t seem that way in my section, it doesn’t diminish that fact. The other wing behind the door houses the lino-floored wards and seclusion units, where disturbed patients are placed in packs: cold, wet sheets, and then layers of blankets and tied down on the beds until they’re calm.
I have been packed myself. Not here at Woodlands, some time ago, before Dr Rosenstein started treating me. Jim and I agree it’s not the worst thing that can happen to us, almost like being a swaddled infant. I remember my Serbian nanny wrapping a cold wet bandage and then a warm cloth around my sore throat. The pain went. In a pack you can’t hurt yourself or anyone else. But if they don’t do it properly the circulation in your legs stops and it’s agony when they unwrap you and your blood flows into the extremities again. I’m reminded of being in the Halifax on the way to Yugoslavia: we were so cold, even in our flying suits and sleeping bags. I think, too, of a mummy I saw in a Cairo museum: embalmed and wrapped for placing in a tomb.
Instead of resting, as I ordinarily would after a session, I decide to crack on, to write down more of these reflections. I find my notebook and sit in my usual spot on the window seat to write.
We’d been well schooled on ranges, and in gun fights in mocked-up villages in remote parts of southern England. We knew how to defend ourselves. But it was still a shock when the two Chetniks burst in on the Partisan camp just after first light.
They dragged a prisoner with them: a German officer.
My first German. Amber stared at the prisoner like a silly schoolgirl. Branko approached the trio, revolver pointed at them. ‘What’s this about?’ His voice was low but angry.
‘You like German officers, and so we bring you one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You say we’re too soft on them. Now’s your chance to show us how we should treat prisoners. He’s for sale.’
Branko’s lip curled in contempt. ‘We don’t trade for prisoners.’
‘This isn’t just any German officer. He’s Intelligence.’
From the cave entrance Amber felt her skin prick.
‘We ambushed his car. Before he died, the driver said he was taking this man up through Slovenia and over into Austria.’
‘You didn’t kill the German, your marksmen need more practice.’ Branko was walking away.
‘Major Max Stimmer, German Military Intelligence HQ in Belgrade.’ The Chetnik paused, looking for a reaction. ‘He will know about Nazi plans to attack you.’
‘I’ll save you a bullet.’ Branko aimed the gun at the prisoner.
‘Big drop of supplies last night,’ the Chetnik said. ‘Our boys followed you from the drop zone. Give us what we ask for and then you can make him talk.’ The German prisoner must have understood some of the language because his eyes narrowed. The ponies moved on their tethers, some dropping their heads to graze at the thin grass.
Ana moved swiftly and silently to stand next to Amber. ‘We should shoot the three of them,’ she whispered.
‘No.’ The inspiration came to Amber. ‘Tell Branko we should take the officer.’
‘What?’
‘Cairo can interrogate him. Find out what the Germans are planning.’
Amber had lost Naomi. The drop zone had been moved south, making it harder for her to carry out her own mission of exflitrating Allies out of Yugoslavia. But the whole business could be turned around, made into even more of a success than they could ever have hoped for during their briefings at Rustum Buildings.
She could make Robert proud of her.
‘Keep the German,’ she told Ana. ‘When I make my transmission, I’ll confirm it all with Cairo.’
Branko lent her a pack pony to transport the wireless up the slope. Amber stopped to wipe her brow on her jacket sleeve and the pony took the opportunity to nibble at the meagre vegetation. She spotted a rock that could act as a transmission desk, then unloaded the wireless and laid out the code book and the message she had composed in the relative warmth of the cave. The pac
k pony lifted his head briefly to eye her apathetically before returning to cropping the sparse grass.
She opened her notebook, put on the headphones, turned the SEND-REC knob and switched on the current. Turning the tuner, she searched for the pre-agreed signal Robert’s team had given her, thinking of an unknown girl, probably her own age, hundreds of miles away, pencil in hand, waiting for the transmission. Strange for her, the formerly cold Maud, to feel such emotion at the thought of contact with this other girl. She swallowed. I chose you because I knew you could do this. Robert had told her this several times with that slow, almost mocking smile of his. I knew you could cope with the pressure, Amber. Generally wireless operators are kept away from operations, but we don’t have enough people in Yugoslavia at the moment, so you’ll have to carry out both functions.
If Naomi had still been here she’d have come up the hillside with Amber and helped her set up, stood guard as she transmitted. How far had Naomi got now? Was she hungry or cold? It was hard to think of her giving in to such weaknesses. Get on with the task. Input the password and remember to include the pre-agreed ‘mistake’: substituting a random letter for each eighth letter of the coded message. Make a mental note to burn the one-use-only code in the book when you’ve finished.
Amber looked over her shoulder. If someone came up behind her when she put on the headphones and absorbed herself in the transmission she might not hear them. She resisted a shiver and swept the dial a fraction to the right.
And there it was, the answering return signal. The girl at the other end knew it was her. Amber was no longer alone on the hillside, but part of a web of communication. She answered the personal security questions, the name of the terrier Mama had owned at Trpca and her own favourite brand of chocolate: CADBURY. When these answers were cleared, she tapped in the message she’d encoded. Clarity, accuracy and brevity. It was hard to explain the derailment of the mission and the arrival of Stimmer in this way. Was she being too cryptic? She tapped in the last characters, stating that she would tune in for any answer in an hour, took off the headphones and switched off the set. Not enough time to dismantle the aerial. Surely up here in this inhospitable terrain she’d be safe from mobile detection units triangulating her signal.
The Lines We Leave Behind Page 10