The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  ‘Those boys.’ He picks it up carefully.

  ‘I wish they’d leave us alone. They . . .’ I’d been going to say they frightened me. It’s because I’ve been writing up the scene with the Ustaše officers and have violent males on my mind.

  ‘You’re safe, Maud, they can’t get in.’ Ingrams puts down the bottle and erects the stepladder for me. ‘Look at your doves. They’ll make you feel better.’

  He’s right. The same pairs are inside. Their gentle sounds make the back of my neck feel less tense.

  ‘I’m worried about that buzzard,’ I say to Ingrams when I’m down again.

  ‘I’ve never known him take a bird from here,’ Ingrams says. ‘Sometimes when I’m cycling here I see him gliding above me on an air current.’

  ‘He’s elegant, I’ll give him that.’

  ‘It’s hard to tell who’s an enemy and who’s not in nature.’ Ingrams stoops to pull up chickweed from the edge of a flowerbed. ‘I like these little white flowers, but they’re weeds, really.’

  There’s a sadness to his face when he says it. Jim has finished helping with the trellis and is standing on the terrace with his tennis balls. I see him juggle the four balls with confidence.

  When I’m settled in my room, Ingrams appears with tea and a piece of toast for me. ‘Don’t write any more,’ he says. ‘Read some more of those history books.’

  I try to read about the Civil War. The books normally grab my attention with their historical detail, some of it local to Woodlands. But I still keep seeing different scenes, a remote road in a country a long way from here. A car that’s been attacked, uniformed men slumped over. Me in the back. Shots. A woman’s voice.

  I close my eyes and let the images fill my head.

  Ana. It was Ana who’d come to my rescue.

  Ana aimed her pistol at Stimmer’s temple.

  ‘Wait,’ Amber called to her.

  ‘For what? More trouble?’

  ‘These two also knew about your friend, the one who’s heading towards Slovenia. Their police must have told them,’ Stimmer said in rapid Serbo-Croat, his voice low.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Amber asked. ‘Give me back my pistol and tell me what you’re talking about.’

  Slowly he removed the gun from his jacket and handed it to her. ‘Look in the front footwell.’ He attempted to sit up straighter. Ana waved her gun at him.

  Amber saw Naomi’s beret.

  ‘And the map there.’ He nodded at the space between the two front seats. Amber pulled it out: Naomi’s. A cross was marked on a village in a valley about sixteen kilometres to the north. ‘The cross probably marks the spot where they found the beret,’ Stimmer continued. He’d picked up these details so quickly as they’d driven down the track. Well, he was Intelligence, after all. ‘We can assume they know a woman – a stranger – is heading north. Probably alone. She lost her beret and her map, so perhaps she ran into trouble.’

  Amber shivered.

  ‘They know she must have come from a base with more people. The police have sent word north to their colleagues to capture her and they came looking for the rest of you in this valley.’

  Ana had been listening intently. ‘Guesswork,’ she said. ‘Why were there only two of them?’

  Stimmer shrugged. ‘Local militiamen who happened to be there when the call came through. Thought they’d have a sniff around and telephone any information to the base from the nearest police station.’ His voice was becoming more confident as he pieced it together. ‘Their colleagues will pick up your friend before she reaches Slovenia. And if she does cross the border, I can assure you that the Ustaše have Slovene associates who’ll act on their intelligence in an equally unpleasant way.’

  ‘That’s no concern of yours.’ Ana aimed her gun at him.

  ‘Wait.’ Amber put out a hand.

  ‘He has caused us enough trouble.’

  ‘I can help you.’ Stimmer sounded quietly confident.

  Ana let out a harsh laugh.

  ‘I spent some of my childhood in Slovenia,’ he said. ‘I know the routes across the border. And I know many of the German authorities in Slovenia. I can probably get your friend safely over the border into Hungary.’

  ‘Why the hell would you do that?’ Ana asked.

  ‘The Allies are slowly pushing north in Italy. Tito is winning in Yugoslavia.’ He looked at them in a more calculating way.

  ‘Your side will put a bullet into you for desertion and aiding the enemy,’ Ana said.

  ‘Not if you fly me out to Egypt for questioning, as was the original plan, I gather.’

  Ana cocked her gun at him again, glancing sideways at Amber without turning her head. ‘We’ve wasted too much time on him. Our unit is moving out. We should be with them.’

  ‘Naomi—’

  ‘Is just one individual.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Our cause is bigger than a single person.’

  ‘You agreed you’d help us in all aspects of our work in return for drops of medicine and guns.’

  ‘Many of which we had to give away to the Chetniks. Because of you.’

  ‘There’ll be more drops, Ana. But only if you help me find Naomi.’ Amber faced the older woman, a head shorter than she was, with eyes that seemed to have been forged in the fieriest depths of a volcano. Ana’s mouth tightened. ‘Come with me,’ Amber said. How strange that the former Maud, the girl who’d never understood female friendships, was once again yearning for the presence of another woman. But reason, not emotion, should be the basis of this argument. She made an effort not to let the longing manifest itself in her voice. ‘It’s in your interest to help me track her down quickly.’

  Ana emitted a long, low sigh and looked down at the ground for a moment. She whistled. A boy hopped out from behind a rock. He must have observed the ambush. Of course, she wouldn’t have come here alone. Ana said something rapidly and quietly to him. He ran off in the direction of the summit. She nodded at the car, with its bullet-shattered windscreen. ‘We can drive until the petrol runs out. By then the local HQ will be missing these two. We need to put their bodies in the boot.’ She waved her gun at Stimmer. ‘That’s for you to do.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Again the women held eye contact.

  ‘You are in our debt,’ Ana said. ‘Once more. I hope I will not need to remind you of that, Amber, when the time comes for you to repay me for abandoning my unit to go with you.’

  The older woman would probably pursue her through hell itself to force her to honour the obligation. ‘I won’t forget.’

  Ana screwed up her eyes and examined her almost forensically. ‘The back of your jacket is covered in dirt and you have bruised lips.’ She turned so that Stimmer couldn’t hear. ‘Did they try something?’

  Amber nodded. The older woman’s expression lost some of its harshness. ‘Do you need me to examine you?’ It was easy to forget that Ana was a medic, that she had been trained to heal. And yet her black-mittened fingers on Amber’s forearm were slender and looked as though they would search gently for any injury. The nails were cut short, remarkably clean.

  Amber shook her head. ‘It was . . . brief. Just one, briefly . . . He stopped them.’ She nodded at Stimmer. Ana followed her gaze, still frowning. ‘If I had some water and a cloth, I could . . .’

  Ana nodded. With her knife she ripped off the front of the senior officer’s shirt. She sniffed it. ‘Clean on this morning.’ She handed the torn material and her water bottle to Amber and pointed at an outcrop. ‘Don’t take long. Someone may come looking for those two.’

  Behind the limestone rock Amber squatted and pulled down her lower clothes, washing away the blood, hoping the bruises would come out quickly and not affect her ability to do her work. At least she probably didn’t have to fear pregnancy. But there was still the chance of disease. An ability to push unwanted and unnecessary thoughts out of your mind will be of immense help.

  ‘I had to forget about it,’ I tell Dr Rosenstein. ‘Abo
ut what the Ustaše did to me.’

  I am telling her what I wrote down. There’s a lot to catch up on; my pen flew across the pages of the pad.

  ‘I couldn’t brood on it. We had to go on, we had to find Naomi. I thought . . .’ That if she had also been captured, what had almost happened to me would have been inflicted on her, and she would have nobody to defend her. ‘Nothing had happened as it was supposed to, but there was still a chance to make things right, to save Naomi, guide her . . . where she needed to go safely and return to the group. And my wireless.’

  ‘You wanted to make good. For Robert? Or for yourself?’

  ‘Both. I felt ashamed.’ I pause, trying to express why that was exactly. ‘Because I’d let him down. Things hadn’t gone to plan.’

  ‘So there was still a sense of Robert mattering very much. Not just because of what he was, but because of how you felt about him personally?’

  My silence says everything.

  ‘But what happened to you is important, Maud.’ She observes me between narrowed eyelids.

  ‘I suppose it made me feel tainted. Even though it didn’t really go . . . all the way. And I wasn’t exactly unspotted beforehand.’

  ‘It was rape.’ There is a hint of emotion in Dr Rosenstein’s voice. She is normally so measured.

  I have hardly used that word, even to myself.

  ‘It would be useful if you could think of how that rape might have affected you.’

  She looks at her watch. ‘That’s all we have time for now. This part of your story is key, Maud. I’m glad we are unravelling it. Write down more. Don’t worry if you have to edit or expunge names and details. It’s the themes we’re looking at.’

  Ingrams is waiting outside her door. He asks if I want to go to my room, but I decide to check on the doves, so we go out towards the dovecot. One of the hen doves looks at me with something in her eyes that is different. There’s been a change: I spot two eggs beneath her and my heart gives a small thump. I wonder how long it will take for them to hatch. I’ll need to hunt out books on doves or pigeons in the extensive library. I feel like a child, impatient for Father Christmas. No matter how bad things are, there’s always the chance that something good will happen.

  Jim is watching me as I descend and put away the stepladder. ‘You look pleased.’ I tell him the news.

  ‘How are things going with you?’ I use the guarded code for asking about our sessions that we usually employ.

  ‘Exciting news, I’m apparently to have visitors who for once aren’t just members of my sorrowing family.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘Some kind of civil servants, it seems.’

  Perhaps some ministry or other wants to talk to Jim about what happened to him in the North Atlantic. Or they’re still accounting for everyone lost when the ship was torpedoed, all those children who drowned or froze in lifeboats. How could he possibly remember after such a long time? But I’m the amnesiac, not him. Perhaps he has full recall. Would he want to regain this memory, though?

  ‘It’s probably just about my pension,’ he says. I hope for his sake that it’s something as mundane.

  It’s nearly lunchtime. I make my excuses so I can wash my hands and comb my hair, still thinking about memory and how we lose it. Dr Rosenstein is stalking mine like a hunter tracking a shy and wary prey, and luring it into the open where we can capture it. Going through all the details leading up to the events precipitating my certification as mad is taking so long. Too long. I need to be out of here. I feel a flash of panic at how much time has passed since they certified me. Autumn, the leaves were turning. Why this sudden sense of urgency? The war is long over. Nobody relies on me any longer.

  I wish we could fast-forward over the Ustaše assault on me. But I trust her; I trust the process. After lunch I will return to my journal and I will make myself write more, being sure to leave out sensitive details while not omitting any of the truth. I will take myself back to that road leading north to Slovenia where the three of us – a British agent, a female Partisan medic and a German intelligence officer, sounding like the players in a bad joke – found ourselves thrown together.

  When Stimmer had deposited the Ustaše officers as instructed they drove north, Amber sitting in the back with the German, his hands and feet bound with twine from Ana’s pocket, Amber’s field glasses back around her own neck. He sat motionless, studying the landscape. Even if he had managed to jump out of the car, with its locked rear doors, he’d be alone on a road in a part of the country where Partisan raids were frequent. He’d be vulnerable, just as Amber had been.

  Then he turned to look at her as though she were still the vulnerable one. To control her shaking she sat back in the seat, wishing she had something alcoholic to drink. Put it out of your mind. Concentrate.

  Amber’s thighs throbbed from being forced open. On her clothes she was sure she could still smell the scent of the man whose body was now bouncing around in the boot. He couldn’t hurt her again, but she wondered how long it would take for her to lose that smell. She thought of the carbolic soap in the shower rooms at school, how she’d hated its abrasive pungency. If only she had carbolic soap and water now.

  Ana drove silently, letting the car slide down the mountain slopes when she could, glancing at the fuel gauge. The landscape grew more wintry in aspect, taking on a flat, grey light as they neared the higher peaks near the Slovenian border. As they drove through a silent village she slowed the vehicle. ‘This is where that cross was on the map,’ she said. ‘Where your friend there says the Ustaše found Naomi’s beret and map.’

  Amber peered through the car window. Nobody around. ‘Could we ask if anyone’s seen her?’

  Ana shook her head. ‘This village is known for its anti-Partisan sympathies. Our best hope is that they think we’re officials and don’t look at us too closely.’

  Amber turned to look through the opposite window. Not a sign of anyone anywhere.

  Ten miles further on, the car spluttered once and slowed. ‘That’s it,’ Ana said. ‘We’re out of fuel. It’s better for us to get off the road now, anyway, they’ve had plenty of time to come looking for the car.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  Ana pointed to a spot on the map. ‘We need to take the uniforms off those two and use them to keep warm at night.’

  Amber’s sheepskin-lined jacket and silk underwear were insulating her. But her gloves and scarf were in her rucksack, left behind in the cave. The temperature was dropping and it would freeze again tonight.

  Ana’s rucksack sat on the seat beside her. She’d obviously taken the time to grab it. Amber wished she’d shown the same forethought. Hopefully the medic’s bag contained food and water.

  ‘Hands on your head,’ she told Stimmer as he got out, ‘and move slowly.’

  In the boot, the two Croat officers lay with their eyes still open. Amber removed the Walther from the lieutenant’s holster. She cut the twine from Stimmer’s wrists and he removed the men’s jackets and shirts and pulled the gloves from their hands, tossing them on to the ground. ‘The undershirts might be useful,’ he said.

  Both men wore vests made of woollen fabric. The thought of wearing something that had been against her attacker’s skin made her want to vomit again. ‘I can’t,’ she told Ana. ‘You take them if you want them.’

  Ana treated her to one of her fierce scowls. ‘I hope you don’t regret it. Take the gloves.’

  Amber stooped, pistol still in one hand, to go through the pockets of their tunic jackets. ‘Keys. Cuffs. Cigarette cases, identity cards and wallets. I don’t suppose money is very useful any more but I’ll take the bank notes.’ Amber remembered to retrieve Naomi’s map.

  Stimmer removed the belts from the men’s breeches. ‘We can roll up the clothes we can’t wear.’ He produced two neat bundles. Perhaps he’d once been a Scout. Probably too old to have gone through much Hitler Youth training.

  ‘We should bury their guns,’ Ana said. ‘I thought behind
those rocks.’ She pointed to the far side of the road. ‘We can come back for them.’

  ‘Take one of the Walthers,’ Amber said. Ana nodded.

  ‘Better than this old thing.’ She pointed at her scratched-looking pistol. Ana also helped herself to the dead men’s cigarette tins and the handcuffs before hiding the surplus firearms in the rocks, marking the side of the road by snapping off two branches of a small shrubby tree to make a cross.

  They walked on for three or four hours, the road becoming steeper as they headed north. Ana stopped, indicating that Stimmer could sit on the grass at the edge of the road. She unfolded the map. ‘There’s a mountain hut up here I remember from before the war,’ she said.

  Perhaps Ana had taken Branko skiing here as a child.

  Amber looked at the map and then lifted the field glasses to her eyes to examine the mountains with the green denoting the covering of birch, fir and small oak trees, and the sharp inclines where rivers turned into waterfalls and plunged underground. Where was Naomi now? Had someone taken her in that silent village, or had she evaded them, losing the map and beret in the process?

  If only she still had her wireless: she could have alerted friendly contacts via Cairo to look out for Naomi on her way through.

  Behind them in the southwest the sun was dipping down. It had hardly penetrated the smudge-coloured sky during the day. Darkness would make their journey even more unpleasant.

  As they walked up into the mountains they met the snowline. Amber looked out for small, female boot prints. Was it possible they’d overtaken Naomi?

  They walked for another kilometre. Ana stopped, raising a hand, nodding at the thin clump of trees to the side of the track. The three ducked behind the birches. Horses’ hooves crunched on the snow ahead of them.

  ‘Chetniks,’ Ana whispered. And indeed they wore the trademark grey caps with the double-headed eagle badge. One of the men sported the bushy beard that the Chetniks were so fond of. Concentration seemed to pulse through Ana. Silently she tapped on Amber’s arm and pointed at the field glasses. Amber handed them to her and Ana examined the men. She let out a gasp. The bay mare ridden by the first of the approaching riders shied.