The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  She heard the click of the door latch. Then he was gone.

  ‘Thank you,’ Ana whispered to Amber. ‘For trusting me. And him. I won’t forget it.’

  ‘Touching,’ Stimmer said. ‘Any chance of some sleep now?’

  ‘Keep your mouth shut or I will cut out your tongue,’ Ana said. Amber did not doubt that she meant it.

  ‘It’s my turn to guard him.’ Amber knew she wouldn’t sleep now, anyway. Fragments of her so-far neglected objectives mingled with the words Miko had spoken. If they could take the airmen from the farmhouse and find a way of escorting them to the coast or flying them out, Robert might not regard her operation as a disaster.

  She watched the embers of the fire glow. Outside, a wolf howled. Amber imagined it prowling around the hut and shuddered. The isolation of this cabin, the feeling that enemies were close at hand, and hiding outside on the karst mingled with Amber’s memories of her old nurse’s folk stories. The monsters that lurked in darkness . . . Enough. She stood up quietly and poked at the logs on the fire.

  Staring at the glowing hearth made her drowsy. Her eyelids felt heavy. She clenched the pistol hard to keep herself awake. An hour before dawn, Ana woke and ordered her to return to the bunk for a last sleep. ‘Take my bed, it’s still warm.’ She could smell the scent of Ana’s body on the blanket: clean, or just about, and slightly metallic. Amber scratched a leg. Chances were she already had lice, Cairo had warned they would pick them up quickly.

  She slumbered, dreamless this time, like an infant until Ana shook her awake, the first signs of dawn visible through the shutters Ana had opened. ‘I’ve heated up some more soup and there’s hot water for washing.’

  They let Stimmer down from his bunk and gave him food and drink. He ate in silence, rubbing his right wrist where the cuff had been.

  Ana locked the door, replacing the key in its hiding place at the edge of the track and pausing briefly to look at the little hut one last time.

  They made brisk progress. ‘If we carry on at this rate we should be in Slovenia by noon,’ Ana said. Amber peered at the track for Naomi’s boot prints. Still no sign.

  An hour into the journey they stopped to fill their water bottles at a stream. As they drank, stones downhill to their left scattered onto boulders – something heavy was moving. A sheep?

  Ana put out an arm, warning them to be silent. Amber peered across the limestone and shrubs, and saw a dark outline moving away from them. A male figure? She removed her pistol. ‘Watch Stimmer,’ she whispered to Ana.

  She could run almost silently and explosively fast, the PT instructor in the Wiltshire training course had told her. But the man had a good start. From what she could make out, he appeared well built. On the uncertain surface of the slope, she could gain on him. Amber felt her blood roar inside her as she made up the ground. The man tripped on a hidden root or rock and fell to the ground, dropping the pistol he was holding. He scrabbled for it in the dirty snow, his fingerless mittens exposing a shorter bandage-covered finger on the left hand. The tip of his little finger was missing. Something about him made her feel suddenly nauseous . . . The synapses of her brain whirred, but there was no time to process the thought. He grabbed his pistol and pulled himself to his feet, agile for all his heavy build. She fired at him, catching him on the shoulder. He wheeled around, shooting at her, the bullet flying wide. She took another shot, and missed.

  Amber replaced the pistol in her belt and crawled forward to the rocks, listening out. She wanted to follow him down, but Ana was waiting up on the track with Stimmer. Naomi was the priority.

  Ana frowned, whispering a curse when Amber joined them. ‘He wasn’t in uniform?’

  Stimmer looked down the slope, eyes narrowed. ‘Your Chetnik son was right.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Amber said.

  ‘I saw the man, too,’ he said. ‘My eyesight is good. That was no Slav face.’

  ‘Shut up.’ Ana spat the words at him. ‘No time for this old racial poison now.’

  ‘No racial poison,’ he said. ‘That man was American or British, or some other Anglo-Saxon type.’ He looked at Amber. ‘You’d have caught him easily if you hadn’t had the discipline to keep to your mission.’ He sounded approving, though. Other opportunities may present themselves, but remember that you are not intelligence officers. Follow the objectives we set you.

  Even if this pursuit of Naomi could only loosely be classed as following objectives.

  They walked on for half an hour, pausing occasionally to listen for pursuers, before stopping at the summit of a hill. ‘The village where Miko said Naomi was spotted.’ Ana pointed down the slope. From this height it looked like a child’s toy, a perfect central European model, with red roofs and pale-coloured walls and a church with an onion dome, hardly touched by war, its telephone lines undamaged, cattle in fields smoother than the rocky landscape they’d come from, fringed with willows. Ana screwed up her eyes, surveying the scene. ‘I’ll go down alone,’ she said at last. ‘You and he,’ she nodded at Stimmer, ‘stay up here, out of sight.’ She passed Amber the water bottle. ‘If I’m not back by noon, carry on without me.’ Ana said the last bit dispassionately, looking every bit one of the firm-chinned Partisan women depicted in the propaganda posters Robert had shown them in Cairo.

  Amber wanted to say something to acknowledge that Ana might not return, to thank her for rescuing her from the Ustaše, and for having come this far with her, but the older woman put up a hand, forbidding further conversation, and strode away.

  Stimmer and Amber sat on rocks in a patch of furtive spring sun. He dozed for a half-hour or so. Amber yawned but kept her eyes open. When he woke she offered him the water bottle. ‘It’s a strange place, Yugoslavia,’ he said, softly.

  Her need to answer was taken away by the sound of boots walking briskly towards them. Ana. Her face bore witness to good news. ‘I’ve tracked Naomi down,’ she said. ‘They’re going to bring her down to meet me.’

  ‘They?’ Amber asked.

  ‘A contact of mine. They were helping her. We have to be there in an hour, so we can make our way down slowly. There’s a stream halfway there, so we can fill up the water bottles. And a woman selling bread and cheese from a hut.’

  ‘Was Naomi all right?’

  ‘They said she was well.’

  ‘Who exactly is this contact, Ana?’

  ‘The local doctor. An old friend.’

  That was good. Naomi must have been tired, hungry and cold. She would be relieved to see friendly faces.

  They descended to the hut Ana had earlier identified and stocked up on cheese and bread. Provisions seemed plentiful in this valley. But the woman looked at the trio with unease. ‘It’s all right,’ Ana told her. She tapped Stimmer on the chest. ‘He won’t do you any harm.’

  ‘Ustaše soldiers in the valley,’ the woman said. ‘And others. Outsiders.’

  Amber’s skin pricked. ‘A man with a fingertip missing,’ she said. ‘Do you know who he is?’

  The woman turned her back and rearranged some potatoes in a box. ‘They do that,’ she said. ‘Take off fingers. If there is a betrayal.’

  ‘Who does?’

  The woman’s shoulders were almost rigid.

  ‘We need to move on,’ Ana said.

  ‘Who cut off that man’s finger?’ Amber asked again.

  The woman picked up the box without a word and retreated to her hut, bolting the door behind her.

  ‘Partisans cut off fingers of those they regard as traitors,’ Stimmer said.

  ‘I know nothing of this,’ Ana said. She seemed to slump. ‘I don’t know the Partisan groups around here; they probably come from over the Slovenian border. Let’s go and collect your friend.’

  ‘Stay here,’ Amber said. ‘You rest here with him. One of us alone will be less noticeable than three.’

  Ana looked at her, before nodding. She pointed to a row of pines downhill from the peasant woman’s hut. ‘We’ll wait there. Naomi will be in th
e school, just beyond the church. There’ll be a yellow van parked outside. Come back through the far side of the village, the track loops round and brings you back up here.’

  Amber walked down to the village, stopping every hundred metres or so and turning sharply to make sure that nobody was following. Before she reached the first buildings she threw herself behind a clump of trees, barely breathing, watching, listening. Nothing.

  Despite the hour, shutters were still drawn in the houses. Nobody on the streets. Although from a distance it had seemed serene, the village gave off an air of watchfulness. Twice she darted into doorways, peering over her shoulder to check she wasn’t being followed.

  The yellow van was indeed outside the school. Empty. Amber tried the front door of the school building. Locked. She walked around to find a back entrance. She listened. Not a sound. Could Naomi really be here? And yet Ana had been so definite.

  She pushed the unlocked door open and walked inside to what looked like the sole classroom, desks pushed to one side, dusty, lids hanging off. Amber blinked. On a chair in front of the blackboard sat a woman with her back to her, staring at the half-rubbed-out chalk words. The woman was concentrating very hard on the faded script; she hadn’t even heard Amber come into the classroom.

  She recognised the girl’s straight back and the colour of her hair. She’d watched Naomi whisk up that hair into a bunch when they were out on exercises. ‘Naomi?’

  The girl said nothing. ‘It’s me.’ Amber laid a hand on her shoulder. Naomi crumpled over onto herself. A coldness filled Amber. She walked around Naomi. ‘What have they done to you?’

  She lifted her gently by the shoulders to look and heard her own gasp, harsh in the empty classroom. ‘No.’ Amber closed her eyes and opened them again. But there it still was: a single bullet wound to Naomi’s forehead, blood streaking out of the side of her mouth, her lips bruised and swollen. They must have pulled some of her teeth out. Naomi’s eyes were open. Amber laid her on the floor and tried to close them but the eyelids stayed stubbornly up, as though Naomi were insisting that Amber should look into them. Hadn’t people once believed that you could see a reflection of a murderer in a dead person’s eyes?

  Bile filled Amber’s mouth. She gave up her attempt to close her friend’s eyes. She crossed the girl’s hands over her chest. Was that the wrong thing to do for someone who was Jewish? She didn’t know, and Naomi’s arms were stiffening now; she didn’t want to force them into another position. ‘I’m so sorry.’ Her voice broke on the last word: foolish, inadequate words to say. Amber did her best to tidy the girl’s hair, which had fallen out of its usual neat arrangement, thinking of Naomi’s mother, who must have done something similar so many times for her daughter in childhood. Stop. Emotional control is essential at times of stress. It is human to mourn the dead, but your own life depends on rational responses to events.

  She was Naomi’s friend and she would mourn her properly later. In the meantime, she was a trained operative in danger herself. Time to reassert her role as Amber: cool and logical.

  ‘I have to leave you now,’ she told Naomi, wiping her own eyes on her sleeve. ‘If anyone I know is responsible for this, I will kill them myself.’ She pictured herself with a knife, deliberately aiming for the murderer’s chest. ‘I wish I could stay with you for longer. I wish I could say whatever the Jewish prayers are for the dead. But there is no time.’ For Naomi, time had run out completely.

  She could hear them outside now. Grief turned to fear. Amber wanted very badly to run. Her legs were pulling her towards the door through which she’d just entered. But this is what they would be expecting her to do. They would know that seeing Naomi like that would shock her, and that this was when a mistake might be made. Another mistake. At times of great strain your training is your only hope. Use it.

  Armed only with a pistol, she would be vulnerable. Amber looked around. Additional resources are usually not far away. The teacher’s desk had been upended in some kind of skirmish. Perhaps Naomi had still been alive when they’d brought her here and had refused to die easily. A piece of fabric hung out of a drawer. An old Yugoslav flag. Amber had a lighter in her pocket. She crept to the back door where she found a can of paraffin, empty but for a few precious drops, probably once used to light lamps or the stove.

  Someone moved in the yard beyond the back door. The key to the front door was still in the lock, Amber noted. They wanted her to come out that way. Amber dragged the teacher’s desk towards the window and climbed up. The old iron window frame was hard to open but she forced it. The flame from the matches set the flag alight. She dangled it out of the window and jumped down again to sprinkle half of the paraffin on the floor, then ripped out sheets from an exercise book and stuffed them into the neck of the can.

  She couldn’t bear Naomi staring up with those unseeing eyes, so she found an exercise book in which a child had copied out the same sentence again and again in Croat script and placed it over the girl’s face. She touched Naomi’s chest above her heart briefly, as though hoping to feel movement. But her friend’s heart would never again skip a beat at the sight of a man she liked or fire rapidly as she sprinted around a gym.

  Someone was opening the back door now. Amber upended three of the children’s desks and made a barricade.

  She took out the first man with a single shot between the eyes, and the second one fell back when her bullet caught him in the shoulder. By now the fire had snaked down from the flag and ignited the paraffin. Amber sprang from her hiding place and jumped over the flames towards the front door, scooping up the paper-stuffed paraffin can, glancing back at Naomi one last time before she unlocked the door.

  The yellow van had not moved. Amber lit the paper in the can and threw it through the windscreen. The explosion warmed her back as she ran.

  Ana had told her to come back the long route, skirting to the far side of the village, but she retraced her steps, swiftly, silently. Once she heard the rumble of a car engine ahead of her and ducked into a doorway, but it drove past.

  She pressed on up the hill despite the pain in her chest telling her to stop, rounding the last bend in the track and reaching the row of pines so silently that Ana gasped with shock. ‘Surprised?’ Amber grabbed her around the throat and pushed her pistol into her neck. ‘Your son Miko,’ she said. ‘Who did he talk to after he left us last night?’

  Stimmer was saying something but she couldn’t hear him above the roar of her own anger. ‘You have two seconds before I blow your head in.’ She half-pulled the trigger.

  ‘You were there, in the hut, Amber, you heard me talking to him.’

  ‘Only when I woke up. What were you saying before that?’

  ‘Nothing, what’s wrong? Naomi?’

  ‘Yes, Naomi. Tortured and killed.’

  Ana blinked.

  ‘Oh come on, this was your doing. You and your son’s.’

  ‘It wasn’t her.’ Stimmer spoke sharply now, his words reaching Amber. ‘I woke up when her son came into the hut. I heard it all. She didn’t say anything about the Jewish girl.’

  ‘So it was you?’ She released Ana, throwing her to the ground, and approached Stimmer. ‘You told Miko about Naomi?’ She aimed the gun at him.

  He shook his head. ‘There are no Germans near this village. And I’ve never worked with the Chetniks up here.’

  ‘It was the Ustaše,’ Ana said in a low voice. ‘Torturing her, leaving her like that for you to find. I said nothing about Naomi, not even when Miko told us a young woman had been seen here.’

  Amber crumpled forward, coughing up sour liquid. ‘Amber,’ Ana went on, ‘you can see that it doesn’t make sense that Miko was involved. He has no problem with the Jews. Nor do my contacts.’ She frowned. ‘That man you saw earlier on, the one Miko and that woman who sold us the food told us about . . . ?’

  ‘He went in the opposite direction.’

  ‘He might have doubled back. Or killed Naomi earlier on.’

  ‘Who is yo
ur contact in the village?’

  ‘The local doctor. He is trustworthy. He hid Naomi in a barn and told me he would bring her down to the schoolhouse.’

  ‘Why couldn’t you go straight up there?’

  ‘He said the local farmer would be up by the barn feeding livestock and he didn’t want anyone else to see Naomi. The doctor trained me when I was a medical student. I lived with him and his wife in Zagreb. They have hidden people before.’

  Stimmer sniffed. ‘Anyone would betray their friends if their own family is threatened.’

  ‘Nobody was threatening them. He said he’d walk up to the barn himself and fetch Naomi when he knew the farmer had left.’ She frowned. ‘Someone must have been watching his house.’ Amber thought again of the man she’d chased.

  ‘Bad news for the doctor,’ Stimmer said. ‘Probably bound for a Ustaše camp now.’

  A veil of grey mist fell over the trio as they retraced their steps. At every rustle of the undergrowth, every clink of loose rock, Amber imagined she felt eyes on their backs. Stimmer’s presence, unarmed as he was, felt more like that of a comrade, which made no sense because he was still their enemy and would doubtless betray them if he had a chance of freeing himself.

  They trudged on. Occasionally, Ana raised a hand and swung her rifle off her shoulder to prod the surface of the path under the snow, ensuring it hadn’t eroded or that a sinkhole hadn’t opened beneath them.

  ‘Karst country,’ Stimmer said quietly. ‘Full of hidden caverns, sinkholes and disappearing streams. All kinds of dangers if you don’t know where you’re stepping.’

  ‘You know this part of the country?’

  He nodded. ‘Before the war, I hiked here. It looks barren at times, but underground there are pools of water and mineral deposits.’

  Amber’s father would have found Stimmer’s knowledge interesting. She shrugged off the thought. Stimmer was an enemy.

  ‘On occasions our lost soldiers’ bodies are mutilated when we find them. But sometimes we don’t find their bodies at all. I’ve heard rumours of each side throwing live prisoners down fissures in the rocks and leaving them to die. Sometimes they send dogs down . . .’ He looked at her face and silenced himself.