‘She’d had teeth pulled out,’ Amber told him, furious that he had managed to make her feel a connection with him. ‘I suppose your intelligence colleagues would know all about that kind of work, too?’
He said nothing. Naomi had taken two sets of identities with her, the second securely hidden, she’d promised. But someone had perhaps found it, and then they would have known that Naomi was not who she claimed to be.
Mist seemed not only to obscure the landscape, but also to envelop the very identities of those walking through it.
12
June 1947
The sunshine ripples in through Dr Rosenstein’s consulting-room window, softened by the budding leaves on the chestnuts and oaks outside. I put a hand to my head as I pull myself back into the present. ‘Of course I knew how dangerous our work was, that dying was always a strong possibility. We’d been prepared for it. But for it to occur to someone I knew, someone I had become fond of, so soon after we’d landed, that was a shock.’
Dr Rosenstein lets the silence sit for a minute and writes something in her notebook.
‘This may seem like a somewhat cold question after all the human cost you’ve described, but would you say your operation was ultimately successful?’ Dr Rosenstein crosses her arms and looks at me. I don’t answer immediately. It’s a question I’ve tried to answer many times.
‘It was partially successful by the end. We found Allied servicemen,’ I tell her. ‘They were safe. I started to feel, well, that I might salvage the operation. We had to renovate a landing strip. I did that: organised the labour, told them what needed doing.’ Even then I’d felt the strangeness of all these men: prisoners hardened by years in camps or airmen who’d survived exploding planes, doing as I, a girl still shy of twenty-one, instructed.
The landing strip had been neglected since the German invasion, colonised by weeds. Rocks had worked their way onto its surface, but otherwise it was perfect. Whatever else Miko might have done, he had certainly identified a good location for airlifting personnel.
The POWs and airmen she and Ana had found sheltering in the farmhouse agreed to clear the strip even when Amber explained that their labours wouldn’t benefit them directly. A plane large enough to lift them all simply couldn’t fly into this sector of Yugoslav airspace because of increased Luftwaffe activity. Most of the men would have to continue on foot to the Dalmatian coast, with a courier. From there, a series of boats would take them from island to island, dodging German patrols, until they reached a westerly enough point for the Royal Navy to evacuate them to Italy.
This had all been confirmed by the time Ana sent a courier down to Branko, explaining their circumstances and asking for Amber’s wireless set to be transported north so she could send a signal to Cairo. Ana seemed on edge, uncertain how her temporary abandonment of the Partisans would have been viewed by Branko. It was fortunate, the courier explained on his return, that the day after the women’s departure, the Partisans had ambushed the same Chetnik group with whom they had reluctantly exchanged weapons and medicines for Stimmer. They had reclaimed their bartered provisions.
‘So Branko took possession of an important German prisoner without paying as much as a box of cartridges for him,’ the courier said, drawing on his cigarette.
Branko’s face had been saved. The family disloyalty could perhaps be overlooked, especially as Ana was now assisting in the airlift of Allied personnel.
Amber sent a signal to Robert, describing the loss of the paprika assignment. Summing it up in the terse Morse of the wireless transmission took her longer than usual. Ran into a man with a missing fingertip, she added, from home query. Cairo had to know about fingertip man: he might jeopardise future operations. She explained how Stimmer had proved cooperative and had assisted her against the Ustaše. Belgrade parcel promising, she’d concluded.
The POWs stretched out aching backs and drank thirstily from their water bottles. Six of them would set out and light the paraffin lamps that were to mark the runway. For safety’s sake, this would be done at the very last minute. Not that they had seen much German activity here, other than the distant sight of heavy Junkers, transporting officers north as the fighting swept up through the Balkans. From tonight, Stimmer would be gone, flown out by Lysander with one of the wounded POWs, a young man with a shattered left arm Ana feared had turned septic.
Amber chatted to the POWs, even exchanging a few cordial words with Stimmer, who had shown himself amenable to shifting boulders from the runway, desirous perhaps of putting miles of Mediterranean between himself and the Partisans as expeditiously as possible. ‘I will talk to your friends in Cairo,’ he told Amber, when she handed him a water bottle.
‘What have you to lose?’
‘Acting as a traitor to my country?’
‘Think of it as escaping from a place where everyone wants you dead.’
‘You have such a comforting way about you, Fräulein.’ He gave her that half-smile of his. ‘And yet I wonder whether you’re as confident about everything as you seem.’
This prisoner ought not to be talking to her in this way.
‘The Partisans I can understand, this is their country and we are invaders. But you, for you this operation is something else, and I cannot understand what. A chance to prove yourself?’
Amber turned her face away so he couldn’t see how his words were affecting her. She couldn’t entirely understand what the operation meant to her, either. Impressing Robert? Carrying out a duty to a country she’d loved as a child, a country she had a family link to? Serving the war needs of her own country in assisting an ally? All of these. But something else altogether, too. Coming here had served her own interests. It had enabled her to throw off the mundanity of her old life and show herself what she could do.
Would she have signed up if she’d known what it would mean? The militia officers pushing her down onto the ground and ripping her clothes away? That dark classroom on the Slovenian border, Naomi’s body slumped in a chair, blood trickling from her mouth?
‘Are you really so certain about what is happening here?’ Stimmer went on.
‘You talk too much.’
He bowed his head.
But there was something she still wanted to say to him. ‘You stopped those two Ustaše militiamen.’ She looked away from him.
‘They were undisciplined and delaying my return with a prisoner,’ he said coolly. ‘Please don’t imagine it was anything more chivalrous.’
‘You took a while to tell them to stop.’
He looked up briefly. ‘I told you before, Yugoslavia is a strange place.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It does things to one’s mind, to one’s morals. But I should have intervened before I did.’
She took back the water bottle. He was honest, she’d give him that. If she’d met him at any other time or place, she might almost have liked him. ‘Your break is over. There are still boulders to shift,’ she told him.
‘Cairo will come as a pleasant rest.’ There was a slight edge to his voice now. She wanted to tell him that he would not be tortured, that falling into the hands of British intelligence was not like being taken for questioning by his side.
‘I will tell them how you cooperated with me,’ she said. ‘And that you protected me, too. In your own good time.’
‘You are too friendly with that German,’ Ana told her, approaching with a rake. ‘You forget he is an enemy.’
‘Oh, I certainly know who is and who isn’t an enemy.’ Amber was tired and thirsty. For once she let herself snap at Ana. How dare she preach at her when she’d entertained her very own Chetnik son in the lodge that night? Ana’s eyes widened.
‘All right. I see you will not let me forget that night. Please remember that it was my son who told you where these men were.’ She nodded at the labouring servicemen.
‘And please remember that Stimmer protected me from the Ustaše and has information he will pass on to the Allies.’
‘Let’s hope the information is worth all the effort getting him out of here.’ Ana sounded suddenly weary. Amber thought about the things she’d accused Miko of doing.
‘Ana . . .’
‘What?’
‘I accused you and Miko of having had something to do with Naomi’s death. He’s on the enemy side, but he has helped us. I was wrong to blame him. I’m sorry.’
The other woman studied her, and then gave her a rare smile. ‘I would have made the same accusation in your place.’ She swung the rake over her shoulder. ‘But you were wrong, yes. I’m going to clear the small rocks. Some of us work instead of chatting to Fascists.’
The pilot above shone his searchlight down towards them. Amber checked her watch. Right on time. The Lysander circled lower, almost dazzling the reception party with its lights, before bumping over the ground. The engines were still running as the co-pilot opened the doors, shouting at them to take hold of a container. Amber hoped it was medicine for Ana and Branko’s group. Two further crates were quickly passed out to the waiting POWs, who in return handed over a small sack containing letters they’d written home. The POW who was to fly out with Stimmer carried a sack in his good arm. ‘You’ll have to stow that somewhere so you can handcuff yourself to the prisoner,’ Amber warned him. ‘I doubt he’ll try anything in the plane, but just in case. What on earth is it?’ The sack seemed to contain a small body, rippling and moving.
‘Down. I helped the farmer’s wife with the cows and she gave it to me so my mum can stuff an eiderdown for my little sister.’ The co-pilot held out his arms for the sack and the POW followed it in, helped up by Amber and Ana.
Stimmer was halfway into the hatch after him when a small round object bounced along the strip towards them.
Ana shouted, dragging Amber back. In the light of the flare bursting above them, she could see Stimmer’s eyes widen. The ball exploded. Ana and Amber dropped to the ground. Another round object was rolling towards the plane and now she could hear engines overhead: A Henschel ground-attack plane. Amber screamed at the POW and Stimmer to jump down from the Lysander. The co-pilot pushed the POW out onto the tarmac, he landed awkwardly but rolled clear. Now the co-pilot was shouting at the pilot to take off, but it was all taking too long and the Henschel was firing at them, at first apparently randomly but then picking out Ana, who rolled over and over to escape the bullets. Poised above the Lysander’s wheel, Stimmer paused, looking up at the cockpit. The pilot writhed as flames crackled around him. Stimmer pulled off his jacket, climbing back into the plane, wrapping the pilot in the jacket, dragging him towards the opening. Everything was taking such a long time. Amber shouted at them to hurry. The pair had nearly made it through when the Henschel banked and flew back above the landing strip. Bullets pinged against the Lysander’s casing. For a moment it seemed Stimmer would drag the pilot clear of the plane. Amber rose to her feet to help, running to the plane. Ana shouted a warning. The world shattered into fragments. Ana was pulling at her arms, telling her she had to get clear. She couldn’t understand the hurry and couldn’t rouse herself enough to stand. Ana was dragging her, the rough surface of the strip jolting her, scratching her exposed skin. The explosion came aeons later, bringing with it the crashing of metal shards to the ground. Then there was silence.
When she lifted her head Amber saw the remnants of the Lysander scattered over the landing strip. A small crater had formed just inches from her. Ana was rubbing her arms, talking to her in a low, urgent tone that Amber could register but not understand. She’d saved her. For the second time.
‘Sit up slowly,’ Ana was saying. ‘Easy now. Can you move your legs?’
‘Stimmer?’
Ana said something else she couldn’t hear but her expression told Amber everything. Disaster.
The POW with the septic arm was shouting at them, but Amber couldn’t hear what he was saying either. The stench of burning feathers filled Amber’s senses. Some impulse made her check her watch. Three minutes had passed. Surely wrong? She shook the watch. The hands remained on the same numbers. Weeks, months, of work by so many people, gone in such a short time. She bent to the side and vomited.
A few pieces of scorched down floated gently to earth beside them.
13
June 1947
‘That was that,’ I tell Dr Rosenstein. ‘A costly mission to bring out an important enemy officer destroyed.’
And Ana had saved me for a second time, burning her left hand badly as she pulled me away from the flames.
‘But the landing-strip tragedy wasn’t the end of the operation?’ Dr Rosenstein asks. ‘Tragic and costly though it was? You managed to get the servicemen to safety? Which was your objective, wasn’t it?’
‘True.’
‘And then what?’
‘Once we’d escorted the men to the next courier, Ana and I returned to the farm. By then spring was well and truly there.’ I’d still felt leaden, unable to even decipher the emotions inside me, but Ana was unexpectedly gentle and kind.
They were sitting outside the farmhouse in the spring sunshine. Almond and apple blossom flowered on the trees in the orchard. The valley in which the farm sat lacked the jagged limestone formations of the karst, softer and lusher in its vegetation.
Amber felt her muscles relax. This morning she had carried bucket after bucket of water from the well into the farmhouse for the farmer’s wife. Water, always water, needing to be carried – having had so many extra people living with them, the family needed repaying in any way possible. Fetching water for cooking, or cleaning, or irrigating crops was the simplest way to do this. When Amber returned home she was never going to take taps and running water for granted again. ‘What?’ Ana asked.
‘I was reminiscing about modern plumbing.’ Amber examined the marks on her palms where the bucket handles had dug into her.
‘Hundreds of thousands of Yugoslavs don’t have running water. Millions, perhaps,’ Ana said almost automatically. ‘Our revolution will bring about vast improvements in living conditions and sanitation for the proletariat.’ She caught Amber’s eye. ‘Yes?’
‘Is absolutely everything ideological to you?’ Just weeks ago she wouldn’t have dared to talk to Ana like this. The raid on the landing strip had released something inside Amber and she no longer feared what the Partisan woman thought of her.
Ana’s face darkened. Then she smiled briefly. ‘All right, I’ll admit it: the bathroom in our apartment in Zagreb was possibly my favourite room. And we had soft towels and bath oils, too. I liked coming back from the hospital after a long shift and lying in the bath.’
‘Glad you approve of some decadent bourgeois comforts.’
Ana scowled and then softened her expression into a smile. ‘It is good to see you looking a bit more cheerful.’ She pulled out a tin from her pocket. ‘Make yourself useful, you child of the bourgeoisie.’ Amber extracted and lit a cigarette for her.
‘Can’t wait to get this bandage off me.’ Ana took the cigarette from her.
‘At least it’s not your right hand. If you were your own patient, you’d be urging patience.’
Ana sniffed.
Though who was Amber to counsel this woman on the virtues of patience and acceptance? She remembered her own silence over the last few days, her inability to communicate, even with the POWs for whom she’d been responsible. Ana didn’t say anything, but her question was clear.
‘I can’t stop thinking about how much has been wasted,’ Amber said. ‘Time, resources, people.’
‘You can’t brood on setbacks. It makes no operational sense. Learn from them and move on, Amber.’
‘Someone must have betrayed us.’
‘A German reconnaissance plane may have seen what we were doing on the landing strip.’
‘We kept a watch on the skies all the time. There was no plane.’
Ana said nothing, drawing on the cigarette.
‘I never thanked you properly for dragging me away.’
; ‘Just carrying out my duty.’
‘And there was I thinking you actually thought I was worth saving as a human being, as a friend.’ Amber said it lightly, but their eyes met. Something passed between them. Ana took another puff on the cigarette. ‘Your hand, there’ll be scar damage.’
‘As long as I can carry out my role as Partisan and medic.’ Ana traced a circle in the soil with a boot tip; no, not a circle, a spiral, growing wider with each loop.
‘What about as a mother?’ Ana glared at her, but Amber did not look away. ‘You would do anything for your sons, wouldn’t you?’
Ana grunted. ‘You try and instil some sense into them when they are young, but you can only hope they do what’s best.’
‘You pretend to be harder on them than you actually are.’
Ana smiled. ‘Their father was always telling me that I was too severe. But I was the one who sat up with them all night when they were little children and were ill. I was the one who read stories to them at bedtime and who taught them to swim and ride. Once, we were up in the mountains and Branko disturbed a rabid dog. It went for him and I chased it away by throwing sticks and rocks at it.’ She glared at Amber. ‘Why are you smirking?’
‘I almost feel sorry for the dog.’
‘My Branko is a fighter now.’ Ana stubbed out her cigarette. ‘Lots of young men will shed their blood in this war, or be taken prisoner. You and I have returned six servicemen to the Allies. They will go back to fight, to smash the oil fields in Romania so German fuel runs out. Or to bomb their cities into submission. Or to march on Germany, when you British and the Americans finally get around to it. And there are more Allied servicemen out there we can help. Branko will know where they are.’
Some of her enthusiasm leached into Amber.
‘Be strong, Amber,’ Ana told her. ‘Act like a Partisan, not a pampered middle-class girl. Do not let this setback prevent you from striking again and again at the enemy.’
The Lines We Leave Behind Page 15