The Lines We Leave Behind

by Graham, Eliza

  21

  Esma and Naida are becoming more confident with me. ‘Yes, yes,’ they say, in English, when I gently urge them to extend their vocabulary. ‘But now, with you, we want to talk in our own language.’

  And talk they do, about their home in Bosnia. We sit out in the small paved area behind the hall and smoke. They tell me about the neighbours who were Serbian Orthodox but worked alongside them at harvest time, whose christenings and weddings they attended. ‘All gone.’ Esma says it softly. ‘We were one village, but not now.’

  ‘And our cousins elsewhere in Bosnia had Croatian friends too,’ her sister adds. She looks at me directly. ‘You fought with the Partisans. Your comrades were from all over Yugoslavia?’

  ‘Croats, Serbs, some mixtures.’ I remember Ana with a pang. ‘I even had a friend with one Chetnik and one Partisan son.’

  The women’s eyes narrow at the mention of the Chetniks. ‘Some of the Serb militias shout about being descendants of Chetniks,’ Naida tells me. ‘Boasting that they do what they do to honour their Chetnik fathers and grandfathers, for the glory of Serbia.’

  ‘Then they’re fools.’

  ‘Dangerous fools,’ Esma says very quietly. I think of the gynaecological operation she has been booked in for. I haven’t asked questions but they have told me that they and their children were locked in a house that a Bosnian Serb unit set on fire. The sisters tried to shield the children, receiving serious burns to various parts of their own bodies. Eventually they managed to break out of a downstairs window. I do not know whether Esma and Naida were raped before or after the fire, but have gathered that a group of men was involved. The sisters tell me that the doctors treating them here in London are kind.

  Thinking about doctors makes me think of Ana again.

  ‘My friend’s Chetnik son risked his life for us,’ I say. ‘And they were both shot at the end of the war, even though she had saved many Partisan lives during the fighting.’

  The two of them say nothing, they don’t need to.

  ‘We really should carry on with your English.’ I force myself to put away the past and concentrate on the modern vocabulary that might help two young women with children find work in London. I have to do some research myself, as fax machines and word processors are not part of my everyday vocabulary, though I have hopes of acquainting myself with the latter.

  ‘You have children, Maud?’ Esma asks me as we are packing up the chairs and tables when the session is over.

  ‘I . . . There’s a son.’ I realise it’s a strange way of putting it. ‘I, err, haven’t seen him for a while.’

  They nod without commenting but their faces are studies in incomprehension. There is no civil war in England, no imprisonment of males. Why would a mother not be in regular contact with her son, her only child?

  ‘I would like to see him again,’ I go on. ‘In fact, I’m trying to find him.’

  Am I? Have I actually decided this? What exactly have I done to further this intention? For the last half-century I have let myself remain the passive victim of my former husband. While at times the agent must drift, unremarked on the waves around him or her, lethargy must be avoided. Watchfulness, alertness, rather than passivity, are essential . . .

  When I’m back in my bungalow I look again at the copy of David’s birth certificate, which is all the information I have. I barely know where to begin my search. My solicitor now is a young woman who inherited me. Most of my knowledge of the law as applied to families, missing children, wills and trusts is drawn from Dickens and may not be much help.

  The firm’s telephone number is on top of the headed paper they use each time they write to me. I haven’t used the telephone much. Maureen rings me once a week or so, as a friend, rather than as a professional. I’d probably feel more comfortable setting up a wireless set and sending a signal. The thought of doing this in the bungalow makes me smile briefly. But using Morse code, making the signal so tight and concise, would be very much easier than telephoning. I’ll write to my lawyer – Claire Erskine, her name is – instead.

  I know we haven’t met personally, but I have handled your affairs for a few years now and am delighted to help you with this matter. We usually refer our clients to a firm of private investigators [her answer comes]. We have found them reliable and trustworthy. Would you like me to pass on details of what we know of your son to them?

  The reply is far less lawyerly than I anticipated. I could make a trip up to Miss Erskine’s firm. If I can manage a journey to Paddington, Lincoln’s Inn Fields should be within my capabilities.

  Esma and Naida nod approvingly when I tell them. ‘And when you meet your son we will help you buy new clothes and do your hair,’ they tell me.

  I put a hand to my bob.

  ‘You want to look your best for your son, no?’

  I remember reading how the women of Sarajevo would risk snipers to visit a hairdresser, would somehow procure cosmetics even in the worst days of the siege. Looking your best is a way of showing the world that you cannot be defeated.

  I nod. ‘We’ll go to Bond Street.’ My mother always rated Bond Street for new outfits.

  Esma looks startled. ‘Bond Street cost a lot.’

  ‘That’s all right.’ We spend an afternoon the following week in what seems like every clothes retailer between Oxford Circus and Selfridge’s. I’m glad we don’t go any farther west of that, towards Tyburn.

  We buy what my mother would call a ‘Best’: a summer suit in silk and linen for meeting David and a Nearly-the-Best for the solicitor in a heavier fabric, plus long-sleeved shirts in silk, linen and cotton variously, and a pair of jeans, which I imagined would be too young for me but am told firmly are fine. They insist on adding a silk scarf to my purchase that would probably cost the same as a week’s family shop for them all.

  I want to buy the two women something for themselves to thank them. After a cup of tea and further arguments they allow me to buy clothes for their children and a few saucepans for their kitchen in John Lewis. Then Naida steers me into a beauty salon not far from the office where I was once interviewed for my wartime job. It’s run by a Bosnian woman. She says something quick-fire in a low voice that I can’t pick up. I spend an hour being plucked and manicured. When the bill is run up at the till it seems less than I expected.

  ‘We took off a discount. For them.’ She nods towards my two minders, who smile slightly. ‘They say you have helped them.’

  ‘I wrote a few letters and made a few calls, that’s all.’

  ‘And you have rewritten their CVs so they can apply for jobs. And now they speak better English.’

  ‘They’re not bad.’

  She hands back my credit card. ‘You are a nice lady, very honest and polite. But you should not go offering to pay more than you need.’

  Esma hails a taxi for me. ‘Don’t go on the train with all those bags; they will surely rob you.’ It’s as though I’m planning to take a night train through mountains frequented by brigands.

  The drive back takes a long time because of the traffic, but it’s the first time I’ve seen some of these parts of south London in years and I like staring at the new tower blocks and road junctions, trying to recall what was here before the war.

  Claire Erskine, my solicitor, is younger than I anticipated. In my day there weren’t many female lawyers. Not that I knew many solicitors at all.

  She shows me into a meeting room, walls decorated with watercolours of places that could be anywhere. The offices are a bit of a disappointment compared with their old stone exteriors. I suppose I was hoping for something more Dickensian. Perhaps there was war damage.

  She opens a faded grey cardboard file. ‘Your legal story with us, if you don’t mind me calling it that, starts at the time of your wedding to Robert Havers, when your father redrafted his will. When you were sectioned, or as they called it then . . .’ She swallows, obviously not liking the old typed words on the paper in front of her.

  ‘Certif
ied mad,’ I interject.

  ‘. . . your father took advice about the legal situation. He’d given you some money on your marriage, you may remember, obviously intending you to benefit from their estate when they’d both died. My predecessors advised another redraft of the will and the setting up of a trust, with your parents as trustees, plus a lawyer at this firm.’

  ‘What happened when both my parents died?’

  ‘The trust was set up so it could continue, with this firm appointing successor trustees. You’ll recall us writing to you from time to time, enclosing a valuation of the assets?’

  I blush. I didn’t respond to these letters once I was considered capable of receiving my own post and they arrived at the various institutions I inhabited. I start to explain the lethargy besetting me, but Claire smiles. ‘It wasn’t a problem for us. But I am so glad you want to show more of an interest in what’s yours.’ A pause. ‘Everything that’s yours.’ Another pause. ‘You’ve bought your bungalow, of course, giving you security. But there’s enough money left for you to do whatever you’d like.’ She looks at my suit.

  ‘I was encouraged to invest in my appearance.’

  She smiles. Claire herself is dressed impeccably. She takes out some pages from the file. ‘I’ll make copies of these latest quotations. And you might like to think about whether you need your trust to continue. You’re an adult of fit mind. Just as your parents anticipated you would be again.’

  I feel a warm glow. They knew me, that I was not mad.

  ‘Before we move on to the main reason for your visit, I must just hand over this.’ She pulls an envelope out of a file. It’s brown, official-looking. From this she extracts a smaller envelope. Pale blue. The address on it is written in a woman’s hand, I think. It reminds me of my mother’s.

  ‘It arrived here just this week.’ She hands it to me.

  The intended recipient is simply ‘Miss Amber’. It is addressed to the War Office, Whitehall, London, England. It has been stamped with a foreign office mark and various other franks that I can’t read.

  I turn the envelope over and, sure enough, there’s a return name and address on it.

  It can’t be. I blink and look again. Ana. ‘She never came back. I thought she’d died.’

  ‘Not only is she alive, but very tenacious to have thought of a way of getting in touch with you.’ Claire looks at her watch. ‘I have a three-o’clock, unfortunately.’ Her voice is down to earth. ‘You’ll be wanting your son’s address?’

  ‘He has made contact with you?’

  Claire shakes her head. ‘But your private investigator reported back to me last week.’

  ‘They found him?’

  ‘Yes.’ A simple, short monosyllable.

  ‘Did the investigator talk to him?’

  ‘No. That’s not within their brief. But I have a full name and an address in Durham. You can write to him.’

  ‘Will he—?’ There’s something in my throat.

  ‘I can’t answer that question for you,’ Claire says gently. ‘But as one person, one mother, actually, to another,’ she glances at a small photograph on her bookcase of a toddler I missed before, ‘what do you have to lose? If David doesn’t want to see you, you’re in the same position as you are now. And if he does . . .’

  If David doesn’t want to see me I’m actually in a worse position. At the moment I inhabit a misty borderland where hope mingles with longing, unilluminated by that harsh little word, no. My son has not shown any interest in seeing me for all these years; why should that situation change?

  Claire has a taxi called for me. Perhaps I look shaken.

  But I compose myself enough to insist on stopping at Waterloo. I sit on the train with my letter in my hand. I’ve never seen Ana’s writing before. Between Vauxhall and Clapham Junction I gaze out at the concrete buildings and remaining redbrick terraces, factories and shops, but I’m seeing a landscape of mountains and rocks, waterfalls, harsh in the early spring light, but softening by the day.

  I start to read.

  22

  April 1990

  My dear friend Amber,

  I do not even know your real name, or where you live. When I left you, you were sitting among the blossom. I had to rush north to treat my boy, Miko.

  I thought I would see you again before you left for England. I wonder if you have thought of me since then?

  Miko’s Chetniks never knew I’d been a Partisan, I kept that to myself, telling them only I was a doctor. I treated Miko. But then they insisted I stay with them. The Ustaše were sniffing around and I didn’t want to do anything that would draw attention to me. Despite all my efforts to slip away once Miko was better, I found myself on the march north to Bleiburg in southern Austria at the end of the war, armed Allied soldiers ahead of me, and vengeful supporters of Tito behind me. In Austria I pleaded with the British to allow us to surrender to them.

  I explained who I was, whom I’d fought with. Miko told them he had helped Allied combatants escape. He even showed them a note that an American airman wrote, confirming that Miko had assisted him. The officers left the room and we heard them talking. The younger one wanted to hold us in Bleiburg while they checked our details, but his companion overruled him.

  So back we went, trudging east over the Slovenian border along the road to Maribor, or Marburg, as the Germans called it, guns to our backs, spat at by the very people I had fought for. To the south of Maribor there were tank traps. Convenient. They tied our hands behind us and made us kneel at the edge of these huge ditches. Miko pleaded for me one last time. He gave them names of battles where I had treated wounded comrades. We did not mention Branko because we had already agreed that it would be dangerous for him. Miko and Branko had chosen different paths, but they still loved one another.

  I overheard the guards talking about the war and discovered that one of them had a cousin who’d been wounded two years earlier, when our Partisan unit had retreated for a hundred miles, bearing our casualties on stretchers while under fire. I called out to him and persuaded him to listen to my story. This guard cut the wire from my hands and told me to run for my life. I pleaded for Miko to be spared in my place. For a second or so I thought I had succeeded. But his officer shook his head and told me to say goodbye to my boy. Our eyes met and I turned my head before they could fire the bullet. I heard the thump as my son’s body toppled into the ditch.

  I do not know where I spent that night or the next. I found myself heading south-southeast, towards my old log cabin. I spent six months there, at first living off the tins stored behind the fireplace, and when these ran out I bought food from that old woman who’d sold us provisions in the March of 1944. I’d hidden money in the cabin just before the Germans invaded and checked it was still there when you and I spent the night there. When it ran out I treated the locals in return for food. But the local commissariat found out about me and I knew I would not be safe there.

  I headed east to Zagreb, where I had lived with my family before the war. Our apartment had been taken over, but our former maid took me in. I shared her room for four months before Branko found me. He had believed me executed, but rumours of a female doctor who’d survived Maribor had reached him. Even his passion for Tito and the party was not great enough to dampen my elder son’s wish to look after me.

  Branko did as well in the peace as he had in the war. Tito thought highly of him, and rightly too, he is a diligent and clever man. By the early 1950s Branko managed to rehabilitate me and I worked again as a doctor. He came to London on government business more than once, each time asking British ministers about you. You seemed to have vanished.

  I retired to our holiday home on the Dalmatian coast in the late sixties. Tito died in 1980 and after that things were not the same for Branko. He saw the resurrection of a militant Serbian faction that would resist any signs of the federation breaking up. He smelled war, in short. He resigned his government job and started a small business near me.

  And as you�
��ll know, war came again to Yugoslavia, Amber. I will not waste time and energy writing about these terrible years. They are rebuilding Dubrovnik now and I certainly hope I never have to see another bombed city.

  On a happier note, I am a grandmother four times over. Branko’s eldest boy bears his uncle Miko’s name.

  I hope my letter will reach you and that you will be able to write back to me at this address. Are you married? Do you have children and grandchildren?

  Do not leave it too long, my friend. I am old.

  Ana

  23

  I retreat into myself after I read Ana’s letter. For days I don’t leave the bungalow. I tell Naida and Esma I’m ill.

  A week after I ring them, they knock on my door, carrying a bottle of slivovitz and some flowers. Naida is through the door before I can open my mouth, followed by Esma and the smallest of her children in a small pushchair. Esma plonks the toddler outside in my little garden, telling him fiercely that if he touches anything apart from the grass he will suffer terrible consequences.

  ‘Sit down.’ Naida points at the kitchen table. She and Esma tidy my kitchen and make a pot of strong coffee before I can protest.

  ‘You’re not ill, Maud. Only in here.’ Esma points at her heart. ‘What is it?’

  I can’t think of how to explain, so I pass them Ana’s letter. They read in silence. When they finish, they nod. ‘Bad times for Yugoslavia,’ Naida says. ‘And for your friend’s son. But at least she has lived a long life with her other son and she has had her work.’

  ‘That’s true,’ I say. ‘But all those wasted years when I could have seen her.’ If I hadn’t been locked up, I could have flown to the Dalmatian coast to spend time with Ana in her holiday house. Perhaps I could even have visited our own family house, long abandoned, on Šipan Island near Dubrovnik.

  Ana’s letter has reassured me that I haven’t imagined my time in Yugoslavia during the war, something that has sometimes worried me. It was real. The months we spent working to return Allied servicemen really happened. Stimmer, Miko, the murder of Naomi, all these things were facts. The burning plane was real, too, not just an image a damaged mind had thrown up at me.