One Day in May

by Catherine Alliott

  Gradually I got to know my way around, and one or two of the villages became familiar. I’d smile or attempt to greet the women who slipped silently out of the houses in the dark to take our food, but got nothing in response. Most places were denuded of young men: just women, children and old people. All fighting? I asked Brett one day, who’d recovered enough to pack for us again in the warehouse. ‘Not all,’ he said shortly, and I knew then they’d been rounded up. Thereafter I unloaded the food parcels in silence, the children falling on the tins of milk and sometimes bars of chocolate, the mothers retrieving it all with blank expressions.

  I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew what this was about. All this heat and dust and fear and lack of sleep, the bump and grind of someone else’s war: it was about Dominic, whom I loved heart and soul, and needed to expunge from both. And yes, it helped. But it was about being good, too. A good girl. So all for me, this effort? Perhaps. But it seems to me charity work of any denomination can’t withstand too much scrutiny.

  And I wouldn’t want you to think it was all hard slog either. There were days when I could sit on the Dalmatian coast and sun myself with my new friends, as, clasping our hands around our knees, sleeves rolled up, we rested our weary backs and gazed out to sea. There were days too, in the house in the hillside, when life got immeasurably lighter. Ibby’s husband, Alam, returned from the mountains, and the joy, the relief – the love – that exploded in that little house is something I’ll never forget. The old lady, her face wreathed in smiles I didn’t know she possessed, took her son’s head in her hand and kissed it hard. Mona jumped up and down shrieking and clapping. Ibby, by now hugely pregnant, laughed with joy, but perhaps the most affecting was Alam’s father, who sat down and wept: his only son, back from the war, safe.

  He’d been captured by Chetchkins, we gathered over a reunion supper in which I was included, but mercifully had escaped with a few others. His sunken eyes and gaunt frame bore testament to his ordeal, and he looked nothing like the man in the picture in my bedroom. That night we ate ambrosial cured ham running with yellow fat clearly saved for this occasion, drank very dark wine, soaked creamy cheese up with rough bread and rejoiced. Out of the horror of war, like scattered moondust, special moments.

  Alam spoke a little broken English and I gathered my adopted family were refugees. They were not from around here, not from this town, and one or two things fell into place. Like the fact that they kept to themselves and seemed to know no one. They’d been driven from their home in Kosovo two years ago, all of their immediate family, uncles, cousins, killed. This, they seemed to accept with equanimity, considering themselves the lucky ones. I was later to learn that when they arrived here, they changed their name, from I know not what, to Mastlova, a local one. To do their bit for the war effort they’d taken me in, as if it wasn’t enough that Alam had been fighting in the mountains for weeks on end. But fear was a powerful motivator, and behind most decisions in those days.

  The party went on late into the evening, and the following morning, Mona was late for school. I watched her running off down the road, breaking into a skip, which I’d never seen her do.

  ‘Tata se vratio s planine!’ she cried to a friend, waiting for her on the corner, slightly cross at being kept waiting. ‘Daddy’s back from the mountains!’ A shout of joy went up from her friend; a hug, a dance in the dusty street: the human face of war.

  My own family were reassured by my domestic situation. In letters I was able to gloss over the fact that I fumbled my way through the mountains at night in a blind lorry, and give them snippets of domestic life instead. Mum even sent a doll for Mona and linen for the baby when it came, which the old lady pored over with delight. Kit, I told them, was working closely with an army chaplain in another depot, which I knew to be true. I didn’t mention he was in Sarajevo, which the Serbs now had in a stranglehold, so that he was effectively incarcerated.

  I’d suspected my silent family were kindly but frightened, but only after Alam returned did my relationship with them change completely. They asked me to stay for meals, which made a pleasant change from tins of beans on the warehouse floor, and I’d help Ibby prepare them. Ibby was only a few years older than me and most evenings, before I went out on convoy, we’d sit in the yard together shelling peas, the dogs at our feet, and I taught her a bit of English. She in turn taught me Croatian, laughing at my accent, and in a garbled fashion and with lots of sign language, she told me of the life she’d had before the war, as a teacher in Kosovo. When they’d fled they’d been accepted here in Heronisque only because they were Catholic – Croatia being a fiercely Roman Catholic country – and because Ibby’s grandfather, now dead, had been a priest. One or two notaries in the town had heard of him, remembered his name, and it had proved to be their salvation. Pictures of him in his robes, long grey hair, were all over the house, I realized, under crucifixes, strung with rosary beads, and it was his name the family had taken.

  We’d sit in the evening sun and watch Mona play with the chickens, whilst the men played a board game of some kind behind us, chequers I think, not backgammon, a tiny glass of something strong apiece, and as the old lady slept bolt upright inside on her wooden settle. At length Ibby would get to her feet, one hand on her swollen belly, another in the small of her back, and together we’d go and get supper.

  And then one night, I came back from a convoy that had taken us to the ancient town of Mostar, closer to the front lines, horribly shelled, almost parallel with Serb trenches. The crack of gunfire had been even closer. I was very tired and my nerves were shot because daylight had been breaking towards the end. When I finally left the warehouse and got back to the house it was empty.

  The door to the room where the old couple slept downstairs was wide open, and when I ran up to Alam and Ibby’s room, which Mona shared, it too was deserted.

  I fled into town, to raise someone, anyone, who, although the Mastlovas kept to themselves as refugees, they might know. But it was four in the morning and my banging and hollering fell on deaf ears. Finally, a woman appeared at a doorway in a shawl. She recognized me. Exclaimed. Came out and gripped my wrist. She tried to explain through the language barrier, her words coming fast like gunfire, arching her hand high over her stomach.

  ‘Ibby? The baby?’

  She nodded, fearful: then began to wail, turning her face to the sky, shaking her hands in the air. Yes, the baby.

  ‘What? What?’ I cried.

  At my voice her teenage son appeared behind her in the doorway, bleary-eyed. The woman turned to him and spoke rapidly. His face darkened; he knew this story. He turned to me. She was taken to hospital, he explained in broken English, the baby was coming, they borrowed a car. They all went, all the family, to Dubrovnik hospital. But on the road, on the way, the car was shelled.

  ‘Oh God.’ I sat down in the dust. ‘All dead?’

  ‘Yes, except the young mother. She survived and they got her to hospital, I think. I don’t know.’ He shrugged; looked wretched. The woman began to wail again, pray and cross herself as I sat there, stunned in the dust.

  Moments later I was up and running to the warehouse, stumbling as I went. Alam, his parents, Mona – all gone. Oh, Ibby! I had to stop and clutch my stomach. Take a few moments. Finally I reached the quay, and between sobs, told Pablo, the Italian boy, who was still there, what had happened. I needed a Bedford, and I needed him to come too, right now. He hesitated. The lorries were empty from the night’s convoy, but still, we shouldn’t. In a few hours’ time they’d need to be loaded again. Tears streamed down my face as I begged him, and in another moment he was sitting beside me in the nearest one as I started the engine.

  I drove as I’d never driven before down that baked, potholed road towards Dubrovnik, a long plume of dust spreading out behind us over the fields like a smokescreen. ‘Aide Humanitaire’ on the side got us through the checkpoint outside town, the red crosses doing their work within the city too. At the hospital, in the busy main street, Pabl
o sat outside in case the lorry was stolen, whilst I ran in.

  Other atrocities were never far away: a residential area had been hit in the same shelling that had taken out the Mastlovas’ car, and inside, a mass of terrified relatives swarmed, demanding news of loved ones, hospital staff struggling to put up lists of the injured. I pushed through the mêlée and, on a hunch, made for the stairs. People were sitting on the floor the entire length of the corridor, some bandaged and sick, some waiting for treatment, some for news. I caught hold of a harassed-looking nurse. Maternity? Third floor, I was told.

  As I staggered up the staircase I wondered if Ibby knew, had been told, that her husband and child… Oh, Mona! In my mind I saw her running to meet her young friend on the corner, satchel swinging. Had to stop on the stairs to steady myself. Then I stifled a sob and stumbled on.

  The news I was given outside the delivery room was bad. Ibby had died from her wounds as she’d gone into labour. And the child? The child had been delivered by Caesarean section. The baby was weak, but alive.

  I don’t remember a great deal about what happened next, but I do remember the confusion. The floor seemed to tilt from under me, and as I slid backwards, I felt the eyes of the rows of people sitting on the floor rise above me, gaze down. I imagine I was taken somewhere. I don’t know where. I don’t know how long I was out for either, but when I came round, someone was leaning over me, the same doctor who’d given me the news about Ibby: very young, in a bloodstained white coat.

  ‘Was the baby a boy or a girl?’ I asked.

  A boy.

  ‘And was he OK? Was he going to live?’

  Yes, he was.

  The doctor went to sit down beside me a moment, but a shout went up outside in the corridor. The door flew open. A nurse spoke rapidly, clearly in distress. The doctor hurried from the room. I turned to the woman beside me in the next bed: a school had been shelled, I gathered, close by; they were bringing the injured in now. Kindergarten age. More horror, more chaos and confusion. I just wanted it all to go away. To go away. I shut my eyes.

  Sometime later I left the hospital: stumbled numbly down the corridor, down the stairs and away. I didn’t expect Pablo still to be there and he wasn’t but miraculously he’d alerted another young driver, who was revving nervously in the street. One look at my face told him I’d had terrible news, but he didn’t ask more than was strictly necessary. No one did in those days. He drove me back to Heronisque in silence, although at one point, I had to tell him to stop the lorry so I could throw up by the roadside.

  The shock rendered me speechless for two days. During those days I stayed inside the Mastlovas’ house and saw no one, telling Pablo to tell the others I’d be back at the warehouse when I was able. We all needed to do that from time to time, so I knew I could. I sat in that cold empty house, in the grandmother’s upright wooden settle, by the fire, which I didn’t have the energy to light, the dogs around my feet, feeling numb and empty. On the opposite wall, the priest, Ibby’s grandfather, gazed back. It seemed to me his eyes never left me.

  Two days later, Brett, who’d been on a week-long convoy all the way over the other side of the Balkans to Masticstan, came to the house. More savvy than Pablo, he persuaded me to talk. Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t stop crying, either. The family Brett was living with had a car, a beaten-up old Peugeot, and when I’d recovered sufficiently, Brett and I went back to the hospital.

  The baby had been taken to an orphanage, we were told by a nurse. It was housed in a convent, and operated out of a bombed castle on the outskirts of the city. Brett knew it. It was run by nuns he told me, strictly Catholic, and by all accounts the best amongst many in the city. The least grim, at any rate. I asked him to take me there.

  In some godforsaken wasteland on the edge of town, towering grey crenulated walls rose up from a sea of bricks and rubble. We banged on the huge studded door until finally it was opened. A young nun in a blue habit and starched headdress stood there, stony-faced. I explained. A baby had been brought here, another victim of the atrocities; his mother, father, sister, grandparents, all dead. Could we see him? Such stories were commonplace in this city. She crossed herself and said a silent prayer. Then she turned and led us down a corridor.

  We followed her down the echoing stone passage, doors either side flung wide. Inside were rows and rows of cots with tiny babies, then a room full of older children, who, in a gentler age might just have been starting school or nursery, but who were also in cots. Their eyes followed us, dull and listless as we passed. In a smaller room, a few newborns lay asleep in makeshift cribs, drawers from chests, I realized. The baby I was looking for was amongst them, I was told. The one on the end: dark hair, swaddled.

  A different sister appeared, elderly, no English, in a blue habit, a huge bunch of keys on a chain around her waist. We hadn’t spelled it out to the first nun for fear of not getting in, but she was given to understand, through Brett’s minimal Croatian, why exactly we were here. She was wary, doubtful. Many foreigners wanted these children: couples from Florida sending emissaries waving cash, particularly the tiny babies. They had to be very careful. No, it wasn’t possible. She disappeared and we were shown out.

  The following week, we were back: this time with the full weight of the UN and its aid agency behind us. The same sister appeared and in as many moments as she’d efficiently dispatched us last time, this time gave us her consent. The Foreign Office, it transpired, had already been in touch. Papers had been sent, permission had been given, red tape miraculously severed. At that time, in the chaos of civil war, in the former Yugoslavia, anything could be obtained with money, influence and papers, and I had all three. I was deemed the official adoptive parent and Seffen – as I knew Ibby intended to call a boy – left the orphanage in my arms. We returned to England three weeks later.

  I’d been almost eight months in Bosnia, or Croatia, or Herzegovina, or whatever you wanted to call the Balkans, depending on your creed, your culture, your background, which, apparently, was what the fuss was all about. I’d experienced first-hand the terror of living in a war zone: I’d lived with people who’d feared for their lives and lost them, and I’d feared for my own at times. I’d seen what hatred can do to a beautiful country, brought to its knees by its own people, but I’d felt such love and kindness too, such as I don’t think I ever felt again. Seen horror, but humanity too. Kit, I’m sure, saw more. We never discussed it. Kit lasted longer than me: he didn’t return to England until the war ended the following year, in 1995. He’d been working out of an aid station in Sarajevo with a chaplain from the Italian forces, which regularly came under heavy artillery fire. He was lucky to escape with his life. Brett was not so lucky. Ten days after I left, he was killed on a convoy to Bechistanova, his Bedford lorry shelled and engulfed in flames. Pablo, Gretel and the others survived, although I never heard from them again.

  When he returned home, Kit, who’d been working under the aegis of the Catholic Church in Sarajevo, ditched his place to read Business Studies at Durham, and enrolled instead at Wycliffe Hall Bible College in Oxford to read Theology. Thereafter, he became a priest. He came back from the Balkans with God, and I came back with a baby. The spoils of war, you might say.

  10

  As I leaned on the warm bonnet of my car outside Thame station fifteen years later, waiting for Seffen to emerge with Laura’s daughters, Biba and Daisy, it struck me how, all things considered, the years had been kind to us. To Seffy and me. The first had been tricky admittedly. Mum had been beside herself with anxiety, convinced I’d ‘wrecked my life’, but Dad, after the initial shock, had understood. Kit obviously did, and so too did Laura, because coincidentally, she was about to have a baby. After the shock of discovering she was pregnant by her boyfriend, who was not yet divorced, she then declared herself the happiest girl alive when Hugh, the happiest man, promptly proposed, pending his decree absolute from Carla. So two babies landed unexpectedly in the Carrington family lap that year, an
d as even my mother admitted later with a sigh as she fussed over them in their cots, what, in a way, could be nicer?

  I watched them now, coming through the station concourse together, arguing hotly, which wasn’t unusual. Both tall and slender, Biba blonde and Seffy dark with beautiful, leaf-shaped eyes: two cousins brought up together from the year dot, whilst Daisy, fair and dreamy, lagged behind.

  ‘Hi, Hattie.’ Biba kissed me abstractedly, her cheeks pink. ‘Seffy says the girls at my school are known as the Slutty Stevens – how gross is that? Why are boys so vile? Is it because they’re basically immature and scared of us?’

  ‘Undoubtedly,’ I agreed, kissing my son. ‘Hi, darling.’

  ‘Mum, all I said, right, was that St Steven’s girls are generally messy, using slutty in its true literal sense and not its more modern usage to imply a woman of loose morals, which obviously would be an outrageous slur on their character. What’s wrong with that?’ His eyes widened in mock outrage as Biba went to thump him. He caught her flailing wrists, laughing.

  ‘Ooh, hey,’ he soothed, ‘relax. You’re all stirred up.’

  ‘You are soo horrible!’

  ‘Just breathe,’ he commanded, ‘breathe.’

  I ignored them and greeted Daisy.

  ‘Hello, darling.’

  ‘Hi, Hattie. Have you seen my girls?’

  ‘Not recently, but the last time I looked they seemed in fine fettle. I’m afraid chickens aren’t really my thing, though, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.’