by Tim Pears
‘Come, I want to show you,’ he says. Bowing, he takes Tom deferentially by the elbow. Glancing back, Tom’s eyes meet those of one of the exhausted British officers, who manages a wry smile and rolls his eyes.
As they walk Pero speaks, rapidly, of his wish to hike one day across the Scottish Highlands. ‘To visit the site of my ancestors’ crofts,’ he tells Tom. ‘Before they were turned out. I want to gaze at the architecture of Edinburgh.’ The boy’s eyes are wide and shining, as if the prospect lies before him now. ‘The Athens of the North,’ he says, conclusively. He has taken on his mother’s nostalgia for the home of her birth.
‘It is so good you have come, our Allies, Russia’s allies. We are all so happy you are here, you know.’
‘We are glad to help,’ Tom assures him.
They stop before a line of graffiti. Freshly written in white chalk on a grey wall are words Pero translates: The people shall write their own destiny.
‘This is what we are doing here,’ he says. ‘Our great Slovene poet, Ivan Cankar, wrote those words forty years ago, and we are making his prophecy come true today.’
Tom, impressed but non-plussed at this earnest enthusiasm, is not sure what to say. Pero removes the cap from his head, lays it flat on his palm, gestures to the red star sewn upon it.
‘Of course, the people have to be led by an avant-garde ideologically capable of setting out a government, and of building a truly democratic society.’ Pero takes Tom’s arm as he speaks. ‘I’m sure you know that foreign rulers have referred to the Slovenes as a nation of servants.’
Tom knows, to his regret, no such thing, nor much else at all about the place he’s come to. He thinks of how Napoleon had derided the English as a nation of shopkeepers. Well, that was before Waterloo, was it not? But something from a long-lost history lesson suggests to him that Napoleon was popular in these parts. Had he got down here? Surely not. Across the Alps?
‘Yes, we are servants,’ Pero tells him proudly. ‘We are servants of the people!’
May 18
JACK FARWELL WAS kept waiting yesterday. ‘They tried to fob me off,’ he reiterates, with irate incredulity, at breakfast. He is not a man to stand for such treatment. Having eaten, Jack is about to return to the Partisan Headquarters to pursue his cause there when a Partisan major comes to their house and introduces himself. He is heading for the Fourth Zone himself and has been ordered to accompany them on their journey north; he is to be responsible for their safety. Tom translates as best he can into English.
‘Our safety?’ Jack asks, looking the man up and down. ‘You’re the one sent to keep an eye on us, are you? Well, it’s good to know we’re to leave eventually.’ Although they are of equal rank, Jack barges past him, and out of the house.
Embarrassed by Jack’s rudeness, Tom wishes to apologise. He wonders if this would be classed as insubordination. The major, meanwhile, watches Farwell walk away; his expression remains blank, revealing neither annoyance nor amusement.
‘Please come in, sir,’ Tom says. ‘Let me offer you a cup of tea. Though I’ve an awful feeling we’ve just finished the milk.’
The major turns his attention to Tom: there is a moment’s piercing contemplation, and what Tom experiences as some kind of electric jolt of recognition. The major’s blank face cracks open in a wry smile. Perhaps the recognition was one of humour; that they might be meeting on the same plane of ironic amusement. ‘I should love to,’ he says. ‘And do not worry about the milk. It is an odd British taste anyhow. I take my tea black.’
The major’s name is Jovan Vaskovicˇ. He asks about their journey here. Tom tells it as a series of blunders only enormous luck carried them through.
‘I would like to jump from a plane,’ Jovan says. ‘I doubt if I will ever have the chance.’ His brown eyes are the colour of hazelnut shells that have just turned from green to fawn; the skin crinkles at the edges of his eyes. His face is lined, crooked, well lived-in.
Jovan meets Sid Dixon, sees the radio they are to take with them. ‘My men will protect this machine with their lives,’ he promises Sid.
‘I should like to show you something,’ Jovan tells Tom, who readily agrees. They walk along a gravel road out of Semic, away from the hills into a flattish, uneven landscape. Rows of vegetation ankle- or knee-high in the fields. Copses of birch trees and scrub. Green stalks of bracken, the pale ends of their curled fronds droop modestly before they burgeon wide. Today the air is cooler, and the sky is streaked with dull clouds.
‘The medical supplies we receive from your planes are very good,’ Jovan says. ‘But we do not have enough.’
‘Then we must get you more,’ Tom says.
‘Also, the wrong medicines. Sometimes we think they are sent as a joke.’
‘A joke?’ Tom repeats. ‘Having met them recently, I don’t think the blokes in Stores have a sense of humour.’
Jovan nods, smiling. Again their eyes meet, and there is that feeling, for Tom, of contact at the surface revealing a deeper meeting, too. ‘Last month,’ Jovan says, ‘we received a parachute container full of atrobin.’
‘I should know what that is,’ Tom confesses. ‘My father is a pharmacist. But I’m not sure I do.’
‘Atrobin is an excellent drug,’ Jovan nods, ‘for curing malaria. Very effective. But there’s been little malaria in Slovenia for a few thousand years, I believe.’
‘I’m merely a lieutenant,’ Tom tells Jovan. ‘But I’ll do what I can.’
‘How long have you been doing this work?’ Jovan asks him.
Tom wonders if Jovan is being polite: is it obvious? He feels it must be apparent in everything he says and does. ‘Since nineteen forty. My tutor at Oxford joined intelligence, and asked for me to join him. We interpreted information, and also helped agents preparing to go into occupied Europe. But this is my first time in the field.’
A pair of army trucks pass them in a cloud of white dust. As it settles, quiet returns to the landscape like water recomposing its surface after a disturbance. In the distance across the plain a white wispy column of smoke rises. They reach a small village. An old woman is planting something in a stone basin outside a house. Jovan stops and asks Tom, ‘Which of these houses do you think is the hospital?’
‘The hospital?’ Tom looks around. Did he hear right? ‘Bolnišnica?’
‘I was asked the same thing a week ago,’ Jovan says. ‘Standing where you are now. I did not know the answer.’
A girl walks out of a house, and across a patch of grass. She looks over, takes in the two men, pays them no heed; disappears into another house. ‘Neither do I,’ Tom admits.
Jovan spreads his arms. ‘They all are,’ he says, and resumes walking. ‘Each house is a different ward. This whole village has become a hospital. The inhabitants have moved into the barns.’ He turns and points at a house. ‘That house is the maternity unit. The one over there, I believe, is the bakery. And there the children wash blood out of the bandages, with ash if they have no water. Come.’
They reach a stucco-fronted house. Jovan opens the dark wooden front door. Tom follows, into a short dim hallway. A door opens, and a man steps into the passage wearing an apron like a decorator, covered in paint. Or rather a butcher, Tom realises, for it is blood. With the man comes an aroma of alcohol. He passes them and steps outside. Jovan leads Tom into a room. On rough trestles lie what look like open coffins. Eight of them in the room, the heads of four against each of two opposite walls; just enough room between them for one person to stand. On each boxed-bed lies a wounded man. Some have limbs in splints. All lie silent, stoic. Again the stink of liquor, combined with a faint sweet smell of putrefaction. A girl of fourteen or fifteen comes into the room, and goes to a patient in the corner. Jovan leads the way back out.
‘The men,’ Tom says.
‘They’ve gone into the woods,’ Jovan says. ‘They are with the Partisans. The girls run the village, as you see,’ he says. ‘They have been quicker to adapt than their mothers.’ As th
ey walk back towards Semic, Jovan tells him of a Partisan choir of wounded soldiers, who sing in hospitals, and on the front line.
‘Will this area remain safe?’ Tom asks him.
Jovan shrugs. ‘Nothing is certain. There are Home Guards – collaborators – garrisoned all around this district, Bela Krajina. The Germans prod them into launching counter-offensives. Our people retreat into the hills. The Home Guard take back a slice of the plain. Most of them stick close to their village, as Partisans do if they can. Whether a man joined us or the Home Guard seems to have depended upon whether the priest of his village had socialist leanings or was anti-communist.’
Tom asks him more but Jovan explains that he himself only arrived here in Slovenia two weeks ago. It is a comforting thought that Jovan may be as surprised as Tom by what they encounter. He is a Serb, he says, not from Serbia but from Herzegovina. He’s been in the National Liberation Front from the beginning, in 1941. He wears baggy black corduroy trousers and on his head a black Titovka, the military side-cap adopted by the Partisans. His appearance strikes Tom as a cross between an army soldier and a pirate.
‘And you, Tom?’ Jovan asks.
‘Me?’
‘In England. Mother of Parliaments. Where you got your civil war out of the way three hundred years ago. Do you make yourself busy, Tom, at election times?’
Tom shakes his head. ‘I am not much of a political animal.’
Jovan smiles, with an inquisitive frown. ‘So it is true that Englishmen keep their cards close to their ribs? Do you not have dreams? The desire to build a better world?’
‘My dreams were academic ones. The world I wished to enter already existed. It didn’t occur to me to improve it.’ Tom looks away. He is glad they are walking, he can avoid Jovan’s gaze, for he knows how callow he must appear. I sound like Candide.
‘The good thing is, we are to work together,’ Jovan reassures him.
‘We are here to help your Slovene Partisans attack rail lines.’
‘There is nothing else?’
‘“We have no secrets from our allies”, as Jack says. Major Farwell.’
Jovan nods. ‘Our soldiers need no encouragement,’ he says. ‘They just need weapons and explosives. Give us the arms and matériel and we will do the job.’
When Tom shakes Jovan’s hand, looking into his brown eyes, he feels a throb in his palm: as if, like some Masonic signal, Jovan has imparted it deliberately. Tom realises that Jovan’s angular face is actually, now he has become accustomed to it, younger than he’d thought. He is probably no more than five years older than Tom; it is just that those years have been more fully lived. Jovan is so sure of victory. The confidence is in his handshake. Tom is reluctant to let go, but Jovan loosens his grip, and the two men part.
‘Where the bloody hell have you been?’ Farwell demands. He affects to being always in a huff.
Tom begins to tell him of the village hospital and medical needs. ‘They use schnapps as an anaesthetic,’ he says.
‘Never mind,’ Farwell cuts him off, waving his hand, shaking his head. ‘Don’t want to hear it. Bloody bad luck for a soldier to talk about hospitals. I’ve explained to the Jugs it’s intolerable for us to remain here. Our men are fighting their way up through Italy; we need to cut off the Kraut supply lines. I told them if they’re scared to escort us we’ve got our own compasses, we’ll make our own way. That shook ’em. They’ve agreed to go the day after tomorrow.’
Be glad to see the back of us, Jack, Tom thinks.
Farwell frowns. ‘I’ve agreed to address some bloody meeting tomorrow night. Quid pro quo. Up to the job of interpreting, Freedman?’
May 20
THE COMMANDER AND the commissar of the Slovene Partisans have invited Wilson, Jack Farwell and Tom to dinner with them and their senior staff. In the schoolhouse, the largest room in the village, they sit at a long table on which has been laid a vast spread: platters of sausage, ham, bully beef and potatoes. Most of the food, Wilson says, is from supplies that the Allies dropped by parachute – and the first toast of the evening is a sardonic ‘grace’ by the commissar, thanks for the food to whoever on high delivered it.
The food is washed down with much local wine. The meal is interrupted by a series of toasts, including one from Wilson to the Polish troops who, he announces, have taken the town of Cassino. Cake is served, heavy and thick with fruit.
At one point Jack Farwell rises and, to Tom’s astonishment, instead of requesting that he interpret, proceeds to deliver a brief, fiery speech in Slovene. Had Jack found Pero, ordered him to translate and written it down, phonetically? Together the Allies and the National Liberation Front will defeat the Germans, Jack declares, and fascism will be wiped from this earth forever. He delivers the simple speech with drama and force, and when he sits down he is given a great ovation.
The commander has been in Stajerska – the annexed northern half of Slovenia – recently, and he is keen for them to appreciate how different life there is from this liberated territory in the south. There, German control is total. They will camp in the forest and move at night. They will be hungry. Patrols will hunt them. Jovan, sitting opposite Tom, nods solemnly to him in affirmation of this cheerful message, and Tom feels the threat of it lessened by his friend’s insouciance. Further courses are brought, and toasts raised. Eat, and drink, for tomorrow…
The commissar explains to them, in a most reasonable tone, that the great Red Army will liberate Europe, and if only their capitalist bourgeois allies would do a fraction in the west of what the Russians are doing in the east, fascism would be defeated in a week. Will a second, western front never come? He says this with a resigned shrug of apparent pity for their decadent weakness. Jack Farwell rises red-faced to the bait and says what a blasted shame it was that the Nazis and the Reds had been in bed with each other for so long. Wilson tries to calm him down, but there is no stopping him, and he does so only when the table and chairs are cleared away.
Partisan men and a few women now flood into the hall. Sid Dixon is among them. An accordion is played, and dancing commences, men with revolvers still strapped to their waists, the Partisankas with grenades swinging from their belts. They wear a fine motley of uniforms: German, British, Italian, Slovene Home Guard. Some in their own Yugoslav uniform, showing a Soviet influence on design – high collars, tight across the chest – but cut, surely, from British blankets? When Tom shares this observation, the commissar tells him that the National Liberation Front fought largely barefoot for the first years of the war, and if the Allies really supported them they would drop more shoes and boots.
A little later Jovan quietly explains to Tom that Yugoslav village youth – who made up most of the Partisans – would naturally go barefoot all summer; that it was only their officers from the city who presumed this natural state to be a deprivation. Of course, he added, it became a deprivation in winter. Then the young soldiers suffered frostbite, gangrene, the amputation of toes.
‘From my village,’ Jovan tells him, ‘before the war, women walked to Dubrovnik in their rough canvas sandals. At a point outside the city they put on their good pair of shoes, and placed the old sandals in holes in the stone walls by the roadside, to collect on the way home.’
The Slovenes dance in squares and circles, interchanging partners, swinging each other around. The male and female soldiers perspire freely in their uniforms, their sweat smells of meat and liquor. Rousing songs are sung, loudly. The atmosphere, between tough young men and women, is chaste, childishly friendly. You might expect war to bring about a loosening of the restraints upon sexual behaviour; Tom had seen enough of the soldiers’ wives and sweethearts he’d worked with in intelligence back home, and was glad now to be without one himself. But here, Jovan informs him, sex in the mixed Partisan army has been prohibited for the duration, on pain of death. If a female Partisan becomes pregnant, she and the man involved are summarily shot.
Farwell, Wilson and the senior Partisan officers, including Jovan,
slip away. Tom stays, leaning against the wood-planked wall. As he has leaned against others, many times, in England. He is too lanky, has two left feet, and if he danced with a perfumed girl in his sweaty grip he invariably fell out of step with the tune. It was better to hold up the wall, to nurse a warm beer through the evening. But here it seems the few girls expect nothing, and the men dance with each other. Surrendering to an impetuous burst of drunken enthusiasm, Tom throws himself in to the dancing. He jumps and claps and yells a ‘Hey!’ when the Slovenes do. He swings a hefty Partisanka round, loses his balance, the walls reel and the floorboards rise up to greet him. Men pick him up, laughing their approval, patting him on the back. He dances more, arms interlocked on the shoulders of men on either side. It doesn’t matter if he fouls up but mostly he gets it spot on, for the choreography is ingeniously simple: up and down, or side to side. He feels like one of the rugby crowd at college, drunken louts he despised, and understands all of a sudden what fun they were having.
Later on, Sid Dixon takes up the accordion from which he coaxes a wheezy tune, to which he teaches the Slovenes ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’. As Sid sings each verse, thirty Partisans wait, with mounting excitement, for the chorus, whereupon they launch themselves into as lively a performance of the ridiculous dance as can ever have been seen in England. Knees up, knees up, never get the breeze up, Knees up Mother Brown. Tom wishes they had a camera to record it for a Pathé newsreel.
Sid moves on to the ‘Okey Cokey’, and he and Tom show their hosts how to put their left hand in, their left hand out. The Slovenes mimic instantly. In out, in out, shake it all about. And when Sid Dixon injects a variation featuring a goose-stepping Hitler – his finger suggesting a moustache, a sieg-heiling outstretched arm – it seems to Tom that whatever might lie ahead, they have already done a fair bit for Anglo-Yugoslav relations.