by Tim Pears
Sid Dixon nudges Tom. ‘Sir.’ He looks over. Marija is arguing furiously with Jovan for the right to take her LMG down the hill. Jovan tells her it is out of the question. Stipe is trying to calm her down. Marko is nodding towards Dixon and Tom, and muttering at Jovan: were it not for the Englishmen and their precious radio the others would be at liberty to rush down the hill and mete out revenge. Tom turns away.
They melt back into the woods. The Partisans’ resentment, that they are no more than chaperones, forbidden to fight, is palpable in their bad tempers. They speak snappishly, and look away. They meet with the survivors of the unit, hand over the supplies they’d been guarding for them. Jovan’s odred stand back, at a distance expressive of their shame. When it is time to part, they say nothing.
‘I can see how they feel, sir,’ Sid Dixon tells Tom, as they walk, east, back into the Pohorje, and south. ‘I feel it too. What do they think of us?’
‘I know,’ Tom agrees. ‘I don’t like it any more than you do, Dixon.’
The afternoon is hot. They walk through the day, up and down, through woods and pasture. Jovan does not let them stop but keeps them marching in the cool of the evening and into the night, exhausting his soldiers’ anger, forcing it out of them through their muscles, their endless footsteps.
When at last Jovan lets them stop, in a copse of oak trees, they do not eat but sink to the ground and fall asleep where they lie.
The Sixth Unit
July 15
TOM WAKES MID-MORNING. Stipe is building a cooking fire. Jovan is shaving. He tells Tom that Pero and Franjo have gone to find food. The others are still sleeping.
‘I could eat a horse,’ Tom says. ‘Which, come to think about it, is the only animal we haven’t eaten here.’ He follows Jovan’s lead, shaving without a mirror, by feel alone.
Pero returns with a bag of potatoes on his shoulder. Franjo carries two chickens, their feet tied together. As they stand there, and Pero tells Jovan of the peasant who haggled with him over the price they should pay, Tom notices blood on the beaks of the dead chickens, and their closed eyes. Stipe takes the potatoes, places them in the embers of the fire. Franjo plucks one of the chickens. Francika stirs, and within moments is plucking the other.
After breakfast they lie on the ground, replete and still. The silence is eventually broken by Francika. ‘We understand,’ she tells Jovan. ‘We have to do what we have been assigned to do.’ She speaks on the others’ behalf, to Jovan, but she is also addressing them.
‘For three years, since the summer of ’forty-one,’ Jovan tells them, ‘we have fought this guerrilla war. Never attacking the enemy head on but always at the flank or the rear, and then retreating into the woods and hills. The enemy has chased us but we have lost them. They have gathered fifty thousand men – SS, Hungarians, Italians, Bulgarians, Chetniks – as they did last year in the mountains of Montenegro, and surrounded us with a ring of steel. They carried orders to kill every one of us, down to the last man. But we broke out, and made our way back to Bosnia.’
‘Ah, Tito is the greatest general since Napoleon,’ says Stipe.
‘Napoleon,’ says Marko. ‘Our dear Napoleon.’ He shakes his head. He seems to be remembering an old friend, with great affection. ‘He made Ljubljana the capital of the Illyrian Provinces,’ he tells Tom.
‘You are wrong, Stipe,’ Pero says excitedly. ‘Tito is the greatest general since Alexander the Great.’
‘He must be a Slovene,’ Marko suggests.
‘He’s a Croat,’ Marija tells him.
‘Then his mother must be a Slovene,’ Marko rejoins. This conjecture appears to be acceptable to all.
‘On the trek from Montenegro,’ Jovan resumes, ‘we had nothing to eat but roots and horsemeat. We have made retreat into a glorious military achievement. And with every successful retreat the Germans have become more angry, and have sent more divisions to the Balkans to deal with us.’ He shakes his head. ‘After we broke out,’ he says, ‘they sent patrols to scour the mountains. They discovered the wounded we had left behind, and slaughtered them all. Along with their unarmed nurses, who had stayed beside them.’
Later, Tom sits next to Jovan. He pokes a further hole in his trouser belt. Their arms brush against each other as he twists his penknife into the leather. Jovan’s body odour is tinged with a strawberry perfume.
‘I have been thinking about the reprisals,’ Tom says, ‘that the Germans inflict after your battles with them. It must be terrible to see civilians shot for your actions.’
Jovan shakes his head. ‘Some have sympathy for the Chetniks, for that reason,’ he says. ‘They are members of a tribe. They fight for their tribe, its protection and its freedom. If innocent members of their tribe are executed, then what is the meaning of their action? Or their identity at all? Whereas, for us communists, it is different. We educate ourselves away from our primitive attachments to a clan, or region. Our identity is international as well as national. Me? No, Tom. I have no sympathy.’
The tone of his voice causes Tom to look at Jovan. He sees hatred in his eyes.
‘The reprisals are no excuse for inaction. The Chetniks have betrayed their country. They will be liquidated.’ Jovan sees the quiver of alarm on Tom’s countenance, and smiles. ‘It is treason,’ Jovan says. ‘I believe you would accord it the same punishment.’
Tom lights a cigarette. ‘I suppose so,’ he says. But still, it seems too harsh a judgement. Perhaps there is something unbridgeable dividing them, after all.
As if reading Tom’s thoughts, Jovan says, ‘Do not worry, Tom. They are trying to liquidate us.’
Tom nods. ‘Do you not fear death, Jovan?’
Jovan accepts the cigarette Tom offers him. ‘Pain I enjoy no more than any other man,’ he says. ‘Women are different, their biology has made them braver. But death? No. I agree that a man’s dying is more the survivors’ affair than his own.’
‘Did Marshal Tito say that?’ Tom asks.
Jovan smiles. ‘Thomas Mann,’ he says.
Franjo carries the radio, Nikola the one battery, Marko the pedal dynamo; Stipe hauls Marija’s LMG; all on top of their personal loads – except that they possess barely anything beyond their weapons.
The Englishmen have been gradually divesting themselves of their kit. Tom has given away his spare trousers, to Pero. Marko wears his spare shirt. He swapped his large rucksack for Stipe’s knapsack, the gun carrier delighted to be able to fit the LMG into a backpack. Tom’s own equipment has been reduced to code books, pistol, sub-machine gun and ammunition, maps, flashlight, oilskin, mountain sleeping bag, one spare pair of socks and underwear, a bottle of aspirin and another of iodine, toothbrush, soap and razor. Another good reason for minimising their possessions: they are now as poor as the Partisans, no longer the wealthy bourgeois visitors. To change into a fresh shirt when the others could not now seems unthinkable.
They stop at a small farmhouse, squeeze into the parlour to sleep. The pungent smell of dried mutton that hangs from a rafter mingles with their body odours and the smell of woollen clothes, wet with the morning dew, drying upon them as they lie.
When they wake they are given a tray of ground maize baked in milk and cut into pieces like scones. There are two boys, an old man and three women. All the men of Slovenia are gone from their homes: away with the Home Guard or the Partisans.
In the afternoon Tom sits on a plank bench leaning against the outside wall of a small stone barn, reading, and watching two women lazily scything corn in a field below the house. They appear, with their leisurely strokes, to be doing nothing at all. He has never done such work. Would forcing greater speed from the implement made the action inefficient, counterproductive? Refocusing his awareness from such conjecture to the women in the field he finds they have each moved twenty yards, are slowly clearing great swathes.
The old man sits beneath an apple tree, sharpening fresh blades.
Marija appears. Tom gestures to her to join him. She sits beside him, g
azes upon the scene. ‘This is how things will change,’ she says, nodding towards the harvesters, and then patting the ammunition belt slung over her own shoulder. ‘Women doing what only men did before. Doing it well. Men will not be able to claim that women are not capable.’
‘But you,’ he says, ‘could you not do what you wanted before?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she says impatiently. ‘In the intelligentsia women here had some freedom, it is the same in England, no? But only two generations ago ninety-nine per cent of people in the Balkans were peasants.’
They bite grains of corn between their teeth, the nutty taste sticks to their tongues.
Marija smiles at some inner reflection, and when Tom catches her eye he raises his eyebrows, inviting her to share the memory.
‘My Serbian father-in-law was a wealthy peasant,’ she tells him. ‘But a peasant still. My husband and I were married in Belgrade, with our friends. When my husband took me to visit his family, I did not join the men at meals but sat with the women in the kitchen. His mother spoke only when spoken to. She and her daughters worked like slaves. They looked after the sheep, the poultry, the dairy. They cooked, cleaned, mended clothes. They wove and spun and made blankets on hand-looms. Always they were spinning: producing yarn for the cloth. But my mother-in-law had no voice in the government of the household. She deferred on all matters to the opinion of her husband.
‘In fact, her own son, my Radovan, gave his mother orders. I was furious. We had our first row as husband and wife. I should have known then that he was spineless. For all his talk of modern civilisation, after ten minutes in his tribe he had become a junior version of his father. A little dictator in his own house. It would have saved time if I had left him then. Instead…’
Marija falls silent.
‘Please carry on,’ Tom says.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It is boring. I must bore you.’
‘Not at all,’ he says. ‘I love to listen to you talk.’
‘Talk?’ Marija says. ‘That is all?’ Seeing Tom flustered, she laughs. ‘And you?’ she says. ‘You have no wife?’
Tom shakes his head, gazing at the ground.
‘You are too handsome not to have a sweetheart back in – what do you call it? – Blightsky?’
‘Blighty,’ Tom tells her.
‘Blighty,’ she repeats.
He glances up to see her sharp blue-violet eyes looking intently at him. He smiles and looks away, unable to hold her gaze.
Glancing to his left, Tom sees, too, Jovan: he is watching them, with hooded eyes.
July 16
NIKOLA RUNS INTO the house from his lookout post: he’s sighted a German patrol, climbing the mountain. The Partisans grab their equipment and depart the house and the scything women; they leave without food.
They reach the forest and from its darkness watch, gasping, to see if they have been seen. ‘No,’ Jovan says. ‘We cannot wait to find out, it might be too late. We must assume they are after us. Move. Go.’
They march without pause uphill, legs burning, lungs on fire. On flat stretches their speed increases, they are almost trotting. For two hours Jovan insists upon this pace. Finally he calls a halt. They collapse. Each is in his or her own cocoon of pain. But as they get their breath back they look up, smile at each other, aware of what they have just done.
Marija voices their achievement. ‘Now that,’ she declares, ‘that is the way to retreat.’
Is the patrol still chasing them? Jovan will not let them light a fire. They sleep in a deep dell, in which pine trees grow slender and dark and straight up towards the distant sky.
They’ve just begun to stir when they hear and then see a little Henschel zooming overhead, buzzing and circling in the afternoon air and freezing them into immobility beneath the trees. Is the pilot looking for them? After a while he goes off, fluttering like a leaf in the currents of air that rise and fall in these mountain valleys, and disappears in the direction of Maribor.
Pero goes off in search of a courier to take them to the sixth unit who are somewhere in the hills above a town called Mislinje – close to the viaduct that was Tom’s first target. They clean their weapons, rest, search for food. Sid and Marko show each other the Devon and the Slovene methods of setting snares for rabbits; they cannot risk a hunter’s shot, a single gunshot would require that lookouts be sent to the four points of the compass. After a few hours they circle around to check on the traps. They are all empty.
Tom looks forward to conversation with Jovan. He speaks with his soldiers, but often the two of them find themselves together under a tree; leaning against a sun-warmed rock.
‘Ah, Tom, it is good to rest,’ Jovan says.
They eat a few tiny wild raspberries. To make them last, Tom locates each miniature pip in his mouth, cracks it between his teeth.
‘Good to take the weight off one’s feet,’ Tom agrees.
‘The first time I was put in prison,’ Jovan says quietly, ‘was in nineteen thirty-three, during student demonstrations in Belgrade against the dictatorship, confined in a cell with half a dozen other men. Twice a day, for just ten minutes, we could walk around a yard. It was all the exercise we had. I remember how the day I came out my legs, walking down the street away from Glavnjacˇa prison, felt unfamiliar to me, my stride was so long and loose I feared I was about to fly up from the pavement.’
‘Your party was already outlawed?’
Jovan nods. ‘The second time they imprisoned me,’ he says, ‘was less cordial. For their initial method to extract information they told me to kneel down. They chained the hands and feet together, behind me. One of them pushed me, and I fell forward on to my front. Another stuffed a rag in my mouth. The third struck the soles of my feet with a pizzle. You don’t know this? It’s a whip made from a dried bull’s penis. An instrument of torture the Serb police inherited from the Turks.’
Tom grimaces.
The expression on Jovan’s face suggests pleasant reminiscence. ‘On the foot, each blow is like a sharp cut. At the same instant you feel a stab in the brain. Your body wants to scream but because of the gag in your mouth you can’t; instead you produce a pathetic grunt in the depths of your intestines.’
‘They say any man can be broken,’ Tom offers.
Jovan nods slowly. ‘Perhaps. There may well be more efficient inquisitors than those Serbian agents. I was still wavering, at that time, between politics and literature. Then one day the chief interrogator put pencils between my toes, and squeezed with all his might.’
Tom realises Jovan has no more fruit. He takes Jovan’s hands and makes a bowl of his palms, pouring a few of his own raspberries in.
Jovan puts a wrinkled little raspberry in his mouth, chews it, looks at Tom and smiles. He shakes his head. ‘Unbelievable pain. It may not be logical, but I never wrote another story again. That day, Tom, I was not merely a communist, but became a revolutionary.’ He takes a deep breath, and pats Tom on the shoulder. ‘Enough rest, I think.’ He climbs to his feet, and orders the resumption of their march, further on across the mountains.
July 17
THEY HAVE NO food, are too high now for wild berries, or a farmhouse from which to buy provisions. It rains in the night. In the morning the sky is clear and blue. A courier Pero has been waiting for appears at midday. ‘We must leave now,’ he tells Jovan.
‘It is better to wait for darkness.’
‘Sir, there is an enemy patrol just over that hill.’
Again they march at a brisk pace in the noon sun, descending through puddles. Bracken smells musky in the heat, after rain. Tom loses any sense of his surroundings. At first he concentrates on each footstep, every yard propelled forward, but this only makes the struggle more arduous. Awareness focuses on joints that cry out for respite, lungs desperate for a breather. So he tries to think of something quite different. What comes to mind are the few Union debates he attended at university. Too shy to take part himself, he half-admired and half-despised those who, imbued
with an unpleasant self-confidence, swaggered forth their rhetoric. If there was one secret to it, someone told him, it was that the less you believed in something the easier it was to argue for it. He imagines now debates in the Union in which Jovan is taking part, arguing for what he believes in, for justice and dignity for all, and wipes the floor with the cynical young Ciceros and Quintilians of Oxford.
Miles go by of which he is unaware.
They pause, rest, while Dixon sets up the radio. Franjo and Nikola persuade some of their comrades to help them pull thistles they have found in a high alpine meadow: the root, Nikola explains, can be eaten raw, according to his father. Sometimes the plant comes out of the ground whole; at others, it snaps at ground level, and the victim curses the waste of energy.
Franjo seems able to tease each root out whole. Tom watches, unsure whether or not he is hungry enough to participate. Marija yanks at thistles, most of them break off, she grabs another.
‘An incredible woman.’
Tom turns, to find Jovan beside him, shaking his head.
‘My mother, when she married my father, said, “I am leading my beloved ox by his tether, so that he will not roar, throw his weight around and beat me.” We have tried to move forward. My wife was my equal, in my eyes. But in her own eyes, in many ways she was still restrained by the ideas put in her head during her childhood. But this woman.’ He gestures towards Marija. ‘She is free.’ He nods to himself. ‘In her own head, she is free.’
Sid Dixon makes contact with base. News is good: in the east, Soviet armies are advancing on the Baltic states. In Italy, the Eighth Army has captured Arezzo and reached the Arno river. A drop is arranged for twelve o’clock tonight; the courier will lead them to the sixth unit.