by Tim Pears
‘We run,’ Tom tells them. His order is passed back down the line. ‘If the shells begin to sound, fall flat, then start again in the next lull.’
The soldiers wait for Pero to set off, Tom and Stipe running clumsily behind, along a little path amid boulders, over corpses of men and horses who have tried to go before them. Tom understands that his party is merely one of many in the middle of a great retreat. Shells explode around them, but not close, and they do not stop but run with their burden at a frantic pace.
Soon they reach the river. The small suspension bridge across it is undamaged, though the surrounding banks are freshly gouged, and covered with corpses. The steep meadow on the far side is also strewn with bodies. They cross the bridge at their awkward trot. Artillery begins to resound. They reach the meadow and begin to climb, moving from sparse tree to bush to mound. They put Marija on her stretcher down on the ground and lie around her. Tom looks through his binoculars: the enemy operating the mortars are dressed in Italian helmets and grey tattered uniforms, some remnant band left behind at the capitulation, marooned in a war in which they have no allegiance, but they fight on, for killing and dying is all they know.
‘Naprej,’ Tom says. They scuttle forward.
It takes so long to cross the meadow, lurching from one pathetic cover to the next: time stops and though they stagger as fast as they can they make no progress, none at all, and Tom knows they are in a dream, his dream, and this will never end. The canyon rumbles with explosions. They will spend eternity here, struggling on up the steep slope, going nowhere, comrades falling around them, until a shell hits them too. A plane roars overhead. Before they reach the relative safety of the trees it flies over them again, much lower this time, spraying the field.
The survivors congregate in the forest. Stipe tends to Marija, tries to give her water. Tom scans the group. It doesn’t make sense: many must have been killed crossing the steep meadow yet there appear to be more now than when they set off across the clearing on the far side of the river. It is as if the dead have risen, and joined them.
Pero takes Tom to the highest point on the hill, from where they can see smoke rising from burning villages, to the east and to the west. Machine-gun fire echoes across the hills. From ahead of them, north-west, comes the all too frequent roar of bombs.
They walk on in the afternoon. The sun is lost in a grey sky. Droplets of rain slip through the trees and fall lightly upon them. There is a distinctive scent, that made by a mild autumn rain on fallen leaves. Tom’s mind is transported: even in the midst of this inferno a sense of dread in his stomach, of going back to school after the long summer holiday. For half an hour the light drizzle refreshes them. They must find food.
They walk through a village where yellow houses on each side of the street are blackened shells, with gaping windows and roofs that have fallen in, but they do not stop.
For an hour they hear the enemy without meeting him. Once they halt and crouch and watch one, two, three, four lorries driving along a lane no more than fifty yards away. One is full of German soldiers. Another bears the insignia of the Slovene flag, with the Carniolan eagle upon it. Heading in which direction? To the bridge? To the valley? Going to, or returning from, battle?
They rise and move on, as fast as they can. But a boy runs up to Tom and tells him, ‘They are not far behind us.’ Tom orders a small unit to cover the retreat. He waits with them long enough to see through his binoculars a number of the enemy come over a rise not in their footsteps but off to the side, as if following a parallel course. They are dressed in greenish-grey and faded brown uniforms and wear peaked caps, but some wear scarlet fezzes with black tassels that flow behind them like the pony-tails of young girls as they run, and they have an emblem of a scimitar on their collar patches.
They rest in a beech grove. Tom orders the most severely wounded to be left where they are. There are not enough able-bodied men to prop up and carry them. Yet he knows he will not leave Marija behind. A score of men accept the reality of their predicament. One, whose right leg has been blown off at the knee, asks only that they be allowed to keep their weapons. A young woman, a nurse, volunteers to stay with them. Tom tells her she does not need to, it is futile, but she insists, and he does not argue in the face of her courage. A futile death is what she chooses. He looks at her. She turns shyly away. She is blond, moon-faced and plain, with freckles on her cheeks.
The beech grove is in a natural bowl on the slope of a hill. The combination of the sculpted earth and the stately trees is naturally theatrical. As they pull out Tom looks back. The soldier without a leg and one or two of his lame companions take up positions facing the way they have come, ready for their pursuers. The nurse tends to a groaning man.
They pass a farmhouse, whose peasants give them eggs and cider. Marija is once more conscious, though her eyes have sunk deeper into their sockets and her skin is grey, and she does not seem to recognise Tom this time. She whispers something but when he lowers his ear to her lips he hears nothing but her faint breathing. After they set off, an old man cries out from the farm: he limps after them, with a bottle of rakija.
Pero and Stipe carry the stretcher. They hear shots in the distance behind them. Tom steps aside from the column, raises his glasses. The Partisans hurry past him. He looks into the trees, changes focus, suddenly sees men in camouflage uniform, clutching submachine guns, crouching low and weaving through the wood. Have they seen him? He turns and runs after his companions.
By evening their ragged column is once more longer than when the wounded were left, replenished along the way by scattered troops and stragglers. Here the rain must have fallen more heavily: they stumble along a muddy path and into the wet forest. At once they come across dead bodies scattered by a track and the thunder of shells ahead. Tom turns, raises his arm and cries, ‘Naprej!’ They dash forward, towards the booming shells, with the others bunching behind Tom. They run not away from but towards each explosion, for the next round of shells should land elsewhere.
Beyond the explosions they carry on through the forest and come across half a dozen Partisans skinning a horse beside a crackling fire. Their hunger makes them unreasonable. They are drooling from the smell, impatient with hunger. It is difficult to persuade anyone to stand guard. As the flesh is roasting a woman becomes hysterical and an old man, as if infected by her, begins to scream. A female Partisan slaps the woman, who is stunned into quiescence. She slaps the old man too but this has no effect, so she takes his gun off him and swings it at his head so hard that the rifle butt breaks, and the man falls to the ground.
They eat their fill of barely cooked horsemeat. Stipe chews and spits morsels into his hand, then feeds them to Marija like a bird regurgitating food for its young. He pours drops of rakija onto her lips. They sleep.
After Tom has fallen fast asleep, something seems to awaken him. In his mind Christ appears: the figure from Piero della Francesca’s Baptism in the National Gallery; yet one also from a book of his father’s on the Northern Renaissance; and one too from the fresco in their local church, fourteenth century, faded. This Christ is stern, sad, understanding. Tom has rejected this saviour; he tries consciously to dispel the image, but in vain. It only melts into a still sadder, sterner gentleness. Tom opens his eyes. Around him are the trees and his slumbering companions. And silence, endless and lasting, as if there have been no planes or guns, no explosions or screams. He closes his eyes, and there is Christ again – tangible, close enough to touch. Tom begins to speak to Him: why are you here? Do you not know that I have lost my faith in you? My schoolboy religion has been dispelled by what I have seen. What hope I have I put in the hands of men: we shall make heaven on earth or we shall not, there is no help for it.
Yet the figure looks on, His expression unchanged. He is sad that Tom has lost his faith but He understands. More than that: He knows that such faith as Tom had should be lost. He is severe, unrelenting. Forgiveness is not the easy option, but the hardest.
‘No,’ Tom says. ‘Do not abandon us.’ He stops resisting, and the image fades as sleep absorbs him.
September 5
THEY WAKE IN the forest, covered in dew. A fog has settled amongst the trees. From a nearby spring two boys ferry water, and Stipe moistens Marija’s lips. She is breathing so faintly they can hardly be certain that she is alive. Her skin is clear, unlined, yet it has the pallor of an old woman. A man has died during the night.
Tom gives Pero his compass. ‘It is yours,’ he says. ‘You may need it.’ Pero studies it. He nods in gratitude.
There are about a hundred troops with them now, from various units and staffs. They are loaded down with ammunition. No one has any food. Three wounded, in great pain, choose to stay where they are and cover the rear of the ragged band, who set off, leaving behind one large cooking pot, the dead, and the wounded. They have barely begun when they hear the faint yelp of a bloodhound, and then a horse whinnying, some way behind them.
Pero walks in front, Tom and Stipe carry Marija, just the two of them again, for their fellow stretcher-bearers have disappeared and Tom lacks the will to recruit two more. He has wrapped his blistered palms in leaves. A rocket flashes in their direction from somewhere to the east. Soon mortars begin to tear up the ground and undergrowth around them, but they do not stop. They stagger blindly forward through the fog, now with two Partisans on either side of Pero, sub-machine guns at the ready should they stumble into the enemy. They are terrified but Pero strides forward. Planes fly overhead, the sound of their engines muffled.
After an hour of walking they realise the fog is thinning, and lifting, they are visible, and vulnerable, and wish that it would wrap them once more in its embrace. Pero takes over Tom’s end of the stretcher. They cross a meadow in which sheep hustle away from them on their spindly legs. There is movement off to one side and Tom sees through his glasses more of the Chetniks who’d chased them off the mountain, with their black beards and long hair and silver metal skull and crossbones. Panning the glasses, he sees a band of Cossacks in their Astrakhan hats, moving along parallel to his column, as if to overtake them.
Above, planes fly about, and the convoy of straggling combatants are in full view, but it no longer seems worthy of the pilots’ attention. Tom glances back and sees that on Stipe’s broad peasant face tears are sliding over his cheekbones, but he does not stop.
They walk on, through forest, back into the valley. Through a break in the trees they see an enemy column down below moving slowly out along the main road. They walk through the woods in which until a few days ago two thousand soldiers were billeted. Their imprint is slight: in clearings, the ashes of camp fires; bones of chewed meat; the odd piece of metal or scrap of fabric. A Partisan lookout sees them approach but turns away as they pass. Half a dozen men dismantle a field kitchen, strapping pots and ladles to the panniers of two ponies standing patiently by.
When they reach headquarters the two men on guard let them by without a word. For a second Tom sees, in their eyes, what he and his companions must look like. Haggard men returned from battle with a comrade on a stretcher. Tom with no shirt beneath his battledress jacket. Pero all muddied. The big man bedraggled. Tom glances back, past Stipe. They are now alone. The soldiers behind them have disappeared as discreetly as they’d joined. As if they were an illusion, a band of dead men escorting them on their journey home.
Pero stops. They lay the stretcher down upon the grass. The headquarters is being emptied. One could believe the ox-carts are this region’s rustic equivalents of English removals lorries. A printing press is being tied down. Archives are carried out. An officer on the wooden veranda signs a piece of paper and bends over the banister to hand it to a courier, who takes off at a jog. The officer, as he pulls himself back up to his full, familiar height, makes a quick visual sweep of what lies before him. His gaze rests on the three men. Tom detaches himself from the others and walks towards the balcony. When he reaches it he becomes aware of himself saluting his fellow officer. A fatuous gesture Jovan does not return. He looks past Tom.
‘You are moving out,’ Tom says.
Jovan refocuses on Tom, below him. ‘It is no longer safe here,’ he says. He glances back at the others, and at the body on the stretcher, then once more at Tom. ‘Though the whole world knows that Germany will be defeated, the Home Guard are fighting us as never before, ferociously. It is hard to understand.’ He shakes his head. ‘And they are being joined by all the rabble and scum.’
Jovan looks away again, and asks the question that he must ask. ‘Who is that?’
Tom slowly takes a breath; exhales it. ‘Marija,’ he says.
The muscles in Jovan’s hard-set jaw work visibly beneath the skin, tiny tremors, intimate spasms that reveal the effort he is making to suppress any greater movement. With his mouth barely open he asks, ‘Is she dead?’
‘Yes.’
Jovan nods slowly. His eyes narrow, his face darkens. ‘You have brought her here,’ he declares flatly. He looks down at Tom. ‘Have you brought the gun?’
‘The gun?’ Tom asks. ‘No.’
Now Jovan’s face twists with confused feelings. Anger triumphs. ‘Why not?’ he demands. ‘What use is a body?’ His lips are flecked with spittle. ‘A machine gun is worth five live men, and five hundred dead ones.’ Jovan’s face is red, his eyes blaze, he looks ready to explode.
Tom turns away.
‘If it had been anyone else,’ Jovan says, and Tom turns back. ‘If it had been one of my men, anyone but you, I would have him shot.’
Tom shakes his head. He has nothing to say. His feelings have made Jovan into someone other than what and who he is. And he was wrong to bring Marija here.
‘Is Colonel Farwell still here?’ Tom asks.
‘They left two days ago,’ Jovan says. ‘For the south. You will follow.’
Tom looks up at Jovan. Whom he thought he loved; but he did not know him.
As if reading Tom’s mind, as he had often seemed to do, Jovan says, ‘How could she have preferred you?’ There is hatred in his eyes. ‘Look at you. What do you look like? A peasant Partisan! Yes. You have achieved your metamorphosis, Tom, your rebirth. You think you are one of us now? You will always be a liberal capitalist enemy, but you are a sentimental one. I prefer Farwell. He knows what he is made of. He knows we are opposed to each other. It is me or him in the world to come.’ Jovan turns away, his resolve faltering for a moment. When he turns back the hatred has gone from his face. ‘Do you not see, Tom?’ he says.
Tom nods. He is weak and exhausted, his stomach is empty. His mind is blank, there is no point in words. He turns away. Jovan says after him, ‘The bridge has not been blown.’
Tom does not respond. He returns to the others.
They are very tired. They have eaten nothing but scraps for twenty-four hours. Pero finds a spade, and they carry the stretcher deep into the woods. Under a tall beech tree Stipe digs a hole. Tom lifts Marija. Her dead body seems much lighter than it was when he held her that night in his arms; as if her vitality had physical substance. Stipe wraps her head in the blanket they’d used for the stretcher. He says he cannot bear to think of her with dirt in her hair. They lower her into the grave, and Pero covers her with soil. The hole is filled. They bury their fallen warrior.
They leave Stipe at the grave. The one of us, Tom thinks, who truly loved her. Tom tells Pero he is going to the British Mission house to wash, eat, put on fresh clothes, before leaving.
The house is a charred ruin. The woman who had looked after the Englishmen is sifting through the still-warm ashes for metal utensils. A man of the same age recovers nails. He puts them in a little pile. A child collects shards of pottery bowls. Another finds the blade of a knife; new handles will need to be carved. They work methodically, without undue haste or excitement, as if it is something these people are used to, their home burned down at least once in every century.
Tom leaves them to their labour. The afternoon draws towards evening. He can hear
occasional shots, down in the valley. He makes his way to the Soviet Mission house. It stands unscathed. The Soviets have gone, but the family who have moved back in now feed Tom. They give him hot water to wash. A boy disappears and returns with a shirt that almost fits him. Tom sleeps on a straw pallet, a deep and dreamless oblivion.
September 7
WHEN TOM WAKES it is late morning.
The woman of the house gives him bread and honey, and milk. He goes outside and finds Pero, studying the compass Tom gave him. Pero looks up, and nods.
‘I have been waiting,’ Pero says. ‘It is time to leave.’
Tom puts a hand on Pero’s shoulder. ‘Let us go,’ he says.
They climb through the forest. Although Tom was asleep he knows, somehow, he can sense perhaps by a moisture in the atmosphere, that it was misty earlier this morning. The sky is washed clean, and is a wonderfully pale yet bright eggshell blue. When they walk through a patch where the trees grow sparsely the glare of the sun is dazzling. They cross the first ridge, a high pasture, out of the valley. Tom pauses for breath. He looks across the grass to the wood ahead, and realises that amongst the beech and elm and birch, and odd coniferous trees, not a single one is the same colour as its neighbour. His eyes can see in the canopy of leaves every shade of green, though he lacks the words to name them. Some are flecked with brown as they begin to turn, in these first days of autumn. From pale silver birch to dark pine, they stand in their mute variety, growing slowly, even as he watches, so slowly, as if planted there just for him to gaze on.
Tom turns and looks back to the valley they are leaving, and beyond. He can see – across fifty or more miles of trees, pasture, crops, small towns, with here and there thin columns of smoke rising in the sunshine – towards distant peaks. The morning is unimprovable. He turns, and resumes their march.