One evening, after he had returned from hunting with Rudi, Lubji told his host that it would not be long before he had to leave. “I must find a port, and get as far away from the Germans as possible,” he explained. Rudi nodded as they sat round the fire, sharing a rabbit. Neither of them saw the look of sadness that came into Mari’s eyes.
When Lubji returned to the caravan that night, he found Mari waiting for him. He climbed up to join her and tried to explain that as his wound had nearly healed, he no longer required her help to undress. She smiled and began to remove his shirt gently from his shoulder, taking off the bandages and cleaning the wound. She looked in her canvas bag, frowned, hesitated for a moment, and started to tear her dress, using the material to rebandage his shoulder.
Lubji just stared at Mari’s long brown legs as she slowly ran her fingers down his chest to the top of his trousers. She smiled at him and began to undo the buttons. He placed a cold hand on her thigh, and turned scarlet as she lifted up her dress to reveal that she was wearing nothing underneath.
Mari waited expectantly for him to move his hand, but he continued to stare. She leaned forward and pulled off his pants, then climbed across him and lowered herself gently onto him. He remained as still as he had when felled by the bullet, until she began to move slowly up and down, her head tossed back. She took his other hand and placed it inside the top of her dress, shuddering when he first touched her warm breast. He just left it there, still not moving, even though her rhythm became faster and faster. Just when he wanted to shout out, he quickly pulled her down, kissing her roughly on the lips. A few seconds later he lay back exhausted, wondering if he had hurt her, until he opened his eyes and saw the expression on her face. She sank on his shoulder, rolled onto one side and fell into a deep sleep.
He lay awake, thinking that he might have died without ever having experienced such pleasure. A few hours passed before he woke her. This time he didn’t remain motionless, his hands continually discovering different parts of her body, and he found that he enjoyed the experience even more the second time. Then they both slept.
When the caravans moved on the next day, Rudi told Lubji that during the night they had crossed yet another border, and were now in Yugoslavia.
“And what is the name of those hills covered in snow?” asked Lubji.
“From this distance they may look like hills,” said Rudi, “but they are the treacherous Dinaric Mountains. My caravans cannot hope to make it across them to the coast.” For some time he didn’t speak, then he added, “But a determined man just might.”
They traveled on for three more days, resting only for a few hours each night, avoiding towns and villages, until they finally came to the foot of the mountains.
That night, Lubji lay awake as Mari slept on his shoulder. He began to think about his new life and the happiness he had experienced during the past few weeks, wondering if he really wanted to leave the little band and be on his own again. But he decided that if he were ever to escape the wrath of the Germans, he must somehow reach the other side of those mountains and find a boat to take him as far away as possible. The next morning he dressed long before Mari woke. After breakfast he walked around the camp, shaking hands and bidding farewell to every one of his compatriots, ending with Rudi.
Mari waited until he returned to her caravan. He leaned forward, took her in his arms and kissed her for the last time. She clung to him long after his arms had fallen to his side. After she had finally released him, she passed over a large bundle of food. He smiled and then walked quickly away from the camp toward the foot of the mountains. Although he could hear her following for the first few paces, he never once looked back.
Lubji traveled on and on up into the mountains until it was too dark to see even a pace in front of him. He selected a large rock to shelter him from the worst of the bitter wind, but even huddled up he still nearly froze. He spent a sleepless night eating Mari’s food and thinking about the warmth of her body.
As soon as the sun came up he was on the move again, rarely stopping for more than a few moments. At nightfall he wondered if the harsh, cold wind would freeze him to death while he was asleep. But he woke each morning with the sun shining in his eyes.
By the end of the third day he had no food left, and could see nothing but mountains in every direction he looked. He began to wonder why he had ever left Rudi and his little gypsy band.
On the fourth morning he could barely put one foot in front of the other: perhaps starvation would achieve what the Germans had failed to do. By the evening of the fifth day he was just wandering aimlessly forward, almost indifferent to his fate, when he thought he saw smoke rising in the distance. But he had to freeze for another night before flickering lights confirmed the testimony of his eyes. For there in front of him lay a village and, beyond that, his first sight of the sea.
Coming down the mountains might have been quicker than climbing them, but it was no less treacherous. He fell several times, and failed to reach the flat, green plains before sunset, by which time the moon was darting in and out between the clouds, fitfully lighting his slow progress.
Most of the lamps in the little houses had already been blown out by the time he reached the edge of the village, but he hobbled on, hoping he would find someone who was still awake. When he reached the first house, which looked as if it was part of a small farm, he considered knocking on the door, but as there were no lights to be seen he decided against it. He was waiting for the moon to reappear from behind a cloud when his eyes made out a barn on the far side of the yard. He slowly made his way toward the ramshackle building. Stray chickens squawked as they jumped out of his path, and he nearly walked into a black cow which had no intention of moving for the stranger. The door of the barn was half open. He crept inside, collapsed onto the straw and fell into a deep sleep.
When Lubji woke the next morning he found he couldn’t move his neck; it was pinned firmly to the ground. He thought for a moment that he must be back in jail, until he opened his eyes and stared up at a massive figure towering above him. The man was attached to a long pitchfork, which turned out to be the reason why he couldn’t move.
The farmer shouted some words in yet another language. Lubji was only relieved that it wasn’t German. He raised his eyes to heaven and thanked his tutors for the breadth of his education. Lubji told the man on the end of the pitchfork that he had come over the mountains after escaping from the Germans. The farmer looked incredulous, until he had examined the bullet scar on Lubji’s shoulder. His father had owned the farm before him, and he had never told him of anyone crossing those mountains.
He led Lubji back to the farmhouse, keeping the pitchfork firmly in his hand. Over a breakfast of bacon and eggs, and thick slabs of bread supplied by the farmer’s wife, Lubji told them, more with hand gestures than words, what he had been through during the past few months. The farmer’s wife looked sympathetic and kept filling his empty plate. The farmer said little, and still looked doubtful.
When Lubji came to the end of his tale, the farmer warned him that despite the brave words of Tito, the partisan leader, he didn’t think it would be long before the Germans would invade Yugoslavia. Lubji began to wonder if any country on earth was safe from the ambitions of the Führer. Perhaps he would have to spend the rest of his life just running away from him.
“I must get to the coast,” he said. “Then if I could get on a boat and cross the ocean…”
“It doesn’t matter where you go,” said the farmer, “as long as it’s as far away from this war as possible.” He dug his teeth into an apple. “If they ever catch up with you again, they won’t let you escape a second time. Find yourself a ship—any ship. Go to America, Mexico, the West Indies, even Africa,” said the farmer.
“How do I reach the nearest port?”
“Dubrovnik is two hundred kilometers south-east of us,” said the farmer, lighting up a pipe. “There you will find many ships only too happy to sail away from this war.”
“Don’t be in such a hurry, young man,” said the farmer, puffing away. “The Germans won’t be crossing those mountains for some time yet.” Lubji sat back down, and the farmer’s wife cut the crust off a second loaf and covered it in dripping, placing it on the table in front of him.
There was only a pile of crumbs left on his plate when Lubji eventually rose from the table and followed the farmer out of the kitchen. When he reached the door, the farmer’s wife loaded him down with apples, cheese and more bread, before he jumped onto the back of her husband’s tractor and was taken to the edge of the village. The farmer eventually left him by the side of a road that he assured him led to the coast.
Lubji walked along the road, sticking his thumb in the air whenever he saw a vehicle approaching. But for the first two hours every one of them, however fast or slow, simply ignored him. It was quite late in the afternoon when a battered old Tatra came to a halt a few yards ahead of him.
He ran up to the driver’s side as the window was being wound down.
“Where are you going?” asked the driver.
“Dubrovnik,” said Lubji, with a smile. The driver shrugged, wound up the window and drove off without another word.
Several tractors, two cars and a lorry passed him before another car stopped, and to the same question Lubji gave the same answer.
“I’m not going that far,” came back the reply, “but I could take you part of the way.”
One car, two lorries, three horse-drawn carts and the pillion of a motorcycle completed the three-day journey to Dubrovnik. By that time Lubji had devoured all the food the farmer’s wife had supplied, and had gathered what knowledge he could on how to go about finding a ship in Dubrovnik that might help him to escape from the Germans.
Once he had been dropped on the outskirts of the busy port, it only took a few minutes to discover that the farmer’s worst fears had been accurate: everywhere he turned he could see citizens preparing for a German invasion. Lubji had no intention of waiting around to greet them a second time as they goose-stepped their way down the streets of yet another foreign town. This was one city he didn’t intend to be caught asleep in.
Acting on the farmer’s advice, he made his way to the docks. Once he had reached the quayside he spent the next couple of hours walking up and down, trying to work out which ships had come from which ports and where they were bound. He shortlisted three likely vessels, but had no way of knowing when they might be sailing or where they were destined for. He continued to hang around on the quayside. Whenever he spotted anyone in uniform he would quickly disappear into the shadows of one of the many alleys that ran alongside the dock, and once even into a packed bar, despite the fact he had no money.
He slipped into a seat in the farthest corner of the dingy tavern, hoping that no one would notice him, and began to eavesdrop on conversations taking place in different languages at the tables around him. He picked up information on where you could buy a woman, who was paying the best rate for stokers, even where you could get yourself a tattoo of Neptune at a cut price; but among the noisy banter, he also discovered that the next boat due to weigh anchor was the Arridin, which would cast off the moment it had finished loading a cargo of wheat. But he couldn’t find out where it was bound for.
One of the deckhands kept repeating the word “Egypt.” Lubji’s first thought was of Moses and the Promised Land.
He slipped out of the bar and back onto the quayside. This time he checked each ship carefully until he came to a group of men loading sacks into the hold of a small cargo steamer that bore the name Arridin on its bow. Lubji studied the flag hanging limply from the ship’s mast. There was no wind, so he couldn’t be sure where she was registered. But he was certain of one thing: the flag wasn’t a swastika.
Lubji stood to one side and watched as the men humped sacks onto their shoulders, carried them up the gangplank and then dropped them into a hole in the middle of the deck. A foreman stood at the top of the gangplank, making a tick on a clipboard as each load passed him. Every few moments a gap in the line would appear as one of the men returned down the gangplank at a different pace. Lubji waited patiently for the exact moment when he could join the line without being noticed. He ambled forward, pretending to be passing by, then suddenly bent down, threw one of the sacks over his left shoulder and walked toward the ship, hiding his face behind the sack from the man at the top of the gangplank. When he reached the deck, he dropped it into the gaping hole.
Lubji repeated the exercise several times, learning a little more about the layout of the ship with each circle he made. An idea began to form in his mind. After a dozen or so drops, he found he could, by speeding up, be on the heels of the man in front of him and a clear distance from the man following him. As the pile of sacks on the quay diminished, Lubji realized he had little opportunity left. The timing would be critical.
He hauled another sack up onto his shoulder. Within moments he had caught up with the man in front of him, who dropped his bag into the hold and began walking back down the gangplank.
When Lubji reached the deck he also dropped his sack into the hold, but, without daring to look back, he jumped in after it, landing awkwardly on top of the pile. He scampered quickly to the farthest corner, and waited fearfully for the raised voices of men rushing forward to help him out. But it was several seconds before the next loader appeared above the hole. He simply leaned over to deposit his sack, without even bothering to look where it landed.
Lubji tried to position himself so that he would be hidden from anyone who might look down into the hold, while at the same time avoiding having a sack of wheat land on top of him. If he made certain of remaining hidden, he almost suffocated, so after each sack came hurtling down, he shot up for a quick breath of fresh air before quickly disappearing back out of sight. By the time the last sack had been dropped into the hold, Lubji was not only bruised from head to toe, but was gasping like a drowning rat.
Just as he began to think it couldn’t get any worse, the cover of the cargo hold was dropped into place and a slab of wood wedged between the iron grids. Lubji tried desperately to work his way to the top of the pile, so that he could press his mouth up against the tiny cracks in the slits above him and gulp in the fresh air.
No sooner had he settled himself on the top of the sacks than the engines started up below him. A few minutes later, he began to feel the slight sway of the vessel as it moved slowly out of the harbor. He could hear voices up on the deck, and occasionally feet walked across the boards just above his head. Once the little cargo ship was clear of the harbor, the swaying and bobbing turned into a lurching and crashing as it plowed into deeper waters. Lubji positioned himself between two sacks and clung on to each with an outstretched arm, trying not to be flung about.
He and the sacks were continually tossed from side to side in the hold until he wanted to scream out for help, but it was now dark, and only the stars were above him, as the deckhands had all disappeared below. He doubted if they would even hear his cries.
He had no idea how long the voyage to Egypt would take, and began to wonder if he could survive in that hold during a storm. When the sun came up, he was pleased to be still alive. By nightfall he wanted to die.
He could not be sure how many days had passed when they eventually reached calmer waters, though he was certain he had remained awake for most of them. Were they entering a harbor? There was now almost no movement, and the engine was only just turning over. He assumed the vessel must have come to a halt when he heard the anchor being lowered, even though his stomach was still moving around as if they were in the middle of the ocean.
At least another hour passed before a sailor bent down and removed the bar that kept the cover of the hold in place. Moments later Lubji heard a new set of voices, in a tongue he’d never encountered before. He assumed it must be Egyptian, and was again thankful it wasn’t German. The cover of the hold was finall
y removed, to reveal two burly men staring down at him.
“So, what have we got ourselves here?” said one of them, as Lubji thrust his hands up desperately toward the sky.
“A German spy, mark my words,” said his mate, with a gruff laugh. The first one leaned forward, grabbed Lubji’s outstretched arms and yanked him out onto the deck as if he were just another sack of wheat. Lubji sat in front of them, legs outstretched, gulping in the fresh air as he waited to be put in someone else’s jail.
He looked up and blinked at the morning sun. “Where am I?” he asked in Czech. But the dockers showed no sign of understanding him. He tried Hungarian, Russian and, reluctantly, German, but received no response other than shrugs and laughter. Finally they lifted him off the deck and frogmarched him down the gangplank, without making the slightest attempt to converse with him in any language.
Lubji’s feet hardly touched the ground as the two men dragged him off the boat and down to the dockside. They then hurried him off toward a white building at the far end of the wharf. Across the top of the door were printed words that meant nothing to the illegal immigrant: DOCKS POLICE, PORT OF LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND.
8.
St. Andy
12 September 1945
DAWN OF A NEW REPUBLIC
“Abolish the Honors System” read the banner headline in the third edition of the St. Andy.
In the editor’s opinion, the honors system was nothing more than an excuse for a bunch of clapped-out politicians to award themselves and their friends titles that they didn’t deserve. “Honors are almost always given to the undeserving. This offensive display of self-aggrandisement is just another example of the last remnants of a colonial empire, and ought to be done away with at the first possible opportunity. We should consign this antiquated system to the dustbin of history.”
Several members of his class wrote to the editor, pointing out that his father had accepted a knighthood, and the more historically informed among them went on to add that the last sentence had been plagiarized from a far better cause.
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