No, no, he told them, you’ve got it all upside down. He was a member of the Yugoslavian Communist party- he’d destroyed the card ten minutes before the Germans got him or it would have been lights out for him. He was a worker. All he wanted was to go home, eat some real food if he could find it, see what his old girlfriend was up to. He’d repaired German aircraft at a factory in Prague. The production schedules were set weekly, based on an anticipated workload known to three foremen. The day before he left, an ME-110 wing had been trucked in with damage from small arms fire-the number on the wing was something like 7705-12. The German security officer in the factory was called Bischau. Production norms were not being met. He had committed several acts of sabotage, using emery grit and other materials. The name of the Communist party secretary in Kralijevo, his hometown, was Webak, but he believed it to be an alias. German casualties were being barged down the river Nitra, then up the Danube to Austria.
He spooned it into their mouths as they slapped him and kicked his shins. Something to write down. Names, numbers, addresses. He never met their eyes and made them work for every bit of it. Dried up several times, was driven back to the subject. At last, he began to bore them. He’d taken the edge off their appetites and seemed to them less and less like anything resembling a banquet. Would he, they wanted to know, just in case he should some day be allowed to return to Yugoslavia, keep in touch? Nothing formal. Just the odd observation on life and circumstance in his homeland.
Such a request caught him entirely unaware. He blinked stupidly, paused for some time, mulling it over like a machinist’s problem. Well, he told them, this was not anything he’d ever considered, but he could find little wrong with it. The fascists in Yugoslavia had nearly destroyed the country, they must in future be resisted. If he could help in such an effort, be of some value, he saw nothing wrong with it. Any patriotic Yugoslav would do no less-he was sure of that.
Well, they said, they would see him again. And they let him go.
He returned to the
“I am sorry,” he said.
They stood at the rail together. From the streets of the city they could hear drunken singing and shouting and the occasional shot fired. “Be grateful that you are alive, Annika,” she said to herself sternly, pulling her sweater tight against the night chill rising off the river.
“What now?” she asked him.
He nodded east and said, “One way or another.”
“You are a funny sort of an American, river boy, that speaks Bulgarian and Russian and God knows what else.”
“American?”
“You run from the Germans and fool the Russians. What else could you be?”
“Just a man going home.”
“Very well,” she said, “I shall remember you so.”
They were together in silence for a time, he was reluctant to leave her. She patted him twice on the shoulder and went belowdecks. When she returned, she handed him the Czech automatic that she had hidden for him, two tins of jam, a clasp knife, and a few ten-florin Hungarian coins.
“You are kind, Annika,” he said.
“For luck,” she said. “You cannot give a knife without a coin.” She leaned out over the bulwark and unknotted a kerchief that held the small fortune he had given her-they both knew she dared not keep it.
“Farewell, my little friends,” she said sadly. “Once upon a time you were a rich man’s pride. You have made a great journey, but now you stink like old cheese, and the Russians will smell you out.” One by one, at first, then all together, she let them fall from her open hand, gold coins lost in a river.
He walked up a ramp onto the quay and made quickly for the side streets. He had intended to steal a rowboat and drift silently away from the city, but there wasn’t an unguarded craft of any description that he could see-not with all the bridges down, there wasn’t. So he walked south, making his way to within sight of the river from time to time to be sure he wasn’t wandering off course.
The city had apparently seen many weeks of street fighting. A few blocks were mounds of stone and dirt and splintered wood, but it took bombs or artillery to do that. Where he walked it was mostly building facades pocked with mortar shells and sprinkled with the whitish chip marks of small arms fire. There was hardly an unshattered windowpane to be seen-glass crunched continually beneath his boots-and the clouds of flies and the smell of unburied bodies nauseated him. He clamped a hand over his mouth and nose and breathed against his own skin and that seemed to help a little.
There were no Russian officers to be seen, just a few drunken troopers trying to make their way back to wherever they thought their units might be. At one point, a Mongolian corporal rushed out of a doorway and, embracing him with a clasp like iron, lifted him completely off the ground, put him down, and began singing wildly and dancing him around in a bear hug. The man was only an inch or two above five feet tall and his breath reeked of turpentine. Khristo danced along and sang at the top of his lungs-he knew that when you are that drunk, everyone else had better be too-whooping and yowling like a lunatic. After they had sworn friendship for life and Khristo had gravely accepted the hand of his sister in marriage, the man went staggering away and disappeared into an alley.
He spent the better part of the night reaching the outskirts of the city. When first dawn began to lighten the road, he wandered into a neighborhood of little shacks, crawled under a piece of tin sheeting at the back of a roofless house, and fell asleep.
It took him four days to reach Yugoslavia. There was nothing moving downstream-no opportunity for stowaway or expropriation presented itself-so he walked, on a road that meandered down the eastern bank of the river for some hundred and ten miles. He had to guess the distance; only a few mile markers remained and some of those had been altered to deceive invading armies, but it was at least that far.
He was not alone on the road. Small knots of refugees, old people, women and children, walked along with him or passed him going the other way, their possessions rolled in blankets on their backs or pushed along in handcarts or baby carriages. There seemed to be equal numbers of them headed in each direction, and this puzzled him. In his experience, refugees moved only in one direction: away from war. But this was different, he thought. This was something he had never seen before.
In 1940, when he’d fled from the German armies down clogged French roads, the air had been filled with wild rumors and the electricity of unfolding events. That had been a terrible time, but despite its sorrow and confusion there’d been a perverse ecstasy to it-the struggle of ordinary people, caught in the open by a moment of history, to survive. This was far worse. These people were the defeated, the uprooted; hopelessness and despair hung about them like smoke. They walked slowly, hypnotized by exhaustion, and their eyes never left the ground.
He began to suspect, after a time, that the refugees on the road might not have a destination. Perhaps they had no papers or permits, perhaps when they tried to stay somewhere they were chased away. He did not know the reason, but the people walked without purpose, as though walking itself was now all they could do, and they meant to walk until they dropped or until some authority appeared and told them what was required of them.
On the first day, he caught himself walking too quickly, with too much purpose. He cut a stick from an exploded tree and, after that, fell naturally into the appropriate limp. By the second day he was covered with a fine, gritty soil that blew in the wind, and he was tiring, and there was no longer any difficulty at all about blending in. He walked past empty villages where open shutters banged in the wind, past burnt-out farmhouses seen at a distance across fields of unplowed mud, past blackened tanks with guns pointing at the sky. At night he slept on the ground, waking damp and sore, and the brief flurries of rain meant that he never really dried out.
He had started out in reasonably good shape. In Prague he had spent so much time on the move, hurrying from meeting to meeting, always behind schedule, that the walking of the first two days did not bother him overmuch. His shins ached where the Russians had kicked him, but that would pass, he knew, and he had unwrapped his hand to let the air heal the long, white blister that had formed on it.
But he now began to comprehend what had happened to Voluta, how he had come to make the critical error that had nearly killed them both. To meet after curfew, in the open, at a guarded bridge, was a reasonable definition of suicide, an extraordinarily stupid mistake for a man who had spent his adult life in the shadows, for a man who crossed borders like the wind.
