People of the Book (9 page)

That night, Oskar left the campsite. He did not return the next day. Lola overheard Isak rebuking Branko. “You goaded him into undertaking a fool’s errand. How can he capture a weapon when he has no weapon to use?”

Branko shrugged. “Your sister did.” He had taken the Luger from Ina and wore it, with some swagger, on his hip. That night, Lola was helping Zlata gather wood for the cook fire when Oskar came crashing through the trees, the grin on his face wide as a clown’s. Over his shoulder he had a German rifle. He was wearing a baggy gray uniform several sizes too large for him, pant legs rolled up and the waist cinched with twine, and carrying a Nazi-issue rucksack bulging with supplies.

He refused to tell the tale of his triumph until Branko, Isak, and the rest of the
odred
had gathered. As he handed around slices of German sausage, he told how he had crept into the nearby occupied village and hidden in some roadside bushes. “I had to lie there almost all day, watching the Germans come and go,” he said. “There were always two or three of them together. At last, one comes by, alone. I wait till he passes. I jump out of the bushes, shove a stick between his shoulder blades, and shout,
Stoi
! The ass actually believed I was armed. He raised his hands. I got his gun, and then I told him to strip to his underpants.”

Everyone was convulsed with laughter at this point, except Branko.

“And then. You shot him.” His voice was flat and cold.

“No, I…I didn’t see the need…. He was unarmed…I thought…”

“And tomorrow, he will be armed again, and the next day, he will kill your comrade. Sentimental fool. You will give the gun to Zlata. She at least will know how to use it.” Lola could not see Oskar’s face in the dark. But she felt his silent anger.

The next night, the
odred
was required to help secure and clear a drop site. Lola’s job was to keep the mule quiet and calm, ready to carry the arms, radios, or medicines that descended by parachute. While her
odred
hid just beyond the tree line, Partisans from a different
odred,
working under the direction of a foreigner—a British spy, someone said—set out brush and tinder for signal fires, laid across a clearing in a prearranged pattern that the Allied pilot would recognize. Lola trembled from fear and cold. She leaned into Rid’s thick pelt, seeking warmth. She had no weapon, aside from the grenade that all Partisans were required to wear on their belts. “If you are about to be captured, you will use it to kill yourself and as many of the enemy as you can take with you,” Branko had said. “On no account be taken alive. Use the grenade, and then there is no way you can be tortured into betrayal.”

The moon had not yet risen. Lola looked up, searching for starlight. But the thick foliage of the trees denied her even that. Her imagination peopled the dark with Germans, waiting to ambush them. The night crawled on. Just before dawn, the wind rose, threshing the pine boughs. Branko decided that the drop must have been aborted, and signaled Lola to prepare to move off. Wearily, stiff from cold, Lola scrambled to her feet and adjusted Rid’s halter.

Just then, the faint buzz of an airplane sounded in the distance. Branko shouted orders to get the fires lit. Isak’s fire wouldn’t catch. He swore as he struggled. Lola did not think of herself as brave. She would not have described the feeling that took hold of her as courage. All she knew was that she could not leave Isak out there, exposed, struggling, alone. She crashed through the trees and into the clearing. She threw herself prone, blowing hard on the stubborn kindling. A flame leaped just as the dark bulk of the Dakota came into view overhead. The pilot made one run, for reconnaissance, and then swept back around, spilling a rain of packages, each with its own small parachute. Partisans emerged from the surrounding forest, running to gather the precious cargo. Lola slashed at the parachute cords and wrapped up the silk, which she would use to make bandages.

The
odreds
worked fast as the sky began to lighten in the east. By the time dawn broke, Lola was toiling along a narrow ridgeline, a fully laden Rid walking biddably beside her, as they tried to put miles between them and the drop site before the Germans reached the place. Whenever they came to a stream, Branko ordered Maks into the water, to turn over the moss-covered stones. After the
odred
had crossed, the stones were flipped back as they had been, the moss unbroken by boot prints or mule hoofs.

For seven months, Lola’s
odred
lived on the move, rarely spending more than a night or two in one campsite, carrying out demolitions of railway tracks or small bridges. On many nights, they were offered the shelter of a farmer’s barn, where they slept in an animal warmth, cushioned by straw. But at other times, they camped in the forest, with only a makeshift blanket of pine needles to keep back the punishing cold. Although never much more than five miles from the nearest enemy post, their
odred
managed to escape ambushes that claimed other units. Branko preened about this as if it were a product of his own leadership. He expected to be served and deferred to like a general officer. Once, at the end of a grueling march, he lay down against a tree to take his rest while everyone else scrambled to gather dry firewood before the darkness overtook them. Oskar, throwing a heavy bundle of branches down beside the prone Branko, muttered something about Communists supposedly doing away with elitist privilege.

Branko was on his feet in a second. He gripped Oskar by the front of his uniform and slammed him hard against the trunk of a tree.

“You sniveling brats are lucky I was assigned to lead you. You should be thanking me every day for keeping you alive.”

Isak stepped between them and gently pushed Branko away.

“What keeps us alive,” he said quietly, “is not luck, or your
excellent
leadership. It’s the loyalty of the civilian population. We wouldn’t be able to last five minutes out here without their support.”

For a moment, it seemed that Branko was going to strike Isak. But he retained control of himself somehow, and stepped back, spitting contemptuously on the ground.

Lola had sensed Isak’s growing impatience with Branko. She knew he deplored Branko’s incessant speechifying, late into the night, even after long marches, when the exhausted youths would rather have been sleeping than listening to rambling exegesis on surplus value and false consciousness. Isak would try to bring the political harangues to a close, but many times Branko carried on, oblivious. The greater frustration lay in the difference between Branko’s self-regard and the rather low opinion held of him by the brigade commander in their region. Branko promised better weapons, yet they did not materialize. He told Lola that she would be assigned to a field hospital for training, but this never occurred.

Still, she felt useful in her role as muleteer, and even Branko, who was stinting with praise, from time to time commended her. As winter pressed in upon them, most fell ill. The hacking of their wet coughs became the morning reveille. Lola begged onions from the farmers to make poultices. Isak showed her how to compound the ingredients for expectorants, which she administered diligently. She proposed a redistribution of rations so that those who were recuperating from illness could receive more. Branko promised to move them into winter quarters, but weeks passed and the
odred
remained camped out on the unforgiving mountains. Numbers dwindled. Zlata, ill for weeks with a violent chest infection, was taken in by a local peasant family and died there, in a warm bed, at least. Oskar, tired of the hardships and Branko’s constant ill will, deserted in the night, taking Slava, one of the farm girls, with him.

Lola worried about Ina. The child had the same hacking cough as most of the
odred.
But when she raised the subject of finding a winter haven for her with Isak, he dismissed it. “For one thing, she would not go. For another, I would not ask her. I promised her I’d never leave her again. It’s that simple.”

On a blizzarding day in early March, Milovan, the regional brigade commander, summoned the remnant
odred
to a meeting. As the thin, sickly teenagers gathered around him, he began his address. Tito, Milovan said, had a new vision for his army. It was to be consolidated into tough, professional units that would engage the Germans directly. The enemy forces were to be pushed back to the cities, their lines disrupted, until Partisan control of the countryside was achieved.

Lola, her head muffled in a scarf and her cap pulled down tight over her ears, at first thought she had mistaken what the colonel said next. But the dismay on others’ faces confirmed that what she thought she had heard was true. Their
odred
was to be disbanded, effective immediately. “Marshal Tito thanks you for your service, and it will be remembered on the glorious day of victory. Now, those of you who have arms, please stack them for collection. You, mule girl. Take charge of loading them. We will leave now. You will wait till nightfall before moving out.”

Everyone looked at Branko, waiting for him to say something. But Branko, his head bowed against the blowing snow, said nothing. It was Isak who was left to protest.

“Sir? May I ask where you propose we go?”

“You may go home.”

“Home? What home?” Isak was shouting now. “None of us has a home anymore. Most of our families have been murdered. We, all of us, are outlaws. You can’t seriously expect us to walk unarmed into the hands of the Ustashe?” He turned to Branko. “Tell him, damn it!”

Branko raised his head and stared coldly at Isak. “You heard the colonel. Marshal Tito has said there is no longer any place for ragtag bands of children wielding sticks and firecrackers. We are a professional army now.”

“Oh, I see!” Isak’s voice oozed contempt. “
You
may keep
your
gun—the gun my little sister, a ‘ragtag child,’ got for you. And the rest of us get a death sentence!”

“Silence!” Milovan raised his gloved hand. “Obey your orders, and your service will be rewarded in the future. Disobey, and you will be shot.”

Lola, numb and confused, loaded Rid as she had been commanded. When the few rifles and the bag of grenades had been secured, she took the mule’s soft muzzle between her two hands and looked into his eyes. “Be safe, friend,” she whispered. “You, at least, they have a use for. May they treat you with more loyalty and care than they are showing to us.” She handed the halter to Milovan’s aide and gave him a sack in which she kept a precious ration of oats. The aide looked inside the bag, and from his expression, Lola realized Rid would be lucky to see the oats again before they warmed the aide’s belly. So she thrust her gloved hands into the sack and pulled up two generous handfuls. Rid’s wet breath warmed her hands for a moment. Before he had disappeared into the swirling snow, his saliva had frozen solid on the darned wool. Branko, she noted, did not look back.

The rest of the group gathered around Isak, waiting for him to offer them a plan. “I think we will do best in pairs or small groups,” he said. His own intention was to head for liberated territory. Lola sat in silence as the discussion passed from one to another around the fire. Some aimed to go south, into Italian-occupied areas. Others said they would seek out extended family members. Lola had no one, and the thought of an uncertain journey to a strange southern town frightened her. She waited for someone to ask her about her plans, to offer her a place at their side. But no one said anything at all. It was as if she had already ceased to exist. When she got up and left the circle, no one said good night.

Lola found her place in a corner of the clearing and tossed there, restless. She had piled her few belongings into a rucksack and had tied up her feet in layers of cloth she’d saved for bandages. She was lying, awake but with her eyes closed, when she felt Ina’s fierce brown gaze. The child was wrapped in her blanket as if it were a cocoon. She had a woolen hat pulled tight over her brow, so that her eyes were all that was visible.

Lola did not realize she had drifted to sleep until she felt Ina’s small hand shaking her. It was still dark, but Ina and Isak were up, rucksacks packed. Ina put a hand on her lips to urge silence and then extended a hand to pull Lola to her feet. Scrambling, she rolled her blanket and pushed it into the pack with her few supplies, and trailed after Ina and her brother.

The details of the days and nights that followed would return to Lola in her dreams. But in her waking memory, they remained a blur of pain and fear. The three moved in the dark and hid during the short daylight hours, snatching restless sleep when they could find a barn or a haystack to shelter them, waking in fear to the sound of a dog barking, which could mean a German patrol. On the fourth night, Ina’s fever rose. Isak had to carry her, shivering, sweating, murmuring in her delirium. On the fifth night, the temperature plunged. Isak had given his socks to Ina, and wrapped her in his coat, in a vain attempt to stop her wracking shivers. Halfway through the night march, just after they had forded an ice-covered river, he stopped and sank down onto the frozen pine needles.

“What is it?” Lola whispered.

“My foot. I can’t feel it,” Isak said. “The ice—there was a thin place. My foot went through. It got wet and now it’s frozen. I can’t walk anymore.”

“We can’t stop here,” Lola said. “We’ve got to find some shelter.”

“You go. I can’t.”

“Let me see.” Lola shone her torch beam on the torn, gaping leather of Isak’s boot. The exposed flesh was black with frostbite. The foot had been damaged long before the accident in the stream. She placed her gloved hands over the foot to try to warm it. But it was no good. The toes were frozen solid, brittle as twigs. The slightest pressure would snap them right off. Lola took her own coat off and laid it on the ground. She lifted Ina and placed her on it. The child’s breath was shallow and irregular. Lola felt for her pulse and could not find it.

“Lola,” Isak said. “I can’t walk anymore, and Ina is dying. You have to go on alone.”