Briefing for a Descent Into Hell - Doris May Lessing [91]
I can remember very clearly my fantasies of those few days of waiting, the daydreams that are the most useful of preparations for forthcoming stress or danger. My day-dreams—or plans—might have come out of a boy’s adventure story, or Beau Geste. The sordidness, the dirty-cellar nastiness, the psychological double-twisting of modern torture would have taken me completely by surprise if I had had the bad luck to be caught.
I and Miles Bovey were dropped together on a dark and very cold night into a total darkness. We might have been falling into the desert of the sea—or upwards into the nothingness of space—instead of into mountains where, we knew, were villages, and which were full of groups of fighting men, the Partisans and their opponents, the Chetniks.
Bovey dropped first. He gave me a small nod and a smile as he jumped—it was the last human contact he had. I did not even see the white of his parachute below me as I fell into the dark. The tiny gleam from the aircraft fled into the black overhead, and I swung down and down until something black came swinging up—I missed the crown of a tall pine by a few feet and landed in a heap in a space between sharp rocks. I hurt my leg a little. It was four in the morning, and still night. It was cloudy: they had waited for a cloudy night. I did not dare call out to Miles. I piled the parachute behind a rock, where its whiteness would be hidden, and I sat on it. It was extremely cold. I sat on until the light came filtering down through high conifers. I was on the side of a mountain. It was still dark under the trees when the sky was flooded with a rosy dawn light. I saw a white glimmer high in the air about a hundred yards away and sat on without moving until I could determine that it was, as I thought, Miles’ parachute. But it could have been a layer of snow on a branch.
The parachute was hanging from a high branch, stirring and moving in the dawn wind. I emerged from behind my rock with caution, and found, a few feet away from the tree which held his parachute, Miles, quite dead. He had not been shot, as I first thought from the dark stain of blood on his forehead. He had crashed down through the tall pine. His parachute had caught in it. He had hung there like a fly in a web. Trying to unhitch himself he had fallen, and had knocked his head on a rock. The fall had not been much more than thirty feet, and all around the rock he had struck the forest floor was soft with old leaf mould and littered with pine needles. It must have happened no more than minutes before I landed. He had been as unlucky as I had been lucky.
The parachute was catching the light, making a beacon that could be seen for miles. I had to climb that tree and get it down. The trunk rose straight up without a branch for twenty feet or so, but had many sharp projecting woody bits. I went up it clinging with my arms and legs, trying to by-pass the sharp pieces, and trying, too, to keep a lookout for anyone who might be coming to investigate that high patch of glistening white. I got to the level of the first branch, when I heard a sound that might have been a twig breaking or the crack of a rifle, and I remained quite still in indecision before thinking that nothing was more dangerous to me than that heap of stirring white. I went up the remainder of that trunk as fast as I could, and, lying face down along the projecting branch that held the parachute, wriggled