One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [145]
I saw the harassed young doctor, who’d delivered Seffy, leaning over me. Then I saw something my mind had blocked for years. Heard it too. Voices shouting, screaming in the corridor about a kindergarten being bombed: the ward door flying open. A man, his face racked with anguish, his little girl in his arms: one leg just a bloody stump, half her head blown off. The man shrieking, forcing the limp, mutilated body into the obstetrician’s arms, there in the maternity ward: a desperate man, desperate for help. They say the mind blocks these sorts of memories to protect us. Does it also protect us from the consequences resultant of such appalling chance and timing? In which a terrible wrong can seem like the only course of action? Or do we have to work out the whys and wherefores for ourselves, years later. I took a breath to steady myself.
‘I fled. I left you, Seffy, on that hospital bed.’ Seffy’s eyes widened in shock. ‘I fled in terror and disbelief at all that had happened.’
There was a silence as my words were absorbed.
‘Didn’t anyone try to stop you? Find you?’
‘No one had time. Dubrovnik was a city in chaos, remember. Injured were arriving constantly. Bloody children in despairing arms. And no one knew who I was. I got a lift on a lorry and went back to the village, to the empty little house. Very empty. All dead. The whole family. And taciturn as they were, they’d been my family, all those months. And there I was, without my baby. I was… well, I wasn’t well. In my head. Traumatized. All sorts of labels would be stuck on me now, I recognize that.’ I took another deep breath. Let it out slowly. ‘People do extraordinary things in war, Seffy. Not always good, brave ones. Although those are the ones you hear about.’ My shoulders sagged, then I composed myself. ‘I don’t remember much about those few days, except I know I sat in the dark, by an unlit fire, the dogs on my feet. I was in shock, I think.’ I raised my head. ‘Two days later, I took one of the Bedford lorries, and went back to the hospital. I was told the baby had been taken to an orphanage.’ I looked at my son, very calm now. ‘You need to know, Seffy, that I didn’t go to that orphanage to reclaim you. I went to see that you were really there. Safe and well. To place you, in my head. Some kind people might say I was not in my right mind at the time, but I think it’s important you know that.’ I was aware of Seffy watching me intently but I couldn’t read him.
‘I went to the orphanage with a friend I drove convoys with. It was run by nuns, in a disused castle in a bombed corner on the outskirts of Dubrovnik. Kindly, gentle nuns. Not an altogether terrible place. They did the best they could. But still… dismal lines of cots. No place for a baby to grow up. The moment I saw you, something kicked in. My heart, I suppose. It started beating again. I told them immediately you were mine, that you’d been born to me in Dubrovnik hospital, that I wanted you back. No one believed me. I told them there were records, birth certificates. Of course there weren’t, there was a bloody civil war on; no one had taken the time to write anything down. I told them to examine me, then they’d know. They wouldn’t. They said a lot of mothers had lost their babies in the war, came in claiming orphans.’ I gave a wry smile. ‘The final irony was, I couldn’t have you. I told them I’d be back. I was. With the help of the UN, friends in the right places, and my humanitarian connections behind me, I adopted you. We came home two weeks later. Me and my Bosnian child. Ibby’s child. That was my story, my raison d’être. I told everyone it was her baby who’d been taken to the orphanage, and that I’d gone and claimed him. And I had papers to prove it, signed by the mother superior. Papers to show to my parents, the world. Which was why, in my head, I was able to believe I’d adopted