One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [39]
Day after day I packed and loaded and slapped that lorry, and night after night, after supper, I slipped quietly back into my house in the hillside, the dogs no longer trying to tear my ankles off.
Then, three months into my stay, dysentery descended on our little community. Gretel, the German girl, got it first, then Brett, and then one or two of the other boys. They’d be fine, I was assured by the others, it was an occupational hazard out here, but for the moment, we lacked drivers. I’d been out on convoy once or twice before, but only as lookout. Now, for the first time, with a new young Italian boy beside me, I was behind the wheel. Initially I only went to villages close by, then, presumably when they saw I could bring the Bedford back in one piece, I went further up into the mountains. Always at night, almost always in convoy, always with no headlights. Sometimes, though, the length of the journeys and the state of the roads meant dawn was breaking as we returned. I’d grip the wheel with Pablo beside me, both of us scanning the road, not just for boulders to take the front wheel off now, but for bandit gangs too: modern-day highwaymen with AK47s, ready to commandeer the truck, and then who knows what fate befell the occupants. Each time I bumped back down those perilous dusty roads and felt the empty Bedford lurching into the familiar potholes that led to the village, I sent up a silent prayer. Thank you, God.
Gradually I got to know my way around, and one or two of the villages became familiar. I’d smile or attempt to greet the women who slipped silently out of the houses in the dark to take our food, but got nothing in response. Most places were denuded of young men: just women, children and old people. All fighting? I asked Brett one day, who’d recovered enough to pack for us again in the warehouse. ‘Not all,’ he said shortly, and I knew then they’d been rounded up. Thereafter I unloaded the food parcels in silence, the children falling on the tins of milk and sometimes bars of chocolate, the mothers retrieving it all with blank expressions.
I wasn’t fooling myself. I knew what this was about. All this heat and dust and fear and lack of sleep, the bump and grind of someone else’s war: it was about Dominic, whom I loved heart and soul, and needed to expunge from both. And yes, it helped. But it was about being good, too. A good girl. So all for me, this effort? Perhaps. But it seems to me charity work of any denomination can’t withstand too much scrutiny.
And I wouldn’t want you to think it was all hard slog either. There were days when I could sit on the Dalmatian coast and sun myself with my new friends, as, clasping our hands around our knees, sleeves rolled up, we rested our weary backs and gazed out to sea. There were days too, in the house in the hillside, when life got immeasurably lighter. Ibby’s husband, Alam, returned from the mountains, and the joy, the relief – the love – that exploded in that little house is something I’ll never forget. The old lady, her face wreathed in smiles I didn’t know she possessed, took her son’s head in her hand and kissed it hard. Mona jumped up and down shrieking and clapping. Ibby, by now hugely pregnant, laughed with joy, but perhaps the most affecting was Alam’s father, who sat down and wept: his only son, back from the war, safe.
He’d been captured by Chetchkins, we gathered over a reunion supper in which I was included, but mercifully had escaped with a few others. His sunken eyes and gaunt frame bore testament to his ordeal, and he looked nothing like the man in the picture in my bedroom. That night we ate ambrosial cured ham running with yellow fat clearly saved for this occasion, drank very dark wine, soaked creamy cheese up with rough bread and rejoiced. Out of the horror of war, like scattered moondust, special moments.
Alam spoke a little broken English and I gathered my adopted family were refugees. They were not from around here, not from this town, and one or two things fell into place. Like the fact that they kept to