One Day in May - Catherine Alliott [40]
The party went on late into the evening, and the following morning, Mona was late for school. I watched her running off down the road, breaking into a skip, which I’d never seen her do.
‘Tata se vratio s planine!’ she cried to a friend, waiting for her on the corner, slightly cross at being kept waiting. ‘Daddy’s back from the mountains!’ A shout of joy went up from her friend; a hug, a dance in the dusty street: the human face of war.
My own family were reassured by my domestic situation. In letters I was able to gloss over the fact that I fumbled my way through the mountains at night in a blind lorry, and give them snippets of domestic life instead. Mum even sent a doll for Mona and linen for the baby when it came, which the old lady pored over with delight. Kit, I told them, was working closely with an army chaplain in another depot, which I knew to be true. I didn’t mention he was in Sarajevo, which the Serbs now had in a stranglehold, so that he was effectively incarcerated.
I’d suspected my silent family were kindly but frightened, but only after Alam returned did my relationship with them change completely. They asked me to stay for meals, which made a pleasant change from tins of beans on the warehouse floor, and I’d help Ibby prepare them. Ibby was only a few years older than me and most evenings, before I went out on convoy, we’d sit in the yard together shelling peas, the dogs at our feet, and I taught her a bit of English. She in turn taught me Croatian, laughing at my accent, and in a garbled fashion and with lots of sign language, she told me of the life she’d had before the war, as a teacher in Kosovo. When they’d fled they’d been accepted here in Heronisque only because they were Catholic – Croatia being a fiercely Roman Catholic country – and because Ibby’s grandfather, now dead, had been a priest. One or two notaries in the town had heard of him, remembered his name, and it had proved to be their salvation. Pictures of him in his robes, long grey hair, were all over the house, I realized, under crucifixes, strung with rosary beads, and it was his name the family had taken.
We’d sit in the evening sun and watch Mona play with the chickens, whilst the men played a board game of some kind behind us, chequers I think, not backgammon, a tiny glass of something strong apiece, and as the old lady slept bolt upright inside on her wooden settle. At length Ibby would get to her feet, one hand on her swollen belly, another in the small of her back, and together we’d go and get supper.
And then one night, I came back from a convoy that had taken us to the ancient town of Mostar, closer to the front lines, horribly shelled, almost parallel with Serb trenches. The crack of gunfire had been even closer. I was very tired and my nerves were shot because daylight had been breaking towards the end. When I finally left the warehouse and got back to the house it was empty.
The door to the room where the old couple slept downstairs was wide open, and when I ran up to Alam and Ibby’s room, which Mona shared, it too was deserted.
I fled into town, to raise someone, anyone, who, although the Mastlovas kept to themselves as refugees, they might know. But it was four in the morning and my banging and hollering fell on deaf ears. Finally, a woman appeared at a doorway in a shawl. She recognized me. Exclaimed. Came out and gripped my wrist. She tried to explain through the language barrier, her words coming fast like gunfire, arching her hand high over her