The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh - Evelyn Waugh [192]
They rose to go. Mme. Kanyi made a last attempt to attract his sympathy. “Will you please come and see the place where they have put us?”
“I am sorry, madam, it simply is not my business. I am a military liaison officer, nothing more.”
They thanked him humbly and profusely for the cocoa and left the house. Major Gordon saw them in the farmyard disputing. The men seemed to think Mme. Kanyi had mishandled the affair. Then Bakic hustled them out. Major Gordon saw the crowd close round them and then move off down the lane in a babel of explanation and reproach.
II
There were thermal springs at Begoy. The little town had come into being about them. Never a fashionable spa, it had attracted genuine invalids of modest means from all over the Hapsburg Empire. Serbian rule changed it very little. Until 1940 it retained its Austrian style; now the place was ravaged. Partisans and Ustashi had fought there, or, rather, each in turn had fired it and fled. Most houses were gutted and the occupants camped in basements or improvised shelters. Major Gordon’s normal routine did not take him into the town, for the officials and military were in farmhouses like his own on the outskirts, but he daily frequented the little park and public gardens. These had been charmingly laid out sixty years before and were, surprisingly, still kept in order by two old gardeners who had stayed on quietly weeding and pruning while the streets were in flames and noisy with machine-gun fire. There were winding paths and specimen trees, statuary, a bandstand, a pond with carp and exotic ducks, and the ornamental cages of what had once been a little zoo. The gardeners kept rabbits in one of these, fowls in another, a red squirrel in a third. The partisans had shown a peculiar solicitude for these gardens; they had cut a bed in the centre of the principal lawn in the shape of the Soviet star and had shot a man whom they caught chopping a rustic seat for firewood. Above the gardens lay a slope wooded with chestnut and full of paths carefully graded for the convalescent with kiosks every kilometre, where once postcards and coffee and medicinal water had been on sale. Here for an hour a day in the soft autumn sunshine Major Gordon could forget the war. More than once on his walks there he met Mme. Kanyi, saluted her, and smiled.
Then, after a week, he received a signal from his headquarters in Bari saying: Unrra research team require particulars displaced persons Yugoslavia stop report any your district. He replied: One hundred and eight Jews. Next day (there was wireless communication for only two hours daily): Expedite details Jews names nationality conditions. So his duty took him away from the gardens into the streets where the lime trees still flourished between the stucco shells. He passed ragged, swaggering partisans, all young, some scarcely more than children; girls in battle dress, bandaged, bemedalled, girdled with grenades, squat, chaste, cheerful, sexless, barely human, who had grown up in mountain bivouacs, singing patriotic songs, arm-in-arm along the pavements where a few years earlier rheumatics had crept with parasols and light, romantic novels.
The Jews lived in a school near the ruined church. Bakic led him there. They found the house in half darkness for the glass had all gone from the windows and been replaced with bits of wood and tin collected from other ruins. There was no furniture. The inmates for the most part lay huddled in little nests of straw and rags. As Major Gordon and Bakic entered they roused themselves, got to their feet and retreated towards the walls and darker corners, some raising their fists in salute, others hugging bundles of small possessions. Bakic called one of them forward and questioned him roughly in Serbo-Croat.
“He says de others gone for firewood. Dese ones sick.