The Europe That Was (2 page)

GIVE US THIS DAY

Mirko Brancovitch was an old man, a calm link with the past; it seemed incredible that he could have been a bandit. He was not garrulous on the subject. There had been nothing gay in his trade, nothing dashing or even markedly virile. It was simply a way of life into which he had drifted. His reminiscences were not of stolen purses, but of poverty. He felt instinctively that thus he revealed the really essential difference between then and now. Other sufferings which had existed at the beginning of the century were still present in recognizable form, but extremes of hunger had vanished from all Europe, East and West.

The poverty of his mountains on the border of Bosnia and Montenegro had been unimaginable, he said. His fellow peasants were mostly freeholders and proud of it, though they had little benefit from their miserable patches of stony soil but freedom to starve. They were Serbs, unwilling subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Military service was the greatest disaster. The soldier ate, but no provision was made for wife and children. The State took no account of such inglorious hindrances to patriotism. If he sent them all his pay, every single penny of it, his family would be alive when he returned. But pay could not dig the land and keep it dug, far less hire a labourer.

Exaggerated? When the young men in the café insisted that it was, insisted, before they left on their bicycles or even motor cycles, that such hardship was impossible, the ex-bandit used to lay it down that the test of how much a man fears his fate is what he will do to avoid it. He would quote Pavlo Popovnic as an example.

Pavlo had a young wife and two sons aged four and five—gallant little fellows but not yet able to lift their father's clumsy tools, let alone use them. By working fourteen hours a day on his four acres of mountain—only two of which could really be counted as cultivable—he fed his family, though neither he nor his brave Despina could ever be sure of it from year to year. Flood or the failure of a single crop could tip the balance against them. Remove Pavlo's strong arms and the place would not feed a couple of goats.

When Pavlo was called up for three years with the colours, he had to go. So far he had managed to avoid the alien service, but in the excitements of 1913 the empire was granting no exemptions, especially
to Slavs along the southern frontiers. There was nothing he could do about it. The military were up to such acts of desperation as cutting off the trigger finger. Authorities and their tame doctors looked very closely into any accidents at all which happened after a man had received his call-up papers. Even a genuine accident at so convenient a time could land him with ten years in gaol instead of three in the Army.

As soon as Danilo, the local policeman, had delivered Pavlo's orders and left, Despina abandoned herself to shrieks and tears. Then, like all generous women, she drew strength from her own exhaustion and started to make sensible plans. The goats, the sow and the seed potatoes could be eaten. There was an uncle who, at the worst, would give them shelter. Oh yes, she assured Pavlo, they would get through the three years somehow.

Pavlo agreed. He would have agreed to anything. He hated to see his dark-haired darling cry. But he knew very well that even if she and the children survived his years of absence the land and its stock could not. After his return, starvation was certain.

They were like morning and night together—Pavlo a golden Slav, Despina with the raven braids and thin-cream skin of the Mediterranean. We do not see such fine animals today, Mirko Brancovitch asserted. They won much more love than they ever knew, for they were shy of being loved except by each other.

The next morning Pavlo went down the mountain to see the bone-setter. It was spring, but the winter stores were finished and there were still some weeks to go before his work could produce anything solid to eat. A bunch of radishes was all the present he could bring her.

She was the only doctor peasants could afford, and they would have had to travel fifty miles to find a better, in spite of her odd pharmacopoeia of herbs and charms. She even had a medical beard of seven coarse black bristles. Pavlo was a little afraid of her, but he knew her to be well disposed towards Despina whose two sons she had delivered.

‘If I break my leg, Mother,' he asked, ‘how long before I can begin to work?'

‘Four weeks,' she said. ‘Perhaps five.'

That was all right. He would be up in time to get in the harvest. And while he was confined to bed he wouldn't need to eat very much. The children could have his share.

‘You would set it crooked for me?'

‘You will limp a little all your life,' she promised him.

Pavlo could not ask better than that; but it was not so easy to break a leg and harder still to do it so convincingly that the doctor in uniform and the lawyer in his black coat would write it down on their papers as an accident.

It was then that the bandit, Brancovitch, himself entered the story. All four went out to find him—Pavlo, Despina and the two children. They were quite confident. He did not rob peasants. He was as poor as they. When he had accumulated a little store of coins he bought powder and shot with them, just as the men who lived in cottages bought seed. He lived a lot worse than they and ate, perhaps, a bit better, for he had more meat—when he could swallow it down. It was not always very fresh meat. He used to hang it in a forked branch like a wild-cat.

The family found him sitting in the sun at the entrance to his winter cave, preparing a pine-marten skin. He made more out of selling shabby furs than banditry. There were few travellers really worth the trouble of holding them up.

While the children played in the scrub of the hillside, Pavlo explained the disaster of the call-up and made an eloquent speech such as his father might have delivered to a Turkish bey, begging for patronage. The formality was correct but unnecessary. Towards the neighbours Brancovitch was as benevolent as Robin Hood, within the limits of his charity. They were quickly reached. His largesse might perhaps run to a couple of sparrows on a wooden spit if a friend were ill.

‘I want you to shoot me through the leg,' said Pavlo.

Mirko Brancovitch understood the urgency of it. But his weapon was not equal to his skill. He had only an old muzzle-loader. Normally he charged it with bird shot. On any game as big as Pavlo Popovnic he would have to use ball.

He pointed out that what Pavlo and Despina required was difficult. A leg was very small. He might give a flesh wound which wouldn't keep anybody out of the Army or, worse still, he might smash the knee-cap. Of course, at point-blank range he could make sure, and if he used a light charge of powder he could guarantee a clean break. But what about the powder burns and the wadding? The military examiners could be trusted to find that palpable evidence, for it would be just what they were looking for.

‘Besides,' he had said, ‘why in the devil's name should I shoot at you?'

Pavlo looked blank. He himself knew very well the sort of crime which Brancovitch would or would not commit, but he assumed that to the outside world a bandit was unaccountable; if caught, he would be executed in any case, so he was free to take a pot shot at anyone he pleased to amuse himself. It did not occur to Pavlo Popovnic that bandits had to have motives like anybody else.

Despina thought up a dozen reasons for shooting at her husband, but all of them were improbable and involved quite unforeseeable consequences. Brancovitch sadly refused to have anything to do with
the plan. He accepted a bottle of Despina's plum brandy and gave in return a little bag of wild seeds for the hens. It was very welcome. At home there were few scraps fit for chickens, and of course no grain.

On their way back Pavlo was silent. His obstinate male mind was more impressed by the technical than the personal difficulties of firing a ball into a leg. He was an experienced shot himself. The death of the family cow had compelled him to sell his gun to buy a heifer.

He left his family to their thin soup and returned to the bone-setter, though it was now after dark and no time to disturb her. He begged her to tell him if there were not a way to hide powder burns and to make a bullet wound appear as if it had been inflicted from a distance.

Her memories went as far back into the past as Brancovitch's today. She knew a trick handed down from the time when the Turkish Janissaries raided the valleys to recruit Christian boys and drove the Serbs up into crags where liberty could be preserved at the price of hunger.

‘You will buy two thick loaves,' she instructed him, ‘of good wheat bread, not our peasant bread. Tie a loaf on each side of the leg and fire through them.'

Her prescription was obviously sound. Pavlo trusted it as if she had given him an infallible charm. He begged her not to reveal the secret to any of the other families who had husbands or sons called up for the Army. He did not fear that they would give him away. Mutual loyalty among the Serbs was absolute. No, he was alarmed lest they might all play the same trick and consequently all go to prison.

‘They are as brave as I,' he said with a conceit which was national rather than personal.

‘But their wives have not the courage of your Despina,' she answered.

It always took time—very naturally—to find Mirko Brancovitch. When at last they were able to tell him about the bread, he saw the point and was professionally enthusiastic. He suggested that the loaves should be at least a day old, since new bread might slow up the ball like a sandbag. And, to avoid shattering the bone, he was going to load with only a quarter charge of powder.

He was far more willing to oblige Pavlo and Despina than before. He explained that he had given his lonely thoughts to their problem. It was in his interest, too, that Pavlo's leg should be broken so long as it was plain that he had been shooting not at him, but at the police. And it was about time he did, or Danilo might be transferred to some other district.

Danilo was responsible for enforcing such law as he could over fifty square miles of rock. He and Brancovitch were of the same clan and most reluctant to interfere with each other; but for the sake of higher authority an occasional exchange of shots was essential.

‘If you are willing to swear that I fired at Danilo from ambush and he fired back,' Brancovitch said, ‘there will be no questions afterwards.'

Yes, he could ensure Danilo's co-operation and silence. No trouble at all there. The greatest difficulty still lay ahead. You, forty years later, the former bandit would explain, could never suspect it. The greatest difficulty was to get the bread.

Time was beginning to run short. In three days' time Pavlo had to report to the depot. The nearest baker was half a day's journey away, and even he did not bake town bread unless it were specially ordered. Neither Despina nor her neighbours had an oven which would bake loaves of the texture and thickness required.

Experiments with a little white wheat flour and inadequate fuel were hopeless. They dared not use any substitute. So one of the last precious days and nights of Pavlo and Despina had to be sacrificed while he walked to the town, gave his order to the baker, slept in the open and returned the next day with the loaves.

It seemed extraordinary that bread should cost so much when at home it cost nothing—nothing, that is, but Pavlo's indispensable labour and the children's scrabblings among the rocks to find dry, burnable roots. But all of them agreed that such loaves were a perfection of food, satisfying eye, scent and touch. The sons stroked the crust with little wondering hands.

The following morning Danilo turned up at the Popovnics' cottage with his rifle slung on his back. His presence there would be easy to explain to his officer. He was paying a visit to answer Pavlo's ignorant questions, to see what he was up to and to ensure that he was making no preparations for escape. The bone-setter was already boiling her remedies at the stove, with the splints and bandages under her skirt. It was unlikely that the Law would ever find out from her at what time she had come to attend to the patient. She accounted to no one for her mysterious movements and answered threats with crazy cackles of abuse and curses.

The children were left at the cottage. Pavlo, Danilo and the two women scrambled uphill to a just cultivable clearing, the size of a small room, at the top of the land. When they were there, Brancovitch detached himself from a cluster of rocks and patted Pavlo reassuringly on the back. Pavlo was pale and nervous. He was like mid-century man being prepared for an operation. It was going to save the future of his family, but it was not pleasant.

‘Don't hurt him, Mirko!' Despina cried.

A ridiculous remark. But no doubt surgeons hear it today. And Brancovitch knew as well as they what she meant—that he wasn't to hurt Pavlo more than he must.

Now that the moment of their plotting had become reality,
Despina's anxiety was silent and terrible. It had no relation to our modern fears: of a dangerous compound fracture or of septic poisoning. Her medical knowledge was not up to that. In her experience—which in a country of blood feud was considerable—men always recovered from a broken limb though it was never as useful as before. That was why she and Pavlo had chosen a leg rather than an arm. The legs were only for carrying the arms to work.

No, her anxiety was not for the possible consequences, but a sharing of Pavlo's pain and distress. Yet she never doubted that it was his duty. She felt no horror at all for such an atrocity. It was the only alternative to disaster, and she would have unhesitatingly mutilated herself if it had been she whom the government wanted to take away.

Brancovitch insisted that the girl accepted the preparations naturally. She almost sanctified them by her love and simplicity, and the need of her children for food. Under those circumstances nothing in the act was criminal, nothing unclean.

Pavlo tied the loaves lightly on each side of his shin and stood with that leg advanced. The bandit knelt at a distance of two yards from him, his old muzzle-loader pointing slightly downwards. The trajectory of the ball would correspond to that of a shot aimed at the unsuspecting Danilo from higher up the hillside.