The Bloody Road to Death (9 page)

‘Wh-what do you want?’ asks the man on the bed in a trembling voice. The whole room smells of fear.

‘To have a little talk with you, my dear Delco. Shall we speak in German, or would you prefer our own language? Let us speak German. You have surely forgotten your mother tongue after all the years you have spent with your German friends.’

‘I have nothing to do with the Germans,’ Delco defends himself. ‘Do you think if I had I would be living here?’

‘Delco, dear little Delco, what nonsense! We know
all
about you. Have you had a knock on the head for your memory to be affected so? Have you no memory of Peter? Of Pone? Of Illijeco?
Of my brother
!’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I know what happened to your brother but I had nothing to do with it!’

‘Loss of memory! Remarkable case,’ jerks out the man with the cigarette-holder and the strange desiccated laughter. He has found a bottle of
Slivovitz
and drinks almost half of it, before handing the bottle on to his comrade.

‘It seems to be contagious. Nobody remembers anything any more. The disease seems to be particularly virulent in wartime. What about you, Olja, have you also become infected with this loss of memory?’

The woman does not answer him. Fear stares from her large terrified eyes. She hugs the boy tightly to her.

‘The dry air out here makes thoughts so light, perhaps, that in the end they fly right away,’ laughs the cigarette-holder man. He belches loudly.

‘Why do you come here in the middle of the night and break your way in? Why do you not come in daylight like honest men?’

‘Delco, Delco, we missed your company so much that we simply couldn’t wait when we finally heard where you were. Your German friends were kind enough to help us with a lift. We do a little work for them ourselves, you know. Or perhaps you
don’t
know? They are very pleased with you and Olja. SD-Obersturmführer Scharndt asked us specially to visit you and to look after you! And now we are here and we
do
intend really to look after you.’ He looks round the poor room. ‘Your place in Sofia was much nicer.’ The cigarette-holder man laughs, a weird, toneless crackle. It reminds one of a gallows creaking in the wind.

His comrade sings softly:

Wenn was nicht klappt, dann sag ich unverhohlen,
wie man so sagt ‘Die Heimat hat’s befohlen!’
Es ist so schôn, gar keine Schuld zu kennen
und sich nur einfach ein Soldat zu nennen.
¹⁵

They hoist themselves noisily up onto the table. They swing their legs. Their highly-polished riding boots gleam in the candlelight. The boots seem somehow threatening. These two are soldiers though still seeming to be partly civilian.

‘Do you find it boring here in the mountains?’ asks the cigarette-holder man, mockingly. With only scorpions, snakes and the little red body-snatchers to keep you company?’

With shaking fingers the young woman buttons her nightdress up to the throat. The little boy presses himself closer to his mother. He cannot understand German, but can feel the dangerous tension in the air.

The cigarette-holder man takes down a guitar from the wall, climbs up on the table again, and begins to experiment with the instrument.

‘You hold musical evenings here?’ He strikes a few harsh, dissonant phrases from the strings.

The little family presses tighter against the wall as if hoping it will swallow them up. Their faces are pale blots. The crickets sing loudly, almost drowning out the sound of the wild, mad guitar.

I look uncertainly at Porta and lift my Mpi.

‘Not yet,’ he whispers, shaking his head. ‘Not our business yet. This is between the Greeks and the Bulgars. If anything illegal happens, we interfere. We are taking care of things on behalf of the police, who are not with us at this time.’

I smile tiredly and wish myself anywhere but here.

The hunters are triumphant inside the hut. Their prey is cornered. The boy pushes his tousled head into his father’s chest.

‘Why
did
you go over to those brown devils?’ asks the leader.

‘Because they thought it was to their advantage, of course,’ laughs the cigarette-holder man. He takes the carbine slowly
from his shoulder, snaps the lock noisily and extracts a clip of bullets from his pocket. He holds it up to the light. The six bullets gleam like gold. ‘Pretty, eh?’ he almost whispers. ‘
German
bullets!’ He removes one from the clip and studies it carefully. ‘Very new too. Made in Bamberg in 1943, and I do believe they have your numbers on them!’

Olja is weeping silently.

‘We have been looking for you for a long time,’ says the leader coldly. ‘It was not until we asked your German friends about you that we got a lead. Now we are here!’

‘And you certainly don’t seem overjoyed to see us,’ laughs the cigarette-holder man, pressing the clip into the magazine of his carbine.

‘Delco and Olja,’ says the leader, as if he were enjoying the very taste of the words. ‘You have been sentenced to death! You have betrayed your people, and we have come to carry out the sentence passed upon you!’

‘We’ve betrayed nobody,’ shouts Delco wildly, putting his arm around his wife. ‘Our country is allied to Germany. ‘Our Army is fighting in the Soviet. I am a Bulgarian policeman.’

‘Delco, you understand so
little
! You
were
a policeman, the poor tool of the Royalists. The Bulgarian people does not wish to fight for the King and his Fascist vassals against the great Soviet brotherland.’

‘The King
ordered
us to fight the Soviets,’ screams Delco, desperately. The two carbine muzzles move slowly until they are pointing directly at him.

The cigarette-holder man laughs a laugh without a trace of amusement in it.

‘How stupid people are,’ he sighs. ‘They simply
will
not understand.’

Olja screams plangently, and hides her face in her hands.

Delco makes a movement to get to his feet, but slumps down again despairingly. He is facing the inevitable. The boy seems to make himself smaller, pressing in between his terrified parents. Wide-eyed he stares at these terrible guests who have appeared so suddenly from the night.

The stillness of death reigns in the humble room.

The cigarette-holder man strums dreamily on the guitar.
Suddenly he throws it from him. Strings jangle and snap. He laughs noisily.

Two shots crash out almost together.

Olja slides down from the bed. Her hands are still pressed to her face. Delco lifts himself half up, then falls sideways across the bed clutching at the pillow. His body jerks and is still.

Immediately after the shots there is a strange quiet in the room. The two executioners remain sitting stiffly on the table for several minutes.

A long, piercing bird call comes from the unit.

Porta answers with the call of a raven. This tells them that we are all right.

‘Why didn’t you call them up here?’ I ask in a whisper.

‘Njet, the Old Man’d ruin the last act, and I don’t think our good German God would like that,’ Porta laughs ominously.

‘Shall we go in?’ I ask.

‘No, no. Let them enjoy themselves a little longer.
The pair of shits!
’

The two executioners are still sitting on the bed watching the little boy. He strokes his father’s hair lovingly.

‘Will you shoot me, too? I am all alone now.’

The executioners look questioningly at one another. The cigarette-holder man lifts his carbine.

‘No!’ snarls the leader, knocking it down.

‘Why not?’ asks the cigarette-holder man in surprise. ‘Best thing to do with the little traitor.’

I arm a hand-grenade. If they kill the boy I’ll throw it. I am so furious I am shaking all over.

‘Daddy, mummy, I’m all alone! Where am I to go?’ The boy’s voice trembles. It is easy to hear that he is close to tears. This ‘great’ war has hardened children in an unnatural way. The brutal face of death has become an everyday sight to them.

The executioners jump lightly down from the table. The cigarette-holder man laughs and looks through the cupboards again, to see if there is anything he can use. He pokes at the bodies with the barrel of his carbine.

Olja is still breathing. He presses the muzzle of the carbine against her neck. A shot crashes. The skull splinters. Pieces of bone and brains spatter the room.

Porta looks at me. We say nothing but we are agreed on what is to be done.

Noisily they leave the hut.

A little white dog comes rushing around the corner. The cigarette-holder man kills it with a couple of blows from the butt of his carbine and kicks the body inside the hut.

‘It would be best to kill the child,’ he says when they have gone a little way. ‘If the Germans come he could identify us, you know.’

‘You are right,’ says the leader. ‘Do it then!’

The cigarette-holder man laughs his dry, rasping rattle of a laugh. It tails off in a gasp as he almost runs up against our Mpi muzzles.

‘Hi, there!’ says Porta, pleasantly, tipping his yellow hat to them.

‘Ooh!’ comes in astonishment from the cigarette-holder man.

‘Booh!’ laughs Porta.

‘We have
Ausweis
¹⁶
says the leader, nervously. ‘We are employed by the SD
¹⁷
.’

‘Like fuck you have,’ answers Porta, brutally, splashing him without warning across the face with his Mpi, The sight tears his cheek open.

I press my weapon into the pit of the cigarette-holder man’s belly, and snick the safety off.

‘Take it easy now, chum, or I’ll blow your guts out through your back for you.’

Like all killers he fears death greatly.

‘What are you up to?’ asks the leader, wiping the blood from his face.

‘Guess!’ laughs Porta roughly.

‘Shall we tell him?’ I ask.

Porta spits in the leader’s face.

‘You have
Ausweis
, you say! Employed by the SD, you say! You’re our friends, you say!’

‘Indeed we
are
,’ says the cigarette-holder man fervently, Panic terror is in his eyes.

‘Good,
good
! says Porta with a terrible grin. ‘Were you also friends of the two dear departed inside there?’

‘Traitors, they were,’ says the leader. ‘Communists, Soviet spies.’

Porta whistles in surprise.

‘And you two fixed their waggon for them? Sorry, sonnies, it won’t work. We’ve been following you boys all night. One thing, you two certainly know how to run a good exciting, dramatic liquidation-scene. Five stars you get from this reviewer.’

‘We were only obeying orders,’ stammers the cigarette-holder man, nervously.

‘Orders?’ sneers Porta. ‘Get your kicks from obeying orders, do you? See here, kiddies,
we
get
paid
for murdering. Paid by the German state, see? They’ve given us stripes on our arms and tin on our chests for it. We’re
good
at it, you understand! Now usually we only do it for money, but you boys you’re SD and you’re our friends. So for you we do it for nothing. Won’t cost you a
penny
to get your guts shot out. And by
experts
, too!’

We hear marching boots and the rattle of equipment coming up the path. The unit is on the move with the Old Man in the lead. I look quickly at Porta. He nods slightly.

‘On your way, friends,’ he says to the two executioners. ‘If you can really run you can save yourselves yet.’

They seem not to understand us for a moment. Our expressions are friendly. We seem to intend them well. Quickly, they turn on their heels and are off at full speed.

‘So long, boys!’ shouts Porta, tipping his cylindrical, yellow hat.

Our Mpi’s rattle. The two men fall and roll down the path.

‘What the devil’s going on,’ shouts the Old Man at our backs. He sees the bodies. ‘What’s all this?’ he asks, threateningly.

‘Couple of the heathen,’ grins Porta. ‘They’d just murdered a wife and husband. We ordered them to halt, but they wouldn’t. They ran and we opened fire, according to the manual.’

The Old Man looks at us suspiciously.

‘If you’ve fixed up a phony “attempted escape”, I’ll get you two a summary!’

Tiny gets up with a short laugh and shows us three gold teeth.

‘You fixed them up proper, all right. Nearly cut ’em in two. They must’ve been bleedin’ barmy to make a run for it!’

The boy is still sitting by his father’s body running his hand over the dead man’s hair. His hands are covered with blood.

‘I’m all alone now. Where must I go?’ he repeats the words automatically, stonily.

The Old Man picks him up and comforts him.

‘You’ll come with us!’

We bury the parents behind the house. We search the hut, but there is nothing worth liberating. There is not much water either. Two goatskins partly full.