Another Kind of Country (3 page)

She’d given up asking if they were really going to fucking Germany and why the fuck weren’t they waiting for her father. Dieter ignored her. Her mother didn’t even remind her that such language was forbidden. Elena reached back from the front seat beside Dieter and took Rosa’s hands in her own. Elena’s hands felt cool, comforting, and she let her mother go on holding her.

‘We might make it now.’

They had to strain to catch Dieter’s almost whispered words. They were in a short street on the outskirts of the city. Ahead, beyond the tiled roofs and the church towers, the Andes reared, distant, yet seemingly close enough
to touch.

‘If we can make it to the mountain road . . .’ Dieter left the rest unsaid.

He eased the jeep out of the alley on to a long curving boulevard that Rosa recognized. Beyond, she knew, lay the countryside, climbing to the mountains.

‘Shit.’

As they rounded the curve, they could see, further ahead, a police van on the shoulder and a couple of carabineros stopping traffic.

‘Here.’ From his inside pocket Dieter took a pair of plastic-covered ID cards which he handed to Elena. ‘You are Señora Medeiros and her daughter, Susi, and I’m your driver-cum-gardener. We’re headed for your weekend place in Santa Marta, you’re worried by the trouble in the city.’

A photograph of herself stared back at Rosa from the ID card. It wasn’t today or yesterday, she realized, that her father had begun to organize their escape.

‘And Papa? Where—’

‘Hush, Rosa, say nothing.’

Dieter eased the car to a halt beside the carabineros.

‘Papers.’ The shorter one had his hand out; the taller, thin one stood back, cradling his sub-machine gun.

Dieter gestured towards Elena. She smiled, opened her handbag, handed over the ID card. The policeman waited, staring at Rosa. He wiped at a large blob of sweat on his mouth as he took Rosa’s card.

To Rosa it seemed that all of them had stopped breathing as the carabinero examined the IDs.

‘Where are you going, Señora?’

He’s from the south
, Rosa thought,
where the chilling wind narrows your eyes and your words almost to a whistle
.

‘We have a summer cottage in Santa Marta. We
were worried about—’

He wasn’t interested in her worries. ‘And Señor Medeiros?’

‘He’s at work.’

‘Where?’

She hesitated. ‘At the university.’

The narrow eyes narrowed almost to a slit. ‘Señora, the university is closed.’

She tried to smile. ‘Yes, my husband had some paperwork to pick up.’

‘Which department?’

‘Physics,’ Elena said. She tried to meet his eyes, tried to look unconcerned, a middle-class lady on the way to the country with her teenage daughter.

‘Corporal.’ The word spat from deep in his windpipe. ‘Get on the radio to headquarters and clear these IDs.’ He turned away from the jeep, arm extended to give the ID cards to his colleague.

‘Get down!’ Dieter’s pistol was in his hand. He fired through the doorway of the van, splintering the radio set. The thin one was levelling the sub-machine gun as Dieter pushed down on the accelerator. The engine roared. He swung the wheel, clipping the smaller carabinero. The plastic ID cards flew from his hand.

‘Get down! Down!’ Dieter yelled again.

He floored the accelerator. The jeep roared away along the road. Gunfire followed them.

Even with her head buried in the seat, Rosa couldn’t shut out the deathly pinging of bullets on the steel rear of the jeep. Her insides jellied with fear.

And then Dieter swung the jeep hard across the central island of the boulevard. For a moment, as the jeep clattered against the kerb, it seemed to hang in the air and Rosa held tight, her new fear now that she’d be flung from the vehicle.

Dieter chanced a look over
his shoulder.

‘I’m OK,’ Rosa gasped.

He nodded, went on pushing the jeep to its limit.

‘Their radio is kaput,’ Dieter shouted. ‘If we can get on to the mountain tracks, we have a chance.’

And then Elena, with a tiny sigh, slumped against Dieter in the front seat.

‘Señora Rossman?’ With his right hand Dieter tried to push Elena upright.

Another tiny sigh came from her lips.

‘Mama!’ Rosa was staring wide-eyed at the hole in the back of the seat in front of her. ‘Mama!’ she screamed again. She touched the edge of the bullet-drilled hole with tentative fingers and drew back her hand as though scorched by the ragged edges.

‘Get up here in front.’ Dieter was handling the heavy steering of the jeep while holding Elena upright with his other hand. ‘It’s too risky to stop.’

Rosa clambered into the front seat, somehow got herself between her mother and Dieter.

The jeep leapt ahead as Dieter got both hands on the steering wheel and pushed down on the accelerator.

Rosa held her mother close against her. Elena’s body was limp, heavy. Another sigh, a bubble of blood leaking at the corner of her mouth.

‘We have to get Mama to hospital.’ Her words seemed flung backwards in the slipstream of the jeep. ‘She needs help or she’ll die.’

Dieter seemed deaf.

Rosa kicked out at his leg. ‘Take us to a hospital – now.’

Dieter’s right hand flew from the steering wheel, backhanding her in the face.

‘Every hospital in the city is under guard. We go there and you will die too. D’you think your mother would want
that?’ She wondered at the calmness in the blue eyes when he threw her a sideways glance. ‘Your father trusted me, that’s why he gave me the job of protecting you.’

‘And this is how you protect us?’ She took one hand from around her mother’s body, pushed the blood-soaked palm close to his face.

‘Forgive me, Fräulein Rosa.’ Only her grandfather, her mother’s father, had ever called her
Fräulein
, an echo of the country he had long ago left and never again visited. But her grandfather’s voice had never been laden with such dull sorrow as she heard now in Dieter’s words.

‘I know I’ve failed.’ His words spoken to the fly-splattered windscreen of the jeep. ‘But there’s going to be no more failing.’

She reached out then, touched him on the shoulder.

The city was behind them now. She tried to hold her mother close against her to soften the bouncing jolts as they hurtled along a narrow potholed blacktop.

Elena gave a long, slow sigh. Her body rattled, seemed to crumple against Rosa like an empty paper bag. A bag that went on emptying blood against Rosa, drenching her shirt with a warm stickiness.

Dieter, too, had heard that long, rattling sigh.

‘I’m truly sorry, Fräulein Rosa.’ A hard hand on her arm, the briefest of pressure. ‘Truly sorry.’

Rosa swallowed. In the rushing blur of sloping fields she could glimpse her mother’s face that morning, the intimate look she flashed at Franco. She could hear above the growling of the engine the smack of Elena’s hand on her face.

‘She slapped me this morning,’ she said. ‘On the face.’

Dieter glanced at her. ‘Maybe you deserved it.’

‘Yes,’ Rosa said, ‘I deserved it.’

Dieter smiled at her and she
returned his smile.

For about an hour they rattled along winding roads that climbed higher, narrowing as they climbed. They drove through villages with closed doors and shuttered windows and they knew that eyes followed them and ears listened to the planes that screamed across the sky.

Dieter slowed, pointing at a farmhouse ahead. ‘We’ll be safe here,’ he said, ‘for a little while.’

He swung the jeep on to the dirt track that led to the farmhouse. Chickens scurried across the yard. A thin plume of smoke hung in the air above the chimney. Rosa shivered, as though her mother’s body had suddenly cooled against her own.

Dieter cut the engine.

In the open doorway of the farmhouse a close-shaven young man in faded dungarees stood watching them. A pair of dark-haired twin boys, maybe four years old, stood beside him.

‘You made it this far,’ the man said.

‘Not without trouble,’ Dieter said.

The children’s mother came to the door. Her solemn gaze moved from the men to the jeep in the yard. She gave a little cry when she saw the girl and the blood-soaked woman slumped in her arms. She ran across the stony yard to Elena; her husband held the children back.

‘Señora Rossman?’

Dieter nodded. ‘We almost made it.’ He shook his head. ‘You know how it is.’

‘Eat something,’ the man said, ‘and get moving.’ He looked across at the jeep. ‘I’ll take care of it.’

‘The soldiers will come, maybe soon.’

‘They’ll find nothing.’

Rosa was ushered into the big kitchen. The twins watched her, silent, as she sat at the
table, shoulders slumped. The woman offered her tea, coffee, water. Rosa didn’t even shake her head. Outside in the yard the men moved softly, murmuring to each other, but she knew they were about the business of putting her mother’s remains in the stony ground.

Dieter came in.

‘Nando?’ the woman said.

‘He’s doing what has to be done.’

From outside came the clanging sound of metal on stone.

They’re digging my mother’s grave
. ‘I want to see,’ Rosa said, ‘I want to say
adios
.’

‘There isn’t time,’ Dieter said. ‘We’ve got to move.’

Something snapped in her.

‘I want to say goodbye to my mother!’ she shouted.

The twins began to cry.

‘Please, please!’ their mother said.

Rosa looked at the bawling children, the way they clung to their mother’s skirt. She saw the fear in the woman’s eyes, heard the clang of danger in every stroke of the spade slicing into the stony earth.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She looked around the kitchen, saw the large old-fashioned radio on the window sill. ‘But please, is there news of my father?’

The woman shook her head.
How do you tell a young girl that the army-controlled radio had announced that President Allende had taken his own life in the palace rather than face trial for his crimes against Chile? And that one of his fellow criminals in government, Franco Mendoza, had been shot dead for resisting arrest by the soldiers of liberation.

‘There is no news, little one,’ the woman said. ‘The radio is silent.’

She turned away, bent over the cooking pot to spoon rice and beans into a dish for Dieter. He ate in small, neat
spoonfuls yet in a few minutes the dish was empty.

‘
Gracias
,’ he told the woman.

‘You should go now,’ she said. ‘If the soldiers find you here . . .’ She drew the twins to her, one on either side.

Rosa stood up. ‘Thank you for taking care of my mother, Señora – I don’t know your name.’

‘It’s better not to, little one.’

‘The soldiers,’ Dieter said. ‘If they stop us.’

What you don’t know, Rosa thought, can’t kill you.
Or anyone else either
.

‘
Gracias
, Señora,’ she said. ‘From my heart.’

The woman embraced her.

‘I will come back,’ Rosa said.

‘Of course you will.’ There was a sadness in the woman’s voice.

‘
I will!
’ A kind of fury in Rosa’s words.

‘Rosa.’ She heard something different in Dieter’s voice. When she turned to him she saw a different face, harder, but sadder too. ‘Socialism in Chile is finished for now, the army generals and the Americans have made sure of that today. What they have done is illegal, anti-democratic, but the Americans will get away with it – for now anyway. Maybe socialism can survive here, even the Americans can’t kill us all. We don’t know,’ his voice softened, ‘we don’t know if President Allende is alive, if your father is alive, or any other ministers.’ The woman caught his eye and he read understanding there: sometimes you had to lie. ‘You’re fourteen years old, Rosa, maybe your father never talked to you about socialism or democracy . . .’

‘The other girls at school called my father a Communist, that he and the President would steal their lands and their businesses.’ She half smiled. ‘I always told them to fuck off.’

The woman flinched, drew
her children closer.

Dieter shrugged. ‘Sometimes you have to lose a battle before you can win the war. But if you go to Germany now, as your father wished, it may be a long time before you can come back.’

‘Germany? Who wants to go to fucking Germany?’ She looked at Dieter, stunned.
Germany, where her grandfather never wished to return?
Outside, the spade went on clanging, digging her mother’s grave.

A jumbled blur of images flashed through her mind like a cock-eyed movie. Her father’s laugh, his stubbly cheek as he kissed her goodnight. Grandfather Rossman singing ‘
Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht
’ when they all gathered together on Christmas Eve. The girls at school sneering with raised eyebrows. Her mother’s stinging hand. The planes tearing the fabric of the September sky and her mother’s life leaking away in the front seat of the rattling jeep driven by a German stranger in a cheap, shiny suit.

She looked at him, this man who had just wandered purposefully into her life. Who had probably saved her life.

‘It’s what your father wanted,’ Dieter said. ‘When it’s safe, he’ll join you.’

She wanted to believe him. There had to be a different place, a different ending – another beginning – from this mountainside where her mother’s body would lie unmarked. Just hours ago her mind had been focused on a school play, her lines learned, her moves rehearsed; now there was
this
– the wind on the mountain, the clang of steel on stones, the confusing kindness of strangers. Here the drama was unrehearsed, the plot unscripted.

Dieter was waiting, watching. She saw his stillness, like a rock that belonged on the mountain.

What did it matter now, Germany or anywhere else?

‘All right,’ Rosa said. ‘If my father wished it.’

The twins stood waving in
the doorway as Dieter turned the jeep in the farmyard. The back of the jeep was laden with jerrycans of petrol that the children’s father had secured with ropes, and Rosa thought again how long they must have been preparing for this day of disaster.