Another Kind of Country (4 page)

The sky was darkening. Here in the mountains night would fall suddenly, like a curtain on her school play.

When they swung on to the road, she looked back at the farmhouse, retreating into the gloom. In the field beyond the house the dark-haired farmer raised one arm in farewell, then bent again over her mother’s grave.

11–14 September 1973

The Andes

South America

Afterwards, in her new life, wrestling with
the unaccustomed language, Rosa could not recall clearly how long they had meandered among the lower reaches of the mountains. She remembered the cold of the nights, wrapped in the hairy blankets from the farmhouse, but was it three nights or four, under the icy stars? She remembered Dieter’s paleness, face drawn, as though the dentist had forgotten to inject him before pulling resistant teeth. And the peaks themselves, like giant canines, towering above them, mocking their puny attempt at escape.

Even in the mountains there was no escaping the screaming planes.

Dieter pulled the jeep under a hanging rock, killed the engine and stared skywards.

‘So much for national airspace.’ She had to strain to make out his words.

‘We’re out of Chile?’

‘I hope so.’ But he didn’t say where they were.

Limbo
, she told herself. A place between there and now, between here and yesterday. A place where the unforgiving mountain terrain was ever-changing
but always the same.

‘Argentina?’ The sky was silent.

‘Argentina has generals too, Rosa.’ Dieter pulled the jeep out from under the rock. ‘We can’t stay here.’

Generals
. In her ears like another word for bogeymen, the kind of monsters who ambushed your dreams and you woke to find your mother dead and your father . . .

She wanted to ask but Dieter looked too tired for questions.

Each day he drove until darkness stopped them. Too dangerous, he said, to chance the lights. Yet whenever she stirred in the night, he was awake, upright in the driver’s seat, or standing by the jeep, cowled in the rough blanket. Once she felt him rearranging her blanket, folding it more closely around her.
He loved my father
, she thought.
Or maybe they both loved the same thing
.

She wanted to ask about her father. She didn’t want to hear the answer. Something about the woman’s attitude, her tenderness, in the farmhouse made her doubt that the radio had been silent all day.

Her mother had died that day. Even though Elena had begged Dieter not to kill that American at their house. You spare one of them but another of the bastards will kill you anyway. She had to believe that her father was alive, that he would come for her in Germany. She looked at Dieter, at that impassive face, and was both frightened and reassured.

Dieter was tapping on a dial on the metal dashboard. He looked at his watch, drew the jeep to a halt. From his pocket he took a piece of paper and unfolded it. Rosa leaned closer, watched him finger a black line on the hand-drawn map.

‘Are we almost there – wherever we’re going?’

‘A few hours.’ He smiled at her. ‘If the petrol holds out.’

‘We still have one can left.’

‘But it’s no longer full, Fräulein Rossman.’

She watched him uncap the jerrycan and empty it into the tank with small, neat movements. He’d be a good dancer, she thought, and she laughed.

‘Are you laughing at me, Fräulein Rossman?’

She was ashamed then, as though the teacher had caught her giggling over some silliness at the back of the class.

‘You can laugh at me anytime.’ His voice was soft.

‘There’s not much else to laugh about right now.’

Dieter smiled.

There was something renewed about the way he turned the key now. He banged on the horn, a hoarse, squawky sound like geese over the mountains, as they moved off along the mountain track.

‘We have to make time.’ He had to shout above the noise of the engine. ‘And the petrol has to last. But I think we’re going to make it.’

They did.

A long climb along
a boulder-edged path, a muffled sound, like a Sunday lawnmower, above and beyond them, and then they emerged on to a narrow, unexpected plateau. In the middle of the plateau, incongruous, a small twin-engined plane, its engine idling with a throaty
put-putting
noise.

Dieter drove the jeep along the levelled causeway. Close to, the surface was rough; jagged splinters flew from under the wheels of the jeep.

A blue van, a white Beetle and a motorbike with a sidecar stood to one side of the plane. A small group of men, jacket collars turned up against the mountain chill, stood watching as Dieter drew the jeep to a halt. Only the rim of the sun edged above the mountain peaks; in the gloom it was impossible to make out faces.

A single figure detached himself from the group. He was tall, painfully thin.

‘You made it, Dieter.’ He spoke in German but Rosa had spent enough time in her grandfather’s garrulous company to understand.

‘Just in time, it seems.’ Dieter gestured at the plane.

‘You know we’d have waited for you.’

Dieter laughed drily. ‘Yes, but for how long?’

‘You must have more faith, Dieter, in our sense of socialist fraternity.’ Now the thin fellow was laughing too. ‘What you need is a long spell in the homeland.’

‘I forgot to bring bananas.’

The rest of the group – five men and a close-cropped woman, Rosa could see now – were silent, listening to this exchange. And she felt small, childish even, in the presence of these strangers in the deepening shadow of the mountains. She felt their eyes upon her, on the flimsy T-shirt and denim jeans, and she raised her hand to her long dark hair and longed for a shower and a shampoo.

And her mother.

The dark mountains seemed to stoop over them. Rosa looked into the darkness, felt her own smallness before these strangers in this alien place.

‘My father,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘Where is my father?’

The thin man, seemingly the leader of the group, looked from Rosa to Dieter.

‘This is Minister Mendoza’s daughter?’

‘Rosa.’ She was
glad of Dieter’s hand on her shoulder: the long journey through the mountains had created its own bond. ‘Rosa Rossman, daughter of Franco Mendoza and Elena Rossman.’

The The thin man held out his hand to her. ‘You are welcome among us, Fräulein Rossman.’ He spoke to her in German, using the formal, adult
Sie
.

She asked again. ‘My father?’

‘He died defending his President.’ She was sure he clicked his heels together, gave her a slight bow. ‘My deepest sympathies.’

Her hands reached out but the darkness offered no support. She felt her mind scrambling for something – anything – to hang on to. The school play, she thought, but now even the title eluded her. Hers was the role of the teenage girl at odds with disapproving parents over an unsuitable boyfriend: not even a name came to her.

She felt the men come closer but they were shadows, as unreal as the parents in the play. Only her mother’s nameless grave was real. And her father. His smell, his smile. His hard jaw against her face when he hugged her.

And now he, too, was an absence.

My deepest sympathies
.

She wanted to know how and where and when and, most of all,
why
, but these considerations seemed less important under the majesty of the darkening mountains. The thought struck her that she was an orphan now – but she was an adult too. She drew herself taller and inclined her head gravely to the thin German and she said thank you.

And then she was falling, crumpling, and she felt Dieter gather her into his arms.

‘She’s just a child,’ Dieter said.

Rosa didn’t hear
him. She had passed out and they were carrying her up and into the small plane.

14 September 1973

The
Andes

South America

They were airborne
when she came to. She didn’t move, kept her head on the small pillow pushed against the window. Eyes closed. The engines droning like a lullaby off-key.

She could hear Dieter’s voice, raised above the noise of the engine.

‘You think I’d leave her to those animals?’

‘It was her father we wanted to get out.’ A female voice, smoky with cigarettes. ‘He stood for something, it would have been a triumph if we could have shown him to the cameras in Berlin.’

‘He stood for decency and democracy and socialism.’ There was an edge to Dieter’s voice. ‘And Franco Mendoza entrusted me with the safety of his woman and his daughter.’

‘He should have got out when we told him to.’ The woman snorted. ‘Romantic bullshit – was he going to hold off the rebels with a handgun? Talk about tilting at fucking windmills.’

Rosa heard a match struck, smelled cigarette smoke.

When Dieter spoke again, his tone was sharper. ‘A man like Franco Mendoza reminds us of the meaning of socialism, of the ideals we strive to achieve in our own country.’

‘Dieter, you talk like a fucking textbook. You’re full of—’

Rosa never did hear what the woman thought Dieter was full of.

The plane bucked, plummeted through a hole in the mountain air. A shared gasp of fright filled the cabin. Rosa’s head was knocked against the seat in front and she grabbed for Dieter’s hand. His fingers went round hers.

‘It’s OK.’ He put his arm around her.

The plane righted itself, levelled off, climbed again. Across the aisle the woman’s face, framed in its cropped cut, was as white as the cigarette that she held in her thin fingers. Rosa felt skewered by the grey eyes in the pale face. The woman went on staring at her as she stubbed out her butt in an empty cigarette pack.

‘We shall see.’ The woman turned her head to Dieter but he made no reply.

Rosa felt his fingers tighten on her shoulder.

‘Just a little bump,’ he said again. ‘Feeling better?’

She wanted to thank him for what he had said about her father but she wasn’t sure she had fully understood his words.

‘I’m tired, Dieter.’

‘We’ll be home soon.’ He let the words rest there, sitting on her shoulder, as the small plane droned on through the Andean night. She knew that the short-haired woman was seated across the aisle; she knew that she and Dieter were not alone but in the dimly lit cabin you couldn’t see the other passengers belted into their seats.

Even with a friendly hand on hers she felt alone, ploughing through the dark skies towards a strange place that Dieter called ‘home’.

But first there
was Asunción, Paraguay. She knew it was Asunción because the woman said so as they were coming to land.

‘Paraguay?’ Puzzlement in Dieter’s voice. ‘Why Paraguay?’

‘No time to organize anything else – and there was a fraternal visit by a cadre of factory workers to our fellow workers in the great socialist state of Paraguay.’

‘Socialist Paraguay!’ Dieter’s laugh was dry. ‘The Americans own the place – so how?’

‘American dollars, how else?’ The woman’s voice bitter. ‘Dollars can buy you anything – even a handful of army colonels to get you in and out of Asunción.’

The wheels hit the runway, bounced once, twice, settled and roared to a halt. The silence seemed deafening when the engines were switched off.

The woman was on her feet. ‘We must be silent.’ The hubbub of landing was quelled.

The thin man who had shaken her hand was standing in the aisle, looking back at Rosa.
He has the words but it’s the sharp-faced woman who leads
.

In silence they trailed the woman down the steps on to the black tarmac. The plane had come to rest far from the airport buildings: in the distance a lighted window in a tower hung above the single-storey terminal. The military lorry standing near the plane was dark. A lighted cigarette glowed in the cabin. Instinctively the small group moved together towards the lorry. Only then did Rosa see the soldiers: three of them, rifles held across their chests, standing beside the lorry. The door of the vehicle opened, the cigarette end glowed again. The officer who climbed down was short, pot-bellied, cigarette in one hand, a silver-tipped swagger stick in the other.

‘Welcome to my
country.’ In Spanish, the words spat out below the pencil-thin moustache. ‘Alas, your stay here must be brief.’ He let the cigarette fall from his hand, trod on it without taking his eyes from the huddled group. ‘And your stay must be silent.’ The swagger stick swung lazily towards the lorry. ‘All aboard – in silence.’

There were no steps to climb into the back of the lorry. Two of the men swung aboard, reached down to help the pale-faced woman. Rosa shrugged Dieter’s helping hand aside and hauled herself up. The soldiers stood immobile, arms ready, watching them. Dieter boarded last. Only then did the soldiers move, climbing into the back of the lorry. They stood at the tailgate, gripping the metal frame. One of them faced the night. The other two stared inwards at the group.

Someone coughed as the lorry moved off, tried to quell the noise in cupped hands.

The lorry driver changed gear noisily and metal mangled metal. In the back they could hear the officer’s barked expletive, the driver’s mumbled apology and they smiled at one another.

The soldiers at the back of the lorry didn’t smile.

The soldiers sprang to the ground when the lorry halted, stood back to let the group alight.

They were standing in the shadow of the Tupolev. The Russian-made plane reared above them, a fortress in the night. No lights showed inside. The tail rose in the dark, brooding above the engine tucked below it and the pair of side engines.

She felt Dieter’s
hand on her shoulder, felt herself drawn closer to him. She wondered about her lost father. Saw the stubble-jawed farmer bend over her mother’s grave in an unnamed wilderness. She let herself be led up the gangway steps. At the top she hesitated, looked back down. The moustached officer had another cigarette going, a red glow in the darkness. The silver tip of his stick shone in the glow as he touched it to the peak of his cap in a silent gesture of
adios
.
He’s glad to be rid of us
. What was it the woman had said?
Dollars will buy anything
.