Chapter 11

I was very late waking up the next morning, and everybody was just about ready to move on.

‘Morning sleepyhead! You can eat your breakfast in the cab, we’ve all had ours.’

Steamed carrots and potatoes again, but us littlies were being spoilt again: a hard boiled egg and a mug of fresh milk. Little Liz confided in me that she’d had a spoonful of jam as well, which I’d already deduced just by looking at her face.

Pawprints had been found in the mud around the trailer, and muddy pawprints on the side of the trailer a metre and a half off the ground.

‘That’s a good size for a wolf. There must be plenty of prey of some sort around here.’

‘That was no wolf. I don’t know much about pawprints, but I’d have guessed that was more like a bear. Wolves don’t have paws that big – at least, none of the wolves I’ve butchered did.’

‘So we can add bears to our list of surviving mammals. Or was it some kind of big cat, perhaps?’

‘Don’t know. Just as well Greg didn’t go out in the dark if it was a bear or a big cat. We’d better take to keeping a gun and a lantern handy at night.’

‘There used to be bears in these parts, I believe, but no big cats for a very long time. Not in recorded history, I don’t think.’

‘No, but things have changed. I think the big death was pretty much total in most places, and things have re-established themselves from small pockets of survivors. The pattern of re-establishment probably isn’t the same as the old ranges. For example, I’m pretty sure there were never any rabbits in southern Norway before the cull, but it was overrun with them just a few years after it.’

Laima spotted another overgrown allotment with potatoes and carrots run wild just as we were leaving Perechin, and she and Nikolai dug up several buckets full before we got moving again.

‘We’ll look like potatoes and carrots before long!’ Granny said, but I know she was pleased really. Fresh stuff is better than tins and jars, even when it’s all a bit samey. I know that Laima knew Granny was pleased really, too.

We reached Uzhgorod by late morning. The weather by then was glorious, and Grandad and Granny and Dad and Lieđđi settled down to fish from a bridge over the river, while the rest of us walked into the town to go raiding. The particular thing we really wanted was road maps, but as usual we were on the look out for anything useful.

We found road maps all right, but we found something else, too. There was a truck with its cab embedded in the front of a shop, and the driver still at the wheel. What was odd about it was that he wasn’t a skeleton. He was long dead and decayed, but there was rotting flesh hanging off his face. Most of us had never seen anything like it, of course. Laima had – but not for over thirty years.

‘He’s in army uniform, too. There’s a camp somewhere near here. We ought to be moving out of this area as quick as we can. We don’t want to run into one of their raiding parties. I guess this happened on a raid. Lucky we found this chap!’

We hotfooted it back to the bridge, and told the others.

‘A pity. This river’s brimming with fish, and we’ve only caught a few so far. But needs must when the Devil drives.’

Even Granny had to get Grandad to explain that expression, so it really was an obscure one; but after the thorough explanation Grandad gave, it’s stuck in my mind. It probably stuck even more thoroughly because we didn’t get the explanation immediately. Everyone wanted to get moving as quickly as possible.

Once we’d got started, the first priority for Granny was working out our route, while Laima drove. With road maps and a street map of Uzhgorod as well as the atlas, Granny didn’t find this difficult at all, but it still took a little time. Then Laima asked Granny what Grandad had been talking about, and Granny called Grandad up on the intercom. That’s when we got the explanation.

A few kilometres out of Uzhgorod we got more recent, and worrying, evidence of the proximity of a camp. There was a stretch of road that evidently flooded from time to time, and the floods had left a lot of mud on the road. Fortunately the line of the road was still obvious, so there was no risk of ending up in a ditch. But there were tyre tracks in the mud.

They weren’t absolutely fresh. In places they’d been buried under a new layer of mud in a more recent flood. Granny thought that even the most recent layer of mud had dried out before getting wet again in the previous day’s rain.

‘You can see how it’s cracked and peeled, and then got soggy again.’

She reckoned that the tracks were at least a few weeks old, but almost certainly very much more recent than the crash in Uzhgorod.

‘There’s one reassuring thing. There’s only one vehicle, that went first one way and then the other.’

‘It’s got self-cleaning tyres like ours, so you can see which way it’s going. I can’t tell which way it went first though.’

‘We might be able to, if we look carefully. One set must be on top of the other in some places.’

Laima was right. Just a kilometre or so later there was a stretch of clear tyre tracks where the two sets merged for a short distance. Granny and Laima and I got down from the tanker to take a close look.

‘Well, assuming they’ve not got their tyres on backwards, we’re heading towards the camp. That’s a blow.’

‘It’s worse than a blow. I think it’s reason enough to alter our route. At least we’ve got a choice here. I think we should go back to Uzhgorod and then go via Chop instead of Mukachevo. I bet the camp’s somewhere near Mukachevo.’

‘You’re the navigator.’

According to the map, there was a minor road not very far ahead, so we went to the junction to turn around. Theoretically, the minor road connected through to the Chop road, but Granny thought the risk that the minor road might be impassable wasn’t worth taking.

‘I wonder how often they come this way. I wonder what they’ll make of our tyre tracks. They’ll surely notice them.’

‘Chances are it’ll be a few days at least before they come this way again. We’ll be a long way away. And it’s not as though we leave tracks everywhere.’

The road south from Uzhgorod was very like the one to the east that we’d set out on – a good road, but almost level with the flood plain. It too had a coating of mud for long stretches. Reassuringly, there were no tyre tracks. I wondered what it looked like after we’d all been along there. Four big trucks, a Bandvagn and a Unimog, all but one of them with trailers. We didn’t stop to look.

Laima was driving, and Granny was navigating. And cuddling me. Or maybe it was me cuddling her. She seemed to need it as much as I did.

Granny was thinking we ought to be reaching Chop very soon, when we reached a bridge that wasn’t there. It looked as though it had been blown up. Granny got out to take a look, and came back looking worried.

‘I wonder who did that, and why? That’s definitely deliberate, and I don’t reckon it was thirty-five years ago, either. Maybe three or four years ago, but probably not much more.’

‘Competition between a camp here in the Ukraine, and one in Hungary?’

‘Or one in Czechoslovakia. Not that I think national boundaries mean anything any more.’

‘No. Natural boundaries like this mean much more, though this isn’t a particularly big river. But are we stuck between two camps, wherever they are?’

‘I don’t know about stuck between, but I think there must be antagonistic groups in this area. But as far as I can tell from this map, Mukachevo is right on this river, further upstream. So which lot are on which side of the river, and where they are, who knows? As you say, it’s not a very big river, but it’d be very hard to cross without a bridge. It’ll be bottomless mud underneath.’

Not having any idea where the camps were, they thought it was as good a plan as any simply to press on the way we were going for the moment, and try and get as far away from the area as we could as quickly as possible. But could we get across the river anywhere near here at all?

We’d noticed a gravel track off to the left just before we found the missing bridge, running between big, old trees on the river side and small young trees on what had presumably been fields before the cull. Laima turned the tanker round and went back to it, leaving everyone else to turn round in their own good time.

‘Don’t follow us just yet. You’ve obviously got to turn round where you are, but no sense ending up all the rest of you having to turn round again.’

Just a few hundred metres down the gravel track, there was a turning towards the river again, and another bridge. It was smaller and older and not in very good condition, but Granny had a good look at it and reckoned it was still good enough to carry the trucks.

‘But why is it still here, when the other one’s been blown up?’

Some things are destined to remain a mystery. This was one of them. There might have been some clues in the jeeplike vehicle we saw almost hidden amongst the trees when we reached the other side, but Granny didn’t want to investigate it closely. It clearly hadn’t been there ever since the cull, but equally clearly it hadn’t moved for several years, and that was good enough for Granny. She said she had an uncanny feeling there’d be skeletons inside it, or maybe more recent corpses than that.

‘I wonder whether the chap in the truck in Uzhgorod had been shot? It never occurred to me to look whether there was bullet damage to the truck. I just assumed he’d died of a heart attack at the wheel or something, or died in the accident.’

‘I think I’d have noticed if there’d been any bullet holes on the side we could see, but there could have been in the front, or the other side.’

We rejoined the main road very quickly, and Granny called the rest of the convoy to follow us.

We didn’t have a roadmap for Chop, but we found our road without difficulty. There was a huge railway goods yard there, and a change of gauge, so goods wagons would have been unloaded and reloaded there; but Laima and Granny checked for radioactive contamination and found no sign of it. If radioactive materials had been handled there, maybe they’d been better handled than at Brest – and certainly there happened to have been none there at the time of the cull.

After Chop, the road was running on a causeway between flooded marshes. We were only just above the level of the water in most places. Here and there there were houses, in various states of decay, standing in the water. Five or six kilometres out of Chop the road climbed onto a dike, over a bridge over a drainage channel, over another dike, and then back down to just above marsh level. Granny pointed out an old pumping station just by the dike. It was half under water, and the level of water in the drainage channel was exactly the same as the level in the marshes either side of it.

I say, ‘the level of the water’, but there was no water visible in the drainage channel at all. It was the smoothest, greenest area of grass I ever remember seeing anywhere, but Granny said it probably wouldn’t be safe to walk on.

‘My guess is you’d sink without trace as soon as you put foot on it. In it.’

Laima wasn’t so sure, but none of us wanted to try!

The causeway across the marshes went on and on. There were whole flooded villages. At this point, the road was heading towards Mukachevo. We wanted a right turn somewhere, but we hadn’t picked up maps for this route in Uzhgorod, and the best map we had was the one in the big atlas.

We arrived in a bigger village at about the right distance from Chop, and there were several right turns in it, but they all looked like little roads just serving a few houses in the village. Then suddenly there was a signpost – the first legible signpost I ever remember seeing.

Legible? I couldn’t read it, but Laima and Granny could. I didn’t learn the Cyrillic alphabet until years later, studying Laima’s books. Granny told me it said Mukachevo straight on and Beregovo to the right, and Beregovo was the place she was heading for.

The road didn’t look too bad. The village continued for a few hundred metres – at least, it did on our left. There was a dense forest on our right, the first we’d seen since the river with the missing bridge. I was getting used to these different trees, too, with leaves rather than needles. I liked them, they seemed friendlier.

Then we were on a causeway between marshes again. Granny told me how she was sure they used to be fields.

‘Long, long ago it would all have been marshes around here, but you can tell that the marshes had been drained to make farmland. But after the cull no-one was keeping the pumps going or the drainage channels cleared, so it’s all turned back to marshland.’

Laima thought that threw an interesting light on the groups of survivors we knew there must be in the area.

‘I wonder what the people around here are doing? They must be farming somewhere, and when it’s drained, this must be some of the most productive land in the area.’

‘There’s probably not all that many of them. They’ve probably kept a few thousand hectares drained somewhere that we’ve just not seen. I hope we never do.’

What I did see, just at that moment, was a whole lot of big, white birds. I pointed them out to Granny.

‘Swans! That’s a great sight.’

‘I wouldn’t mind swan for dinner, but if we shoot one there, how will we go and retrieve it?’

‘You’re not thinking, Laima. The Bandvagn would have no trouble getting over there. But we’d have to detach the bowser, which is quite a palaver. We’ve got plenty of meat – and fish – at the moment.’

‘Oh, it’s not such a palaver! Let’s do it!’

‘I’d never get one from this distance, but they’ll all take flight if you drive any closer.’

Laima stopped the tanker. Granny got down with the gun, and set off along the road on foot. Before she’d got close enough to feel confident of hitting them, the swans flew off. We watched them go. Granny never fired a shot.

‘I reckon the people around here must shoot them. I don’t remember swans being as nervous as that in the old days.’

‘I don’t know. Swans migrate over huge distances. I wouldn’t have thought they’d come across people often at all nowadays. It could simply be unfamiliarity, or even just chance that they flew off at that moment.’

We reached another flooded village. The road, still just above the level of the water, wiggled its way between two rows of sorry looking houses, and finally ended at a major railway line, with several parallel tracks and no level crossing. We could have got across, but there was no sign of a road continuing on the other side.

‘There were junctions in the village. We must have missed the main road.’

Turning the tanker was easy enough, but the rest of the convoy had the usual trouble. Back we went. We left the other vehicles at the first junction, and went exploring in the tanker. Eventually we found a level crossing with the road continuing beyond it. Granny gave Grandad instructions over the intercom about the route, and before long we were all together again.

By this time it was getting late, but Granny wanted to get as far away from any military camps as she could before stopping for the night.

‘But for all we know, we could be going closer to them, rather than further away.’

‘I don’t think so. The best evidence we have of their existence is behind us. But another few kilometres won’t make much difference, it’s true.’

Nevertheless, we kept on going quite a long way, looking for a patch of grass to put the goats and chickens out on, but it was all marsh on both sides of the road. Eventually we gave up, because it was beginning to get dark, and we wouldn’t have been able to put the animals out to grass anyway. We stopped by a patch of open water, and Grandad and Dad and Lieđđi started fishing while Aunty Anna and Aunty Dot prepared supper.

Gealbu and Aunty Belle pulled up armfuls of weeds from the edge of the road and fed them to the goats and chickens.

Little Liz and I sat one each side of Granny, with her arms around our shoulders. We stared out into the evening. The moon was rising over the reeds at the far side of the water, its reflection a long stripe on the surface. Black shapes flapped across in front of it.

Granny laughed softly.

‘Did you see that, my babies? The swans in front of the moon? That’s such a cliché, but it’s beautiful, isn’t it? You know, Mikey, I don’t think I could shoot a swan, not really. For one thing, I always try to shoot anything in the head if I can, so it dies quickly, and you’ve no chance of shooting a bird in the head. But anyway, a swan is such a wonderful creature. A deer is a wonderful creature too, but you’ve got to eat.’

Even at six I could see the inconsistencies in the things people say. Even Granny Persie. But I could still see her point, and I’m sure she could see the inconsistency too, and probably guessed that I could as well.

I wondered how she’d react another time if Laima or anyone shot a swan. She always tried to hit anything she shot in the head, but she never said anything when anyone else shot an animal anywhere else.

The fishing that evening was very successful, and Laima and Nikolai spent half the night preparing fish and hanging them up to dry in the trailer. We still had carrots and potatoes, too. When we’d set out on our expotition, we’d expected to be mostly eating stuff from tins and jars all the way, but it wasn’t working out like that at all.

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