Chapter 14

The next day Carol set off early. He didn’t want to wait for a cooked breakfast. Aunty Anna opened a can of fish and a packet of crispbread for him. He’d never eaten anything like it before, but he said it was good.

When he set off, I wondered how we’d managed never to hear his motorbike while he was following us. The motorbike was pretty loud, and I didn’t understand then about the inverse square law, but as soon as Granny pointed out that the truck was noisy and right in our ears and the motorbike was a long way behind us, I realized that distance makes a big difference.

‘Another factor is that he’s probably going quite a lot faster now, and I expect his bike makes a lot more noise when it’s going fast.’

Our next destination was Zaječar, and we managed to find our way there using the big atlas and a big dose of Granny’s common sense (which isn’t common at all). We spent a little while lost in the town before we found a service station, where happily we found some road maps.

We’d taken most of the day just getting to Zaječar, and by the time we got out of the town it was late in the afternoon, so we made camp. We couldn’t find a decent patch of grass. Nikolai had to break several small saplings to clear a place to put the chicken run, and the goats had the problem they sometimes had with their tethers getting tangled up.

Radiation levels were up – not enough to stop us putting the animals out to grass for one odd night, or refrain from drinking milk or eating eggs thereafter, but enough to make Granny want to take readings a bit more frequently again.

‘That must be from Kozloduy. I wonder what levels in Craiova are like? Do the people there even think about it? Craiova’s a lot closer to Kozloduy than we are here.’

‘I’m not sure. We’re still a long way from Kozloduy. Even Craiova must be sixty kilometres from it. I wonder if this is some industrial source nearer here. I don’t know anything about this area at all.’

The next morning, we continued south to Niš. There was a town plan for Niš on the back of one of the maps we’d found in Zaječar, and we managed to get straight through the city without getting lost at all. Not long after Niš we reached the biggest road I’d ever seen.

There were the usual saplings growing through the surface, but only near the edges for most of the way. The middle of the road was clear almost everywhere, and we were able to keep up a good speed most of the afternoon.

There didn’t seen to be anywhere good to stop, but eventually the road crossed the river – and then immediately the railway – near a place called Grdelica^*. We knew from the map that we’d been close to the river and the railway for a long way, but until the bridge we hadn’t seen them at all because of all the trees. There was a lush green meadow between the river and the railway, but we were high above it on the bridge. By the time we were off the bridge on an embankment, we were the other side of the railway, and there was a long goods train blocking the path to the meadow.

Grandad said we could clamber between the wagons, over the tops of the buffers and couplings, or even crawl underneath, but it wouldn’t be practical to take the goats or chicken run that way, and it was an awful long way to go around either end of the train. We pressed on, looking for somewhere else, but by then it was getting dusk and the animals wouldn’t get long out on the grass anyway.

We passed a village. We could only see it was there because the road went over a little side valley on an embankment, and there was a gap in the trees where we went over a bridge. The roofs of the village showed here and there between the trees far below us. We could see where the trees were old, and where they had grown since the cull, but even of the younger ones many were as tall as the houses.

Shortly after that the road went through a tunnel! I’d never seen nor heard of tunnels before. Granny told me that railways often went through tunnels, but that road tunnels like this were relatively unusual.

‘I’m glad it’s a short one that we can see right through, and can see that it’s not got piles of debris in the road where parts of the tunnel have collapsed. It’d be pretty horrible having to reverse out of a tunnel. And there’s an old road running parallel with this road here, but getting between this road and that would be impossible in most places, and the old road is probably mostly in worse condition.’

The tunnel was no problem. Where we came out, the road was high above the river, with a high wall down to the river on our right.

We stopped a little later in the middle of nowhere, as far as we could tell. The road was just a strip of tarmac through dense forest, and the forest was nibbling away at its edges – or, more accurately, slowly burying its edges under vegetation, dead and alive.

In the morning, Granny, Grandad, Laima and Aunty Anna took us four littlies for a walk through the woods and down to the river. Dang rode on Aunty Anna’s shoulders and Emma on Grandad’s.

I spotted something that confused me. ‘The railway’s on the other side of the river! I never saw where it crossed! It’s shown this side all the way around here in the atlas.’

‘It must have crossed before we went through the tunnel. The big atlas is too small scale to see detail like that, and the railway’s not shown on the road maps at all.’

‘But Granny, I could see the detail. The atlas is just wrong!’

The oldies all laughed.

There wasn’t going to be any fishing or shooting, because the radiation levels were still up – not as high as they’d been near Zaječar, but still too high to think of eating any local wildlife. So it was just a walk for the pleasure of it.

We stared into the water for a while, and saw quite a lot of quite big fish, but nobody regretted not having the fishing rods.

‘At these levels, once in a while wouldn’t really do any harm, but we’ve got plenty of food in stock, so why use up our once-in-a-whiles?’

Little Liz and I agreed that the fish would be very pleased to hear that.

On the way back we saw a squirrel, the first we’d seen since Jarosław. It scampered up a tree and scolded at us from a safe height.

Breakfast was ready when we got back, so it wasn’t until after breakfast that I got a chance to check the atlas. I was right! But I decided not to try to tell the oldies, not even Granny.

I could have told Granny Merly. She wouldn’t have told the other oldies, either. She’d have said it was best to keep it ‘our little secret.’

Thinking about Granny Merly started me crying, and of course then Grandad wanted to know what I was crying about. I should have just told him I was thinking about Granny Merly, but I didn’t think, and it all came tumbling out. Then he looked in the atlas too, and saw that I was right, and gave me a big cuddle, and said that I was a clever boy, and that he’d tell Granny Persie, but I told him not to. She never said anything about it to me, but I think he must have said something to her really, because she never doubted my map reading again.

It’s probably mostly because I’ve got young eyes. Granny’s very good at map reading, but she finds tiny details hard to see, I think. She’s got several pair of glasses, but she says, ‘They’re simple reading specs. They’re not exactly right, but where could I get prescription spectacles nowadays?’

It was years later before I understood what that meant.

I’m good at reading what’s there on the map to read, but Granny’s incredibly good at guessing the things that aren’t actually written on the map at all. What Grandad calls ‘reading between the lines.’

The road was still in pretty good condition, and at first we made a good pace, but only about fifteen kilometres down the road we came to another tunnel. This one was too long to see through. Granny pointed out the lights in the roof of the tunnel, but of course they weren’t lit. No electricity. Laima had brought the tanker right up to the mouth of the tunnel, and Granny got her to bring it just a little inside.

‘It won’t be any trouble reversing out this little bit.’

Then, with the headlights on main beam, Granny and I walked into the tunnel to see if we could get far enough to see through to the other end, and see whether the tunnel was safe.

It wasn’t. The furthest point the headlights reached wasn’t really much further than the daylight reached, but it was far enough that we could see light coming in from the other end. We couldn’t actually see the other end of the tunnel yet, but we could see light filtering past an obstruction, which wasn’t a pile of rocks, but the remains of several vehicles. Granny reckoned they were burnt out.

‘Hard to tell in this light, but they just somehow look it.’

Granny reading between the lines again. I couldn’t even see the lines. But I bet she was right.

Just before we reached the tunnel, we’d crossed a huge bridge high over the river. We reversed over the bridge to a junction only a couple of hundred metres back, which led us down onto another, smaller road that came under the bridge alongside the river, and then continued on the west of the river, while the bigger road went down the east.

‘According to the road atlas, we ought to be able to rejoin the main road at Vladičin Han. I hope this old road is still passable!’

‘It looks like about five or six kilometres on the map, but very wiggly, so it’s probably a bit more.’

‘I’m sure it will be, Mikey. Look, it’s heading in exactly the wrong direction at the moment. It has to, because of the loop in the river.’

It was actually nine kilometres, and the road wasn’t bad at all. The surface was more broken than the main road, and there was much more vegetation growing through it, but we’d been along very much worse.

We crossed the river right in the middle of Vladičin Han. From the bridge, I noticed a huge white building towering over the trees on a hillside, and pointed it out to Granny. She said she thought it was probably a church, and Laima said she was sure it was. It didn’t look anything like the church in the village near our old farm.

Just after the bridge there was a service station – with a tyre store. It didn’t take long to pull the big doors open with the tanker’s winch. None of us cared that no-one would ever be able to shut them again. There were tyres to fit the animals’ trailer, but not to fit anything else. We didn’t have any extra wheels to put them on, but we took a couple of tyres and some inner tubes.

‘Better than nothing. Much better than nothing, in fact. Nikolai is strong enough to fit them with the hand tools we’ve got.’

There was diesel and petrol, too. We still had plenty, but it was good to keep topped up.

Granny and Laima checked the radiation levels while we were stopped. They were lower again, now down to nothing to worry about at all, but still above what they thought was just natural background.

After Vladičin Han, the road just kept on and on. There were no more tunnels, and no other obstructions, all that day. Sometimes we got a good view when the road was high above the surrounding countryside on an embankment or a bridge, but most of the time all we could see was trees. Granny said she thought that after Vladičin Han they were almost all young trees that had grown in former fields since the cull, but I couldn’t really see much difference. Maybe the trees weren’t quite as big, the woods not quite as dark, there weren’t any places where a big tree had fallen down and made a clearing, and no big dead branches lying rotting on the ground. So maybe I was seeing the difference after all. I just hadn’t realized the significance of what I was seeing.

I’m glad I’ve got Granny. I wouldn’t see or understand half as much if I hadn’t. Oh – and I’m just glad I’ve got Granny anyway!

For a long way, we only saw the occasional building hidden in the trees. If they were part of large settlements, villages or towns, it wasn’t obvious from the road. We passed a few turnings off the road, but it was very clear which was the main road.

In the middle of the afternoon, we reached Kumanovo. If the road after Niš had amazed me, it was nothing to the road around and after Kumanovo. In fact, it wasn’t one road, it was two broad roads, side by side. Down the middle of each half it was so smooth and clear of vegetation that we could go faster than ever before. I thought the two roads were going to separate and go their different ways, but Granny said, ‘No, they’re two halves of the same road, this one for going in this direction, and the other one for going in the other direction.’

I tried to imagine it with enough vehicles going up and down it to need so much road.

Granny was driving the tanker at this point. I could see that she was enjoying herself. The trees flew past on each side, but the noise was incredible.

Then the intercom came to life. It was Uncle Sid, from the truck at the very rear of the convoy, behind the Bandvagn.

‘Slow down, Mum. We’re getting left behind. I think Suonjar’s worried about the Bandvagn. She keeps flashing the rear lights. Now she’s waving her arm out of the window and slowing down. We’re stopping. She’s jumping out.’

We heard him jump out of the cab.

We stopped and jumped out. The Unimog was right behind us, and two of the trucks, but the Bandvagn and the other truck were out of sight.

Grandad was still in the cab of the Unimog, so he heard what we didn’t on the intercom. Aunty Anna was telling him not to worry, the Bandvagn hadn’t caught fire or anything, but there was a warning light on the dashboard and Suonjar had turned the engine off and all seemed to be okay. Grandad opened his door, and we all crowded round to listen.

Uncle Sid came back on the intercom.

‘I think you’d better come back here and have a look at the Bandvagn, Mum.’

‘How far back are you? Should we walk, or turn something round?’

‘How would I know? Oh, okay, Suonjar says you’d been out of sight for several minutes before she stopped. So a long way, anyway. You all shot off like rockets and we never went over about fifty.’

I heard Grandad calculating to himself, ‘that’s about thirty.’ Granny heard him too, and laughed quietly. I caught them exchanging a little grin.

Granny had a look at the strip of vegetation up between the two halves of the road. There was a bit of a ditch in the middle of it, but nothing that would give the trucks any trouble.

‘We can just do a U-turn across the central reservation. We’ll take the sleeping truck and all go. We’ll leave the rest here. We might end up staying the night back there, depends what’s wrong with the Bandvagn. I hope it’s something we can fix.’

It didn’t take long to get back to the others. It would have taken a long time to walk it, though.

Uncle Sid already had the cover off the Bandvagn’s engine, but hadn’t gone any further.

‘It’s awfully hot. I wonder if it’s got any water left.’

‘Well thank goodness you didn’t open the header tank!’

‘I’m not that daft, Mum!’

Suonjar showed Granny which warning light had come on. Granny turned on the ignition, but didn’t start the engine. The warning light didn’t come back on.

‘Overheated, but it’s cooled down a bit now. Still damned hot, you can feel the heat from here. We’ll have to wait until it’s cooled down properly before we can top up the water. How long did you keep going after the warning light came on?’

‘Just a few seconds.’

‘Shouldn’t be any damage then. When it’s cold we’ll check the oil and water, top up if necessary, and start it up and see what’s what. We’ll do it in the morning. This is as good a place to spend the night as anywhere.’

Granny and Laima checked the radiation levels, which were low, probably near enough whatever the natural background level had been around there. Several of us went off for a walk, carrying the fishing rods and the guns. We’d no reason to think there was anywhere to fish around there – we’d not seen a river for some time, and we weren’t in an obvious valley – but who knows? There could have been a pond in the woods somewhere. Granny thought probably not, because the area was very flat, and she was sure it had all been under the plough before the cull. Grandad and Dad and Lieđđi were not to be deterred.

‘Who knows? There can be ponds in amongst ploughed fields in the flattest country.’

We didn’t find any, but there could easily have been some. We could have been just a few metres away from them without seeing them.

We tried to head consistently east, but constantly found ourselves being turned northwards, because in every other direction the undergrowth was too thick and tangled. Grandad thought we were probably being forced to follow an old minor road, now completely buried in vegetation, but restricting its growth somewhat.

He was probably exactly right, because after a little while we reached a small rocky hill sticking up out of the general flatness, with a definite recognizable track around the foot of it. The track ended in an area with distinctly different trees. They were smaller, with tangled, wiggly branches, and looked somehow much older than the rest.

Amongst the trees there were carved stones sticking up, and the broken remains of low walls and small buildings.

‘It’s an old graveyard,’ Grandad said. ‘What a contrast with the one we buried Fiona in, that looked as though it had only been abandoned quite recently.’

He was crying. He sat on a bit of wall that was still standing. Lieđđi put her arm around his shoulders, bent over and kissed him on the forehead, and then sat down beside him with her arm round him. I thought he suddenly looked old. I sat down the other side of him and held his hand.

Dad wandered off among the old graves. I thought he was probably crying too, but I didn’t see.

We heard a shot. Lieđđi jumped up with a startled look and ran off in the direction Dad had gone. Then we heard Dad’s voice.

‘Sorry. I didn’t think. I should have realized you might be worried. There was a deer, but I missed it. Can’t see properly. Eyes watering.’

Lieđđi produced a bit of clean rag from her sleeve and wiped everybody’s eyes before we set off back. We didn’t say anything about the graveyard. Dad told them there’d been a deer, but he’d missed it.

I think Granny at least, and probably some of the others, could see we’d been crying, but they didn’t say anything. Not in my hearing, anyway.

I woke in the night. I thought I’d heard a strange noise, but I listened hard and couldn’t hear anything but wind in the trees. Then, just as I was nodding off again, I heard it again – and then it disappeared under the noise of the wind again.

The next time I woke, I could definitely hear voices. Talking – Russian? Then some English – ah, that was Laima – then a language I couldn’t recognize. A voice I didn’t know – a woman’s voice.

I tried to jump up, but I was all tangled up in reindeer skins, and I woke little Liz. She started crying quietly, so I cuddled her to help her go back to sleep again. I realized Dad had got up, leaving me and Liz side by side.

Cuddling little Liz, I went back to sleep again myself.

I was all alone in the truck when I woke up, and it was quite light. I could smell frying meat. I thought, someone must have shot a deer early this morning. And I didn’t even hear the shot.

It wasn’t a deer, it was two rabbits. Only Granny can hit a second rabbit once they’ve started running because of the first shot, so I knew the second one was hers. But I was wrong, and there hadn’t been a single shot.

We’d more or less concluded that Carol and his girlfriend had decided against joining us, but they’d arrived late at night. Carol had set several snares before going to sleep.

It had taken them longer to catch up with us than Carol had initially thought, because he decided to give his motorbike a thorough overhaul while he had access to spare parts. He wanted to make it last as long as possible. And then, with Nina on the back, he didn’t travel as fast as he did when he was alone, especially on the rough roads.

By the time we were making camp near Zaječar, Carol had reached Craiova, and pretty much finished working on his motorbike, but of course we didn’t know that. We had thought he was probably back at the power station by then, with Nina. We thought they’d probably catch up with us sometime the next day. If they were coming.

The next morning, Carol finished working on his motorbike, and the two of them set off. That night, they reached the place we’d stopped when Carol first came and met us. They spent the night in a house in the village. It was the first time they’d broken into an old abandoned house, and they felt very strange doing it – especially when they found skeletons. If Granny and Grandad hadn’t talked with Carol about their own history, he and Nina might have been at a loss where to stay.

Or so they say. My impression is that they’re more resourceful than they gives themselves credit for.

Carol had followed our trail as far as Zaječar without difficulty, but the tangle of our tracks in Zaječar proved more difficult. Eventually he realized that one truck – the tanker, of course – had wandered about all over the place while the rest of the convoy had stayed put until we worked out where we were going. In most places, the clearest evidence of our passage was broken down vegetation, but here and there he could see the Bandvagn tracks in muddy stretches – and the Bandvagn tracks didn’t go wandering about all over the place at all. They were somewhat messed up by the truck and trailer coming along behind, but they gave him enough of the clues he needed.

Once he got onto the main road at Niš, he knew where we were headed, and just made the best speed he safely could. The odd bits of crushed and broken vegetation here and there in the road reassured him he was on our trail. His biggest worry was whether he’d got enough fuel to reach us before he ran out – and he certainly wouldn’t have enough to get back to Craiova – so he was desperate to catch up with us before we moved on again. At least the road was good enough to go quite fast even after it got dark, but he had to concentrate hard because his headlight didn’t reach all that far.

What Carol hadn’t told us was that Nina was heavily pregnant.

Nobody minded that, though. Well, almost nobody.

‘Three for the price of two!’ Grandad said. He loves having children around him.

Nikolai was a bit annoyed at first, saying that Carol should have told us. Laima shushed him, and Granny said it wouldn’t be him who had to be midwife, there were plenty of willing hands, and another little friend for the littlies would be a good thing.

Carol joined Granny and Nikolai looking at the Bandvagn engine. The oil was a bit low, but not worryingly so; but there was almost no water at all. They filled it up, and looked for leaks, but couldn’t find any. The engine started okay and sounded sweet enough.

‘There’ll be a steam leak somewhere. It’ll show up in a minute or two.’

Granny was right, of course.

‘If we just had a spare hose, this would be an easy thing to fix. Without it, it’s going to be quite a trick. There’s no chance of finding exactly the right hose anywhere, but we could probably find one that we could twist into position somehow if we can find a parts store somewhere. It’s only got to have roughly the right diameter at each end. I suppose we’re not all that far from Skopje, but it’ll take a day getting there and back, and a while searching. Worth it, though. We’ll detach the animal trailer and take the Unimog.’

But Carol had a better idea, and he and Granny set off on the motorbike. Grandad laughed.

‘They’ll have fun! Persie has about fifteen words of Russian!’

‘And no Romanian at all. But she’s got a lot more than fifteen words of Russian, Pete. She doesn’t say much, but she understands a lot. I was watching her last night.’

I wished I could have gone too.

The goats and chickens were very glad of a whole day out to grass – well, out to weeds and saplings, really. Nikolai moved the chicken run a couple of times to let them have fresh weeds.

‘When we finally settle somewhere, I’ll make them a couple of nice big runs like we had back at home, so they won’t run out of fresh stuff so quickly, and one run can recover while they’re in the other one. But this arrangement isn’t bad for now.’

Nikolai and Laima and Nina talked Russian all day. Laima translated for the rest of us from time to time, but we knew we’d have to catch up slowly later too.

Grandad and Dad and I walked all the way to the other trucks and back, just for the walk really. Grandad said he wanted to check they were okay, but of course they were. We saw lots of rabbits, a couple of squirrels and we heard rustling in the undergrowth that Grandad thought might be a deer, but we didn’t see it. We saw various small birds, too, but none of us knew what sort they were. We were halfway back when we heard the motorbike in the distance, and I realized that was the sound I’d heard in the night. Carol and Granny arrived back at just the same time we did.

‘I feel a complete fool,’ Granny said. ‘If I’d measured all the other hoses on all the vehicles before we left, we could have brought spares for all of them. This one’s not an exact replacement for the busted one, but it’s pretty close and it’s flexible with this bellows section in the middle.’

‘Sure, but we can’t carry every possible spare for every vehicle. And I’m sure that Thessaloníki will be at least as good a place for raiding. It’s not so far now.’

‘True. If this road is as good as this all the way, we could get there tomorrow.’

‘Don’t go too fast, Persie. We don’t want to kill the Bandvagn.’

‘I’m sure it ought to be able to do more than fifty. Once we’ve fitted this hose, I’m going to take it for a spin myself, and see if I can spot anything wrong with it. We could spend another day here, or more, rather than risk killing it.’

‘It’s only got sixty on its speedo, so I wouldn’t be surprised if its maximum is about fifty.’

‘Oh, fair enough. I’d still like to ride in it for a bit, just to get the feel of it. Perhaps I should come with you tomorrow, Suonjar? I’m sure Laima doesn’t need me to navigate. The route is just straight down this main road all the way to Thessaloníki now. According to the map it’s a dual carriageway all the way, and there aren’t any others.’

‘We could lead the convoy anyway, Persie. On a road like this, we can all turn anywhere, it doesn’t matter who leads.’

‘Hmm. I’m not sure. I don’t really like to put the Bandvagn first or last, because of not having intercom between it and the others.’

‘True. It’s a pity you got so far ahead yesterday. It would have been awful if we hadn’t been able to communicate.’

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