A Bed for the Wretched – Chapter 22

A Bed for the Wretched – Chapter 22

The next day Pando met with Kirche. “I was looking for you yesterday, Sir, but I couldn’t find you anywhere. Where were you?” asked Kirche. “I sent Numo away and after that I was all alone,” replied Pando. Kirche did not ask where Numo went... Several of the young men who did volunteer duties during the night saw Numo getting on one of the trucks. One of the young men told Kirche that he saw his one-legged friend leaving. “And you, Kirche, you never did finish telling me how far you got following the rails? Did you make it to Bitola?” asked Pando. “Yes I did! I made it all the way to Bitola and a little further, but they caught me and brought me back to the monastery. They did not punish me. Kosta, my teacher, called me into his office and explained to me that we were very far away from home and that I shouldn’t be doing such foolish things. He also said that one day we would be going home but not the way I did it. A week later, in the evening, they gathered us together in the great hall (which earlier was a church). On the stage they had a poster hanging with large letters written in both Macedonian and Greek which read: ‘Oli sta arma, Ola gia ti Niki!’ (All to arms, everything for victory!). Then two men walked in and were followed by a young woman with a disfigured face. The men headed straight for the stage and the woman sat in the second row. One of the men climbed onto the stage and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Here today we have representatives from DAG Headquarters…’ or something like that, I don’t remember the exact words. The woman with the disfigured face then stood up, climbed onto her chair, yelled out a few slogans in honour of DAG and the fighters, and then began to shout: ‘We are ready! We are ready! We are ready!’ The entire hall became excited. We all stood up and started yelling, ‘We are ready! We are ready! We are ready!’ at the top of our voices. The tallest of the three guests then raised his arms and began to wave his hands to stop us from yelling. When we did he said: ‘Dear children of the freedom fighting heroic fathers and mothers...’ He spoke like that for along time, occasionally being interrupted by our yelling ‘We are ready! We are ready! We are ready!’ The woman with the deformed face walked around between the rows and when the man on the stage said something about the struggle or about the leader, she screamed the appropriate slogan and ‘we are ready’ in her screechy voice. ‘Shut up!’ I heard a voice yell from the back of the hall. I turned around and saw one of the mothers, dressed in black, grab the woman with the disfigured face by the shoulders, shove her on a seat, look in her eyes and yell out: ‘Shut up you tramp! Now sit here and don’t stand up again!’ The woman with

the deformed face freed herself from the mother’s grip, left the hall, ran up to the front of the stage and shouted: ‘Sindrofe! Ego ime proti! Grapse me sindrofe! Ego ime proti!’ (Comrade! I am first! Write me up comrade! I am first!) The tall guy took a ledger from his briefcase, opened it up and set it on the table. He then sharpened a pencil, wrote the disfigured woman’s name in the ledger and began to look our way. She, in the meantime, raised her arms up in the air and shouted: ‘Boys, boys, what are you waiting for? We are ready!’ We completely disregarded what the mother had done and, one by one, listening to the woman with the disfigured face, we lined up and voluntarily wrote our names in the ledger. In front of us were pictures of Gramos and Vicho, which the tall guy had put there. By watching those images we could hear bombs exploding and machine gun fire. We signed our names shouting slogans and the loudest of them all was ‘we are ready to fight now!’ We didn’t sleep that night. All we did was think about what was said and done in the great hall; the yelling, the yearning to return home and the battle songs. The next day the younger children, the ones two to thirteen years old, found out what had taken place the night before; that the older children would be going to the front! My sister Lenka ran up to me crying and asked: ‘Are you going too, Kirche?’ I said: ‘Yes! I will be going!’ and she said: ‘Are you leaving me here alone?’ And I said: ‘No, you will not be alone. Look how many girls there are here…’ She then began to cry even harder, pleading with me not to go: ‘Don’t go Kirche, don’t go. I don’t want to be left here alone, without you…’ I didn’t know how to calm her down, how to comfort her. I took out my handkerchief and wiped her tears and held her head in my arms. I then undid her hair braids and braided them again three times. I hugged her hard but she still cried until a loud sound came from the speakers: ‘Attention! Attention! Volunteers gather in the mess hall! Volunteers gather in the mess hall!’ Lenka put her arms around my neck and would not let go. She held onto me while pleading with me not to go, not with her voice, but by sobbing: ‘No Kirche! No my brother! No! Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go...’ But I went anyway... Then, during the night, so the little ones would not see us, all volunteers lined up in four columns. We were all dressed in warm military uniforms and carried our backpacks on our shoulders when we marched on the asphalt. Most of us were from Kostur, Lerin and Voden Regions with a few from Epirus and Thessaly. It seemed like we were pounding the asphalt a little harder with our brand new military boots. My coat was a bit long and I kept stepping on it but I took shorter steps to avoid tripping. I kept up the pace while marching through the city, but then when we suddenly turned I lost my pace and accidentally kicked the person in front of me. Smarting from the pain he turned, looked at me and said: ‘You bastard, don’t you know how to march, eh?’ And I said: “Why can’t you turn properly, eh?’ We marched to the train station, stopped in front of it and about three minutes later they dismissed the columns one by one and let us board the train. The locomotive was running noisily but we could hear songs coming from the cars. All the children from all Romanian cities were gathered here in Oradea. When they all boarded the train we left. I heard the tall guy say: ‘We have one thousand, two hundred volunteers and in two days we will be in Berkovitsa (a town in Bulgaria, west of Sofia). There we will pick up more children from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The Poles, those reactionaries, refused to allow us to recruit volunteers from Poland. A tall, bald Polish guy waving his big hands in front of my eyes said to me...’ I couldn’t hear the rest of what the tall guy said about the bald Polish guy. Also I never saw the young lady with the deformed face, the one that was yelling the loudest about being ready to fight.

She was not there with us. They closed the car doors, the engine blew its whistle and off we went following the tracks which I had followed to Bitola on foot. We continued to travel south at a fast pace. We didn’t have to wait long in stations. Other trains made way for us. We arrived in Berkovitsa on time and spent two days there. After that, in the dark of night, they transferred us from Bulgarian to Yugoslav cars at the border. On our way I saw signs for Kriva Palanka, Kumanovo, Titov Veles, Prilep and... and Bitola. We got off in Bitola. From there it was only an hour’s ride to Kozhani. The same Kozhani I had visited last November. I remembered the driver and the two policemen. I then looked at myself. I too am now wearing a uniform but it’s not black. The train followed the tracks up and down and around sharp bends over the mountains. The sun was hot and its reflection made the waters shine like mirrors. When we reached the lakeshore the sun was gone. We slowly moved along the tracks, drowning in dust. On our right was the lake and on our left were tall mountains with pointy peaks. We stopped close to the lake. ‘Everyone off the train!’ we heard our leader yell. He was an older man dressed in a military uniform, but without any markings to indicate rank. We immediately jumped off the cars and took a leak at the side of the road. It was total darkness, you couldn’t see a thing. Our leader was hiding his lit cigarette in the palm of his hand while talking to a senior officer. We heard someone say, ‘Line up!’ and then he said ‘Quickly!’ We formed a line and waited. The silence was interrupted by waves hitting the lakeshore. There were tall mountains to the left of us and the moon was hiding behind the clouds. We could make out its outline by its pale light. The reflection of the moon looked like a long, bright tail in the lake, all broken up in bends. The choppy waters were playing tricks with the moon. ‘Attention!’ we heard someone yell. It seems our leader had forgotten that we were already lined up and standing still. The detachment lined up in front of us began to march. We followed next. At first we marched along a cobblestone road, we then marched along a sandy road and arrived in a field. We then marched uphill and when we entered the forest we were ordered to stop. ‘Gentlemen, we are sleeping here tonight!’ we heard the same voice order. It was March and the night was cold and wet. I laid half my blanket under me and covered myself with the other half. I lay in the grass and watched the stars until I fell asleep. We were awakened at dawn the next day and gathered inside a church. A young man from Zhelevo yelled out: ‘Hey everyone, we are in Prespa! I know this place. It’s called Goritsa. The mountain on the other side is called Vrba, the mountain to our left is called German Mountain... And the village you see over there is called Rabi, above that is the village German... The village in front of us is called Medovo. Over there are the villages Shtrkovo, Rudari and P’pli ... Gentlemen, we are in Prespa. We have arrived! We have arrived!’ We started training the first day we arrived. We did ordinary exercises like crawling, running, jumping, going under barbed wire fences, tossing pretend grenades and marching. Lots and lots of marching. But they would not let us get near the villages. They wouldn’t let villagers get near us either. We slept in open spaces or in trenches regardless, of whether it was raining or if the weather was good. We also climbed up German mountain and camped there in the outdoors. We usually went there when we practiced with live ammunition. There was no day when enemy aircraft did not fly over us. The airplanes circled over the surrounding villages and over the Prespa Plains, firing their machine guns at anything that moved. Sometime around the middle of April the weather warmed up and in no time at all everything turned green. One evening they lined us up and two DAG officers observed us for a long time.

Then they lined us up according to our height. Then they told us that as of today, everyone was to remember their place in line and this is how were to line up from now on… And, Pando, Sir, we began to do some serious marching, day and night, just marching but at a fast pace. During the night before April 21st, I remember the date, they gave us new uniforms and automatic rifles. We looked like officers. What joy! Some were even saying that we might see action the next day. That same evening they gave us good food and let us go to bed early. The alarm went off very early the next day! We expected that so none of us undressed or even removed our shoes before going to bed because we wanted to be ready quickly. The moment the alarm was sounded we formed our lines fast and were ready to march. We passed through Strkovo and then through P’pli where they told us to stop in the woods above the road. We sat there and waited and waited. The sun rose and we could see the surrounding villages. Villagers and DAG fighters passing over Preval were gathering in Orovnik. We watched them assemble in the meadow where a big stage was set up. At about eight o’clock in the morning our leader summoned all the squad commanders and briefly spoke to them. They then assembled us and our leader said: ‘Gentlemen! We need to make a special appearance. Today we will go on parade and we will march in front of the leader and the people...’ We heard the squad commanders giving orders. We lined up and waited. Then, suddenly we heard live music roaring with trumpets and drums! ‘Echelons forward, march!’ we heard the shallow voice of our leader order. The first few steps we took raised a lot of dust on the road. We started with a free march behind the orchestra, descended down hill and then stopped and formed a new line at the bottom. ‘Brigade march!’ commanded our leader. We marched a strong march to the sounds of the DAG Headquarters orchestra. Women wearing black and older men ran over to greet us. We were welcomed as DAG soldiers… Our leader yelled out: ‘Brigade turn, right!’ With our arms clenched around our machine guns we marched exactly as we had been taught. In doing so, we raised a lot of dust on the road and stomped on a lot of grass while keeping our eyes focused on the stage. And there, sitting next to each other, smiling and enthusiastic, applauding and waving were the top leaders... We completed our march. The orchestra returned, established itself in front of the stage and began to play again. We were ordered ‘at ease’. Then the orchestra stopped playing and we heard someone making a speech. Then many others spoke. Only slogans, Pando, Sir, only slogans! The people came over to us, to see this wonderful new DAG army. Then suddenly I head a woman’s voice calling out: ‘Kirche!’ I turned around. ‘Kirche, my son!’ I heard her say again. ‘Mamo? Mamo!’ I yelled out instinctively. Oh, Pando, Pando, Sir... Many mothers met their children in Orovnik that day. You would have thought they would be happy to see their sons? No, they were not happy at all. Many started yelling and cursing, Pando, Sir, cursing. They cursed the Party, the leader, our destiny, everything… They threw stones at the officers and at the stage. The old men also cursed and swore something awful. I wish, Pando, Sir, I had something nice to tell you but there was nothing nice about what happened that day. I will tell you more about this later, another time. I can’t now. My voice is starting to break and I am afraid I might cry… But I will tell you that when my mother asked me where Lenka and Kosta were, I cried. I cried out loudly. And it was not just me who cried, many wept uncontrollably, Pando, Sir... I will tell you more another time, maybe tomorrow or the day after tomorrow...” concluded Kirche.