Compass Needle (Philippe V. Again)

Boy of eight tall for his age crosses the tamped earth floor of the house in Western Bosnia not far from the Croatian border between the legs of his 2.1m tall granddad Stojan. The French-speaking, Algerian-born mother who had fled the war in the 60s had taken her sons to meet the family of her husband. Without Serbo-Croat the visitors would rely on other forms of communication and understanding. The boys learned fast in their new environment, where from what she had seen in the first two weeks the mother had the confidence to leave her children three months. Three months of learning animal husbandry, water-fetching from the spring, tending the vegetable plots and the standing hills all round. Old Stojan had another son named Milan, dear one; (the boy’s father was Slobodan; verb, adjective and talisman for free). After having escaped the country illegally in the late 50s in a commandeered school bus that he and a group of teenage companions drove to the Austrian border, from where they walked to Switzerland, were apprehended by the authorities, transported and dumped at the Red Cross Centre in Marseille, France, the boy’s father could not return home to Mali Dubovik. (Five hours the interview lasted for the mother and her two boys at Belgrade Airport on first landing in Yugoslavia, French interpreter officiating.) The whole of autumn in the small forest of oaks that gave Mali Dubovik its name—due south of Zagreb; Bihac 100kms west. The earlier visit to the mother’s side of the family in central France had been a useful preparation: tamped earthen floor again, animals sharing the house together with the peasants and the well indoors there. A thicker, forbidding you would have thought forest behind the French village (a neighbouring local boy of the same age steered well clear). After the early morning tending of the herd, collection of kindling, eggs from beneath the chickens and assorted other tasks, the dark stand here became a powerful draw for the new tall, older boy. Late afternoons hearing the bells of the returning herd was time to go back home, where no one asked the lad where have you been, what have you seen. The grandmother on the maternal side had been born on Malta and spoke Arabic; Corsican the buccaneering grandfather, on whose island there was a secluded cove perfect for requirements. (The dots were not difficult to join here: on a clear day the coast of Sardinia across the water enticed, and Malta not far distant.) The family still regularly gathered on the French/Italo island. Friday coming the man that was the tall boy would depart for Hobart, Tasmania; following on the 13th of the month begin across the lagoon into the wilderness west of Cockle Creek; a fortnight’s trek through the forest on the other side of the water, where a mountain awaited. Rain was expected and forecast throughout. On the last meeting Philippe took from his pack the Daygo waterproof trousers speckled with reds, blues and greens that were for evening celebrations at the camps. It was impossible to share such a trek; it could only be undertaken alone.