When Lubji came to the end of his tale, the farmer warned him that despite the brave words of Tito, the partisan leader, he didn’t think it would be long before the Germans would invade Yugoslavia. Lubji began to wonder if any country on earth was safe from the ambitions of the Führer. Perhaps he would have to spend the rest of his life just running away from him.
‘I must get to the coast,’ he said. ‘Then if I could get on a boat and cross the ocean...’
‘It doesn’t matter where you go,’ said the farmer, ‘as long as it’s as far away from this war as possible.’ He dug his teeth into an apple. ‘If they ever catch up with you again, they won’t let you escape a second time. Find yourself a ship — any ship. Go to America, Mexico, the West Indies, even Africa,’ said the farmer.
‘How do I reach the nearest port?’
‘Dubrovnik is two hundred kilometers south-east of us,’ said the farmer, lighting up a pipe. ‘There you will find many ships only too happy to sail away from this war.’
‘I must leave at once,’ said Lubji, jumping up.
‘Don’t be in such a hurry, young man,’ said the farmer, puffing away. ‘The Germans won’t be crossing those mountains for some time yet.’ Lubji sat back down, and the farmer’s wife cut the crust off a second loaf and covered it in dripping, placing it on the table in front of him.
There was only a pile of crumbs left on his plate when Lubji eventually rose from the table and followed the farmer out of the kitchen. When he reached the door, the farmer’s wife loaded him down with apples, cheese and more bread, before he jumped onto the back of her husband’s tractor and was taken to the edge of the village. The farmer eventually left him by the side of a road that he assured him led to the coast.
Lubji walked along the road, sticking his thumb in the air whenever he saw a vehicle approaching. But for the first two hours every one of them, however fast or slow, simply ignored him. It was quite late in the afternoon when a battered old Tatra came to a halt a few yards ahead of him.
He ran up to the driver’s side as the window was being wound down.
‘Where are you going?’ asked the driver.
‘Dubrovnik,’ said Lubji, with a smile. The driver shrugged, wound up the window and drove off without another word.
Several tractors, two cars and a lorry passed him before another car stopped, and to the same question Lubji gave the same answer.
‘I’m not going that far,’ came back the reply, ‘but I could take you part of the way.’
One car, two lorries, three horse-drawn carts and the pillion of a motorcycle completed the three-day journey to Dubrovnik. By that time Lubji had devoured all the food the farmer’s wife had supplied, and had gathered what knowledge he could on how to go about finding a ship in Dubrovnik that might help him to escape from the Germans.
Once he had been dropped on the outskirts of the busy port, it only took a few minutes to discover that the farmer’s worst fears had been accurate: everywhere he turned he could see citizens preparing for a German invasion. Lubji had no intention of waiting around to greet them a second time as they goose-stepped their way down the streets of yet another foreign town. This was one city he didn’t intend to be caught asleep in.
Acting on the farmer’s advice, he made his way to the docks. Once he had reached the quayside he spent the next couple of hours walking up and down, trying to work out which ships had come from which ports and where they were bound. He shortlisted three likely vessels, but had no way of knowing when they might be sailing or where they were destined for. He continued to hang around on the quayside. Whenever he spotted anyone in uniform he would quickly disappear into the shadows of one of the many alleys that ran alongside the dock, and once even into a packed bar, despite the fact he had no money.
He slipped into a seat in the farthest corner of the dingy tavern, hoping that no one would notice him, and began to eavesdrop on conversations taking place in different languages at the tables around him. He picked up information on where you could buy a woman, who was paying the best rate for stokers, even where you could get yourself a tattoo of Neptune at a cut price; but among the noisy banter, he also discovered that the next boat due to weigh anchor was the Arridin, which would cast off the moment it had finished loading a cargo of wheat. But he couldn’t find out where it was bound for.
One of the deckhands kept repeating the word ‘Egypt.’ Lubji’s first thought was of Moses and the Promised Land.
He slipped out of the bar and back onto the quayside. This time he checked each ship carefully until he came to a group of men loading sacks into the hold of a small cargo steamer that bore the name Arridin on its bow. Lubji studied the flag hanging limply from the ship’s mast. There was no wind, so he couldn’t be sure where she was registered. But he was certain of one thing: the flag wasn’t a swastika.
Lubji stood to one side and watched as the men humped sacks onto their shoulders, carried them up the gangplank and then dropped them into a hole in the middle of the deck. A foreman stood at the top of the gangplank, making a tick on a clipboard as each load passed him. Every few moments a gap in the line would appear as one of the men returned down the gangplank at a different pace. Lubji waited patiently for the exact moment when he could join the line without being noticed. He ambled forward, pretending to be passing by, then suddenly bent down, threw one of the sacks over his left shoulder and walked toward the ship, hiding his face behind the sack from the man at the top of the gangplank. When he reached the deck, he dropped it into the gaping hole.
Lubji repeated the exercise several times, learning a little more about the layout of the ship with each circle he made. An idea began to form in his mind. After a dozen or so drops, he found he could, by speeding up, be on the heels of the man in front of him and a clear distance from the man following him. As the pile of sacks on the quay diminished, Lubji realized he had little opportunity left. The timing would be critical.
He hauled another sack up onto his shoulder. Within moments he had caught up with the man in front of him, who dropped his bag into the hold and began walking back down the gangplank.
When Lubji reached the deck he also dropped his sack into the hold, but, without daring to look back, he jumped in after it, landing awkwardly on top of the pile. He scampered quickly to the farthest corner, and waited fearfully for the raised voices of men rushing forward to help him out. But it was several seconds before the next loader appeared above the hole. He simply leaned over to deposit his sack, without even bothering to look where it landed.
Lubji tried to position himself so that he would be hidden from anyone who might look down into the hold, while at the same time avoiding having a sack of wheat land on top of him. If he made certain of remaining hidden, he almost suffocated, so after each sack came hurtling down, he shot up for a quick breath of fresh air before quickly disappearing back out of sight. By the time the last sack had been dropped into the hold, Lubji was not only bruised from head to toe, but was gasping like a drowning rat.
Just as he began to think it couldn’t get any worse, the cover of the cargo hold was dropped into place and a slab of wood wedged between the iron grids. Lubji tried desperately to work his way to the top of the pile, so that he could press his mouth up against the tiny cracks in the slits above him and gulp in the fresh air.
No sooner had he settled himself on the top of the sacks than the engines started up below him. A few minutes later, he began to feel the slight sway of the vessel as it moved slowly out of the harbor. He could hear voices up on the deck, and occasionally feet walked across the boards just above his head. Once the little cargo ship was clear of the harbor, the swaying and bobbing turned into a lurching and crashing as it plowed into deeper waters. Lubji positioned himself between two sacks and clung on to each with an outstretched arm, trying not to be flung about.