As I let the rope go, something caught my attention. It was a cloud of dust streaming toward Taita in the valley below. Eventually I saw that it was a four-wheel-drive vehicle racing toward Taita. It could only be the policeman Hiller. Only he had that type of vehicle. It disappeared from sight under the overhanging cliff. Was Hiller coming to see the celebrations? Surely not.
‘Well, Major Ernst Krag,’ Rocca’s voice boomed out as if he wanted all the village to hear, ‘at last you see Taita. You’ll meet a few old friends here from the war. Bonnelli, Leca, Castelli… well, just about everyone here was in the Resistance. Of course, many of them are dead. You’ll remember Michel Rocca, my son, I expect. You had many conversations with him.’
Major Krag turned deathly pale. He rubbed his hands together. Then he burst out laughing. ‘You’re making a joke? Is that it? I’ve never been to Corsica in my life,’ he said loudly. ‘I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting any of these gentlemen.’
Kragl I searched for the connection. Then I remembered Maria’s vision. His blood shall run on the cobbles. Jesus! They’d brought Krag here to murder him. I thought of Ambrosini lying in his coffin. ‘God help him! They’re going to murder him in cold blood,’ I whispered.
I had to do something. Then I thought, But why? It’s their affair. I’m here to observe. What has all this to do with me? No doubt Krag deserves whatever he gets.
But I couldn’t stand by and allow this to happen. I raced down the spiral stone steps but found Romanetti blocking my way. His rifle was cocked and ready, three armed shepherds behind him.
‘I like you, Walters.’ Romanetti’s menacing stare belied his words. ‘But if you know what’s good for you, you’ll get back up there. You’re trapped, so you might as well enjoy the show. It’ll be over soon. That bastard will die today, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’
‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ I asked. ‘A whole village out to murder a single man.’
‘Murder? This is a vendetta! Go back to your books, Walters. You’ve been asking enough questions these past two years. Here’s the real thing, but I see you have no stomach for it.’
‘Not for terrorism. You’ll all pay the price.’
‘We’re more interested in imposing justice than saving our own skins.’
‘The war’s over.’
‘The war will never be over.’
I raced back and leaned over the balustrade. I was a spectator watching a horror movie. Inspired with the need to do something, I rang the church bell several times in rapid succession. Then I regretted my action. No one looked up, and the ringing seemed to bind me into an unholy alliance with what they were about to do.
At that moment there were shots from the side of the square. I saw Hiller standing at the edge of the mob, two policemen by his side. He fired again into the air.
‘Thank God,’ I muttered.
The police were shouting; ‘Make way. Move off. Let us through,’ in the dialect. Hiller was panting and red-faced. ‘Move away!’ he yelled as he pushed through the crowd. When he reached Rocca’s side, he called out: ‘In the name of the law, I arrest you, Major Ernst Krag, for crimes perpetrated against the French people.’ His voice cut like a gunshot. ‘Come on, hand him over,’ he added. ‘Major Krag’s going to stand trial, and we’ll see he gets what he deserves.’
At these words, Krag abandoned all pretences. There was a scuffle as he tried to fight his way toward the police. When his hand grabbed his hunting knife, Rocca, who was sticking close to him, squeezed his arm until the knife clattered to the ground.
‘You won’t be needing it again,’ he said.
A shepherd picked up the knife and thrust it into his pocket. Another took the rifle from Xavier and began to examine it. This, more than anything, unnerved Krag. Suddenly his knees buckled, but he quickly regained his composure.
‘What is the meaning of this charade?’ he said. His voice seemed to be pitched too high. ‘This is a case of mistaken identity. I was never a major. Merely a corporal on the eastern front. I have never been to Corsica in my life before.’
The crowd began to close in on Krag, pushing him toward the centre of the square. Hiller was elbowed aside.
‘Stop! In the name of the law,’ Hiller yelled, his voice high-pitched and ineffectual. ‘Xavier Rocca, hand over this man into police custody. This is my last warning.’
Three service revolvers were pointing straight at Rocca’s head.
‘Three guns against this crowd,’ he sneered. ‘You may kill me, you may get one or two of my colleagues, but you, my friend, will be tom limb from limb before you leave the square.’
Hiller faltered. He looked.around and saw the truth of Rocca’s words. At his command the police put their guns down.
The villagers pushed and pulled Krag toward the centre of the square. They walked in total silence. All I could hear was the victim’s rasping breath.
Krag seemed to have trouble moving his legs. Rocca crossed himself and took a long leather thong out of his pocket.
The women began to chant in their shrill, piercing voices: ‘Kill! Kill! Kill the Boche. Kill him.’ The young girls hid their faces and yelped in horror and excitement. Ursuline and Jules were agog with excitement as they clambered up a chestnut tree for a grandstand view.
‘Major Ernst Krag, for your crimes against Corsica and Corsicans, you are to die,’ Rocca called out.
At these words, the German bellowed like a bullock being slaughtered.
Hiller, surrounded by villagers, watched from the back of the crowd. Rocca wound the thong around the major’s neck. Two burly villagers grabbed his arms from behind. Krag’s eyes opened wide in terror, his face turned purple as he gasped for air.
There was a sudden lunge forward from the crowd, a surge that knocked Rocca aside. He hung on the cord, but slowly he was ousted and forced away as the villagers moved in.
Now Krag was making strange, inhuman noises. His arms came free, and for a moment he seemed to be swimming in a human tide. Then he sank under it.
The crowd had taken over. It was intent upon tearing Krag limb from limb. There was a low, guttural moan, like the growl of some savage creature. Each one of them was caught in a strange metamorphosis -animals merged into one conscious will. They moved over Krag, growling softly, rummaging for blood, tearing the flesh.
I remembered the priest’s words: Satan’s breath! I shuddered.
At the edge of the crowd another act in the horror movie was being enacted, as Hiller tried to arrest Xavier Rocca. Under his unwavering stare, Hiller faltered, put down his gun, and looked away, to the jeers and laughs of the villagers.
‘I’ll be back with reinforcements,’ he said. ‘Next time you won’t be laughing.’
Rocca ignored him. He was looking for Sybilia. He found her and took hold of her arm, forcing her to look at him. ‘Your husband is fully avenged,’ he told her sternly.
‘But you are alive,’ she said loudly. She jerked her arm free.
Rocca swore and turned his back on her. As he walked across the square to his house, Hiller took aim, then thought better of it. For the third time that morning, he put away his gun.
Suddenly the square was emptying. The shepherds blocking the stairs shouldered their guns and left. The women, heads hanging, shuffled away. The beast had disintegrated. From the distance the procession could be seen returning from behind the cemetery.
A dove cooed in the branches overhead, and I realized that the wind had stopped suddenly, as it usually did, leaving a breathlessly beautiful morning.
And I, who had been feeling sickened by the grisly scene, now felt bewildered by the sudden end to it all. An anticlimax! Was that it? No orchestration, no curtain calls, no applause?
I was wrong. From behind the cemetery the procession was returning. They were singing loudly, and I was struck by the beautiful voices of the choirboys. I caught the words ‘mercy’, ‘forgiveness’ and ‘penitence’.
So much for mercy, I thought.
All that was left of Krag was a pulpy mess of flesh and rags and two boots lying some distance away.
Chapter 72
October passed. By early November it was clear that it would be a long, hard winter. I’d developed such an aversion to Madame Barnard’s feather mattress that I made up my mind to rent a small cottage by the sea and spend the weekends there, catching up on the paperwork.
It seemed a good idea, but I wasted three weeks trying to locate the owners of various properties that appeared to be abandoned but habitable. Eventually I went to an estate agent in Galeria.
The agent found an ideal cottage nearby. My enthusiasm waned when I discovered that there were over thirty joint owners, all of whom had to be traced and their acceptance gained before the lease could be signed. After obtaining fourteen signatures I told the agent to forget the whole idea.
‘Ah, well,’ the agent sighed. ‘That’s Corsica for you.’
Snow fell early that year, and the mountains took on a curious two-dimensional proportion. They looked like a theatre backdrop, one range behind the other, going on endlessly from white to off white to grey. The last peaks were just a faint grey smudge against the pearly sky. The countryside was white and fresh, too. It was all so beautiful, but for working purposes winter was a nightmare; weeks of sludge alternated with weeks of frozen ground. Digging became a punishment.
I caught the flu and then bronchitis from working in the rain and sleeping out. One morning I found I was too ill to get up. I lay in my sleeping bag in the cave feeling sorry for myself.
Eventually Sybilia arrived to find out why I hadn’t purchased my food. Like all healthy men, I’ve always felt sickness to be a weakness, and I felt ashamed.
I began by blaming Sybilia for avoiding me. When she denied this, I grabbed her arm and pulled her toward me. ‘You’re driving me crazy,’ I muttered hoarsely. ‘I can’t stop longing for you. Don’t you have any feelings?’
She fought me off. She didn’t have to try too hard. Rape isn’t my style. Then she sat on a rock, stared at me sadly, and said: ‘I can’t give you what you want, Jock. There’s nothing left of me to give. Robin took it all. I feel… well, I feel empty; emotionally drained. You want sex, which is natural enough, but I… I can’t explain.’
I understood her. In a way, we were much alike. I’d always avoided intimate friendships with women. ‘All right,’ I blurted out this dismal morning, amazing myself. ‘Don’t pretend you don’t feel close to me. I’ll settle for friendship. Now for God’s sake, stop avoiding me.’
Then I felt embarrassed. I grumbled on about the laziness of Corsican villagers who would not turn their hands to a day’s digging no matter how much money was offered them.
‘You don’t understand us at all,’ she explained. ‘You just want to hire labour, not people. But if you would only explain about your work. Why not? You’ve never bothered with us. You behave as if we are imbeciles. Even schoolboys would be better than nothing,’ she babbled on in a torrent of anger. ‘If they thought for one moment they were doing something for Corsica, they’d volunteer. So don’t blame us, blame yourself.’
The stream of voluble patois took my breath away, and I had to spend a minute or two fathoming it out, by which time she’d calmed down.
‘D’you think it would work? I mean, lectures — that sort of thing?’
‘I already told you what I think.’
A week later, when I had recovered, I gave in to Sybilia’s nagging and planned a series of lectures. The priest offered me the library hall free of charge and promised to use his muscle to make sure that at least the front two rows were filled.
To my amazement, most of the village turned out. The hall was overflowing as I talked about Corsican prehistory and its unique artistic development.
At question time all the village men asked the same thing:
Where exactly was I planning to extend my dig? They didn’t have any real interest in archaeology, I discovered, although they were polite enough.
The lectures, which I repeated in three neighbouring villages, brought a few schoolboys to volunteer their help, but after a month most of them dwindled away. Jules, however, became a regular helper. He worked hard, and this surprised me, for I’d often seen him drinking in the cafc, and I gathered he was lazy.
As the weeks passed I caught a glimpse of some of the traumas the boy was shouldering. Apart from the stigma of his mother’s reputation, the Roccas were the most powerful and respected family in the district, in a country where ancient clan heirarchy still counted above all else. Family pride and honour was the basis of the Corsicans’ traditional life. It overflowed into Corsican politics. With his father dead and his grandfather hiding in the mountains half the time, the onus was on Jules, at eighteen, to lead the family. He had to assert himself in the political arena. This rqeant that most of the district’s youngsters would support Mm in whichever direction he went.
Consequently he was inclined to show off and swagger about the trenches, surly and uncooperative, while desperately seeking assurance from me. When we were working side by side, we had long arguments. His main preoccupation was Corsican politics and the economy. Jules maintained that Corsica had been cheated. The island did not receive its fair share of the nation’s cash. Consequently there were no jobs for youngsters like him.
I tried to explain the background: Since Napoleon’s days, large numbers of Corsican youth had entered the colonial service and eventually retired to the island with a good pension. Suddenly France had accepted a policy of decolonization. But Corsica was unable to provide alternative livelihoods, for there was no industry.
‘So what’s the answser?’ Jules plagued me repeatedly.
‘More capital investment; the rapid development of tourism and agriculture; new industries to create more jobs; better communication with France.’ I spent hours explaining basic economics to the boy.
Jules had other problems. He had been groomed to take over his grandfather's position as the local clan leader, but training was not enough. He had to prove himself the better man and come up with a viable policy, if he was to keep the communists at bay.
I began to worry about the boy. I talked about him to Sybilia one day when she came to help at the dig. ‘Why should Jules shoulder all this responsibility?’ I asked. ‘Send him to the university. Let him be a boy while he’s still young. He’s missing his youth. I can organize an American scholarship for him. He’s a bright boy.’
Sybilia laughed at me. ‘He’s not a boy, he’s a man. He has inherited his responsibilities, together with this land and the birthright of being a Corsican. He cannot escape from it. Sometimes I fear you’ve missed the point entirely here. We’re proud of our traditions, and we love our country."Sometimes you make me sick,’ I snarled at her. Without really being aware of it, I’d become fond of Jules, and I wanted to help him. As a bystander it was obvious that Jules’s anger was leading him to anarchy. Before long he’d be in trouble with the authorities. I warned Sybilia.
‘Since when has a Corsican run away from trouble?’ she retorted. ‘Then he would not be Corsican.’
It was my birthday. In the evening I decided to visit the café and stand drinks all round. I sat at a table drinking eau de vie while Romanetti poured out his soul in ancient laments. He gave himself completely to the music, his body vibrating with his song, his skin damp with sweat, his eyes burning with passion. His heartrending cry of love and separation laid a spell on the room. Gnarled old men remembered how it had been and wiped their eyes on their neck scarves. Even Bonnelli sat at the counter, his head held between his hands. The shepherd’s cries seemed to intensify my own aloneness.
It was after midnight when I reeled off to the widow Barnard’s apartment, but the house looked twice as dismal in the moonlight. Stucco that had fallen from the facade, exposing red patches of rotting brick, looked like suppurating wounds. The smell of garbage and the garden privy turned my stomach, which suddenly revolted against the evening’s abuse.
I threw up in the gardenias.
Better to sleep at the cave, I thought, in spite of the cold.
So I staggered up through the maquis, sobering rapidly as I climbed. The amphitheatre, as I thought of the ancient quarry, was brilliantly lit by reflected moonlight on hoarfrost. On one side of the open arena was a huge shadow thrown over the ground. I hardly noticed it, until it moved. Then I heard a spade strike against granite. I jumped and moved to the shadow of a thorn bush. The figure of a tall man stood there staring at me in silence. He was dressed in black corduroy, his rifle over his shoulder, his spade in his hand. It had to be Xavier Rocca. There was no one else that big inTaita.
When my initial shock had passed, I stepped toward him and called out: ‘Hi there. Want to join the dig?’
He waved briefly and disappeared into the maquis, agile as a mountain goat.
I was too tired to wonder about it. I scrambled into my sleeping bag, slept soundly, and awoke to find the sun was shining the next morning.
Chapter 73
Since the execution of Major Ernst Krag, the Rocca household had been thrown into confusion. At first Xavier enjoyed the accolades of the village. Later he became moody. Not that he ever regretted his action. After all, he was not a man to shirk responsibility, but the harsh reality was that his life was ruined. He would have to head the local branch of the National Front as a guerrilla leader. Hiller would be back with a regiment of police and a warrant for his arrest. From now on he would never know a moment’s peace, and there would be many nights spent out in the maquis. At sixty-three, he confided in me, he was too old for rough living. But what could he do? At least Michel could rest in peace.
Three weeks after Krag’s execution Hiller returned, accompanied by twelve policemen, and marched to the Rocca house with a warrant for his arrest. Naturally he was not at home. The police posse had been seen as soon as they’d left the forest, which gave Rocca ample time to pack a hamper, stand several rounds of drinks with his friends at the cafe, and disappear into the maquis while the villagers gave him a hero’s good-bye. He was seen by several children to climb onto a rock and stand gazing down at Taita, wiping his eyes for several minutes before entering the forest.
The Corsican Woman Page 37