The Cross of Lazzaro

by John Harris

  ‘I was just preparing some of my little ones,’ she said, almost as though they were her own offspring. ‘They’ve been asked if they’d like to help in washing the things they’re finding in the lake, and they must be clean – at least to start off with. They’ve been bringing things up since dawn. The Signorina Daniells was here. They will be paid, of course. Not much, but it will be pocket money and they’ll feel these things belong to them, not merely to a vast organization centred on Rome.’

  As she finished speaking there was a sudden outburst of noise in one of the rooms alongside, and the stamp of boots and boys’ voices that lifted Sister Ursula’s head. Then there was a flash of a white wimple through the glass door and another nun appeared. She was small and fat and she was obviously agitated.

  ‘Sister Ursula,’ she said breathlessly above the din. ‘Come quickly! Come quickly!’

  Sister Ursula looked round, unmoved. ‘What is it, Sister Agata?’ she asked. ‘I thought we had all our excitement yesterday.’

  Sister Agata flapped her hands. ‘Giovanni’s fighting again,’ she said. ‘With Ercole Battista this time.’

  Sister Ursula turned to Henry. ‘Excuse me,’ she said in her soft voice, still completely unruffled.

  Two minutes later the noise in the room had stopped and Sister Ursula reappeared, followed by two boys, one of them tall and slender, with dark burning eyes, the other thickset and sturdy, a surly expression on his face.

  ‘I want you to apologize to each other and shake hands,’ she commanded them. ‘And then, please, get yourselves ready.’

  The short thickset boy muttered something and stuck out his hand. The taller boy ignored it, averting his eyes.

  ‘Giovanni!’ Sister Ursula’s voice hardened.

  His eyes flashed and he gestured quickly. ‘Sister Ursula, I didn’t hit him,’ he said. ‘At least, not until he said what he did say.’

  Sister Ursula pursed her lips. ‘That will be attended to later,’ she said. ‘For the moment we must have peace. We have a job to do. Now shake hands.’

  Again the thickset boy stuck out his hand. Again Giovanni ignored it. Sister Ursula sighed.

  ‘He must be punished,’ Sister Agata shrilled.

  ‘Sister Agata’ – Sister Ursula’s voice was quiet but it was very firm – ‘Giovanni’s my charge. I’ll deal with him.’

  Sister Agata stuck her nose in the air and disappeared, and Sister Ursula turned to the thickset boy.

  ‘You may go, Ercole,’ she said. ‘I will punish you later.’

  Ercole bobbed his head and vanished. Sister Ursula looked at Henry and turned to Giovanni. He was obviously distressed and she spoke gently to him.

  ‘Tell me, Giovanni,’ she said. ‘Tell me what happened.’

  The boy’s eyes filled with tears. ‘He spoke of my father and mother,’ he pointed out bitterly. ‘He said that although he was an orphan, at least he had had a father once.’

  Sister Ursula frowned. ‘I see. It was very stupid of him and he will be punished. But Ercole is stupid and can only be corrected by physical punishment. I expect more from you, Giovanni.’

  ‘More, Sister?’

  ‘When our Lord Jesus Christ told us to turn the other cheek He didn’t mean we should stand still and offer ourselves to further blows. He meant simply that we should have the strength of character to ignore wounding remarks. He was humble, yet He was strong. He was often insulted, yet He was never violent, because violence only breeds more violence, Giovanni. An intelligent person has the strength to see this. You have your cross to bear, Giovanni, but so has Ercole. He has his stupidity. He will never understand things. So I would like you to be friendly with him.’

  For a while the boy considered, then he nodded. ‘Very well, Sister. For you.’

  ‘No, Giovanni. Not for me, for you.’

  ‘Very well, Sister.’

  ‘Now, for the time being, please help to clean up here.’

  As the boy turned away, she moved towards Henry and smiled. ‘Sometimes it is very difficult,’ she said apologetically. ‘They have such sad histories. But we must teach them to bear the responsibility their parents failed to show to them. I’m sorry to have been so long. It must be very tedious to listen to a foreign language.’

  ‘I speak Italian, Sister,’ Henry explained. ‘Very well. I studied in Florence for a while.’

  He turned her attention to the dam, and she paused, thinking.

  ‘It was Giovanni who first noticed it,’ she said with a little smile. ‘This Giovanni. He is slightly older than the others, you see, and intense for his years. He never knew his parents and has always been rather difficult. Perhaps because he is more intelligent. He is always fighting, though I think I have now almost won him over.’

  She called the boy across from where he was straightening the bowls.

  ‘Tell the Signor Dottore what you saw up the mountain, Giovanni,’ she said.

  He stared at her and then at Henry, then he drew a deep breath.

  ‘There was more water than last year,’ he said in a rush. ‘It was quite clear there was more water. It was coming through the wall.’

  ‘There has always been water coming through the wall,’ Sister Ursula went on gently, waving him away. ‘We have been going up there for picnics for ages, and always there was water. But this time there was more than usual.’

  ‘I see. Go on, Sister.’

  She smiled. ‘I knew the dam was in need of repair. So did everyone, of course. Every time it rains the older boys run in to me and shout, “Sister, the dam has given way.” It is a great joke, just as it is with the men in the bars in the town.’

  She managed another smile. ‘I was daydreaming,’ she said. ‘I’d been watching the people on the lake and thinking that if we had all the money they were spending to find the past, and all the money that was being spent to destroy the past by the Montanari with their bombs, we might be a little better off in the future. New blankets. New books for the schoolroom.’ She indicated the rows of chamber pots on little shelves along the corridor. ‘Lavatories,’ she said. ‘So that the younger children would not have to use these.

  ‘I went up with Giovanni to look,’ she went on. ‘I like to take notice of Giovanni in case he feels like breaking out again. He did so once and ran away. He got as far as Trepizano before we found him and I feel I must help him. It is a home he needs, not an orphanage someone to make him feel he belongs, something we can never give him, however hard we try.’ She paused, then seemed to realize she was daydreaming again and pulled herself sharply back to the subject of the dam. ‘You could see the cracks,’ she continued. ‘The trickles had become streams, and the river below was broader than I’d ever seen it before. I felt it was my duty to tell someone. I decided on Signor Caporelli. He’s a good man and a good friend of ours. He was once an engineer himself and has always been concerned about the dam. Besides, everybody else has always seemed to be too occupied with politics, I’m afraid, to have much time for us.’

  She sighed, then she gave a sad smile. ‘It would be so satisfying to see an end to all the hatred we have here,’ she said. ‘So satisfying to know we could move out of our four walls certain of the safety of the children.’

  In her words Henry saw how deeply the fear of the Montanari had bitten into the life of the valley. It was never obvious on the bright surface that the tourists saw and he hadn’t properly seen it himself, but underneath it had penetrated into everything, even into the activities of a few nuns and the parentless children they cared for.

  ‘There would be so much more money and so much more happiness,’ Sister Ursula ended, ‘and we all know how much love is needed in this world of ours. These children aren’t concerned with whether they’re Austrian or Italian, and neither are we. We take them all in, no matter which part of the mountains they come from.’

  The rain seemed to have cleared as Henry set off for the dam. Outside the Church of Lazzaro di Colleno the newspapermen and television technicia
ns were standing in groups, talking with Father Anselmo among the peasant women with net shopping bags. By the fountain a couple of girls were slapping at their washing, watched by a fat Franciscan friar in brown dusty habit and sandals and a gloomy-looking policeman reading a newspaper strongly marked in the corners with hammers and sickles. In the bay the two archaeologists’ boats were busy and Henry could see the youngsters talking on the decks, their feet among the piles of gear. Stettner was in the water alongside, draped with aqualung gear and oxygen bottles, his wet shoulders gleaming in the sunshine, and Maggie Daniells was talking to him over the side, on her knees on the deck in the yellow swimming costume. As he watched, Stettner heaved himself up the ladder with a powerful lunge, without waiting for her to take the heavy cylinders off his back, then he climbed over the bulwarks, slipped the buckles and wriggled out of the straps, and Henry heard the thud as the lead weights fell to the deck.

  He sat in the van, staring at them for a while, his mind full of questions about them both, then he started the engine again and drove up the mountain. The sun had dried away the rain now and the road was covered with limestone grit in a grey film that had been scattered on the grass and the trees like the dust from a cement works by the big Lancia buses of the Societa Automobilistica Dolomiti with their trumpeting horns.

  He turned off the main road towards the dam, past a woman trudging downhill with a bundle of twigs piled high on her back, and there were millions of gentians among the grass, and buttercups in the crevices, and massed clumps of the dwarf hydrangea they called the alpenrose among the cushions of moss and soldanella between the rocks.

  It was a brilliant day now and the clouds had quite disappeared except for a little mist drifting along the crags with a hint of an afternoon storm. The meadows gave way to the dazzling white scree and then to the outer bastions of the Catena di Saga that sparkled against the deep blue of the sky. He could see the saw-toothed ridge plainly and in front of it, like the spike it was named after, La Spiga. Away on the right, he could see La Fortezza, the Fortress, a series of spires like battlements out of a fairy tale, and, farther to the east, more proud pinnacles above the Val Caloroso, grave and silent, yellow-white, venerable iron walls that had braved centuries of time.

  Below him he could see a trudging peasant cart on the winding road sweeping in vast curves to join the highway along the broad valley of the Adige, the link between the German and Italian peoples since the days of the Romans, the road that had brought the conquering Visigoths and Vandals down to the Lombardy plains with their leagues of maize and corn and vineyards.

  Up at the dam there was an immense silence. The trees below him looked like dark cotton wool through the nearer acacias and wild laburnum, and along the skyline the firs stood up round the jagged tooth of La Spiga like bristles on the back of a giant hand. He could see the rock strata lined with firs, too, showing where the land had heaved thousands of years before to produce the mountains and the bottomless lakes of Switzerland and Italy. Even now, centuries later, the land seemed to slide down to the dark green water.

  He left the van by the dam and examined the gates of the stopper wall, which were situated in small tunnels that led to what had once been an artificial spillway. But the spillway was choked with rubbish now and the gates looked old and solid. There were the remains of a fire in one of the tunnels, as though some climber had been using the place for a shelter, and he noticed to his surprise that the embers were still warm.

  As he left the tunnel, he saw a man standing just below him among the rocks – a small dark man with a beard and piercing eyes.

  ‘Grüss Gott,’ Henry said in the ancient salutation of the mountains, but as he tried to talk to him in German the man turned and was off among the crags, and had vanished within seconds. It was eerie and unnerving. The man had been small and stunted and the way he had vanished as soon as Henry had spoken had made him seem like one of the mountain trolls from Peer Gynt. It was obvious the fire was his, and Henry wondered briefly whether he were one of the Montanari the police were so diligently seeking.

  It worried him a little, but the quarrel was nothing to do with him, and he started to climb to the main wall of the dam, where some youngster called up for the army had daubed in tar the year of his birth – Evviva 1940 – in a sarcastic farewell to civilian life. Trudging up the rocks at the side, he reached the top of the wall, where the dusty road that ran across had subsided in parts. There were cracks that had been crudely patched with concrete, and in the little stone huts that had been built up there the great iron wheels intended to lift the gates in the spillways were rusted solid. He guessed that those on the stopper wall were just the same. As Caporelli had suggested, it would have needed a charge of explosive to move them.

  He sat for some time on a rock alongside the old fortress-like barrier, examining the plans he’d brought. The original dam had been reinforced with an outer wall of stone which was a good twenty feet thick at the base and tapered to four feet thick at the top, and there was a layer of slate inside to hold the earth-filling in place. There were five discharge pipes extending through the rock culvert at the base of the dam, but there was obviously so much rubbish behind them the water coming through was a mere trickle.

  The dam was leaking in a dozen places, and the water seemed to be eating into the outer wall and so into the earth it was designed to protect. There appeared to be danger in the absence of a discharge pipe to take the water out of the dam for repairs, and in the poor method which had been used on the last occasion anyone had bothered to repair it. This had left a large leak which seemed to be cutting into the new embankment and, as the water couldn’t be lowered, Henry couldn’t see any means of reaching the point of the leaks. The only alternative seemed to be, as Caporelli had suggested, to drain it somehow through the stopper wall.

  According to the reports, the sluice gates had never been opened for years. It was no wonder the wall was rotten. There had been little planning behind it. It had been erected in the last corrupt days of the old Austrian Empire by men who had known little of the stresses and strains of such vast undertakings as this, men who had grown up in the nineteenth century’s atmosphere of brash over-confidence, men of importance who had been less skilful than they had thought they were. They had believed the dam impregnable and, judging by the dimensions and the engineering standards of the time, they had probably had considerable justification for their beliefs. But the years had had their effect on the dam. It had been an inferior piece of work to begin with and it had been neglected for generations. The old original wall of earth had been well rammed down but though the earth in the new one had been chosen for its clayey quality it had never been anything else but merely dumped in place between the containing walls. And the carelessness of the construction had allowed it to be lower in the middle instead of higher; and the stone core, which was supposed to extend twenty feet above the normal water line was, in fact, only a matter for speculation. Henry could find no real details about it or any reference to its ever having been built.

  He did his job carefully, collecting earth and rock samples, and walked slowly back along the wall and down the bank of rock, inspecting the choked-up sluices and examining the jammed and useless gates. There was a farmer there, a sharp-eyed, long-jawed man in thick clothes and clodhopper shoes stumbling behind an ox that struggled with a plough in the rocky soil. He lived below the vast artificial lake on a few cows and goats and pigs and a square of turned earth. Henry tried to talk to him, but he spoke in German and his strange mountain accent made him difficult to understand. It was clear, however, that he didn’t think much of the dam either.

  He invited Henry in and they crossed a yard full of barking dogs and strutting chickens to the house which was a curious mixture of carved galleries and the white-walled grace of the Italians to the south. There was a large dark room with a wood fire burning at one end, grey with ash, and a stone-flagged floor, and walls hung with copper pitchers, salamis and ham, and tallow
for greasing boots and a vast calendar with a gaudy picture of St Stephen’s in Vienna.

  The farmer said his name was Dieter Oswino and he offered Henry a drink of grappa. His wife brought the bottle in, and Henry saw she was a buxom woman with a plump handsome figure laced into the Austrian embroidered bodice and white blouse. She had cold dramatic eyes and spoke stiff unrelenting German, and he suddenly realized he was looking at one of Stettner’s mistresses. She was just the sort who would appeal to him – handsome, intelligent and animal like himself, with none of the independence or practised humility of the peasant – and he wondered how they solved the problem of Dieter Oswino.

  When he left he drove down the mountain back to the main road where the nerveless drivers of the SAD buses swung their vehicles round the tight corners, and over the bridges that crossed the artificial cutting that led the stream from the dam through the town. For a while he sat in the Fiat, staring at the rubbish that choked the gully and examining the rest of the documents that Caporelli had given him. He’d been painstaking and gathered information from the town archives, the library and the Trepizano and Bolzano newspapers. Henry studied them with a frown, then he slowly closed the folder and started up the van.

  When he got back to the Stettnerhof, Stettner was in the bar, drinking beer, his head close to that of the waiter. They were talking in German and broke apart as he entered, and Stettner sat staring round him, his eyes cold, as though he resented the fact that the place no longer belonged to his family.

  After a while he moved up to make room for Henry and offered him a cigarette. Henry didn’t like him very much but it was difficult not to respond to his rough charm.