The Cross of Lazzaro

by John Harris

  The group of houses where they’d left the car had completely disappeared, though the church still stood, its sides piled high with wreckage. The water had vanished now, except for the thick stream of mud still draining from the dam, and the spreading cloud of brown that stretched over the surface of the lake with the driftwood and wreckage it had brought down. There were no vineyards, no orchards, no meadows, none of the little inns and wine-shops that had advertised their wares so carefully in Italian and Gothic German, no growing things at all in the path the water had taken. All the fields, all the grass, all the top soil, the trees and the people seemed to have been swept away, and the valley floor was a featureless expanse of pebbled mud, everything gone from it, scoured and ground clean by the water in its rush for the lake.

  ‘The hotel’s still there,’ Caporelli shouted above the noise of the rain, as he peered downwards.

  The Stettnerhof was like an island on its little raised knoll of rocks, but on either side of it where the road had run, as though some massive bulldozer had swept past, there was a gouged channel and a swathe of debris as the island had parted the water, and the whole centre of the town to the east had vanished. They began to go faster, stumbling under the weight of the boy, and here and there as they descended they began to come across cars, hurled aside by the force of the water, flattened like tin toys against the rocks, and great banks of driftwood piled against the odd stone building that had survived.

  The debris that the dam had washed off the mountain had formed a moving wall of human beings, animals, trees, bridges, cars, a huge battering-ram of masonry, metal, stone, wood and flesh. The centre of the town had been drowned in ten minutes, and it had gone like a picture rubbed off a slate. Houses had been crushed like eggshells and already the wailing cry of the injured was beginning to rise.

  They began to see a few shocked people moving about on the slopes above the tide-wrack of wreckage, and one or two more clinging to the piles of planks and splintered timber. Then they began to pass corpses, hanging in trees, half clothed and protruding from shattered doors and windows, or impaled on ruined fences. Giovanni had fallen asleep now, his head bobbing over Caporelli’s shoulder as he marched, step by heavy step, down towards the town, his face bleak and drawn and tragic.

  They saw a couple of policemen, both of them without hats, bringing bodies out of a ruined house. They had already laid three in a row and were just bringing out a fourth. All the boats had disappeared from the fringe of the lake, and even the lakeside itself had gone, the trees, the flowers and all the decorative bushes that had been tended with such loving care to attract the city tourists. Now there was only mud.

  There was no sign of the boat-station or the Stöckli Bar or the Wolfhof, and there was no sign on the mole of the old Customs House, and it occurred to Henry in his dumb misery that Maggie’s theft of the explosives would never be discovered now because what she’d left had gone too. The two boats the archaeological group had been using were lying on their sides, half sunk against the mole, and even the wood and stone Church of Lazzaro di Colleno was gone in a tumbled heap of debris.

  There was still the river of thick mud between them and the Stettnerhof, but Henry could see several of the archaeologists standing among the dark trees outside the hotel. Caporelli managed to find a rope, and somehow, in the growing darkness, they got it across and made their end fast to a tree. Caporelli went down into the river of brown water, working his way across slowly, then, as he reached the other side, Henry took hold of the drowsy, whimpering Giovanni and followed him, groping for a foothold among the muddy boulders that shifted under his bare toes in the swirling water which broke in a wave against him and formed again in a vortex below. It was icy cold and Giovanni began to cry with misery, and Henry remembered it was all off the mountains and what wasn’t rain was melted snow and glacier water.

  There was no electricity in the hotel, but they could see one or two candles in the windows. As Henry heaved Giovanni up the muddy bank of the great fissure that had been carved out of the earth, he felt hands grab the boy and take him away, and more hands reaching down to him to help him up. He saw a face he recognized and realized it was Maggs. Caporelli was standing in the doorway, with Giovanni in his arms.

  ‘Where’s Maggie?’ Henry said.

  ‘She’s here somewhere,’ Maggs said. ‘I saw her – or I thought I did.’

  He found her in the dining-room and saw all the children from the orphanage were there, too, with the Sisters and the Mother Superior, trying to find some comfort among the saturated, tumbled furniture.

  Maggie saw him as soon as he appeared in the doorway. She was kneeling by a weeping child, and she jumped to her feet, the dulled misery going from her eyes at once.

  ‘Henry!’ She pushed the child aside gently and ran across to him. Her hair was wet, as though she’d been outside in the rain, and her clothes seemed as plastered to her small body as his own.

  ‘Henry! Oh, Henry!’

  He put his arms round her as she flung herself against him, clinging to him, sobbing and trembling and shuddering, and he stroked her damp hair instinctively, as though he’d been doing it for years.

  ‘We were too late,’ he said flatly. ‘Stettner was there.’

  Her fingers were clutching at him, working nervously as they dug into his flesh. ‘I thought it must have caught you,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d gone.’

  ‘Not me. Thank God you’re all right.’

  ‘It only took ten minutes. I ran up to the orphanage when you’d gone. At first they wouldn’t listen to me, but they came in the end. And then the streets were full of people running for their lives. The water seemed to lick them up, Henry, and the whole town just disappeared. Houses were tumbling one after the other, all pushed against the banks like packs of cards with everyone inside. The orphanage was one of the first to go. We watched it all from the windows.’

  She shuddered and her body seemed icy in his arms. ‘We heard it coming and I heard someone shouting, “Run for your lives”, and then it all seemed to be noise and screams. I saw a wagon coming down the hill as the water came, but it lost a wheel, and everybody fell out – and – and then they disappeared.

  ‘Then the water began to come in at the back of the hotel and we felt the rocks and trees hitting it, and even houses. We thought it was going all the time. Henry – there’s a policeman at the back there, and Oswino’s wife. They’re dead.’

  There was nothing they could do that night. Nothing at all. There were no lights, and no doctors and no nurses and no police. Everything had vanished. All they could do was look after themselves as best they could until daylight.

  Caporelli turned out every blanket he possessed, and they tucked the children up six or seven at a time in the beds on the dry upper floors with the worst of the shocked or injured. There were several people with broken limbs and one woman, whose hair had been caught in a tree, with the scalp almost torn from her head. There were so many people crowding into the hotel there was nothing much Caporelli could give them in the way of food, but with a stomach full of soup and bread and with dry clothes on him again, Henry began at last to feel capable of thinking of others.

  The town was black in the rain except for the small moving lights of lanterns and torches. Occasionally, they could hear calls and cries across the dwindling strip of brown water, and all the time the wails and moans of injured people in the smashed houses around.

  When they’d brought some organization back to the Stettnerhof they collected a party of men and scrambled back along the rope to the other side, leaving the women and the nuns and the older people to look after the survivors.

  Almost immediately, in the light of the torch Caporelli had given him, Henry saw a dead woman, practically naked, lying half covered with mud, on the bank, and he wondered why he hadn’t seen her as they’d climbed down from the dam. They dragged her up the bank and laid her on the grass and left her there. There was nothing else they could do. Then they saw
an old man clinging to a roof where he’d climbed when the first flood had poured round him. In the dark and the rain he couldn’t see to climb down and he was petrified with fear and cold. They rescued him with a broken ladder from a twisted barn and he said he thought he could manage because his house was still standing.

  As they reached the town they began to meet people coming from the other side of the lake, clean people with dry clothes and rubber capes and stretchers, and they realized they must be the first of the rescue workers from Trepizano arriving to look for survivors. There was a doctor among them, kneeling at the roadside, sewing up a gash in the arm of a girl who was leaning, white-faced and fainting, against a fence.

  ‘They’ll be bringing help from Bolzano,’ they were told. ‘There’ll be more from Trento. Tomorrow. It’ll be here tomorrow.’

  The wreckage was banked up in mounds thirty feet high, twisted around with barbed wire and telephone cable, wood, trees, stone, human beings, unbreakable and impossible to free.

  The survivors they found, those who had been through the flood and escaped, were all shocked and helpless, with staring white faces in masks of blood and mud. Where their homes had been there was now only bare ground. The whole town seemed to have been swept aside, with only an occasional stone building surviving. Those that were standing all seemed to have bodies in them, caught by the water bursting through windows and doors and rising to twenty feet in a matter of seconds, brown, choking water that had smashed the life out of them long before they were drowned. And everything, every single thing, seemed to be under a three-foot layer of slime.

  The Piazza della Citta, which seemed to have taken the full force of the flood, was just a mass of debris and broken stone and scattered tiles. The old palace of the Von Benedikts still stood, but every door and window had gone from the first floor as the water had smashed through, and the dungeons contained the bodies of the students who had been imprisoned there the day before, together with that of a police sergeant who had tried to free them. The wooden houses in the streets behind had simply collapsed into piles of heavy timbers, where policemen and rescuers, directed by Castelrossi, were clambering about, trying to find the owners of the crying voices underneath.

  They were stumbling with weariness when they got back to the Stettnerhof, and they congregated in the hall, sitting on the stairs, uncertain where to go and what to do with themselves.

  Caporelli produced a bottle of brandy and filled glasses without thinking of the cost. They were all blank-faced and drunk with tiredness, and, seeking somewhere to sleep, Henry found himself in the dining-room. The children had all disappeared and there seemed to be nobody awake except for a nun sitting in the corner telling her beads among the silent mounds of sleeping people huddled on tables and under tables and in chairs. Then he saw Maggie’s head lift and he saw she’d found a blanket and was stretched out on a goat-skin rug near the door. Her face twisted into a smile that was sad and friendly both at the same time, and she lifted the edge of the blanket without speaking.

  Henry stumbled towards her and stretched out beside her, feeling the young warmth of her body against his own cold limbs, and her lips against his cheek. Almost immediately, as she put her arms round him and drew him to her, he fell asleep and the last thought that entered his mind before he drifted into darkness was of Lazzaro’s cross. Of the Church of Lazzaro di Colleno there had been no sign. It seemed to have been swept clean away and in his last conscious thought Henry wondered dumbly if the Cross of Lazzaro had gone, too, smashed to splinters among the wreckage, with Father Anselmo and Father Gianpiero and all the red cloth and the floodlights and the television cameras that it had attracted.

  Daylight came with a bright sky that mocked the stricken valley with the first real promise of settled weather for weeks. The first direct rays of the sun struck the upper crests of the Catena di Saga, so that they glowed dull red against the sky, then as the light strengthened, the red became orange and then gold as the shadows retreated from the screes. Then the gold was lost as the sun gathered strength until, in a sky of tragically staggering ultramarine, the peaks stood out in dazzling cream and ivory.

  The police started evacuating the survivors at first light, the injured first, and the long thread of people, many of them in black and carrying all that remained of their belongings on their backs, began to move out of the village, muttering and weeping and crying out to each other. The Citta di Trepizano lay just off-shore opposite where the boat-station had once stood, and the launches which had come across from Trepizano were ferrying people out for the ship to take them to relatives across the lake or to trains for the south.

  Even the opposite bank had not escaped unscathed. The water that had smashed down from the mountain had created an artificial wave that had rushed across the mile and a half of lake and flung itself at Trepizano. The ferry had a set of smashed rails and twisted ventilators to show where she had been flung against the concrete mole, and other, smaller boats had been hurled twenty or thirty feet up the banks and on to the road. Cars had been snatched away, and there wasn’t a chair or a table left along the waterfront cafés.

  The death roll in Cadivescovo was not as high as had been expected in the first shock of the disaster because, in spite of the old joke of shouting into bars that the dam had burst, everybody had guessed at once what had happened, the minute they’d heard the roar from the mountain behind. Fortunately, also, the valley was narrow and the debris that the flood had carried before it had formed a wall that had slowed the force of the water and given people a chance to run for high ground.

  By the grace of God it had just been still daylight, too, and they had been able to watch the moving wall of water and the plunging trees coming down on them long enough to understand what had happened. Only the laggards and those occupied in rescuing treasures had been caught. The rest had seen the advance guard of mist and heard the ominous sound of the water approaching behind the trembling horizon, and by the time the first wave had smashed into the houses, splintering and pulping everything, the townspeople had managed to reach the higher ground round the hotel or on either side of the artificial stream bed.

  Henry said goodbye to Caporelli, who was waiting by the door of the Stettnerhof as he left. The children from the orphanage were going, too, to be evacuated across to Trepizano because the old saw mill was nothing more now than a flattened pile of timbers, stone and tiles and scattered chamber pots. They each had their little packet of sandwiches, carried in the small gay bags that Caporelli had been in the habit of giving to tourists in the summer for their outings up the mountains.

  ‘We must have faith,’ Sister Agata was saying agitatedly in answer to a chorus of ‘Whys’ as the children stared across the debris and began to ask questions. ‘We have our faith and we must lean on it. God moves in His mysterious way and we can suffer worse than this, far worse. If we cannot believe we cannot live.’

  Caporelli looked up as Henry appeared. Giovanni was with him, still in his orphanage clothes, still pale and strained-looking, but with a new light in his eyes, a new alert look full of understanding and warmth that even the disaster could not touch.

  ‘He’ll stay here,’ Caporelli had said. ‘He’s intelligent and sensitive and he’s got plenty of courage. Sister Ursula would like that.’

  Caporelli couldn’t speak as Henry put down his suitcase, and just silently gripped his hand.

  ‘Auf wiedersehen, Aynree,’ he said at last. ‘Ci vedremo. And thank you. We tried. We very nearly succeeded.’

  The Stettnerhof was a wreck inside. All the windows and doors on the ground floor had been smashed in and the cold wind had blown through the corridors, bringing the rain, and for two days there had been five bodies in the ruined out-houses behind.

  ‘Goodbye, Ettore,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll come and see you again some time.’

  ‘Yes, Aynree. Come back. I would like that.’

  They’d heard no more of Stettner or Dittli and, though Caporelli had taken t
he trouble to enquire at the little office the police had opened for people asking about relatives, nothing was known of either of them and they’d guessed that somehow Dittli had got Stettner up into the mountains, on his way to Austria and safety, to live out his life in a bleak twilight as a cripple, cut off from all the things he enjoyed – women, climbing, swimming, laughing – tormented by the most appallingly cruel punishment that could have been devised for him.

  As they moved down to the lakeside with the children in a long crocodile behind them, the rear brought up by the nuns, they could see cars along the Via Colleno – sightseers and camera fiends who’d come to take pictures of the disaster. Bulldozers were at work in the town near the littered Hoferdenkmal, pushing the debris aside, while rescue workers examined it for the trapped bodies of the missing. The whole place had a sour-sweet stink over it, percolating through the smell of disinfectant and chloride of lime, and there were official vans everywhere from Trepizano, and men trying to bring some order back to the drainage and electricity and telephone systems.

  The place seemed to be full of soldiers and there were tents everywhere, as well as a couple of helicopters circling overhead, one of them with United States markings on it.

  Where they had buried Sister Ursula and the murdered policemen only a day or two before, there were no longer any cypress-shaded tombs, just a few smeared stone angels sticking out of the mud, and the broken slabs from the scoured graves, and the torn-off wall of a columbarium exposing the coffins inside, and soldiers moving in a long line in the valley, searching. Their faces were stony and there was a listlessness about their movements, because there was nothing to find. It was if the valley had been scoured clean and even the dead had to be dragged bodily from the mud.

  A lorry came past with a couple of drowned cows in the back, stinking of chlorine, their legs sticking pole-like into the air, and coming down the mountainside were four men in smocks carrying a stretcher bearing a blanket-covered bundle, followed by a woman who was wailing and beating at her breast in her anguish. All the homes had gone, with their flowers and Gothic inscriptions that spoke of happiness and warmth, which had been carved so lovingly over the doors, all their music and all their colour – the church, the school, the brass band, the orphanage, the Municipio, the boat-station, everything, leaving only a mud-covered expanse stretched across with searching lines of dun-coloured soldiers.