by Anthony Paul
‘I didn’t just wander in. I watched the village for over an hour, working out the patterns of the patrols so I could come in behind one. And I took the same route as the night before, the one the signora thought was safe. The streets were almost empty, except for a couple of off-duty Germans.’ The doctor clenches. ‘Don’t worry. You can’t stay free for three months without learning a few tricks: limp like you’re war-wounded, so they don’t think you’re a deserter; keep your hands by your side; pee in the road if they look at you too long.’
The doctor chuckles. ‘The Germans’ contempt for us sometimes works in our favour. But the locals won’t have been fooled. Even with your hands by your sides you English walk, even limp, differently from us. Country people notice such things, and there are informers everywhere. It’s easy to be tempted when food is short.
‘Then there are the fascists. You know there’s a family of them next door?’ The captain looks to the party wall. ‘Don’t worry. That wall is a couple of feet thick. But their windows aren’t. We’ll have to keep you out of sight for a while, until you’re a bit more Italian. You can’t stay on the mountain. This rain is falling as snow higher up, even on the camp. And you can’t go clambering over mountains until that wrist is strong again. You’ll have to stay in this house for a while.’
‘No, I can’t. I must have another go at getting through the lines before the weather gets any worse. I do have a duty to get back.’
‘Forget your duty. You stand a better chance of surviving if you forget you’re an English army officer. So does this family. You blundered in here this evening. They’ve been waiting for the Germans to raid the house ever since. So presumably whoever saw you has decided to keep it to himself, but you can’t rely on such luck lasting. Next time you leave this house you’ll be walking like an Italian, speaking like one. It’s your only chance. It’s the family’s only chance, and they’ve got more at stake than you have.
‘I’ll come and see you again tomorrow evening, if I can. There’s a lot more I need you to tell me. And when you’ve told it to me, you and I will stop talking in English. The signora has some pasta for you. Eat and sleep as well as you can. Tomorrow you will be two years old again and you will be learning how to talk and how to behave.’
3
The captain was chased all night, round spurs, up steep scree where the sliding stones kept dragging him back, down them where he was at full pelt to keep his feet, through scrub that tore his face, clearings where he had to stay their width ahead, forever listening for shouts or barking dogs to tell him where his pursuers were. Chased until his lungs gasped, his legs drained, his will wanted to give up, to sink to his knees with his hands in the air, to submit to the fore-sight to his head. Sometimes his dreams cut just before his capture, sometimes he fell tumbling onto the air, into a cold black nothingness.
He awoke at dawn. The sweat from his dreams still chilled him. He huddled the blanket around him, putting off the cold of getting up. The chair with strange clothes on it towered through the cloud of his breath over his lumpy hair mattress. At floor level he felt threatened by the height and size of the room, like a child waking from a nightmare.
He tried to settle his mind for the day. He wanted to bolt into the kitchen and ask if there was news of Mike. Fine if the news was good and he too had escaped: there would be a secret rendezvous tonight and Mike’s Italian would encourage the doctor to allow them both to leave for the lines, but he couldn’t go into the kitchen unprepared for that hope to be dashed, or worse unprepared for the news that he had been shot as a partisan. Whichever, he had to face a day of not being able to communicate except by gesture and the few words he had learned on the journey south. Damn that he hadn’t stuck with the language classes in the prison camp, damn that he’d always left the talking to Mike. If he were Mike it wouldn’t be such a daunting day ahead.
It was useless trying to compose himself. He needed to be doing something. He cast off the blanket and quickly dressed in the clothes that had been left for him on the chair while his own were drying: a collarless woollen shirt, an old jacket which pinched his armpits and patched trousers a few inches too short for his legs, but no boots or socks. He skipped barefoot across the cold tiled floor for the heat of the kitchen.
–
It was a cluttered room, like the kitchen of an elderly couple’s farmhouse deep in the English countryside. Copper and iron pots and pans were suspended from hooks on the walls and dresser, plaits of onions and other vegetables from nails on the ceiling beams. There was a blackened iron stove, a basket of firewood alongside it, a large glass flagon encased in woven reeds to hold the family’s water supply for the day, a wooden chest to hold the flour and other dry stores.
The father had already left the house. Sitting around the deal table, its surface bleached by years of scrubbing, were three generations of the womenfolk, the grandmother in faded black, the mother who brought him from the camp to listen to the wireless two nights ago and a daughter, perhaps seven years old. The mother rose and put down his boots, which she had been greasing with tallow. She wiped her hands on her apron, a tear from her eye, and came across to reach up and button his shirt at the neck. She stepped back to pronounce her satisfaction: ‘L’ospite italiano.’
He smiled and said ‘Buongiorno’. ‘Buongiorno’ the signora and her mother replied. The little girl put her hand to her mouth and giggled. The mother went to the stove to fetch the metal coffee-pot. ‘Mangia’ she said, laying a palm towards the bread and small white cup before the empty seat at the table. Another word already known.
‘Mike?’ he asked.
‘Niente’, nothing, the signora shrugged.
He ate in silence. The bread was dry and filling, and after more than a year in wartime Italy he was used to ersatz coffee. Here in the valley it was made with barley rather than the acorns of the hills, although it still had no smell or taste except of soot; but at least it was black and bitter and cleared the staleness of a waking mouth and warmed the belly. He ate quickly at first, then slowed down, chewing the dry bread carefully, realising that when he had finished he would have to speak.
‘Si parla inglese?’ he asked with a hopeful smile. The signora and her mother looked at each other and back at him. The signora’s shoulders, then her chin, then her dark eyes and their brows lifted back. It was a disappointing reaction: when Mike had been translating her instructions for his first visit to her house he had wondered if she had recognised at least some of the English words.
‘Francais?’ A shrug. ‘Latino?’ Another shrug.
The little girl giggled again. ‘Come si chiama?’ she asked.
Good, a good start, a question he knew, the first over every slab of polenta on the journey south. Would the second, the third, the fourth be the same? He had twenty or so to go before he’d run out of answers and would need the syntax he’d never learned, twenty or so you could answer with vocabulary burned into your memory and infinitive verbs and the present tense of to be. The few Italian lessons he’d been to at the camp had all been about conjugating verbs, just like languages at school: a great exercise in memorising, useless in conversation, useless in the Italy beyond the barbed wire. Jimmy Brown, one of the best in class, had been cleared by the escape committee to cut through the wire, given as good clothes and forged papers as they could muster, and headed for the railway station. It was as far as he’d got. ‘I thought I’d made it’ he said when he came out of the cooler. ‘Bought a ticket, found my seat, Switzerland here I come. All I had to do was sit there, look out of the window, hand over my ticket or papers when asked, and in no time at all I’d be looking up at the Alps. No way, you’re walking into Babel. “What’s your name?” “Where do you come from?” “Where are you going?” “Are you married?” “Do you have a photograph of her?” Children? Parents still alive? “Have an apple.” Not just me. Everyone’s asking everyone else the same questions, nosey lot. I was done for before we’d left the station.’
Th
at had been enough for Bobby Johnson: no more Italian lessons. Mike had persevered, for lack of anything better to do. It was why Mike had always taken over the conversation after the games of happy families.
‘Come si chiama?’ the girl repeated, as if this stupid adult hadn’t understood a simple question, before pointing at her chest. ‘Mi chiamo Anna.’
‘Bobby’ the captain smiled. ‘Mi chiamo Bobby.’
‘Boh-bi?’ Her freckled face screwed up. ‘Boh-bi?’
‘It’s short for Robert’ he said in English.
‘Ah!’ Her face returned to a smile. ‘Roberto! Ti chiami Roberto. Buongiorno, Roberto.’
‘Buongiorno, Anna.’
Next question?
There was none.
‘Bene’ said her mother and launched at speed into the orders of the day. ‘Italiano’ and words beginning ‘parl..’ were there many times, as were ‘casa’, or house, and ‘linea alleata’. So was the dreaded word ‘tedeschi’. The captain assumed that the girl was being told the doctor’s instructions that he was not to leave the house, let alone try to make the Allied lines, until he spoke Italian well enough to fool the Germans. The doctor’s word was clearly law. He had passed sentence and the house was now his gaol.
The mother turned away and the little girl rose to her feet. She was shorter than he had imagined; her old woollen hand-me-down clothes were too big for her, as were her ankle-boots. The braids of her chestnut hair framed an impish face whose eyes smiled an innocence long gone from her elders’. She took his hand in hers and with the instruction ‘Vieni’ dragged him into the dining room, as if taking an uncle not seen for a while to see her dolls. He heard the mother choke a sob as he left the room.
–
The girl had no dolls. Like every other child he had met on his journey south she had no toys at all, had to play out her fantasies with other children and the normal props of the house or farm. But that day was special. She had a captive to play mummy to, a pupil for her schoolmarm.
She relished the role - although from time to time she would forget herself and become the pupil as he told her the English versions of the words she was teaching him - as they moved from one item in the room to another giving it its name: the table and its chairs, made of oak; the curtains and rugs, made of wool, the tiles; the antique plates and cups on the dresser. Each word was repeated and repeated until it sounded right. She took him to the sideboard and showed him the framed sepia photographs, their edges stained by damp, of the recent ancestors and the older members of the family, all posed to look serene and severe at the same time, people it seemed with a significant destiny. She taught him the word for each family relationship - but never their names - and each feature of their faces. She moved on to the body, working from head to toe, the clothes from hat to boots. She counted her fingers. Dozens of words.
After a while she would became frustrated with remote correction of his pronunciation and come to stand in front of him, leaning forward until her mouth was level with his eyes, and fiddle her fingers around her lips and teeth and tongue to show him the correct places for making a particular sound. Then she would giggle, sometimes pull an even sillier face, sometimes simply step back with her head to one side, looking prim with her hands clasped in front of her. For a while they could both laugh at his ineptness with sounds which had come so naturally to her when she was learning to speak.
The novelty could not last. Their enthusiasms ebbed and flowed, ebbed more than flowed as she became tired. She became impatient with his slow progress, bored by the game of school. She slammed her palm against her forehead, grimaced the word ‘cretino!’ and stormed back to her mother, stamping her feet and swinging her arms in mock army fashion. He didn’t mind. He was exhausted. He had forgotten how tiring learning was.
He heard the signora remonstrating with her daughter in the kitchen before releasing her to play with her friends in the street. She came in with a benign smile: ‘Abbi pazienza’ she said. Patience, he thought, how could he be patient only thirty miles from his own troops, his compatriots, his freedom?
She smiled, reached up to brush his cheek with the back of her hand - ‘povero ragazzo’, you poor boy, were her words - before hastily withdrawing it and handing him the bundle of his own clothes now dry from hanging in the kitchen. She had done more than washing and mending them. He had travelled south in the clothes he had been wearing at the time of his escape from the camp, his battle-dress trousers and shirt and socks, all died black in the early days of his freedom, but still clothes of recognisable cut. As well as repairing them, she had removed the epaulettes and pocket flaps and replaced the soldier’s buttons with a motley set. She left him to change, gesturing that he could keep his makeshift jacket. In one hour, he assumed she said, her husband would be home to eat the mid-day meal.
A success. The father was indeed home within the hour, bringing with him a teenage son who hadn’t been in the house the nights before. The signora fell on him with kisses and shrieks of relief.
4
The incongruous doctor did not return that night, or the next, or the one after that. Three days were spent cooped in the house, the church bells tolling the hours away, not even allowed to look from the window, although it rained every day and the streets must have been empty. The neighbours too would have been gazing from their windows for something out of the ordinary to relieve their own boredoms. Even the rain slapped by the gusting wind against the windows, splattering the balcony, spouting from the valleys between the tiles of the opposite roofs, seemed a threat, hiding the sound of the patrols that were marching the streets, the footsteps of soldiers who might be halting outside their door. He would startle, thinking he had heard a search party stop on the cobbles below the window, afraid to go to check.
He was trapped in the house, almost an unwelcome guest. He remembered a proverb he had heard in the north: fish and visitors stink after three days. He and Mike had never stayed anywhere that long. Perhaps a second night when their hosts’ farm was so remote that they wouldn’t be seen by anyone as they paid their way by helping on the farm getting in the crops or treading the grapes or helping turn the soil with a mattock for the day. But never a third: it was too dangerous for their hosts and they were too anxious to be on their way, anxious to make as much distance as they could before the leaves which hid them fell, anxious to make the mountains behind the battle-lines before the snow came and made them visible a mile away.
The longer he was in the house the more nostalgic he was for those early days, days full of hope, of walking in the fields with the sun on their backs, the cicadas still blasting the air as if the warmth would never go, of the grape and chestnut harvests, of sharing in the plenty of their hosts from their new crops. With Mike for company. Every mile, every day, had been one nearer their deliverance. The near misses as they hid while convoys of troop-carriers rolled past their thickets, the days trudging in the rain up and down mud-covered slopes, the shivering evenings when they had despaired of finding shelter, were forgotten. Confined to this dark musty house, every day on the journey south seemed to have been sun-drenched and full of welcoming faces.
Faces without names. Everyone had conversed without names, all of them afraid of the penalty of death proclaimed for those helping the refugees in their midst, knowing that remembering names made forgetting them harder. Anonymity had only been broken as they left, and then only to write the family’s name down on a chit certifying their help to be hidden and then redeemed for food and money when the Allied army came.
Here again he was always ‘Capitano’ or ‘Capitano Inglese’, the English captain, his hosts ‘Signore’ and ‘Signora’ and ‘Nonna’ or grandma. No-one but Anna and her elfin brother Luigi called him Roberto. The family had never before put up an Englishman for more than a single night. The conventions of the autumn were ingrained, but they were awkward for an English officer and an Italian family thrown together for an indeterminate time. Neither knew how to adapt them; both were e
mbarrassed by their inability to become more informal, paralysed by the knowledge that giving a name made one vulnerable, that refusing to give it showed distrust.
It was not only their lack of names that perplexed him. Their circumstances too were a mystery. If only he could speak enough of their language to understand them better. Where did they fit in the social scheme of things? Were they a one, two or three haystack family? At least in the countryside the haystacks could be their guide: one haystack, too poor a family to impose themselves upon when asking for shelter; three haystacks, affluent, concerned to protect their wealth, possibly fascists. But this family was an enigma.
He was like an illiterate trying to follow the story in a comic-book, trying to pick up what was happening from faces and gestures. But how can you understand the nuances of an unknown culture? He’d never understood the Italians, whether as enemy soldiers, gaolers or hosts on the journey south. Their values were so different: how can you risk your life to shelter someone who a few months before might have been shooting at your own soldier son? Everything was a mystery. He would look at them, study them, memorise every expression and gesture, everything they did, but in the end all he had was impressions of how they looked.
Even their hands told him nothing. The signora’s were the hard, chilblained ones of someone who’d spent her life washing things in cold water, well on the way to being like her mother’s claws. But her husband’s were not those of a farmer or a labourer, although what professional jobs were there for a man without a fascist party card, unless he had one? Where did he go when he left the house each morning and afternoon, sweeping his cloak onto his shoulders, dubbing his hat on his head and then leaving empty-handed? How could he be a manual worker? There were no tools in the cellar, but for that matter there were wasn’t a single book in the house, apart from the battered school grammar book Luigi had given him with an expansive flourish. It was as if the house had been stripped of any evidence which would betray who the family was.