by Anthony Paul
–
‘They wouldn’t have told us if the Allies had taken Rome, the cretins. They wouldn’t want the Germans to know they were no longer there. Wooden heads!’ Carlo was taking out his frustration on the censors at Radio Londra, whose news had made no mention of the new campaign, but it was reassuring that he was now wondering why the raid had happened. They had all slept badly, the captain so because he knew the bombers would be back.
They were. They came after an hour of people’s searching in the rubble. The Germans had now set up air-raid sirens to warn their troops of approaching bombers and the start of their whining scattered the crowds. The villagers had seen that the slope up the mountain to the south had been unaffected the day before and as the sirens started ran that way. All day the village was pummelled like a fighter prevented by the ropes from falling to the canvas, all day the shock waves from each bomb spread out like ripples on a pond, tumbling walls that had survived so far. And when the last pilots had flown home to their messes the town crier announced a general evacuation of the village during daylight hours next day.
‘The Germans have thought of everything, telling us to leave our windows and doors open. To reduce the damage from the explosions, they say’ Carlo huffs. ‘It makes it easier for them to loot our homes while we’re gone.’ Natale Giobellini has invited him and the captain round to discuss his own same fears. ‘What are we going to do? And what is Roberto going to do? Every time a young man came out of hiding today to help his kin the Germans arrested him and sent him off to work repairing the railway. It’s been their most successful round-up so far.’
‘I’ll have to stay in the village’ says the captain. ‘They’ll be watching who leaves. At least I can help save your things. We’ll have to leave the windows open while the bombs are coming down, but I can at least shut them again afterwards. It may put off the Germans coming in, if everywhere else is opened up for them.’
–
So the next day the captain stays beneath his own side’s bombs while the villagers shelter how they can in the rain on the mountainside, watching their buildings being destroyed. They watch the railway station hit again, blocks of houses by the bridge collapsing, lost to sight in billowing dust, then emerging from the settling cloud as heaps of stones. They see a bomb blow up the electricity station powered by the fast stream that comes down the other side of the valley and know that for the coming months candles will be in short supply. At least no-one is dying down there today, except the Germans doing what they will, but what will each family find when it returns to its street tonight? Their home for generations reduced to rubble? Their furnishings, their tools, destroyed? And how will they do for food if their stores are gone as well?
The Golvis come home and find the captain dazed, entranced by the din and shockwaves still echoing in his head. They pour him a glass of aqua vitae, feed him all they can, but he remains silent throughout the meal, a meal eaten by candlelight, a meal where it is noted that without electricity there will be no more radio broadcasts to tell them what is going on in this war that has, as fierce as hell, come at last to their village.
‘At least we won’t have any more fascist propaganda to put up with’ Elvira says. ‘They destroyed the print-shop as well.’
–
In the middle of the night the captain knocks on Carlo and Elvira’s bedroom door. ‘Can’t it wait?’
‘No. Elvira said the print-shop was destroyed. What do they print there?’
‘Posters, ration cards, party cards, that kind of thing.’
‘Identity cards?’
‘I think they do. No. Wait. You can’t go now. It’s too dangerous.’
‘It’ll be even more dangerous after they’ve remembered what’s there. They’re too busy thinking about more important things right now. Tonight’s the best time to go. Where is it?’
So the captain goes out into the streets now as dark as they had been a century ago, picking his way through the rubble scattered by the bombs and not yet cleared, dodging the patrols, wrapping around him his new sackcloth coat.
13
The captain and Natale are alone in the Giobellini house, awaiting the first bombing raid of the day. Natale’s hip has been playing up since his damp day on the mountainside and to Caterina’s dismay he has decided to stay at home and risk the bombs. An inkwell, an old dipping pen and scraps of paper surround his identity card and the blank one, the one the captain had taken from the print-shop during the night. The captain is practising with the pen.
‘Why don’t you have my card the right way up, Roberto?’
The captain signs his name on a sheet of paper and asks the older man to copy it, then tells him to repeat the exercise with the specimen signature upside down. ‘Which is better?’ he asks. ‘The second looks more like yours, but it’s very jerky.’ ‘Do it again, then again.’ Natale’s copy becomes more flowing. ‘It’s magic.’ ‘No it’s not. When you do it upside down you’re copying what you see, not what you read. We used to do this when forging papers in the prison camp, but you have to keep doing it until the writing flows.’
‘What about the words which aren’t on my card, like your name?’
‘Most of the letters are there in other words. You just do the same thing, one letter at a time, over and over again until it looks as if it’s written by the same person. You have to be patient. It’s like learning to write again.’
After an hour the captain announces he is ready to begin. He had only dared to take one card, lest the theft be spotted and the Germans start harsher identity checks. He only has one chance. He breathes deeply, stands up and shakes his forearms, wrists and hands, sits down, breathes deeply again and writes onto the card the identity which he and the doctor first discussed before his trip to the line. Name: DiGiovanni. Given name: Roberto. Born: he writes his own date of birth. At: Bolzano, the town in the Tyrol which the doctor had decided upon to explain his fair skin. Profession: carpenter. ‘Now all we need is a photograph and the stamp and I’ll be a complete new person.’
Natale rummages in the dresser for old photographs, but none of them will do. ‘What’s wrong with your present one?’ The captain shows him the stolen fascist party card he has been carrying for the last month. ‘A good enough likeness, Roberto. No-one looks like his photograph any more.’
‘You’re mostly right. Everyone is thinner in the face this winter, his eyes more hollow, blank even, and people now have beards, something no-one ever wore before. You can, as you say, get away with a photograph that’s barely like you, but for one thing. Look at the ears in the photograph; they’re nothing like mine. It’s the one thing that being cold and hungry and afraid, even getting old, doesn’t change. A smart policeman would spot it immediately. It’s lucky I’ve never been asked for this card. We’ve got to find a photograph with ears like mine.’
‘What about the stamp?’
‘All I need is a bit of old tyre, a sharp knife and a mirror, so I can copy the stamp from yours.’
‘There are plenty of discarded tyres around. I’ll get a piece when everyone is coming home tonight. What do we do now?’
‘First we burn all these bits of paper we’ve been practising on. Then we mend my boots. I found some machinery belting in the print-shop; it’s perfect for the soles.’
‘So it was a profitable night.’
It is a quiet morning. The bombers have not come back. Perhaps they have done their business and people can return to salvage their things from the wrecked buildings. Perhaps life will return to something like it was. But their mood is destroyed by a hammering on the front door downstairs. They move out to the cloistered balcony, the captain ready to slip into the Golvi house. They hear two German soldiers swearing: ‘Scheisse, diese ist verriegelt. Gehen wir nebenan.’ The captain places his finger to his lips and then points to the room they have just come from. They slip back in. ‘They’re stealing. They’re trying the Golvis’ now. Let’s hope they’ll decide it’s easier to loot the h
ouses that aren’t locked.’
The looters are disturbed before they reach the Golvis’ door. A siren sounds. There is a growing drone of approaching bombers and the Germans are in full flight down the street, hands to helmets to keep them on, rifles dangling dangerously from outstretched arms to stop them tripping over them. Natale and the captain leave the balcony door open and dive under the table, Natale forgetting his arthritic hip.
–
robertos friends have been dropping bombs on the village for 4 days now
they dont know theyre dropping them on him
i dont think they know there are people underneath
anita and her mamma were killed on the first day
now we go up to the mountain every morning and sit in the rain and cold and watch the planes come over and drop their bombs
its like watching a bunch of stupid boys breaking things and the noise is horrid
everyone is crying about their homes
roberto says theyre trying to destroy the train lines
they did that the first day
why do they keep coming back
–
In the evening a motorbike and sidecar comes along the street outside the house, the passenger barking into his megaphone a warning to everyone, on pain of death, to stay indoors and keep their shutters firmly closed. It is followed by the sound of one-ton trucks, the kind used to ferry infantrymen, dozens of them. ‘This must be the only way left through the village’ says Carlo. The din grows: the full-throated sound of the heavy traction engines of tank transporters, the shouts and curses from the traffic police as the articulated trucks have to move back and forwards to negotiate the corners of streets only made for horses and carts. For hours the clamour goes on, the revving of heavy engines, the troops singing Nazi marching songs - forever full of pomp and arrogance and power - to keep up their morale as their lorries are held up in the traffic jam in the cold damp night. For hours the engine fumes, trapped in the narrow street, rise and insinuate themselves through the shutters and windows of the cold houses, making the locals wheeze for breath.
‘Panzers,’ says the captain, ‘a full division of them. There must be something big happening on the west coast. They wouldn’t be moving that lot unless Rome was under threat.’
Suddenly the bombing had had a purpose, but the show of German military might, its power still to resist the Allied armies, was as frightening to them as the bombing itself.
–
The next day the captain completed his new identity card with a photograph from one of the Golvi albums and a rubber stamp, good enough to pass a cursory inspection, carved against a mirror on a scrap of motor-cycle tyre. He resoled his boots, greased their leather uppers with a block of tallow, and finished his plans for his hide between the bombing raids.
In the evening he did not stop shaking, only breaking his silence to ask for a mattock, a saw, a hammer and some nails, and as much food as the Golvis could spare. He could not stand the bombing any more. He was going back up the mountain next morning. If he was going to die, he would rather die in a little peace and quiet, not at the hands of his own side.
14
The captain slipped from the village well before dawn, following a German patrol going out to check the southern approaches, his boots in his hand until he left the cobbled streets. The night-time frosts had not yet returned, so trenching should not be too difficult today, and the Golvis had lent him a good strong mattock, now over his shoulder in the style of every peasant going off to his fields. Under his sacking coat, on the string tags left by Elvira, hung his tools and slung over his back were a bag of boiled potatoes and a roll of the remainder of the sacking retrieved from the camp and now dried out.
He reached the camp soon after dawn, relieved to see no more recent footprints than those he and Luigi had seen a week before. As was to be expected: the Germans would be too busy repairing their railway for the next few days. He had time to build his hide if the weather held out. He rigged up a makeshift shelter in the ruined buildings of the camp, somewhere to sleep tonight, for it would take him more than a day to build the hide.
It took until noon to pick his site in the pine forest, the area the Germans saw no need to walk through. The slope of the ground had to be just right to provide the drainage he needed to prevent the hide becoming flooded and at the same time conceal its lines. He marked his chosen spot with his mattock and set off to look at it from all the angles from which a patrol might look, touring it in increasing loops until he saw that it was good. There was even bracken near it. He cleared the pine needles from his ground, sweeping them with his mattock into piles well clear of the area he would need for the soil and stones he would be lifting out, and started digging his trench into the mountain-side. The further down he went the colder and harder the earth he found; the thaw had only gone down a foot and although the pines had been crumbling the soil for decades there were still rocks and stones to work his way around and lift. By evening he had finished the hole, nearly the width of the corrugated iron sheet he had found in the camp, and slightly longer, a trench like a cutting into a railway tunnel. He walked back up to the old camp to eat a cold potato and to sleep. He dreamt of sleeping in the hide and its roof collapsing.
–
The next morning he went straight down to his trench and found none of the night’s rainwater still in it. The drainage worked. He went back up the hill and dragged down the iron sheet, then the joist timbers he needed. He planked the sides of the trench, splay-nailed cross-members across the top and bottom and duck-boarded the floor, then laid the iron sheet across the top and weighed it down with rocks. It had taken all day to get this far, but he could sleep in it tonight and see if it was weathertight.
All night it rained, the raindrops exploding on the metal above his head, but the steep angle of the roof down the slope - he could kneel with his back straight up at the inward end - meant that he stayed dry. At first he could not sleep, forever thinking he had just been hit by a drop of rain finding a way through his roof, but he slowly grew more confident of his work and at last fell into the deep sleep of the working man.
–
He awoke after dawn not wet, not cold, but hungry. It was his third day out of the village, the third day away from the bombs, away from the fear of being betrayed. The ringing in his ears from the bombs had gone, driven out by manual labour and the tranquillity of the mountain. Luigi would be coming up to the camp at noon with more food. He set to work with vigour, relishing the thought that when the job was done he would at last, after weeks of idleness, have achieved something, be less dependant on the people in the village for his survival.
First he had to camouflage the hide. He piled the soil he had dug from the trench over his roof and down the sides where it stood proud from the slope, stamping it down with his feet so that the contours would not sag as the soil settled. He wandered fifty yards this way and that to see if his work was obtrusive in the grove, returned and shifted the soil again to smooth the contours. He went off in search of wintering bracken to uproot and plant around his site. Then he scattered his piles of pine-needles and cones over the top. All was now concealed except the entrance. It must be nearly noon he thought, and so he piled bracken against it as a stop-gap and went up to the camp, whistling the folk song Luigi had taught him as a call-sign.
–
He stops some way beneath the camp and from above hears the same song being whistled. He whistles back and Luigi comes down to meet him. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Come and see.’ He takes him down to the grove, convinced of the imperfection of his work, surprised at the lad’s failure to spot it straightaway.
‘Where is it?’
‘You’re standing next to it.’
Luigi looks around, still baffled. The captain bends down and removes the bracken covering the entrance. ‘Surely you saw it? I don’t need compliments. I need to know if it’s easy to spot it if you don’t know where it is.’
‘No, it’s not. But when I was staying in charcoal-burners’ huts in the north they were using bracken to line their walls. If I can find some which is dry I can make it a lot warmer; and the sacking we dried out at your house will be very useful as well once I’ve got some bracken down.
‘Have you brought any food? I’m starving.’
Luigi opens his sack and spreads out on the ground some bread, some cheese and two thin slices of mountain sausage. ‘Mamma said you’d need cheering up’ he says and reaching into the sack pulls out a flask of wine. He flicks away with a sudden jerk of his wrist the film of olive oil sealing the wine and in turn they swig a toast to the captain’s new home.
‘Now eat.’ The captain waits for him. ‘You need it more than I do, Roberto, you’ve been working. Eat.’ The captain falls on the food and wolfs it down.
–
Luigi has been up to the camp to retrieve the cooking pot they had seen the week before while the captain has been finishing the door to his hide, some smaller planks of wood crossed and nailed together, then hinged to the roof with bent nails. ‘I’ve brought up some beans and potatoes for you to cook. They should last you a few days. I’ll be up again the day after tomorrow, in the morning. If it snows before then, come to the spur above the nearest church at sunset. We’ll use the same song.’
febbraio
15
The captain spent the following days scouting the mountains, learning the layout of the valleys, the German dispositions, the routes to take to avoid the bare moors where a man can be seen from distance, the places to hide and the routes of escape.
But he never went to look at Sannessuno. He told himself that he didn’t need to because he already knew every rock on the way. He knew it was a poor excuse, that he dreaded seeing what was happening to it, feared for his friends and the partisans’ families. He wondered if he would ever dare go back amongst them after what the air force had done.