Wolf on the Mountain

by Anthony Paul

  ‘Maybe the committee. To think of it, I’m sure the doctor would have told them. But they wouldn’t have sent anyone up here; they would have relied on us to contact you. And the Giobellinis wouldn’t have dared tell anyone. It must be just a local, scavenging for things. Don’t worry. Anyway, it’s going to snow again. The wind has changed and it’s getting cold again. Mamma says you’re to come down to the village with me tonight.’

  The captain looked around and up at the sky. The clouds looked leaden yellow. He shuddered at the prospect of more inactivity, more time hiding in the village afraid to betray his hosts by any movement, any curiosity. He would rather be tramping his mountain, learning its every hiding place and route, knowing its secrets of evasion. Here he was almost a free man plotting his future. In the village everything was out of his control. ‘Let’s stay here as long as we can. Despite the weather I’m learning to like this mountain. I’m more my own man here.’

  They were in the ruined camp, sitting on the cold grass. The captain looked around at the walls sheltering them from the wind. As a boy in England, on holiday in its wilder parts, he had marvelled at the work of the dry stone waller, his memory for the shapes of the stones in his pile so that he could pick the one he needed for the next load-bearing fit. Here in remote Italy was the same art, the ability to build, without cement, a wall that could withstand modern explosives. He had time to note each fit of each stone, admire the complexity of its mason’s skill, his symmetry.

  His scan stopped, disturbed by an anomaly, and retraced itself. There was one stone, no more than two feet from the ground, which was different, like one filling up an old window, a stone which appeared to bear no load of the others above it. He levered himself to his knees and crawled towards it, focusing on it so as not to lose its place. He poked its outline with a stick. It was slightly loose. Gradually he eased it from the wall with his fingertips, edging it gently from side to side so as to make sure that it came out without disturbing its companions. He placed it carefully on a patch of moss at the foot of the wall, facing the same way as before so that he could replace it exactly when the time came. He reached his hand into the gap.

  He turned and looked at Luigi, who saw the expectation on his face. ‘A hiding place! Be careful. There may be a scorpion wintering in there.’

  The captain reached further into the hole and gently turned his arm around. Just in reach at the bottom of the cavity, amongst the decayed moss and moist crumbled stone-dust and soil, his fingers touched what seemed to be a package, more importantly one wrapped in some kind of waterproof material and bound with string. He manoeuvred more of his arm into the hole and started tracing its dimensions with his fingertips, tried tipping it into a position from which he could lift it. It was far too heavy for its size. It could only be one thing. He paused to recompose himself, then hooked the string with his forefinger and very slowly lifted it up, round and out of the hole.

  He turned and sat back against the wall, the waxed paper package horizontal on his lap. Luigi had seen his suppressed excitement as soon as he had turned and started to move towards him, but the Englishman stopped him coming too close. ‘We have to be careful. We don’t know if it’s safe.’

  He paused a while, as if trying to remember the drill that would have been second nature until his capture, then stood up holding it out to one side of his body, now pointing up or down, he knew not which, and beckoned the boy to help him with the string. The lad stepped forward, swept his black cape back over his shoulders to free his arms and gingerly untied the knot and on the captain’s nod backed away again. The captain carefully unrolled the waxed paper and the rag and oilskin layers inside, slipped his left forefinger into the front of the trigger guard and let the weight of the butt pull the barrel skywards.

  A Beretta pistol. Safety catch on. No need to have worried. A gun that had belonged to someone who took care of such things. His right hand took it by the handle, pointed it at the ground so that he could see it better. There was no doubt: it was a beautiful gun.

  It was the first time he had held one since his capture in the desert, now nearly two years ago. For two years people with guns had been guarding him or hunting him. How many times in those years had they fired at him? How many times since his escape from the prison camp had he feared chancing on a man with a rifle, a rifle he could point at him to end his freedom? Now he had a gun again. What is a soldier without a gun?

  But first things first. ‘Stay back, Luigi, I must check it. Guns must be respected, handled with care.’ He sat back against the wall, placing the oilskin on the ground between his outstretched knees to take the parts. He slipped the lever at the base of the handle and pulled out the ammunition clip. Six rounds in the zigzag coil. Good, the spring hadn’t been stretched by overloading it. He twisted the bullets from the clip and laid them on the oilskin before replacing the empty clip, the better to look at his new possession. His new possession. One easily concealed, quick to draw, an automatic pistol all whose bullets he could fire before an infantryman could bolt a single round into his rifle’s chamber.

  He beckoned Luigi over. He had been patient and should now be given the chance to admire it properly, to hold it. ‘Beretta, nine millimetre’ the lad said without a second’s hesitation. The captain was surprised but shouldn’t have been. Such things interest boys, particularly when the war is on their doorsteps. ‘Army officer issue, maybe an air force officer, maybe carabinieri - the armed police. Probably an army officer’s. I think we had some up here, but I was never told. It’s yours now, Roberto. You’re very lucky.’ He handed it back, perhaps a little reluctantly.

  Yes, lucky. The captain bounced the unloaded pistol on his hand, like a beautiful polished stone found on a beach, to relish its weight and smoothness, its perfect fit into his palm. He slipped it forward and gripped it as a weapon. He pulled the slide back to reveal the polished silvery steel of the barrel and its recoil guide, pointing out from the dull grey of the slide like the tip of an aroused bull. He lifted it to the height of his cheek and aimed at a rock and squeezed the trigger. Good, the mechanism was smooth. That would make the aim surer.

  He brought the pistol down to the oilskin sheet again and stripped it to see if it needed cleaning. Better to clean it soon, but it was in good condition. The man who had owned it before had looked after it. ‘How will I keep it clean?’ he asked. ‘I’ve a friend who still has his rifle. He’ll help.’ ‘Get more bullets?’ ‘Maybe a friendly carabiniere. I’ll ask my father.’ A gun. A better chance of freedom. He tucked it into the waistband of his trousers at the back and practised drawing it and aiming.

  ‘Range, Luigi?’

  The lad replied immediately ‘Twenty five metres accuracy, when you’re used to it.’ Again what an Italian boy would know. And the captain himself was suddenly a child on Christmas morning, practising drawing his new cap-gun from his new toy holster, preparing for his next game of cowboys and indians.

  ‘You’ll have to find a better place than your waistband to keep it’ Luigi said. ‘It’s the first place the Germans look when they search us.’

  The captain’s elation snapped. He had forgotten that a gun brought greater danger if you were captured with it. Suppose a German patrol were to come now, when he had a gun, worse an unloaded one? He quickly replaced the bullets in the magazine and slipped it back into the handle. He practised fastening and unfastening the safety catch with his thumb, an awkward manoeuvre which would require much practice. He rolled up the oilskin and placed it in his trouser pocket.

  The pistol loaded, he was an armed man again, one who could fight for his freedom, rather than simply surrender or run and hope that he wasn’t shot in the back. He was also a man the Germans would shoot if they caught him with the gun. No more Geneva Convention. All things considered, however, he would rather he had the gun. It would make him a harder man to catch.

  marzo

  19

  It snowed for days and the captain slipped from one house to the othe
r, the families sharing the load of feeding him, the risk of being caught with him in their home. Yet the tension between them remained as high as ever, neither trusting the other or its motives. The Golvis said that the Giobellinis regarded him as no more than their witness for the time when collaborators were tried for their crimes, that they were only sheltering him out of desperation. The Giobellinis accused their neighbours of seeking to keep him in the village - why couldn’t they find a guide over the mountains for him? - until the Allies came, of intending to use him for their own advancement in the peace.

  Yet Luigi and Anna visited the captain in Natale’s house, Alfonso and Isabella in Carlo’s. The conspiracy, the common vulnerability to German retribution, bound them to co-operate although the Englishman wondered if they returned to hostile silence as soon as he was gone.

  A wary companionship grew with the Giobellini children, perhaps because they were of a more similar age. The captain and Alfonso would talk about how the war was going but their underlying hopes and fears were different: for the Englishman German defeat meant liberation whilst for Alfonso it meant the loss of all his family’s influence, maybe danger in an anarchic orgy of retribution. Such conversations would always end with a silence. Every topic had its taboos: what each had done in the war had been done with the other’s companions in mortal opposition and politics Roberto refused to discuss. Isabella usually listened in silence, intervening only with a sob as a signal that it was time to change the subject. Even discussions about what young people did in England ended in incomprehension of the freedom allowed to young women to go unchaperoned by their families and the general mixing of men and women at social gatherings. Isabella, shy, dutiful Isabella, who with her parents never spoke except on their cue, was intrigued by this other world. She wanted to know all about pubs and cinemas and dance-halls, what the young women wore, what rules their families imposed. Did Roberto take girls dancing? Was there a special one? And Alfonso was equally beguiled by the freedom young Englishmen had with the fairer sex, although ambivalent about his sister’s interest.

  Although neither understood the social code of the other it made for greater understanding of the other’s aspirations, but this created different problems. Elvira noticed the captain’s greater relaxation in the Giobellinis’ company, that Caterina had come close to adopting him, that Isabella was starting to look at him in a different way. One afternoon she described Alfonso as Isabella’s chaperon and the girl blushed.

  –

  Then in the Giobellini house the same evening she suddenly appeared in the kitchen in her best clothes. The plain country girl, the nurse with the soft kind eyes who had leant over the captain to check his fever, her thick grey woollen dress concealing any hint of sensuality, was transformed into a belladonna. The lines of her blue floral cotton dress accentuated her full breasts and the swaying curves from her tight waist out to her hips as she turned for her mother’s comments on how she looked. The deep pink lipstick, the mascara and the powder enlarged her lips and eyes, threw into relief the contours of her face.

  The Englishman was shocked, but what by? The sudden appearance of a girl from peacetime? The image of plenty amidst privation? The musk of the Egyptian bazaar? The fact that she had slyly looked to see if he was admiring her, that he had quickly had to turn away?

  –

  Later that evening, in the Golvis’ house, he lay awake rehearsing the possibilities. What was there to do in the village in wartime that Isabella should have been so dressed? Where had she been going, and who with? Hadn’t she gone out unchaperoned? Why? Then he remembered the voices he thought he had heard in the street below his bedroom when he was convalescing after his walk through the gorge, one of them German. He had wondered then if the hearing was part of his delirium. Now he was certain that he had heard it. She had been going to the German officers’ mess.

  ‘No-one will marry her when the Germans go’ Luigi said when he told him the next day. ‘Of course she was seeing a German. It’s bad enough going out unchaperoned, but with a German.’

  ‘Isabella’s a good girl’ Caterina said that evening. ‘Look, she’s brought us some tinned meat.’

  –

  The captain lay awake again that night, waiting for the voice of Isabella’s German friend in the street below, again trying to find an explanation for these events. What was her relationship with this man? Did it show that her family were still hunting with the hare and the hounds? And even if it was entirely innocent, that gaining food was the sole purpose of her trysts, what were the chances of a careless remark betraying him and bringing the German army to his door? And if it was an innocent thing, why did she dress up so alluringly?

  The way she had looked kept coming back to him: her body, her hips, her breasts, her sly glance. It was more than the shock of metamorphosis. Her physical presence was beginning to haunt him. He had been in the same place too long if he was being so distracted.

  He thought back to the early days of the journey south, when every farm had had a widow of the war or a wife who had not seen her soldier husband for years, when Mike and he were unused to having women around. To them, so many of these women had seemed to flirt with them. It seemed that their glances would linger as conversation turned to the autumn coupling of the farmyard stock, that they would lean over them too long when laying food on the table, turn their backs before bending down, hitch their dresses invitingly high before washing their feet at the pump or taking their turn in the grape-trough.

  Were these the fantasies of men who had been away from women too long, or had there been something more? Mike and he would joke about it, accusing each other of provoking the woman, but they hadn’t been schoolboy jokes, where the joke is out of fear of the act. They were more out of fear of its consequences. Coition breeds complication and involvement dulls the sense of danger. Celibacy is vital to the safety of the hunted man.

  That he had been stirred by Isabella in her plumage troubled him. It was a sign of his passions reawakening as he spent week after week in a family environment, a sign of his arousal from the single-mindedness that had enabled him to survive so far, that had run his life since the day of his capture in the desert.

  On that day he had returned to school: no women, no physical danger, simply the prospect of killing time. All his fellow prisoners had felt the same, their passions dulled. It had been so different beforehand, almost from the first day he had come under fire. Amongst your own people the wartime fear of death enhances every passion, every instinct: churches are full, hymns lustily sung; the smallest insult leads to blows lest the chance of civilised revenge be lost; people fear dying unfulfilled, so men and women rush to get married or simply to couple in a single night or hour of passion. A spiritual experience, the primal rush of a fist fight and the elation of orgasm give life a rich vein in the midst of danger. The increased sexuality had been the more noticeable: so many beads of perspiration had been licked away beneath static ceiling fans in the cities of the Near East, the name lost when you were posted away. All these passions had wasted in the fly-ridden transit prison camps of the desert, the dormitory life in his prison in the north. He and his companions had become emotional drudges.

  The Armistice had restored danger to their lives, but the torpor of the camp had lingered too long. Many of the prisoners had been recaptured before their sense of danger had been revived. He and Mike had been indecisive for days, waiting for news of what was happening which never came, before deciding to strike south for the battle-lines and try to make their own luck.

  But once restored that sense of danger, in the end more intense than any on the battle-line, had kept him from recapture all these months. He had trained himself to notice nothing that was not essential to his survival, suppress any emotion that endangered it. Staying that way meant staying alive and free.

  Suddenly Isabella was a threat because she was a thing of beauty, pleasurable to look at, distracting. He was in danger of reacting to her the way he would at home
. He had to keep away from her lest he start watching her too much, thinking of her and how she moved too much, not noticing things happening around him. He needed to return to his hermitage on the mountain.

  20

  Then the doctor sent word that the captain was to spend a night in a different house.

  The house was in the poorer quarter on the edge of the village, the quarter where the peasants lived, owning nothing, expecting nothing, seeing and hearing nothing. The weed-filled street reeked of the waste thrown out of its tiny windows and doors. He was led through the darkened cellar, now empty of anything except recently collected firewood and some hay, up the rough stone steps to the small single room on the first floor, lit only by a solitary oil lamp and the flickering flames of the cooking fire, a room reeking of farmyard smells. In one corner the mother, stocky and grizzled, was stirring a soup of beans and potatoes on a grate over the fire.

  In the centre of the room two men sat in the dim light beneath the oil lamp at a rough planked table, a flask of wine between them. They rose together. The older man, once tall but now with his back stooped by a life of working in the fields, his neck locked facing down and to one side, looked sideways and up at his distinguished guest: ‘I am honoured to see you again after so long, Capitano Inglese. Are you well?’ The captain strained to place him until the younger, a giant of a man, taller than the captain and with a barrelled chest, turned to face him. There was no mistaking his ruddy face, framed by a mane of black hair and beard, his pale eyes twinkling.

  ‘Vincenzo!’ the captain exclaimed, recognising the Alpini sergeant who’d led him and Mike up the mountain the first time. ‘So you escaped as well! Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

  Vincenzo embraced the captain, stepped back to slap his shoulders. ‘We have to be careful who knows what.’ He smiled enigmatically and then turned expansively with his palm swinging out: ‘And you see we still have our cow.’