by Anthony Paul
The captain strained into the gloom. The cow! It explained the smell of the room. How could he have forgotten the cow? That first night in the village, back in November, he and Mike had slept in this very room with the cow, while the family slept in the single room in the roof void reached by the ladder. The room had then, as now, stunk of the warm sweet smell of cow, its spattering copious waste. ‘The Germans would never look for a cow up here,’ Vincenzo had said, ‘we’ll have milk and cheese all winter, use its shit for fuel.’ A cow in hiding from the Germans! How had they coaxed it up the steps from the cellar? How did they keep it quiet enough? That morning they had drunk warm milk from a bowl beneath its teats before climbing up the mountain to the camp, where they had arrived stinking of animal. Now in March it was the sweet smell of plenty. ‘But tonight you’ll have wine, not milk’ Vincenzo’s father said and filled a tumbler to the brim with the rough, cloudy pink wine he had made himself.
–
‘I wasn’t there that night. I didn’t trust those officers, they were full of shit, gentry fops. You’d said those South Africans were Germans. That was enough for me. I came back home for the night. It’s a shame that more of us didn’t. They’re nearly all still working as slaves, some working rebuilding the railways every time they’re bombed, others shovelling concrete for a new defensive line they’re building north of here. At least it shows they’re planning a retreat in the spring. But meanwhile our comrades are being worked to death, starving, being beaten up when they go less quickly. I saw one of our men buried in snow up to his neck alongside a party working on a road last week, the butchers. If I could lay my hands on them!
‘And what they did to Ugo! The fool pulled out his rifle when they came. They took him down to the Gestapo on the coast, beat him half to death. He didn’t say a thing. They were going to put him up against a wall and shoot him the next morning, but they didn’t count on him coming round as soon as he did. They left the window open to get rid of the stink of what they’d done to him, and out of it he hopped. He’s still around, hiding, like I’ve been ever since.
‘Do you want to see him? I’ll get him round tomorrow evening. You can stay here tomorrow night as well. I’ll teach you how to play cards in the morning.
‘Enough of that. Here’s the soup, and afterwards you can have some of our own cow’s cheese. Eat, Roberto.’
–
He slept in the room with the cow, but fitfully. Unlike on that first night with Mike in Vincenzo’s father’s house, he was now unused to the night-time noise of cattle, their snorting, the slathering noise as they chewed the cud, their rumbling stomachs, flatulence. In November they had slept with farmyard animals almost every night since their escape, grateful for the warmth, relieved by their hosts’ ability to plead ignorance that they were there if a German patrol came by. They were used to the smells, the noise, the spattering of shit and urine, the ammonia smarting their eyes.
Since Mike’s capture he had only once slept with animals, in the shepherd’s hut, and that night had been one when there was no danger of the Germans coming. He had slept nearly all the time in village houses or in his hide, aware in the near-silence that any noise which disturbed him was a sign of danger. This cow could cover the sounds of a patrol in the street outside. Its smells he did not mind; his sense of smell, like his other senses, had long since been devoted to the interests of survival, not comfort or pleasure. The smell of Vincenzo’s father’s cow was the promise of warm milk in the morning, of cheese for lunch, but its rumblings could hide other more important sounds. He strained all night to hear things above the cow.
The next day he was introduced to the Neapolitan pack of cards: a deck of forty, looking like a fortune-teller’s set, in four suits of ten, one to seven, squire, knight and king, the suits similar to the English ones. It should have been easy, after a year of day-long contract bridge in his prison camp, to adapt to this new pack but it was not. No matter how good his hand was, he always lost. The games had local rules you found out as you went along, like croquet on an English country lawn where a house rule is suddenly invoked to deny the guest. He laid a king, only to be beaten by the seven of money, il sette bello. ‘You’ll learn Roberto, but these games do need cunning.’
–
Ugo, a short wiry man, comes for supper, the food the same as the night before. His nose is broken now, he has a lazy eye and a finger on his left hand is permanently straight. He is a man now burdened with a hateful mission: ‘Did you ask the English captain about re-forming the band?’
‘No’ Vincenzo says quietly, clearly annoyed that Ugo’s impatience has prevented his raising the subject in a more auspicious way. Sergeants are used to waiting for the right time to ask officers unwelcome questions. He’d been planning to wait until the second flask of wine. ‘But since you raise the matter…’ His eyes soften as he turns to the captain. ‘Roberto, you may be able to help us with your advice, your knowledge as an officer. There are now fifteen or so of the old band hiding in Sannessuno, and there’ll be more of us soon. These bombing raids have forced the Germans to use their working parties in the village, rather than on the roads outside. It’s harder to guard them where there are so many people about, and they’re starting to escape. There are too many of us here now for safety. We’ve got to move up to the mountain again. You’re living up there. What do you think?’
‘You can’t use the old camp. The Germans patrols are still visiting it.’
‘Where are you sleeping then?’
The captain hesitates to reply. Only Luigi knows where the hide is, and Luigi knows he is the only person who knows. Safety demands that it should stay that way. ‘Why can’t I have some secrets too?’ He pauses again. ‘Somewhere as secret as where you’re hiding your food.’ He wonders if he has been churlish, seemed too distrustful, despite dressing his reply as a joke.
Vincenzo’s mother stops stirring and looks back from her pot to her husband, who senses her stare and turns towards her, then back to his son. He chuckles, then the son. ‘Well said, Roberto,’ the mother pronounces, ‘don’t tell them’ and returns to stirring the soup. She too starts to laugh, puts down her spoon, brings over a glass, pours herself a full measure and lifts it to her lips. ‘You’re learning the cunning of the working man, Roberto. You’ll soon be one of us. Good health.’
She brings their supper. Their good spirits have keened their appetites and they eat their soup and then the cheese voraciously. The mother goes down to the cellar and reappears with more wine and cheese that didn’t seem to have been there earlier.
‘Your sleeping place is very well hidden’ Vincenzo says after a while. ‘I couldn’t find it, and I know that mountain well.’
‘Was it you, then, up at the camp last week, twice?’
‘Three times’ Vincenzo says triumphantly. ‘You look relieved. Yes, it was me. I was up there looking to see what could be done. Our friend, whose identity Ugo doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know, suggested we speak about it. That’s why he arranged our meeting.’
The party being secretive again, the captain thought. But he was beginning to appreciate its way of doing things, its chain of command. He had long since worked out that in each cell up or down the chain only its leader knew the contact in the cell above and no-one else there. It prevented wholesale betrayal of the chain, was why the organisation had survived the December raid. It had its disadvantages, like the paralysis as a new chain was established after the capo had been killed, but it meant that there was always something there to build on.
Yet here he was, not a member of the party, now with the same knowledge of the chain as Vincenzo. So the doctor’s committee had decided on Vincenzo to re-form the partisan band. He was being dragged into its web, again imprisoned by his impotence. All he could do was help them, at least until his next chance to cross the lines.
‘No. The old camp is out of the question. The Germans know you were there last year. They’re still patrolling the area, presumably to chec
k that no-one’s gone back. And you’ve got the problem of a water supply. That many men need a lot of water.’
‘Do you know the route the patrols take?’
The captain rehearsed the route that he and Luigi had tracked before the bombing raids, a route he had observed the Germans following only the week before. They always followed it. They were now so used to assuming that there was no-one living on the mountain that it had become a matter of going through the motions, keeping warm and moving in the bitter cold and the howling wind, looking forward to their barracks at the end.
‘So they always turn right down the gully’ Vincenzo mused. ‘Good. There’s an old shepherd’s cottage just above it, long since abandoned, now swallowed up in the scrub. Hardly anyone knows it’s still there. It’s in even worse condition than the old camp, but we could repair it with stones and things from there, and it’s big enough for fifteen men at least. I’ll show it to you when we go up tomorrow.’
21
The wind dropped four days ago. It is strange to be on the mountain without its constant buffeting sound, the dropping of the cones from the trees. In its place has come a freezing calm. Each morning he wakes, his fingers and toes and ears frozen, his breath billowing in the air, to a heavy frost, brittling the bracken against his door, coating the trees, the bushes and the grass with a heavy white rime that sparkles in the sun shining coldly down from a deep blue sky. Each day the sun is powerless to melt the frost for hours and the water in the spring above his hide remains frozen until the middle of the day. He walks around compulsively, trying to warm himself, makes trips over the frozen crust of the snow on the mountain top, hoping for a sign of something different; but as ever the white peaks, the snow so deep that he can hardly see the rock in their features, surround him on every horizon.
Vincenzo has been up to see him the last two days, has shown him the site for the new partisan camp. They have rummaged in the old for materials to use in making the shepherd hut weatherproof again. Vincenzo will bring up some of his companions and together they will start the building work, soon. At least when there are others up here someone will be deputed to quartermaster the food. But more people up here will mean more evidence of people up here. Will the Germans miss these signs when they are on patrol? Perhaps it would be better to be more hungry and more safe.
He cooks his potatoes under a dying ginger sun well before dusk. He needs to stay still to do so, and so must do it before the evening frost sets in. Then he crawls into his hide. At least he has light, light to last as long as he wants: he collects the dried downflows from his candles, reheats them over his fire and pours the molten wax down a piece of tin rolled into a tube, a piece of string suspended down the middle, to make new candles. And for some reason matches are plentiful in this place of shortages. There is always light to read by, even if sometimes he is too cold to stay in one position long enough to read his book.
–
He had forgotten the story of Erisichthon, the king who incurred the wrath of the corn goddess by chopping down her sacred tree. For his punishment the king had been plagued with a hunger so severe that, after eating away his kingdom’s stores, he had started eating his own flesh. It had seemed a silly story when he was at school but, chancing on it in Luigi’s book on this cold mountainside after a paltry supper, in a country where the rulers were taking all the people’s food for their own, it was suddenly apt.
Ovid had personified Famine as an emaciated hag on a barren, frozen mountain, summoned by one of the goddess’s nymphs to visit the king in his sleep, place her clammy lips on his, breathe her foul breath into his throat and infect him with her plague.
He remembered the poet dwelling on her appearance. Surely this was the passage, with so many words similar to the words for parts of the body used by the Italians, even by English doctors:
“quaesitamque Famem lapidoso vidit in agro
unguibus et raras vellentem dentibus herbas.
hirtus erat crinis, cava lumina, pallor in ore,
labra incana situ, scabrae rubigine fauces,
dura cutis, per quam spectari viscera possent;
ossa sub incurvis exstabant arida lumbis,
ventris erat pro ventre locus; pendere putares
pectus et a spinae tantummodo crate teneri.
auxerat articulos macies, genuumque tumebat
orbis, et inmodico prodibant tubere tali.”
He parses the first line. “Quaesitamque”: the conjunction, “and then”? “Famem”: object noun, “Famine”. “vidit”: past verb, “he/she saw”. “in agro”: “in a field”. “lapidoso” - same ending as agro, adjective qualifying it, lapidary, stone merchant, “stony”. “And then she saw Famine in a stony field.”
It becomes harder as he struggles through the changes of word order the poet had made to meet the meter, the ellipses of words to keep the verse compact, the strange assonances and all the other linguistic tricks so beloved of the ancient poets, and Tweaky White, and whose names he had never even bothered to remember. The passage extends him for an hour, passes it.
“And then she saw Famine in a stony field, scratchingup the sparse herbs with her fingernails and teeth. Her hair was tangled, her eye sockets like caves, her skin pallid, her lips and chin scabrous and red; her entrails could be seen through her hard skin; her shrivelled thigh bones arched out below her hips, and where her belly should have been there was merely a space for one; her breasts hung empty from her ribcage clinging to her spine. Her emaciation accentuated her joints, her knees swollen like orbs, her ankles like tubers.”
Such powerful images. Was this a sight Ovid had seen on these mountains long ago?
He is annoyed with himself for reading such a depressing passage before settling down for the night. His first attempts at sleep are disturbed by Ovid’s scene. He huddles beneath his sacking and forces himself to think of some of the feasts that Mike and he had enjoyed in the remote farms on the journey south, and as meal follows meal he slowly slips away.
–
He and Mike are in the north at the time of the grape harvest. They are miles from anywhere in countryside straight from a Renaissance painting, blue mountains, golden fields, cypress trees and pines, pink-roofed cottages, under a cloudless sky and a late summer sun. Miles from German patrols they have stayed a day to help harvest the vines. All day they have taken it in turns with the family to pick the grapes, carry them in wooden pails to the wine cellar, edge their way as blinded men down the stone steps, step out of their boots into a pail of water and then into the treading trough. Each task must be done in turn, to give their backs a rest while in the trough, their thighs and calves a rest while in the fields. The day is suffused with the warm sweet smell, the sweet sticky taste, of the grapes, the warm sticky feel rising between their toes and up their feet and calves. Men and women share the toil, facing each other in the trough, their clothes hitched up their thighs, juice trickling down their legs moving in time, living a bacchanalia in minds already heady from the sun and the alcoholic fumes from the vats loaded with the pressings of a few days before.
And then as the sun goes low they wash themselves by the pump in the farmyard with knowing country glances at each other’s exhausted limbs and repair to the stone-floored kitchen. The farmer’s wife is stirring a large copper pot of maize flour and water over a fierce brushwood fire. They slake their thirsts with the first thin brutal pressings of wine. The fire flashes light into the room, showing faces in sudden relief, its smoke smarting their eyes. As the polenta boils, bubbles release the smell of the cooking maize into the air. The father goes to help the mother with the stirring of the porage as it thickens and carries it with her to the table to be poured like golden lava, solidifying as it flows further outward across the flour-dusted wood. The mother smears it with tomato paste. The father makes the sign of the cross. Then everyone lunges forward with a knife to cut a wedge and start cramming it down his or her throat, stopping only to gulp wine to wash it down, intent only on
filling a stomach famished by the day’s labour and waiting for its fullness to course strength back into their aching limbs. The daughters keep pace with the men, for they are country stock with broad shoulders and hips, have done their absent brothers’ or husbands’ work while they have been away at the war. The eating slows down as their appetites are assuaged, but the entire contents of the pot are eaten, the father keeps opening his hand toward the flask of wine and replenishing it, the mother brings walnuts and medlar pears.
‘All the produce of our own land’ the father says. ‘We have more than enough to last us until next year’s harvests. Next month we’ll take what we don’t need to market and trade it for salt and other things we cannot make ourselves.’ And turning to Mike the farmer he asks ‘Is it like this in your own country?’ before the Englishman stumbles through a series of half-truths to save his host’s contentment.
Then, their stomachs filled to bursting, Mike and he had retired to the barn and dreamt of roast beef.
What would he give to be filled with polenta and tomato paste now?
–
‘Stay with us’ so many families had said. ‘We have enough food for the winter. You will be safe and warm here.’
Were they right, not knowing the reasons why? The Germans were too far away to steal their food. Their homes were too far from anything of strategic importance to be bombed. And when the time came for the Germans to retreat, they would go along the valleys, not over the highest hills. The front could pass them by without their knowing, their only evidence the fact that the sound of the artillery barrage was suddenly to the north of them, rather than the south.
And he would be fed, warm, not surrounded by the enemy’s men, fearing betrayal at any time.
But those villages to the north offered no hope, except of meagre survival until the spring. Here, just behind the line, he could find a guide to lead him through, or even find a way through himself, at any time. To proper warmth, to safety, to his own people, to his family.