by Anthony Paul
‘Don’t worry,’ says the priest, ‘she can be relied upon.’ Roberto and the doctor look at each other. ‘Where were we?’
‘Planning for the retreat, Don Bartolomeo’ the doctor replies. ‘I’ve been giving this much thought since we first discussed this. We have to remember that this village has been gripped by a great fear for twenty years. It’s not just the matter of the schoolmaster. Everyone, except the mayor’s friends, has suffered. Their sons taken away to war and never seen or heard of again while the fascists’ sons always seemed to be able to stay at home - so many of them by enlisting in the militia and doing things their neighbours will never forgive. People have starved while the fascist families’ stores have been left alone by the Germans. Many have suffered at the hands of informers, and know who they are.’
‘The carabinieri will have to round them all up, for their protection’ says the priest. ‘We can’t have the good Christians of this village doing things they’ll regret once tempers have cooled. But where can we put them all? I assume you’ve got an idea of who should be interned?’ The doctor nods. ‘And that there are dozens of them?’ The doctor nods again. ‘Too many for the gaol? Can we use the school? Are there enough carabinieri to guard them all?’
‘We’ll have to see, Don Bartolomeo. We’ll have to see.’
‘Can you make a list of names for me to give the captain of the carabinieri?’
The priest turns to Roberto. ‘Just like the Germans, aren’t we, rounding up people we don’t agree with and putting them in prison?’
‘It’s for their own protection’ the doctor intervenes. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘You’re quite right, doctor. It’s the Christian thing to do, to remove temptation from people who might afterwards regret their impulsiveness.’ He sighs.
–
‘You didn’t need me in there’ Roberto whispers as they reach the edge of the darkening village and make to part, Roberto back to his mountain. ‘ “Capitano Inglese” this, “Capitano Inglese” that. You could have said it all yourself. You had to remind me of it all before we went!’
‘I know, but it’s better to keep up appearances. Don Bartolomeo wants to think, for his conscience’s sake, that I’m just a doctor. As if priests had consciences. I’d been wondering for days how I’d approach it. Then I remembered that you were English. I told him about you, told him you could help. It was so much better coming from you. Honour was served all round. I thought it went rather well.’
‘Why didn’t you mention the possibility of captured Germans also having to be imprisoned?’
‘Because that assumes that they’ll be captured by the partisans. The priest mustn’t know that the partisans even exist. He wouldn’t approve. Remember, the church doesn’t trust the communists. I keep quiet about the partisans, so as not to compromise him. Maybe he knows about them, about my connection with them, but feels he shouldn’t let me know he knows. Maybe that’s why he’s discussing this all with me, so as to show that he trusts me to control the partisans when the Germans go. Maybe he knows that I don’t trust the captain of the carabinieri.’
‘You mean that you’re not going to give the carabinieri that list?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t ask. Do you remember once protesting to me that you were a soldier and not a politician? Soldiers shouldn’t ask such questions. Politicians don’t need to. I accept that I’m a politician. So’s the priest, as much a politician as I am, although he’d deny it. All the Catholic church are politicians. It’s how they’ve retained their privileges and wealth for centuries while their so-called flocks have stayed so poor.’
43
Early morning is a good time now, a time when it is cool and one is refreshed by sleep after the hot hungry exhaustion of the day before. The sky lightens, pinkens and throws its hues first on the eastern peaks of the grey mountains, then lower down their slopes. The birds stay twittering in the trees, waiting for the first warmth that will send them in search of their food. Every day means the crops that will feed the locals will advance further to ripeness. Each dawn could be the one on which the distant thunder of the artillery barrages does not start. Sometimes the guns start late, but they will stop when they stop. There is no point in being disappointed when they start. It would destroy the optimism that attends each new day.
Elvira and Anna now come up the mountain every day. Roberto stays behind while the partisans go on their sabotage missions. His caution is too inhibiting to them, but each night he joins in their tactical discussions and they pore over his map selecting their targets. Word had come back of German reprisals, ten people shot in a village to the north, a village Vincenzo’s finger had lingered on in one of their planning meetings. No-one had commented. The time had come when fearing reprisals would abash strategic action, action necessary to accelerate deliverance and end the famine. Debate had ended on the matter.
Elvira is glad for his company. They talk for hours, while Anna goes exploring for butterflies and birds’ nests, about her dreams for the valley after the war, of farm co-operatives so that there will be more food, more fairly divided, of better schools and medical care. It provides a distraction from her grief, a justification for the sacrifices they all have made.
‘You can see it’s a beautiful place. The mountains with their pasture for the sheep and goats. The soil is poor, except just by the river, but there’s just enough of it, if it is fairly shared, to feed everyone properly. You’ve seen how well the fruit trees grow, how many vines there are, how many vegetables we grow. Last year’s potatoes and beans have only just run out, despite losing so many to the bombs. It will be a good place to live if the party has its way, no longer a place where the old peasants yearn for death as a release from a lifetime of unrewarded toil.’
He leans back on his elbows to survey the scene. Now that it is warm up to the mountain tops the valley has textures he could not have imagined when the snow reached down to the lower slopes. Everywhere on the plain there are small fields with the different colours of different growing crops, trees lining the streams and roads or simply providing shade. The sun has bleached the winter grey of every building in sight and the mountain villages on their spurs are a dazzling white that denies the poverty and squalor that lie within their walls. As the sun changes its position and height throughout the day new contours are shown on every hill. It looks like the background to a renaissance painting, but like every such painting its idyll hides the poverty and fear that haunt the little people there.
‘When did you last eat, Roberto?’
‘The day before yesterday. Boiled nettles and some small rodents Salvatore caught. We’re even running out of game on the mountain now. The boys have laid snares everywhere, but they’re nearly always empty. We’re living on the leaves of wild plants, dandelions, things like that. Anything that seems to fill you up for a while and doesn’t make you sick. Scraping with fingernails and teeth at the scanty herbs.’
‘Is that your Ovid again?’
‘His story of the man who chopped down the sacred oak and brought famine to his country. It keeps coming back to me. Don’t worry. I’m used to not eating. I got used to it when I was up here on my own. Your stomach shrinks. I have this thought of getting to the English army and seeing tables of food, things I’ve stopped dreaming of eating, and not being able to eat a thing.’
‘It’s like that for everyone now, except the Germans and their little circle of friends. And they’re not getting any more food from the north. We haven’t seen a train or lorry coming south for more than a week now. We can’t understand why your army isn’t here. The rivers are so low a child could wade across them. The ground is so dry that the farmers are praying for rain.’
‘Their generals are crazy, Elvira. Their planes must be telling them the Germans have nothing left. By delaying their advance they’re just giving the Germans time to withdraw all their equipment up to the next line.’
‘We’re already losing some of the older people. I don’t know how much longer Nonna will last. She’s lying about how much she’s eating, giving her food to Anna when I’m not looking. So many of the old ones are refusing food so that the youngsters can eat. There’s a story going round that you can make flour from the bristles on your brooms. Can you imagine it? But people are trying it. People are dying with sore stomachs and even the doctor doesn’t know if it’s because of what they’ve eaten or because they haven’t eaten. Everyone’s wasting away, so weak they can’t do anything to help themselves. How many more days will the partisans be able to fight without food? If your army doesn’t come soon they’ll be too weak to stop the Germans blowing everything up.’
There again, he thinks, a sign that Elvira has been privy to the doctor’s tactical discussions. Blowing things up. Or did she get such information from Carlo? He thinks back to the things that Vincenzo had said as they walked on the afternoon of Luigi’s funeral, the day he had learned that the schoolteacher had been Carlo’s brother. He tries again to remember what everyone had said that night, back deep in the winter, when the doctor had told of the capo being killed in the bombing raid and Elvira had cried; and to recall all that had been said at Vincenzo’s father’s house when the doctor had come disguised as a priest.
Then he remembers the thing that had been troubling him without his knowing what it was. On the night of the eggs the doctor had talked of a committee, and later had used words like ‘knowing you the way we do’. ‘…we do…’. ‘…we…’.
He hadn’t been talking of just Elvira and himself. Besides, Elvira couldn’t have been on the committee when the capo had been killed because she’d been so surprised by the news. There was someone else on that committee who knew him well. It had to be a man. It couldn’t be Vincenzo. It could only be Carlo.
‘How is Carlo?’ he asks. ‘How is he coping?’
‘He’s throwing himself into his work. It’s the only way he can forget his grief.’
His work. The work that had kept him out of the house for days last winter. Carlo is on that committee. Yet he’d risked everything to hide him in his house last winter. Why had he done it, particularly after the Giobellinis had found out what was happening? Why hadn’t he found someone else in the organisation, a lesser functionary, to take the risk?
Then a more frightening thought strikes him. Why would Carlo never have given him a glimpse of that fact unless his anonymity was crucial, so crucial that none of the partisans, or even he Roberto, should know his role? Was he the new capo, its leader? He hadn’t seen him for months. Was that why? No, it couldn’t be. He was too vulnerable: every one of the partisans knew his wife, could betray her under torture. Every reason why was matched by a reason why not. At least part of his mystery was solved: he was certainly on that committee.
giugno
44
Within a week of the last snows melting from their peaks the mountains are in high summer. Although the scarlet poppies hang on, wave after wave of wild flowers has faded, desiccated and dropped and the verges and pastures are resigned to the arid season when the rocky mountainsides will shimmer with heat until the autumn rains.
The dawn sky lightens like opal, cool and with no hint of the heat to come. The sun rises softly, pinkening and rounding the hills. The pastures show green until the evaporating dew turns them grey and then green again, refreshing the landscape.
Within a couple of hours it is hot. Within three the starving partisans stop moving and spend the rest of the day conserving their energy in the shade of the trees as the sun hammers down on the anvil of the mountain. It is too hot to move. The mountain grass is already parched. The mosses and lichens on the rocks have been baked dry and the limestone is bleached and shimmers grey and white in the heat. The pools in which they could bathe and cool themselves are now dried out. They sit or lie on the ground listening to the lizards scampering with snaking backs through last year’s leaves, watching the hawks and eagles drifting in the noonday air and then swooping on their torpid prey. All creatures on the mountain except for man have their normal supplies of food, are carrying on their normal lives and deaths, untroubled by the affairs of man.
The war is still to the south. In the distance there is the intermittent boom of artillery, almost as if to break the torpor of the troops on the lines sweating under the same sun. The partisans ignore it. They stay still because to move, hungry, in this heat makes a man breathless, thirsty. They leave the flies settling on their faces unmolested, crave for the grace of a whiff of breeze to fan the hair from their foreheads, save them the trouble of wanting to swat the flies, slip into their private naps.
Down in the valley the farmers too are sleeping the breathless day. Their stores of food are gone and the drought is making them fear for the growth of the plants in their fields that will break their famine. Another plague, they say. When will the army come? It is time to spray the vines, their leaves now full and the stalks past blossom where the grapes will be, but that is young men’s work and our sons are still in hiding. They wait for the evening cool before checking the growth of their fruits, the figs and pears still green and hard, counting the weeks until they can be eaten. They hoe the weeds and chew the leaves as salad.
–
Even the mornings and evenings are dangerous now. As the sun sets over the mountains with a golden light and a purple, indigo hue drifts down their sides, throwing shadows on dells that were part of a flat backdrop in the glaring sun, the tattered remnants of a defeated army stir from rest and hiding and commence another night of trekking north, free from the risk of strafing planes, free from the eyes of pilots to report on their retreat.
Vincenzo and Roberto come down to check their movements. It is easy for them to stay concealed: the exhausted soldiers, their uniforms soiled tattered and bloodstained, look only at the road ahead. Emboldened the two venture into an olive grove where during the day a group of Germans had rested up in the shade. Trees with the gnarled thick trunks of centuries, that have seen generations of soldiers and brigands come and go, have been hacked for firewood and around the patches of scorched earth are a few tins from which every morsel of food has been scraped. The clusters of unripe peas amongst the old trunks have been ravaged to try the pods for food.
From the grove they watch the procession pass. Scruffy unshaven men, with a glazed look of exhaustion, of shock, placing one foot in front of the other, as dazed as the people of the village had been as they stumbled through the ruins of their homes after the bombing raids, men who have been under artillery fire all winter, defending a position they knew they’d have to concede in the spring, watching their comrades killed or maimed for a mountain that meant nothing to them. Sometimes a group comes past with a farmer’s two-wheeled cart, a requisitioned horse or ox to draw it, with some kit and the wounded sitting or lying on the back between its high wheels.
‘The master race come to this! It would be so easy to shoot them now.’
‘Not when there are more to come, Roberto. They’ve lost all trace of human dignity, of belief in life. They’re desperate. Fire on them and they’ll butcher the next people they see. It’s best to let them pass. There’s still the rearguard to come. The artillery barrages were still there this morning, buying time for the retreat, making the Allies think they’re still on the line in force. As soon as those barrages stop we can make our move.’
–
In the camp the mood is sombre. It will be another night without food except for the edible weeds collected during the day. The weapons are being cleaned and checked. Vincenzo is touring the corporals boosting morale. ‘Maybe there’ll be some Germans to kill tomorrow, but remember our main task is to save the bridge.’
It is so warm that they sleep in the open that night. Roberto looks up from his sheepskin rug at a sky with more stars than he has ever seen before. ‘Not sleeping, comrade?’ Vincenzo asks. ‘You’ll be home soon now. You could probably walk over the mountain and the next rid
ge to the sea and be with your own people tonight.’
‘I probably could. But I might walk into a minefield. Or a patrol. It’s pointless when the English army could be here tomorrow. Besides, I want to see this through.’
‘What do you dream of most, besides seeing your parents again?’
‘That’s the silly thing. I don’t know. It’s as if I can’t remember what to look forward to.’
‘Don’t worry. You’ll remember when the time comes. And who knows? It could be tomorrow. I wake up before dawn every morning, straining my ears for the first artillery shot, hoping it will not come. They were late this morning. I thought it might be today.’
–
The next morning the barrage begins before dawn, more intensely than at any time for days. Just like a card game, Roberto thinks: play your weak card with a flourish. Today must be the last day.
The time after dawn is the time of hope. A few weeks ago it was the heat of the middle day that they looked forward to. Now the cool of the early morning is the time to relish before the high exhausting sun takes its toll of their optimism. Roberto now rejoices the dawn, watching the crags pinken and yellow in the rising sun, the low shadows show curving contours in the foothills like women’s bodies still abed, and then the grass grizzle for a while as the dew starts to steam.
He waits and then wanders the two hours down to the glade to meet Elvira and Anna. The wild cherries are glowing yellow, even reddening, in the low sun on the trees, a promise of food to come. Just as in the valleys hard green figs and pears are growing where a few weeks ago there was only blossom. And late this summer when they are ripe and full of food there will be no enemies to take them.