by JH Fletcher
‘That’s nonsense! I don’t have any information.’
‘You’re in real danger, all the same. You say you’ve been trying to ignore the war? That’s impossible. The more you sit in the middle, the more you get shot at. The Germans are our enemies. Being friendly with them makes you an enemy, too!’
‘What can I do about it?’
Lucia could see his face only as a black shape against the stars that kindled flickers of silver light in his eyes. He ran the back of his hand gently down her cheek.
‘I was in the audience that night you sang Fidelio.’
‘Why didn’t you come backstage afterwards?’
‘And meet your friend Colonel Strasser? I don’t think so. But it was wonderful, so wonderful. I’ve never known anything like it. Such emotion! You’re a truly great artist, perhaps the finest singer of all time. I could kill you now, there’s plenty would say I should, but I can’t. I’ve got to trust you. But I warn you; betray me and your voice won’t save you. You know Arturo Nelli, in the village?’
‘The tobacconist? Of course.’
‘You can leave messages with him. He’ll make sure I get them.’
‘What sort of messages?’
‘Let me know when Eduardo comes home.’
‘And my mother?’
‘I can’t promise anything, but give me Eduardo and I’ll see what I can do.’
5
Indecision was like a wound in her heart.
Eduardo, her mother’s worthless lover, was sure to pitch up eventually. Knowing him, Lucia could well believe he’d been involved in the atrocities of the Repubblichini, yet Helena cared for him, despite all. She couldn’t betray him without betraying her mother, yet to protect him would sentence Helena to death. Herself, too, perhaps.
She remembered Guido’s warning. She hadn’t asked him — it wasn’t a question you asked anybody — but he was obviously with the partisans. He’d been right; trying to ignore the war was futile. By refusing to take sides, she’d ended up mistrusted by everybody. She had to choose; her life could depend on it. She thought of the aura of terror that Colonel Strasser carried with him wherever he went, how Reinhardt had pretended friendship only to use her later. Despite the murderous antics of the cowboy Americans, there was no doubt what her choice would be.
6
Eduardo arrived a week later. He was tired and dirty; while Helena ran to fetch hot water, clean clothes and food, Lucia studied him and the air of feral defiance that he wore like a skin about him.
A cornered rat …
She had to let Guido know, yet it was hard to betray even a man like this to his death. She looked at his face and saw her own. Her mother wouldn’t die because of it — only in opera did that happen — but she would be sentencing her to a lifetime of loneliness and grief.
She had no choice, yet still she dithered. Then Eduardo made the decision easy for her. He saw her watching him, and his temper, never the most placid, flared at once.
‘What d’you think you’re staring at?’
Words came too quickly for thought. ‘Not much, I’d say.’
He was across the room before she could move. He slapped her hard enough to make her ears ring.
‘Want me to tie a knot in your tongue?’
Helena, deaf to all she did not wish to hear, came back into the room with a bowl of hot water and a towel. Lucia, cheeks flaring crimson, snatched up her coat, threw open the front door and ran out into the night.
It was dismal, starless, the rain damping endlessly out of an invisible sky. She picked her way down the track, trying to avoid the puddles that seemed to draw into their pewter-coloured surfaces whatever light there was. Some small creature scuttled in the undergrowth. Vegetation dripped. Away to the north, the sky was lit by flares of red and golden light and she could hear the distant rumble of exploding bombs; Milan was catching it again. The first time it had happened all the people of Montegallo had defied the curfew, coming out into the streets to watch the bombardment, but now the village was silent; even bombing raids became unremarkable, in time.
The dark shapes of the houses drew close about her.
She walked as quietly as she could, yet thought how the whole village must be listening to the sound of her heels on the cobblestones. She reached the tobacconist’s. The shop was dark, with no sense of life or movement behind its closed shutters. She rounded the corner of the building and knocked softly on the side door. For a minute nothing happened. She raised her hand to knock again and the catch clicked as the door opened a crack. She could see no-one in the darkness but knew that someone had to be standing on the other side of the door.
She spoke in a whisper. ‘I’ve a message for Guido.’
No answer; she might have been talking to the air.
‘Tell him that the man he mentioned is at the cottage now.’
Again she waited. This time a voice answered her.
‘Alone?’
‘My mother’s with him. No-one else.’
Silence; the door began to close. Quickly Lucia said: ‘She’ll be safe, won’t she? Guido said she’d be safe.’
The door continued to close. It moved so gently that she barely heard the click as the lock slipped home. She was left facing the closed door, her question hanging unanswered in the air before her.
What was she supposed to do now?
Go back and she might walk straight into trouble. Stay away, and her mother would know for sure who was to blame for whatever happened. Assuming anything did. She made up her mind. She would go back, and wait. She and her mother would have to live with the consequences, and each other.
7
She had hoped they’d be tucked up in bed by the time she got back, the door of the room closed tight, the only sound her mother’s sighs through the thin walls. Unfortunately they were not.
Eduardo looked at her suspiciously. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘For a walk.’
‘In the rain?’
Boldly, she returned his stare. ‘It’s almost stopped. Besides, I thought you’d be glad of the privacy.’
‘Since when have you thought of anyone but yourself?’
A little of this mongrel went a very long way. She said: ‘I was thinking of myself. I’d been looking forward to an evening alone.’
Eduardo drew back his lips over his teeth. He tapped the butt of the pistol in his belt. ‘Don’t try your smart-arse games with me.’
He turned to Helena, who was watching them both anxiously. ‘You wanted to wait up for her. Well, here she is, as sweet-tempered as ever. Now let’s go to bed.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
1
They came shortly before dawn, and it was terrifying.
There were three of them, carrying machine pistols and with balaclavas covering their faces, but what was truly frightening was not their appearance but their speed and purpose, the air of implacable violence that for the moment was controlled but would plainly erupt at once if there was even the slightest sign of resistance.
Lucia, knowing what the night might bring, had lain awake for a long time but the hours had passed, nothing had happened and eventually she had fallen asleep. Now she awoke to find the men in the room with her.
One of them menaced her with his gun; she thought she was about to die and shut her eyes, rigid with shock and fear, but nothing happened.
The other men paused at the closed door behind which Helena and Eduardo were sleeping. With sudden violence they threw it open and burst into the room beyond. They made no attempt to move quietly; noise, too, must have been part of their intention, quelling all possibility of resistance.
Lucia, cowering beneath her bedding, expected to hear the sound of firing, but there was not. There was a scream of protest from Helena, the sounds of a brief struggle and the two men emerged from the room, dragging Eduardo between them. That was what Lucia would always remember: the speed and remorselessness of the operation, Eduardo’s gaping mouth uttering not a
sound as he was dragged out into the night.
The third man jerked the barrel of his gun at Lucia as though warning her to do nothing, then he, too, was gone, the open door swinging listlessly on its hinges.
Once she was sure that the men had gone, Lucia leapt out of bed and ran into her mother’s room.
2
Now all was still.
The violated air hung motionless. The room — the desecrated bed, the faded wallpaper, the mirror’s tarnished blink — had seen, and the memory was engrained within its surfaces. Only Helena’s mind raced, finding nothing to which it could take hold.
Eduardo had been ripped from beneath the tumbled sheets, the abduction like the collapse of a house in an earthquake, one instant standing and the next in ruins.
Her life, too, was in ruins. She did not know why they had not taken her, too. When they had burst into the room, that was what she had feared most: not that they would take him but that she, too, was about to die. Betrayal in its many forms. She had not died. Now she wondered whether that might not be the greater punishment, to live victim to the priest, the crow-clad, vengeful women. Lucia came running but Helena would not acknowledge her, knowing who must have betrayed him.
3
Her mother’s clenched hands clutched the bedding, her face was buried in her pillow. Her nightdress was dragged up. From the waist down she was naked but she made no attempt to cover herself. Body rigid, eyes wide with shock, she wept, the sound muffled by the bedding.
Lucia placed her hand on her shoulder.
‘Mother …’
Her touch unleashed a tigress who turned and screamed, lashing with her fingernails at the daughter leaning over her.
‘Don’t touch me!’
Shock compounded shock. Lucia stepped back. Helena made no attempt to follow but assailed her with a banshee howl of fury, terror and hatred, until Lucia’s control snapped. She reached into the gale of sound and slapped her mother hard on both cheeks.
‘Be quiet!’
The silence that followed was almost harder to bear than the screams. Helena threw herself back on the bed, voice keening endlessly on a single note, face shiny with the tears that poured from her staring eyes. Lucia pulled the nightdress decently over her mother’s legs; she took her unresisting hand in her own and sat with her until the first greyness of approaching dawn showed around the edges of the blackout curtain that masked the window.
Exhausted by the traumas of the night, Helena fell asleep at last. Trying not to disturb her, Lucia worked her fingers free. She went into the parlour and put some water on to boil. While she waited she went back into the bedroom and sat down once again beside her mother’s bed. In the morning light her sleeping face looked unguarded and vulnerable. It was a long time since Lucia had examined her features so searchingly; she saw the first threads of grey in her hair, the lines radiating from the corners of eyes and mouth, the residue of all the years of anxiety and privation that had made up her mother’s life. Helena was forty-five and they had not been easy years. She had told Lucia how her parents had died in that earlier war, all the things that had happened afterwards. She had seen the place where Helena had been brought up; she understood something of the remorseless struggle that her mother had faced in Australia. She herself had fond memories of her childhood in the mallee; she still thought of it, far more than Italy, as her place, to which, when it was possible, she would return. For her mother it had been different, a place of exile from her true life. In the end, her sense of deprivation and loneliness had been too much. In defiance of the traditions of her upbringing, she had abandoned both husband and marriage vows, had come back to the country she had left, only to discover that it, too, had changed and that nothing of what she had deemed most precious remained. Without a place she could truly call her own she had become lost. That was why she had become infatuated with a man like Eduardo, because he seemed to offer the prospect of love and belonging that she had sought unavailingly for so long. With a dawning perception Lucia saw that Helena’s true tragedy was that of a woman of sensitivity and intelligence who, knowing from the first what manner of creature Eduardo was, had been helpless to resist him, for the sake of the love that everyone but herself had known was as big a sham as Eduardo himself.
Her poor mother, so desperate for love, whose temperament made the giving and receiving of it so hard.
Lucia sat by her until she heard the water start to boil. In her sleep Helena also heard the sound. She stirred and began to waken. Lucia made coffee with the last of the precious supply that Reinhardt had given her and brought a cup back into the bedroom. Helena lay on her back, eyes staring at bereavement and horror.
‘Drink this.’
She turned to look at her daughter and at the brimming cup. ‘What is it?’
‘The last of the coffee.’
‘Something to celebrate, have we?’
‘It’ll do you good.’
Helena sat up and took the cup. The familiar expression — tight mouth, guarded eyes — was back on her face. She showed nothing of her true feelings, yet Lucia, who had seen her asleep, recognised the woman, so vulnerable beneath the cold exterior. The woman whom, in trying to save, she had at the same time destroyed. Helena knew it, too.
She finished the coffee. She put the mug on the chair beside the bed. She said: ‘I shall never forgive you.’
Lucia could have denied all knowledge but did not. ‘I had no choice.’ Remembering what Marta Bianci had told her, that there is always a choice. ‘If I hadn’t let them know he was here, they would have killed you, too.’
‘Them. They. Who are they?’
Lucia was silent.
‘It was Guido, wasn’t it? The pair of you conspired to kill him, because he was precious to me. You betrayed him to punish me. Guido, because he was jealous; you, because you’ve never forgiven me for taking you away from Australia, for bringing you to Italy. The most civilised country in the world and you hate me for it! I haven’t forgotten how you wouldn’t speak to me on the boat. All I ever wanted was to advance your career, and this is how you thank me.’
All the resentments, real and imagined, gushing in the wake of Eduardo’s loss, and Lucia, who minutes before had felt such tenderness for her mother, found, once again, that she was incapable of receiving abuse without hitting back.
‘You came back for your own benefit! The only reason you’ve taken any interest in my career is because you hoped it might turn you into someone important!’
Now it was Helena’s turn to deny nothing. ‘Do you blame me? Don’t you think I’ve had enough to put up with in my life?’ Then her honesty was submerged by the image that appealed to her most: the long-suffering mother, unselfishly sacrificing life and domestic happiness for her daughter’s success. ‘All I wanted was to see you obtain the recognition your talent deserves. It’s cruel of you to suggest anything else!’
Accusations and recriminations grew more bitter by the moment. The terrible events of the night might have united them but had driven them further apart. Reconciliation, for both of them, had become an impossible dream.
4
The mechanism of Lucia’s life was broken. She had resented Helena, told herself a hundred times that she hated her, yet now she realised that her mother had been the centre of the orbit that made up her days. However long she had spent in Parma, however engrossed in her studies, it had always been in the knowledge that her mother was there, in Montegallo. When she boarded the tram in the evenings it was, in a very real sense, to come home. Even Eduardo and their increasingly acrimonious quarrels had been unable to alter that. Now all had changed. It was not Eduardo’s death — that might even have brought mother and daughter closer together — but the fact of Lucia’s betrayal that had created an unbridgeable gulf between them. She had damaged, perhaps irreparably, the relationship that was the cornerstone of her existence. She lay with shut eyes on her bed and watched the days winding back through the time of her adolescence to the shadowed m
ysteries of infancy. Always her mother had been there. Even when they had fought, the act of fighting had brought life to her existence. Without that relationship, what remained was a void that she feared even music would not fill.
5
Eduardo’s body was found in a ravine a little way outside the village. No-one had seen anything.
The German response was savage. Eduardo might have been only an Italian but he had been an ally and his death had to be avenged.
Suddenly troops were everywhere. Uniforms, grey and black, poured into the village. Roadblocks were set up. Every house was searched, some more than once. Their own cottage was one of them. The soldiers found nothing; there was nothing to be found. Helena’s relationship with the dead man was well known but Lucia’s role was more ambiguous.
Colonel Strasser, passing her in a staff car, instructed his driver to stop. He wound down the window while Lucia stood with feet rooted to the ground, wondering what was going to happen to her. Speaking carelessly, or perhaps for the benefit of listening ears, he said: ‘I have carried out enquiries about the matter you raised with me. The soldier in question denied everything.’
Lucia was as conscious as he of those who might be listening. ‘He would deny it, wouldn’t he? Attempted rape? Who’s going to admit that?’
‘Precisely. So the question I ask myself is why you made the complaint. If you knew he would deny it? Was it to obtain justice, as you claimed, or to cause trouble?’
‘You must believe what you want.’
‘You have a wonderful talent. I would be saddened to see it go to waste. I have to warn you, all the same. Be careful. Give me any more reason to question your motives and your voice won’t save you. I hear they are not interested in opera at Auschwitz.’
The car window closed. The car drove on, leaving Lucia shaking so badly she could scarcely stand.