Fire in the Hills

by Donna Jo Napoli

  Those people in the farmhouses the day before had to get their water from somewhere.

  Wells.

  He got to his feet and brushed off. A slight nausea made him pause to breathe deep. It passed, but he was still light-headed. And the air felt funny in his ears—buzzy like insects. He walked, looking, looking.

  It wasn’t long before he saw another farmhouse. Isolated. With a well to one side.

  A well in a dry land was maybe the most valuable commodity a person had. Who knew what trouble he could get in for taking water without asking first?

  A tree behind the well hung heavy with yellow-orange fruits. Apricots? Were they ripe?

  He watched a while. No one came out. No one went in.

  He couldn’t just stand there forever. In fact, he felt like he couldn’t stand there for a moment more. His knees wobbled. He was nauseated. Such a short while without water could do this?

  Well, sure. People died without water. Especially in the sun. Besides, he hadn’t eaten, either.

  He went up to the door and knocked.

  “What do you want?” came a woman’s shout.

  “Water,” called back Roberto, trying to make his voice sound trustworthy. A woman. A woman was less likely to have a gun. He screwed up his courage. “And food. Bread. An apricot or two. I could work for it.”

  “You’re not Sicilian, what are you doing here?”

  “I . . . I was in a battle.”

  “What battle? Where?”

  “On the coast.”

  “Which town?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know?”

  Her questions were like fists; his answers, like limp hands. Against all odds, though, the exchange invigorated Roberto. He was speaking his own language again, finally. And it didn’t matter that the woman behind the door spoke Sicilian dialect, not Venetian, and not standard Italian. His ears were so greedy for a familiar language that he didn’t have trouble following it.

  “I haven’t had a drop to drink for almost two days. Please. I’ll work for you. I promise.”

  The woman opened the door a crack: drawn face, hair pulled back tightly, black eyes that gave nothing away.

  Roberto raised his hands in surrender, as Maurizio had taught him to do way back in Turkey. Maurizio, who was dead now, who Roberto had refused to let himself think about. His hands took on such a sudden heaviness, he feared he’d fall forward.

  “Put your hands down,” the woman said breathily, as though she was the weary one. “What can you do for me?”

  “What do you need done?”

  She stood back and let him pass inside and poured him a glass of water. A second. A third. Then she led him to a field and pointed.

  Two boys cut wheat. They were kids, around eight and ten, no older, for sure. The woman turned without a word and went back to the farmhouse.

  Roberto walked up behind the boys. They’d given him a quick glance when he was standing with the woman, but now they worked as though he wasn’t there. Sweat dripped down their backs. Their hair gleamed with it. They’d already cut about half the field. They must have been working since dawn. Or maybe they’d cut the day before, too.

  There were only two scythes. What was Roberto supposed to use? He stood empty-handed, feeling like an idiot.

  “Make bundles,” said the older boy, between swings of the scythe.

  Roberto bent and gathered cut wheat in his arms.

  “No, stupid. Roll it. Show him, Piero.”

  The littler boy dropped his scythe and rolled the cut wheat along the ground, gathering more as he went.

  Roberto rolled wheat into bundles and left them at the end of each row of wheat. He rolled and rolled until his neck and back ached from bending over.

  “Here.” Piero handed him his scythe and took over rolling.

  So Roberto cut wheat. It was harder than it looked, and Piero was clearly stronger than he looked.

  After a few hours, the woman called from the edge of the field. The boys dropped what they were doing and ran. Roberto followed.

  The table was already set. The boys washed their hands and faces and sat on the benches, with forks ready. The midday meal was whole young artichokes, boiled and flavored with vinegar. And a bowl of spaghetti with fresh tomatoes. And apricots.

  The boys talked a little, but Roberto hardly heard them. He ate till his stomach hurt.

  “Rest now,” said the woman. “You’ve earned it.”

  The boys obediently trooped into another room to nap.

  “No one can work in the heat of the afternoon,” said the woman. She carried the dirty plates to the sink.

  Roberto wasn’t sure what to do next. He stood uncertainly.

  “Sit back down. You stay there.”

  He sat and watched her.

  She returned to the table and stood over the bowl of water the last few apricots were floating in. She picked one up and dried it with her dishcloth. She rolled it round and round, round and round. It was long past dry. Little bits of the skin were coming off now. If she kept doing that, the whole thing would come apart. She stopped at last and said, “Did you see Carlino?”

  Roberto blinked in confusion.

  “My son.” She put the apricot on the table, wiped her hands on the dishcloth now, and sat beside Roberto. “He’s taller than you. A bit stouter. His hair curls like yours. He’s in uniform, of course, like all the others. But he has a wonderful smile. If you saw his smile, you’d pick him out.” Her words raced with sudden urgency. “You’d recognize him. Like an angel.”

  Roberto rubbed his lips and pretended to search his memory, but, really, he wondered if she was crazy. How could he explain to her that he hadn’t looked at anyone’s face? How could he explain the chaos of battle?

  But he wouldn’t explain it to her even if he could. It wouldn’t help anyone to know something that horrible.

  He couldn’t look her in the eyes at first.

  When he finally dared to, though, he found her eyes weren’t on him anymore. They stared past him. She got up without waiting for an answer and opened the door.

  It took a few moments for Roberto to realize she wanted him to leave. A lump formed in his throat. But it shouldn’t have. He hadn’t wanted to stay. Not really. It was the lure of food that made his fingers curl under this bench and hold on tight. And the lure of a home. And a woman’s voice.

  But the sooner he left, the sooner he’d be on the path toward his real home, his real mother.

  As he went out the door, the woman said, “Don’t put your hands up in surrender when someone opens their door. Act like a half-wit, instead. It’s hard to have mercy, but easy to have pity.”

  4

  ROBERTO STOOD ON A HILLTOP and looked down at the battleships moored in the wide harbor of the city below. Soldiers in tan milled around the waterfront. Those were British uniforms, he was sure of it. He’d seen them in war newsreels back in Venice, so long ago. Sun glinted off their helmets.

  He’d heard the battle two nights before. He’d slept outdoors in the scratchy dry scrub of these foothills and squeezed his eyes shut against the glare of the explosions and rocked from side to side on the ground till the noises finally ceased and sleep finally came. The next day he’d sat there, unable to get himself to move. But he had to move today. The need for water was that simple. He had to.

  He wasn’t sure how long it had been since he first set foot in Sicily. He’d lost track of the days. But one thing he knew, this was taking longer than he’d hoped.

  His plan had been to march as many hours as he could, always within sight of the train tracks, and stop only when he absolutely needed water, food, or sleep. But explosions interrupted the plan. They came at any hour of the night or day, always from the direction of the coast. A day might pass without them, but then they’d return. And every time he trembled and ran for the hills. If he was lucky enough to find a cave, he stayed there. Longer than he should have.
Once, he found a cave with a stream inside it, and he stayed for three whole days.

  He couldn’t understand his own behavior. The night the American warship had brought him to Sicily, he’d run straight through the middle of guns and bombs on that beach. Past flames and wounded, screaming men. Past mutilated bodies. Now the guns and bombs were distant, yet now he trembled worse each time he heard them. He couldn’t help it; he couldn’t win against his mounting terror. It immobilized him. Not even the pounding drive to get home could get him going again. Only the need for food—the fundamental need for survival—finally spurred him on.

  The battles weren’t the only reason his plan for getting home wasn’t working out, though. Even without that hateful noise in the distance, he couldn’t walk for more than a few hours at a time. His strength was failing; hunger sapped his energy.

  It wasn’t for shortage of farmhouses. No, he’d gotten used to rubbing his lips and pretending to think—the half-wit, struggling to seize on a vague memory—while women talked at him, always women. Everyone worried about a son, a brother, a father, a nephew, each one sent out by the Fascists to fight the Allied powers, because . . . because . . . Because that’s what you did. You fought, even if you couldn’t remember why.

  He worked hard for these women—repairing roofs, lugging stones for walls, picking cactus pears, anything they wanted. But they were increasingly poor. They gave him a tomato. Or a lemon to suck on. Or dried figs, crunchy with wasp bodies. Or olives. He gnawed on rock-hard brown bread and tried to fool his empty stomach into not twisting, while he listened respectfully as the women talked and scratched behind the long ears of Nubian goats, their eyes limpid with held-back tears.

  They talked of the Allies gobbling up Sicily. They welcomed each invasion, because the more battles won, the sooner this cursed war would end and their men could come home.

  Welcome invasions. Incomprehensible.

  Roberto spied a sign over on the road. He walked across the hillside and read it. It was hard to believe: that city down there was Siracusa. Great Siracusa had fallen to the Allies.

  Roberto hugged himself and watched the scene in the city below. Smoke still rose from a cathedral on fire. People rushed in and out of a large army hospital tent set up in a piazza.

  Other people cheered in the streets. They threw flowers from windows down under the feet of the British soldiers.

  Welcome invasions.

  It was already noon or later. And Roberto hadn’t eaten anything but wild fennel and carrots for days. He needed to knock on a door soon.

  He walked along the road till he came to a house set back a ways. He knocked.

  The woman opened the door without asking who it was. The very act chilled him.

  She looked him up and down and smiled. It seemed she almost expected him. “Come in.”

  On the table was a bowl of broth with bread soaking in it and a spoon tipping out. He’d interrupted her meal, sparse as it was. His mouth watered. He forced his eyes away.

  The woman clapped her hands together once, a sound that made Roberto wince, and moved briskly about the kitchen. She set water to boiling and took a jar of something from her pantry and heated it and put out a second bowl, but this one with a fork beside it. She talked as she worked. She muttered about prices.

  Roberto strained to hear. He wanted to appear polite. He wanted not to stare at the stuff she’d put in the pot, not to think only about the fact that she’d put out a fork—a fork for something solid, not just a spoon.

  “The cost of pasta has tripled since the war began. Did you realize that? You’re a country boy and you don’t know how prices work, of course, but you know that’s bad, don’t you?” She didn’t pause long enough for Roberto to answer. “The cost of oil has multiplied by eight. Bread, by five. It’s killing us. Day by day.” She looked at him and nodded.

  He nodded back instinctively. And he felt like a liar. If he opened his mouth and his accent revealed he wasn’t from Sicily, would she throw him out?

  But she didn’t ask him anything. Not what he was doing there, who he was. Not what he could offer in exchange. Nothing.

  Roberto stood, mesmerized by the smells that came from the stove, by the movements of the woman’s arm as she stirred, by her words that went counter to her cooking. He had to press his lips together to keep his jaw from hanging open.

  “Sit now.”

  He sat at the table, and she placed a heavenly bowl of pasta with sardines in front of him.

  He ate.

  She took out a bottle of oil and poured a dollop in Roberto’s bowl. “My son worked in town for a month to buy that oil on the black market.”

  So why was she giving him this precious food? Roberto felt guilty about eating it. But he was too hungry to stop. And he knew in his bones that the woman couldn’t bear it if he stopped.

  She sat across from him now, and her hand ran up and down that oil bottle, up and down, up and down. Her voice was thin as a blade of dry mountain grass. She’d crush to powder with the least bit of pressure. She needed protection—somebody strong.

  A heart-piercing sense of déjà vu made Roberto pause, his fork halfway to his mouth. The first woman who had fed him rolled an apricot in her dishcloth. This one ran her hand up and down the oil bottle. They were variations on a theme, music that snaked inside his head.

  Only this woman didn’t ask if he’d seen anyone. Oh, Lord.

  When he finished eating, she told him to nap on the kitchen floor while she went inside. He waited till he didn’t hear any movement beyond the door, long enough that she was probably asleep—he hoped she was asleep, at least—then sneaked out and returned to following the train tracks at a distance.

  Home, he keened to himself to drown out the desolate, crying music of the women, all these women, home home home home. Every step took him closer.

  5

  ROBERTO WANDERED THE STREETS of Messina, looking for an opportunity. He’d walked all the way here on feet that now were so callused they were numb as stumps. And there it was: a storage shed with an unlocked door. He squeezed past ropes and canvas into a corner, squatted, and slept instantly.

  The next morning he woke early. He stretched as best he could, without knocking anything over, and slipped out into the empty predawn streets before the owner of the shed could come and scold him. He turned up the narrowest alley he could find and leaned against a wall. It wasn’t as narrow as the alleys in Venice—he couldn’t touch both sides at once—but it felt good to stand there anyway.

  The city was quiet. Whoever stirred inside these homes moved like cats. No one wanted to be noticed. Of course not. That was the trick these days—blend into the background, disappear.

  And that was another reason why he liked narrow alleys. The dawn sun didn’t reach him here. If someone glanced up this alley, they wouldn’t see him unless he moved.

  Roberto looked down the length of the alley, out to the cement walkway along the water, where two Nazi officers leaned over a metal railing and peered through binoculars. One of them had a grenade tucked into the top of his boot.

  The day before, when Roberto had first walked the train tracks into Messina, he’d watched steamers carry retreating Italian soldiers across that water to the mainland of Italy. Now it looked like German soldiers were going to retreat, too, otherwise what were those officers doing there?

  The land on the other side of the strait was easily visible, the hulk of a hill blue against the rising gray of morning. It was far, but not that far. And every single boat crossing the strait was full of soldiers, every single one of which he wanted to avoid. That’s why Roberto had finally decided he had to swim it. Maybe tonight.

  He was a good swimmer. Most Venetian boys were. He’d never swum that far before, but he could float when he needed a rest. It wasn’t that far.

  He’d been in Sicily probably two months by now—at least two months. He had to get off this island, on the road home. Yes, he’d swim the strait tonight.

 
“Want to make some money?”

  Roberto had learned not to flinch at unexpected voices. It made you look suspect, and worse—smart. He turned slowly and assumed that vacant look in the eye that had served him well in Sicily so far.

  The voice belonged to an Italian soldier with a festering cut across his face, high on his right temple, through the red ball oozing pus that was his eye, to the flange of his nostril. “Take me home with you,” he said. “Just till the Allies get here and I can surrender. It won’t be long.” His accent made Roberto think of Maurizio; he was Roman, for sure. Another Roman deserter.

  Roberto shook his head.

  The soldier grabbed him around the throat with both hands. “Take me home, or I’ll kill you.”

  “I don’t have a home here,” croaked Roberto. He yanked down on the man’s elbows and broke his grip. It wasn’t hard; the soldier was as weak as he looked.

  The soldier absently ran the fingers of his left hand over his grimy front teeth. “You’re not even Sicilian. Listen to you. You’re Venetian, right? What are you doing here? A kid like you. Hell, you didn’t make the mistake of actually joining the army, did you? Idiot. Complete idiot.” And he cried. His shoulders curled forward, and his head slumped and he bawled.

  Roberto quickly stepped close. “Don’t do that,” he whispered. “People will look at us. We’ll get caught.”

  The man put his hands over his mouth and nose. His body jerked with sobs. But he didn’t make noise anymore.

  “Listen,” said Roberto softly, “I wish I could help you, but I can’t. I’m going home, to Venice, and I’m going to swim that strait. You aren’t strong enough to make it.”

  “Swim the strait?” The man dropped his arms as though they were dead things. The stench of his breath made Roberto turn his head away. “And then what? Walk into the hands of the Germans?”

  What did he mean? “Once I get on the other side, I’ll never have to look at another German again.”

  “Don’t you know anything? Haven’t you heard?” The man clutched Roberto’s arm. “Back in July the Allies made an air raid on Rome. A thousand civilians died. One thousand. The people couldn’t stand it anymore. They’re fed up with the war. They threw stones at the king, so he had Mussolini arrested.”