A Winter's Night

by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  Vasco smiled when he saw Nino, but he didn’t even look like himself. When he had left for the war, he was healthy as an ox, one of the best looking boys in town. He was pale now, emaciated and gaunt, and his forehead was beaded with sweat. Nino hugged him and realized that he was feverish.

  “You have a temperature.”

  “It’s the infection, Nino. Nothing hurts, really, but this fever never goes away. If it drops during the day, it just gets higher at night.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They don’t seem to attach much importance to it. There’s an awful lot of young guys here, wounded, sick . . . Maybe what I have doesn’t seem so serious. I’ve heard that they may send me to a hospital in Bologna, where they know how to cure these things.”

  “When?”

  “I’m not sure. Tomorrow, maybe, the day after . . . I’ve been here for days and no one has done anything. They’re not really equipped to do much here; more or less they just look at you and decide where to send you to, which hospital. But . . . where are my parents?”

  “They’re down walking on the beach. I made them wait; I wanted to see how you were first. Your father asked me to come here with them; they were worried about getting lost or not knowing what to do. They’re afraid, Vasco, they’re getting older, you know?”

  “You did the right thing, Nino, thank you . . . how do I look? I don’t look too bad, do I? And . . . Rina?”

  “You’re looking good,” lied Nino, “and you’ll be back to normal before you know it. Rina is still at home, waiting for you. She was always hoping to get your letters, but I don’t think many came.”

  “They must have gotten lost. Do you know how big Russia is? You can’t even imagine how big it is. How could we have thought of attacking such an enormous country? Even if you didn’t have to fight, you’d get old just trying to get from one end to the other. How absurd this whole thing is: the Russians . . . first I’d never even seen one of them and now I have to shoot at them. What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going to call your parents.”

  “Thanks, Nino. You’re a friend.”

  Nino walked outside just as Checco and his wife were approaching the entrance.

  “He’s upstairs,” said Nino. “He’s waiting to give you a hug.”

  “How’s it going, then?” asked Checco.

  “Well, it could be better but I’d say there’s no reason to worry. Vasco’s strong as a horse, he’ll kick this one.”

  They went back up together, but Nino waited out in the hall so that Vasco’s parents could be alone with him at first. He entered a few minutes later and stayed with them for the rest of the visit. Esterina held her tears until they stepped out the door.

  They went back to the station together and Nino watched Checco and his wife as they walked, stooped over as he’d never seen them before, weighed down by their worry and their pain. As they waited for the train that would bring them back to Bologna, they sat in a café and had some coffee. Nino tried to offer words of encouragement: ‘You’ll see, at the hospital in Bologna, they’ll find a way to make him better. They might have to amputate a toe, at worst it’ll be his foot, but at least he’ll survive, and that’s the most important thing. You can get used to anything.’

  In reality, he had nothing to go on and no idea of what they’d be able to do in Bologna. Save him, at least. He was young, his constitution was strong, he’d make it for sure. For sure.

  They transferred him to the Putti Hospital three days later and as soon as Nino found out, he went to visit with Rina, Vasco’s fiancée. The hospital was located on a hill overlooking Bologna. It was a beautiful setting, with forest land all around and a lovely view of the city. Nino let Rina go ahead, and he strolled for half an hour, looking at the giant cedars and the lofty magnolias rising a good thirty meters tall. From this vantage point, he would see the villa where Cardinal Nasalli Rocca lived, a magnificent place where two gigantic nettle trees with their smooth, gray bark stood at either side of a long, stately flight of steps at the entrance.

  He loitered for a while to give them some time together, then went up to see Vasco in his new room. “Cheer up!” said Nino, “they’ll get you better here. There are these famous professors walking around with long strings of assistants tagging behind them; they’ll know how to fix you up.”

  “Have you seen my parents?” asked Vasco.

  “Sure, I drop by whenever I can, they say that seeing me helps keep their morale up. They’ve given me a package for you; there’s clean underwear, cookies that your mother made, and some oranges. Your mom says be sure to eat them, they’re good for you!”

  Vasco thanked him again. “Come back to see me, Nino, when you can. Time stands still here, you know? Seeing someone you know is such a relief. Helps me forget about my troubles, at least for a little while. I wanted so bad to come home and look at me now.”

  Rina looked at him with tears in her eyes and held his hand tightly between hers.

  “You’re close here,” replied Nino, “it takes no time at all on the bus. Now that Rina knows the way, she’ll come to see you often, right, Rina? And your parents will come too. You just work on keeping your spirits up, you’ll get better faster.”

  “Yes, I will,” said Vasco, his eyes shining.

  Rina kissed him and followed Nino down the stairs, drying her tears with a handkerchief. She went back the following Saturday with Vasco’s parents. When they were all on the bus together, Checco said that they had to be ready to accept that the doctors might have to amputate the boy’s foot, because that was what was necessary, sometimes, to stop the gangrene. It would be tough, but the important thing was for him to make it home.

  “I’m just praying that he lives,” said Rina. “Nothing else matters to me. I’ll take him any way, without a foot, without a leg, I couldn’t care less.” Hot tears ran down her cheek as she spoke.

  When they were finally admitted to Vasco’s room, they found him in a cast from his neck to his groin. They didn’t know what to think.

  “What is this thing?” asked Checco.

  “Papà, I can’t understand,” replied Vasco. “Yesterday two nurses came in and they put me in this cast. The doctor hasn’t come by, so I haven’t talked to him. I don’t know why they did it.”

  His parents looked at each other in consternation and then lowered their eyes to the ground. Thus began the atrocious calvary of their son as his entire body was devoured by gangrene.

  Nino had had to return to his unit, which was stationed in Albania. But before deploying to his next destination, he wounded himself in the hand as he was cleaning a pistol and he was discharged. A number of people maligned him, insinuating that he had shot himself so he could get out. The military authorities, however, never even opened a disciplinary procedure against him and they dismissed him without finding any fault in his performance. As soon as he returned home, Nino could sense the finger-pointing. He was angry that anyone would suspect him of desertion, and never tolerated a single insult or insinuation, always responding with his fists.

  By the time he returned to see Vasco, his friend’s situation had greatly worsened. Nino had to fight an impulse to retch at the smell of putrefaction that permeated the room and was shocked at the shrugs he met with when he tried to understand what had happened.

  Checco managed, the following week, to stop the chief physician as he was whisked down the hall in a flurry of white smocks. “Professor, just a word, professor, for the love of God . . . ”

  “What is it?” asked the doctor, clearly irritated.

  “I’m the father of Vasco Bruni, room 32, orthopedics. That poor boy is rotting inside that body cast that you had made for him. The smell in his room is atrocious.”

  The professor barely glanced his way and replied haughtily: “Who’s the doctor here, you or me? You do your job and I’ll do mine
,” and he hurried off with his assistants thronging around him.

  One day that both Rina and Nino were present, Vasco asked his friend to scratch his back because he couldn’t stand the itching. Nino took one of the knitting needles that Rina was using to make a sweater and poked it down between the cast and the boy’s skin. When he pulled it back up it was full of worms. Vasco somehow realized and his eyes filled up with tears. “My God, the horror of this,” he said. “Why does it have to be so difficult to die?” After four months of excruciating agony, Vasco Bruni, a handsome, intelligent and sensitive young man, died in the stench of his own tainted flesh, twisted and stiff as a rabid dog.

  The entire town came to the boy’s funeral.

  His fiancée continued to bring flowers to the cemetery for years and years, even after she finally decided to accept the proposal of a good man who had asked her to become his wife.

  Vasco’s father Checco, who had always been cheerful and good-natured, began to waste away. He stooped so badly that he became as bent over as a hunchback, as if some malicious demon had given him a nasty punch.

  One day Nino came to visit, and asked: “How are you, Checco?”

  “How could I be,” he replied. “This is the kind of pain that doesn’t kill you, but it tortures you every day of every month of every year, until you close your eyes.”

  No one could stop talking about the agony and death of Vasco Bruni in town; it was hard to believe or even explain. Why would a doctor have condemned a twenty-three-year-old boy to such a horrible death? Why force him to rot alive in a shield of plaster, without an explanation, without a reason?

  Vasco was, at that time, under the power of the military authorities and there was no way to have him released from that authority, so no one blamed his family. But some people in town even voiced the terrible suspicion that the doctor had wanted to punish his patient. Could he have acted so ferociously and sadistically because he believed that Vasco somehow had tried to escape the dangers and the sacrifices demanded by the war; could he have intended to make the boy regret that, somehow, he hadn’t fulfilled his duty?

  Fonso asked Doctor Munari about it one day. The whole family was shaken and wounded no end by the tormented death of Vasco, a lad they had all dearly loved.

  “Why did he have to die that way, doctor?” Fonso asked him as he was helping to weed the garden.

  “I was an army doctor myself,” Munari answered, “and even though we had to work under abominable conditions, we always tried to save the soldiers put in our care. Ask your brother-in-law Raffaele about that, if you ever run into him. He saw me at work, and I think he could tell you what kind of a doctor I was.”

  “I believe it, doctor, but we’re talking about someone else here, not you. You know how much respect I have for you, as a man and as a doctor.”

  “I thank you for that. For Maria’s brother and wife to see their son die that way . . . it’s something you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. There’s only one explanation that I can come up with. If I’m right, the doctors should certainly have deigned to tell the boy’s parents. It is probable that a latent, that is, hidden, form of bone tuberculosis developed as a consequence of the frostbitten foot and spread through his body; the doctors would have decided, in that case, to put him in a full body cast so that his bones would not crumble to pieces. Perhaps other patients had been saved using that treatment; perhaps they thought there was no other choice. Otherwise, I wouldn’t know what to think.”

  Fonso hesitated a moment before answering, trying to understand the sense of what Munari had just explained, then he said: “One thing is certain about that professor: if it were his own son, he would never have condemned him to such a cruel death.”

  The sun had gone down and Fonso had nothing more to add. He leaned the spade on his shoulder and said: “I wish you a good night, doctor.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  He spent his days with his friends in town; they all hoped that the war would end soon and that they wouldn’t be called up. Instead, the postcard arrived one day, calling Corrado to arms. He went down to the plains one last time to say goodbye to his aunts and uncles and his friends. Uncle Checco and Aunt Esterina clung to him, as if it were their Vasco, leaving again to go to war and to his death.

  “Be careful! Stay out of danger’s way, try to come back home, son. We’ll be waiting for you,” said Uncle Checco, drying his eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Don’t worry, zio, I can take care of myself,” replied Corrado. “You’ll see me again soon, you can be sure of it.” He took the bundle that Aunt Esterina had prepared for him with the cookies that Vasco liked so much, hopped onto his bicycle and disappeared at the end of the road.

  Like many of the young men who lived in mountainous areas, Corrado was assigned to an Alpino infantry division, the “Julia.”

  The Alpine soldiers were all mountain men, outfitted, armed and trained to operate on mountainous terrain, to climb wall faces and move tactically on the edge of a cliff. They were sent to Russia, to the plain along the Don River, as flat as a bread board. The reasoning was that they were more resistant to the cold.

  In his misfortune, Corrado at least had the luck of finding himself in the same battalion as a friend of his from Camporgiano named Adriano Masetti, a good guy who worked as a woodcutter and was as strong as an oak tree. They travelled with their fellow soldiers for many days and many nights by train through endless, unchanging plains which filled them with a sense of infinite desolation. Sometimes the boys would sing songs for two or three voices, harmonies inspired by the majesty of the soaring peaks, the roar of the waterfalls and the bloom of mountain meadows in the springtime, but always sad. Their songs always had that nostalgic, forsaken feel because almost all of them came from little villages where everyone knew everyone else and it was like living in one big family.

  After a two-week journey that they thought would never end, they arrived at their destination. It was the end of the summer, and they immediately realized what they would be up against. The Italian units already posted there, who had survived the winter of 1941-42, reported terrible operational conditions: insufficient equipment, unreliable fuel provisioning and clothing and footwear of very poor quality, totally unsuitable to the rigors of a Russian winter. They told of the friends they’d lost, of the hardships and hunger they’d suffered. They described the bodies of fellow soldiers found frozen to death, stiffened by the frost at their guard posts, in the gray dawns of January. Hard as slabs of salt cod. They were demoralized in the face of a reality that corresponded in no way to the images spread by propaganda, and humiliated by the disparaging attitude of their German allies.

  “In the Great War,” their officers, veterans of that conflict, would tell them, “the enemy was in front of you. Behind you, you had the Italian people, our own families, the houses in which we were born.” Here, the enemy was everywhere. The only thing that kept them alive and pushed them to fight was the hope of returning.

  Corrado was assigned to the drivers because he had worked as a mechanic before he was drafted and that made someone think that he must know something about means of transport. He learned to drive a truck, just like his Uncle Checco at Bligny, and was tasked to service the rear-line supply bases on increasingly dangerous missions. The vehicles on the supply routes were those which carried ammunition, spare parts, provisions and messages in both directions, and were thus the first to be targeted by the enemy artillery and aviation, but Corrado was a quick study and he always managed to get out of a fix with minimal damage. He soon became familiar with every secret of his truck, an ancient Isotta Fraschini with two hundred thousand kilometers under its belt that seemed to want to break down every time it took a jolt.

  Sometimes he managed to make the supply runs with his friend Adriano at his side; they would keep each other company and talk about what they would do when they got back home. There was another grea
t advantage to driving a truck: spending so many hours in the heated cab. Corrado had worked hard at isolating it with any scraps of material he could find: cardboard, rags, even some hay and straw pilfered from the izbas they found along their way. In this way, the heat remained in the cab. It seemed infinitely better, to them, to die warm with a big boom, than struggling to survive in the freezing cold with a harsh, dry, hacking cough that felt like it was splitting your chest in two.

  They spent nearly a year this way, during which everyone’s attention was focused on the Battle of Stalingrad, where other Italian army corps divisions were deployed. More than once it looked like the Russians were caving in and Corrado, who was an optimist at heart, began to hope that the war might be over soon.

  “You’re happy that the Nazis are winning?” asked Adriano with a reproachful tone.

  “My father was a socialist when you were still pissing your bed. He was persecuted by the fascists, unjustly accused of attempted murder, forced to sleep in the fields like a tramp. They burned down the family’s stable. What do you think, that I like these guys? I’m his son. I didn’t want this war but here we are. We’ve made our beds, so we must lie in them, isn’t that what they say? The sooner it’s over the happier I’ll be. Should I hope for defeat, so we can be slaughtered or be taken prisoner and sent to Siberia to die like dogs? Fighting to survive is our right, I say, no one can claim otherwise.”

  “Oh, calm down, I wasn’t trying to offend you! Are you mad at me?”

  “When you start sounding off like an idiot, I am.”

  Adriano let it drop, especially because deep down he knew that Corrado was right. But discussions of that sort soon became futile as the months passed. The winter turned out to be even more cruel than the one before; the Soviets drove the Axis powers from the ruins of Stalingrad and conducted a huge operation of encirclement. The Italian army corps began their retreat: a long black snake on the snow gray with the dust and smoke of the continuous explosions. Corrado drove his truck full of soldiers who had no shoes and whose feet were so frostbitten they could not walk. And yet those poor wretches were envied by the others who had to push forward on foot, one step after another, numb with cold and hunger. Most of them had been scattered from their original units and had lost touch with their comrades and officers. Many of them had abandoned their weapons once they ran out of ammunition. The only units which were still disciplined, armed and outfitted were the Alpine “Tridentina” division who marched at the head of the long string of men crossing the boundless fields of snow, some of the “Julia” units and another two or three battalions. No more than fifteen or sixteen thousand men in all, out of a total of sixty thousand in the Alpine army corps, but the distance from the head to the tail was so enormous that no one in the rear lines knew what was happening up ahead.