by Angela Petch
Massimo was seated on his own on a bench by the centre’s vegetable patch. His eyes were closed but they opened when he heard Alba approach down the shingle path, and he beamed her a smile.
‘Come and sit down next to me, cara mia. What are you up to today?’
She hesitated before grasping one of his hands. ‘What would you think about letting me and Alfiero come to live in your house with you?’
He frowned. ‘But I thought you two were not…’
She shook her head. ‘No, no… I’m not explaining myself well.’ She started again. ‘I know how much you prefer being in your own home in Tramarecchia to living here.’
‘I was dreaming about such a thing.’ He pointed at the centre’s vegetable garden laid out like a parterre. ‘This is ornamental – it needs a good digging over and plenty of sheep letame adding. And look at those,’ he said, pointing to a line of trees with colourful, crocheted scarves wrapped around the trunks. ‘Can you explain to me what purpose those serve? They’d be far more use around our old necks…’ His laughter came out like a wheeze.
‘Let your dream come true,’ Alba continued. ‘Alfi and I can take turns to live in the house. That way, we’ll be there if you need us. To tell you the truth, Massimo, I love it there too.’ She squeezed his hand gently. ‘What do you say?’
His eyes were watery when he replied. ‘You would be my new family.’
Alba had to blink back her own tears. She stood up and pulled him to his feet. ‘Let’s go and talk to your prison governor,’ she whispered, and the old man grinned.
Ma and Babbo teased her about living with two men, but they fully backed her plan, once it was all agreed with the centre. Tanya had told her she’d never thought Massimo should be there anyway, surrounded by patients with dementia. ‘There’s nothing wrong with his head, he’s just elderly and needs a little extra help. He likes being with you, Alba,’ she said. ‘And he can come to us for the occasional weekend. That way you will have a break. We’ll see about arranging a phone line for you, too. There is a grant available for that.’
Alba was relieved she wouldn’t have to disappear halfway up the mountain for a signal on her mobile phone if ever there was an emergency. Lodovica had endorsed the idea for Alfiero, too. ‘She says it will take me out of my own problems,’ Alfiero had said when he’d phoned to confirm a day later. ‘And I like the old man. We’ll all be old one day. Hopefully somebody will look after me when I’m in need.’
A system was devised so that Alfiero covered for Alba from Tuesday through to Friday morning. Massimo moved back into the main bedroom he had occupied with Lucia, and Alba and Alfi would use the little single room in turn.
When they both helped him move in, he could not thank them enough. ‘I don’t know how to repay you.’
‘You can start by not saying thank you all the time, signor Massimo,’ Alfiero said. ‘It’s our pleasure, is it not, Alba?’
‘Of course! Now, what shall we eat tonight?’ Alba asked.
‘Tonight, we will have a party and cook steaks on the brace, with charcoal,’ Massimo said. ‘They always give me thin vegetable soup at the centre. I dream about T-bones, even if I can’t get my teeth into them.’
‘Alfiero is vegetarian,’ Alba said. ‘Just insalata for him.’
‘No way,’ came Alfi’s vehement reply.
‘That didn’t last long,’ Alba said, laughing.
As darkness fell, they sat outside the front door with Massimo wrapped up warm in the cooler evening air, and between them they finished a bottle of red.
‘Lucia liked her glass of wine,’ Massimo said, raising his glass to the stars, ‘Cin cin, tesoro mio!’ he said. ‘It was always a good way to finish off a day of work. And that is when she used to talk to me about the past. Later, when she was ill, she tended to repeat her stories and I would listen. It did her good, even if I had heard them all before.’ He turned to his young friends. ‘And now I am old, and Alba is very patient when she listens to me.’
‘Massimo, it’s not a question of patience. I love your stories, and I’m honoured to be a listener,’ Alba said. ‘Now, it’s late. We’ll get you up the stairs and I’ll leave you with Alfiero for the next few days.’
‘Alfiero is a good man,’ Massimo said when he and Alba were eating a late breakfast on the Friday, after Alfiero had left in his Alfa. ‘He’s had a hard time with that girl, and no family to help him through it.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on him. Now, what do you want to do today?’
‘Can you help me clear Lucia’s things? They’ve remained in the wardrobe since she died nearly twenty-five years ago.’ He sighed. ‘It’s the right time now, with you as my guide.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don’t want strangers rifling through her things when I am gone and commenting on her eccentricities,’ Massimo said. ‘And today it will rain, so no gallivanting to the river with your paintbrushes.’
She laughed. ‘How did you guess what I wanted to do?’
‘I’m getting to know my new family,’ he said with a twinkle.
Alba swallowed the lump in her throat and, after clearing away the dishes, she helped him upstairs.
‘You sit on the bed and I’ll put things next to you and you can tell me how you want me to sort them.’
She started with the wardrobe. There were very few clothes, mostly patched, typical wrap-around country pinafore dresses. ‘I think these are too far gone to be of use to anybody,’ Alba said, starting a pile for the bin.
She pulled out a cotton summer dress with puffed sleeves, printed with tiny poppies. ‘This is lovely, really vintage.’ She held the dress against her body. ‘We can’t throw this away. There are boutiques in Arezzo that we could sell this to. And this,’ she said, producing a white broderie anglaise blouse with pretty mother-of-pearl buttons. ‘It’s lovely.’
‘Those came in a parcel from Molly, a few months after I’d left England. I’d written, telling her how my life was working out in Italy and she sent a few things: two pairs of tweed trousers for me and half a dozen cotton shirts. And a couple of dresses for Lucia. Do you know, Lucia never wore that dress.’
‘Maybe she was jealous.’
‘She had no reason to be. In fact, Molly remarried later. Her husband, Ken, never came back and Molly’s American GI came all the way to England to fetch her after the war. We kept in touch for years, sent Christmas cards, but our correspondence petered out in the end. She was a nice girl. Wait, I have a photo of her somewhere.’
He pulled open the drawer in the bottom of the wardrobe and lifted the lining paper to produce a bundle of cards and letters tied in a ribbon. ‘Take a look through these. There should be a couple of photographs, including one of young Denis when he graduated from university. He was a mechanical engineer.’
Alba sorted through the airmail envelopes, peering at the old stamps and straggly handwriting until she found a handful of black and white photos. A pretty blonde with a snub nose and sausage curls grinned at her. She was sitting in a swing chair on the porch of a house, a little boy with a crew cut on her knee. There was another taken at a future date, with Molly, her waist a little thicker, her hair styled in a bob, arm in arm with a stocky man. Massimo peered at the photo. ‘That is Chuck, her husband.’
Most of the contents of Lucia’s wardrobe was fit only for the ragbag, but Alba tactfully told Massimo she would recycle as much as she could. It seemed sad that a lifetime’s possessions should end up as rubbish.
‘That dress and blouse,’ Massimo said. ‘Would you like them?’
‘I’d love them,’ she replied, although the dress needed to be seriously altered. The waist was tiny. ‘Grazie. I’ll treasure them.’
‘She was very thin,’ Massimo said. ‘She never really returned to the Lucia I knew when we were younger. But none of us was the same after the war.’
Twenty-Five
Tuscany, 1944
Florian was on edge all day. Tonight was the
night. It would either blow up in his face or mark the start of the rest of his war. It was hard to act normally. As he listened to Major Schmalz detailing the final elements of the planned attack on the Simoncello airdrop, he hoped that Stancko had been successful in organising cooperation from the other two partisan groups in the zone. Three quarters of the Germans at the Badia headquarters were being deployed to thwart this operation at Simoncello, and Stancko’s small band would be no match. His insides were churning. He glanced at his watch. Only three more hours until it would all kick off.
On his latest visit to Stancko and the partisans, they had huddled round a portable wireless in the house up on the Mountain of the Moon, listening to General Alexander, Supreme Allied Commander, entreating the Italian resistance to double its efforts.
‘L’Italia Combatte’ – Italy fights back – was the title of the message, relaying to covert radio stations all over Italy that the Gothic Line would probably be the last line of German resistance against the Allies and northern Italy.
‘Those of you in German-occupied territories,’ the General had said in so many words, ‘do as much as possible to destroy transportation of German arms in whatever way you can. The work you are doing is good. This is the right time to act. The German soldiers are discouraged and tired and have diminishing means of transport. Do not blow up bridges or damage roads, but attack troops and hinder their transport. Observe carefully where they lay mines and which direction their cannons are pointing. Find out where their munitions and fuel stores are. Gather the information and send it to us and, if you can, destroy these stores…’
‘The timing is perfect,’ Stancko said to his group as the announcement came to an end. He ordered the wireless to be moved immediately to another location. ‘We all know what we have to do, and we will do it well,’ he told the group. For the first time, he shook hands with Florian, his grip firm. When he spoke Florian’s name and thanked him in German, his accent was perfect, and Florian realised he had been accepted by a fellow defector.
* * *
Back in Badia Tedalda, Florian was making progress with his part in the combined plan. He had jumped down from the truck where he was nervously waiting with twenty other soldiers.
‘Don’t wait for me, I’ll hitch a ride on another truck,’ he said to the driver. He clutched his stomach and swore. ‘That shitty sausage I ate yesterday. It’s rotting my guts. I need to crap again.’
There was nervous laughter from the men, and he heard one of them comment that he too was scared. Florian let the comment go. The least fuss at this stage of the game, the better. He raced towards the toilet block, and when he was out of sight of the trucks, he ran up the stairs to a toilet on the second floor of the empty barracks where he had concealed a Sten gun with a noise suppressor. He had no intention of jumping onto any vehicle any time soon.
From the window, he watched the movements in the square outside the former town hall where the swastika flag fluttered gently in the breeze. A military Mercedes had drawn up outside the main entrance and an officer, new to Florian, emerged from the passenger seat. He noted the insignia on the man’s field uniform and raised his eyebrows as he recognised the high rank of general. Major Schmalz came down the steps to greet him and both men saluted the Reich and entered the building. Florian hoped there were no last-minute changes being made.
Fifteen minutes later, four trucks crammed with soldiers left the square along the main route in the direction of Simoncello. Florian waited until the piazza was empty, slipped down the stairs and made his way along the shadows of the buildings towards the munitions store.
Korporal Weber was on guard again, as expected, but Florian observed another soldier with him. His heart sank, cold fear filling his chest. It would be harder to deal with two men on his own. He checked with his fingers for the knife in his boot. Adrenaline kicked in, his heartbeat pulsating in his ears. Hidden in the shadows of the doorway to the closed butcher’s shop, Florian watched the two men patrol back and forth in front of the entrance to the munitions store. He waited until the second guard was at some distance and then emerged from his hiding place.
When Weber smiled at him in welcome, he returned the greeting, drawing closer as if to shake the man’s hand. Instead, he stuck his knife in deep just below Weber’s ribs, angling it to his heart. There was a muffled scream as Florian tugged the knife out and stuck it in again from the side. As the dead man slumped to the floor, the second guard turned and quickened his pace, his rifle extended. But Florian was ready. The silencer on his gun sounded a dull thud in the night. It was followed by a second thud as the dying guard followed Weber to the dirt.
Moving quickly, Florian used his knife for a second time as the guard’s face registered horror in a silent scream. With a last gurgle, he was gone too. Florian refused to think of these men as individuals. Instead he focused on the image of the dead boy cradling his father’s body and the way Weber had boasted of the killing in the canteen later, while stuffing food into his mouth. Florian felt a strange satisfaction that a wrong had been righted.
With shaking hands, he fumbled for the key to the munitions store and dragged both bodies inside, out of sight. Then he emerged, checking there was no movement outside, willing his fingers to stop trembling. He flashed his torch twice in the direction of the woods above the store. On-off, on-off. Within seconds, Stancko and six of the band were inside the store and loading up sacks with everything they could manage. Florian urged them to hurry and then concentrated on positioning the Torpex sticks towards the boxes in the centre of the store. He unwrapped the wire from around his waist and, after attaching it to the dynamite, moved backward as slowly and steadily as his thumping heart would allow. He swore softly as he almost tripped over the dead bodies of the German guards. Then, with a nod from Stancko, he bent to light the fuse and the men stepped out of the door, pulling it to.
In ten minutes the men were up the hill, moving with stealth through the woods away from Badia with their loads. After fifteen minutes, there was a huge explosion and the sky lit up like celebration fireworks. The men punched the air and then dispersed, carrying their spoils through the dark forest.
* * *
Florian made his way up to the cave where he had arranged to meet Lucia. Seccaroni would be his new billet from now on, but first he wanted time to be alone with his Tuscan girl. There was extra weight to his load as he hurried up the path, his rucksack pulling on his shoulders with the special gift he had secreted from the art store. God only knew if there would be another chance to hand it over.
She was standing at the back of the cave when he pulled aside the creepers and she moved forward with a cry. ‘You’re safe, you’re safe! I’ve been out of my mind.’ She threw herself into his outstretched arms and he hugged her close, his body trembling now not with fear but desire.
‘I heard the explosion,’ she said. ‘The sky lit up and I was so afraid you wouldn’t come back.’
‘It went well,’ he told her, sparing the details of the two guards he had killed. ‘Let’s hope the same is true of the next mission. The guns and ammunition we acquired tonight should help, and Schmalz will have to halt movements while he waits for more men and supplies to arrive.’
‘Florian, I’m afraid…’
He stopped her words with feverish kisses, and she clung tighter, returning his passion with her own. Then, she pushed him away and started to unbutton her shirt.
‘Are you sure?’ he whispered, gazing at her breasts.
‘I’ve never been so sure in all my life.’
* * *
Afterwards, she lay in his arms while he slept. In repose, the worry lines on his brow were gone. His body was well toned, lean and strong but his skin was pale, compared with the countrymen she’d seen working in the fields, and washing at the fountain afterwards, their mahogany-brown torsos glistening with sweat and water in the sun.
What she had done with Florian this evening might seem wrong. It went against everything she
had been taught by the priest and her mother. You never made love to your husband before marriage – not before a ceremony conducted in church when vows were officially exchanged. But she didn’t care a lira. Florian had made her feel alive, and none of what he had done to her felt wrong. Her whole body sang with passion; the pain that throbbed inside her was a gift from him and she wanted more. She blew softly on his face to wake him, giggling as he shook his head as if to ward off an insect. She moved even closer to leave a butterfly kiss on his cheek with her eyelashes. This time he woke, and caught hold of her arms, threatening to tickle her if she didn’t behave. They gazed deep into each other’s eyes and kissed again.
‘I think I love you,’ he whispered to her as he nibbled her ear.
‘You only think?’
‘All right, I love you, and if I had the powers to magic away the war, then I would see you every day. We would slowly discover one another, you would introduce me to your parents, and then…’
She waited for him to continue but he lay back, his arms behind his head.
‘And then?’ she asked.
‘I don’t have those magic powers.’
‘But we can make our own magic,’ she said, sitting astride him, pinning him with her body.
‘Those eyes, those green eyes,’ he said. ‘They’ve put a spell on me.’
‘My lovely old nonno used to say I must be descended from a Saracen pirate because of my eyes. My family travelled down to the coast each winter with their animals on the transumanza, and he joked that it must have happened then. He was always teasing my nonna about running off with the pirates instead of planting artichokes, while he was tending the sheep. But it was only a joke. They loved each other very much. Would you object if I had pirate blood?’ She leant forward to kiss him again, but with much self-control, he stopped her.