Hero on a Bicycle
Page 9
Hilaria was becoming shrill with impatience.
“But you don’t understand, Constanza! After they’d been to search your house, I felt so awful. I mean, I may have let drop something about my suspicions to Aldo at some point. It was silly of me, I know. It just slipped out as a kind of joke when I was talking to him. He was — you know — leading me on to gossip about you and your family. He seemed sort of curious. But what I’ve come to tell you is that today I heard him talking to Colonel Richter on the phone. Aldo mentioned your mother’s name, so I picked up the extension and I heard the colonel say her name was on some sort of list — a Gestapo list — of people who might be helping the Partisans. And that means she could be shot, Constanza! The colonel said he was sending soldiers back again to make another search. Really soon — today, probably. So you’ve just got to get away — all of you — right now!”
At that moment, they heard a couple of urgent honks from the waiting car.
Hilaria hurriedly brushed away her tears and shook out her hair. “I’ve simply got to go. I’ll see you again, I expect — when all this is over.” She made an attempt to take Constanza’s hands again but was met with a stony response.
“Good-bye, Hilaria.”
“I’ll send you a postcard with my new address. But I don’t expect it’ll arrive. . . .”
“I said good-bye.”
There was another honk on the horn. Hilaria hesitated uncertainly for a moment, then turned and ran off down the drive, unsteady on her high heels, waving over her shoulder but not looking back.
Constanza stood still in the doorway, her eyes tightly closed and her fists clenched. Then she ran inside to find her mother and warn Joe.
“I’ll be OK, honest,” said Joe. He was scrambling into the workman’s coat and cap he had worn for his previous escape. Rosemary was stuffing a bottle of water and what food they could spare into a shoulder bag.
“When you get to the main road, go in the opposite direction from Florence,” she told him. “Most people will be trying to get to the north of the city to avoid the fighting. Just keep going until you come to one of the paths that leads up into the hills. The Partisans are in control there.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Constanza. “Part of the way, at least.”
Rosemary dropped the bag.
“Constanza — you can’t! It’s far too dangerous!”
“We’ll be less likely to be noticed as a couple,” said Constanza. “I can do all the talking if we’re stopped. Then as soon as we’re clear, Joe can go on alone and make for the hills, and I’ll come straight back.”
“No, Constanza. I won’t let you, and that’s final!”
“Your mom’s right,” said Joe. “I can manage fine on my own, and once I’ve contacted the Partisans, they’ll help me.”
But he looked pale and shaky, hardly fit for a long walk in the punishing heat, let alone another possible encounter with German soldiers on the way.
Constanza had a look on her face that her mother knew well, one that since childhood had signaled a steely determination to accomplish exactly what she had made up her mind to do — it nearly always resulted in her getting her own way. She was already taking Maria’s shawl from the peg and pulling it around her shoulders.
“We’ll need some money,” she said, “and —” But she was cut short by the sound of wheels on the gravel outside the front door and a voice shouting orders in German. It seemed that the search party had arrived even earlier than expected. Rosemary ran into the hall. This time there was no polite ring at the doorbell and no Colonel Richter or Lieutenant Gräss to engage in conversation. The door was simply flung open, and a German army sergeant burst in, followed by four army privates with rifles at the ready.
Rosemary confronted them as bravely as she could.
“What do you want?” she asked in German.
The sergeant was a man in his early thirties, well built but already running to fat. He had the weary, short-tempered look of a professional soldier who had not had any leave for a very long time.
“Have you a warrant to come in here?” she asked him, coolly polite. “A very thorough search of this house has already been made, you know.”
“We’re under orders from the Gestapo to make a further search. There’s been another report made to headquarters that you may be hiding Allied servicemen, enemies of the Reich, here, and aiding their escape.”
“There’s nobody here but myself, my children, and my maid, Maria.”
The sergeant didn’t answer but motioned briskly with his rifle for two of his men to start their search upstairs. Then, followed by the other two, he pushed past her and hurried down the passage that led to the kitchen.
We’re finished, thought Rosemary, with a great pang of desperation. This is the end of everything. She felt sick with fear.
Maria emerged from the kitchen, complaining shrilly and attempting to bar their way, but she was soon thrust aside. They pushed open the door — and found Constanza sitting alone at the long wooden table with a plate of grapes and some bread in front of her. She looked up with a fawnlike expression of innocent alarm that would have melted the heart of the most battle-weary soldier. The sergeant muttered something at her as the soldiers began their search of the room, the pantries, and the laundry room. Rosemary caught her breath with relief when she noticed that the door to the yard was ajar. Constanza must have gotten Joe out of the way just in time.
Upstairs, the other soldiers were going through the house from top to bottom. This time they made no attempt to restore the chaos they were leaving behind them. They were extremely thorough. They paid particular attention when they reached the cellar.
Rosemary and Constanza went to the top of the stairs and watched, huddled together, as they ransacked their way through it, shining flashlights into every corner. All the junk that had been carefully put back in front of Joe’s hiding place was pulled away, and the poor old uniformed dummy toppled. There was a cry of triumph when they found the little door to the wine store. The soldiers took aim with their rifles as the sergeant flung it open. There was an awkward pause when they found it empty. One of the men swore under his breath but was barked into silence by the sergeant.
“There’s nobody here, as you see,” said Rosemary in loud, clear German. “Colonel Richter’s party was here before, as you know, and found nothing, because there’s nothing to find. I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. But perhaps you would like to make a further search of the garden and sheds? I want it on record that we have been absolutely cooperative.”
She caught Constanza’s eye with a glance that said “Where is he?” but there was no flicker of response. The two women stood aside as the search party trooped back up the cellar stairs. The sergeant was angry and still suspicious. Without another word to Rosemary, he ordered his men outside and then stamped out after them. They heard him shouting orders as the soldiers fanned out across the dried-up garden, beating bushes and trampling over what used to be Rosemary’s flower beds, working their way toward the sheds and the yard. Rosemary and Constanza waited inside. Rosemary took Constanza’s hand. It trembled in hers as they both stood there, listening, hardly able to move.
They could hear Guido’s frantic barking from the yard. Then there were shots, and Constanza’s brave reserve broke down. She clung to her mother, burying her face in her shoulder.
There was a long, terrible silence, then a lot of shouting. At last the sergeant reappeared at the front door. He ordered his men to bring the truck around. The soldiers climbed in. When they were all on board, the sergeant slung his rifle over his shoulder and turned to the two women. His face was expressionless. “Heil Hitler,” he said, then saluted, jumped into the truck beside the driver, and gave orders to move on.
Rosemary was very pale. Slowly, as though her feet were weighted down, she went to the door and looked after them.
“He was in the yard,” whispered Constanza, then covered her face with her hands.
“Don’t come — don’t. Stay inside,” she insisted. “It would be much better, really. Please.”
But Constanza took no notice.
The yard was weirdly silent. And there, lying stretched out on the ground as far away from his kennel as his leash would allow, lay Guido’s dead body. He had been shot three times in the head. The flies were already beginning to collect in the jagged hole where his eyes had once been and on the sticky mess of blood and brains that was seeping from it onto the ground beneath. Constanza made a kind of strangled cry. She stood stock-still beside Rosemary for a moment, then she knelt down and very gently touched his blood-soaked fur.
“Guido,” she said in a very low voice. She turned to the kennel. There was a movement inside, and Joe crawled out from the dark interior. He squatted beside her and put his good arm around her shoulders.
“Poor old Guido,” he said. “He knew he was protecting me, and he put up a great fight. He barked and snarled and pulled on his chain until it nearly choked him. So one of those swine put three bullets into him. And not one of them thought of looking inside the kennel.”
Tears had begun to course down Constanza’s cheeks. She was too distraught to wipe them away.
“It was the only place I could think of for you to hide,” she said.
“He saved my life,” said Joe. “You and Guido both.”
With Maria’s help, Constanza and Rosemary wrapped Guido’s body in a sheet and dragged him out of the yard to one of the sheds, where it was cool and quiet.
“We’ll have to bury him quickly,” said Rosemary. “If only Paolo . . .” Then she stopped short. The thought of Paolo’s reaction to Guido’s death, on top of everything else, was almost more than she could bear.
Maria was unexpectedly calm in the face of death. She stopped her customary flood of scolding and complaints, led Rosemary into the kitchen, and sat her down at the table. While she was looking in the cupboard to see if there was any coffee left, Rosemary suddenly slumped sideways on her chair, covering her eyes with her hand.
“I’m sorry, Maria — I seem to be feeling faint. . . . Could you . . . ?”
Maria caught her as she fell.
When she came around she was lying on the living-room sofa with Maria bending over her.
“I’m all right, really,” she said, attempting to prop herself up on her elbow. “It was silly of me. . . .”
“Rimanga qui, signora! Stay there a little. You’ve had too much for anyone to take today.”
“If I could have a glass of water?”
“Surely, surely. I’ll get it. Stay there and rest.”
“But I can’t. I mustn’t. If only Paolo would come home. He really ought to be back by now. And Constanza and Joe — where are they?”
“Not in the house. In the yard, perhaps. I’ll get them for you.”
She hurried away. But the yard, house, and garden were silent and empty. Constanza and Joe had already set out, hand in hand, and were on the road, making their way amid the steadily building stream of people who were fleeing from the fighting.
The late-afternoon sun was suffocatingly hot. The road was clogged with cyclists, families pushing handcarts that groaned under the weight of their belongings, and nuns shepherding groups of children. Motorists were honking their horns and trying to edge forward through the crowd. Weary Italian soldiers, some wounded, were trudging north in an attempt to rejoin their units. Everyone was too intent on their own survival to pay much attention to anyone else. The sound of shell fire was alarmingly near now, sometimes spasmodic, sometimes a sustained barrage that shook the ground under their feet. A convoy of army trucks packed with soldiers suddenly rounded the bend, followed by a couple of machine-gun carriers, and everyone scattered as they forced their way through. Joe put his good arm protectively around Constanza.
“I shouldn’t have let you do this,” he said.
“But I wanted to,” she insisted.
“And I wanted it, too. But it was selfish of me, I guess. I just couldn’t say good-bye to you in the yard after what happened and all you’ve done for me.”
Constanza said nothing. She just shook her head and smiled. They walked on in silence, keeping up a steady pace until they reached the spot from which the path led off into the hills. Here, Joe stopped and said, “I’m not letting you come any farther. This is where we have to say good-bye.”
“Is your shoulder OK?”
“Yeah, it’ll be fine.”
“The Partisans are coming out of hiding now. They’re very strong in this area, and the local people won’t bother you. Just make sure they know you are Canadian.”
“I’ll let you know where I end up if — I mean, when I get through. I’ll write you. I’m not much good at letters, but —”
“I am. I’ll write back. It’ll be good for my English!”
“I’m no good at saying how I feel. It all turns out like a lot of garbage from some bad movie. Especially when I look at you, your eyes, and the way you push your hair back over your ears like that, like a kid. How old are you, anyway?”
“Nearly seventeen.”
“I’m so much older than you.”
“How old?”
“Twenty-one. But fighting a war’s an aging business, I guess. You have to shut down such a lot of yourself, just concentrate on staying alive. In the camp, the only thing that keeps you going is the dream of what you’ll do when you get out — imagining someone like you. . . .”
“I hate this war. I hate you and me and my family having to be in it. I hate hardly being able to remember what things were like before it all began. Oh, Joe, do you think we’ll ever be able to go dancing?”
“Sure. Sure we will.”
“I’ll think about it. I’ll imagine the dress I’ll wear.”
“And I’ll imagine you wearing it.”
“Now you’ve got to go.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to go.”
He put both his arms around her, and, ignoring his poor shoulder, they clung together with a kind of fierce desperation. It was an awkward embrace, but the kiss that followed was the world-shaking kind, the kind that goes down in history, the kind you always remember. When Joe had gone a little way up the road, he turned to wave to her, but she was already walking away, very fast. She didn’t turn around.
Constanza managed to walk some distance from the spot where she had left Joe before she began to cry. She kept on walking, half blinded by tears and wiping them away with the palms of her hands because she had no handkerchief. She was thinking about Joe kissing her, and the possibility that she might never see him again, and then about the horror of Guido’s death, still so raw in her mind, and about the whole frightening mess that she and her family were in, and there being nothing, nothing, to look forward to now except the end of this horrible war, and heaven knew when that would be.
Up until then, she had always thought of the day she had said good-bye to Babbo — not then fully understanding why he had to leave them — as the blackest in her life. But that seemed like a long time ago, when she had still been almost a child. She felt far older now, and everything had gotten far, far worse.
When she reached the main road, she found it more crowded than ever. She tried to jostle through, but nobody was in the mood to give way, and she only just managed to avoid being pushed into the ditch by a man and his wife leading a horse and cart piled high with assorted furniture, a pen full of live chickens, some cooking pots, and a large mattress with two children and a dog perched on top. Constanza stopped for a moment, exhausted, her tears still coming as though there were no end to them. Then she heard someone call her name. For a moment she thought Joe had come back to find her, and her heart leaped with joy. Then she realized that it was an even more familiar voice.
“Paolo!” she shouted back.
She could see his head bobbing along some way off. He was waving.
“Oh, Paolo — thank God!”
They struggled toward each other. Paolo looked every bit as exhausted as she was, and he was clearly so close to tears that she stopped crying and hugged him.
“Paolo — where have you been all this time? Where’s your bicycle?”
“I lost it. I mean, I gave it to someone.”
“Gave it? What on earth . . . ? But let’s get out of this crowd, and you can tell me about it. This road’s hopeless. I think we should go around the other way, take the back road and cut across to the farm. We’ve got to hurry. Mamma’ll be worried sick.”
This was clearly not the time to tell him all that had happened at home that day, and especially not about Guido. As they doubled back, Paolo began to pour out a rather incoherent account of his own exploits, but when he tried to explain what had happened to his bicycle, he could not go on. He fell silent, and Constanza didn’t press him. They kept walking by sheer effort of will, their legs sore and tired; one strap on Constanza’s flimsy sandal had broken and Paolo was hardly able to put one foot in front of the other. When they reached the side road, they found it unusually deserted.
“It’s a longer walk, but it’ll take us less time now we’re clear of all those people,” said Constanza. Paolo was too weary to answer. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two aircraft ripped through the sky overhead, and there was a series of earsplitting explosions as three bombs hit the hillside just across the valley. A barn caught fire, and heavy smoke began to drift toward them. Instinctively, they covered their heads with their hands.
“Allied planes,” said Paolo, “harassing the German retreat. Those planes are trying to knock out their gun emplacements.”
“Come on, Paolo — let’s try to go faster,” urged Constanza. “I can’t bear to think of Mamma being alone at home with only Maria.”
She quickened her pace, and Paolo stumbled along behind her. They could hear the noise of heavy gunfire, frighteningly near. Then there was the sound of vehicles coming up the road behind them. A truckload of German soldiers bumped into view, followed by an armored car with an officer and a sergeant on board. Paolo and Constanza drew back into the hedge to let them pass, but they pulled up a few feet away. The officer jumped out of the car and strode toward them.