“Helmut!” breathed Constanza. Paolo said nothing. They had both reached the point where they were beyond surprise.
Helmut’s appearance was no longer that of the finely turned-out young German officer. His uniform was covered with dust and sweat, and his face was drawn with exhaustion. He shouted an order over his shoulder, and the truck driver turned off his engine. “What are you doing here?” Helmut asked angrily. “Do you realize how dangerous it is to be out here on this road? The enemy is advancing very near here.”
“I — we . . .” began Constanza, and then stopped. It was all just too difficult to explain. “I came to meet Paolo,” she continued lamely. “He’s been — he had an accident and lost his bicycle.”
“You must turn back at once,” Helmut said impatiently. “This road isn’t safe. The Partisans have planted mines everywhere. You must get back to the main road.”
“But we’ve got to get home quickly. We’re worried about my mother being on her own.”
“You should never have come out here.”
“You are retreating?”
“Yes — yes, we are retreating. My men have had no sleep for two nights now. The bridges over the Arno are being blown up, all but the Ponte Vecchio, which is blocked at both ends. General Schlemm is occupying the north of the city, and we need to make a detour to regroup farther up the river. So, as you see, this is no time for polite conversation.”
“Of course we’ll turn back if you say we must. Right away. But, Helmut”— she impulsively put out her hand to him —“before we go, I just want to say . . . I mean, I hope you get through this all right.”
This sounded ridiculously lame and schoolgirlish, she thought, but she meant it with all her heart. It came from the real affection she felt for him and the huge gratitude for the day when he had led the search party at their house and somehow managed not to notice that scrap of incriminating evidence on the floor of their cellar. She knew he had done it out of friendship, for her sake and for her family’s sake, and that it had gone against all his disciplined instincts as a German officer. Her feelings for him had nothing to do with the hatred she felt for the side he was fighting for. Sides didn’t seem very relevant at that particular moment.
He hesitated, then took her hand and held it. For a minute, all the anger left his face. He looked at her intently, as though he were trying to store something vitally important in his memory. Then he pulled away, saluted, and turned back to his men.
He ordered the truck to stay where it was. His sergeant jumped down then and brought out a mine detector. Paolo, who had been watching the scene from where he was resting his weary feet on the bank, guessed what was about to happen. Helmut and his sergeant were going to go on ahead to test the next stretch of road for mines. The Partisans tended to plant them at the sides of the road rather than in the middle, but that was by no means certain, and even with a detector, this was a dangerous operation. If the road was clear, the truck would follow.
The two men disappeared around the bend in the lane. A tense silence descended, broken only by the buzzing of cicadas. The shell fire across the valley seemed to have ceased. The men on the truck sat immobile, listening. The minutes dragged by slowly. Constanza clutched Paolo’s arm. They were all concentrating on the moment when those two men would reappear; each person was willing them to walk back around the bend.
Suddenly the silence was broken by an earsplitting roar as an explosion tore through the air. There was a blast of heat as though from an oven, and flame, earth, and foliage shot upward. Immediately several men jumped down from the truck and ran around the bend in the road. Constanza and Paolo tried to follow them, but one of the soldiers ordered them to stay back. All they could do was stand and wait.
Everything seemed to go into slow motion. At last the soldiers reappeared. Two of them were supporting the sergeant. His face was badly cut and streaming with blood. The others were carrying Helmut, his arms trailing, his body hanging limp between them. They laid him on the bank, near where Constanza and Paolo were standing, and covered him with their jackets. He lay perfectly still. Ignoring all warnings to keep back, Constanza knelt beside him. His face and shoulders were, amazingly, unharmed, but she could not bear to look at the rest of him. He was muttering, trying to say something. He put out a hand toward her and she took it. She tried to find the right reassuring words in German but found that they utterly failed her. All she could do was stroke his hand very gently and say, “Helmut . . . Helmut . . . it’s all right, Helmut.” She thought she heard him say something that sounded like “My mother . . . tell my mother . . .” He closed his eyes, then opened them again and seemed for a moment to recognize her. Meanwhile, one of the men ran to fetch a first-aid kit from the car, and another put a rolled-up shirt under Helmut’s head.
“We’ll get help,” she told him desperately. Blood was soaking copiously through the jacket that covered his legs and was spilling out onto the grass. One of his men was attempting to stanch the flow by tying a scarf tightly above what was left of his right knee. Another was trying to assist his breathing. Constanza felt useless and started to move out of the way, but he held on to her hand. He was trying to speak again, and she lowered her ear very close to his mouth, straining to catch the words, but they were garbled and unintelligible. She knew that it was only a matter of minutes before the trauma of the explosion gave way to the agony of his injuries and he would start to scream. Somebody put a water bottle to his lips, but he was unable to drink.
Then his face changed. He was no longer looking at her. He seemed focused on something farther away, something he couldn’t see clearly. Suddenly, he wasn’t looking at anything at all. His hand went limp in hers. She murmured his name again, very softly. But he didn’t hear her. It was as though something invisible had escaped, light as a feather, from his open mouth. It took her some minutes before she realized he was dead.
A few miles away, Joe was still walking. He was fairly deep into the countryside now, and the brisk pace he had attempted at the start of his journey was slowing down. He was sweating heavily, and his shoulder wound was throbbing badly. From time to time, he encountered local people on the path carrying their children and pathetically few belongings, but they were far too desperate to get away from the tide of war to take any notice of him. So far he had seen no Partisans. He had hoped to meet up with them by now. He knew they were operating openly all over this area at this point, harassing the retreating Germans and taking summary revenge on local Fascists. But where were they? Not in this particular area, it seemed.
The sun was going down. Joe began to wonder anxiously if he had taken the wrong road or missed a turn. His head was aching so much that he began to doubt his sense of direction. Some RAF planes flew overhead, and he looked up at them with grim satisfaction. It seemed like the battle for Florence was in its last stages. But here on the ground, he was far from safe. If he met up with any Germans, he would probably be shot right here on this path. One thing was sure: he was too tired to run.
He sat down for a brief rest, grateful for the bottle of water and small pack of food Rosemary had given him. The temptation to stretch out on the grass and fall asleep was enormous, but he knew he had to keep going. Constanza’s face when they had said good-bye kept coming back to him. What a heck of a sweet kid. He wished he had been able to find the words to tell her how he felt about her: her bravery, the way she held her head, her eyes — all the things he so desperately wanted to remember about her. He was well aware that being locked up all that time in the prison camp might have made him overly susceptible to the first good-looking girl he met, but he was convinced that she was special. Back in the camp, he had envied David, who had a special girl waiting for him in England, and the joy her letters gave him when those longed-for Red Cross deliveries came through. There had been girls in his own life, of course. There were always plenty of women around wherever there were army camps. But never anyone who would bother to write to him. He wondered where David was
now. Back behind the wire maybe, poor guy — if he was alive at all. Joe knew he shouldn’t be thinking about all this now. With a great effort, he heaved himself to his feet and tried to concentrate his mind and what was left of his energy on his own immediate survival. The artillery barrage seemed to be coming from the area just to the north of where he was, a constant exchange of fire. He had a nasty feeling that this plan of escape was going horribly wrong.
He had hardly begun to walk on before there came the sudden sound of an approaching vehicle. It was on him before he had time to hide. All he could do was stop stock-still in the middle of the path and face whatever was coming. A tank came rumbling around the bend, and he found himself staring into the muzzle of a gun pointing straight at him. This is it, he thought. This is the end. He held his hands up over his head and shouted, “Don’t shoot! I’m unarmed!”
There was a short pause. Then a head appeared, and a voice called out in English, “Who are you?”
“I’m Sergeant Joe Zolinski of the First Canadian Division. I’m an escaped prisoner of war, and I demand full rights under the Geneva Convention.”
“Hey! What the hell are you doing here?” came the answer. Slowly, it dawned on Joe that this was not a German speaking in English. It was a real Canadian accent, one he hadn’t heard for far too long. He took another look at the tank and realized with a sudden burst of almost unbearable joy and relief that it was not a German one but a “Grizzly”— a Canadian M4.
A soldier in Canadian uniform jumped out and walked over to him, accompanied by another, who kept him covered with a rifle, just in case. Joe kept his arms aloft, but his face broke into a huge grin. “Boy, am I glad to see you!” he said.
“We’re with the First Canadian Armored Brigade. We’re moving north. Won’t be long before we’ve got Jerry licked this side of the Arno, at least. Hop on board. We’ll give you a lift.”
It was almost midnight when Constanza and Paolo trudged up the drive. Rosemary ran out to meet them. She threw her arms around both of them, too overwhelmed with relief to say very much. All the questions could wait. The eternity she seemed to have spent praying for their safe arrival was over, and that was all that mattered.
Maria conjured up some hot water for a bath and put out something to eat. Paolo tucked in ravenously, but Constanza hardly touched what was on her plate. They were both very quiet, clearly too exhausted to relate the events of their day. Rosemary knew better than to press them now. “Thank God you’re back,” she kept saying. “Thank God.”
The moment she most dreaded came when they had finished eating and she realized that she had to break it to Paolo that Guido was dead. He broke down completely when she told him, covering his face with his hands and sobbing uncontrollably.
“How could they?” he kept repeating. “Poor, poor Guido!”
“He was always a brave dog,” Rosemary said. “And he died saving Joe’s life.”
“Those Nazi swine! I’d like to shoot them. Guido’s been my dog since I was little. He was my friend! I just can’t imagine being without him.”
There was nothing anyone could say that would console him. He wanted to run out to Guido there and then, but Rosemary had to explain that she and Maria had already buried him with the help of Maria’s nephew Renato.
“We had to do it,” she said quietly. “It was entirely necessary in this heat. We’ve made a grave for him in the garden, under the big cypress tree. When you’ve had some sleep, you can think about making something to mark the place.”
“How can I sleep now?” Paolo almost screamed. “How can I, after what’s happened to me today?” And he rushed out into the dark to find the spot where Guido was buried.
Rosemary turned desperately to Constanza. “I couldn’t let Paolo see Guido in the state he was in,” she said. “I wanted at least to spare him that.”
Constanza said nothing, but Rosemary saw that tears were coursing down her cheeks. She put an arm around her.
“We all need some sleep,” she said.
But sleep was almost impossible that night. The Germans had moved their batteries even nearer, and the Crivellis could hear great thudding explosions so close that it seemed the roof might fall in at any moment. And the electricity had been cut off.
Rosemary wondered if they should all take shelter in the cellar but in the end settled for piling some cushions on the living-room floor. It was well after one in the morning before Paolo at last reappeared, tearstained and distraught. They huddled under blankets on the makeshift mattresses — all except Maria, who had refused to leave the comfort of her own bed.
Somewhere in the early hours, Paolo and Constanza finally fell asleep, poleaxed with exhaustion. Rosemary lay wedged between them, staring into the dark. She was thinking about Franco. It was almost unbearable not to have him here with them now, and even worse to have no news of him. She wondered if Paolo and Constanza were forgetting him. They hardly ever mentioned him, which was not surprising, considering all they were going through. But right now they needed him more than ever, and so did she. And when he did come back, she wondered, what then? If they survived this war, would he expect them all to settle down to tranquil family life again? They were different people now. He had left behind two much-loved children, and he would return to a couple of young adults who had been forced to experience things from which no one, not even she, had been able to protect them.
As if to reinforce her fears, there was a particularly huge explosion. It shook the ceiling, and bits of plaster fell onto their makeshift bed. We should have gone into the cellar, she thought grimly. But she didn’t have the heart to wake the two oblivious sleepers beside her.
Lying there, tensely bracing herself for the next explosion, she found herself thinking about her mother. The Germans had boasted about their terrifying new weapons — pilotless rocket planes — with which they had attacked London and southeast England. And, with the noise of bombardment ringing in her own ears, Rosemary wondered if she would ever see her mother again.
The early dawn was just breaking when Rosemary heard Maria’s angry voice raised outside. A moment later, she came hurrying in, still wearing her dressing gown and her formidable helmetlike hairnet.
“Come quickly, signora!” she cried. “There are German soldiers in the yard demanding food! Some of them are even washing at the pump — nearly naked except for their underpants! Che vergogna!”
Rosemary struggled to her feet, careful not to wake her children. Soldiers, naked or otherwise, were the last thing she wanted to contend with at this hour, but she hurried with Maria into the yard.
The men there looked terribly demoralized, more like a rabble than a platoon of well-disciplined German infantry. Many of them had leaned their weapons against the wall while they doused themselves under the tap; others were slumped about on the ground, utterly exhausted. Rosemary glanced around for the officer in charge. At last he appeared, looking almost as disheveled as his men, and ordered them to dress themselves and form up. He gave her a perfunctory “Heil Hitler!” salute, but she noticed that his hand returned quite quickly to his revolver. He was a hard-eyed young man somewhere in his midtwenties.
“Good morning,” she said politely in German. She was thinking fast, in spite of her weariness. There had been local stories of looting, of houses ransacked, and not only for food and money but for all kinds of things such as raincoats, jewelry, watches, live fowl, and even sunglasses. There had been darker tales of violence, too. She thought of Constanza, still lying peacefully asleep on the living-room floor, and her heart turned over with fear, but she faced the officer as bravely as she could.
“We have hardly any food left,” she said. “But we do have some barley bread and fruit.”
He nodded.
“We’ll bring it out for you.” As she and Maria hurried into the kitchen, she whispered, “Whatever happens, we mustn’t let them into the house!”
The men ate ravenously and washed the food down with great gulps of water fr
om the tap. The officer’s mood seemed slightly improved after he had eaten. He eyed the back door.
“You are alone here, signora?”
“This is our family home. My husband will be back any moment now.”
“And the rest of the family?”
“Inside.”
“You have children?”
“Yes. I told you. They are inside.”
There was a tinge of insolence in his look now.
“Your German is very good.”
“Thank you.”
He paused. She could see him trying to peer in through one of the windows. She was too frightened to speak.
“We need —” he began. But he was cut off in midsentence by a shattering explosion so near that for a moment Rosemary thought the house had received a direct hit. Smoke drifted across the yard from the garden. A shell must have landed there, missing them all by only a few hundred yards.
“We seem to be very near the front line,” she said shakily.
He looked at her, half contemptuous, and she thought she had never seen so much world-weariness in such a young face.
“Signora, you are on the front line,” he said.
Then he turned to his men and barked out a few orders. They straightened up and shouldered their rifles. She and Maria watched them trudge out of the yard in ragged formation. There could be few more depressing sights, she thought, than soldiers in retreat, wondering where they would be by nightfall, or even if they would be alive at all.
All that day, the bombardment continued. In the end, it was so bad that they all went down to shelter in the cellar, taking what food they had left. They had a flashlight, and there was a little oil left in the lamps, but they decided to save them for an emergency and huddled together in the darkness. Paolo and Constanza dozed fitfully; Maria alternated between praying and complaining under her breath. The old dummy in its elaborate uniform loomed from the shadows, shuddering with every fresh explosion but still managing to remain upright. The hours dragged by. Rosemary was amazed when she looked at her watch and found that it was only four o’clock in the afternoon.
Hero on a Bicycle Page 10