Hero on a Bicycle

by Shirley Hughes

  At last she drifted into sleep. She had no idea how long she had slept when she was suddenly jerked awake by the sound of someone moving in the yard.

  “Hello?” It was a man’s voice, unmistakably speaking in English. “Hello? Is there anyone there?”

  She jumped up, panic-stricken. Leaving the others still sleeping, she ran upstairs to the kitchen, flung open the back door, and called out, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  It was dark outside. A figure in uniform stepped forward and saluted briskly.

  “Ah, you speak English! Splendid!” he said, and held out his hand. “Captain Roberts. I’m a signals officer attached to the Sixth South African Armored Division. Terribly sorry if I frightened you. I just wasn’t sure if this place was empty or not.”

  “I am Signora Crivelli, and I am English. This is my home. Are you an escaped prisoner?”

  “Oh, no, no! Not at all. Quite the reverse. Didn’t you know? Since noon today, this area has been in Allied hands. We’re already in Florence, occupying the south of the city. I’m afraid I’ve come to ask you to accommodate my men here on your grounds and around the house. We’ll need to set up a communications center, rooms for my wireless operators, and so forth. We’ll try not to be too much of a nuisance.”

  A nuisance! Rosemary’s first impulse was to fling her arms around him and welcome him with tears of joy, but she managed to restrain herself. Instead, she held the door open wide and said, “Delighted to see you, Captain Roberts. Do come in!”

  Early the next morning, Paolo emerged into the sunlight to find the drive full of army vehicles and soldiers all over the yard, putting up tents. The whole place was such a hive of activity that it helped take his mind off the sadness of Guido’s death. He wandered around, watching the work and trying out his English.

  It took some time for the wonderful reality of the situation to sink in: the Nazi occupation was over. The battle for Florence had been fought bloodily, street by street, by Partisans and trained soldiers alike. The sound of artillery fire was still clearly audible in the hills surrounding the city, and there was a lot of aircraft activity overhead. But the scent of victory was in the air, and now, perhaps, that hated swastika would be gone from the Piazza del Publico forever.

  Avoiding the spot where Guido was buried, Paolo went to look at the big torn-up crater in the vegetable garden where the shell had landed the day before. It had been a very near thing. It could have so easily been a direct hit.

  At last, realizing that he was achingly hungry, he went into the kitchen, where he found Maria in high spirits, putting away food.

  “Look at this, Paolo! Look at what the soldiers have given us! Flour, ham, olive oil, cheese, and coffee, as well as all this canned stuff! Che meraviglia!” Joyfully she held up a can of corned beef. “We’ve got some milk, too. I managed to get across to the farm early this morning. Sit down and have some breakfast. Your mamma and Constanza are still asleep.”

  After he had eaten, Paolo went to watch Captain Roberts and his team at work. They had completely cleared the dining room and were busy setting up their wireless equipment. He longed to ask all kinds of questions about how it operated, but he was too shy to bother them. Instead, he hung around in the background, trying to keep out of their way, thrilled to be looking on at the purposeful Captain Roberts’s world and, even better, knowing that they were Allied soldiers who were not to be feared. The memories of that sunbaked village square, the packed, sweating crowd awaiting that summary execution, still haunted him. They kept running and rerunning in his head, a sequence of sinister, surreal images that wouldn’t go away. He wondered what had happened to Il Volpe and his fellow Partisans. Had they managed to escape or had they been shot, or hanged from lampposts, like so many of their comrades? More selfishly, he also wondered what had happened to his bicycle.

  The whole family was drinking coffee in the kitchen — coffee, the first proper cup they had tasted for a long time — when they heard the sound of cheering coming from the road. Constanza and Paolo ran out to see what was happening. All the local people who had not evacuated to a safer zone were outside. There was great excitement.

  “Is it the Canadians?” asked Constanza, full of hope and thinking of Joe.

  “No, no! The Partisans! They’re out in the open, showing themselves at last — heading toward the city!”

  Constanza and Paolo craned their necks as the procession came into view riding in trucks, open cars, and armored personnel carriers. It was a ragged army, wearing patched trousers, shabby caps, berets, and sweat-stained shirts, with ammunition belts slung around their shoulders. Able at last to proudly display their red bandanas, they waved their rifles and fired bullets into the air to acknowledge the cheering. Women handed them flowers. Girls kissed them. Then the cry went up: “Il Volpe! Il Volpe!” And there he was on the open truck — bare head, haggard face, foxy eyes, red beard, and all — surrounded by his henchmen and triumphantly acknowledging his rightful acclaim.

  Paolo cheered himself hoarse with the rest. He had not quite forgotten that menacing encounter in the hills — the punch in the stomach, the guns prodding him in the back. But that seemed like another era, a time when he had been so much more innocent about the brutalities of war. He knew about them now, all right. It wasn’t a simple matter of the good guys and the bad guys — that was certain. But still, he cheered.

  The crowd surged toward the truck on which Il Volpe was riding, slowing it down. Everyone was reaching up their hands to shake his and yelling, “Viva, viva! Viva Il Volpe!”

  It was only a short holdup. But in that brief moment, Il Volpe spotted Paolo. And, as in their desperate confrontation in the piazza, when death had come so close, they looked each other straight in the eye over the sea of heads. Il Volpe raised his hand in a salute and called out something, but Paolo couldn’t catch the words. Then the truck moved on, making its way in triumph toward Florence.

  Paolo and Constanza walked home in silence, both too dazed to talk. But Paolo felt a new comradeship between them, maybe something to do with her acceptance of him as a fellow adult instead of a kid brother. And he guessed that a great deal had happened to her recently that was very private to her and not to be shared with anyone. When they reached the house, she went straight to her room and he heard the familiar sound of her gramophone.

  He wandered off toward the yard. The pain of seeing Guido’s empty kennel had to be faced, and he wanted to make sure that the soldiers hadn’t moved it. Another dog might live in it one day, but there would never, ever be one as faithful and brave and as true a friend as Guido. Paolo was already planning to use Babbo’s wood-carving tools to carve a really beautiful panel for the grave. Perhaps when the war was over, they would even have a marble headstone. On his way to the yard, he passed the bicycle shed. He walked on, then stopped dead in his tracks. He retraced his steps and again stood still in amazement. There, propped up against Maria’s old bone shaker, was his beloved bicycle!

  He pulled it out and looked at it. It had been cleaned. He clasped the handlebars as though it was some wonderful mirage that might suddenly disappear. He tried the brakes and found that they were working beautifully. Then he noticed a sheet of roughly torn paper pushed under the seat. He unfolded it and read: RETURNED WITH THANKS. There was no signature. A British army corporal passed by, carrying a pile of boxes. He stopped and said casually, “Your bike, is it?”

  “Yes . . . yes. I thought I’d lost it.”

  “Valuable things, bikes, these days.”

  “Do you know how it got here?”

  “Oh, yes — didn’t anyone tell you? Some Italians brought it here very early this morning — before dawn, it was. Didn’t speak any English, and the sentry who stopped them doesn’t speak a word of their lingo. But they managed to explain that they were returning the bike.”

  “What sort of men were they?”

  “Partisans, by the look of them. Rifles, red scarves around their necks, and that. They’re all ove
r the place around here now.”

  “Was one of them a red-haired guy with a beard?”

  The man shrugged. “Can’t say. I wasn’t around at the time. You can ask the sentry when he comes back on watch again.”

  “Thanks. I will.”

  “You’ve got your bike back, anyway. That’s the main thing, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Paolo happily. “Yes, it certainly is.”

  Rosemary was walking to church in the evening sunshine. A night’s sleep in her own bed had done wonders for her morale. There had been an important Mass that Sunday morning for the entire village, which she had attended with Constanza and Paolo, but now she was going alone to say her own private prayers. She was full of gratitude, relieved beyond words that her two children were safe. What did she care now that soldiers were all over her house, creating chaos, encamped in what had once been her garden, pitching their tents and setting up field kitchens, shouting orders, installing their equipment, and, from time to time, stretching out wearily on the grass? The house was still standing, and Constanza and Paolo were alive, and right now that was all that mattered. She felt a strong need to give thanks. She might lack her mother’s rock-solid faith — her father’s and Franco’s skepticism were still a powerful influence on her — but even so, she clung to her church.

  It was a quiet, thinly attended Mass. Maria’s brother Mario and his wife were there with their two daughters and their youngest son, Renato. Prayers were said for the archbishop of Florence, Cardinal Dalla Costa, who had stood up so courageously against the Nazis during the occupation, offering to take the place of some of his nuns when they were arrested for harboring Jewish women. There were a few Allied servicemen in the congregation as well, and afterward they stood outside in the sunshine, exchanging greetings with the local people just as the German officers had done such a little time ago.

  Rosemary was on her way home when she realized that Mario was following close behind her. He was alone. His family had gone in the opposite direction, back to the farm to make the supper. When she turned to greet him, she saw that he was terribly troubled and there were tears in his eyes.

  “Mario, is everything all right?”

  “Signora Crivelli — please — I need to speak to you.”

  “Of course. Won’t you come back to the house? It’s rather chaotic up there, as you know, but we could find a quiet place somewhere, I’m sure.”

  “No, no. I’d rather not. I must say what I have to right here.”

  “Tell me what’s wrong, Mario. You’re not in trouble?”

  Mario’s face crumpled, and he began to weep.

  “I have something to tell you, something I have already confessed to the priest,” he said. “It’s about that time when Renato was arrested by the Gestapo . . . that terrible day when they took him to their interrogation headquarters in Florence.”

  “Of course, I remember it only too well. And how relieved we all were when he was released.”

  “But it was not quite as you think. Not at all. They threatened Renato with torture, you see. A boy not yet seventeen! They told us beforehand what they were going to do to him if we didn’t cooperate.”

  “Cooperate? How do you mean?”

  “This is what I have to tell you. They already suspected very strongly that you and your children were helping Allied prisoners of war to escape. They said they knew all about you being English and an enemy to Italy, and about how your husband had run away to aid the Partisans and left you to fend for yourselves here. They said you were all traitors.”

  “I knew that. We’ve always been suspect. But they searched the house and found nothing.”

  “Then they returned a second time.”

  “Yes. We’re pretty sure we were betrayed by someone locally. A friend of my daughter Constanza’s perhaps. Some careless talk . . .”

  “It was I who told them, Signora Crivelli.”

  “You, Mario?”

  “Yes, yes. I knew what you were doing, you see. My sister Maria, she would never betray you. She loves you all too dearly. But she’s not very good at hiding things. It was not difficult to guess.” He paused, wiped his face, then went on in a very low voice. “We cooperated. We told the Gestapo that you were hiding an Allied serviceman in your cellar and that if they made a second search, they would find him. We had to tell them — we had to! If it had been your boy, wouldn’t you have done the same? They would have tortured Renato to death. Killed him in the most horrible way. So we told them. And they stuck to their side of the bargain. Renato was released.”

  There was a long silence. In Rosemary’s mind was the picture of what might have happened to Paolo on the night of the botched escape if he and Joe had been caught. Or to all of them if Joe’s hiding place had been discovered. At last she said, “It seems we’ve all been forced to do a great many things we’ve hated doing, Mario. And I’m glad Renato’s safe. That we’re all safe, at least for the time being.”

  He took both her hands.

  “Thank you, thank you, Signora Crivelli. I knew you would try to understand. And you won’t tell Maria, will you? I couldn’t bear her to know what we did.”

  “No, of course not. This will remain a secret between your family and mine, I promise.”

  “You are a true Christian, Signora Crivelli, a true Christian. E una signora molto simpatica.”

  He clasped both her hands and said good-bye. She watched him trudge off down the path toward his supper. Then she turned and walked slowly home.

  “So it wasn’t Hilaria who told them that second time,” said Constanza. “I so hated her that day when she came to say good-bye, when the Albertinis were leaving for Como. But she’d come specially, to warn us.”

  “Joe wouldn’t have gotten away if she hadn’t,” Rosemary said. “And if he’d been found here . . .” She didn’t go on. It was no use dwelling on that prospect.

  The three of them were huddled together in Babbo’s little study, which was now the only place in the house where they could be alone and have a little privacy. It was late and Maria had taken herself off to bed some time ago. The wireless operators were at work in the living room, but the rest of the house was relatively quiet.

  “You two must never, ever mention to anyone what Mario told me today,” Rosemary told them. “It has to be forgotten. I know you’re both old enough to understand that. Above all, Maria must never know.”

  “Of course, Mamma. We’re not kids anymore, you know. Though you sometimes seem to think so,” said Paolo. Recovering his precious bicycle had gone a long way toward restoring his spirits. “All the same, I can’t understand why you ever wanted Hilaria as a friend, Constanza. They’re a terrible family. I was glad to see the back of them. Though there’s a rumor in the village that Aldo, the Chinless Wonder, is still around in Florence. He’s set himself up as a supplier of all sorts of stuff to the Allied forces now — food, machine parts, toilet paper. Heaven knows where he’s getting it from. But he’s making himself so useful that everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten he was an out-and-out Fascist sympathizer and probably still is.”

  “We can’t hold Hilaria responsible for the things her brother does,” said Rosemary. “She didn’t have to come by that day. We owe her a great debt.”

  Constanza nodded her agreement. But she was in no mood to argue with Paolo. Since the day of Joe’s departure, she had been very quiet and withdrawn, sitting alone in her room, listening to her precious gramophone. Rosemary knew that she was finding Helmut’s violent death very hard to get out of her mind, and now there was this heart-sinking revelation about Mario. How was she going to resume life as a carefree teenager again?

  Rosemary looked at her daughter’s serious young face in the lamplight and thought, When this war ends, it won’t be a simple matter of defeat or victory. It will have spread its horrible, destructive tentacles out into all our lives long after the so-called peace has arrived. Heaven knows what sort of world Paolo and Constanza will have to cope w
ith then. They’ve already had to grow up far too quickly. They’ve faced hunger, danger, and death, yet there’s been so little time for the ordinary teenage pleasures and rebellions, let alone a proper education. And I had so wanted it all to be different. Oh, Franco, Franco — when are you coming home?

  The army was moving on. Since dawn they had been clearing their tents from the yard, packing up equipment, loading stores onto trucks, and dealing with vast amounts of refuse. To Maria’s delight, they were leaving some food behind: “Look, Paolo! English biscuits! Sugar! Spam!” They also left some storage jars, electric lightbulbs, a whole set of shovels, and, most precious of all, a can opener.

  Captain Roberts shook hands warmly with all the family members.

  “You’ve been very patient, Signora Crivelli. I’m sorry we’ve been so much trouble.”

  “Not at all. It was the least we could do. A small price to pay for being liberated, Captain. And we’ve been glad for your protection.”

  “I hope you’ll have news of your husband soon. Perhaps some letters will start to come through. The railway’s being repaired and restored as far as Arezzo, which is very good news. Our main thrust is north now, of course. We’ll have a logistic base here in Florence, and we’ll be supporting General Alexander’s attack on Kesselring’s Gothic Line. Won’t be long before we’re in Bologna!”

  “I wish you the very best of luck, Captain.”