Last Comes the Raven

by Italo Calvino

  * * *

  The others who’d been rounded up became increasingly sluggish and gray, too, worn into resignation, indifference, and in the interrogations each had an excuse for evading the draft, a margin of legality to hold on to: an expired badge from the Todt organization, the air force that had never been summoned, the recovery from pleurisy. He alone was as if naked in his crude situation as one outside the law, and he felt around him the padded warmth of legality and men who were basking in it, already content.

  The barracks chained him in the geometry of corridors, stairs, terraces; soon he, too, would think that as long as the government pays it’s better to be on the side of the government and avoid trouble for the family, that in the “republic” you’re better off than in the “monarchy,” because there’s no need to be careful in front of the officers, you eat in the mess, and you can sell the covers for the barracks equipment without paying for them; soon he, too, would laugh at the obscene remarks of the lieutenant with the eyeglasses when he mocked the mule driver with the yellow face.

  The partisans evaporated in memory like a myth, a memory of ancient ages of man; giant generators of new laws, distant from him as, at night, the mountains appeared distant from the barracks, beyond the broken panes of the big windows. The wall separating the barracks from the countryside that sloped down in terraces was the boundary between two categories of the soul. The fence that the colonel had had built to prevent attacks by the rebels was a wall of iron that rose in his conscience.

  * * *

  Then came days filled with anxiety, in which rumors of transfer circulated, of lists that someone had seen in the orderly office, of the men rounded up who would be sent to Monza or Treviso or Bolzano. He felt the circle tightening around him, the day approaching when his instinct for preservation would force him to emerge from his torpor, would dictate the most propitious moment for flight.

  He waited passively, every day feeling more like the butt on the floor of the dormitory, pushed by strokes of the broom. And the things of the barracks appeared to him like daisies whose petals you’d pluck to grasp a secret, ambiguous horoscopes telling his future, the Frisian horse on the stairs was inside him, objects and faces succeeded one another before his eyes like chapters in a story, and you didn’t know where or when it would end.

  Later there were tense days when it seemed that the transfer was imminent and the names on the first list were called and his wasn’t there. Because there was another list, of men who would leave in two weeks, and he was among those. So waking from the anguish was put off, there was still time to hope for the Great Advance that would free everyone overnight, of the Great Bombardment that would kill all the inhabitants of the barracks except him, of the leg that by chance would be broken and would keep him in the hospital until the end of the war, of his father who might have been freed and with all the family would have been able to find safety from the reprisals . . .

  The morning of the first group’s departure, three or four were missing at the roll call, quiet, resigned youths whom one wouldn’t have expected to escape. Those remaining, guarded by some old armed soldiers who would be their escort, sat in the dormitory, heads bent, waiting for the truck, a veil of tears in the depths of their eyes and voices. He wandered among them: the cots, unadorned by blankets, were anxious, uneasy forebodings.

  It was then that the lieutenant with the eyeglasses entered, fat snub-nosed face, nodded to him to approach; certainly he wanted to send him to sweep the stairs. He said, “Come on, hurry, get your stuff ready, you’re going, too, the order came from the command.”

  A veil of blood over his eyes, then everything was frighteningly clear, as in a world of mirrors: the lieutenant, the words he’d said, the useless protests, his resigned comrades, the bleak room, his picking up stuff with trembling hands and putting it in the knapsack, his history, his weakness, the sadness of his fate, everything was what it was, pitilessly that.

  * * *

  The illness of symbols took hold of him again on the journey in the truck, but without relief. The truck was the world and life, the men different, without pity for one another, bourgeois types who spoke of the things they’d do when the war was over, they’d buy a car and not travel by truck anymore, the lieutenant with the eyeglasses, who laughed, saying, “If peace should break out now!” A note of fear in his ignorant southerner’s accent.

  The fat kid from Oneglia who looked around at every stop, sniffing out a way to escape, was a part of him, of his mind still cautiously wakened; the old Venetian soldier who was always on him with the musket under his arm (Cecchetti was the name of that bastard) was also a part of him, his dominant cowardice. The other comrades of misfortune, full of desolate resignation, were the weight of his impotence. And in their midst, stupid and fortunate even in his name, the fat, unconscious human beast, the bespectacled Lieutenant Coronati, who joked with the drivers in the language of the south.

  The breakdown of the truck sounded like a warning. The last symbol was the hotel where they stopped for breakfast, with tidy English prints on the walls, a chloroformed atmosphere like an operating room, a limbo where souls await judgment.

  When they were led on foot to the nearby town and, since there was a delay in repairing the truck, somewhat dispersed to buy food in the shops, the nightmare suddenly ceased: the road that led to the fields was a road that led to the fields, the Venetian turning back to wait for the others was the Venetian turned back, the fat boy from One­glia whom he asked “Shall we escape?” and who answered “Come on” was the fat boy from Oneglia, the earth that ran under their steps was the earth that ran under their steps, the corner of the wall that separated them from the view of the others was a corner of a wall, the run over the hill was a beautiful, radiant, anxious run over the hill.

  The first sentence he said to the other, walking now only quickly along a lane that led upward, was “Now I can tell you, I’m a partisan.” “Me, too,” said the other. “What unit are you in? What’s your name?” They said their noms de guerre, the bands they’d belonged to, the known comrades, the actions they had taken part in.

  He was going up the hill now with the other, his military coat unbuttoned, content, content even if they could recap­ture him and shoot him at any moment: the gray barracks no longer existed for him, submerged in the depths of consciousness. The grasses and the sun and they who were walking, coats unbuttoned, amid the grasses and the sun were a new symbol, airy and enormous, they were what, without understanding, men often call freedom.

  Fear on the Footpath

  At a quarter past nine, just as the moon was rising, he reached the Colla Bracca meadow; at ten he was already at the juncture of the two trees; by half past twelve he’d be at the fountain; he might reach Vendetta’s camp by one—​ten hours of walking at a normal speed, but six hours at the most for Binda, the courier of the first battalion, the fastest courier in the partisan brigade.

  He went hard at it, did Binda, flinging himself headlong down shortcuts, never making a mistake at crossroads that all looked alike, recognizing stones and bushes in the dark. His firm chest kept the same rhythm of breathing; his legs went like pistons. “Hurry up, Binda!” his comrades would say as they saw him from a distance climbing up toward their camp. They tried to read in his face whether the news and orders he was bringing were good or bad; but Binda’s face was shut like a fist, a narrow mountaineer’s face with hairy lips on a short bony body more like a boy’s than a youth’s, with muscles like stones.

  His was a tough and solitary job, being woken at all hours, sent out even to Serpe’s camp or Pelle’s, having to march in the dark valleys at night, accompanied only by a French tommy gun, light as a little wooden rifle, hanging on his shoulder; and when he reached a detachment he had to move on to another or return with the answer; he would wake up the cook and grope around in the cold pots, then leave again with a panful of chestnuts still sticking in his gullet. But it was the natural job for him, because he never got lost in the
woods and knew all the paths, from having led goats about them or gone there for wood or hay since he was a child; and he never went lame or rubbed the skin off his feet scrambling about the rocks, as so many partisans did who’d come up from the towns or the navy.

  Glimpses caught as he went along—​a chestnut tree with a hollow trunk, blue lichen on a stone, the bare space around a charcoal pit—​linked themselves in his mind to his remotest memories: an escaped goat, a polecat driven from its lair, the raised skirt of a girl. And now the war in these parts was like a continuation of his normal life; work, play, hunting, all turned into war: the smell of gunpowder at the Loreto bridge, escapes down the bushy slopes, minefields sown with death.

  The war twisted closely around and around in those valleys like a dog trying to bite its tail; partisans elbow to elbow with bersaglieri and Fascist militia; each side alternating between mountain and valley, making wide turns around the crests so as not to run into one another and find themselves fired on; and always someone killed, either on hill or in valley. Binda’s village, San Faustino, was down among fields, three groups of houses on each side of the valley. His girl, Regina, hung out sheets from her window on days when there were roundups. Binda’s village was a short halt on his way up and down, a sip of milk, a clean vest ready washed by his mother; then off he had to hurry, in case the Fascists suddenly arrived, for there hadn’t been enough partisans killed at San Faustino.

  All winter it was a game of hide and seek: the bersaglieri at Baiardo, the militia at Molini, the Germans at Briga, and in the middle of them the partisans squeezed into two corners of the valley, avoiding the roundups by moving from one to the other during the night. That very night a German column was marching on Briga, had perhaps already reached Carma, and the militia were getting ready to reinforce Molini. The partisan detachments were sleeping in stalls around half-spent braziers; Binda marched along in the dark woods, with their salvation in his legs, for the order he carried was “Evacuate the valleys at once. Entire battalion and heavy machine guns to be on Mount Pellegrino by dawn.”

  Binda felt anxiety fluttering in his lungs like bats’ wings; he longed to grasp the slope two miles away, pull himself up it, whisper the order like a breath of wind into the grass and hear it flowing off through his mustache and nostrils till it reached Vendetta, Serpe, Gueriglia; then scoop himself out a hole in the chestnut leaves and bury himself in it, he and Regina, first removing the cones that might prick Regina’s legs; but the more leaves he scooped out, the more cones he found—​it was impossible to make a place for Regina’s legs there, her big soft legs with their smooth thin skin.

  The dry leaves and the chestnut cones rustled, almost gurgled, under Binda’s feet; the squirrels, with round, glittering eyes, ran to hide at the tops of the trees. “Be quick, Binda!” the commander, Fegato, had said to him when giving him the message. Sleep rose from the heart of the night, there was a velvety feel on the inside of his eyelids; Binda would have liked to lose the path, plunge into a sea of dry leaves and swim in them until they submerged him. “Be quick, Binda!”

  He was now walking on a narrow path along the upper slopes of the Tumena valley, which was still covered with ice. The widest valley in the area, it had high sides wide apart; the one opposite him was glimmering in the dark, the one on which he was walking had bare slopes scattered with an occasional bush from which, in daytime, groups of partridges rose fluttering. Binda felt he saw a distant light, down in lower Tumena, moving ahead of him. It zigzagged every now and again as if going around a curve, vanished, and reappeared a little farther on in an unexpected spot. Who on earth could it be at that hour? Sometimes it seemed to Binda that the light was much farther away, on the other side of the valley, sometimes that it had stopped, and sometimes that it was behind him. Who could be carrying so many different lights along all the paths of lower Tumena—​perhaps in front of him, too, in higher Tumena—​winking on and off like that? The Germans!

  Following on Binda’s tracks was an animal roused from deep back in his childhood; it was coming after him, would soon catch up with him: the animal of fear. Those lights were the Germans searching Tumena, bush by bush, in battalions. Impossible, Binda knew, although it would be almost pleasant to believe it, to abandon himself to the blandishments of that animal from childhood, which was following him so closely. Time was drumming, gulping in Binda’s throat. Perhaps it was too late now to arrive before the Germans and save his comrades. Already Binda could see Vendetta’s hut at Castagna burned out, the bleeding bodies of his comrades, the heads of some of them hanging by their long hair on branches of larch trees. “Be quick, Binda!”

  He was amazed at where he was, for he seemed to have gone such a little way in such a long time; perhaps he had slowed down or even stopped without realizing it. He did not change his pace, however; he knew well that it was always regular and sure, that he mustn’t trust the animal that came to visit him on these night missions, wetting his temples with its invisible fingers slimy with saliva. Binda was a healthy lad, with good nerves, cool in every eventuality; and he held on to all his power to act even though he was carrying that animal around with him like a monkey tethered to his neck.

  The surface of the Colla Bracca meadow looked soft in the moonlight. Mines! thought Binda. There were no mines up there, Binda knew; they were a long way off, on the other slope of the mountain. But now Binda began thinking that the mines might have moved underground from one part of the mountain to the other, following his steps like enormous underground spiders. The earth above mines produces strange funguses, disastrous to knock over; everything would go up in a second, but each second would become as long as a century and the world would have stopped as if by magic.

  Now Binda was going down through the wood. Drowsiness and darkness drew gloomy masks on the tree trunks and bushes. There were Germans all around. They must have seen him pass the Colla Bracca meadow in the moonlight; they were following him, waiting for him at the entrance to the wood. An owl hooted nearby: it was a whistle, a signal for the Germans to close in around him. There, another whistle; he was surrounded! An animal moved behind a bush of heather; perhaps it was a hare, perhaps a fox, perhaps a German lying in the thickets keeping him covered. There was a German in every thicket, a German perched at the top of every tree, with the squirrels. The stones were pullulating with helmets, rifles were sprouting among the branches, the roots of the trees ended in human feet. Binda was walking between a double row of hidden Germans, who were looking at him with glistening eyes from among the leaves; the farther he walked, the deeper he penetrated their ranks. At the third, the fourth, the sixth hoot of the owl, all the Germans would jump to their feet around him, their guns pointed, their chests crossed by Sten-gun straps.

  One named Gund, in the middle of them, with a terrible white smile under his helmet, would stretch out huge hands to seize him. Binda was afraid to turn around in case he saw Gund looming above his shoulders, Sten gun at the ready, hands open in the air. Or perhaps Gund would appear on the path ahead, pointing a finger at him, or come up and begin walking silently along beside him.

  Suddenly he thought he must have missed the way; yet he recognized the path, the stones, the trees, the smell of musk. But they were stones, trees, musk from another place, far away, from a thousand different faraway places. After these stone steps there should be a short drop, not a bramble bush. After that slope a bush of broom, not of holly; the side of the path should be dry, not full of water and frogs. The frogs were in another valley, near the Germans; at the turn of the path there was a German ambush waiting and he’d suddenly fall into their bands, find himself facing the big German named Gund who is deep down in all of us, and who opens his enormous hands above us all, yet never succeeds in catching us.

  To drive away Gund he must think of Regina, scoop a niche for Regina in the snow; but the snow is hard and frozen—​Regina can’t sit on it in her thin dress; nor can she sit under the pines—​there are endless layers of pine nee
dles; the earth beneath is all anthills, and Gund is already above, lowering his hands to their heads and throats, lowering still . . . He gave a shriek. No, he must think of Regina, the girl who is in all of us and for whom we all want to scoop a niche deep in the woods—​the girl with big hips, dressed only in hair that falls down over her shoulders.

  But the pursuit between Binda and Gund is nearing its end; Vendetta’s camp is now only fifteen, twenty minutes away. Though Binda’s thoughts run ahead, his feet go on placing themselves regularly one in front of the other so he won’t lose breath. When he reaches his comrades his fear will have vanished, canceled even from the bottom of his memory as something impossible. He must think of waking up Vendetta and Sciabola, the commissar, to explain Fegato’s order to them; then he’ll set off again for Serpe’s camp.

  But would he ever reach the hut? Wasn’t he tied by a wire that dragged him farther away the nearer he got? And as he arrived wouldn’t he hear ausch ausch from Germans sitting around the fire eating up the remaining chestnuts? Binda imagined himself arriving at the hut to find it half burned out and deserted. He would go inside: empty. But in a corner, huge, sitting on his haunches, with his helmet touching the ceiling, would be Gund, with his eyes round and glistening like the squirrels’ and his white toothy smile between damp lips. Gund would make a sign to him: “Sit down.” And Binda would sit down.

  There, a hundred yards off, a light! It was them! Which of them? He longed to turn back, to flee, as if all the danger were up there in the hut. But he walked on quickly, his face hard and closed like a fist. Now the fire suddenly seemed to be getting too near—​was it moving to meet him?—​now to be getting farther off—​was it running away? But it was motionless, a campfire that had not yet gone out, as Binda knew.