Last Comes the Raven

by Italo Calvino

  But now from under an arcade resounded a tramp of feet; Giuà hid in a doorway, sucking in his round paunch. It was a German, with the look of a peasant, wrists and neck jutting out of his short tunic, and long, long legs and a big gun as long as himself. He had left the others to try to find something on his own; besides, the look and smells of the village reminded him of things he knew well. So he was walking along sniffing the air and looking around with a yellow, porkish face under the peak of his squashed cap. At that moment Coccinella lowed: “Mooo.” She could not under­stand why her master had not arrived yet. The German quivered in his shrunken clothes and at once made for the stall; Giuà Dei Fichi held his breath.

  He saw the German beginning to kick violently at the door; he’d break it in soon for sure. Then Giuà slipped around the corner behind the house, went to the haystack, and began groping about under the hay. There he’d hidden his old double-barreled shotgun, with a full belt of cartridges. Giuà loaded the gun with a couple of shots, strapped the belt around his tummy, then very quietly, with the gun at the ready, went and hid behind the door of the stall.

  The German was coming out, pulling Coccinella along behind him on a rope. She was a fine red cow with black markings (that was why she was called Coccinella*), a young, affectionate, punctilious cow; she did not want to be taken away by this man she did not know, and was balking; the German had to pull her along by the halter.

  Giuà Dei Fichi looked on, hidden behind a wall. Now, it should be said that Giuà was the worst shot in the village. Never had he succeeded in hitting, even by mistake, a squirrel, let alone a hare. When he shot at sitting thrushes, they didn’t even bother to move from the branch. No one wanted to go shooting with him, for he was apt to hit other men’s behinds. He couldn’t aim: his hands always trembled.

  Now he pointed the gun, but his hands were trembling and the barrel of the shotgun waved about in the air. He tried to aim at the German’s heart, but what he saw through the sights was the cow’s rump. Oh dear! thought Giuà. Suppose I fire at the German and kill Coccinella? So he didn’t dare fire.

  The German was moving along very slowly with this cow; she could sense the nearness of her master and was refusing to be dragged. Suddenly the German realized that his fellow soldiers had already evacuated the village and were disappearing down the road. He tried to catch up with them, pulling that stubborn cow after him; and Giuà followed him at a distance, jumping behind bushes and walls and pointing his shotgun every now and again. But he could not manage to keep the weapon steady, and the German and the cow were always too near each other for him to dare fire a shot. Must he let the German take her away?

  To reach the column in the distance, the German took a shortcut through the woods. Now it was easier for Giuà to trail him by hiding among the tree trunks. And perhaps now the German would begin walking farther away from the cow so that it would be possible to shoot at him.

  Once in the woods, Coccinella seemed to lose her reluctance to move, and since the German was apt to get lost among the paths which he could scarcely make out, she even began guiding him and deciding whenever two paths crossed. Before long the German realized he was not on the shortcut to the main road but in the middle of a thick woods; both he and the cow were lost, in fact.

  Giuà Dei Fichi, his nose scratched by branches, his feet soaked by rivulets he’d stumbled into, was still following along behind, among flapping birds taking flight and frogs croaking in the mud. It was even more difficult to aim among the trees, with all those obstacles around and that wine-red-and-black rump, which seemed always to be there under his eyes.

  The German was already looking in alarm at the thickness of the woods and wondering how he could get out when he heard a rustling in an arbutus bush and out came a fine red pig. At home he’d never seen pigs wandering about in the woods. He loosened the rope on the cow and began following the pig. As soon as Coccinella felt herself free she trotted off into the woods, which was, she sensed, full of friendly creatures.

  Now was the moment for Giuà to shoot. The German was fussing around the pig, clutching at it to keep it still, but it slipped away.

  Giuà was about to press the trigger when nearby appeared two small children, a little boy and a little girl, wearing woolen caps with pompoms and long stockings. Big tears were dropping from their eyes. “Aim carefully, Giuà, please,” they said. “If you kill the pig we’ll have nothing left!” Giuà Dei Fichi felt the gun dancing about in his hands again; he had such a soft heart and was too easily moved, not by having to kill that German but by having to risk the pig that belonged to those two poor little children.

  The German was swaying about among the rocks and bushes, gripping the pig, which was wriggling about and grunting, “Ghee . . . ghee . . . ghee . . .” Suddenly the pig’s grunts were answered by a “baaa” and out from a cave trotted a little lamb. The German let the pig go and ran after the lamb. What strange woods, he thought, with pigs in bushes and lambs in caves. And he caught the lamb, which was bleating at the top of its voice, by a leg, hitched it up on his shoulder like the Good Shepherd, and started off. Very quietly Giuà Dei Fichi followed. “This time he won’t escape. This time he’s had it,” he said to himself, and was just about to fire when a hand raised the barrel of his gun. It was an old shepherd with a white beard, who was now holding out his clasped hands toward him and saying, “Giuà, don’t kill my little lamb; kill the German, but don’t kill my little lamb. Aim well, just this once, aim well!” But Giuà was completely confused by now, and couldn’t even find the trigger.

  The German on his way through the woods was making discoveries that left him openmouthed: chickens perched in trees, guinea pigs peering from hollow trunks. It was a complete Noah’s ark. He saw a turkey spreading its tail on the branch of a pine. At once he put up his hand to catch it, but the turkey gave a little skip and went to perch on a branch higher up, still spreading its tail. The German left the lamb and began climbing up the pine. But for every layer of branches he reached, the turkey went up another layer, without looking in the least put out, still preening itself, its hanging wattles aflame.

  Giuà moved under the tree; there was a leafy branch on his head, two others on his shoulders, and one tied to the barrel of his gun. But then a plump young woman with a red handkerchief tied around her head came up to him. “Giuà,” she said, “listen to me. If you kill the German I’ll marry you; if you kill the turkey I’ll bump you off.” Giuà, still a bachelor though no longer young, and very modest, blushed scarlet; his gun began waving around like a spit.

  The German was still climbing and had reached the smallest branches; suddenly one of them broke under him and down he fell. He very nearly fell right on top of Giuà Dei Fichi, who did this once see straight and get away in time. But on the ground Giuà left all the branches that had been hiding him, so the German fell on them and did not hurt himself.

  As he fell he saw a hare on the path. But no, it wasn’t a hare; it was round and paunchy and did not run away when it heard a noise, but settled down on the ground. It was a rabbit; the German took it by the ears. He walked on, with the rabbit struggling and twisting about in all directions, so that in order not to let it escape he had to keep jumping about with his arm raised. The woods were full of lowing, bleating, and screeching. At every step were new things to be seen: a parrot on a holly branch, three goldfish wriggling in a spring.

  Giuà, from astride the high branch of an ancient oak, was following the German’s dance with the rabbit. But it was difficult to aim at him because the rabbit was constantly changing position and getting in between. Giuà felt a pull at a corner of his jerkin; it was a little girl with braids and a freckly face. “Don’t kill the rabbit, Giuà, please. I don’t mind if you shoot the German, though.”

  Meanwhile the German had reached a place covered with gray stones spotted with blue and green lichen. There were only a few bare pines growing there, and nearby opened a precipice. A hen was scratching about in the carpet of pine n
eedles covering the ground. When the German began running after the hen, the rabbit escaped.

  It was the thinnest, oldest, and scraggiest hen he had ever seen. It belonged to Girumina, the poorest old woman in the village. Now the German had it in his hands.

  Giuà was lying on top of the rocks and had constructed a pedestal of stones for his shotgun. He had even put up a sort of little fortress, with only a narrow slit for the barrel. Now he could fire without having any scruples: even if he killed that scraggy hen, little harm was done.

  But now old Girumina came up to him, wrapped in her ragged black shawls, and began saying persuasively, “Giuà, it’s bad enough that a German should take away my hen, the last thing I possess in all the world. But it’s much worse that you should be the one to kill it.”

  Giuà began trembling more than ever before because of the great responsibility weighing on him. But he pulled himself together and pressed the trigger.

  The German heard the shot and saw the chicken wriggling in his hands lose its tail. Another shot, and the chicken lost a wing. Was it bewitched, this chicken, that it exploded every now and again and was falling to pieces in his hands? There was another explosion and the chicken was completely featherless, ready for roasting, and yet it still went on flapping its one wing. Seized with terror, the German was holding the chicken away from himself by the neck. Giuà’s fourth cartridge cut the neck off right under his hand and left him holding the head, which was still moving. He flung it aside and ran away. But he could not find any more paths. Near him was that rocky precipice. The last tree before the precipice was a carob, and in its branches the German saw a big cat crouching.

  By now he was beyond feeling any surprise at seeing domestic animals scattered in the woods, and he put out a hand to stroke the cat. Then he took it by the nape of the neck, hoping to please it and hear it purr.

  For some time now the woods had been plagued by a savage wild cat that killed birds and sometimes even got into the henhouses in the village. The German, who was expecting to hear it purr, suddenly saw the cat fling itself at him with its fur on end, and felt its claws slashing into him. In the struggle that followed both man and beast rolled over the edge of the precipice.

  So it was that Giuà, a hopeless shot, was feted as the greatest partisan and huntsman in the village. And poor Girumina was bought a brood of newly hatched chicks at the expense of the community.

  Minefield

  “Mined” was exactly what the old man had said, waving an open hand before his eyes, as if he were wiping a clouded pane. “All along there, didn’t know exactly where. They came and mined it. We were in hiding.”

  The man in the baggy trousers had glanced for a moment at the slope of the mountain, then at the old man standing erect in the doorway.

  “But since the end of the war,” he had said then, “there’s been time to do something about it. There must be some kind of path. Somebody must know.”

  You know it well, old man, the younger man had thought, too, because the old man was surely a smuggler and knew the frontier terrain like the bowl of his pipe.

  The old man had looked at the patched, baggy trousers, the other man’s limp, torn knapsack, the layer of dust covering him from hair to shoes, bearing witness to the miles he must have covered on foot. “Nobody knows just where,” the old man had repeated. “The pass. It’s a minefield.” Then he made that gesture, as if there were a clouded glass between himself and everything else.

  “Hey, I can’t be all that unlucky, can I? To go and step right on a mine?” the younger man had asked, with a smile that seemed to set the old man’s teeth on edge as an unripe persimmon would.

  “Huh,” the old man had said then. Only that: Huh.

  Now the younger man was trying to remember the tone of that huh. Because it could have been a huh, I should think not, or a huh, you never can tell, or a huh, nothing more likely. But the old man had uttered only a huh without any special intonation, as blank as his gaze, bleak as this mountain terrain, where even the grass was short and tough as an ill-shaven human beard.

  The trees along the slopes could never grow taller than the brush; every now and then there was a twisted, rubbery pine, situated so as to cast as little shade as possible. The man was now walking along the remnants of climbing trails, gnawed away year after year by the encroaching bushes and trodden only by smugglers’ footsteps, an animal tread that leaves little imprint.

  “Damn this land,” the man said. “I can’t wait to be on the other side.” Luckily he had already taken this route once, before the war, and he could do without a guide. He also knew that the pass was a broad, high gap, and they couldn’t mine the whole thing.

  So he had only to be careful where he set his feet: a spot with a mine underneath must surely look different somehow from all other spots. Somehow: loose dirt, stones artfully arranged, fresher grass. Over there, for example: you knew immediately there could be no mines. No mines? What about that slab of slate lying askew? That bare patch in the middle of the field? And that tree across the path? But the pass was still far ahead. There couldn’t be any mines, not yet. He walked on.

  Perhaps he would have preferred to cross the mined zone at night, crawling in the darkness, not to elude the border guards—​these places were safe from them—​but to elude the fear of the mines, as if the mines were great dozing beasts that could waken at his passing. Marmots, enormous marmots curled up in underground lairs, with one acting as a sentry on top of a rock, the way marmots do, to give the alarm with a hiss on seeing him.

  At that hiss, the man thought, the minefield blows up, the enormous marmots fall on me and tear me to pieces with their teeth.

  But never had a man been chewed by marmots, and never would he be blown up by mines. It was hunger that prompted these thoughts; he knew it. The man knew hunger, the tricks the imagination plays in times of hunger, when everything seen or heard assumes a meaning associated with food and chewing.

  The marmots did exist, however. You could hear the hissing—​“ghee . . . gheeeee . . .”—​from up in the spills of rock. If I could succeed in killing a marmot with a stone, the man thought, and roast it on a stake . . .

  He thought of the greasy smell of marmot, but without nausea; hunger gave him an appetite even for marmot fat, anything that could be eaten. For a week he had been lurking around farms, approaching shepherds to beg a loaf of brown bread, a cup of clotted milk.

  “If only we had some for ourselves. We don’t have anything,” they would say, pointing to the bare, smoke-darkened walls, decorated only with a string or two of garlic.

  He came within sight of the gap before he was expecting it and felt a twinge of amazement, almost of fear, at once: he wasn’t expecting the rhododendrons to be in bloom. He had thought he would find the gap bare, so he could study every stone, every bush before taking a step forward. Instead he was plunged up to his knees in a sea of rhododendrons, a uniform, impenetrable sea from which only the humps of the gray stones surfaced.

  And under it, the mines. “Don’t know exactly where,” the old man had said. “All along there.” And then he had passed those open hands through the air. The younger man now thought he could see the shadow of those hands fall on the expanse of rhododendrons, spreading out until it covered them.

  He had chosen a route along a winding crevasse flanking the broad gap, uncomfortable for walking but also uncomfortable to mine. Farther up, the rhododendrons thinned out, and among the rocks you could hear the “ghee . . . ghee . . .” of the marmots, as unrelenting as the sun on the back of his neck.

  Where there are marmots, he thought, heading in that direction, it’s a sign there are no mines.

  But this reasoning was erroneous: there were anti­personnel mines, devised to kill men, and the weight of a marmot would not be enough to trip them. He had recalled the name of the mines at this moment, antipersonnel, and it frightened him.

  Personnel, he repeated, human beings.

  That name was sudde
nly enough to frighten him. Certainly if they mined a pass it was in order to make it completely useless. He had better turn back, question the men of the area more closely, try some other way.

  He turned to retrace his steps. But where had he set his foot before? The rhododendrons stretched out behind him, a vegetable sea, impenetrable, with no trace of his passage. Perhaps he was already in the heart of the minefield, and a misstep could destroy him; he might as well go forward.

  This damned land, he thought. Damned right to the end.

  If only he had a dog, a big dog, heavy as a man, to send ahead. Instinctively he clicked his tongue, as if urging a dog to run. I have to be my own dog, he thought.

  Maybe a stone would do. There was one near him: big, but he could lift it. It was just right. He grabbed it with both hands and flung it ahead of himself as far as he could throw, uphill. The stone fell not far away and rolled back toward him. He could only try his luck, as he was doing.

  He was already in the higher part of the gap, among the treacherous dry, rocky stream beds. The colonies of marmots had heard the man and were in a state of alarm. Their screams pierced the air like cactus spines.

  But the man no longer thought of hunting the animals. He had realized that the gap, broad at its mouth, had gradually narrowed and now was only a passage between cliffs and brush. Then the man understood: the minefield could only be here. This was the only spot where a certain number of mines, placed at the correct interval, could block all passing. Instead of terrifying him, this discovery gave him a strange serenity. Very well: he now found himself in the middle of the minefield, that was sure. Now there was nothing to do but continue climbing, at random, and let what would happen, happen. If it was his fate to die that day, he would die; if not, he would walk between one mine and the next and would be saved.

  He formulated this thought about fate without any conviction: he did not believe in fate. If he took a step it was because he could not do otherwise; it was because the movement of his muscles, the course of his thoughts, led him to take that step. But there was a moment when he could take this step or that one, when his thoughts were in doubt, his muscles taut but without direction. He decided not to think, to let his legs move like a robot’s, to set his feet on the stones without looking; but he had the nagging suspicion that it was his volition that decided whether he would turn right or left, place his foot on this stone or that.