The jovial produce vendors urged a weightless Emmanuelle to taste their pineapples, peaches, lemons, and limes. A potbellied farmer held out a half-moon plum slice that she accepted hungrily. But as she stretched out her arm to take the juicy fruit, a bee came out of nowhere and buried its stinger in her neck, just missing her jugular. She shrieked in pain and horror, waving her arms wildly in the air to chase away her attacker. But there was no need: it was already dead.
“Bees die after they sting,” the farmer explained gently.
Manue looked for her assailant’s corpse, to no avail. It had vanished into the humid Montreal air.
“You’d better hurry and take out the stinger, miss,” continued the insect expert. “Those things secrete a liquid that attracts other bees, and they’ll all start coming after you soon.”
Not wanting to be killed by a swarm of angry bees, Manue pulled the stinger from her skin, which had started to turn red and swell. She would need to go home, put ice on the wound, and take some antihistamines. And she still hadn’t bought anything to eat. Their intimate dinner would probably involve a slice of pizza and a glass of Coke.
Before she got on the metro, Manue stopped by a drugstore to pick up some medication; she took two of the tablets right away. Her neck had swelled considerably and the only thing she wanted to do was scratch, scratch, scratch her skin off, right down to the muscle and bone. As the drugs slowly kicked in, Emmanuelle began to feel drowsy. She struggled to stay awake so she wouldn’t miss her stop. She managed to keep her eyes open until Préfontaine, where she got off shakily and trudged back to her apartment like a zombie. She had a hard time fitting her key into the keyhole, which seemed to have shrunk. When she finally managed to swing open the door, she was met with a surprise.
Before her eyes—too sleepy to register any shock—stood Serena in her work outfit (G-string and semi-transparent bra) and Fabio, pants down around his ankles. Thinking that the pills she’d swallowed were making her hallucinate, Manue rubbed her eyes, trying to erase the absurd scene before her. But everything was still there when she opened them again. Serena and Fabio hadn’t moved an inch. They stood frozen, searching for a way to explain the situation.
“It’s not what you think,” Serena protested.
“It wasn’t me, it was her!” Fabio insisted.
“Whoa!” cried Emmanuelle, like an alcoholic stumbling out of the bar at 3 a.m. “Stop squabbling like toddlers in daycare. First of all, how did you get in?”
“You gave me a key,” Serena reminded her.
“Why are you here already, Fabio?”
“My flight was early and there was no line at customs, so I got in sooner than I expected.”
“OK,” nodded Manue. “Now tell me what exactly you’re doing half-naked in my living room.”
“Nothing,” Fabio insisted. “I was just trying to explain to your friend that I am not interested in having sex with her.”
“Liar!” Serena interjected. “You were dying to get some. I could see it in your eyes.”
It was surreal. Emmanuelle was so hopped up on Benadryl that she had a hard time putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Fabio and Serena were having an all-out shouting match, curses flying in Spanish and Italian. Their forms blurred, pitched back and forth, vanished, returned, and disappeared all over again. Emmanuelle didn’t have the strength to listen to their lame excuses. She went straight into her room, slammed the door, and collapsed on the bed. She slept for five hours, spooning the bee that had fallen down her shirt and come to rest between her skin and the underwire of her bra.
PART II
The Unpredictability of the Pigeon
Monarchs
the train had stopped, once again.
They were constantly being bumped to the service tracks to make way for the Russian military convoys that had priority. The train bringing Sergio and his cohort home rarely managed to cover more than a hundred kilometres a day. The men spent most of their time waiting in the middle of a field smoking imaginary cigarettes, or in tiny rail stations where the clocks never showed the correct time. It could have been an excellent opportunity to tour one quintessentially Russian village after another.
But after five years away from home, more than half spent in a forced labour camp, they didn’t feel much like sightseeing.
“Any chance you’re hiding grappa in that pastrano5, Sergio? I’m thirsty.”
Alfonso was kidding. Sergio had met him in the camp infirmary just before they were repatriated. He was a good guy with a biting sense of humour and a pastel gaze. He probably wouldn’t last the trip. Sergio, generous as ever, smiled and passed him an imaginary flask.
“Don’t get yourselves all worked up. I told you, you aren’t strong enough to be making jokes.”
Doctor Andreïeva, the physician assigned to accompany the soldiers to Frankfurt, didn’t put up with any nonsense. She was dedicated to her patients’ health and didn’t consider laughter a cure.
The train started up again within minutes. It chugged along slowly, drifting rather than making any real progress, as if to avoid rousing the prairie from its autumn slumber. Through the gaps between the train cars, Sergio watched fragments of scenery roll by. The birds were silent. Only the rusted sound of metal scraping across the tracks reached their shattered ears.
It would have been faster to walk.
Sergio knew of some men who had done just that, men like his aptly named cousin Liberato, who was part of the Corpo d’Armata Alpino6. Liberato managed to escape the pocket of resistance when the Russians had surrounded them near the Don River in December 1942. He and a few hundred other Italians had returned to their homeland from Russia on foot. It had taken them nearly two hundred days.
Malnourished, wounded, and fatigued after months of fighting, they somehow found the strength to keep going. Was it hope that had given them the energy, or just their innocence? Were they naïve enough to believe that everything would be fine once they got back? We occasionally manage to forget that the world is a tragedy when we’re home sitting next to a woman we respect, in front of a roaring fire and a bowl of hot soup.
Liberato and the other survivors were like monarchs, the delicate North American butterflies that migrate thousands of kilometres a year to escape the harsh winter and return home to warmer weather. Sergio had never heard of these creatures; the tale of their exploits hadn’t reached the Italian countryside, much less the vast Russian hinterland.
As he lay on a bed of straw in a car intended for livestock, lulled by the sway of the journey, Sergio often thought about those men who had found a way to escape the Russians. He wondered what would have happened had he been among the fugitives. If he, too, had returned from Stalingrad on foot three years earlier.
Walking
three thousand kilometres
to reach home:
enough to wash down a hearty evening meal
or
digest the cruelty and barbarity of your species.
Three thousand kilometres
the minimum distance it takes
to lose the weight that has collected on your
shoulders from witnessing scenes
of torture, humiliation, savagery.
Walking, walking
to scrape away the layers of pain
that stick to the flesh
perhaps walking would have been the best way to return home
the only way to make it through
truly
and perhaps imagining a different fate
was—ironically—how Sergio learned to accept
his own destiny.
Sergio’s anxiety grew the closer he got to home. He was afraid he wouldn’t be up to the task, that he wasn’t cut out for the life that awaited him, a life of quiet happiness, calm Sundays with the family, Saturday nights spent dancing and courting
young women. He was no longer sure he knew how to be happy, how to put his mind at ease, how not to think of everything dying.
In the spring of 1941, Sergio had received the card confirming he wouldn’t be spared compulsory military service. He had hoped he’d be forgotten, that the card would get lost among the multitude of letters and parcels handled by the postal clerks, that it would never make it to him. Unfortunately, conscription letters always reached their destination.
Bad news is never lost as easily as the good.
Sergio’s assignment was to be six months long. But it was naïve of him to think that in the midst of World War II a strapping young man in good health would be gone for such a short time. They wouldn’t let him go so easily, and he wasn’t the type to desert.
Once more, in a screech of iron on iron, the driver stopped the train in the middle of a wasteland.
“Not again!” Alfonso protested between deep, wracking coughs. “At this rate, we’ll never get to Italy in time for my funeral.”
Sergio tried in vain to look for clues in the landscape that might orient him. Only fields, fields, and more fields. Had the earth become nothing but one endless, lifeless field steeped in tall grass, subject to the driving rain, hail, and burning midday sun? Since they had begun their odyssey, Sergio couldn’t remember passing anything other than twigs, steppe, and ancient rock. Nothing but frozen land, immovable, marked by the ravages of time—a miserable backdrop against which his thoughts echoed like the footsteps of a restless priest pacing through a candlelit church.
Sergio had been wearing the same rags for nineteen seasons. “Worn out” didn’t do justice to either his clothing or his mindset: “dead” would have been more appropriate. Sergio wore dead clothes over his dead skin, which hid a terrified, broken, and dispossessed soul. A ghostly costume to convince the enemy that he was lifeless, an empty shell that wasn’t worth the trouble.
Even if, officially, there was no longer an enemy, Sergio couldn’t keep his survival instincts from getting the better of him. He couldn’t help hiding, holding back the slightest noise, avoiding notice, lowering his eyes when passing a stranger, concealing any trace of emotion that could be interpreted as a betrayal or an affront.
Was all this really a product of the war? Probably not. But the experience had made the shy Italian unwilling to assert himself ever again. In his eyes, anybody looking to stand out was power-hungry and lacked virtue.
“Do you think we’re getting close, comrade?” Alfonso asked, emphasizing the word sardonically.
It was impossible for Sergio to tell which country they were in. Ukraine? Poland? Austria? Borders were crossed unbeknownst to the travellers. The invisible lines left marks on the bodies of those who crossed them: blows, bruises, scars, bullets to the heart. It was over these borders the men fought. And Sergio had been among the men sent to the front. Sergio, who would never have hurt a thing—not the flies that disturbed his sleep during the hottest summer months, not the wolf that feasted on his chickens in the darkness.
Those nights seemed like a lifetime ago. Had they ever really existed? Heat was an intangible dream to troops who had known nothing but frostbite for months.
Sergio had been whisked away before he could say goodbye to his mother or sisters. Like everyone else, he had brought only light clothing, cotton socks and thin wool sweaters for the chilly evenings. They were sent to fight in the lands of the north dressed for an Italian climate. They thought they would be back soon. Or that they wouldn’t be back at all.
What’s the use of a warm winter coat when you know you’re going to die?
The young men preferred to believe the former: that it wouldn’t be long until they were reunited with curly-haired fiancées and mothers waiting by the stove. Everyone basked in the illusion of an everlasting summer.
An officer pounded on the train car to let the passengers know they would be stopped a bit longer this time. Sergio struggled to roll back the heavy door, which creaked on its hinges. The inside of the car was constantly in half-darkness. He had to blink back the sun’s white light, the certainty of the real world that kept turning without him.
He jumped down and motioned to Alfonso to join him.
“Come on, it’s nice out.”
Alfonso didn’t have the strength. He sat crouched in the corner.
“Don’t worry about me, comrade. I’m plenty able to amuse myself with all that morphine from the doc!”
Sergio used the forced break to loosen up. He stretched his quadriceps and rolled his ankles a few times. His bones cracked like explosives set off in the neighbouring trenches: a muffled popping, as if they came from someone else.
He took a few steps, but had to stop and catch his breath, doubling over in a sudden fit of coughing. He spat on the ground and straightened up without paying any attention to the droplets of blood colouring his spittle. He began walking, barely lifting his feet off the ground. He was too weak, or too sad. He wasn’t sure which was more tired, his body or his soul. His boots, soles loose and flapping, beat out a syncopated rhythm on the frozen ground. Sergio’s movements were irregular; his breath faltered and, at times, so did his will. Sometimes he was taken by a longing to abandon the train, to watch it trudge off without him, to sit on a rock in the middle of the prairie and die in silence. Without hurting anyone.
But then he caught himself, thought back to the hardships he’d endured, the mountains he’d crossed over the past years. And he convinced himself that giving up was not an option. Not after all this time, all this pain. Giving up would have been the worst betrayal of all.
Sergio found it hard to believe that all this had really happened. That the war was over, yes, but above all, that it had ever taken place. The events of the past months bubbled up in him like soap suds against a blue sky. The memories slipped through his hands, transparent, undulating, fleeting. Impossible to catch and reclaim. They seemed to belong to the man he had once been but would never be again. Sergio felt as if he was living someone else’s life, a life he had stolen from a stranger. Before him was only borrowed time and an unlikely future.
How was he still alive? After all the kilometres, the ambushes, the nights spent walking, the days without food or sleep, the hatred, the fear, the cold? How was it possible that he had survived? Should he consider himself lucky? Who was more fortunate, those who had perished or those who escaped with a handful of scratches? It was difficult to say.
Sometimes, when the night was dangerously calm and Sergio could not sleep in spite of the dark silence, he told himself that the first men to fall had been truly blessed. They had only known part of the horror.
And they would never have to remember it.
* * *
5.Military coat
6.Alpine Army Corps
The Octopus
on June 22, 1941—despite the Nonaggression Pact promising a shared Eastern Europe that had been signed by the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939—Germany, Italy, and Romania declared war on their communist neighbour. The Nazis did not speak of war, rather of “hostilities committed as preventive measures” in response to Soviet political practices. Generals master the art of rhetoric so well they have you believe, with a doleful glance and a syrupy tone, that they would never have dared to attack if their enemies hadn’t forced their hand.
“We didn’t start it, they did.”
German, Romanian, and Italian movie houses screened propaganda films to young men, claiming that going to Russia would be a stroll in the park, a day in the country, a certain victory. These films fed the future recruits’ hatred, spouting racist diatribes about Bolsheviks, whom they associated, in a strange game of unlikely parallels, with an image of the impure Jew. The communist, like the Gypsy, the homosexual, and the Israelite, was to be destroyed.
Hitler had launched Operation Barbarossa thinking that the disorganization that pervaded the Red Army t
roops, somewhat weakened by Stalin’s Great Purges and the Winter War against Finland, would ensure victory. The Russians proved stronger than he thought. The Wehrmacht and its allies met with a sizeable resistance. The fight was anything but a foregone conclusion. Reinforcements were needed.
In September of 1941, after only six months of training, a twenty-one-year-old Sergio was sent to the front to help out countrymen ready to die for a nation that claimed to love its youth. Nearly two hundred thousand Italians, enlisted by their own will or by force in the ARMIR7, would share his fate and set off to swell the ranks of the Ostheer8.
Two hundred thousand soldiers. It was as if the whole of Bologna had gone to fight. Sergio felt lonely among the infantrymen, sentries, and other gun-toting madmen. Fortunately, he had Angelo, Primo, Fausto, and Remolo. The five friends never left each other’s sides. They were there for each other no matter what. They were all wireless operators in General Gariboldi’s 8th Italian Army. Marconisti. Some days, Sergio resented Marconi for having invented the radio and revolutionizing the way humans went about killing each other. That said, he was happy they no longer used carrier pigeons to communicate in times of war; the poor birds had no place among man’s senseless conflicts.
Sergio, who used his telegraph key to relay orders he received to the soldiers on the front lines, liked to think that he was now playing the role of the pigeon.
From Ukraine, where they had been deployed following Operation Barbarossa, Sergio and the Italian troops slowly made their way towards the Soviet capital. More than a year of clashes, of victories, of defeats, of advances, of retreats.
The Russians practised a scorched-earth policy, destroying everything in their path. Their own buildings, their own infrastructure, their homes, everything. Ostheer soldiers felt as if they were fighting in a desert. Endless snow and ash. Behind, nothing but a few corpses in disordered heaps; ahead, even less, just fire, blood, and an enemy ready to die for victory.
Behind the eyes we meet Page 9