After Hannibal (10 page)

It took Ritter the best part of a month to clear the olive terraces. The ground descended steeply and the terraces were rough and uneven, deeply rutted in places by tractors in wet Decembers of past years during the harvesting of the olives. He could have followed local practice and simply had the ground turned over. This
would have cost him something and he was poor, but it was not for the sake of saving money that he decided against it. He wanted to make these terraces into pieces of meadow. He saw them in his mind’s eye descending in ranks, scattered with daisies and corn lilies and grape hyacinths, the silver green of the olives toning with the denser green of the grass.

It was a vision that required much labor for its fulfillment. For several seasons now, through the years of old Adelio’s illness and discouragement, the tough thick-bladed couch grass had grown up and flowered and died and the stalks had folded over and packed down over the earth in thick swathes, sealing the land off from gentler growths, shutting out light and air. Chicory and bramble and broom had pushed through this rotting mat and were tangled in it. Before these could be cut close the dead grass had to be raked out and piled up for compost. Up and down the slopes Ritter toiled with rake and billhook and wheelbarrow.

At the end of the day he was exhausted. He would sit in his kitchen with a bottle of the red wine which he bought by the crate very cheaply in the village, grateful for the condition of mindlessness, while the wine relaxed his limbs, stiffened by the hours of labor. It was in the course of these spring evenings, as he sat in the wicker chair he had acquired with the house, and the ancient iron stove on which he cooked his meals cracked and hissed, that Ritter discovered himself to be, though precariously, once again part of the continuity of things.

On the days when it rained and he could not get out to work he read from the small store of books he had brought with him, the poetry of Heine and Montale, some history; but mainly he liked to
read about the working of things, the larval stages of dragonflies, the spawning of salmon, the replication of cells. He clung to process as a way of salvation; and his dread was still a return to the stricken immobility of his illness, when the current of time had been frozen.

Part of the price he had to pay for this recovery of time was a certain unruliness of memory. Incidents from the past would come into his mind without warning, without any conscious effort of recall and with nothing in his surroundings that could account for them. In early May, when he had nearly finished clearing the terraces, he stood on the slope above his house looking down at drifting flakes of whitish fluff that came in great swarms from the flowering poplar trees along the stream bank. The day was almost windless but the down from the trees sidled and floated like snow and seemed from where he was standing to fill all the spaces of the air above him and below.

Linnets and thrushes sang through this glinting swarm. Ritter had a momentary sense of screened view, limited perspectives. Then the memory came. A long room with high windows, rubberized tiles on the floor hushing footsteps. He had been down to the body of the auditorium to collect some papers, the texts of speeches perhaps or some program of events—he could not remember. He was returning, mounting the stairs that led back up to the interpreters’ booths, wide shallow stairs, care was needed not to stumble. He had looked up at the row of glass-fronted booths where his fellow interpreters were speaking in languages that ranged from Finnish to Japanese, reproducing the measured hypocrisies of the dark-suited man standing at the podium below. Seen through the glass, with the
bumps of the headsets on their ears, they had a remote, strangely robotic or androidal look.

He had stood still and the sensation of nausea and blocked hearing had come to him that he sometimes felt in a plane that was losing altitude too quickly. In these first few seconds of hush he had been aware only of the figures behind the glass. Then fragments of the speech had come from below. Developing nations, benefits of Western technology … the world one great family … not denying the baleful effects of industrial pollution and his company was foremost … anyone looking at their track record …

This was coded language; it meant something else. He had stood there, halfway up the stairs, and there was nothing but the words below and the moving mouths above, redundant voices translating a redundant voice. Something of that same hush and sickness came to him now as he stood looking through the glinting, drifting swarm of flakes. Another voice came to him and with it the memory of his father’s face, the serious gray eyes, the straight brows, the thin sensitive mouth like a mobile wound. Below this the exact symmetry of the white flashes on the high collar of his uniform. The mouth moved, words came, measured and rhetorical, making no concession to the understanding of a child.
Germany’s historic mission
 … 
heirs to the glories of European Christendom
 … 
German spirituality, French clarity, Italian subtlety
 … 
The hegemony of the Holy Roman Empire restored
 … 
Marxism and International Jewry the great enemies of humanity
 …

Coded language this too. Could he really have spoken thus to a ten-year-old boy or were these phrases from some other, later time? He had spoken in the same terms afterward, long after the war, even when he lay dying in an Ulm hospital, but then it had been in tones
of disillusion and bitterness. Germany had betrayed its mission, failed in energy. Perhaps on that distant afternoon in Rome, seeing his son’s distress, he had spoken more gently, more simply. If so, no memory of it remained … March 1944, I was ten and he was forty-three, a former Leipzig schoolmaster, now a captain in German Military Intelligence, explaining to me why it had been necessary to take three hundred and thirty-five people from their homes, from the streets, from prison, transport them to a quarry on the outskirts of Rome and kill them all with pistol shots in the back of the neck. It was done, he said, in order to safeguard the German civilizing mission.

Ritter began to walk down the slope and with the movement he became aware of sounds again, birdsong, a distant airplane, the sound of water flowing invisibly in the gully below. He had not known then the number of the victims or the place they had been taken to or what had been done to them. All this he had learned later, years later—he had made it his business to learn everything he could about this mass killing at the Fosse Ardeatine. He had been too young at the time for abstractions but old enough to understand the meaning of retaliation and he knew that German soldiers had been killed in an explosion in the Via Rasella the day before, the work of the Resistance.

He had known too that these people who had been taken away would never come back again. He had known it because one of them was an uncle—or a kind of uncle—of his one great friend in Rome, a boy of his own age called Giuseppe, who lived in the dark basement of the building with his mother. Giuseppe’s mother was the concierge, a handsome woman dressed in black who sat all day in a
glass booth knitting and watching people come and go. Father there was none.

When we are very young, Ritter thought, it is others who teach us the modes and management of feeling, behavior most appropriate whether in grief or joy—a changing expression, the inflection of a voice, a friend seen with tears on his face then never seen again. From that day onward Giuseppe had never come back to play with him. He and his mother had disappeared from their room in the basement and Ritter had never seen them again. And he had known then, as surely as he knew now, that he was to blame for this, that it was he who had betrayed Giuseppe.

When had it been? When had he stood there on the white steps, holding the papers? What year, what city? Through the high windows of that conference room he had seen ornamental cherry trees in the grounds, smothered in pink blossom. Spring, it must have been. That spring of 1944 was cold, the almond trees were late to flower. He used to see them from the windows of the car that took him to school. The wind dislodged the white petals and they floated and drifted and seemed to fill the air. White petals on the desk when he spoke to me that afternoon about Germany’s civilizing mission.

Ritter was surprised for a moment—he had not thought of these petals before, had not known they were retained in memory. The white flashes on the uniform, yes, and the whiteness of the room, and the moving mouth. But the almond trees on the way to school, the vase on the desk, the spill of petals, these were things
that had lain beyond recall, rescued from oblivion now by the glinting fluff from the poplars. He had not thought about those days in Rome since his illness, nor much in the period immediately preceding it, too burdened with the present, with surviving the hours as they followed in succession. Now, unbidden, unblurred by pain or reluctance, these memories had come drifting back.

He was looking down directly at the tangled vegetation of the gully below him, at the draped trees struggling up from thickets of bramble and blackthorn, opening indomitable leaves again to the sun. It was now that the intention came to him: he would not stop his work of clearance when he had done with the terraces, he would cross the grass-grown track and clear the slopes of the ravine.

With this the world became fully distinct again to his senses, the fading flowers of the crab-apple trees along the bank, the new green on the fig tree above his house, the dipping line of the hills. He was turning away with the intention of clipping some shoots of olive he had noticed growing from the base of a tree; when he saw a man approaching along the track. He descended the slope and began to walk along the track toward his visitor. After a moment he recognized him for the Englishman, Chapman, who had the next house along the road. They had not so far spoken to each other, but Ritter had seen him once or twice in the village shop.

The Englishman waved as he drew near but his face seemed rather serious. “Harold Chapman,” he said, holding out a hand.

“Anders Ritter.”

“I was wondering if you speak any English?”

“Yes,” Ritter said. “That is, I used to. It is still good enough, I
think.” His voice was soft, without much trace of foreignness in the accent except for the careful distinctness of the vowels.

Chapman’s expression relaxed a little with this first hurdle surmounted. “I wanted to talk to you about the road.”

“The road?” Ritter looked carefully at his visitor. The deranged always assumed that you knew what they were talking about. The Englishman showed no obvious signs of disturbance. He was dressed with rather incongruous neatness, considering the remoteness of the place, in a tie with diagonal stripes and a navy blue blazer and gray flannels. The blazer, Ritter noticed, had some insignia in gold stitching over the breast pocket. “Which road do you mean?” he said. “Do you mean the way forward, the way we should take?”

“I mean the road we are standing on at this present moment in time. The road which provides the only access to your house and mine.” Chapman did not feel very much at ease with this German; the man kept on looking at you as if you were something he had just noticed. “You must have seen that the garden wall of the house on the corner, the last one if you are coming from this end, has fallen down and partly blocked the road. We left the matter in the hands of our lawyer, but it seems that these Checchetti have refused to sign the papers.”

“Papers? No, I have not seen it. I do not go that way.”

“But it is the only way you can go. You can’t get out with a car any other way.”

“I have no car.”

“No car?” Chapman was staggered. “But how—”

“I go to the village on foot.” Ritter gestured toward the hillside behind him. “It is a shortcut.”

“I see,” Chapman said blankly. This was something of a blow; he had been hoping to make an appeal to their common interests. The situation of being without a car was almost unimaginable to him. He had seen no television aerial anywhere about the German’s house either. He glanced quickly at the other’s wrist: no watch. This was a man without possessions. A ramshackle house, the ground floor windowless, still with its original earth floor, a broken staircase on the outside, no conversion work in process and none apparently intended. There was something disturbing to Chapman, something freakish, about a man who had so little. However, he was looking for allies and had to begin somewhere. “All the same,” he said, “you will want to have things delivered from time to time.”