Between Enemies (3 page)

‘Is it German, that pendant of yours?’

‘No. It was on the corpse of a
bersagliere
officer. Would you rather have a rag doll?’

I wasn’t interested in what she said, but only in her voice. Giulia was chaos personified, an irresistible force. Grandpa had described her as the crupper of a horse, the shudder it gives, the lash of its tail on a horsefly. But she was far, far more than that: she was beautiful, she was ablaze. She regarded me with the hauteur of one who, knowing herself desired, strives not to reproach the unrequited lover.

‘I must see your grandmother. At once!’

‘She’s been shut up in her room ever since…this lot arrived.’

‘They’ve kidnapped some girls. Over at the church. And knocked out the priest.’

‘How do you know?’

‘What I know I know.’

‘Go upstairs then. Try knocking.’

I was left alone in the dark room. They had carried off the carpets and nearly all the chairs were smashed. The pianola
had vanished. The great oak table was still there, and on it two filthy mattresses which made me think of the kidnapped girls and what it said in the
Corriere
about the iniquities committed by the Huns in Belgium. I had never really wanted to believe it, even if at the inn they spoke of certain details…

I left by the back door, wound my scarf around my neck and buttoned up my overcoat. I took the path that goes up to the little temple. It wasn’t far, but it took me almost ten minutes. I saw Renato digging the latrine along with a German soldier and an Italian prisoner with his neck swathed in grey, bloodstained bandages. I exchanged a glance with the steward and almost unwittingly turned to look at the church, one whole side of which adjoined the rear of our porticoed
barchessa
. Six or seven soldiers were sitting round the apse, chewing on pipe-stems. From their helmets I realized they were prisoners too. If they were outside the church, it meant that the story about the girls was true. I looked up at the bell tower, and made out the bell in its belfry. Whenever anything extraordinary happened, it was that bell that first spoke of it. I wondered how soon the value of its metal would rob us of it, leaving Refrontolo without its ancient voice.

I noticed they were digging a second latrine right up against the wall of our cemetery. ‘Aunt won’t like that,’ I said to myself as I walked on. Muffled by distance, the din of the artillery sounded like the rhythmic hooting of ships’ foghorns. Every cloud, be it large or small, left its dark shadow on the empty plain. Nearly everyone had fled the village. But not the peasants. All they had was that patch of land, three farm animals and four chairs: how could they possibly leave them? Of people of any standing in the village only the priest was left, apart from a few with their heads not screwed on properly, such as the Third
Paramour, who was not the type to become a refugee. His feet were big enough, but his pockets were not deep.

Only one cow was left in our cowshed, because the Germans had taken the other two off to a nearby farmhouse; but the milk of that one cow, which Loretta milked at dawn, was enough for us.

More noise from the big guns. It came from over Montello way. I sat down on the empty altar in the middle of the little round temple, so tiny that when I stretched my arms my fingertips brushed the pillars. The sun was paling in a sky growing greyer by the moment. The air was heavy with the odour of stabling and sweaty clothes. And also that smell like iron filings that even today – more then ten years later – makes me think of the war. The roads were choked with refugees then and I learnt to recognize the stench of iron and piss that got right into your throat, tasting of sweat, and terror, and rags clogged with excrement.

I lit a cigarette and tried to think about nothing.

The darkness was as dense as the breath of cattle. There was no one in the streets. The windows were all shuttered up. Only from the church windows filtered some wan and ominous light. The drizzle had intensified the smell of mule dung. The Villa was almost empty, and my grandparents didn’t even have supper. Aunt Maria and I ate in a corner of her room, where the frescoed ceiling depicted a jungle with huge red ibises and water buffalo. Among the tangle of boughs there was also a little temple that was perhaps Hindu, in the shadow of which were two Barbary apes and a blue parrot. Loretta served us a dish of rice, with a few drops of olive oil from a jug which Teresa at once went and hid behind the dresser, where a brick had been removed to make a secret hiding place.

A sudden din of engines and crunching gravel brought us to our feet. Motorbikes. Then two, three, four lorries. The rain was rebounding on the window sill. I watched an orderly file of lorries drive into the grounds. ‘They’re a different sort from yesterday’s. No mules, no bicycles,’ I said.

‘Germany here on our doorstep, whoever would have thought it?’ My aunt’s voice betrayed more anger than sorrow. Then the noise of the rain came crashing against the windowpanes, drowning even the roar of the engines.

Three

T
HE MEDALLION CLINKED AGAINST THE DOG’S COLLAR
. I
T
was a messenger dog belonging to the Imperial Army, a sheepdog with the tips of its ears folded down, part Alsatian and part retriever. Giulia, sitting under the magnolia tree with her gasmask in her lap, stretched out a hand. ‘It’s a medallion with a picture of the Madonna,’ she said.

I leant down and took hold of the medallion as the dog raised its nose. I read the inscription: ‘To Luisa, for her First Communion, 9 May 1908’. I looked over at the sentries standing guard at the gate. ‘What bastards! How dare they hang it round the neck of a dog.’

‘They’ve got guns.’

‘How many are there in the church?’

‘What does it matter? There’s nothing we can do.’ At that moment the dog, alarmed by a rifle shot, darted away. Giulia dropped the mask.

One of the two sentries at the gate fell to the ground. The other unslung his rifle, dropped to one knee and fired twice at a window on the other side of the road.

The fire was returned from the window.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ said Giulia. We ran back into the Villa and up the stairs, two at a time. We entered the loft without knocking, and crowded in close to Grandpa, already at one of
the dormer windows.

‘That must be Rocca. The fellow who works at Pancrazio’s. They’ve got one of his nieces in the church.’

‘What can we do?’ said Giulia and Grandpa in unison.

A platoon of infantrymen was surrounding the house across the way; a few of them broke down the door.

Another shot, then one more. Then silence.

Five minutes passed, or perhaps ten. Then we watched as the soldiers, led by a dark-haired lieutenant, emerged with their rifle butts thrust into the ribs of two old men with their hands up, and an old woman not just bent but crippled.

The officer barked two orders. The prisoners were pushed under the portico of our barchetta. One soldier forced them to sit against the wall while another started kicking the younger man, who looked about sixty. The old woman hobbled out and stopped right in front of the officer.

‘This has nothing to do with the kidnapped girls,’ said Grandpa, turning away from the window. ‘I bet that if one were to prick her belly with a pin a barrel of grappa would spurt out.’ He chuckled. ‘If that German has them shot there’ll be three corpses ready for bottling, but if he decides to hang them the old girl will get away with it. Just wait and see.’

Grandpa was right. The lieutenant was partial to the noose, and the woman was spared. ‘You’ll find they leave them hanging there in full view,’ said Grandpa. ‘Shootings are soon forgotten, but the bodies of hanged men…There’s no more explicit threat.’

The trial lasted a bare minute or two. Just enough time for the young officer to bark out three orders and draw up his small troop at the edge of the street that a little further on widened into a little piazza. The old dame was escorted into the inn where the non-commissioned officers were lodged, even though some
said she too had fired with a revolver towards the great magnolia tree in our grounds. The soldier was not seriously wounded, and that evening I saw him on a camp bed by the drawing-room fire, surrounded by his mates, who were laughing and handing him one glass of wine after another.

It was a hanging without ceremony. Almost no one spoke up in their defence. Only the innkeeper said that they were drunk on his grappa, that they certainly didn’t know what they were doing, that the guns were only shotguns that wouldn’t really hurt anyone, and that they didn’t deserve to die.

The officer listened, silent and motionless, and when mine host had finished he saluted him, clicking his heels as though the man before him was a general. The innkeeper went back inside with dragging feet and a hung head, and the troops burst out laughing, every man jack of them. Then the officer shouted one single brief word and all fell silent. Men, women, donkeys, everything.

It may be that, drunk as they were, they died without realizing it. The soldier who tied the knot did not show them the noose. No one murmured pious fibs into their ears. They remained there hanging, their breeches sodden with urine, until evening. And until darkness fell no one crossed the piazza, where the lime-tree branches creaked without ceasing in the Sirocco wind.

That night we held a family conference. Grandma called us into the only room where she was sure of not being disturbed, her own bedroom. She was wearing a blue dress and high heels. At her neck she wore a black lace frill and in her ears two artificial sapphires that competed with her eyes for blueness. Grandpa, with ill-groomed moustache, was seated beside her on the bed, clasping an old issue of the Touring Club magazine
with a picture of a column of Alpine troops and mules heavily laden with Talmone chocolate. I stood next to my aunt, who was sitting by the chest of drawers containing Grandma’s underwear, priceless possessions that only Teresa was authorized to iron and replace. Although not ‘family’, the steward was standing at the door – his enormous hands clasped behind his back, his felt jacket buttoned up to the neck, and his feet apart – as if to say, with his embarrassingly huge bulk, that no one was setting foot in here, not even if they mobilized the whole Alpenkorps. I think it was the first time I had seen him without his pipe.

‘I have called you here to explain to you how we must behave from now on,’ said Grandma almost in an undertone. ‘Between these people and us I want there to be a barrier of tight lips and sour looks. After what has happened we cannot behave otherwise. We will put at their disposal whatever they would take in any case, which means to say everything – except our dignity. And this we will defend by maintaining a scornful silence. The village is virtually deserted, and the remaining old people cannot and must not attempt foolish actions like today’s. To get oneself hanged is downright stupid.’ She gave each of us in turn a straight look, and time for it to sink in. ‘Do nothing rash.’ And Grandma looked at me, just me. ‘We will have as little contact as possible with the enemy. Signor Manca,’ and she nodded towards the steward at the door, as she smoothed out the folds of her skirt with her bony fingers, ‘has offered to act as our ears and my voice, talking to the farmhands and referring to me alone, every day, as to what is going on. We have to be careful and circumspect.’

All eyes turned towards Renato. All except those of Aunt Maria, who stared fixedly at some spot on the wall. The fact that the steward was there at all was already strange, but this
investiture by Grandma bordered on the astonishing. ‘Our ears and my voice,’ is what she had said. I couldn’t believe it. I noticed that Grandpa looked saddened; not surprised, just saddened. He kept his eyes low, fixed on that old copy of the Touring Club magazine until it slipped from his fingers and ended up on the carpet.

Grandpa didn’t take to Renato. ‘That fellow doesn’t say much and looks around him too much,’ he told me a few days after the steward’s arrival. ‘I bet my moustache that he could have the shoes off me while I was walking in the rain, and I wouldn’t know it until my feet were sopping.’ The truth is that it was Grandma and Aunt Maria who had a liking for that giant; it was they who had decided to employ him, despite the fact that the references from that Tuscan marquis were, according to Grandpa, rather nebulous.

A heavy blow shook the door, once, twice, three times. A curt order in German. Renato undid the bolt and Aunt Maria went to stand at his side. The door creaked open. The soldier said something to my aunt which I didn’t understand. The steward stood aside and she followed the soldier down the stairs.

‘We mustn’t show any curiosity,’ said Grandma. ‘Paolo, catch up with your aunt and pretend you’ve got something to tell her. She’ll like to have you close by.’

Grandpa looked at me with great sad-dog eyes, and leant down to retrieve the crumpled magazine with the mules and their loads of Talmone. ‘Run along, then,’ he said.

There was a great coming and going in the garden. Swarms of troops with mud-spattered boots and uniforms, their faces drawn with exhaustion. I went to the gate. No one took the least notice of me. Aunt Maria was standing between the two sentries guarding the entrance, who were rigidly at attention.
The captain, upright in the saddle, screwed in his monocle and brought his right hand up to his temple, as stiff as an iron wing.

‘Captain Korpium,’ said my aunt.

The captain, with a twitch of irritation, ejected the monocle.

‘Madame, your river Piave was not favourable to us, but I am still in one piece. I dare say you are not pleased.’ He pronounced the Italian vowels with a studied precision that endowed them with a roundness hard to credit in the mouth of a foreigner. The hard edge of his voice struggled with a warmth diminished, perhaps banished, by the brutality of war.

‘Captain, have you had me summoned just to let me know you are still alive?’

‘I want you to enter the church immediately after me…Fetch the girls out: they will need to hear a woman’s voice. Call your maids, give me five minutes and not a second longer, then enter.’