Between Enemies (30 page)

The moon had lit up the face of the river, and I followed the stream until I saw the black shape of the bell tower of the church of San Michele al Ponte. I slowed down and my right hand found the hilt of my knife. From there on I could run into enemy patrols. I skirted the town, staying close to the forest. The windows were dark and no smoke rose from the chimney pots, as if the houses had all been abandoned. I hastened my steps, because the silence of that place was scarier than the noises of the woods.

Thirty-Seven

E
VERY SO OFTEN
I
STOPPED TO CHECK THE MAP
. I
WAS TRYING
to economize on my use of matches, which I only lit very carefully, after lying bellydown on the earth, behind a rock or else using my rucksack as a shelter: a tiny flame can be seen for a long way. I was no longer walking in the woods, now I was on the cart road, and I only abandoned it when I glimpsed the campfire of a bivouac.

I was pretty sure that I was midway between Materazzo and Donegatti, but I couldn’t seem to make out the rooftops of Trame, which ought to be straight ahead of me, according to the map. I walked on for another half an hour, returning to the road to make better time. My feet were shattered, my legs were rubbery, but I was determined not to stop. I came to a ruined town, a tumbled heap of rocks, fallen walls, and blocked lanes. That’s why I’d been unable to see those houses: Trame was nothing but a pile of rubble.

‘Italian cannons.’

I swung around, grabbing the knife from my belt. I barely had time to focus on a tall, massive silhouette before I felt my wrist seized in a vice grip. I choked back a shout.

‘Hurry, get off the road, there’s a patrol not three minutes from here.’

In spite of the pain in my wrist, I hadn’t dropped the knife,
and I proudly slipped it back into its sheath.

We hurried away from the rubble of Trame and in less than a minute we were in the woods. Immediately afterwards we saw the patrol go by, four soldiers sloshing with alcohol, barely able to stay on their feet. They were walking slowly, making no noise. It took a good five minutes before they were out of sight; they were zigzagging as they went, in grim silence.

‘They’re not on a happy drunk,’ said the man.

‘Who are you?’

‘We’ve met. Lieutenant Muller.’

‘I remember, you took me to Renato…Major Manca.’

‘How is he, have you heard anything?’

‘Under arrest.’

‘I know that, he’s not the only…friend we have in Refrontolo.’

‘The reason I ran away is—’

‘Save your breath, I can fill in the rest.’

He stood up. I did the same.

‘We can’t go though Falzè or Mirra. We’d do better to cross the Soligo and head for Mercatelli, we can find a boat there.’

He started off without another word. He walked quickly, so fast that I had a hard time keeping pace with him, and he never turned to see if I was following him. Suddenly, he stopped and looked me in the eye: ‘Do you know how to shoot?’

‘I can identify a weapon at first sight, calibre and make…’

‘Answer me!’

‘No. I’ve never fired a gun at anyone. I’ve only shot a few bullets into trees…one time I killed a roe deer with my grandpa’s hunting rifle.’

The lieutenant pulled a revolver out of his pocket and put it in my hand.

It was heavy.

‘It will never jam on you, just cock the hammer and aim at the chest, the centre of the chest.’

He set off again. I walked after him, hefting the revolver as I went. I went over it, trying to find out everything I could with my fingers and, where possible, with my eyes. ‘It’s a Tettoni, an import, am I right?’

The lieutenant said nothing but just started walking a little faster.

When we re-crossed the river, day was already dawning. We stripped bare and wrung out our clothing. The lieutenant handed me a hunk of cheese and I held out the tin of marmalade. Then we ate some dried figs. We set off again with our wet clothing sticking to our skin. We needed to move quickly and find a hiding place before the bivouacs stirred to life: we were too close to the Piave to be able to walk around in broad daylight.

I kept the revolver in my left jacket pocket so I could grab it faster with my right hand. I’d managed to keep it from getting wet. Even if I was afraid of it, something drove me to want to use it, to be forced to kill in self-defence. I could feel a dark, molten mass building up inside me. I was strangely aroused.

We stopped around nine. We gulped down the last few pieces of polenta and shared out the cheese that Luisa’s mother had given me. For a few minutes, as I sat eating, I thought back to her, and Giulia. Their faces appeared before me, and I was astonished that I couldn’t clearly remember the moments of pleasure, only certain scattered details that poured into my head, only to slip quickly away.

‘Get down!’

I flattened myself to the ground behind a log. I saw that the lieutenant had his revolver in his hand. I pulled out mine. The
voices were coming from the trail. Two, three. One voice was a woman’s. Then a shout: ‘No!’

I looked at the lieutenant; he was tense, motionless, listening.

The German voices exchanged short phrases, imprecations. The woman had started screaming, and her screams grew louder and louder. From his position the lieutenant could see, but I couldn’t. I craned my neck: a soldier had grabbed a girl and was dragging her into the ditch. The other soldier was laughing and tagging along; he laughed and laughed.

‘They’re raping her,’ I said.

‘Don’t move.’

The screams died out, resumed, then fell silent.

‘Aren’t we going to do anything?’ I didn’t realize I had raised my voice.

‘Shut up!’ said the lieutenant, but it was too late. A soldier was coming towards us, his rifle levelled, bare-chested with his belt undone.

The lieutenant emerged from his hiding place and fired. The soldier fell forward, face first. I was frozen in place. A second shot made me jump. The lieutenant dropped right in front of me. I looked up. Not five metres away, the other soldier was taking aim. He was practically naked, that’s the only thing I noticed – that and the rifle barrel pointing straight at me. I lifted my left hand to the gun that I was already aiming and I pulled the trigger, once, twice. The soldier fell to his knees, his rifle splayed in the middle of the path. Without thinking twice, I walked towards him. He had one hand pressed against his chest and the other held high, in a gesture of surrender. His eyes were large and dark. And he was looking at me. I stopped two metres away from him. He was looking at me, shaking his head
no
as blood oozed down onto his belly, his exposed genitals.
My right hand was shaking. Once again, I raised my left hand to the grip of the revolver, but the barrel of the gun refused to stay still. He was looking me straight in the eye, with one hand held high: ‘
Nein
,’ he said, ‘
nein!
’ and he shook his head
nein
too, over and over again. He wouldn’t stop. I don’t remember pulling the trigger, but the bullet blew his face wide open and blood splattered everywhere.

I took a step back. My mouth was dry. I looked around. There was no one on the trail. I leant over the lieutenant. The rifle shot had splayed his throat open right up to the chin. His eyes were staring at the sky, opaque. I closed them. My hand was no longer shaking.

The girl’s jacket was torn. She was barefoot. Her hair and her face were smeared with mud, and her features were pinched in an expression of extreme alarm. Her eyes were fastened on my revolver. I realized I still had it clutched in my hand; I pocketed it and took the hand the young woman was holding out to me. We started running, running through a field of corn and there, in the middle of the field, we stopped to catch our breath. I dropped to the ground and, from a sitting position, took off my rucksack. She squatted down, pressing her hands between her legs with a grimace of pain. The shocks of corn rustled overhead.

When her grimace faded, I saw that she was pretty. She had a high forehead, unlined, and pronounced eyebrows, blue eyes that looked straight ahead of her. Her fine nose was well shaped. Her fleshy lips were pressed together in anger and disgust. Only then did I realize that she couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen, at the most.

‘What’s your name?’

‘
Ti
…
te parli da sior
…
e ti gà le man de quei che no gà mai lavorà
.’ She said in dialect that I spoke like a gentleman, and
that I had the hands of someone who’d never done a day’s work.

‘My name’s Paolo, what’s yours?’

‘You don’t need to know my name.’

Without the lieutenant there was no point trying to reach Mercatelli.

‘I have to get to the river,’ I said.

‘I’ll take you.’

She was on her feet and walking before I could get the rucksack back on my shoulders. It wasn’t easy to keep up with her. She moved through the corn, and then through the woods, like a wild animal whose den was there.

The darkness and the pouring rain forced us to take shelter in an abandoned sheepfold, about thirty metres above the cart road that ran parallel to the rampart of the levee: the Austrians had fortified the levee and equipped it with machine-gun nests, plazas for light artillery, and munition dumps. From there I could see the oxbow curve of the river Piave. Not even the furious rain was loud enough to drown out the sound of the river flowing past.

‘If it keeps up, it’ll be hard to get across the river. The water is quick to rise.’

She told me not to try to cross here, where soldiers might see, but to go further on.

I objected that I needed to rest for a little bit, that I didn’t have it in me to take another step. The girl nodded and slipped all five fingers of her right hand into her mouth to let me know she was hungry. I shared with her the cheese and the marmalade, greedily gobbling down my portion. Then I stuck my cupped hands out so that they’d fill with rain. I’d lost my canteen. The girl asked me to give her my knife. My objections met with complete indifference: without that knife she wasn’t willing to stay
near me. When I gave it to her, she waved it in my face, then she demanded that I put the revolver under the rucksack, and then she pretended to go to sleep. I tossed and turned on the straw. I was drenched, exhausted, and – enveloped in the stench of manure – I did my best to get my thoughts straight.

Thirty-Eight

W
HEN
I
OPENED MY EYES
I
TURNED TOWARDS THE GIRL:
she was watching the raindrops bounce off the stone enclosure of our shelter, while the tip of the knife blade struck the upright supporting the lean-to roof overhead, rising and falling in time with some inner cadence. She didn’t look at me, and if she had, she wouldn’t have seen me. Before me I saw the blank eyes of Lieutenant Muller, then the soldier I’d killed, even though he was trying to surrender, even though his eyes, his face, and his voice kept telling me not to. I imagined a noose tightening around my neck. The girl kept driving the tip of the knife into the wood.

I picked up the rucksack to get my revolver.

‘Where did you put the revolver? My revolver!’

The girl kept chopping the tip of the blade against the wood, faster and faster. She was far away, she couldn’t hear and she couldn’t see. I tried to speak to her in a gentle voice. I spoke in dialect. But she went on driving the knife into the upright supporting the rafter. I looked outside: the rain was falling harder and harder, and the river was roaring.

I felt a spurt of something hot on my face, I clapped my hand to my cheek and I turned to look at her: she’d sliced her throat open and the blood was still spurting out. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe, and I shouted: ‘No-o-o!’ I yanked the knife out of the girl’s rigid hand. I don’t know if she was already dead, she was
no longer convulsing, and that cut throat gaping open was something horrifying to behold. I ran outside. I wanted the falling rain to wash me clean; my face and hair must have been covered with blood. I cleaned the blade by rubbing it on the grass. Luckily, there wasn’t a soul in sight. I was shaking, I was sobbing. Finally I fell to my knees. And I stopped crying. I wanted to stay alive. I couldn’t seem to think. It was raining so hard that I couldn’t even see the cart road, and I practically couldn’t hear the river any more. I started walking, after sliding the knife under my belt. The rain was blinding me. I walked for ten or twenty minutes; I wanted to put some distance between me and all that blood. Without meaning to, I found myself standing in the middle of the cart road. I crossed the road and headed for the river. The barbed wire fences were in the midst of the stream, and at this point, the levee had collapsed. I realized that I had wound up amidst the enemy’s defensive structures. They seemed to have been abandoned, the bunkers were empty. The Austrians must have taken shelter in some nearby house to stay dry. I knew that all the civilians within a distance of two or three kilometres had been evacuated. I ran my tongue over my lips. I still had the taste of blood stuck to my skin. I rubbed my face with my hands and I drank water by tipping my mouth up towards the sky. It was out of the question to try to ford the river. I was a good swimmer, but I knew that stronger swimmers than me had drowned in that river. I ventured down the levee that had been washed away by the current. There was barbed wire sticking out of the water here and there, and I imagined the spine of a sea monster lying on the riverbed. I went into the water, putting just my shod feet in first. I wanted to test the strength of the current. I had no alternative, I decided to run the risk.

‘I have to get past that stretch of wire fence and stay on my
feet while I’m doing it,’ I said to myself, ‘otherwise I’m finished.’ The water was up to my knees, I’d got within a metre of the iron barbs. ‘I can do it, I have to!’ I said.

A shot.

‘Halt!’

I turned around. There were two rifles aimed at me. I looked at the river, I saw an islet.

‘Halt!’

I felt someone grab me by the shoulders. There was an arm around my neck. I twisted free. There was a sudden pain, dull and powerful, in the middle of my chest.