Hero on a Bicycle (14 page)

Maria caught her as she fell.

When she came around she was lying on the living-room sofa with Maria bending over her.

“I’m all right, really,” she said, attempting to prop herself up on her elbow. “It was silly of me. . . .”

“
Rimanga qui, signora!
Stay there a little. You’ve had too much for anyone to take today.”

“If I could have a glass of water?”

“Surely, surely. I’ll get it. Stay there and rest.”

“But I can’t. I mustn’t. If only Paolo would come home. He really ought to be back by now. And Constanza and Joe — where are they?”

“Not in the house. In the yard, perhaps. I’ll get them for you.”

She hurried away. But the yard, house, and garden were silent and empty. Constanza and Joe had already set out, hand in hand, and were on the road, making their way amid the steadily building stream of people who were fleeing from the fighting.

The late-afternoon sun was suffocatingly hot. The road was clogged with cyclists, families pushing handcarts that groaned under the weight of their belongings, and nuns shepherding groups of children. Motorists were honking their horns and trying to edge forward through the crowd. Weary Italian soldiers, some wounded, were trudging north in an attempt to rejoin their units. Everyone was too intent on their own survival to pay much attention to anyone else. The sound of shell fire was alarmingly near now, sometimes spasmodic, sometimes a sustained barrage that shook the ground under their feet. A convoy of army trucks packed with soldiers suddenly rounded the bend, followed by a couple of machine-gun carriers, and everyone scattered as they forced their way through. Joe put his good arm protectively around Constanza.

“I shouldn’t have let you do this,” he said.

“But I wanted to,” she insisted.

“And I wanted it, too. But it was selfish of me, I guess. I just couldn’t say good-bye to you in the yard after what happened and all you’ve done for me.”

Constanza said nothing. She just shook her head and smiled. They walked on in silence, keeping up a steady pace until they reached the spot from which the path led off into the hills. Here, Joe stopped and said, “I’m not letting you come any farther. This is where we have to say good-bye.”

“Is your shoulder OK?”

“Yeah, it’ll be fine.”

“The Partisans are coming out of hiding now. They’re very strong in this area, and the local people won’t bother you. Just make sure they know you are Canadian.”

“I’ll let you know where I end up if — I mean,
when
I get through. I’ll write you. I’m not much good at letters, but —”

“I am. I’ll write back. It’ll be good for my English!”

“I’m no good at saying how I feel. It all turns out like a lot of garbage from some bad movie. Especially when I look at you, your eyes, and the way you push your hair back over your ears like that, like a kid. How old are you, anyway?”

“Nearly seventeen.”

“I’m so much older than you.”

“How old?”

“Twenty-one. But fighting a war’s an aging business, I guess. You have to shut down such a lot of yourself, just concentrate on staying alive. In the camp, the only thing that keeps you going is the dream of what you’ll do when you get out — imagining someone like you. . . .”

“I hate this war. I hate you and me and my family having to be in it. I hate hardly being able to remember what things were like before it all began. Oh, Joe, do you think we’ll ever be able to go dancing?”

“Sure. Sure we will.”

“I’ll think about it. I’ll imagine the dress I’ll wear.”

“And I’ll imagine you wearing it.”

“Now you’ve got to go.”

“Yeah. I’ve got to go.”

He put both his arms around her, and, ignoring his poor shoulder, they clung together with a kind of fierce desperation. It was an awkward embrace, but the kiss that followed was the world-shaking kind, the kind that goes down in history, the kind you always remember. When Joe had gone a little way up the road, he turned to wave to her, but she was already walking away, very fast. She didn’t turn around.

Constanza managed to walk some distance from the spot where she had left Joe before she began to cry. She kept on walking, half blinded by tears and wiping them away with the palms of her hands because she had no handkerchief. She was thinking about Joe kissing her, and the possibility that she might never see him again, and then about the horror of Guido’s death, still so raw in her mind, and about the whole frightening mess that she and her family were in, and there being nothing,
nothing,
to look forward to now except the end of this horrible war, and heaven knew when that would be.

Up until then, she had always thought of the day she had said good-bye to Babbo — not then fully understanding why he had to leave them — as the blackest in her life. But that seemed like a long time ago, when she had still been almost a child. She felt far older now, and everything had gotten far, far worse.

When she reached the main road, she found it more crowded than ever. She tried to jostle through, but nobody was in the mood to give way, and she only just managed to avoid being pushed into the ditch by a man and his wife leading a horse and cart piled high with assorted furniture, a pen full of live chickens, some cooking pots, and a large mattress with two children and a dog perched on top. Constanza stopped for a moment, exhausted, her tears still coming as though there were no end to them. Then she heard someone call her name. For a moment she thought Joe had come back to find her, and her heart leaped with joy. Then she realized that it was an even more familiar voice.

“Paolo!” she shouted back.

She could see his head bobbing along some way off. He was waving.

“Oh, Paolo — thank God!”

They struggled toward each other. Paolo looked every bit as exhausted as she was, and he was clearly so close to tears that she stopped crying and hugged him.

“Paolo — where have you been all this time? Where’s your bicycle?”

“I lost it. I mean, I gave it to someone.”

“Gave it? What on earth . . . ? But let’s get out of this crowd, and you can tell me about it. This road’s hopeless. I think we should go around the other way, take the back road and cut across to the farm. We’ve got to hurry. Mamma’ll be worried sick.”

This was clearly not the time to tell him all that had happened at home that day, and especially not about Guido. As they doubled back, Paolo began to pour out a rather incoherent account of his own exploits, but when he tried to explain what had happened to his bicycle, he could not go on. He fell silent, and Constanza didn’t press him. They kept walking by sheer effort of will, their legs sore and tired; one strap on Constanza’s flimsy sandal had broken and Paolo was hardly able to put one foot in front of the other. When they reached the side road, they found it unusually deserted.

“It’s a longer walk, but it’ll take us less time now we’re clear of all those people,” said Constanza. Paolo was too weary to answer. Suddenly, out of nowhere, two aircraft ripped through the sky overhead, and there was a series of earsplitting explosions as three bombs hit the hillside just across the valley. A barn caught fire, and heavy smoke began to drift toward them. Instinctively, they covered their heads with their hands.

“Allied planes,” said Paolo, “harassing the German retreat. Those planes are trying to knock out their gun emplacements.”

“Come on, Paolo — let’s try to go faster,” urged Constanza. “I can’t bear to think of Mamma being alone at home with only Maria.”

She quickened her pace, and Paolo stumbled along behind her. They could hear the noise of heavy gunfire, frighteningly near. Then there was the sound of vehicles coming up the road behind them. A truckload of German soldiers bumped into view, followed by an armored car with an officer and a sergeant on board. Paolo and Constanza drew back into the hedge to let them pass, but they pulled up a few feet away. The officer jumped out of the car and strode toward them.

“Helmut!” breathed Constanza. Paolo said nothing. They had both reached the point where they were beyond surprise.

H
elmut’s appearance was no longer that of the finely turned-out young German officer. His uniform was covered with dust and sweat, and his face was drawn with exhaustion. He shouted an order over his shoulder, and the truck driver turned off his engine. “What are you doing here?” Helmut asked angrily. “Do you realize how dangerous it is to be out here on this road? The enemy is advancing very near here.”

“I — we . . .” began Constanza, and then stopped. It was all just too difficult to explain. “I came to meet Paolo,” she continued lamely. “He’s been — he had an accident and lost his bicycle.”

“You must turn back at once,” Helmut said impatiently. “This road isn’t safe. The Partisans have planted mines everywhere. You must get back to the main road.”

“But we’ve got to get home quickly. We’re worried about my mother being on her own.”

“You should never have come out here.”

“You are retreating?”

“Yes — yes, we are retreating. My men have had no sleep for two nights now. The bridges over the Arno are being blown up, all but the Ponte Vecchio, which is blocked at both ends. General Schlemm is occupying the north of the city, and we need to make a detour to regroup farther up the river. So, as you see, this is no time for polite conversation.”

“Of course we’ll turn back if you say we must. Right away. But, Helmut”— she impulsively put out her hand to him —“before we go, I just want to say . . . I mean, I hope you get through this all right.”

This sounded ridiculously lame and schoolgirlish, she thought, but she meant it with all her heart. It came from the real affection she felt for him and the huge gratitude for the day when he had led the search party at their house and somehow managed not to notice that scrap of incriminating evidence on the floor of their cellar. She knew he had done it out of friendship, for her sake and for her family’s sake, and that it had gone against all his disciplined instincts as a German officer. Her feelings for him had nothing to do with the hatred she felt for the side he was fighting for. Sides didn’t seem very relevant at that particular moment.

He hesitated, then took her hand and held it. For a minute, all the anger left his face. He looked at her intently, as though he were trying to store something vitally important in his memory. Then he pulled away, saluted, and turned back to his men.

He ordered the truck to stay where it was. His sergeant jumped down then and brought out a mine detector. Paolo, who had been watching the scene from where he was resting his weary feet on the bank, guessed what was about to happen. Helmut and his sergeant were going to go on ahead to test the next stretch of road for mines. The Partisans tended to plant them at the sides of the road rather than in the middle, but that was by no means certain, and even with a detector, this was a dangerous operation. If the road was clear, the truck would follow.

The two men disappeared around the bend in the lane. A tense silence descended, broken only by the buzzing of cicadas. The shell fire across the valley seemed to have ceased. The men on the truck sat immobile, listening. The minutes dragged by slowly. Constanza clutched Paolo’s arm. They were all concentrating on the moment when those two men would reappear; each person was willing them to walk back around the bend.

Suddenly the silence was broken by an earsplitting roar as an explosion tore through the air. There was a blast of heat as though from an oven, and flame, earth, and foliage shot upward. Immediately several men jumped down from the truck and ran around the bend in the road. Constanza and Paolo tried to follow them, but one of the soldiers ordered them to stay back. All they could do was stand and wait.

Everything seemed to go into slow motion. At last the soldiers reappeared. Two of them were supporting the sergeant. His face was badly cut and streaming with blood. The others were carrying Helmut, his arms trailing, his body hanging limp between them. They laid him on the bank, near where Constanza and Paolo were standing, and covered him with their jackets. He lay perfectly still. Ignoring all warnings to keep back, Constanza knelt beside him. His face and shoulders were, amazingly, unharmed, but she could not bear to look at the rest of him. He was muttering, trying to say something. He put out a hand toward her and she took it. She tried to find the right reassuring words in German but found that they utterly failed her. All she could do was stroke his hand very gently and say, “Helmut . . . Helmut . . . it’s all right, Helmut.” She thought she heard him say something that sounded like “My mother . . . tell my mother . . .” He closed his eyes, then opened them again and seemed for a moment to recognize her. Meanwhile, one of the men ran to fetch a first-aid kit from the car, and another put a rolled-up shirt under Helmut’s head.

“We’ll get help,” she told him desperately. Blood was soaking copiously through the jacket that covered his legs and was spilling out onto the grass. One of his men was attempting to stanch the flow by tying a scarf tightly above what was left of his right knee. Another was trying to assist his breathing. Constanza felt useless and started to move out of the way, but he held on to her hand. He was trying to speak again, and she lowered her ear very close to his mouth, straining to catch the words, but they were garbled and unintelligible. She knew that it was only a matter of minutes before the trauma of the explosion gave way to the agony of his injuries and he would start to scream. Somebody put a water bottle to his lips, but he was unable to drink.