The Art of Waiting (13 page)

‘Totally out of control,' confirmed Luigi.

Gianni nodded.

‘What are you fucking nodding for?' said Aldo. ‘I thought you were better than that.'

‘Are
you?'
said Gianni, angry now.

‘Yeah, what did you fucking do?' said Luigi, backing Gianni up, chucking back the guilt.

‘Fuck you,' said Aldo, but he knew that they were right.

‘Look, everyone,' said the sergeant. ‘We do whatever we have to, and we just keep going. Look after yourselves and look after each other, until we make it home, that's all.'

‘But don't you ever get that feeling?' said Luigi. ‘That we'll never make it home?'

‘Shut the fuck up,' said the sergeant.

‘Yes, shut the fuck up,' said Aldo. ‘Shut the fuck up. We have to be strong.'

‘And what if we're not strong?' said Luigi. ‘What then?'

‘Then just fucking pretend that you are.'

‘But we know we're all cowards now,' said Gianni. ‘Not just today. Yesterday too. We didn't do anything, did we? We just hid in a field.'

‘What could we have done?' said the sergeant. ‘Try to be heroes? What's the point? Do that and you'll never see your home again, I promise you that.'

After dark they moved out of the village, now just a collection of dying embers among the blackened remains of the
izbas
, surrounded by fields of crushed and burning flowers. A small gaggle of women followed the soldiers along the track, one of them pleading with Aldo for help, begging him not to leave them among the ruins of the village with no shelter, no food, nothing but the clothes on their backs and the bodies of their men. Aldo stopped and was about to speak when the sergeant pushed himself between them.

‘Leave her,' he said. ‘She's not your fucking problem.'

And he pulled Aldo away and they rejoined the column and the column kept going, a weary line of shadows moving east, the dark shapes of German tanks roaring past, Panzer grenadiers upon the
hulls, their cigarettes glowing orange flecks like fireflies in the night as they passed, looking down upon the tramping soldiers who stirred up the dust in the sudden cool of the night. And then a blood-red moon rose out of the field and lingered low over the horizon. It coated everything in the same subdued orange light: the dead and the living, the flowers in the fields, and the barren dusty track that was carrying them all away over the eastern horizon again. But this time there was no black shadow stalking Aldo, because the black shadow was within him now.

The Angel

Pavlovsk, near Rostov-on-Don, December 1942

Aldo was freezing to death, lying in the dark in a shallow depression in no-man's land beside the frozen banks of the River Don. In late afternoon, as the last of the light died away, his platoon had been sent out on patrol towards the Russian lines and they had been caught by the flares and the shells. Aldo fell to the ground and hadn't moved a muscle since. Move and a sniper's bullet would get you in the head – that was the usual way. But if he didn't move soon, he would die all the same from the cold, just more slowly. He looked now at the stars, the same stars, he thought, that would be shining over Venice, far away to the west, whichever way that was. He had plenty of time to think now, parts of him long-since numb, and his thoughts turned to those he had left back home that summer and he wondered what they might be doing, if they too were outside in the freezing air, his mother walking home in the moonlight from Casa Luca, or in Isabella's case, expertly navigating her tides of passion in the company of some new cabin boy before drawing him in for a shared cigarette. Tufts of coarse steppe grass speared the snow around Aldo, and by the banks of the river the remnants of reeds were bent double in the wind that was picking up again now. Thick ice covered the river and deep snow covered the ice, and the snow was still coming down heavily, falling upon the earth in a million goose-down flakes. Here and there the river-ice jagged and jutted in angular slabs where shells sent over by the artillery had split it open in an attempt to impede the Russian attacks, but the river froze so hard and so fast that the Russians always attacked anyway and the dark shapes of bodies littered the slope on either
side. A disembodied voice rose and fell again, as it had done for hours, one of the lingering wounded. It was impossible to make out the man's words or the side for which he had been fighting when he fell.

Aldo heard the Russian guns starting up again, shells singing overhead, coming down on the Italian lines. There was movement around the Russian trenches too, white-clad figures moving down the slope towards the river, onto the ice, then across it. Then gunfire started up from both sides, the usual thing. Italian mortar shells were falling here and there, splitting the river, rafts of ice breaking free and drifting around in patches of open water as men clung to their slippery edges and tried to haul themselves out. But the river was wide and there were enough passages across its frozen surface, and soon Aldo saw Russian boots as they rushed past his face, kicking up the snow as they ran. He heard the shouts of the enemy and their cries as they fell. He heard the sound of the bullets as they buzzed and burrowed about and the explosions of the mortars that burst all around, but the chill had penetrated deeper now and an unexpected liberation swept over him, a sense of disembodiment, lifting him so that he began to feel as if he were floating above the ground, hovering there, suddenly only vaguely aware of the shouts and the violence that came to him through the night as if from another dimension. He lay insulated by cold and detached from the world, like a hibernating animal that would sleep through the long dark winter to wake again one bright heavenly day when the only sounds would be those of the breeze among young leaves, the unfolding of spring flowers, and an orchestra of birds hailing the rebirth of the world.

As Aldo lay semi-conscious in the midst of chaos he saw a great winged creature as it passed over the desolate scene, and he watched its slow trajectory as it illuminated the dying. He looked into its eyes and he understood now the meaning of things. It had revealed itself to him as he clung to the threshold between life and death, a moment of clarity, one that he would always remember, a fragment of insight from the depths of a dream, the essence of which remains
beyond the comprehension of a normal consciousness. He would only know that he had once been shown the answer, that it does exist, and that it is as obvious and yet as intangible as the blue of the sky. Then he closed his eyes and the roar of battle grew more distant, like the sounds of a petty argument passing through the wall from a neighbouring room, and he lay somehow in sunshine, in some other place.

Water stretched out before him, reaching across a bay to steep wooded slopes that dropped into the blue-green of a lake. Shadowy fish rose up in the water and dappled the surface with their kisses, rings rippling out from where their rubbery lips sipped down insects that chanced upon the water. And away to one side a figure stood on an outcrop of rock, lit up by the sun, and she dived into the water, sending a giant wave rolling towards the place where Aldo sat naked in the grass, and the wave that she had created washed over him and he lay back and felt the sun drink the cool clean water from his weary flesh.

But then Aldo heard Italian voices again, close by now, and he snapped back to reality, to the dark and the cold and the snow. The attack must have foundered as it reached the Italian trenches: they usually did. Then he felt someone leaning over him, and an accent he recognised, a Milanese leaning in with a fragment of mirror, holding it to Aldo's mouth, waiting to see if it misted over with breath. And it did, so he hauled him up and dragged him back towards the Italian lines. In the smoky fug of a dugout they laid Aldo in front of a stove, rubbed him vigorously, shook him until he finally spoke, then filled his mouth with warm polenta, covered him with the grease that they used to protect the guns from the cold, and in this way they lured him back into what might pass for a normal state of consciousness.

‘I saw an angel,' said Aldo when he was fully conscious again, his first words to the watching faces in the gloom.

‘What the hell!' laughed the sergeant. ‘You saw an angel? In this fucking place?'

‘That's right. An angel. An angel in the snow.'

‘Mother of God, that's all we need,' said the sergeant. ‘Another fucking nutcase.'

‘I promise you, it was an angel, all wings and light. And that look.'

‘That look?'

‘Yes, you know, that Jesus look.'

‘Like you get in statues?' said Gianni, perking up suddenly from the back of the dugout, sitting there doubled up to retain some warmth.

‘Yes, like you get in statues,' said Aldo. ‘But it wasn't a statue, it was an angel.'

‘Don't worry, my friend, I believe you,' said Gianni. ‘I want to believe in angels too.'

The Retreat

Pavlovsk, near Rostov-on-Don, January 1943

Two weeks after New Year, the retreat began. In a brief lull between one Russian attack and the next, the 156th Vicenza Division – and the Tridentina and Cuneense, dug in on either side of them – abandoned their trenches just after dusk. Aldo pulled on his pack and tugged his scarf tight around his throat, and he followed the others up the steps towards the rear, leaving the network of trenches behind him empty, little sign of recent human habitation but for the footprints in the snow and the frozen contents of the latrines and, pinned to a wooden post and flapping in the wind, a photo of a girl on a beach on a sunny summer's day.

‘The long road home starts here,' said the sergeant.

‘The long road home started the day we came to this godforsaken country,' said Gianni. ‘How did we ever think we could win against all this?'

He looked at the surrounding countryside, bleak and white and unending.

‘And the Russians never stop coming, do they?' he said. ‘Old Mother Russia must be a fertile old bitch, churning out all her millions of sons.'

‘A heartless bitch too,' said Aldo. ‘Chucking them all away with such haste. And
Il Duce
isn't much better.'

‘Don't speak ill of your father,' said the sergeant.

‘He's not my father. My father's dead. I told you that.'

‘Oh yes,' the sergeant laughed. ‘The hunting accident . . .'

‘It wasn't a fucking accident. He killed him.'

‘He?'

‘Fausto Pozzi. Fausto Pozzi killed him. I told you that too,' said Aldo, and he felt that itch again on his arm, in that place with the tattoo, as if the pig were stirring, reminding him it was there.

‘I still don't see why,' said the sergeant.

‘Why what?'

‘Why he would kill him.'

‘Business, of course. Money. I told you that too. Christ, sergeant, have you got no fucking memory?'

‘I'll remember what you've just said, if that's what you mean.'

‘Money,' said Gianni, chipping in late as usual. ‘The root of all evil. My priest always used to tell us that.'

‘But, Gianni, we're the root of all evil,' said Aldo. ‘Didn't your fucking priest ever tell you that? Haven't you seen enough here to realise it?'

‘All right, Aldo. Calm down, I was just saying.'

‘Well, don't say, don't just say. And tell that fucking priest of yours how things really are. If you ever make it home . . .'

They retreated for the whole of January, sniped at by pursuing troops, machine-gunned by planes that swept in out of clear blue skies, hunted down by partisans who gnawed at the flanks of the column as it snaked its way home. The unrelenting cold cloaked them in inertia. The wind swept cold death in all around them and then blew in blizzards to shield them from the eyes of Russian pilots high above, allowing them to lie a while in peace, curled up by the side of the track where some would lie down to rest, close their eyes, and sleep themselves to death if it were not for the sharp and brotherly prod in the ribs with which they kept each other awake and alive. When the sky cleared they continued their long march through the snow, an unbroken line of diminished figures that stretched from one edge of the horizon to the other, anonymous ants upon the map, waiting to be stepped on, time stretching into infinity in all directions, leaving them so far from home that even if they marched for a thousand years they would still be in the middle of this vast and empty white plain.

One morning, after the night had lifted the clouds and the sky
hung huge and pale and clear, Aldo saw three specks high up to the east. He watched the dark specks swell to spots and then the hum of engines come sweeping in, the Russian Yaks coming down in a screaming dive. The column of men panicked and broke apart. Aldo and Gianni and Luigi and the sergeant ran for their lives as the planes shrieked low above their heads, their cannons leaving red furrows in the snow where men had been. Aldo threw himself down, trying to burrow into the snow with his hands. He could see men here and there firing wildly into the air as the planes climbed and turned and descended again. They came back again and again, and each time Aldo picked himself up and hurried further off into the emptiness of the steppe, and each time fewer men were running beside him and more men lay dead in the bloody snow. And then, as suddenly as they had arrived, the planes hummed away into the distance, the sound of their engines fading at last to nothing. Aldo picked himself up and looked around. He saw Luigi stumbling about, tripping over a broken body and falling into the snow. Luigi remained there on his hands and knees, head down, and as Aldo reached him he heard him whimpering.

‘My eyes, my eyes,' Luigi was saying, his fingers pushing and probing around the edges of the sockets. ‘God, I can't see. Help me. Help me.'

‘Look at me Luigi, look at me,' Aldo shouted.

‘How can I fucking look at you, you fucking idiot?' Luigi said as he lifted his head, and Aldo saw that his eyes had gone and his cheeks ran with blood, black specks embedded all over his face.

‘Help me, Aldo. You will help me, won't you? How am I ever going to make it home when I can't even see where I'm going?'

Aldo wiped Luigi's blood away with handfuls of snow but the eyes overflowed again, so he found a dirty bandage and wound it around Luigi's head, then took a length of rope from the pack of a dead man and tied one end around Luigi's waist and the other around his own, and he led him off to find Gianni and the sergeant.

In the interminable depths of another night on the steppe the shapes of
izbas
came to them through the blizzard. The sergeant strode towards the huts, head down, a stubborn bull in a field. No stopping him, it seemed, and Aldo followed in his steps, Luigi trailing at the end of the rope, Gianni bringing up the rear. The sergeant banged on the door of the first
izba
and the door inched ajar. Through the crack Aldo saw a helmet with the proud cockerel feathers of the Bersaglieri, a pair of eyes peering out from under it.

‘Fuck off, no room in here,' came the voice. ‘We're already packed in like sardines. Try the houses further down.'

The door slammed shut and they moved on. The scene repeated itself again and again, only the expletives varying. Finally Aldo hammered on the door of the last hut, set back from the others at the end of the village, then kicked it open and tumbled in, Luigi following him at the end of the rope, smacking his head on the doorframe as he went in, and the sergeant pushing past Gianni and Gianni swearing and trying to pull the door closed behind them. Aldo looked around at the small kitchen, smoke from a black stove in the corner thickening the air. There were no Italians here. Three figures sat around a table in the middle of the room, two men and a woman, the woman looking over her shoulder towards the new arrivals, a look of surprise on her face; the other two, Russian soldiers, sat in their white winter coats, one still wearing his helmet, the other holding a spoon between bowl and mouth. An iron pot steamed in the middle of the table. Fuck me, thought Aldo, here we go. This is it. But then he saw the Russians' guns, propped together against the far wall, out of reach. Oh God, what now? Let's shoot the fuckers, Massimo had said, Gianni too. But no, let's not shoot anyone, Aldo. Calm yourself now. He saw the Russians looking at him, at his rifle, and he could hear the wind behind him, blowing great flakes of snow into the room.

‘Well, if you're coming in, then shut the fucking door,' said one of the Russians, resuming his meal as the orange light of the stove set his face ablaze. An Asian face, Aldo thought, like so many he had seen, dead ones, usually, no other way to get this close to them. Until now.

‘And if you're not coming in, then fuck off and shut the door on your way out,' said the other, a younger man, his face like an angel's but his eyes black and cold like the coal eyes of a snowman.

Aldo carefully propped his rifle against the wall and Gianni pulled the door shut and the sergeant looked more nervous than Aldo had ever seen him. The woman offered them chairs and they sat down, Luigi still holding on to his rope.

‘Funny place to be taking a dog for a walk,' said one of the Russians, pointing at the rope. ‘Woof, woof!' And he laughed.

‘What's he saying, Aldo?'

‘Nothing, Luigi. Nothing at all.'

The woman ladled soup into a bowl, placed it in front of them, and fetched four more spoons. Aldo breathed in the cabbage aroma. He lifted a spoon towards Luigi's mouth, then took a spoonful for himself. The woman passed him a cup, beautifully clean, blue flowers on white. She motioned him to fill it with soup and pass it to Luigi.

‘
Spasiba
,' said Aldo.

‘You speak Russian?' said the man with the Asiatic features.

Aldo nodded.

‘You speak Russian but you wear an Italian uniform? I'd call that an unnatural combination.'

‘I'm Italian. What sort of uniform do you want me to wear?'

The younger Russian looked at the intruders with his snowman's eyes.

‘You know,' he said with sudden venom. ‘I saw something one night, back home in Leningrad, before the war. I was walking through a park one night and there were these stray dogs, big rough ones, almost wild, like wolves. And they'd found this cat, cornered it in the bushes, and they got it between them and they shook it to pieces, ripped it apart, like this . . .'

The Russian growled and bared his teeth, took his hand in his mouth and shook it, bits of soup flying about as he re-enacted the cat's demise.

‘And when they'd killed it they just left it there and went on their way, to look for another one, no doubt. You know what dogs
are like when they're together. And every day after that for a month I walked through the park and I saw that cat's body, and every day it had changed. Every day it had shrunk just a bit, rotted just a little bit more. And that's what's happening to you, isn't it? Every day a little bit more. We take you and shake you, rip you to pieces, and every day you are less and we are more, and one day there will be nothing left of you but a stain on the ground where we left you. But we won't be able to just go on our way again like those dogs, because when we've pushed you all out of the Motherland, we'll take your country and we'll tear it to pieces too, and every day you'll walk past what used to be your home and you'll see it slowly disappear, smaller and smaller every day in front of your eyes, and there'll be nothing at all you can do about it. And then, when it's all gone, and you have nothing left to lose, then you'll know you should never have come here.'

‘Nice story,' said Aldo.

The man hurled his spoon across the table at Aldo.

‘Oh, ignore him,' said the other Russian. ‘He's just upset because he got shot yesterday. Come on, Aleksandr, don't be shy. Show them your wound.'

The younger Russian lifted his arm and placed his hand on the table. He peeled back the grubby bandage and Aldo saw the bloody mess beneath.

‘Two fingers I lost,' said the Russian. ‘I've got them in my pocket. They're still fucking frozen. Do you want to see them?'

He took out a little bundle stained red and brown with blood. He pulled it open and two grey stubby lumps, black grime beneath the nails, tumbled out onto the table.

‘Look at those fucking things!' he yelled, and he picked them up and hurled them one after the other at Aldo.

‘Come on, that's no way to behave at the table,' said the older man.

‘Fuck that! Look at my fucking hand!'

The woman went over and picked the fingers up off the floor and put them back on the table beside the young Russian.

‘Put them back in your pocket, now,' she said. ‘Stop talking rubbish and eat your soup.'

‘Fuck my soup!' he yelled.

‘My bowl's empty,' said the older man.

She refilled their bowls and suddenly there was silence as they ate.

‘Maybe we should go and find somewhere else to sleep,' said Aldo when they had finished.

‘Where are you going to find room now?' said the older man. ‘All the other
izbas
will be packed full of your pals. You'll die out there in the cold. Stay here. There's plenty of room for us all.'

‘Yes, and we'll slit your throats while you sleep,' said the younger man. ‘Here, listen, listen, let me read you this.' He pulled a tattered page, torn from an old edition of
Red Star
, from his tunic. ‘Listen, listen. Do not count days; do not count miles. Count only the number of Germans you have killed! Kill the German – this is your mother's prayer! Kill the German – this is the cry of your Russian earth! Do not waiver! Do not let up! Kill!'

‘Yes,' said Aldo, ‘but we're Italian.'

The older Russian laughed out loud, a raucous rumbling rolling laugh. The woman raised a cautious eyebrow.