The Veteran (21 page)

“He gave his orders to the men behind him. Columns of stretcher-bearers came from the alley. Take only Germans, he told them, leave the Allies to the Allies. He walked among the German wounded, selecting only those who might be able to stand the long bumpy ride across the Chianti hills and up to Milan where they would at last get the best of everything. Those Germans he deemed to have no hope at all he told the stretcher-men to leave behind. When he had done, seventy of the Germans had been removed. That left fifty, and the Allies. Then he came back to me. The sun had dropped behind the houses, heading for the hills. The cool was returning. His manner was no longer brusque. He just looked old and ill.

“Someone should stay behind. Stay with them.”

“I will stay,” I said.

“It will mean becoming a prisoner of war.”

“I know, sir,” I said.

“So, for you a short war after all. I hope we will meet again, back in the Fatherland.”

“There was nothing more to be said. He walked into that arch, turned and threw me a salute. Can you imagine it? A general to a captain. I had no cap on, so I could not reply. Then he was gone. I never saw him again. He died in a bombing raid six months later. I was left alone here, with a hundred and fifty men, mainly scheduled to die if help did not come quickly. The sun went down, the darkness came, my lanterns were out of gas. But the moon rose. I began to pass out pannikins of water. I turned round, and she was back again.”

The sound in the Piazza del Campo was a continuous shout by now. The ten jockeys, small wiry men and all professionals, had mounted up. Each had been issued with his crop, a vicious quirt made from a dried bull’s pizzle, with which they would hack not only at their own horses but at steeds and jockeys coming too close. Sabotage is part of the Palio race, which is not for the squeamish. The bets are mind-numbing, the lust to win beyond restraint and, once on the sand track, anything goes.

The lots had been drawn for the placing of the ten horses behind the thick rope that serves as a starting line. Each jockey, brilliantly garbed in the colours of his Contrada, had his round steel cap on, crop in hand, reins held tight. The horses skittered in anticipation as they entered their slots behind the rope. The starter or mossiere glanced up at the Magistrate for the nod to drop the rope when the last horse was in place. The roar of the crowd sounded like a lion on the veld.

“She came back? The third night?”

“The third and the last. We worked as a sort of team. I spoke sometimes, in German of course, but she clearly did not understand. She smiled but said nothing, not even in Italian. We never touched. She tended the wounded men. I fetched more water and changed a few dressings. The Surgeon-General had left me fresh supplies, whatever he could spare for what he saw as a lost cause. By dawn they were gone.

“I noticed something else that third night that I had not seen earlier. She was a pretty girl but by the light of the moon I saw that she had a big black stain on the back of each hand, about the size of a dollar piece. I thought nothing of it, until years later. Just before dawn I turned again, and she was gone.”

“You never saw her again?”

“No. Never. Just after sunrise I saw flags begin to flutter from all those high windows over there. Not the eagle of the Reich, not any more. The Sienese had patched and stitched together the flags of the Allies, especially the tricolour of France. They broke out all over the city. About seven o’clock I heard footsteps coming up the alley outside. I was frightened. Remember, I had never seen an Allied soldier with a gun before, but Hitler’s propaganda had taught us they were all murderers.

“After a few minutes five soldiers appeared in the arch. They were dark and swarthy, uniforms so stained with earth and sweat I could hardly work out which unit they came from. Then I saw the Cross of Lorraine. It was the French. Except they were Algerians.

“They shouted some words at me but I did not understand. Either French or Arabic. I smiled and shrugged. I was wearing my bloody smock over my Wehrmacht shirt and trousers, but beneath the smock they must have seen my boots. Distinctive. Wehrmacht boots. They had taken heavy casualties south of Siena, and here I was, the enemy. They came into the yard, shouted and waved their rifles under my nose. I thought they were going to shoot me. Then one of the Algerian wounded called softly from that corner. The soldiers went over and listened while he whispered to them. When they came back their mood had changed. They produced a truly horrible cigarette and forced me to smoke it as a sign of friendship.

“By nine o’clock the French were flooding through the city, assailed on every side by ecstatic Italians, the girls smothering them with kisses, and I stayed here with my friendly captors.

“Then a French major appeared. He spoke a little English; so did I. I explained that I was a German surgeon, left behind with my charges, some of whom were French and most were Allies. He charged among the men on the ground, realized there were twenty of his fellow countrymen, apart from British and American Allies, and ran out into the alley shouting for help. Within an hour all the wounded had been taken to the by now almost empty main hospital, where only a few unmovable Germans remained. I went with them.

“I was held in the matron’s room at gunpoint while a French colonel-surgeon examined them all, one by one. By this time they were on clean white sheets and relays of Italian nurses sponged them clean and spoon-fed them whatever nourishing foods they could take.

“In the afternoon the colonel-surgeon came to the room. He was accompanied by a French general, name of De Monsabert, who spoke English.

“My colleague tells me that half of these men should be dead,” he said. “What have you done to them?” I explained that I had done nothing but my best with the equipment and drugs that I had.

“They conferred in French. Then the general said, “We have to keep the records for the next of kin. Where are the dog tags of the ones who died—all nationalities?” I explained that there were no dog tags. Not a man brought into that courtyard had died.

“They talked again, the surgeon often shrugging his shoulders. Then the general said, “Will you give me your parole, and stay here to work with my colleague? There is much to be done.” Of course I did. Where would I run? My country’s army was retreating faster than I could walk. If I got away into the countryside the partisans would kill me. Then, from lack of food and sleep, I just passed out right on the floor.

“After a bath, twenty hours of sleep and a meal, I was ready to work again. All the French wounded recovered by the French in the previous ten days had gone south to Perugia, Assisi, even Rome. Those in the Siena hospital were almost all from this courtyard.

“There were bones to be reset and plastered, sutures to be reopened and internal damage to be properly repaired. Yet wounds that ought to have gone septic and killed their owners were amazingly clean. Torn arteries seemed to have sealed themselves; haemorrhages had ceased to bleed. That colonel was an ace from Lyons; he operated and I acted as his assistant. We operated without a break for a night and a day and no man died.

“The tide of war rolled north. I was allowed to live with the French officers. General Juin visited the hospital and thanked me for what I had done for the French. After that I was assigned simply to look after the fifty Germans. After a month we were all evacuated south to Rome. None of the Germans would ever fight again, so repatriation was arranged through the Red Cross.”

“They went home?” asked the American.

“They all went home,” said the surgeon. “The US Army Medical Corps took over their boys and shipped them out of Ostia back to the States when they were ready. The Virginians went home to the Shenandoah and the Texans to the Lone Star State. The boy from Austin who had cried for his mother went back to Texas, his innards still inside him, his stomach wall healed up.

“The French took theirs and brought them home after the liberation of France. The British took theirs and took me with them. General Alexander was touring the hospital in Rome and heard about this courtyard in Siena. He said if I would extend my parole I could work in a military hospital in Britain with German wounded until the war ended. So I did. Germany had lost anyway. By the autumn of 1944 we all knew that. Peace came with the final surrender in May 1945 and I was allowed home to my native but shattered Hamburg.”

“Then what are you doing here thirty-one years later?” asked the American tourist.

The screams from the Piazza del Campo were clearly heard. One horse was down, leg broken, jockey unconscious as the remaining nine raced on. Despite the sand covering, there are bone-jarring cobbles beneath, the pace is frenzied and terrible crashes are frequent.

The faded man raised his shoulders and shrugged. He looked slowly around.

“What happened in this courtyard in those three days was, I believe, a miracle. But it was nothing to do with me. I was a younger and eager surgeon, but not that good. It was about the girl.”

“There will be other Palios,” said the tourist. “Tell me about the girl.”

“Very well. I was sent back to Germany in the autumn of 1945. Hamburg was under British occupation. I worked at first in their main hospital and then the Hamburg General. By 1949 we had our own non-Nazi republic again and I moved to a private clinic. It prospered, I became a partner. I married a local girl, we had two children. Life became better, Germany prospered. I left and founded a small clinic of my own. I treated the new wealthy and became wealthy myself. But I never forgot this courtyard and I never forgot the girl in the nun’s habit.

“In 1965 my marriage ended after fifteen years. The children were in their teens; they were distressed but they understood. I had my own money, I had my freedom. In 1968 I decided to come back here and find her. Just to say thank you.”

“So you found her again?”

“In a way. Twenty-four years had gone by. I presumed she was in her late forties, like myself. I supposed she was still a nun, or, if for any reason she had left the order, a middle-aged married woman with children of her own. So I came that summer of ‘68 and took a room at the Villa Patrizia and began my search.

“First I went to all the nunneries I could find. There were three, all different orders. I hired an interpreter and visited them all. I spoke to the Mothers Superior. Two had been there during the war, the third had come later. They shook their heads when I described the novice nun I was seeking. All summoned the oldest sister in the convent, but they knew of no such novice, then or ever.

“Of particular note was that habit she had worn: pale grey with a darker grey device stitched on the front. No-one recognized it. None of the orders had pale grey habits.

“I spread the net wider; perhaps she came from an order outside the city, had been visiting relatives during that last week of German occupation in 1944. I roamed across Tuscany looking for the convent from which she came. No success. With my interpreter losing patience I researched all the types of habits used by orders of nuns, past and present. There were several of pale grey but no-one had ever seen the device of the cross with the broken arm.

“After six weeks I realized it was hopeless. No-one had ever heard of her, let alone seen her. She had come into this courtyard on three consecutive nights twenty-four years earlier. She had swabbed the faces of dying soldiers and comforted them. She had touched their wounds and they had not died. Perhaps she was one of those blessed with the gift of healing by touch. But then she had disappeared into the teeming mass of war-torn Italy, never to be seen again. I wished her well, wherever she was, but I knew I would never find her.”

“But you said you had,” remarked the American.

“I said ‘in a way’,” the surgeon corrected. “I packed to leave, but I tried one last recourse. There are two newspapers in this town. The Corriere di Siena and La Gazzetta di Siena. In each of them I took a quarter-page advert. It even had an illustration. I drew the device I had seen on her shift and this drawing appeared with the text of the advert. It offered a reward for any information that anyone could provide about this strange design. The morning I was due to leave, the papers appeared.

“I was in my room packing when the reception rang to say there was someone asking for me. I came down with my bags. My cab was due in an hour. I never needed that cab and I missed my flight.

“Waiting in the hall was a little old man with a fuzz of white hair in the garb of a monk, a dark grey habit circled at the waist by a white rope, sandals on his feet. He had a copy of the Gazzetta in his hand, opened at the page of my own advert. We adjourned to the coffee lounge and sat down. He spoke English.

“He asked who I was, why I had placed the advert. I told him that I had been seeking a young woman of Siena who had helped me almost a quarter of a century earlier. He told me that his name was Fra Domenico and that he came from an order dedicated to fasting, prayer and learning. His own lifelong study had been the history of Siena and of its various religious orders.

“He seemed nervous, agitated, and asked me to narrate to him exactly how I had come across this particular design on a habit worn by a young woman in Siena. It’s a long story, I told him.

We have time, he replied, please tell me everything, so I did.”

The great piazza erupted in sound as one of the horses crossed the finish line just a half-length ahead of the next. The members of nine Contrade groaned in despair while those of the tenth, the Contrada called Istrice, the Porcupine, exploded in screams of joy. In the guildhalls of the losing nine the wine would flow that night but with much regretful shaking of heads and lectures on what might have been. In the guildhall of the Istrice District the celebrations would be a riot.

“Go on,” said the American, “what did you tell him?”

“I told him everything. That was what he wanted, insisted on.

From start to finish. Every tiny detail, over and over again. The cab came. I dismissed it. But with all that, I forgot one detail until the end. Then I remembered it. The hands, the girl’s hands. At the end I told him about seeing, in the moonlight, the dark stains on the back of each hand.