To Find a Mountain (4 page)

C
HAPTER SEVEN

M
y father walked through the door, and although the Germans had been with us less than four days, he suddenly looked ten years older. His shoulders, always slightly rounded, were now downright slumped. The bags under his eyes had turned dark, and the smile was gone from his face, along with the bounce in his step. My heart caught in my throat, but before I could ask what was wrong, he answered.

“Benedetta,” he said. “I am going to the front.”

“No . . .” I began, but he held up his hand.

“It is too late, Benny. I, we, have no choice.”

“Why don’t you find a mountain, Papa?” I whispered. “Like the other men. They are there; they can help you. You won’t survive at the front!”

“The Germans have said if I were to disappear . . . well, it just would not be good.”

“But why you? I thought they needed you to work with the people in Casalvieri . . .”

He shrugged. “They say they need me at the front, to coordinate the drivers of the ambulances.”

“I need you!
We
need you . . .”

His eyes suddenly blazed with anger, but I was not scared; I knew it wasn’t directed at me.

“And I need you, but these . . .” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “These machines don’t think. They follow orders, and expect us to do the same.”

We paused at the sound of boots scraping the gravel outside, but they, along with the voices of their two German owners, soon trailed off as the soldiers continued walking.

“Signora Checcone is going to come and stay with you,” my father said. “With all of the cooking and cleaning for the Germans, you’re going to need help. Plus, you need to take care of Iole and Emidio. Wolff has given me his word that you won’t be harmed.”

“Don’t worry about me, Papa,” I said, fighting back the urge to throw my arms around him and cry on his shirt.

“I will be back every few days or so, bringing the wounded back to the hospital at the Ingrellis’.”

I wanted to ask if Wolff had said anything about the incident with Schlemmer. I considered it as my father talked to me, and I looked into his eyes. They were dark brown like mine, and they looked so rich, so wounded, so full of love and pain that my heart sagged as he talked. I wouldn’t bring up what Schlemmer had done—especially since, technically, he hadn’t done anything. Papa had enough to worry about, staying alive being at the top of the list.

“Iole and Emidio don’t need to know where I’m going.”

“What have you told them?”

“That I am going to neighboring villages to help the Germans.”

But what if you don’t come back?
I thought, but again could not ask. He needed me to be strong. He was trying to be strong for all of us, as he had been since Mama died. Now it was time for someone else to be strong for him.

“Just remember, Papa,” I said. “If the Germans put a gun in your hand, point the part where the bullet comes out
away
from you.”

He smiled then, and laughed. I knew it was partly from relief, and partly from trying to make me feel calm and relaxed. It worked. But when I got up to start packing clothes for him, my legs were unsteady beneath me. Papa grabbed me and hugged me hard. The stale sweat in his collar seemed like the sweetest smell in the world to me at that moment. God couldn’t take him away from me. He just couldn’t.

Losing one of my parents was enough—too much, in fact.

I intended to keep this one.

C
HAPTER EIGHT

I
briefly forgot an Italian tradition, a way of life, and because of that I began to get angry with Zizi Checcone.

She arrived the day after my father left. I saw her trudging wearily up the hill toward the house with a bundle over her shoulder, and when I opened the door for her, her brow was beaded with perspiration and she was very short of breath. She had on a thick black dress, which had probably heated up quite well underneath the sun.

Emidio and Iole rushed past me to her and threw their arms around her thick waist and legs.

“Zizi Checcone, are you really going to stay with us?” Iole asked.

“If you want me to,” she said, a small smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

Both of them cried out, “Yes! Yes!”

She raised her black eyes toward me and I smiled at her.

“It’s good to have you here, Zizi Checcone,” I said. “Let me take your bag up to Papa’s room.”

“Oh, I don’t need a room. I can sleep in the kitchen,” she said. “Or maybe out here on the floor with a blanket . . .”

“Papa gave us strict instructions,” I said. “You are to sleep in his room.”

With that, I hoisted her bag over my shoulder and went up to Papa’s room, which I had just cleaned.

When I came back down, Zizi Checcone was standing in front of the big table, her hands in front of her, looking at the big black pot being heated over the fire. I was about to start a batch of menestra, a soup that is cooked with whatever ingredients are available.

“How are you doing, Zizi Checcone?” I asked. I started chopping vegetables, making room for her beside me. But she didn’t join me, as I’d expected her to. Instead, she took a seat at the table.

“I am well, Benedetta, thank you. There is always much work to be done, even though I am by myself and have no one else to take care of,” she said. “The problem with that is there is also no one to help.”

Talk about no help
, I thought, hoisting another log onto the fire as she went on sitting in her chair, her hands folded in her lap.

She told me about how her land had not been properly prepared for crops and that was why her harvest had not been as bountiful as she hoped. For ten minutes she talked while I chopped garlic, sliced tomatoes, and cleaned vegetables, all with no offer of help from the woman who had been brought here specifically to help me.

“It is hard to be the head of a household,” she said. “Much to do. Much responsibility. And it is not always easy to ask for help.”

I nodded.

“When a man leaves, the woman is suddenly in charge, and she is not always ready for that.”

I plunked beans into the soup that was still too thin. There was no point in listening to her; she was repeating herself.

“Women suddenly have to do things the world has not prepared them for,” she said.

She was like a broken record, all this talk of women being heads of the household, that’s what happens when men leave for the mountains. Suddenly, my hands froze.

Not easy to ask for help.
I felt my face flush and turned to look at her. She had her eyes lowered; she was wringing her hands.

She was waiting for me to ask her to help. How foolish of me! Here I was getting angry with her, chastising her in my mind for being lazy and unhelpful, when she was simply being respectful toward me. Not wanting to overstep her bounds and insult me. Sometimes I was a stupid girl.

“Zizi Checcone,” I said, and she looked up quickly. “Since my father is not here, I wonder if I could ask you to help me. There is so much to do for the Germans, for Iole and Emidio, for the house, I would appreciate any help you could give me.”

She jumped up and her hand came out of a small bag next to her feet. In it was a jar of tomato sauce.

“I would love to,” she said. “Let’s start by thickening this soup up.” She dumped the tomato sauce in.

“How much bread do we have?” she asked.

“I’ve got two loaves.”

“Benedetta, why don’t you start a fire in the bread oven and I will begin making the dough.”

I started to go, but she stopped me.

“Is there much laundry to be done?” she asked.

“Piles and piles,” I answered.

“Do you know how to clean clothes with ash from the fireplace?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“When the bread is done, and after dinner, we will use the ash to clean the clothes,” she said.

“How does that work?”

“We’ll fill a large wooden tub with water outside, add the ash, bring it to a boil, and then the ash will sink to the bottom. When it does, the water above it will have a slick quality to it that cleans even the dirtiest clothes. Soap is very hard to come by these days.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll start the oven.”

“Very good, Benedetta. Thank you.”

I heard the tone of her voice and she was smiling at me, a twinkle in her eye.

“No, Zizi Checcone, thank you.” I meant it. I knew I could learn a lot from Zizi Checcone.

I stepped outside, happy to have behaved properly (eventually) and displayed the manners my mother and father had taught me.

C
HAPTER NINE

T
he big table was piled with meat.

The German soldiers fighting on the front line near Mt. Cassino were starving. Apparently the German army was already running low on fuel and the supply convoys to the front were all but halted. The Germans told us their men were in desperate need of meat and that they were weak from lack of proper food. They needed meat, and they needed it prepared in a way that would allow it to be packed for days, maybe even weeks and months, without spoiling.

Word went out into the village and soon women were arriving at the house with what little meat they had. Haunches of wild game. A few chickens. Tripe and sweetbreads. By the end of the day, the table in my house looked like something straight out of a slaughterhouse.

The butcher was on his way to show the Germans where to take the meat, and from there he would smoke and then cure it so that it could be taken to the front line. It was probably for this reason that the butcher had not been told to pick up a gun and join the Wehrmacht near Mt. Cassino.

A truck pulled up in front of the house and the men who were back from the front, either because of injury or for a brief rest, helped load the carcasses into the waiting vehicle. They waited while a few stragglers arrived at the house, one woman with some chickens slung over her shoulder, another with a shank of beef. The butcher, Signor Pipitone, sat next to the driver of the truck and they pulled out in the direction of his shop. Even with the carcasses removed, their scent lingered, and my stomach turned.

Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore.

Becher, Wolff’s second-in-command, approached me. Colonel Wolff was at the front now, and in his absence, Becher had taken over the job of putting together food for soldiers. When he had gathered it, he would go to the front and Wolff would come back. Becher spoke sharply to everyone, and it was no wonder that his men obeyed him quickly. Now, he turned his eyes to me.

“Benedetta. You have two pigs, no?”

I nodded.

“Bring them out front.”

My heart sank, even though I had known this time would come.

I walked outside, past the bread oven, then around back to the barn, which sat about a hundred yards from the house. A low stone wall circled the entire area, leading up to the edge of the forest.

A chicken coop ran off the back of the barn, and a pen for the pigs jutted out from the main entrance. The chicken coop had been in disrepair for some years, but the pigs had done well.

A lean-to provided shade for the pigs now standing along the fence. The wind generally blew the other way, so the smell was not bad. They squealed when they saw me, expecting a treat of garbage from the kitchen.

As I got closer I heard a strange sound. It seemed to be coming from the pen, but farther back. When I got to the fence, I saw the piglet cowering behind his mother. We had thought that she was pregnant, but sometimes it was hard to tell. Papa would be very happy, under other circumstances, to have a new member of the family. But the little piglet’s short life was about to come to an abrupt end.

I looked back toward the house. This was going to be harder than I thought.

I walked through the main doors and entered the pen through the small trapdoor beneath the lean-to. I had a stick in my hand and used it to push the adult pigs toward the other side of the pen. I then scooped up the piglet and held him, squirming, in my arms. He was heavy for being only a few days old.

A thought came to my mind and I quickly stepped back into the shed. Becher had asked for two pigs.

The barn had really become a catchall. It was now a workshop, tack room, and storage shed all rolled into one. Along one wall were the animal stalls, now empty. The other wall held a primitive workbench with a few rusted tools hanging in front of it. There were odd scraps of leather, nails, and piles of junk. In the barn’s far corner, farthest from the house, was another trapdoor leading to the chicken pen.

My eye was drawn to the space between the workbench and the trapdoor leading to the chicken coop. At one point, my father had built another, smaller coop along this back wall. The door to the inside coop was long and rectangular, the kind that you lifted up, and the door itself had a hook in the center. When you lifted the door up, you slid the hook through an eye screw that was screwed into the wall above it. When the door was hooked, it hung open while the chickens were fed. At one time, it had always remained open and there had been a narrow path along the wall, bordered by chicken wire, that allowed the chickens to go back and forth.

It hadn’t been used in years, as we had given up raising chickens. Since my mother’s death, in fact. It had always been her job. The only bird remaining in the outdoor coop was our rooster, and he was getting very old.

I raised the door to the chicken coop and looked inside. It was empty for the most part, just some scrap tools and a bucket with a hole in it. I placed the piglet inside, then closed the door. I went back to the pigpen, where the piglet’s mother snorted indignantly and questioned me with her eyes. I couldn’t meet her gaze and scooped up some ears of corn as well as some hay. There was also a bucket of mixed grain. I put the bucket and corn inside the coop with the piglet. Not knowing when I would be able to come back, I thought it better to give it the whole thing than risk having it die from starvation. I put a bucket of water in there with him and then closed the door, locking it with the crude latch my father had probably fashioned by hand.

I slid a giant, cracked washtub and an old hand plow harness in front of the door. Pressing my ear against the wooden door, I struggled to hear any sound, but there was nothing. I knew it would be complete darkness inside. What I didn’t know was what it would do to the piglet, if he survived at all. But then, I thought, wasn’t that true for all of us?

I walked back through the shed, shutting the main door tightly. Snapping the pigs on their bottoms with my stick, I eventually herded them up the long path to the house. Becher was nowhere to be seen when I rounded the front corner with them.

Schlemmer emerged from the house with another German soldier. They each had a piece of bread in their hand. Schlemmer looked at me, but his face showed no emotion, just a cold, blank stare.

The other soldier said something in German and Schlemmer’s eyes fell on the pigs, now shuffling around the yard in confusion, grunting their displeasure with the whole situation.

Becher came from the house. He barked orders to Schlemmer and the other soldier, who promptly pulled long knives from their belts. Leaving the pigs behind, I moved toward the house, then stood next to Becher, watching.

Schlemmer and the other soldier each got hold of a pig and slid their knives under the animals’ throats. I tried to close my eyes but I couldn’t. I wanted to see the Germans kill the pigs that my father and I had raised. I wanted to see these men spill blood on the ground not more than twenty yards from my house.

The two soldiers moved as one, cutting upward quickly and smoothly, then stepping back as each pig took several tentative steps, swaying as the blood spurted from their severed jugular veins. The pigs sank to their knees and then dropped in the dirt, blood pooling around them. As I raised my eyes from the pigs, I found myself looking directly into Schlemmer’s grinning face. His teeth were yellow and his face was flushed.

“We will eat these now, Benedetta,” said Becher. “Please prepare them immediately.”

I nodded numbly and went inside the house.