Wolf on the Mountain (14 page)

‘And I’m glad for your company. I haven’t seen anyone since the first snows. We’ll celebrate your arrival with mutton fat.’

He takes a blackened iron skillet from a hook on the ceiling beam and puts it on the fire, goes outside to his cold-store and returns with some hunks of mutton fat in his hand and slices and drops them in the pan. They sizzle for a while and then start releasing their rich meaty aroma through the little hovel. The shepherd cuts them smaller with his knife and the fat starts melting in the pan. He sees the appetite in the captain’s eyes and reaches into a wooden chest and brings out some bread, cuts it with his clasp-knife towards his chest and hands him a thick slice. ‘Eat.’

The captain tears a mouthful of the dry grey bread and dips it in the dripping. Its coarse fibres only absorb the grease slowly, but impatiently he pulls it out and crams it into his mouth, not caring for its searing heat. ‘You’re too hungry’ the shepherd says, handing him another cup of ewe’s milk. ‘Have patience. We have all night.’

The luxury of fat on your lips when you have been living on dry bread and boiled potatoes. The captain licks his lips and eats again. Tonight, tomorrow, his beard will taste of mutton, his nostrils will have a coating of fat from the fumes. He sates himself.

After their meal they lean back against the sacks of chestnuts and their flour around the room, a food too distasteful to the conquerors for looting, and the old man offers his guest a pipe. He cuts a plug of tobacco from a roll above his head, teases and rolls it with his mutton-greased fingers into a ball and stuffs it into an old clay pipe. He lights it with a taper from the fire, tamps and re-lights it until he is satisfied with its draw and hands it to the captain. ‘Tell me who you are, where you come from. Are you married? Do you have children?’

The captain tells him no and the shepherd says he is lucky, these are not times to have a family. It is the first time in all his journey down through Italy that he has not been told of his misfortune not to have children, but he does not question the sentiment, and starts the story of his journey. For some reason, maybe because he is for the first time in months relaxed, not waiting for a knock on the door that means capture for him and death for his hosts, he tells the story at length. He tells of the hope of early liberation in the early days; of the elation of walking alone through fields, feeling rather than envying the freedom of the birds; of the harvests, the treading of grapes, the sharing in the plenty of his hosts from their new crops; of Mike’s and his decision to head south as it became clear that their own army would not be coming soon; of the days of marching up and down the sides of the valleys running out from the mountain spine, watching the leaves turn colour and fall, knowing that as they fell and the weather turned worse it would be harder to escape the Germans; of the near-misses they had had on the way; of their joining the partisans and Mike’s capture in the raid on the camp; of his various attempts to cross the lines; of the people he had met along the way. The old man listens in awe to an adventure of the kind not even told by the travelling story-tellers who used to visit his village, oblivious to the passing of time and his tiredness. The story takes them well into the night, before they huddle together for warmth under the sheepskin rug to sleep on the earthen floor.

–

The next morning the shepherd wakes him with a cup of acorn coffee and the news that it has snowed in the night, heavily. ‘You can’t go up the mountain. It’s too deep. And you can’t go down. The Germans will have gangs of our people out to clear the roads. They’ll be doing it all day. You’ll have to stay.’

The captain opens the door and finds a wall of snow against it up to his knees. He wades out to the head of the spur and looks down into the valley. There is snow down to the river and road at its bottom. The entire scene is white but for the black bristles of the trees. The Germans would spot a man a mile away. Trapped. Carrying on up the valley is pointless, trying to climb out of it impossible. Even going back the way he’d come is fraught with danger: he couldn’t fail to be seen, and any man abroad today would be enslaved to clear the roads. He returns to the cottage.

The old man fetches firewood from outside, still damp with snow, and throws it on the fire. ‘You must stay until the snow goes, Roberto. It may only be a few days.’ The captain remains silent, pondering his predicament, eventually resigning himself to a day on which nothing can be done. As he relaxes to his fate, his mind turns to the shepherd. He asks how he came to be alone on this mountain.

–

‘It is a long sad story, but it is the story of the Marsi region.

‘For centuries my family have lived in the Fucino, in a village on a hill overlooking the marshes. We were always poor farmers, but so was everyone else except the gentry in the towns, who owned the land. The rents were always too high, the fields they would let us farm too far apart. If they’d been closer to each other we’d have had more time to look after them, make some money, maybe buy our own land. Instead we’d spend half the day walking, down to the plain, then from field to field, then back up the mountain to the village again at night. And the soil was as poor as us. We could hardly produce enough for our families to eat. It was a hard life, but so it had always been.

‘But then, in my grandfather’s time, a man called Garibaldi came and there were new rulers in Rome. A great man drained the marshes and gave the land to his friends. There were new landlords, who were new to the area and didn’t know when to stop demanding from the peasants if they were to live. And because the marshes had been drained, the soil around them became even drier. Things got worse and worse.

‘Then, in my time, the fascists came. More new landlords, brutal men who knew nothing of the ways of farmers, men with companies of criminals who beat up any peasant who complained. We were told to plant wheat in fields that wouldn’t grow it, so there was even less food. Fields our families had farmed for centuries were taken away. We had no money for the food we could no longer produce ourselves. First my daughter, then my son, died from the malaria. We had no money for quinine. My wife died in childbirth, too hungry to be strong. It was a terrible time.

‘In the end I gave up. I sold what things I could and bought some sheep and came up to these hills. Too few sheep to be a threat to the local shepherds, and when I told them my story they let me stay. But I am not one of them, I have no village or family to go back to. I stay up here, living on what I produce. I’ll stay here until I die.

‘And then the Germans stole my sheep. I only have three ewes left. No ram. There’ll be no lambs this spring.’

‘My dogs? I killed them. Fewer mouths to feed.’

–

The day wore on in the silence of the snow-bound mountain, without food. Despite his host’s entreaties to stay, the weather was too foul, he was so glad of his company, the captain knew that the old man’s stores were getting low. ‘I can’t stay. It may snow for weeks. I came to find a way over the mountains, but there’s none in this weather. I must go back to my friends, and in this snow I can only get out of the valley by night. I’ll have to follow the road. The snow will be too deep everywhere else. If I leave now I’ll be out of the gorge by dawn.’

‘What if the Germans see you?’

‘They won’t be out tonight. If they are and they catch me, then I’ll be a prisoner again. But they won’t be.’

‘You’ll freeze to death.’

‘Not if I keep walking.’

So the captain takes some bread and cheese and the old man’s blessing and walks out into the blizzard, snowflakes attaching to his eyelashes from his first step, stumbling down the hill, always downwards because the slope will lead him to the road. The cold arcs upwards from the small of his back, under his shoulder-blades and into his shoulders. He bounces them up and down, trying to start building up the heat of exertion that will keep him alive through the night, the long cold night of the flecking blinding snow.

It snowed all night and all day, all the black and white way back to the village. He followed the roads, tracking the bottom of the main valley, not caring if he was caught but knowing that, with every landmark obliterated by the blizzard, they were his only hope of finding his way home. His steps became mechanical as he lifted his foot upwards before each step forward, his hunch permanent as he leant into the northern wind buffeting his entire body, scalding his eyes with whiteness and the sting of the flakes from the sky and the powdered snow whipped in mares’ tails from the drifts banked up to the hedges alongside. The roads were empty. No tyre tracks, no footprints, no hint of anyone in the distance, no-one to ask the way or for any succour. Everyone, soldiers, farmers, villagers, had bolted their doors and stayed indoors by their fires.

He arrived at the Golvis’ hours after nightfall, frozen and exhausted, daubed white. Carlo opened the door and was struck with fear. He whispered that the captain must go next door, that there was a German in the house. He knocked at the Giobellinis’ door dreading rejection there too, wondering what he could do if they too could not take him in. He would not survive the night in his hide, not even make it up the mountain to it.

‘Come in, Roberto. Porca miseria, you’re in a state!’ Natale supported him up the stairs to Caterina in the kitchen, who unlaced and removed his sodden boots, took off his clothes, wrapped him in a blanket from one of the beds and sat him on a chair by the stove. His face and his hands were burned red by the snow, his eyes expressionless, his body sometimes still, sometimes convulsing, all his nerve ends numb. He could do nothing for himself. Caterina, who had never welcomed his presence in her house, marvelled at the willpower that had driven him on through the snow and back to them. ‘You poor boy, you poor boy.’ She fetched a bowl of warm water from the stove, threw in some herbs, bathed his face and hands, then lifted his hamstrings and swung his blotched, swollen feet into the bowl. She told Natale to get the bottle of aqua vitae from the hole. The captain’s hands were useless and she poured the strong green liquor through his trembling lips. The bitter herby taste seared his throat, he convulsed again and returned to blankness.

–

He wakes the next day in a bed in a whitewashed room, unaware of where he is. As his eyes accustom to the light he sees the black metal rails of his bed-head, a carved wooden crucifix on the wall above him. Is he in hospital, captured, a prisoner again? It must be well into the afternoon. He strains to raise his head to look for a nurse. A young woman is sitting on a chair by his bed, fingers interlaced in her lap, watching him like a nurse. But not a nurse. Isabella. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says in a gentle reassuring tone. ‘You’re safe. We put you in Alfonso’s bed. We’ve been praying for you.’ She stands, comes to lean over him, tenderly places her palm on his forehead, dabs his temples with a towel and says she will get him some barley coffee. He tries to lever himself up on his arm but is too weak. She fetches her mother and together they lift him up against some bolsters. He pulls the blankets up to his chin and mumbles some words in English. They spoon thin maize porage through his swollen lips and let him sleep again.

–

He awakes refreshed and feeling stronger, although he has a memory from his sleep of a German accent and Isabella’s voice in the street below his window in the night, something that sits oddly with the gentle look he remembers in her eyes the afternoon before. Caterina has washed and dried his clothes and laid them out for him. She feeds him bread and coffee, complaining of the German looting of their stores: ‘We’ve never had a winter like this one. And it will get even harder. Everyone will have to make do how they can. Even the Golvis will entertain the Germans now.’

–

Later the same day Elvira Golvi justifies herself: ‘Do you think there aren’t any good Germans? When you were at war with us did you think there weren’t any good Italians? And are there no bad Englishmen? Of course there are good Germans, people ashamed of what their country is doing, men who wish they were at home with their families, leading normal lives. Men who want to go into a normal home and talk of how the world ought to be, men who will bring food to eat when they visit a house like ours. Would you let your daughter starve so you can treat the man who wants to feed her like a leper?

‘He’s a lieutenant, a decent man, a schoolteacher in the town he comes from. He was grateful to be welcomed in our home, he brought us food, he knew we had so little. I’m sorry he was here when you needed our help, but how were we to know you were coming? How were we to know you’d ever come back? You were trying to cross the lines. You might have succeeded.’

The captain says he understands but remains unhappy. Both homes of refuge are now reduced to treating with the enemy for their food. He slips from one house to the other for the next few days until a thaw comes in on a warmer wind, asks for some candles and provisions and returns to his mountain.

–

His hide seems warmer than it was, perhaps because he has been so cold since he last used it. He has piled bracken from further up the mountain, dried on a day of high winds, over his duckboard floor to insulate him from the cold beneath, nailed sacking to the side-walls, made shelves for the wall furthest in at the highest part of his trench, on which he stores his tools, his candle and matches and his Ovid.

He is resigning himself to a fate of lying low until the spring, accepting that the high ground he needs to cross to reach the lines will be impassable for weeks, the local wisdom he has raged against these past two months. The hide will now be his home to keep warm and safe in for so long as the snowline does not come down to its level and make lighting a fire impossible, his tracks visible from distance. Snow will drive him back to the village, but in the meantime he should make himself as comfortable as he can in his hide.

Each day he scouts his mountain, scavenges in the ruined partisan camp for new possessions for his shelves. Some days he meets Luigi bringing up more beans and potatoes for his pot. Each night he returns to his hide, dragging a tree branch behind him to erase his tracks, moves the hiding bracken from in front of his door, props up the upward hinging door with a stick, piles the bracken on top of it, sweeps away his last footprints with his branch and crawls into the hide; and as his door is closed the bracken falls down to conceal the existence of his home from any inquisitive eyes. He huddles into his sacking blankets, lights his candle and reads the
Metamorphoses
until he is ready to sleep.