Love and War in the Apennines (23 page)

On the only occasion when I stopped dancing during the evening the
padrone
of the farm and his wife introduced me to some of the grown-ups who lined the walls. Gradually, as I grasped a succession of horny male hands and the smaller but almost equally work-hardened hands of their
signoras
, looked into their friendly faces and listened to their invitations to visit their houses and drink wine with them, without anyone of them betraying even the most well-bred curiosity about who I was and where I came from, I began to realise that they only had two surnames among them; and I began to wonder what their wives’ maiden names could have been before they married. Were they, too, members by birth of these two same, all-embracing clans or had they come from other villages to be married, these compact, self-sufficient, efficient-looking women.

There was wine on hand which was being dispensed in an ante-room, but the only guests who were seriously engaged in drinking it were the older men, and although some of the boys took a glass or two the majority of us drank water to assuage our raging thirsts. Drinking so much water we all had to visit the yard from time to time and when I went there myself I found a number of couples locked in fierce embrace in the drizzle, and on my way back to the house from one of these excursions I encountered Dolores, who loomed up in front of me and pinned me against a wall.

After a short interval she offered me her handkerchief to remove the lipstick which gave her mouth a pepper taste, not nearly as good as it had been in the barn.

‘We’ll go after the next three dances,’ she said.

I asked her what would happen to Rita.

‘That boy with the big nose in the white pullover will look after her,’ she said.

But it was not to be. We went back into the room again and
cut into a dance, but before it was finished I heard the word that could empty a room faster than any other, repeated again and again and again.

‘Tedeschi, Tedeschi, Tedeschi, Tedeschi.
’

The effect was of some awful kind of magic. A girl screamed. One moment the band was playing, the next there was nothing but the upturned boxes which had elevated the musicians above us. The elders moved off from the right to left through the anteroom like well-disciplined members of a theatre audience on the cry of fire. Most of the girls were already scrabbling for their coats. I still held Dolores in the attitude in which we had been on the dance floor when the music stopped. She didn’t appear to be frightened, only excited, and her eyes were shining. Rita joined us. She was quite calm, too.

‘Go to the wood,’ they said. ‘We’ll go home. We’ll be all right.’ And they smiled. I was proud of them, the girls from the Pian del Sotto. One or two of the others were screaming hysterically, and at the front door there was an undignified jam of boys all intent, as I was, on
sauve qui peut.
They no longer looked young and full of beans but had suddenly become shrivelled-looking and rather abject, like our guards at Fontanellato. It was not an edifying spectacle. I wondered if I appeared the same to them – after all I was more or less one of them. I only knew that although I was as intent on getting out of the house as they were I was not at all frightened. In all probability I had by now had more experience of this kind of thing than they had and unless the Germans cordoned the mountain, ruling it off in sections on the map and systematically beat each one, or used dogs, I was fairly confident that I could evade them in the woods; and I didn’t think that they would ever deploy such numbers of men for such an unimportant purpose. I was really only vulnerable when in a house such as this, or if I went to sleep in the open as I had done on the day of
my meeting with
Oberleutnant
Frick, which had impressed me very much.

Out in the yard I asked one of the boys who was just about to take off downhill how many
Tedeschi
there were, which was a pretty daft question to ask him because how could he know and, anyway, he had a really big
paura
and was in no mood for conversation.

‘Molti, molti
,’ he said and vanished.

Molti, molti
could be a brigade, a battalion, or one of those large detachments of the German Army, the equivalent of a company in the British Army, which always seemed to be under the sole command of one of their remarkable N.C.O.s who invariably seemed to be endowed with the ability and responsibility of a captain or a major; or it might be some friend of
Oberleutnant
Frick, inflamed by his lyrical descriptions of the beauty of the region, come to ask for a couple of nights’ lodging, which would be nice; or there might be no one at all, which would be even nicer.

But once out on the track which led to the village there was no doubt that something pretty weird was going on in it and in some of the outlying farms also. Light was pouring from unshuttered windows which was both unusual and illegal; hoarse, outlandish voices could be heard which might by some stretch of the imagination be identified as German and along the path from the village to the house in which we had been dancing, torches were flashing, things none of the locals possessed or, if they did, never used. Whoever was wielding them would be here in a couple of minutes; and I set off for home, which was now the place where I had left my rucksack in the wood at the top end of the Pian del Sotto (Thank God that I had remembered to do so before going to the dance!); and now that it was raining I wished that I had made the hole deeper and long enough to sleep in. I knew that I
would never be able to go back to the house again. Perhaps the Germans were already there.

There was no difficulty about getting to it. It would have been madness to use the path up over the Colle del Santo by which we had come down, and it was a very long way round anyway. The shortest route was across the track, over a low wooden fence and into the meadows which had been deep in grass and clover when I had first arrived at the Plan del Sotto with Signor Zanoni and had remained so until the previous week when they had been cut by a band of women armed with reaping hooks, some of whom had waved to me whenever I appeared at the edge of the cliff to discharge my loads of stones, effectively destroying any last illusions I might have that I was living in secrecy. And this was the way I went, with a hullabaloo breaking out behind me when the men with the torches reached the farm, and soon I reached the foot of the landslip where the thousands of stones lay which were a proof of my labours.

The next part was difficult; it would have been impossible if the weather had been dry. The cliff was clay, like the fields above, and when it was dry it was as hard and slippery as stone; but the face of it was scoured with gullies and now with the light rain that had been falling for some hours it was just sufficiently soft to kick steps in, and after a hard, filthy climb I reached the edge of the Pian del Sotto.

The enemy had already arrived at the house. Normally from the outside like a tomb at night, it was now illuminated by a couple of portable spotlights which also showed up a little knot of men standing in the rain who were wearing the same sort of caps with long peaks that
Oberleutnant
Frick had done. Nero was silent. Fearful for the safety of Luigi and Agata, and hoping that the Germans would not take it into their heads to shine the light along the plateau, I walked across it as quickly as I could and into the wood where my rucksack was hidden.

After what seemed a long while I saw the men pick up the lights and go off in the direction of the Colle del Santo. The next hour or two seemed an eternity. I was in anguish at what might have happened to Luigi and Agata. So far as I knew they were the only people in the area who had been sheltering an escaped prisoner and therefore the only ones who were actually liable to be shot for doing so. Perhaps they had been shot and had been left in the house as an example. The fact that Nero made no sound was particularly sinister. And I was very worried about Rita and Dolores on their way up from the Colle. They had had the intention of returning to the farm and even if they had not arrived before the raiding party had left, they would almost certainly have run into it on their way up to it from the Colle. It was also impossible to know what was going on down at the farm where the the dance had been held, and in the village, because they were both out of sight below the cliff and I did not dare to take the risk of crossing the plateau again in order to look down on them.

What I really wanted to do was to go to the house; but this was also much too risky. The Germans might have left an ambush inside it to wait for me. There was nothing to do but stare into the rain and darkness and wait, and with the intention of doing this I put on my thick pullover, slung a sack over my shoulders and squatted down on my haunches.

I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember was being shaken awake, shivering. It was Luigi.

‘Drink this,’ he said, handing me something which felt like a medicine bottle as if I was some elderly aunt who had come over poorly. ‘It’s
grappa
.’

I took a couple of huge swigs and felt better.

‘We’re all alive and we’re all at the house, except Armando, and they haven’t got him, and they won’t,’ Luigi said. ‘This was a big rake-up. (He called it a
rastrellamento.)
There were a lot of them
but nobody knows how many. They went up the ridge behind the village and then down into it from the back, and took everyone by surprise. That was the main lot. The rest came straight here, about a dozen, up over the Colle from the mill by Zanoni’s place. They knew exactly what they were after, an English officer, someone must have told them, a spy.

‘At first, when they didn’t find you, they were very angry. They had an Italian with them who spoke their language and asked us their questions and gave them our answers, but then they began to think that whoever had given them the information must have been wrong and they became more angry with him, whoever he was, than they were with us.

‘That would be good, if they shot him,’ he said.

‘The one thing they wanted to know was why, if only four people had been sleeping in the house, there were two other beds that had been slept in. This was a difficult question for me to answer but Agata told them that Dolores, who sleeps with Rita, had had a fever and had been put to sleep in the upstairs room. They grumbled a lot and then they went away. They forgot about the other bed.’

‘What worried us then was what would happen if they met the girls on the road and found out that it wasn’t true about Dolores having had a fever and sleeping upstairs. Luckily, they had just got to the wood above the Colle when they heard the
Tedeschi
coming down and they hid until I went and found them.’

‘What happened to Nero?’ I said. ‘I didn’t hear him bark.’

‘When the
Tedeschi
came I was in the yard. They shone their lights on my face and for a while I couldn’t see anything. Nero was barking and I thought it must be you, come back from the ball, and playing some sort of joke.’ At this point I tried to imagine myself or the girls playing some kind of joke on Luigi with floodlights. ‘Then I saw that they were
Tedeschi
and Nero went for them, just as he does for everyone.

‘There was one very big
Tedesco
who was in command, a sort of
sergente-maggiore
I would think, and he went towards Nero and I thought he was going to shoot him because he had a pistol in his hand; but, instead, he shouted at him in his own language which sounds a very angry sort of language, and Nero ran away and went into his kennel and he hasn’t moved from it since. I wish I knew what he said to him.’

So Nero was yellow and a bully into the bargain. I, too, would have liked to have known what it was he said to him. It would have made things easier for me on the Pian del Sotto; but it was too late now. I could never go back.

‘But if the
Tedeschi
knew that I was living in the house why did they bother to go to the village?’ I asked.

‘Because they wanted to catch our boys. They’re all soldiers who ran away from their regiments after the eighth of September. They were ordered to report weeks ago; but none of them did. The
Tedeschi
were afraid that they might start a
banda
up here. That’s why they wanted you, too. Luckily, almost all of them were at the ball.’

From what I had seen of the boys when they were struggling to get out of the door at the farm, there was not much danger of any of them starting up a band of partisans, at least not yet. I asked him how many they had taken.

‘Three, I think,’ he said. ‘Two from the village, one from the dance. They didn’t get Armando.’

I had never heard him talk so much the whole time I had been at the Pian del Sotto.

‘While they were upstairs searching, all except one who stood over us with a machine-gun, the Italian who spoke
Tedesco
told us that it was the
segretario
of the commune who had put them up to it. He’s a great Fascist, the
segretario.
It was one of his spies who found out about you. The Italian was only the clerk from
the
municipio.
He was as frightened as we were. The rest I learned when I went down to the village later.’

‘What will happen now to the boys who weren’t captured?’ I said.

‘They’ll stay out in the woods tonight, just as you are doing, and if it’s all clear tomorrow they’ll go back to where they were before. Armando should be back tomorrow; but I think that it would be very dangerous for you,’ he said, apologetically. ‘You see, I have to think of the safety of the others.’