A Dark Song of Blood (41 page)

At two o'clock that night, he was awakened by a terrific explosion, enough to rock the house like an earthquake wave. Not an airplane bomb, unless just one had been dropped. The Germans were probably blowing up ammunition dumps and military facilities on their way out. He listened for more noises and when nothing came over the rumble of cannonade he had grown used to, he went back to sleep.

Bora had been the one to bring orders to destroy the dump. He stayed with the engineers to watch the results, and thought the rage of fire racked by repeated bursts was beautiful in the darkness. Surely more impressive than the blowing up of the two city airports hours earlier. No one would take off from them any more. Roads cut, bridges collapsed, railroads knotted in bundles and torn: his Stalingrad nausea was creeping
up, but slowly. They were starting to kill this city, and he could not bear the thought of it, yet he carried the orders to do it in his briefcase.

Air raids hammered the outskirts of Rome on the morning of the 26th; the air was convulsed with them, and still here and there, in the gardens and open spaces, dynamite wrecked what the Germans could not carry along. Bora was in the hard-held town of Valmontone when Tivoli's dumps were hit by enemy bombers, and though the mountainous spur of Palestrina separated his position from the limestone ledge of Tivoli the noise was overpowering. Twenty miles across the valley, Cisterna had fallen to the enemy.

When he returned to Rome, there was an odd activity in the city. German diplomats and journalists had already cleared most hotels. Fascist officials with wives and lovers and suitcases filled with money had vanished overnight while the lesser ranks stayed, grim and black-shirted, to take what came. Army trucks drove north. Tanks slowly ground north. Mounted artillery guns wheeled north. Columns of wearily marching men streamed as gray ribbons to the north, flanked by officers ghostly with dust and dry blood. The people in the streets – refugees, bombed-out families, partisans, priests, false priests, whores – were angry. The whores practiced English in paper-bound, dog-eared booklets. “
Cum on, Johnnee. Johnnee, want to mek lov? I gotta seester, Johnnee, litta seester.”

His office was all but empty. He stepped into it to take down the watercolors of Rome from the walls. He took his diary from the safe and placed all in his briefcase. From it, he took out a P38 – not his own, another army pistol he'd carried around since Russia, taken from a Soviet prisoner who no doubt had taken it from a German soldier. He'd tried it out at Valmontone, and now laboriously cleaned it, as it would come in handy before he'd dispose of it. Although his appointment with Treib was not for two days yet, he had already removed the sling and was using his left arm. It didn't hurt much.

Having left the Flora, he ordered his driver to take him to the center of town. On the way he did not look at the lines of dark-faced civilians, or at the army vehicles slowly negotiating the narrow streets in a direction opposite from his. At the Spanish Steps he got down to buy flowers from a gray-haired vendor squatting by a wealth of fragrant bouquets. Leaving his car at the foot of the Capitol Hill, with an armful of lilac and mimosa he climbed the long steps to the square, where the cobblestone, weblike corolla of the pavement surrounded the empty pedestal of Marcus Aurelius' monument.

Inside the locked museum, Bora knew full well the tense Wolf bared her teeth from above the sandbags, as if victorious over what they meant. Ears erect, she watched among the frescoes that had struck him so deeply when he had first returned to Rome. They told the story of the defense of the Capitol from barbarian invasion, and much as Bora had wanted to see himself on the side of the Romans, it was all too clear that he belonged to the
other
side.

Around the pedestal, senseless without its imperial rider and casting a long shadow, he walked to the central double ramp of stairs of the Capitol itself. There within her niche, flanked by recumbent statues of hoary river gods, the statue of Rome as Minerva sat enthroned above and behind the empty stone basin of the river's fountain. Clad in porphyry, armed, holding the globe of the world, as the ancient Latin verse said, in her extended left hand.
Roma caput mundi.
Bora felt a renewed envy of the culture she represented. And shame for his own, regret and guilt. Carefully, he laid the flowers on the edge of the fountain, stood at attention to salute, and left.

In his office, Eugene Dollmann was like an island of spruce indifference in the turmoil. He was supervising the packing of several sealed bottles of a very dark, nearly black wine.
Il Messaggero
's pages were torn and crumpled by the orderly to separate the bottles during shipping. “That way I'll also
catch up with the news,” he joked. “Best-kept secret in the region, this Cesanese wine – thick and full and mild, but it does trick you – a great wine for merriment. Stains as deep as elderberry. And say, Bora, I'm shopping around for a gift to give General Wolff. Something artistic but not heavy. What do you suggest?”

Bora was grateful for that lightness in the face of frenzy. “If he likes oils, a Coleman is a good choice. If he'd rather watercolors, I'd go with Roesler Franz.”

“Will you come with me to Via del Babuino tomorrow? I was thinking of Perera or one of the other shops.”

“Save time, Colonel.” Bora opened his briefcase. “Here are my watercolors by Franz – give them to the general.”

“Are you sure you want to part with them?”

“Yes. I've spoken to the field marshal, and I'm going back to field duty as soon as we leave the city. I won't need Roesler Franz where I go.”

“Did you get regiment command?”

Bora nodded. “I meet the men at Lake Bolsena.”

Having packed the wine, the orderly left the room. “What about Sunday?” Dollmann earnestly asked.

“I'll carry on as planned.”

“Do you want me there?”

“It's not necessary. I confronted all the anxiety I'll ever confront, and worked it out to the details. From Aristotle's
Ethics
to Marcus Aurelius'
Meditations
, in a big circle I came back to my hometown Leibniz and his simple advice, ‘It must be done: it will be done.' The point I had most trouble with was not owning to it if it comes to that – I'm a poor liar.”

Dollmann looked mildly alarmed. “You have no choice. Think of it – you'd ruin the operation. Westphal would be embarrassed, myself probably implicated, your family disgraced, let alone what would happen to you.”

“Well, I've gone through all that, and I'm fine.”

*

As for Donna Maria, she was not deceived by self-control. She kept wary eyes on him that evening, afraid by what he chose not to tell her. “Martin, we've known one another twenty-three years, and you've been to me the son I never had – please don't frighten me. What is it you'll do tomorrow?”

Bora shook his head, but more to forbid himself to speak than to refuse her. “I cannot tell you, Donna Maria. If all goes well I'll see you tomorrow night.”

Her shoulders sank. “You frighten me. This has nothing to do with the war, does it?”

“Everything has to do with it. I can't get away from it.”

“You can stay here and not do it.”

“I can't. Please go to Mass for me in the morning.”

Bora stayed at her house until very late. And little by little, absent-mindedly at first, he began telling her about Russia, about his brother's death, about Stalingrad. The terrible stories found a way out of him like the telling of a dream, and because the crimes were not his, he could not free himself by speaking of them, a witness chained to the sight of them forever.

Oh, what he had seen, what he had seen and carried inside these years, the gaping long holes of the East with victims ready to fall in them, the burned-out churches and villages where as from a defiling incestuous meal the stench rose of seared human flesh. Blue flies clustering over dead bodies, over countless dead bodies that lay tainting the spring and infecting the summer air. Only wintertime starkly sealed the corpses in their own frozen blood, as in crackling cloaks of eternity. How he had without guilt, yet guilt-ridden, followed in the wake of the SS through
Judenfrei
regions where for weeks blood had rotted in the swollen cadavers. One would turn them over and the nauseating odor of rotted blood would follow the jellied black ooze from mouths and noses, which the first time staggered him nearly to unconsciousness.

He spoke to her unrelieved by the ordeal, incapable of
damming the words until all was said. And he wouldn't allow her to touch him afterwards, and would not touch her.

“Go to Mass for me tomorrow morning, Donna Maria.”

It was past one o'clock when he returned to the hotel. He began to undress, but did not go to bed. He felt the warmth of the season on his torso, under his armpits, a gentle moisture such as from embracing someone closely, and God knows he was alone. Along with the loneliness before one's death, he thought, there's only the loneliness of one about to kill.

Seated on the bed of the impersonal rented room, he removed the barrel from his Russia pistol and secured it to his own side arm. Disassembling the gun with one hand was a chore, but he had practiced it often enough to be proficient at it, pieces coming apart and then together again. He timed the interval between extracting the P38 from the holster and aiming it, squeezing the trigger and putting it away. Replacing the clip, too, which he had to do holding the weapon against his chest with his left wrist. He did this for nearly an hour. And though he had been target shooting at least once a week since coming to Rome, still he held the empty gun at eye level and exercised the steadiness of his arm. Were the telephone to ring now, he'd be wrenched out of concentration like a limb torn from a tree. His mind clicked not differently from the hours spent in the car after his wife left him, a purely mechanical function of nerve centers. One thought to the next, like an electric clock linking seconds into minutes with a red thin hand. He removed the scapular medal from around his neck and put it away. Over the flat of his briefcase he wrote two letters, sealed them and placed them in the inner pocket of the tunic he would wear in the morning.

The gifts to the dignity of man are desperate and expensive beyond reckoning.

28 MAY 1944

On Sunday morning, Treib glanced at the envelopes on his desk, looked up at Bora and down again. He could see one of them was addressed to General Westphal, and the other to Erwin Franz and Nina Bora von Sickingen, presumably his parents. A well-used, cloth-covered, strongly bound diary followed. “What is it? Are you going back to the Russian front?” And because Bora – who came from tossing his Russia pistol into the Aniene from Ponte Salario – amicably shook his head, Treib continued, “I didn't think so. How long do you want me to hang on to these?”

“Until we move out of Rome. The diary I'll come for tomorrow.”

“And if you don't?”

“My parents can have it, then.”

It was all they said about it. Treib placed the objects in his drawer and locked it.

In his apartment at Via Matilde di Canossa, Guidi looked forward to the day off. At noon he'd go for a bite, take a walk perhaps and return home to lounge. He planned to catch up on reading and correspondence, waiting like everybody else for the Americans to come. Things were changing, imperceptibly. Though he'd neither spoken directly, nor seen Caruso since their scene in March, rumors were that the head of police was apprehensive about a German retreat. He'd likely leave with them, though the Germans despised him and some – like Bora – made their antipathy obvious and obnoxious.

Owing to damage to the aqueducts, there was no water in the apartment, but Guidi didn't need to shave today, or cook for himself; he had enough in a pail to flush the toilet and brush his teeth. Stretched on his bed, he unfolded a newspaper and began to read.

*

At that time Bora was driving away from Piazza Vescovio, bound for St John Lateran's.

From his room by the Spanish Steps, Eugene Dollmann glanced at the elaborate column sustaining a statue of the Immaculate Conception, ninety years old this year. Like a vase surmounted by a crown and a cross, the strange baroque bell tower of St Andrew-in-the-Groves rose above the roofs down the way. He was nervous for having to trust someone else to achieve an end, and genuinely concerned for Bora. Love of intrigue had as much to do with all this as his sense of justice. In the past two weeks he had more than once been tempted to cancel the plan, but once he'd agreed within his own mind to act, Bora never went back on his decision. To those he had merely added external confirmation. So Dollmann stayed in his room, pacing the floor for a while and returning to the window, where fat spring clouds sailed, laden ships behind the serpent-conquering Madonna.

Bora passed St Mary Major, at the other end of Via Merulana from the Lateran.

Donna Maria fed her cats, with an ear to the cannonade awakening the porcelains on the shelves. Martin must have stopped by very early this morning to leave a bouquet of flowers on her doorstep; no note was with them. The maid walked in to ask, “Is the major coming to dinner tonight?”

Donna Maria distractedly petted her oldest cat, a mangy black male with a white spot on his neck like a Roman collar, familiarly known as Monsignore. “I hope so,” she said. “I hope he comes.”