A Winter's Night (39 page)

Vasco was, at that time, under the power of the military authorities and there was no way to have him released from that authority, so no one blamed his family. But some people in town even voiced the terrible suspicion that the doctor had wanted to punish his patient. Could he have acted so ferociously and sadistically because he believed that Vasco somehow had tried to escape the dangers and the sacrifices demanded by the war; could he have intended to make the boy regret that, somehow, he hadn't fulfilled his duty?

Fonso asked Doctor Munari about it one day. The whole family was shaken and wounded no end by the tormented death of Vasco, a lad they had all dearly loved.

“Why did he have to die that way, doctor?” Fonso asked him as he was helping to weed the garden.

“I was an army doctor myself,” Munari answered, “and even though we had to work under abominable conditions, we always tried to save the soldiers put in our care. Ask your brother-in-law Raffaele about that, if you ever run into him. He saw me at work, and I think he could tell you what kind of a doctor I was.”

“I believe it, doctor, but we're talking about someone else here, not you. You know how much respect I have for you, as a man and as a doctor.”

“I thank you for that. For Maria's brother and wife to see their son die that way . . . it's something you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy. There's only one explanation that I can come up with. If I'm right, the doctors should certainly have deigned to tell the boy's parents. It is probable that a latent, that is, hidden, form of bone tuberculosis developed as a consequence of the frostbitten foot and spread through his body; the doctors would have decided, in that case, to put him in a full body cast so that his bones would not crumble to pieces. Perhaps other patients had been saved using that treatment; perhaps they thought there was no other choice. Otherwise, I wouldn't know what to think.”

Fonso hesitated a moment before answering, trying to understand the sense of what Munari had just explained, then he said: “One thing is certain about that professor: if it were his own son, he would never have condemned him to such a cruel death.”

The sun had gone down and Fonso had nothing more to add. He leaned the spade on his shoulder and said: “I wish you a good night, doctor.”

He spent his days with his friends in town; they all hoped that the war would end soon and that they wouldn't be called up. Instead, the postcard arrived one day, calling Corrado to arms. He went down to the plains one last time to say goodbye to his aunts and uncles and his friends. Uncle Checco and Aunt Esterina clung to him, as if it were their Vasco, leaving again to go to war and to his death.

“Be careful! Stay out of danger's way, try to come back home, son. We'll be waiting for you,” said Uncle Checco, drying his eyes with a handkerchief.

“Don't worry,
zio
, I can take care of myself,” replied Corrado. “You'll see me again soon, you can be sure of it.” He took the bundle that Aunt Esterina had prepared for him with the cookies that Vasco liked so much, hopped onto his bicycle and disappeared at the end of the road.

Like many of the young men who lived in mountainous areas, Corrado was assigned to an
Alpino
infantry division, the “Julia.”

The Alpine soldiers were all mountain men, outfitted, armed and trained to operate on mountainous terrain, to climb wall faces and move tactically on the edge of a cliff. They were sent to Russia, to the plain along the Don River, as flat as a bread board. The reasoning was that they were more resistant to the cold.

In his misfortune, Corrado at least had the luck of finding himself in the same battalion as a friend of his from Camporgiano named Adriano Masetti, a good guy who worked as a woodcutter and was as strong as an oak tree. They travelled with their fellow soldiers for many days and many nights by train through endless, unchanging plains which filled them with a sense of infinite desolation. Sometimes the boys would sing songs for two or three voices, harmonies inspired by the majesty of the soaring peaks, the roar of the waterfalls and the bloom of mountain meadows in the springtime, but always sad. Their songs always had that nostalgic, forsaken feel because almost all of them came from little villages where everyone knew everyone else and it was like living in one big family.

After a two-week journey that they thought would never end, they arrived at their destination. It was the end of the summer, and they immediately realized what they would be up against. The Italian units already posted there, who had survived the winter of 1941-42, reported terrible operational conditions: insufficient equipment, unreliable fuel provisioning and clothing and footwear of very poor quality, totally unsuitable to the rigors of a Russian winter. They told of the friends they'd lost, of the hardships and hunger they'd suffered. They described the bodies of fellow soldiers found frozen to death, stiffened by the frost at their guard posts, in the gray dawns of January. Hard as slabs of salt cod. They were demoralized in the face of a reality that corresponded in no way to the images spread by propaganda, and humiliated by the disparaging attitude of their German allies.

“In the Great War,” their officers, veterans of that conflict, would tell them, “the enemy was in front of you. Behind you, you had the Italian people, our own families, the houses in which we were born.” Here, the enemy was everywhere. The only thing that kept them alive and pushed them to fight was the hope of returning.

Corrado was assigned to the drivers because he had worked as a mechanic before he was drafted and that made someone think that he must know something about means of transport. He learned to drive a truck, just like his Uncle Checco at Bligny, and was tasked to service the rear-line supply bases on increasingly dangerous missions. The vehicles on the supply routes were those which carried ammunition, spare parts, provisions and messages in both directions, and were thus the first to be targeted by the enemy artillery and aviation, but Corrado was a quick study and he always managed to get out of a fix with minimal damage. He soon became familiar with every secret of his truck, an ancient Isotta Fraschini with two hundred thousand kilometers under its belt that seemed to want to break down every time it took a jolt.

Sometimes he managed to make the supply runs with his friend Adriano at his side; they would keep each other company and talk about what they would do when they got back home. There was another great advantage to driving a truck: spending so many hours in the heated cab. Corrado had worked hard at isolating it with any scraps of material he could find: cardboard, rags, even some hay and straw pilfered from the
izbas
they found along their way. In this way, the heat remained in the cab. It seemed infinitely better, to them, to die warm with a big boom, than struggling to survive in the freezing cold with a harsh, dry, hacking cough that felt like it was splitting your chest in two.

They spent nearly a year this way, during which everyone's attention was focused on the Battle of Stalingrad, where other Italian army corps divisions were deployed. More than once it looked like the Russians were caving in and Corrado, who was an optimist at heart, began to hope that the war might be over soon.

“You're happy that the Nazis are winning?” asked Adriano with a reproachful tone.

“My father was a socialist when you were still pissing your bed. He was persecuted by the fascists, unjustly accused of attempted murder, forced to sleep in the fields like a tramp. They burned down the family's stable. What do you think, that I like these guys? I'm his son. I didn't want this war but here we are. We've made our beds, so we must lie in them, isn't that what they say? The sooner it's over the happier I'll be. Should I hope for defeat, so we can be slaughtered or be taken prisoner and sent to Siberia to die like dogs? Fighting to survive is our right, I say, no one can claim otherwise.”

“Oh, calm down, I wasn't trying to offend you! Are you mad at me?”

“When you start sounding off like an idiot, I am.”

Adriano let it drop, especially because deep down he knew that Corrado was right. But discussions of that sort soon became futile as the months passed. The winter turned out to be even more cruel than the one before; the Soviets drove the Axis powers from the ruins of Stalingrad and conducted a huge operation of encirclement. The Italian army corps began their retreat: a long black snake on the snow gray with the dust and smoke of the continuous explosions. Corrado drove his truck full of soldiers who had no shoes and whose feet were so frostbitten they could not walk. And yet those poor wretches were envied by the others who had to push forward on foot, one step after another, numb with cold and hunger. Most of them had been scattered from their original units and had lost touch with their comrades and officers. Many of them had abandoned their weapons once they ran out of ammunition. The only units which were still disciplined, armed and outfitted were the Alpine “Tridentina” division who marched at the head of the long string of men crossing the boundless fields of snow, some of the “Julia” units and another two or three battalions. No more than fifteen or sixteen thousand men in all, out of a total of sixty thousand in the Alpine army corps, but the distance from the head to the tail was so enormous that no one in the rear lines knew what was happening up ahead.

As the column slowly advanced it sowed the ground with the fallen. In the ranks of the walking dead, exhausted and half frozen, one after another would drop into the snow. Some were helped up by a friend or a fellow soldier and physically forced to push on, others, most of them, were abandoned to their destiny.

What happened in the end was that the “Tridentina” engaged the front lines of the Soviet army which had united in order to deny any route of escape to the retreating enemy. A furious battle broke out in the vicinity of a village called Nikolajewka. The Soviet strength was far superior, they were better armed and equipped and utterly determined to annihilate the enemy, which had already been cut off from all their supply lines. They opened a barrage of fire that blew huge holes in the Italian columns in marching order, taken completely by surprise. Corrado, who was advancing at a snail's pace, in first gear, could hear the artillery rounds and the crackle of machine guns coming from the head of the column and he imagined that the end had come.

No one could have imagined that it might mean salvation instead. Corrado could see nothing of what was happening at the head of the column but Adriano told him about it later; his friend had gone forward with a courier from the “Vestone” Alpine battalion and had seen what was happening with his own eyes. The “Tridentina” was stubbornly advancing under the crossfire of the entire Soviet front, which extended in an arc from northwest to southwest. They realized they were facing certain death, but the entire unit continued to respond to fire with all the ammunition, energy and desperation at its command. They had actually succeeded in achieving a momentary stalemate when their commander himself, General Reverberi, jumped into an abandoned German tank, started it up and drove it forward, firing with all the weapons he had on board. All the troops poured in after him, not only the Italians, but the Germans and Hungarians as well. “You should have seen these guys,” described Adriano, “they were dropping like flies, mowed down by the machine guns and picked off by the snipers, but they never stopped. If it hadn't been for my buddy Bruni, stuck three kilometers back, I would have joined them myself.”

“You should have,” replied Corrado, as he was fussing under the hood of the Isotta Fraschini.

“No, no,” shot back Adriano. “You and I left together and we'll go back together.”

Corrado pulled his head out from under the hood. “Right, and how is that going to happen?” he answered back, as he rubbed his oil-covered hands on a rag which was even greasier than his hands were. He took the crank handle, fit it onto the bolthead on the engine shaft and pushed hard. The engine coughed, gave a couple of knocks, and died. Corrado tried again, cranking it up three or four times, and this time the engine started up.

He climbed into the cab: “Get in. It's warmer in here,” he said.

Adriano climbed in on the other side and started up again: “Listen to me. As I was heading back, the battle was still in full swing. An inferno. But the guys from the ‘Tridentina' had opened the way and they were marching behind the tank of that crazy general of theirs. Then more battalions showed up. One of their commanders was yelling like a madman: ‘Forward! Forward!' and shooting with his carbine, his pistol, everything he had. He was pushing so hard I'll bet you they're still going. I'll bet you they're still passing through the lines.”

“Yeah. And so . . . ?” asked Corrado.

“I know where there's a hole in the Soviet front. There's a point where there's a frozen swamp, with reeds sticking up all around; the ice is surely thick enough to support our weight. If we're smart, we can pass at that point, look for the footprints of our men, catch up with them wherever they are and that's that. When we've gotten to the other side, it's just a question of time before we're home. We're going home, old man!”

Corrado shook his head. “I can't do that, Adriano.”

“What do you mean you can't? Of course you can! Come with me and tonight we'll be on the other side.”

“I'm the only guy that can get this wreck to work. If they need me to transport the wounded, the men who can't walk . . . How will they do it without me?”

“They'll figure out a way, Bruni! They'll figure it out, no?”

Corrado shook his head stubbornly. “No, I can't. I really can't. You go. It'll be even easier for you if you're alone.”

Adriano got out and before slamming the cab door shut, he said: “You really are a bonehead, you know that?”