Between Enemies (12 page)

The pilot’s chubby face emerged beside mine.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Better.’

The woman nestled up close to Renato. And seeing the pair of us with our hair full of hay, she laughed. For the first time. I noticed she had good teeth. Comfortable life and healthy food, I thought.

‘How are my girls doing?’

‘They’re asleep.’ The pilot’s accent made us laugh, all three.

‘This is what I like about war,’ Brian laughed along with us, ‘when you get a laugh. That’s the best thing.’

A ‘Sshh!’ from Renato sent us all ducking back under. I held a hand over the mouth of one of the girls in case she woke up, and Brian did the same with the other. A rumble of engines. Less than a minute later, after a bend, the cart drew into the roadside. Lorries, lots of them. A motorized convoy climbing up the valley. Our own silence became oppressive. The girl whose mouth I was stopping woke up. But she remained motionless, or almost. I pressed my fingers to her lips, trying not to hurt her. Behind the lorries followed the mules, an entire battalion, I later learnt, of infantry with pack-animals.

The minutes seemed never-ending. But at last the cart moved on. I waited a while and then poked my head out. A church steeple pointed upwards from a knoll. ‘Barbisano?’

‘Yes,’ answered Renato. ‘It’s Barbisano.’ Then, in a lower voice: ‘Honvéd, Hungarians, coming from Falzè, Moriago or Mercatelli. Sickeningly filthy uniforms.’

I dived back under the hay and released the mouth of the girl, who first stroked my hand and then squeezed it without letting go.

The horse was moving at a trot, and I nodded off again with the girl’s breath on my face.

Half an hour later I poked out my head again. ‘How much further?’

‘Not much,’ said the woman.

There were no longer any wrecks by the roadside. We saw no one and made good progress. It was as if the war had simply gone away. No more tents, no more sentries, the sky was clear and the air less chill. We heard no gunfire, not even in the distance, and there was no stink of diesel oil, of wet leather, of urine. Peace had returned.

Suddenly came the loud roar of the Piave. The pilot and the two girls thrust their heads up out of the hay, looking around them and spitting out bits of stalk like threshing machines. ‘Have we got to the river’? asked the younger one.

‘Very nearly,’ replied the woman, gently solicitous.

‘Not long now,’ said Renato, and cracked the whip over the horse’s ears.

Evening had come to our aid. Here and there, the first stars. And at last Renato, who had halted the cart a hundred metres from the river and had gone with the woman in search of food, came back with a sack containing blessings galore:
sopressa
and cheese, and dry black bread which hunger melted in our mouths. There was even a bottle of wine, slightly sour but good. We waited for darkness. The Piave was in full flood, and the noise of it drowned out every other sound. Renato was nervous, Brian was acting impatiently, while the elder girl struggled to hold back her tears and the other slept curled up on the knees of the woman, now crouching in the hay. The cart was drawn up behind a boulder only a few dozen metres from the river bank. The Hungarian trenches stopped three or four hundred metres further south. To the north, less than half a kilometre away, was an Austrian outpost where the soldiers were making merry round two fires burning almost on the river banks.

‘The flood waters are a help to us. There’s not even a patrol boat,’ said Renato, though I could sense the tension in his voice.

‘With such a strong current…will the boat make it?’

‘It’ll make it,’ he assured me, giving me a pat on the shoulder.

The two Austrian fires were in plain view. Quite enough to scare one.

Brian staggered to his feet and joined us, giving Renato a light punch on the chest. ‘Somebody’s coming.’

Indeed, someone was crawling along the bank. Renato crouched low and went to meet him.

‘Are you the Englishman?’ asked a boy’s unbroken voice.

‘Yes, that’s us,’ replied Renato. ‘It’s four people who have to cross,’ he added at once. I stretched out flat on my belly and wormed my way forward to join them. The boy might have been eleven or twelve.

‘They’re sending us children to do war jobs now,’ I murmured, and for the first time I felt myself to be a soldier.

‘There’s room for two,’ said the boy, putting on a man’s voice.

‘You have to fit in four. Two are little girls.’ The major’s tone of voice allowed of no dispute.

While I was helping to lower Brian into the boat – it was long and narrow, a kind of flat-bottomed pirogue – Renato went back to lend a hand to the woman.

In the stern was a boy of fifteen or sixteen, holding the tiller, while the younger one helped the woman to scramble down and told her to crouch down on the floorboards. The sides were scarcely more than half a metre high, and the bow was filled by half a dozen sacks. Brian put his arms round the two girls, so relieved that his ankle wasn’t hurting so badly. The boards were sopping wet, and I felt a shiver of cold run down my back.

Brian and the major brought up their right hands in salute at the very same moment. The boat left the bank. ‘So long.’ And the current swept it away.

‘Good luck,’ I murmured.

Renato turned to me: ‘We’ve got a long trek ahead of us. We must get back before dawn.’

‘What about the cart?’

‘It stays here.’

I tore off a piece of
sopressa
with my teeth and put the rest in my pocket. ‘Do you know the way?’

‘Lieutenant Muller, the man who brought you to me, is expecting us four kilometres away, but we’re late.’

The light caught us just as we reached the garden. The Villa was still sleeping. We made our way round it and approached from the direction of the little temple. We parted without a word. I was so weary that my legs were numb, and all I wanted was to sleep. Grandpa heard me come in. He stroked the back of my neck as I sat on the palliasse taking off my boots. ‘Welcome back, laddie.’

I flopped face down on the pillow. I hadn’t the strength to undress. The crackly mattress stuffing seemed to me like goose-feathers.

Twelve

W
HEN
I W
OKE UP THE
V
ILLA WAS IN FERMENT
. T
HE
ambassador was expected in the afternoon. I breakfasted on hot milk and coffee in the kitchen where Teresa and Loretta had, only recently, regained possession. Their expulsion, lasting two whole days, had enraged the cook: ‘That spawn of hell’s belly, they’ll pay for it I tell you –
diambarne de l’ostia
– them hellkrauts’ll pay through their snotty noses, they will!’

Grandpa appeared, capless and with his jacket smartly ironed. He had shaved off his moustache. ‘All cleaned up like this the master looks like a stripling,’ commented Teresa.

Standing in the doorway he looked us all over from head to foot, and gave a sniff of pleasure: ‘
Caffellatte
, what a treat.’ He took a seat facing me. ‘You know, at home, when I was knee-high to a grasshopper, there was a book – I can’t recall the title, but it was as thick as this…’ – and he formed a C with his thumb and first finger – ‘and in the middle of the last page, otherwise totally blank, was the legend, “Revised and corrected edition without any prunting errors.” Do you know, laddie, that we’ve got an ambassador coming to dinner?’ He knocked back the entire cup of milky coffee at a single draught. ‘In my opinion this invitation is a bad
prunting
error,’ he said, with the accent on the prunting. ‘The front line is only a few kilometres from the village, and who comes to visit? The ambassador of a
neutral
country.’ He rose to
his feet and clicked his heels like a German colonel. ‘There’s not even a whiff of neutrality in this matter. Sweden is friends with those…krauti-chompers, as the cook calls them.’ And a placid expression settled on his face.‘Any news of the fighting?’ He resumed his seat. ‘And is there any more of this coffee?’

While Teresa was pouring it out, Grandpa stroked the moustache he no longer had.

‘The krauti-chompers thought our river was just another Isonzo, another Tagliamento, or maybe the Livenza or the Monticano. It’s been a surprise…for them too.’

‘But do you know anything for certain?’

He sat back heavily, making the chair creak, and once again stroked his non-existent moustache. ‘I am a haunter of
bottiglierie
, and much may be learnt among bottles, the whole world goes where there are bottles to be found…Well then, on the twelfth they tried to cross at Zensòn, where the river makes that big loop, the next day at the Papadopoli sink-holes and at Grisolera, and then a few days ago, on the sixteenth or seventeenth, I think, at Fagarè. Pinned down on the river banks, thrown back everywhere. They’ve got at least twice as many big guns as we have…’ He raised his coffee cup aloft, then brought it down on the table with a crash. ‘But we stopped them, the dirty mangelwurzels…’ This patriotic outburst took me aback, coming from Grandpa, who was usually given to irony.

Grandpa heaved a sigh and continued his discourse, which threatened to turn into a harangue. ‘Now all their main force is up on Monte Grappa, and if the Alpini hold out until the Christmas snow the Huns will end up…’ He broke off and gave Teresa a challenging grin.

‘Frying in hell,
diambarne de l’ostia
,’ they said with one voice, and for exclamation mark the cook snorted.

Thumps at the door. A blast of cold air ushered in three soldiers with grim expressions. The shortest of them, with flaxen hair and Franz Joseph side-whiskers, wore a leather apron reaching to below the knee. ‘Ich cook,’ he said. ‘You out.
Raus!
’ He pointed to the fire. ‘Ich want that.’ Grandpa got up and left the kitchen, slamming the door behind him.

Teresa reopened it at once to let me and her daughter through. Out of the corner of my eye I saw her turn to the German cook and say in dialect: ‘Cook, you’ve got a face like a profiterole made of mouse shit.’ She turned to me and added, ‘The priest’s not the only one knows the right words.’ Indeed, she had rolled the word ‘profiterole’ around in her mouth. It was a pastry she made well, having worked as a girl in a pastry shop in Turin.

Korpium and Donna Maria were walking side by side. My aunt was careful never to leave less than a span between their coat-sleeves, but I fancy she was a little disgruntled because the cold forced her to muffle up, detracting from the grace of her natural gait. I was sitting on the barn roof, legs dangling over the edge, and itching to smoke the pipe which I didn’t have. I was not thinking about Giulia. I was watching my aunt and the captain as they walked the bounds of the park. I watched some soldiers shovelling snow; two of them, instructed by a corporal, were sawing a branch off a tree that was blocking their way. I watched the mules picketed with their muzzles towards the railings that gave out onto the village street. It occurred to me that I felt the same empathy towards those creatures as Aunt Maria did for horses. Their steadfastness, their patience, their strength, these did not spring from stupidity, but resembled the qualities shown by the men in the trenches. And as for the trenches I
had heard many stories – terrible stories – from infantrymen returning from the Kolovrat, the Matajur, the Carso.

And then, I personally had learnt something from the war. My bed was now a lumpy mattress, prickly and noisy, the soles and uppers of my shoes were worn out, the few scraps of meat I got to eat were as tough as leather, I drank unsweetened coffee, and everything, absolutely everything, stank. The streets stank of rotting wood, sweat, men, mules and dung, and there was the stench of clotted blood in bandages, of rotting flesh, of piss, of stagnant water. Even in the garden I smelt cigarettes and tar, diesel oil, burnt rubber and dust. Wartime dust was different from the dust I knew. It got right under your clothes, penetrated curtains and walls, pervaded fields and woods. Even in winter, with the roads half iced over, the columns of lorries and mules managed to raise dust.

To my surprise I saw that the captain and my aunt were making for the barn. They had spotted me. I scrambled down the ladder to get there first and steer them away from Renato’s quarters. I didn’t know if he was still sleeping.

Korpium had no love of peace and quiet, not even the hectic peace of just behind the lines. He was restless, and even awkward in his movements. He needed the swift, clear-cut, obligatory rigour of action.

‘Good morning,’ said the captain.

‘Good morning to you, Captain…And Aunt…’

‘You’ve got rings under your eyes, Signor Paolo. Did you sleep badly?’

‘Not too well.’

‘He’s thinking about that girl,’ said Aunt Maria, scenting the danger.

Korpium smiled. I got the impression that he suspected
something. I tried to smother every trace of concern and looked him straight in the eye.

‘Women are difficult,’ he said, taking his monocle out of his pocket. ‘But you will win through,’ pausing to screw it in, ‘if you keep at it.’

‘Does your horse have a name, Captain?’ Aunt Maria had come to my rescue.

Korpium switched his gaze to her, adjusted his cap, and with a bewildered air said no.

‘It ought to have one.’

The captain swallowed and removed that ridiculous lens from his eye.

‘May I suggest one, Captain?’

‘Please do, Madame.’

‘Torrente. Call him Torrente.’

‘
Torente
,
torente
,’ repeated Korpium, looking sightlessly at me.

‘
Torrente
, with two Rs. It’s a good name for such a lively bay. It’s got three syllables, one O, two Es and two Rs. It has that murmuring sound that horses like so much.’

‘You are a poet, Madame.’

‘No, no, for heaven’s sake, But I like to listen, with care… That’s all.’

‘Oh yes…yes, of course.’

Aunt Maria shot me a look. ‘Now I am afraid that matters at the Villa require my attention, Captain.’

A click of the heels, a little bow.

‘Until this evening,’ I said, following her in.