Between Enemies (23 page)

The news was bad: the enemy forces had broken through on the Montello, overrunning the front and second lines, and were about to flood the plain. But Renato was still optimistic. ‘The Piave river is rising; it’ll be no easy thing to fight with a river in spate at their back, and after all, the attack on the Montello can’t be the principal thrust…Judging from what the wounded
men have to say today, south of Nervesa it must have been hell.’

That night, even though it was summer, we lit a fire in the little drawing room near my aunt’s bedroom to dry our bones: the rain was pouring down and the night was damp and chilly. No one spoke. We knew that if the Austrians pushed all the way to the banks of the Adige river, Italy would be tempted to surrender: perhaps sue for a separate peace. But we also knew that this offensive might well prove to be the Hapsburgs’ swan song. Grandpa and I agreed to slip in among the prisoners and ask how the battle was faring, because the wait had become intolerable.

‘Tomorrow I’ll go down and introduce myself to the official in charge at the church; I want to do something to help,’ my aunt announced, breaking the silence. There were no comments: for once, not even my grandpa knew what to say.

We practically hadn’t eaten a thing, and Teresa angrily scolded us: ‘Time to eat, masters and mistresses,’ she said. ‘Empty bags can’t stand upright.’

You could cut the tension with a knife and my aunt, to break the evil spell, started telling us about the baron, to the astonishment of one and all. She said that his father had been a presence at court, that he was a renowned art historian, and that his mother was a saintly woman who’d lost her mind when the baron’s little sister died. ‘The baron was eleven years old when they committed his mother to a clinic in Zurich from which she never returned…He carries her portrait in a locket that only a mortar shell could separate from his neck.’ My aunt spoke softly, looking into the fire, and there was deep feeling in her clear voice. The army, she told us, had been the refuge of a boy who yearned to do good but had little enough talent to offer. ‘He’s a lonely, good-natured boy, he searches for happiness but
when he finds a little, he doesn’t know how to live with it. He dislikes the army, even though it’s given him a life and a future, and he dislikes warfare too, but he won’t pull back, because… he’s a child filled with uncertainty, and niggling fears…but right now the biggest fear of all, deep inside, is that he might not live up to the uniform that he wears. What Rudolf is most afraid of is dishonour.’

This was the first time we’d ever heard her call him by his given name.

My aunt wrenched her gaze away from the fire that seemed to be hypnotizing her, and looked at us one by one: ‘He learnt our language so well as a way to please his father, whom he’d accompany on his trips to Italy; his father came here to study sixteenth-century painting, especially Venetian artists, and I believe he even wrote a book about Titian.’ She sighed, and the flames made the green wood snap. ‘He’s not much of a soldier… Poor Rudolf, he’s too fond of horses…and, just like me, he can’t stand to see them suffer…A few days ago he admitted to me – and he blushed as he said it – that he was made aide-de-camp to General Bolzano in consideration of his illustrious birth, not his gifts as an officer.’

‘These aren’t the sort of things a man says lightly…I mean to say…unless he doesn’t care about the woman sitting across from him.’ There was a tenderness in Grandma’s voice that I’d never heard before. I too was shocked, it wasn’t like her to confide her inner thoughts.

‘Listen, Maria…take some advice from an old man: don’t let that baron slip through your fingers. One way or another, the war is going to end…’

My aunt looked at my grandfather and shook her head as if she were trying to ring a cowbell. ‘The war will end and that
officer has a wife back home waiting for him…Remember, challenging times bring people together as long as they last, but then they separate them.’ My aunt was practically whispering now. ‘The vanquished cannot forgive the victors…even if no one ever knows who really wins and who loses, because what’s at stake, what’s really at stake, the things that no one ever talks about, are unknown. Life goes on,’ and she looked at my grandfather with her flinty green eyes, ‘but you lose pieces of yourself along the way, every day.’

The windowpanes shivered. Suddenly the explosions had come closer. ‘That’s large-calibre artillery,’ my grandfather said. ‘Let’s keep our fingers crossed.’

‘Don’t be silly, scaredy-cat,’ said my grandmother, with a half-hearted laugh. ‘We’ll survive.’

Twenty-Seven

P
AGNINI SHOWED UP IN CHURCH WITH A SLASHED WRIST
. He’d tried to kill himself. Or at least pretended to. My aunt – who was wearing a white coat smeared with clotted blood – bandaged him with a grimace of disgust. ‘Don’t you understand what we’re doing here? We’re fighting to save a few… of these boys.’ Pagnini left with a bandaged wrist and his face concealed under a broad-brimmed Borsalino.

The church floor was carpeted with blood-encrusted pallets, where the most seriously wounded were laid out side by side. A colonel from Cracow, fair-haired and skinny, solidly muscled, with a firm gaze, was performing surgery on the main altar. The four altars along the two aisles were occupied by one Italian doctor, a prisoner who had been captured on the Montello, and three others, all of them Croatians according to my aunt, who wasn’t even certain that they were really physicians at all. The stone altars were sluiced clean with pails of water. Loretta, Teresa, the other volunteers, and I all carried empty buckets out and full buckets back in, in an endless procession.

The ditches lining the road – for kilometres, from Refrontolo to the banks of the rivers Soligo and Piave – were clogged with ravaged bodies, living and dead, locked in a mass embrace and sending up an incessant wave of moans. And 16 June had been worse than the fifteenth. The wounded were also coming in
from Falzè, Susegana, Tezze, and Cimadolmo; the Conegliano hospital sent word that they’d stopped accepting patients. Wherever I turned, I saw suffering men: the garden was an endless place of torment. Around noon, a Hungarian lieutenant asked me, in dumbshow, to go with him to the inn. I followed him out. We requisitioned all the remaining grappa, with the assistance of both the innkeeper and the innkeeper’s wife. ‘We need it to operate, there’s no more morphine.’ The thing was to stun them before sinking the scalpel into their flesh, and grappa also made a serviceable disinfectant. A lorry had gone out to make the rounds of the farmhouses and confiscate all the alcohol that could be found. No one spoke, no one asked questions. My head was throbbing and I was praying, yes praying, for the day to come to an end, for the wounded to stop pouring in. In the afternoon, three lorries loaded with nuns pulled in from who knows where, and they set to work; that allowed me, Teresa, and Loretta to return to the Villa. My aunt refused to leave the church: ‘I’m staying here; tonight I’m not leaving this place.’ A spurt of dark red blood ran across her pinched face, as sharp and clear as if she’d been slashed by a sword: there was blood on the backs of her hands, under her fingernails, on her boots, and on the hem of the skirt that showed beneath her white coat smeared with clumps of mucus, bile, and tincture of iodine.

Even the ground floor of the Villa had become a hospital. The nuns brought everyone there who could walk, even if it was just a few steps and even if they required assistance to do so. We were without blankets, straw, or hay: the wounded were laid out on the bare flooring and they shut their eyes, all in the throes of deathly exhaustion. I looked for Renato, but he was nowhere to be found. Grandpa had shut himself up in his Thinking Den and I could hear him pounding away on Beelzebub’s keys. Towards
evening, while I was trying to take my mind off my thoughts with an adventure novel, he told me that he hadn’t written a word all day: ‘But you know, all that pounding on the keys does help to keep away the voices of the dead.’

I went to see Grandma. I found her sitting at her desk, bowed over her numbers; maybe it was her code. She looked at me as if she had seen a ghost: ‘Paolo…you’re a wreck…They’re all so young.’ Her voice was cracking and her eyes were wet. But she wasn’t crying. Her swift and agile mind seemed to be hunting through the numbers for a handhold, a nugget of beauty, some accounting that made sense, anything that might tell her ‘we’re not all insane.’

I went back to the church, determined to give my aunt what help I could. I found her helping Don Lorenzo give extreme unction to those who were breathing their last. She held the cross while the priest blessed the young men and murmured his litanies. When my aunt saw me, she told me to leave. ‘You’re not needed here.’ I shook my head no. ‘Then lend a hand,’ she said.

I knelt down and lifted an infantryman’s head. There was a yellow bandage wrapped around his eyes and he was murmuring words I couldn’t understand. He might have been Hungarian, but it was hard to say because he was no longer in uniform. The parish priest slipped the communion wafer into his mouth and the soldier thanked him as best he could, gripping his hand and moving one leg. The priest asked, in a soft voice: ‘Who can ever forgive all this?’ He glanced in my direction, dry-eyed, but what he was looking at I couldn’t guess.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ Don Lorenzo repeated. Then he stood up and went over to another boy stretched out on the floor.

‘I’m Italian.’ There was a grimace of pain nailed to his face.
‘I can walk, take me out of here, I don’t want to lie in the midst of these others…Everyone here is dying.’ He was terribly pale, and his eyes were red, shot through with suffering. I understood that he was trying to shout, but all that would come out of his mouth was a tiny thread of a voice. ‘I can walk,’ he said again. ‘Help me up.’

I looked down at the muddy sheet that covered him from the neck down: I realized that he had no legs, his body was only half there. I turned around and looked for my aunt. There was no more noise around me; the moaning and wailing was gone in my head. All that was left was what I could see, and what I could see had carried off all the sounds of the world. My aunt came over to me and grasped my hands, then she put her mouth close to my ear: ‘Go to Grandpa, he needs you now.’

I left, making my way, one step at a time, over that expanse of butchered flesh, by the flickering light of a hundred candles. ‘This is what cannons do,’ said a voice. A voice that followed me to the exit.

It wouldn’t be long now till sunset. As I was leaving, Teresa walked in. She barely glanced at me. In her hands, with a pair of oven mitts, she was carrying a basin of boiling water, with half a dozen surgical instruments in it. I went back inside, walking alongside her. She was bent over and exhausted, and I helped her carry the basin. ‘Here, let me, Teresa.’ She let me help without a word. She really was exhausted, and she too, just like my aunt, had black blood clotted on the collar of her blouse and on down to her shoes.

I thought about how many of those basins she must have carried. The water was heavy, and I rested it against my belly and arched my back against it.

‘Come with me, son.’

A nun was waiting for us by the first altar on the right, where a young man lay stretched out, barely clinging to life. There was a pungent odour, of carbolic acid and piss, of grappa, rank sweat, and something else, something sickly sweet and revolting. I realized that it was the smell of death.

Lining the floor of the right aisle of the church were twenty straw pallets, side by side, with two soldiers on each. Loretta went over to the mother superior. The nun gave them rapid instructions, in dialect. No one paid me any mind. I was invisible. I looked around for my aunt, who was now assisting the Polish colonel operating on the main altar. Teresa and Loretta were heading over to her. I followed them. Sobs and moans, whispered words, sudden shrieks of pain, falling metal rattling onto the marble floor; oaths and prayers fused into a single murmuring stream of discordant voices. The colonel’s apron was covered with blood. Don Lorenzo kept entering and leaving the sacristy with his load of communion wafers. He moved from one wounded man to the next, listening to confessions he didn’t understand, scattering sketched-out crosses into the air. When he came to a prisoner, an Italian, he stopped a few seconds longer, because he understood what the man was saying. To one and all he dispensed Latin formulas.

I read the word ‘water’ on the lips of a
bersagliere
. In the short distance I had to cover to reach my aunt, I saw eyes sink shut and quivering bodies collapse without another moan.

The transept was for the hopeless ones. As I crossed it, I kept my eyes fixed on the floor; the last thing I wanted was to step on anyone, but my footsteps were uncertain and my mind was prey to a devastating sense of guilt, the way I felt when I walked past little children’s graves at the cemetery, or the time I entered the Brustolon family’s hovel, black with soot and poverty.

I stood by my aunt, tamping down my sense of nausea. With Teresa and Loretta I helped her lift a boy who had been hit by enemy fire, half his face reduced to a glistening, bloody pudding. The one eye remaining to him stared at me for an instant. I had the impression he was asking me who I was, what I was doing there. But he no longer had a mouth. From what had once been his face not even a single moan escaped. As soon as we laid him on the marble altar top, the colonel yanked open his eye, splaying forefinger and thumb. ‘
Raus!
’ he shouted. ‘You don’t call me for dead men.’ The doctor’s face was grey with weariness.

My aunt closed the boy’s eye again, then glanced over at me. ‘I told you to go and tend to Grandpa,’ she said, giving me a piercing look. ‘Here it’s forbidden, it’s absolutely criminal to faint, you understand that?’

So I left the church for a second time, shuffling cautiously, dragging my feet where the recumbent bodies allowed me to. I wasn’t even aware that Teresa was holding me up. But as soon as I got a mouthful of the cool evening air, I told her to turn right around and go back to my aunt.