Fire in the Hills (6 page)

He would have liked to sleep outside in that blackness. But Rina, the mother of this family, wouldn't hear of it. She made him sleep on a mattress stuffed with corncobs—the same kind everyone else in the family slept on. Roberto's was old and pressed thin with wear. It had been discarded but not yet burned, lucky for him. Rina placed it in the barn, with the oxen.

Roberto walked between a willow and a poplar, part of a line of trees connected by vines, which formed a natural fence between the fields. The other workers had gone back to the farmhouse a while ago to clean up before dinner. But Roberto had formed the habit of lagging behind. No one seemed to mind, so long as he showed up for the meal.

Maybe he'd lagged a bit too long today, though. He hurried now, straight to the well. Two copper pitchers were waiting on the ground beside it. He filled them, like usual, then carried one in each hand. He hardly felt the dig of the thin metal handles anymore, his hands had already grown hard from cutting maize stalks all day.

He wore old trousers, a shirt without a collar, and a jacket without sleeves. Rina had pulled them from a trunk for him. They fit okay.

Planes went by overhead. Roberto could tell from the sound that there were several of them. He didn't look up.

When he got to the house, the thick smell of minestra greeted him, cabbage rich. He'd come to love Rina's minestra. He put the pitchers on the sideboard and washed his hands and face in the basin with the water the boys had already used for the same purpose. Then he helped set the table. The boys didn't help in that kind of work. But Roberto liked doing it. Their teasing didn't bother him. And he knew it made Rina feel better about having him around—about having one more mouth to feed.

Rina put two hot loaves of bread on the table, and the boys appeared as if by magic. Four of them. The two who had found Roberto that night in the bushes: Ivano, the one with the gun, and Angelo. Plus Manfreddo, who was older, and Emilio, who was a lot younger. They were brothers—Rina's children.

Roberto picked up a long loaf and held it upright to his chest. Its warmth felt wonderful through his jacket. He cut it into wedges, drawing the knife toward his chest. He'd learned that way of cutting bread from the oldest brother. It felt honest to hug the bread like that—respectful acknowledgment of how essential it was. He wished he could give a loaf like this to every fourteen-year-old girl in Naples. His eyes burned for an instant.

The boys dropped pieces of bread into their bowls of minestra and ate greedily, talking about the grape harvest that would start in the morning. Roberto listened only enough to get an idea of what his next job would be. They had harvested about half the grapes before he got there, using some for eating and the rest for wine. But the other half were still on the vine. The blush of maturity had passed. The grapes were partly dry. It didn't make any sense to Roberto. But, then, not much made sense to him. He was a city boy. Venice didn't have fields to work. Or not on the main islands, anyway. His only experience with field labor before now was that afternoon he'd spent cutting and rolling wheat with the two little boys in Sicily. He ate the cheese and nuts and grapes that followed the soup without hearing anything really.

After dinner everyone went outside to relieve themselves in the outhouse. Though the farmhouse had electricity, it had no running water and no bathroom. Then the boys went inside to gather around the radio, while Rina washed the dishes in the water Roberto had brought from the well. Roberto went to the barn. He couldn't bear listening to war news on the radio. He didn't care about battles anywhere.

Venice was occupied by the Nazis. His Venice. His parents. So long as that was true, he couldn't go home. Rina said it was too dangerous.

After all that Roberto had been through, it was almost laughable how he obeyed the warnings of this mild woman. But he did. It felt good to be treated like a child by her.

And obeying her gave him the excuse he needed. He didn't want to leave this farm. He wished he was home with his family, oh, Lord, how he wished that. But he couldn't travel there; he couldn't bear the thought of meeting up with German soldiers again. Soon enough the Allies would take back the north of Italy from Hitler, and then he'd leave. Only then. He'd go to Venice. But for now, he was where he had to be. He was staying put.

Tonight shouts came from the house. Roberto was leaning over the half-door of the oxen stable, surprised at how he could pick out the white one from the brindled gray and brown one in the dark. He heard the shouts but didn't turn around. He reached out and ran his hand down the length of one long horn and up the length of the next. He was careful to keep his arm away from the mucus that dripped almost continually from the ox's muzzle.

“We did it.” Ivano's voice came strong and happy behind Roberto. “We declared war on Germany. Finally. October 13 is the best day of my life.”

“We've been at war with Germany, maybe all along,” said Roberto, turning around.

“Not officially. Yesterday the Americans secured Naples. They'll take Rome next week. No doubt about it. And I'm going to be part of it.”

Roberto's cheeks felt heavy. “What do you mean?”

“I'm joining the
partigiani
—the resistance fighters. I'll go behind the enemy lines into occupied Italy. I'll kill those Nazis. With their own pistol.”

Their own pistol. So that pistol Ivano had was from a German. Did he get it the same way he got the guns and ammunition that were hidden in the metal trunk? There was a time when Roberto had never seen a real gun. The police in Venice didn't carry them. But for so long now, guns had surrounded him. Guns and grenades and bombs.

“I'll go all the way to Venice,” said Ivano.

Roberto wished he could see Ivano's eyes in the dark of the barn—the bright wetness of them. He had the eerie sensation of talking to a disembodied voice, the voice of a dead man. “Does your mother know?”

“No. I won't tell her. I'll help with the grapes and the wine. Then I'll just leave.”

Roberto wanted to say, Don't. Don't do that to your mother. But he knew Ivano by now. There was no point. He turned back to the oxen.

“All the way to Venice. Your city.” Ivano came up beside him and rested his forearms on the top of the stable half-door. “Come with me.”

Back into the middle of war.

Roberto had once planned to join the
partigiani
. He and Maurizio were going to do it together. Like brothers. Maurizio would have made a terrific big brother. Roberto squeezed his eyes shut for an instant—
please please let his real big brother be alive still. Let Sergio be fine.

“You know you want to. Come on, Roberto.”

“No.”

“You have almost as much reason to hate them as I do.” Hate? Roberto felt too tired to even think about hate. Ivano left.

Roberto lay down on his mattress. The oxen chewed. Their bellies rumbled. Their dung fell with a splash. Hour after hour he listened to them shifting their massive weight.

11

R
OBERTO WOKE TO DAWN AIR, warm from oxen breath. Breakfast was the remains of last night's bread broken into bowls of warm buffalo milk with sugar. Today they would pick the lightly shriveled grapes, sometimes one by one, and drop them into the handcart.

Angelo said picking grapes earlier in the season was easy compared to this—you just ripped off the whole bunch, stems and all. He smiled. “It's worth it, though. The wine from these grapes, ah, it tastes like honey and oranges. It's spicy. It deserves to be called holy.”

They picked all day long. Roberto had no time at the end of the day to lie in the grasses. But boys from neighboring farms had come to help, so at least they finished the harvesting. Women Roberto didn't know joined Rina in spreading out the grapes on straw mats to dry even more.

After dinner, Ivano and Angelo came into the barn. “Get up,” said Angelo.

Roberto got up and followed them around the little pond. Geese hissed at them. The boys had never led Roberto anywhere at night before. Still, he was neither afraid nor excited. His only thought was that he didn't want to get too close to those geese.

The boys walked in such a tight band that they could smell one another's hair and hear one another's breath. They walked a long while, then climbed a hill and sat in a row. Ivano pointed.

Lights. Headlights. Roberto could make out the black snake of a road way down there. Now he saw a second set of headlights.

“Nazi trucks,” said Angelo.

“I'm going to blow up trucks just like those,” said Ivano. “See that?”

A third set of headlights came along the road, smaller ones, closer together.

“That's a staff car. Officers are in it. If it were daytime, you'd see the mottled camouflage. I'll blow up staff cars, too.”

Nazis. Trucks and staff cars and airplanes. Somewhere out there a war was still going on. And Ivano wanted to be part of it. Ivano and Angelo had killed four German soldiers. Maybe they'd killed others, too, before that ambush of the convoy that Roberto was in. He didn't know. But four was enough. Four was too many.

Roberto put his chin on his knees and stared through the air, out over the treetops into nowhere.

Two days later they made wine. Roberto climbed into the vat when it was his turn. His scrubbed feet sank into the pulp, all the way up to his knees. He stamped, lifting his knees high and coming down as hard as he could on the toughened grape skins. The remaining pips and stray stalks resisted. The juice was thick between his toes, sticky like blood. A trough sloped out of the bottom edge of the vat, and juice ran into a bucket. The bucket filled fast. Then one of the boys turned the spigot off and put his hand under it for security while another boy took away the full bucket and a third boy put an empty bucket in place. Now and then a boy put his mouth on the spigot and let the juice run right in. Usually it squirted up his nose and all over his face, as well.

The buckets were emptied into a wooden vat in the back of the cellar. It was so tall, there was barely enough room between the top and the ceiling to turn over a bucket.

Like before, the work took all day long, with no time for lying in the grass at the end. That was all right with Roberto. Exhaustion was a welcome thing.

That night Ivano came into the barn again. “You should have listened to the radio tonight.”

“I don't want to know about the war,” said Roberto.

“You're the one who had a Jewish friend.”

Roberto pushed himself up to sitting. “What happened?” “The Nazis sprayed bullets over the Jewish ghetto in Rome today. And they arrested more than a thousand people. They're going to send them by train to Germany and Poland.”

Roberto put his hands on top of his head and dropped his chin to his chest. He knew about the death camps in Germany and Poland. He wanted to scream at Ivano to stop talking.

But he didn't have to. Ivano left.

A few days later Angelo brought Roberto into the cellar to put his ear to the vat. It rumbled. Angelo smiled. “It's working.”

They skimmed off the impurities that had risen to the top of the vats. Clouds of tiny red-headed flies circled there. The air was alcohol. They squeezed the rubbish and put the solids into the slop jar for the pigs. They saved the liquid, and the next day they mixed it with water and drank it in the middle of the day. Rina called it
mezz' vin
—half wine.

Life on this farm was continual toil. Blessed toil from Roberto's point of view; work kept thoughts at bay. The only one who didn't have to work was Emilio. He was ten. Rina said that when he turned twelve he'd work like the rest of them. Till then, she spoiled him. It was a good system. Ten was little. Roberto could hardly remember being ten, but he could tell from Emilio's smile how little ten was.

Roberto helped Rina spoil the boy. He became an expert at making the pancakes Emilio loved. He warmed the special tongs in the fireplace. Then he brushed them with oil and dipped them, hot, into the bowl of batter. He pressed the two sides together. Little bits of batter sizzled out at the sides. He opened the tongs and dropped the pancake right into Emilio's hands. The boy ate it with soft cheese. Then a second and a third and a fourth, before they even called in the other brothers for their share of the treat.

Less than a week after picking the grapes for that wine, Ivano disappeared. Rina pressed her forehead against the doorframe and sobbed. Her fingers curled around the frame. Her body seemed to collapse in on itself.

After that, Roberto worked doubly hard. Especially since Angelo wasn't working anymore—because he had to go back to school. Roberto was needed on this farm now, truly needed. He took over the job of mucking out the hog barn, even though the mean pigs scared him and the stench turned his stomach.

And he joined the others around the radio at night. But there was no news of Allied progress in taking Italy back from the Nazis. Nothing. What were the Allies doing? Why weren't they helping Italy?

Weeks went by. Months. In November the Jews in Florence and Bologna were deported. In December the Jews in Milan, Verona, and Trieste were deported. Children were doubled up in classrooms to free up whole schools as prisons for Jews. When that wasn't enough, abandoned castles served as prisons. Jews' belongings were sequestered. And the Vatican said nothing—as Rina put it, “The pope sits on his hands.”

All this time, and Ivano still didn't come back. Christmas and New Year's came and went. Rina sent the boys out in the bitter cold to ask everyone they knew for news of Ivano. The harshest winter Italy had seen in decades drew to a close. And still no word. And still Rome was occupied by the Germans. And still everything north of Rome—including Roberto's beloved Venice—belonged to the Germans. And still Jews were being deported, three thousand of them, four thousand, five.