Fire in the Hills (7 page)

No word from Ivano. Nothing nothing nothing.

The Allies didn't come and didn't come and didn't come.

The Jews were rotting who knew where.

Italy was occupied.

The war went on.

12

P
LOUGHING IN THE RAIN WAS HARD. Roberto and Manfreddo and Angelo screamed at the oxen to make them move. The boys tugged at the nose rings. Their feet slipped in the mire. The oxen didn't budge. It was as though they'd formed a pact between them. Their breath made hot clouds around the boys. Their tracks—like huge swallows without tails—puddled with cold rain.

“Eat,” called Rina. She stood at the edge of the field with an umbrella in one hand and a basket in the other. Usually on a Sunday like this, the only day when school wasn't in session, Emilio would be at her side, holding a basin of water for them to rinse their face and hands in—but not today. It was raining too hard today.

The boys wiped their hands on their trousers, then held them up to the rain to finish cleaning them. They ran to Rina and unwrapped the cloth in the basket to find hot pizza—thick dough, flavored with the earliest spring onions. They gnawed on hard cheese between bites of that pizza. They drank wine thinned with water. It was so good to eat—so good. When your belly was empty and your arms and back ached from work, nothing was better than pizza.

Manfreddo watched Roberto and Angelo eating. “Look, it's raining too hard to get those lazy oxen moving. Angelo, you unhitch them and let them wander back to the barn. Then rub them down and clean off the plough and put it away before you come out again. Roberto and I will finally work the hill field. The oxen are no use there anyway.”

It sounded to Roberto as though Angelo was getting the harder task. Dragging that plough back to the barn in this mud would take so much strength. But he followed Manfreddo obediently to the barn and accepted the hoe he was handed. It had a blade as long as his forearm.

They walked to the sloping field, the only one that hadn't yet been touched this spring. Manfreddo swung his hoe and slammed it into the wet earth. It came up caked with clay. He swung again and again. After every five digs, he wiped off the clay.

Roberto mimicked him. But he quickly found that he had to wipe his blade after every other swing. Otherwise the clay clinging to the blade made it too heavy for him. In minutes, he was covered with sweat despite that cold rain. This was bitterly hard work.

Spring.

Spring in Venice was birdsong and a return to playing in the sand on the beach island—the Lido—and lots of sparkling sun on the water.

Spring on this farm was work. Oh, the birds came, too. Shy jays in pink and black with flashes of white and blue on their wings. Green woodpeckers and wagtails over by the stream. Hawks above the meadows. And the night was full of the delight of fireflies. But mostly spring meant work.

That was good, though. Every part of Roberto's body had been strong in the autumn from all the farmwork. Winter had softened him a little. Now he was getting strong again. This was good. And the rain meant the earth would be ready for planting. This was what a farm was all about. He swung his hoe rhythmically: swing, swing, wipe; swing, swing, wipe.

The work filled his brain. It overflowed. There wasn't room for thought. Nothing existed in the world but this earth, this hoe. But, then, he hit a stone. A gray stone. Flat on one side and rounded on the other. He picked it up.

A Jewish girl had given him a stone like this one in Poland so long ago. He tossed it away. He wouldn't think about it.

Swing swing wipe.

But that one memory was like the single shot at the start of a battle; memories rushed him, things he'd promised himself he'd never think about again.

It was almost two years ago, June 1942. Roberto was in a movie theater. A normal day. Normal kids at the movies. Then Nazi Secret Service soldiers marched down the aisles and gathered all the boys. They forced them onto trains going north into Germany. Without even telling anyone. Roberto and his brother and his friends—all kidnapped.

He was separated from his brother early on, and he prayed Sergio had made it home. Otherwise his parents might still have no idea what had happened to their children. That thought drove Roberto crazy sometimes—that image of Mamma crying in the circle of Papà's arms.

Swing, swing, wipe.

Roberto and his friend Samuele were sent to a work camp near Munich. They built tarmacs and loaded planes. Then they got moved to Poland and built barbed-wire pens—like the one the Polish girl was imprisoned in. Roberto remembered her bone-thin arms, the little girl that clung to her, the food he sneaked them both, the stone she'd given him in return. A gift. A talisman.

Swing, swing, wipe.

They moved on to a work camp in Ukraine, where the snow made the German soldiers shiver as hard as the Italian boys. Where Samuele died, protecting Roberto's shoes from a thief. His friend died. His best friend. And Roberto had had enough. He walked away, expecting to be shot in the back by the Nazi soldiers in charge of the boys.

Instead, he tramped through snow for days, got shot and captured by Ukrainians, escaped, and made it down the river in a boat he'd found under a bush. That's where he'd met up, by chance, with Maurizio, the Roman deserter, who saved him from the infection in his bullet wound.

Swing, swing, wipe.

Maurizio told him about the
partigiani
. They vowed that when they got home, they'd join up and help sabotage the war; Hitler had to be stopped.

Swing, swing, wipe.

They went in that small boat along the coast of the Black Sea, and cut across the narrow passageway through Turkey into the Mediterranean. That's where villagers got the better of them. They were stupid enough to think a fisherman had overlooked squid eggs in his cast-aside net. While they were busy eating the eggs, the villagers stole their boat. It was easy to get tricked when they were so hungry they'd been chomping on pine needles, as though a jaw could be fooled simply by the act of chewing. Maurizio had mumbled, “A couple of cows, chewing our cud.” And he laughed. His laugh used to make Roberto feel almost happy.

Swing, swing, wipe.

Walking home would have been impossible; it would have taken months, and they were hungry. So they pirated away a sailboat and its Turkish captain. No, that made it sound romantic. What they did was steal; they stole the boat. Roberto didn't want to. He was a Venetian—and in Venice no one was lower than a boat thief. But it was a big, rich boat. Like the ones he'd watched wealthy Americans sun themselves on in Venice before the war. That wasn't as bad as stealing a fishing boat, someone's livelihood. It wasn't.

Roberto had never before been so far out at sea. In every direction indigo water met cerulean sky, with sun dazzling dazzling, like the world was ready to flicker into flames at the first rasping wind. He loved it.

He remembered looking down off the side of the yacht at light glancing off a reddish brown oval just under the surface. And there was a second one. And a third. Lots of them. Turtles! They darted around and under the boat, their strong fins making them soar, so that Roberto half expected them to leap into the air. He laughed.

He was happy then, not almost, but really. The captain had agreed, under duress, to take them to Italy. These turtles were their escort.

But the captain delivered them, instead, into the hands of a German ship off Crete. Captured by the Germans again.

Maybe that's what a boat thief deserved.

Swing, swing, wipe.

The German officer at the base on Suda Bay spoke Italian. He looked at the stuff from their pockets—a knife and compass from Maurizio's, the Polish girl's stone from Roberto's. He called them spies and put them in separate corners and grilled them. When they wouldn't speak, he said they were deserters, and he'd shoot them.

Roberto clutched at the chair he sat on. That couldn't be. You don't shoot prisoners. You put them behind bars. You don't shoot them. No one shoots them.

The commander barked an order in German.

“Wait,” said Maurizio. “Roberto's a child. You can't kill—”

They shot him midsentence.

“Maurizio!” Roberto ran toward his friend, but he fell, pushed from behind. His teeth smacked on the floor.

A black boot rolled him onto his back. “If you had come yesterday, I'd have greeted you with a Happy New Year celebration,” said the commander. “But gunshots a day late aren't so bad, eh?” He picked up the stone and slammed Maurizio's head with it. The Polish girl's gift stone.

It didn't matter, Roberto told himself, it didn't matter, because Maurizio was already dead. The blood on the stone glistened in the sunlight. The commander threw it out the window.

Swing, swing, wipe.

No one deserved that. Not even a boat thief.

Swing, swing, wipe.

Swing, swing, wipe.

They put him to work in the kitchen. Without realizing he was doing it, Roberto became an eavesdropper. He knew a little German from the work camps, and one day he found he'd somehow absorbed enough German so that he could get the gist of what was said. The German soldiers talked about battles. Roberto hated it. He was on no one's side. He must have been crazy to have ever thought he could join the
partigiani
. Maurizio was a soldier—he had the heart of a hero. But Roberto couldn't shoot a gun. He wouldn't. He hated war.

Spring came to Crete, and somewhere in there his birthday passed. Then one day the German ships loaded up and went to fight the Americans and the British in North Africa. They took Roberto to his first battle.

Swing, swing, wipe.

Roberto's head throbbed. Memories were bullets.

Swing, swing, wipe.

Crack! He was underwater. He swam hard for the surface, bursting out at the last moment. His whole body sucked in air. Pieces of metal and rope and rubber splashed down around him. His ship had been hit.

Roberto swam for open water, swam for hours. Sometime in the night he washed up onshore far from the harbor, like a dead thing. Joe and Randy, some American soldiers, found him. They couldn't believe a kid his age was off alone in the middle of a war. They offered him a smoke. When he didn't take the cigarette, they gave him a chocolate bar. “Hershey's,” Joe said. They watched him eat and lick his fingers, and they laughed.

He patrolled the coast with them. They slept in shallow trenches in the sand. They ate straight from cans. The pears were delicious, in their thick syrup. And Randy taught Roberto the names of all the birds in English. So many birds.

At night Roberto watched the wave crests break into glowing white sea foam. At dawn he watched flamingos ascend in huge, rosy clouds.

That week was like a dream.

But the next was a nightmare. They were called to Lake Bizerte to help process Axis prisoners from a huge battle there. Joe, who spoke broken Italian, told Roberto to keep his mouth shut. If anyone knew he was Italian, he'd be taken prisoner, too.

Bizerte was a mess. The buildings had been smashed by heavy shelling, the streets blown to dust. Arabs draped in white cloths watched them walk by, their faces as immobile as those of the camels that stood beside them, held by a halter. One little girl peeked out from around a man, looked at Roberto, and ran her fingers across her throat, as though she were slashing it. Her eyes flashed hatred. Stray dogs and cats skittered out of their way.

And then they got to the prisoners. Most were German. The rest, Italian. Prisoners and prisoners and prisoners. They stretched off in lines as far as Roberto could see.

The Italian soldiers' feet bled; Mussolini didn't provide shoes. Their rolled-up pants and unbuttoned shirts revealed scabs and bruises. They talked about how being captured was the best thing that could have happened. They swarmed gratefully into cages made of barbed wire and cactus hedges, and held out their hands for cans of beef and packets of biscuits. They ate like the starving.

A German band of seven motley performers played music through it all. Some Axis soldiers actually swung their fingers in the air in time with the beat. One man swung an arm missing its hand. The worst sight, though, was the dead. Floating, bloated bodies filled Lake Bizerte.

The infantry prisoners walked to their cages. But the Nazi officers climbed into jeeps or their own little staff cars and actually drove themselves to prison, swerving around the corpses. And the vultures.

Abandoned tanks. Shovels, pipes, shattered guns, empty helmets. Twisted telegraph wires. Piles of burnt, blackened things—charred beyond recognition.

At one point a shell came tearing out of nowhere. Everyone jumped and aimed their guns. But it had just come from a pile of flaming debris.

Bodies sank into the soft ground, as though part of the earth itself. American soldiers turned them over with their boots, looking for the living. Swarms of flies rose and settled again. The Americans chewed gum and moved on.

The pungent smell of burning—oil and steel and cloth— welled up everywhere. And dust. Soldiers wrapped cloth around their faces to keep it out. It didn't work.

After Bizerte, Joe and Randy and Roberto climbed into a truck and went west with other Allied soldiers, across Tunisia into Algeria. They passed dummies in Allied uniforms, stuffed with dried grasses and topped with helmets, made up to look like antitank gun crews from above, to lure Axis planes into wasting bombs on them.

In Algeria they trained for the invasion of Sicily. Then they got into the Landing Ship Tanks and went across the sea. The whole way the soldiers talked about land mines and how many people they'd seen have a leg blown off, or an arm, or a head. After a while Joe stopped translating for Roberto.