Wolf on the Mountain (11 page)

Then more explosions, even louder and nearer, seeming to follow the track of the railway line. The Allies have never before bombed the railway so close to Sannessuno. Why are they doing it now?

Then he hears the unmistakable sound of a dive-bomber accelerating down from the clouds towards the village: not the high-pitched whine of the Stukas that used to attack their positions in the desert, but still the accelerating sound of an aircraft engine at full throttle in the dive, far more intense than the sound of an aircraft shot out of the sky and heading for its own destruction on the ground. A bomb explodes across the river, by the railway line, close to the station.

The house rattles.

Another dive-bomber screams down and there is another explosion, another rattling of the windows and the doors, and then many more. The Allies want the railway out of action, and not just at the junction to the south, a town bombed many times before, but along its entire length through the valley. He looks up at the calendar on the wall: January the nineteenth. What on earth is happening?

Elvira rushes into the room, followed by a shrieking Anna, then gathers her to her side. ‘The Allies are bombing our village. Why?’

‘They’re bombing all along the railway line. Why, I don’t know. They’ve only bombed the junctions in the past. But they’re only using dive-bombers, so it’s accurate. Don’t worry.’

Carlo joins them, breathless from running up the stairs. ‘They’ve hit the station. People have been killed. Someone said twenty or more.’ The captain is silent. Anna is gradually composed, Luigi stops shivering. All are stunned by the loss of so many lives.

Then in the silence a heavy droning sound grows from the south. The captain and Carlo rush to the window, open it and stand out on the balcony, oblivious to who might see them from the street below. Through the clouds glimpses of heavy bombers appear, and then the whistle of falling bombs. ‘Get inside, under the table’ the captain shouts. The table is too small for them all. Elvira remembers her mother in the kitchen and rushes for the table there, dragging her children with her. They barely have time before a dozen bombs explode in the village, almost together. The crockery on the dresser chatters, a plate rolls off a shelf and smashes on the floor, Anna shrieks again and again. Powder drops from an old crack in the ceiling.

‘What’s happening?’ asks Carlo.

‘They’re going for the bridge as well. Something big is about to happen. They’ll be back.’

‘God help us.’

–

The bombers return again and again. They are flying in formation down the valley, dropping a stick of bombs, all at the same time, over each town or village with a station or a bridge. Fortunately for the Golvis the mountain behind protects them from the angle of the falling bombs, but repeatedly through the day their house is shaken by tremors as the shock waves vibrate through the foundations of the village and their lives. In the streets outside dazed people stumble about not understanding what is happening, oblivious to their further dangers.

In the late afternoon, when the last bombers have gone, Carlo tours the village. He is silent over supper, his eyes fixed unfocussed on the table alongside his untouched glass. His mind is full of the sights he has seen in the failing light: the houses reduced to heaps of stone, people tearing the stones and shattered timbers away with their bare hands in hope of finding relatives alive; homes with their walls fallen away, iron bedsteads hanging out over a half-remaining floor, a room of privacy and all its contents exposed, the pictures of Christ and the Madonna prayed to each night askew on the inside walls; the people staggering dazed in the street. And everywhere the smell of excrement and piss.

Elvira simply repeats ‘Those poor people.’

Only Nonna is prepared to speak, breaking her usual silence over meals: ‘I don’t suppose the Germans are that pleased either.’ She looks around for appreciation of her point, her jaw wandering around her gums before she juts it out to make her next: ‘They’ve lost people too, and they’ve got no railway now. Maybe they’ll go sooner after a day like that.’ She fixes the captain’s eye. ‘What do you think, Roberto? You know about these things.’

The captain has spent the day wondering how he can justify to them the loss of civilian lives, not enemy ones, at the hands of his own air force. Their silence has almost been a condemnation. He is grateful for Nonna’s intervention. ‘There
is
a reason for it. They want to make it impossible for the Germans to move troops in the valley for a while, to cause so much damage that it will take days to clear it up. And the only reason for the Germans to move troops is if there’s a big attack about to start, one so big they’ll have to move troops from one side of the country to the other.’

‘You mean bring them from the west to protect Pescara?’

‘Or from the east to protect Rome. Let’s hope it’s to protect Pescara. If the Allies take Pescara the Germans will have to fall back to the Gran Sasso, and we’ll all be free.’

‘We’ll listen to Radio Londra tonight’ says Elvira, her despair abating with the captain’s words and the hope of earlier liberation that they bring. ‘Maybe we’ll find out which one it is.’

–

‘They wouldn’t have told us if the Allies had taken Rome, the cretins. They wouldn’t want the Germans to know they were no longer there. Wooden heads!’ Carlo was taking out his frustration on the censors at Radio Londra, whose news had made no mention of the new campaign, but it was reassuring that he was now wondering why the raid had happened. They had all slept badly, the captain so because he knew the bombers would be back.

They were. They came after an hour of people’s searching in the rubble. The Germans had now set up air-raid sirens to warn their troops of approaching bombers and the start of their whining scattered the crowds. The villagers had seen that the slope up the mountain to the south had been unaffected the day before and as the sirens started ran that way. All day the village was pummelled like a fighter prevented by the ropes from falling to the canvas, all day the shock waves from each bomb spread out like ripples on a pond, tumbling walls that had survived so far. And when the last pilots had flown home to their messes the town crier announced a general evacuation of the village during daylight hours next day.

‘The Germans have thought of everything, telling us to leave our windows and doors open. To reduce the damage from the explosions, they say’ Carlo huffs. ‘It makes it easier for them to loot our homes while we’re gone.’ Natale Giobellini has invited him and the captain round to discuss his own same fears. ‘What are we going to do? And what is Roberto going to do? Every time a young man came out of hiding today to help his kin the Germans arrested him and sent him off to work repairing the railway. It’s been their most successful round-up so far.’

‘I’ll have to stay in the village’ says the captain. ‘They’ll be watching who leaves. At least I can help save your things. We’ll have to leave the windows open while the bombs are coming down, but I can at least shut them again afterwards. It may put off the Germans coming in, if everywhere else is opened up for them.’

–

So the next day the captain stays beneath his own side’s bombs while the villagers shelter how they can in the rain on the mountainside, watching their buildings being destroyed. They watch the railway station hit again, blocks of houses by the bridge collapsing, lost to sight in billowing dust, then emerging from the settling cloud as heaps of stones. They see a bomb blow up the electricity station powered by the fast stream that comes down the other side of the valley and know that for the coming months candles will be in short supply. At least no-one is dying down there today, except the Germans doing what they will, but what will each family find when it returns to its street tonight? Their home for generations reduced to rubble? Their furnishings, their tools, destroyed? And how will they do for food if their stores are gone as well?

The Golvis come home and find the captain dazed, entranced by the din and shockwaves still echoing in his head. They pour him a glass of aqua vitae
,
feed him all they can, but he remains silent throughout the meal, a meal eaten by candlelight, a meal where it is noted that without electricity there will be no more radio broadcasts to tell them what is going on in this war that has, as fierce as hell, come at last to their village.

‘At least we won’t have any more fascist propaganda to put up with’ Elvira says. ‘They destroyed the print-shop as well.’

–

In the middle of the night the captain knocks on Carlo and Elvira’s bedroom door. ‘Can’t it wait?’

‘No. Elvira said the print-shop was destroyed. What do they print there?’

‘Posters, ration cards, party cards, that kind of thing.’

‘Identity cards?’

‘I think they do. No. Wait. You can’t go now. It’s too dangerous.’

‘It’ll be even more dangerous after they’ve remembered what’s there. They’re too busy thinking about more important things right now. Tonight’s the best time to go. Where is it?’

So the captain goes out into the streets now as dark as they had been a century ago, picking his way through the rubble scattered by the bombs and not yet cleared, dodging the patrols, wrapping around him his new sackcloth coat.

The captain and Natale are alone in the Giobellini house, awaiting the first bombing raid of the day. Natale’s hip has been playing up since his damp day on the mountainside and to Caterina’s dismay he has decided to stay at home and risk the bombs. An inkwell, an old dipping pen and scraps of paper surround his identity card and the blank one, the one the captain had taken from the print-shop during the night. The captain is practising with the pen.

‘Why don’t you have my card the right way up, Roberto?’

The captain signs his name on a sheet of paper and asks the older man to copy it, then tells him to repeat the exercise with the specimen signature upside down. ‘Which is better?’ he asks. ‘The second looks more like yours, but it’s very jerky.’ ‘Do it again, then again.’ Natale’s copy becomes more flowing. ‘It’s magic.’ ‘No it’s not. When you do it upside down you’re copying what you see, not what you read. We used to do this when forging papers in the prison camp, but you have to keep doing it until the writing flows.’

‘What about the words which aren’t on my card, like your name?’

‘Most of the letters are there in other words. You just do the same thing, one letter at a time, over and over again until it looks as if it’s written by the same person. You have to be patient. It’s like learning to write again.’

After an hour the captain announces he is ready to begin. He had only dared to take one card, lest the theft be spotted and the Germans start harsher identity checks. He only has one chance. He breathes deeply, stands up and shakes his forearms, wrists and hands, sits down, breathes deeply again and writes onto the card the identity which he and the doctor first discussed before his trip to the line. Name: DiGiovanni. Given name: Roberto. Born: he writes his own date of birth. At: Bolzano, the town in the Tyrol which the doctor had decided upon to explain his fair skin. Profession: carpenter. ‘Now all we need is a photograph and the stamp and I’ll be a complete new person.’

Natale rummages in the dresser for old photographs, but none of them will do. ‘What’s wrong with your present one?’ The captain shows him the stolen fascist party card he has been carrying for the last month. ‘A good enough likeness, Roberto. No-one looks like his photograph any more.’

‘You’re mostly right. Everyone is thinner in the face this winter, his eyes more hollow, blank even, and people now have beards, something no-one ever wore before. You can, as you say, get away with a photograph that’s barely like you, but for one thing. Look at the ears in the photograph; they’re nothing like mine. It’s the one thing that being cold and hungry and afraid, even getting old, doesn’t change. A smart policeman would spot it immediately. It’s lucky I’ve never been asked for this card. We’ve got to find a photograph with ears like mine.’

‘What about the stamp?’

‘All I need is a bit of old tyre, a sharp knife and a mirror, so I can copy the stamp from yours.’

‘There are plenty of discarded tyres around. I’ll get a piece when everyone is coming home tonight. What do we do now?’

‘First we burn all these bits of paper we’ve been practising on. Then we mend my boots. I found some machinery belting in the print-shop; it’s perfect for the soles.’

‘So it was a profitable night.’

It is a quiet morning. The bombers have not come back. Perhaps they have done their business and people can return to salvage their things from the wrecked buildings. Perhaps life will return to something like it was. But their mood is destroyed by a hammering on the front door downstairs. They move out to the cloistered balcony, the captain ready to slip into the Golvi house. They hear two German soldiers swearing:
‘Scheisse, diese ist verriegelt. Gehen wir nebenan.’
The captain places his finger to his lips and then points to the room they have just come from. They slip back in. ‘They’re stealing. They’re trying the Golvis’ now. Let’s hope they’ll decide it’s easier to loot the houses that aren’t locked.’

The looters are disturbed before they reach the Golvis’ door. A siren sounds. There is a growing drone of approaching bombers and the Germans are in full flight down the street, hands to helmets to keep them on, rifles dangling dangerously from outstretched arms to stop them tripping over them. Natale and the captain leave the balcony door open and dive under the table, Natale forgetting his arthritic hip.

–

robertos friends have been dropping bombs on the village for 4 days now

they dont know theyre dropping them on him

i dont think they know there are people underneath

anita and her mamma were killed on the first day

now we go up to the mountain every morning and sit in the rain and cold and watch the planes come over and drop their bombs

its like watching a bunch of stupid boys breaking things and the noise is horrid