Wolf on the Mountain (16 page)

The way she had looked kept coming back to him: her body, her hips, her breasts, her sly glance. It was more than the shock of metamorphosis. Her physical presence was beginning to haunt him. He had been in the same place too long if he was being so distracted.

He thought back to the early days of the journey south, when every farm had had a widow of the war or a wife who had not seen her soldier husband for years, when Mike and he were unused to having women around. To them, so many of these women had seemed to flirt with them. It seemed that their glances would linger as conversation turned to the autumn coupling of the farmyard stock, that they would lean over them too long when laying food on the table, turn their backs before bending down, hitch their dresses invitingly high before washing their feet at the pump or taking their turn in the grape-trough.

Were these the fantasies of men who had been away from women too long, or had there been something more? Mike and he would joke about it, accusing each other of provoking the woman, but they hadn’t been schoolboy jokes, where the joke is out of fear of the act. They were more out of fear of its consequences. Coition breeds complication and involvement dulls the sense of danger. Celibacy is vital to the safety of the hunted man.

That he had been stirred by Isabella in her plumage troubled him. It was a sign of his passions reawakening as he spent week after week in a family environment, a sign of his arousal from the single-mindedness that had enabled him to survive so far, that had run his life since the day of his capture in the desert.

On that day he had returned to school: no women, no physical danger, simply the prospect of killing time. All his fellow prisoners had felt the same, their passions dulled. It had been so different beforehand, almost from the first day he had come under fire. Amongst your own people the wartime fear of death enhances every passion, every instinct: churches are full, hymns lustily sung; the smallest insult leads to blows lest the chance of civilised revenge be lost; people fear dying unfulfilled, so men and women rush to get married or simply to couple in a single night or hour of passion. A spiritual experience, the primal rush of a fist fight and the elation of orgasm give life a rich vein in the midst of danger. The increased sexuality had been the more noticeable: so many beads of perspiration had been licked away beneath static ceiling fans in the cities of the Near East, the name lost when you were posted away. All these passions had wasted in the fly-ridden transit prison camps of the desert, the dormitory life in his prison in the north. He and his companions had become emotional drudges.

The Armistice had restored danger to their lives, but the torpor of the camp had lingered too long. Many of the prisoners had been recaptured before their sense of danger had been revived. He and Mike had been indecisive for days, waiting for news of what was happening which never came, before deciding to strike south for the battle-lines and try to make their own luck.

But once restored that sense of danger, in the end more intense than any on the battle-line, had kept him from recapture all these months. He had trained himself to notice nothing that was not essential to his survival, suppress any emotion that endangered it. Staying that way meant staying alive and free.

Suddenly Isabella was a threat because she was a thing of beauty, pleasurable to look at, distracting. He was in danger of reacting to her the way he would at home. He had to keep away from her lest he start watching her too much, thinking of her and how she moved too much, not noticing things happening around him. He needed to return to his hermitage on the mountain.

Then the doctor sent word that the captain was to spend a night in a different house.

The house was in the poorer quarter on the edge of the village, the quarter where the peasants lived, owning nothing, expecting nothing, seeing and hearing nothing. The weed-filled street reeked of the waste thrown out of its tiny windows and doors. He was led through the darkened cellar, now empty of anything except recently collected firewood and some hay, up the rough stone steps to the small single room on the first floor, lit only by a solitary oil lamp and the flickering flames of the cooking fire, a room reeking of farmyard smells. In one corner the mother, stocky and grizzled, was stirring a soup of beans and potatoes on a grate over the fire.

In the centre of the room two men sat in the dim light beneath the oil lamp at a rough planked table, a flask of wine between them. They rose together. The older man, once tall but now with his back stooped by a life of working in the fields, his neck locked facing down and to one side, looked sideways and up at his distinguished guest: ‘I am honoured to see you again after so long, Capitano Inglese. Are you well?’ The captain strained to place him until the younger, a giant of a man, taller than the captain and with a barrelled chest, turned to face him. There was no mistaking his ruddy face, framed by a mane of black hair and beard, his pale eyes twinkling.

‘Vincenzo!’ the captain exclaimed, recognising the Alpini sergeant who’d led him and Mike up the mountain the first time. ‘So you escaped as well! Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

Vincenzo embraced the captain, stepped back to slap his shoulders. ‘We have to be careful who knows what.’ He smiled enigmatically and then turned expansively with his palm swinging out: ‘And you see we still have our cow.’

The captain strained into the gloom. The cow! It explained the smell of the room. How could he have forgotten the cow? That first night in the village, back in November, he and Mike had slept in this very room with the cow, while the family slept in the single room in the roof void reached by the ladder. The room had then, as now, stunk of the warm sweet smell of cow, its spattering copious waste. ‘The Germans would never look for a cow up here,’ Vincenzo had said, ‘we’ll have milk and cheese all winter, use its shit for fuel.’ A cow in hiding from the Germans! How had they coaxed it up the steps from the cellar? How did they keep it quiet enough? That morning they had drunk warm milk from a bowl beneath its teats before climbing up the mountain to the camp, where they had arrived stinking of animal. Now in March it was the sweet smell of plenty. ‘But tonight you’ll have wine, not milk’ Vincenzo’s father said and filled a tumbler to the brim with the rough, cloudy pink wine he had made himself.

–

‘I wasn’t there that night. I didn’t trust those officers, they were full of shit, gentry fops. You’d said those South Africans were Germans. That was enough for me. I came back home for the night. It’s a shame that more of us didn’t. They’re nearly all still working as slaves, some working rebuilding the railways every time they’re bombed, others shovelling concrete for a new defensive line they’re building north of here. At least it shows they’re planning a retreat in the spring. But meanwhile our comrades are being worked to death, starving, being beaten up when they go less quickly. I saw one of our men buried in snow up to his neck alongside a party working on a road last week, the butchers. If I could lay my hands on them!

‘And what they did to Ugo! The fool pulled out his rifle when they came. They took him down to the Gestapo on the coast, beat him half to death. He didn’t say a thing. They were going to put him up against a wall and shoot him the next morning, but they didn’t count on him coming round as soon as he did. They left the window open to get rid of the stink of what they’d done to him, and out of it he hopped. He’s still around, hiding, like I’ve been ever since.

‘Do you want to see him? I’ll get him round tomorrow evening. You can stay here tomorrow night as well. I’ll teach you how to play cards in the morning.

‘Enough of that. Here’s the soup, and afterwards you can have some of our own cow’s cheese. Eat, Roberto.’

–

He slept in the room with the cow, but fitfully. Unlike on that first night with Mike in Vincenzo’s father’s house, he was now unused to the night-time noise of cattle, their snorting, the slathering noise as they chewed the cud, their rumbling stomachs, flatulence. In November they had slept with farmyard animals almost every night since their escape, grateful for the warmth, relieved by their hosts’ ability to plead ignorance that they were there if a German patrol came by. They were used to the smells, the noise, the spattering of shit and urine, the ammonia smarting their eyes.

Since Mike’s capture he had only once slept with animals, in the shepherd’s hut, and that night had been one when there was no danger of the Germans coming. He had slept nearly all the time in village houses or in his hide, aware in the near-silence that any noise which disturbed him was a sign of danger. This cow could cover the sounds of a patrol in the street outside. Its smells he did not mind; his sense of smell, like his other senses, had long since been devoted to the interests of survival, not comfort or pleasure. The smell of Vincenzo’s father’s cow was the promise of warm milk in the morning, of cheese for lunch, but its rumblings could hide other more important sounds. He strained all night to hear things above the cow.

The next day he was introduced to the Neapolitan pack of cards: a deck of forty, looking like a fortune-teller’s set, in four suits of ten, one to seven, squire, knight and king, the suits similar to the English ones. It should have been easy, after a year of day-long contract bridge in his prison camp, to adapt to this new pack but it was not. No matter how good his hand was, he always lost. The games had local rules you found out as you went along, like croquet on an English country lawn where a house rule is suddenly invoked to deny the guest. He laid a king, only to be beaten by the seven of money,
il sette bello.
‘You’ll learn Roberto, but these games do need cunning.’

–

Ugo, a short wiry man, comes for supper, the food the same as the night before. His nose is broken now, he has a lazy eye and a finger on his left hand is permanently straight. He is a man now burdened with a hateful mission: ‘Did you ask the English captain about re-forming the band?’

‘No’ Vincenzo says quietly, clearly annoyed that Ugo’s impatience has prevented his raising the subject in a more auspicious way. Sergeants are used to waiting for the right time to ask officers unwelcome questions. He’d been planning to wait until the second flask of wine. ‘But since you raise the matter…’ His eyes soften as he turns to the captain. ‘Roberto, you may be able to help us with your advice, your knowledge as an officer. There are now fifteen or so of the old band hiding in Sannessuno, and there’ll be more of us soon. These bombing raids have forced the Germans to use their working parties in the village, rather than on the roads outside. It’s harder to guard them where there are so many people about, and they’re starting to escape. There are too many of us here now for safety. We’ve got to move up to the mountain again. You’re living up there. What do you think?’

‘You can’t use the old camp. The Germans patrols are still visiting it.’

‘Where are you sleeping then?’

The captain hesitates to reply. Only Luigi knows where the hide is, and Luigi knows he is the only person who knows. Safety demands that it should stay that way. ‘Why can’t I have some secrets too?’ He pauses again. ‘Somewhere as secret as where you’re hiding your food.’ He wonders if he has been churlish, seemed too distrustful, despite dressing his reply as a joke.

Vincenzo’s mother stops stirring and looks back from her pot to her husband, who senses her stare and turns towards her, then back to his son. He chuckles, then the son. ‘Well said, Roberto,’ the mother pronounces, ‘don’t tell them’ and returns to stirring the soup. She too starts to laugh, puts down her spoon, brings over a glass, pours herself a full measure and lifts it to her lips. ‘You’re learning the cunning of the working man, Roberto. You’ll soon be one of us. Good health.’

She brings their supper. Their good spirits have keened their appetites and they eat their soup and then the cheese voraciously. The mother goes down to the cellar and reappears with more wine and cheese that didn’t seem to have been there earlier.

‘Your sleeping place is very well hidden’ Vincenzo says after a while. ‘I couldn’t find it, and I know that mountain well.’

‘Was it you, then, up at the camp last week, twice?’

‘Three times’ Vincenzo says triumphantly. ‘You look relieved. Yes, it was me. I was up there looking to see what could be done. Our friend, whose identity Ugo doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know, suggested we speak about it. That’s why he arranged our meeting.’

The party being secretive again, the captain thought. But he was beginning to appreciate its way of doing things, its chain of command. He had long since worked out that in each cell up or down the chain only its leader knew the contact in the cell above and no-one else there. It prevented wholesale betrayal of the chain, was why the organisation had survived the December raid. It had its disadvantages, like the paralysis as a new chain was established after the capo had been killed, but it meant that there was always something there to build on.

Yet here he was, not a member of the party, now with the same knowledge of the chain as Vincenzo. So the doctor’s committee had decided on Vincenzo to re-form the partisan band. He was being dragged into its web, again imprisoned by his impotence. All he could do was help them, at least until his next chance to cross the lines.

‘No. The old camp is out of the question. The Germans know you were there last year. They’re still patrolling the area, presumably to check that no-one’s gone back. And you’ve got the problem of a water supply. That many men need a lot of water.’

‘Do you know the route the patrols take?’

The captain rehearsed the route that he and Luigi had tracked before the bombing raids, a route he had observed the Germans following only the week before. They always followed it. They were now so used to assuming that there was no-one living on the mountain that it had become a matter of going through the motions, keeping warm and moving in the bitter cold and the howling wind, looking forward to their barracks at the end.

‘So they always turn right down the gully’ Vincenzo mused. ‘Good. There’s an old shepherd’s cottage just above it, long since abandoned, now swallowed up in the scrub. Hardly anyone knows it’s still there. It’s in even worse condition than the old camp, but we could repair it with stones and things from there, and it’s big enough for fifteen men at least. I’ll show it to you when we go up tomorrow.’