Wolf on the Mountain (17 page)

The wind dropped four days ago. It is strange to be on the mountain without its constant buffeting sound, the dropping of the cones from the trees. In its place has come a freezing calm. Each morning he wakes, his fingers and toes and ears frozen, his breath billowing in the air, to a heavy frost, brittling the bracken against his door, coating the trees, the bushes and the grass with a heavy white rime that sparkles in the sun shining coldly down from a deep blue sky. Each day the sun is powerless to melt the frost for hours and the water in the spring above his hide remains frozen until the middle of the day. He walks around compulsively, trying to warm himself, makes trips over the frozen crust of the snow on the mountain top, hoping for a sign of something different; but as ever the white peaks, the snow so deep that he can hardly see the rock in their features, surround him on every horizon.

Vincenzo has been up to see him the last two days, has shown him the site for the new partisan camp. They have rummaged in the old for materials to use in making the shepherd hut weatherproof again. Vincenzo will bring up some of his companions and together they will start the building work, soon. At least when there are others up here someone will be deputed to quartermaster the food. But more people up here will mean more evidence of people up here. Will the Germans miss these signs when they are on patrol? Perhaps it would be better to be more hungry and more safe.

He cooks his potatoes under a dying ginger sun well before dusk. He needs to stay still to do so, and so must do it before the evening frost sets in. Then he crawls into his hide. At least he has light, light to last as long as he wants: he collects the dried downflows from his candles, reheats them over his fire and pours the molten wax down a piece of tin rolled into a tube, a piece of string suspended down the middle, to make new candles. And for some reason matches are plentiful in this place of shortages. There is always light to read by, even if sometimes he is too cold to stay in one position long enough to read his book.

–

He had forgotten the story of Erisichthon, the king who incurred the wrath of the corn goddess by chopping down her sacred tree. For his punishment the king had been plagued with a hunger so severe that, after eating away his kingdom’s stores, he had started eating his own flesh. It had seemed a silly story when he was at school but, chancing on it in Luigi’s book on this cold mountainside after a paltry supper, in a country where the rulers were taking all the people’s food for their own, it was suddenly apt.

Ovid had personified Famine as an emaciated hag on a barren, frozen mountain, summoned by one of the goddess’s nymphs to visit the king in his sleep, place her clammy lips on his, breathe her foul breath into his throat and infect him with her plague.

He remembered the poet dwelling on her appearance. Surely this was the passage, with so many words similar to the words for parts of the body used by the Italians, even by English doctors:

“quaesitamque Famem lapidoso vidit in agro

unguibus et raras vellentem dentibus herbas.

hirtus erat crinis, cava lumina, pallor in ore,

labra incana situ, scabrae rubigine fauces,

dura cutis, per quam spectari viscera possent;

ossa sub incurvis exstabant arida lumbis,

ventris erat pro ventre locus; pendere putares

pectus et a spinae tantummodo crate teneri.

auxerat articulos macies, genuumque tumebat

orbis, et inmodico prodibant tubere tali.”

He parses the first line.
“Quaesitamque”:
the conjunction, “and then”?
“Famem”:
object noun, “Famine”.
“vidit”:
past verb, “he/she saw”.
“in agro”:
“in a field”.
“lapidoso
” - same ending as
agro
, adjective qualifying it, lapidary, stone merchant, “stony”. “And then she saw Famine in a stony field.”

It becomes harder as he struggles through the changes of word order the poet had made to meet the meter, the ellipses of words to keep the verse compact, the strange assonances and all the other linguistic tricks so beloved of the ancient poets, and Tweaky White, and whose names he had never even bothered to remember. The passage extends him for an hour, passes it.

“And then she saw Famine in a stony field, scratching up the sparse herbs with her fingernails and teeth. Her hair was tangled, her eye sockets like caves, her skin pallid, her lips and chin scabrous and red; her entrails could be seen through her hard skin; her shrivelled thigh bones arched out below her hips, and where her belly should have been there was merely a space for one; her breasts hung empty from her ribcage clinging to her spine. Her emaciation accentuated her joints, her knees swollen like orbs, her ankles like tubers.”

Such powerful images. Was this a sight Ovid had seen on these mountains long ago?

He is annoyed with himself for reading such a depressing passage before settling down for the night. His first attempts at sleep are disturbed by Ovid’s scene. He huddles beneath his sacking and forces himself to think of some of the feasts that Mike and he had enjoyed in the remote farms on the journey south, and as meal follows meal he slowly slips away.

–

He and Mike are in the north at the time of the grape harvest. They are miles from anywhere in countryside straight from a Renaissance painting, blue mountains, golden fields, cypress trees and pines, pink-roofed cottages, under a cloudless sky and a late summer sun. Miles from German patrols they have stayed a day to help harvest the vines. All day they have taken it in turns with the family to pick the grapes, carry them in wooden pails to the wine cellar, edge their way as blinded men down the stone steps, step out of their boots into a pail of water and then into the treading trough. Each task must be done in turn, to give their backs a rest while in the trough, their thighs and calves a rest while in the fields. The day is suffused with the warm sweet smell, the sweet sticky taste, of the grapes, the warm sticky feel rising between their toes and up their feet and calves. Men and women share the toil, facing each other in the trough, their clothes hitched up their thighs, juice trickling down their legs moving in time, living a bacchanalia in minds already heady from the sun and the alcoholic fumes from the vats loaded with the pressings of a few days before.

And then as the sun goes low they wash themselves by the pump in the farmyard with knowing country glances at each other’s exhausted limbs and repair to the stone-floored kitchen. The farmer’s wife is stirring a large copper pot of maize flour and water over a fierce brushwood fire. They slake their thirsts with the first thin brutal pressings of wine. The fire flashes light into the room, showing faces in sudden relief, its smoke smarting their eyes. As the polenta boils, bubbles release the smell of the cooking maize into the air. The father goes to help the mother with the stirring of the porage as it thickens and carries it with her to the table to be poured like golden lava, solidifying as it flows further outward across the flour-dusted wood. The mother smears it with tomato paste. The father makes the sign of the cross. Then everyone lunges forward with a knife to cut a wedge and start cramming it down his or her throat, stopping only to gulp wine to wash it down, intent only on filling a stomach famished by the day’s labour and waiting for its fullness to course strength back into their aching limbs. The daughters keep pace with the men, for they are country stock with broad shoulders and hips, have done their absent brothers’ or husbands’ work while they have been away at the war. The eating slows down as their appetites are assuaged, but the entire contents of the pot are eaten, the father keeps opening his hand toward the flask of wine and replenishing it, the mother brings walnuts and medlar pears.

‘All the produce of our own land’ the father says. ‘We have more than enough to last us until next year’s harvests. Next month we’ll take what we don’t need to market and trade it for salt and other things we cannot make ourselves.’ And turning to Mike the farmer he asks ‘Is it like this in your own country?’ before the Englishman stumbles through a series of half-truths to save his host’s contentment.

Then, their stomachs filled to bursting, Mike and he had retired to the barn and dreamt of roast beef.

What would he give to be filled with polenta and tomato paste now?

–

‘Stay with us’ so many families had said. ‘We have enough food for the winter. You will be safe and warm here.’

Were they right, not knowing the reasons why? The Germans were too far away to steal their food. Their homes were too far from anything of strategic importance to be bombed. And when the time came for the Germans to retreat, they would go along the valleys, not over the highest hills. The front could pass them by without their knowing, their only evidence the fact that the sound of the artillery barrage was suddenly to the north of them, rather than the south.

And he would be fed, warm, not surrounded by the enemy’s men, fearing betrayal at any time.

But those villages to the north offered no hope, except of meagre survival until the spring. Here, just behind the line, he could find a guide to lead him through, or even find a way through himself, at any time. To proper warmth, to safety, to his own people, to his family.

Yet it hadn’t happened. A soldier, an infantryman, is used to being hungry, cold, afraid, but he always has his fellows suffering as well, providing mutual solace. Here there was none. Even on patrol he had never been as cold or as hungry as this. A night in a barn in the north, full to bursting with maize porage and wine, trampled by rats, splashed by the warming stench of the cattle, seemed a better fate than this. But then tomorrow he might hear of a guide across the Sangro river.

–

He has been spotted on the mountain by the Germans. They fire at him but miss. They have dogs. All afternoon, as he runs from one crag to the next, he hears the dogs and handlers in pursuit. Soldiers are calling out from different angles, fanning out to sweep the mountainside. He comes exhausted round a crag and sees the German officer. The officer shouts. He turns and runs. The yelps of the dogs are coming towards him from three sides. He does not know this part of the mountain, what is on the fourth side, the side where there is no sound. He runs towards the silence. And then he is falling through the air past the cliff. He sees a boulder coming up towards his feet. He knows he is about to die. His feet hit the rock a glancing blow. His head jerks forward over the rock. All his awareness ends.

He wakes in the cold and lights his candle. This dream is becoming more frequent. It is taking over from the one of finding the nymph bathing in Ovid’s spring.

–

One night, if only to be doing something, to be keeping himself warm, he sets out to cross the ends of the ridges separating him from the sea. He climbs up to the upper edge of the beech forests, their dead brown leaves still on their twigs, the last vegetation before the snow fields, and follows this line around each ridge. It means a little shelter from the wind, cover from binoculared eyes below. The frozen snow is firm a few inches down beneath his feet and he can make good time. He needs to keep moving in order not to freeze. He walks all night, fearful of wolves, listening for their howls, looking out for their footprints or movement in the moonlight, and reaches the high points over the seaward front at dawn.

Straight from the army manual: artillery on every spur, and in the defiles rows of barbed wire funnelling people through the minefields into the fields of fire of machine-gun posts. He hears a field telephone ring nearby, German voices exchanging army banter, the whish of a patrol’s skis on the snow above him. There is no way through.

He waits for dark and retraces his path to his mountain. He is almost ready to admit that it is pointless, wasteful of his little remaining energy, stupidly hazardous when the chances of success are so small, to carry on trying to find a way through the lines before the snow has gone. Almost ready to admit that he will have to wait until the spring to get away from his mountain, the mountain that will soon be as hazardous as his village.

–

Vincenzo and Ugo are chopping down a tree. He had seen them in the distance as he came down the mountain, walking with woodmen’s axes over their black-caped shoulders. It was impossible to mistake the pair: Vincenzo a shambling bear, Ugo small and wiry, hopping with impatience like a goat. He had hidden behind a rock until he was sure they were alone.

‘Good-day, Roberto. You look exhausted. Where’ve you been?’ Vincenzo asks, dropping his axe head down and leaning on the shaft. ‘To the coast? Two nights?’ He stretches his back and tips his head. ‘You’re crazy. Why waste your time? I could have told you there’s no way through there. The Germans have got it buttoned up.’

‘Why not try, Vincenzo? At least it’s doing something, and walking at night keeps me warm. It’s better than waiting to freeze to death by lying still up here. It’s the only thing I can do to pass the time. The village is getting far too dangerous. It’s about trying, not giving up. You never know: I might have got through.’

‘Have patience, Roberto. We’ll be up here soon. This timber is for the roof of the hut. Come April you’ll have company up here, and we’ll be able to hunt for food; and when the time comes we can shoot a few Germans as well. Then you’ll be a soldier again.’

That night, refreshed by some of the food Vincenzo and Ugo had brought with them, the captain lay awake in his hide. The thought of so many people on the mountain, and Ugo and others like him impatient to kill Germans and bring reprisals in the village and searches on the mountain, was frightening. At least it was easy to escape detection when he was alone up here. Would it be so easy when the partisans re-formed? He should warn the doctor. He would raise the matter tomorrow. The doctor had sent up word through Vincenzo that he was to come down to Sannessuno again tomorrow evening. Luigi would be his guide.

Luigi had suggested a new way into the village, one that went through the bomb-sites near the main road and so would give them extra cover if a patrol appeared. After three months of night-time visits to the village greater variety was needed. There would be plenty of corners to stop at to check if the next stretch was clear, to aim for if he was seen or challenged. It might be a good route through the maze.