Wolf on the Mountain (25 page)

How had he died? Had he run out of food, forgetting that last ball of cheese, and walked out into the blizzard for a quicker death? Or had he fallen and been unable to move? Or taken by wolves? Or even been taken out and shot because he’d been seen assisting the captain? He will never know.

He goes back to the cottage, finds a large clasp-knife, levers a plank from the storage chest and carves the words ‘a shepherd from the Fucino’ on it and places it on the cairn. Perhaps when summer comes the locals will find it and give him a Christian burial. He kneels and says a prayer.

Tonight he will climb the frozen crusts of the snow into the Liri valley. He ransacks the cottage for anything he can use. The man needs his things no more and has no kin, was generous to him when he was still alive, would want to be so in death. He finds a small woollen satchel, crams in the clasp-knife, some kitchen tools and the remains of the cheese, wraps the sheepskin rug around him and sets off under stars like glints of hoarfrost to trudge his way up to the summit.

–

‘Back again Roberto?’

‘The story wasn’t true, Vincenzo. I got into the Liri valley. God, what a climb it was though, bowled over by the wind on top of those mountains, having to crawl on the ice because my feet kept slipping from under me as my body braced into the wind. But I got over the top and into the valley. The people there are as scared as the ones on the line south of here. The roads are full of German traffic taking supplies to that battle at Cassino. But I was able to get bread and cheese sometimes, and you can see that I’ve inherited a sheepskin rug. I think it was the difference between surviving on those mountains and not.’

‘When are you going to give up trying to cross the lines? You’re wasting energy that could be used helping the partisans. The Allies will soon come to you. You can better use your time making life difficult for the Germans.’

‘You’re right. I was thinking the same all the way back. I think I’m here now until our army comes.’

‘Good. We need your skills. That Giobellini boy was right. The Germans were up here in force yesterday, not one of those little patrols they were sending out earlier. They surrounded the old camp at dawn, then came further up. Your look-out system worked. We were well out of our camp before they reached the gully. But would you believe? They still turned right, down to the track. So they still haven’t found the new camp. Mind you, it was a much more serious patrol than some of the others.’

‘That’s the one disadvantage of the spring, Vincenzo. Patrolling the mountain is no longer such a hardship for them. They’ll not be looking at their feet now, but all around them. We can only hope that they get called down to the front as reinforcements.’

‘It’s so cold up here, uncle Roberto. Why don’t you come back to our house? The planes dropping those bombs haven’t been here for days and days, so it’s much safer now. You’d be warmer there. Maybe the cat will come back if you do.

‘And it’s so pretty down in the valley now. There are trees with pink blossom, trees with white blossom. And every day there are different flowers in the grass. Look, I picked some on the way up. These blue ones are called irises, these white ones are daisies, and I don’t know what these yellow ones are called. Do you know what they’re called? Do you have flowers like this in England?

‘I’ve missed you, uncle Roberto. And I can’t tell anyone I’m missing you. My friends say I look so sad, but I don’t tell them why. I’m keeping our secret very well, aren’t I, Mamma?’

‘Yes you are, Anna. I don’t know how, because you talk so much. And uncle Roberto and I have things we must talk about.’

‘Mamma says you’ll be going home to England when the summer comes. When you go home, will you send me some toothpaste? I love toothpaste, and it’s so long since we’ve had any.’

‘Of course I will, Anna, but I’m not going back yet. You’ll have to keep our secret a little longer, until I go.’

‘I promise. It’s lovely having secrets. And if I don’t keep it you won’t send me any toothpaste.’

‘That’s quite enough, Anna. Now why don’t you go off and see if you can find some butterflies while I talk to your uncle.’

–

‘It’s bad in the village’ Elvira says. ‘The bombers don’t come so often now, but they’d be wasting their time if they did. There’s nothing left to destroy. It only seems to be fighters coming now, and they only pick on the German traffic. You heard about the riot at the station? It shows how desperate people are if they’re prepared to risk being shot for food. They’re even eating their dogs now. Your army had better come soon, before we all starve to death.

‘If only they’d sent us radios. We could be telling them these Germans were ready for the taking. All they do is hide when the fighters come. And all the time our young men are digging trenches for them alongside the very roads the English fighters are shooting at.

‘We worry so much for Luigi. He’s being fed by the Germans, but not much. It’s some consolation, I suppose. I just hope that when the fighters come they’re just finishing a trench, and can dive into it, rather than just beginning to dig it.

‘We still haven’t heard from Enrico. It’s eighteen months since the fascists sent him to Russia, a year since we had his last letter. He must be lost. And if we lose Luigi too…

‘I mustn’t cry. It hasn’t happened yet. And I must be brave for Anna.

‘Vincenzo says you’ve decided to stay until the Allies come. I’m glad. You’re almost another son, and I’ll be proud if you help us get rid of these Germans. Every day counts if we’re not to starve. Don’t get yourself killed. I couldn’t stand another death.’

–

Roberto watches Elvira, holding little Anna’s hand, set back down to the village through the bare trees. Anna turns to wave goodbye, but her mother does not.

Elvira has changed: instead of the proud, stocky country woman, taking the mountain in her stride, there is someone so much older, smaller, than when he first met her in December, then full of energy and optimism for liberation, both from the Germans and the old regime. Now she is careworn, hunched in the shoulders, seemingly resigned to bereavement. The doctor was right. The villagers do need the partisans to do something to raise their spirits.

Over the last few days the thaw has gained in pace. Every morning, after a period of cool white haze, the sun has burned the dawn’s moisture away and pushed the snow further up the mountains, although some mornings they have awoken and seen that last evening’s shower of rain has dusted the lower slopes white, picking out the shapes of the bare trees once again. Now the mountains are showing higher features blue and arcs of white and the vertical streaks up the gullies show the contours hidden from the sun. There is a constant downhill trickle of water, moistening the soil and the roots of the trees. Every day different wild flowers, yellow, pink, white, blue, purple, some large, some small, appear in the grass; a clump of trees further up the hill turns reddish, another shows a shower of white or grey buds, another tentatively uncurls its little leaves. Every afternoon, as the temperature slips again, the tops of the mountains turn dazzling in the sun as the thin layer of the day’s thaw freezes again and doubles the golden reflection from the snow.

Vincenzo and Roberto are on a spur looking down into the valley, hidden in the tangled roots, like mossy snakes, of a tree undermined by an earlier spring. Ever since the petrol tanker was blown up it has been their pastime to come to this spot and wait for a Spitfire. There is no fixed time. Sometimes no plane comes. It is as if the pilots have been given carte blanche to go off and find some Jerries and give them hell. They sit and pass the day, scanning the horizons, listening for the sound of an engine from a hidden valley above the sound of the constant trickle of thawing water down the hill. When one comes they watch and admire the perfection of the machine, its speed, the power of its engine, the beauty of its shape, its camouflage until it bears away from them and shows its underside of duck egg blue against the far side of the valley, its responsiveness to the pilot’s controls that makes its cannon fire so accurate. It is like a man-made hawk which has the natural predator’s accuracy, but greater speed, when it spots its prey and swoops down for the kill.

The Germans are clearly worried by the appearance of these planes in the valley. Daylight traffic is dwindling and all along the roadsides slave-gangs are at work digging trenches for their masters to dive into if a fighter comes, dog-leg trenches so that there is cover whichever way the fighter comes. There are two gangs at work below them, all the workers stripped to their shirts as they labour in a valley to which spring has come at last.

Up on the spur it is still cold, the dwarf trees barely in bud. They are two weeks further back in winter.

Their calm is broken by the sound of a Spitfire coming up the valley from their right.

Down below them the men in the gangs are still oblivious to the sound, blocked off by the shape of the valley, muffled by the rustling of the leaves on the trees.

–

It is warm work. Luigi has never had to work so hard before. At least there is food of sorts in the workers’ camp, but it is poor, the Germans seeing no need to look after the nation that had betrayed them by surrendering as soon as the Allied armies arrived on their soil. Each night they troop back under guard to the concentration camp, pass through the gate in its barbed wire fence, eat thin maize porage, and fall asleep exhausted in their bunks. Each dawn they are woken again and marched unfed to swing their pickaxes and mattocks down into the stony soil to make the trenches.

On the other side of the river their fathers and mothers and sisters are also tending the soil, made heavy by the water from the thawing snow on the mountain that has run down into the valley for days on end. Already the first green of growing corn is showing through the reddish earth, the fig trees are in bud, the olive trees showing small white blossom. There is hope for fresh food in a few months’ time. But instead of digging the soil for food these farmers’ sons are digging holes to save their oppressors, delay their liberation.

Yet the warmth of the day brings hope. It is warmth that will swell the growing of the plants that will bear the food. The almond and pear trees are showing white and pink blossom that in time will become nuts and fruit. The poplar trees have in days shown red buds, then orange leaves, then yellow, and are now in full green leaf to provide shelter from the sun when summer comes. The snowline on the mountain opposite has risen higher every day. It will also have risen on the mountains to the south over which the Allied army will come.

The workmen chat as they swing their tools, pointing out new signs of the spring and warmth that will bring their liberation. The guards shout at them to renew their efforts, but know that in the heat they need from time to time to rest on their tools, wipe the sweat from their brows that trickles down and refracts the sunlight through their eyelashes. But for the digging of the trenches it would be a lovely day. Brilliant red poppies are appearing all over the verges, other flowers of white and yellow and blue. The wind whishes through the poplar leaves. The molten snow of the valley rushes down the river now so full that its banks might overflow.

Everything around them, but for their German guards, speaks of growth and hope. Yet every one of them is scared. The guards, their rifles slung on their shoulders, spend as much time looking to the sky up and down the valley as at their charges, would rather a man escaped than that they failed to spot a fighter plane bearing down on them. Always at least one of the workers, taking his turn, is looking for the same threat to their lives, ready to shout the warning that will send them running and diving into the trench they were digging yesterday.

Luigi is distracted by a movement against the high mountain opposite. An eagle is floating slowly on a current that sets him sometimes against the high white snow and then the sky. Suddenly the eagle resets its wings and with no effort it seems is diving towards its prey. He stops digging, leans on his mattock and wipes his eyes to better watch its dive. It distracts him for a second as the roar of an aircraft engine comes from around a spur behind him, a guard shouts ‘
Spitfeu!
’, and spurts of dust and soil are kicked up by bullets travelling a straight line along the road and then its verges towards the working men.

–

The plane is gone but for the first time Vincenzo and Roberto are not cheering a victory. The men around the trench are huddled, not working. Someone has been shot. If it were a German they would be scattering for their freedom while their guards were distracted. It must be one of the Italians, someone they know.

‘Why did he open fire, Roberto? He must have known they were local workers.’

‘They had soldier guards, with helmets and rifles. How was he to know they weren’t all soldiers?’

‘If only we had a radio and could tell them. So many innocent people are being killed. They don’t know that. And they don’t know how weak the Germans are. They could just walk in here if they wanted to. How many more will die before they come?’

The Germans commandeer a stretcher party to take the man back to the village. Vincenzo and Roberto walk back to the shepherd hut in silence, knowing they will soon hear who the man is, wondering how badly he is injured. No-one speaks over supper that night. Roberto sneaks back to his hide to sleep alone, but barely sleeps.

–

All the partisans are hiding in places where they can look down into the village. The danger is too great for any of them to go down for Luigi’s funeral. The Germans will know that every man in hiding wants to be there. They have come down as close as they can. The tolling of a single, deep, church bell rolls out across the valley and up its sides.

Four old men drag a two-wheeled cart up the street of the Golvis’ house. There are no horses or oxen left to draw it. A bare wooden coffin, a posy of wild poppies on its lid, is carried through the front door and laid on the cart between its high spoked wheels. The family follow it out and take their places behind, Carlo holding Elvira up, Anna’s face buried in the fold of Nonna’s black cloak. Most of the village it seems is lining the streets and, as the cart goes past on its circuitous way to the church, joins the back of the procession. Everywhere women are slapping their hands in front of their faces, falling to their knees, crossing themselves and being helped to their feet. From time to time the sound of communal wailing is carried up on a whiff of wind. The crude catafalque reaches the church where the priest is waiting on the steps and the crowd disperses to leave the family to their god and their grief. The family, pitiful, stumbling, alone, are ushered in through the doors.