Wolf on the Mountain (9 page)

‘Do you smoke, Captain Johnson?’

‘I used to smoke a pipe. I haven’t had any tobacco for months.’

Natale Giobellini retires to the kitchen and returns with two clay pipes and what looks like a sausage. He takes out his penknife and cuts a tobacco plug from the end, rolling it in his hands and then teasing it into two balls, one for each pipe. He hands the captain one, tossing a box of small waxed matches onto the table in front of him. They light their pipes. ‘Do you have tobacco like this in England?’

‘We do, we call it navy cut.’ The Italian asks him why and the captain describes how in the days of long voyages in sailing ships the sailors used to douse their tobacco in rum to pickle it, then wrap it in canvas and cord to compact it for the voyage.

‘How extraordinary that they did it the same way’ says his host. ‘But we don’t use rum. We use aqua vitae. The peasants in the hills use wine.’

The captain is puffing contentedly. The tobacco is indeed much better than that he had smoked in the mountains to the north, where the wine had made it bitter, and there is no more pleasant way of establishing rapport with a stranger than to sit down together and draw on your pipes, waving the smoke away out of respect, letting silences convey trust.

‘You can sleep here tonight if you wish, Captain Johnson. We could make something up for you on the floor.’ The captain looks unsure. ‘But we’ll quite understand if you wish to go back to the Golvis. What you must understand is that you can come here any time you wish. It will be our pleasure. And we have somewhere where you can hide during the round-ups. As the saying goes, it’s a sad mouse who has only one hole. It would be quite easy for a fit young man like you to slip from the Golvis’ balcony to ours without being seen. Come, let me show you our secret place.’

He leads him into the bedroom and slides a heavy, old wooden linen chest away from the wall. ‘We all have places to hide our more precious things in troubled times, of which there seem to be so many in the Abruzzo. This is ours and it’s big enough to hide a man.’ Low in the wall is a flushed door. The father opens it, lights a candle and ushers the captain into the space in the eaves, its sides lined with bottles and the family’s more precious ornaments glinting with the flickering flame. It is smaller than the priest’s hole he was once shown in England and he will have to crouch in it like a foetus, but no-one would ever suspect that the cupboard was there.

‘A good place to hide, is it not?’

The captain nods his approval. He feels content. He has eaten as well as at any time since he escaped from the prison camp four months ago. The Giobellinis have asked him about his family, wouldn’t have done so if they were going to betray him. They wouldn’t have wanted his parents on their consciences. Nor would they have shown him where they kept their precious things if they weren’t going to protect him. He feels more secure.

And his friends next door now have a name.

“Of bodies chang’d to various forms, I sing:

Ye gods, from whom these miracles did spring,

Inspire my numbers with celestial heat;

’Til I my long laborious work complete.”

Dusty Rhodes, their history teacher, who loathed Tweaky White as much as he loved his seventeenth century, had tipped off the boys about the Dryden crib tucked away in the further stacks of the library. It was a bit more saucy than modern translations of the
Metamorphoses
, he’d said, enjoying the thought of his charges letting it fall open at the page where Arethusa, surprised bathing in a brook, had spent a day being chased naked over hill and dale until the goddess Diana had taken pity on her and transformed her into a virgin spring. Like Dusty’s prior pupils they had slipped into the stacks to read the tale. Tweaky, who abjured all poetry in English and knew not of the secret volume, had never understood why they had always got better marks in Ovid translations than Virgil. For the boys the glorious conspiracy meant that many of the words of Dryden’s miracle of metamorphosis had been etched into their memories ever since. The captain was chuckling as Luigi entered the dining room.

‘Ovid again? Mamma will be annoyed that you aren’t revising the modern verbs.’

‘The old ones help. And it’s nice to be reminded of more happy times.’

‘Before the war, you mean? You know, for boys like me the war is only four months old. Until the Germans came it was so lovely. We did what boys here have always done, went up into the hills and roamed around and played. They’re so free, so beautiful. You should see them in the spring, when all the leaves are turning green. There are trees to climb, little valleys to hide in, pools to throw off your clothes and swim in. There’s something to do all day. Our teacher used to say that Ovid must have done the same when he was a boy. “Every scene in a wood, or by a pool, is taken from Ovid’s memories of playing in these hills” he used to say. It was probably just a trick to get us interested in the Latin, but somehow you’d be lying on your back by a pool amongst the trees, doing nothing, just looking up at the sky, and you could suddenly imagine a nymph - Echo was she called? - slipping by. You’d look round, but there was no-one there. But it was just how Ovid described it. You’ll see, when spring comes.

‘And there’s that story about a wolf attacking a flock of sheep and then turning into a rock. That could so easily have happened here. There are wolves up on that mountain. Even some of the shepherds’ dogs look like them. Yes, Ovid must have seen something just like the way he describes it.’

‘Wolves on the mountain?’

‘Oh yes, wolves.’

–

Over supper that evening Carlo Golvi - the captain’s visit next door had made the last month’s anonymity otiose - asked the captain about his visit to the Giobellinis. Did the fascist ask anything about his family? About a radio? About the doctor? No? He must be biding his time.

‘It was very civilised’ the captain said. ‘We simply had supper, as if there’d never been a war. The only question he asked me was about the name of my regiment. I reminded him of the Geneva Convention. In fact it was just like when I was captured in Africa. The German officers took the captured British ones to their mess, complimented them on their conduct in the battle, and proceeded to entertain their former enemies. Natale Giobellini did the same. After all, he was a soldier on the same side as us in the last war. He seems to have some nostalgia for it.’

‘That’s how the fascists came to power,’ huffed Carlo, ‘recruiting from soldiers coming back from the war, promising them glory. They even gave them uniforms, the black shirts. Promised them that it would be just like the days of the Caesars’ empire. They started off by beating up the workers striking for better pay, then they beat up anyone who protested about their thuggish behaviour. The ruling classes in Rome thought Mussolini was marvellous, restoring order. They connived at his coming to power, turned a blind eye to his election frauds, thought they could control him. How wrong they were! The same with the pope. The cardinals were obsessed with the rise of communism, would lie down with the devil to prevent it, so the Vatican also supported him. In no time at all we were ruled by thugs. Parliament even passed a law making the blackshirts an organ of the state, the fascist militia. You should have seen it: bunches of thugs marching through the streets, above the law. If anyone said anything against them, he’d just be beaten up, in full view of the police. Nothing would be done about it.

‘And the ruling classes, in Rome and all the towns, even in villages like this, simply fell in behind him. There was money to be made when the workers were cowed into submission. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, water always flows to the sea.

‘All political opposition disappeared, except for the communist party. Its leaders were all arrested, except for Togliatti, who was abroad at the time. New, secret, leaders took their places and the party has been gaining strength ever since. It’s the only effective opposition. It’s the only hope of freedom in this country.’

–

The next evening, in the fascist house, the captain was treated to the other side of the debate. How the communists had reduced the country to chaos in the aftermath of the Great War and millions had been without work; how Mussolini had got everyone working again, made food production more efficient, improved communications, made Italy once again a country owed respect.

Political theory meant nothing to him. With the Giobellinis he would sit quietly smoking a pipe, with Carlo and Elvira Golvi simply playing with a spoon, as their expressions of undying hatred for the others’ philosophies poured forth. How could he survive in the midst of this family feud?

After a few days he’d had enough. The scampering from house to house over their balconies in the dark, ever fearing the hostility of Signora Giobellini, betrayal as a way of advancing the feud, was depressing him. Despite the separate kindnesses of the two families he was oppressed by his reliance upon them. He still could not enter a room in either of the homes without checking that its escape routes were still there, talk to anyone without listening for an evasion in their speech, bear anyone to leave the house without wondering where they were going. He couldn’t even sleep in a room with a coat hanging from its door lest he awake and take it for a soldier coming to arrest him. He spent his life listening for threats from the street, dreading every knock on the front doors. Apart from his Christmas foray to the battle-line he had spent six weeks cooped, away from the windows, in these dark, cramped, oppressive homes. He needed a space to breathe fresh air, away from the vendetta.

‘I’m going back up to the mountain’ he told Carlo Golvi.

‘You won’t survive the winter. I know there’s a thaw at the moment, but it won’t last.’

‘I can’t stay here any longer. I’m going up to look at the camp. There must be a way of making something up there I can survive in.’

Carlo was equally worried. The Giobellinis were acting out of character. There must be a surprise awaiting them all. ‘Why don’t you go up with Luigi tomorrow morning and have a look around?’

–

It was as if a warm wind had blown in from another quarter, except that there was no wind. The thaw had continued overnight and the track up the mountain had a miniature ravine down its centre where the melted snow had rushed down to the valley. At times the water flowed over their boots as they followed its course up through the boulders and the dripping trees, growing ever shorter as they climbed, and then the scrub.

Luigi was enjoying himself. He had the captain to himself for the day, had set out planning all the questions he would ask about battles and ambushes, about guns and camouflage and tactics. Thin as an anchovy, more boy than man, he would leap from side to side of the path, his eyes darting in all directions, chattering away until the captain finally brought him to order with words that if the Germans were on the mountain they would hear him a mile away. He took to watching the captain in silence, working out the reason for his every move, assuming that each footfall showed some further military skill.

The camp was now just below the snowline. They reached it an hour after first light. The valleys below were hidden in mist, the higher mountains above them in cloud. It was an eerie place, lost in relation to its surroundings, lost in season, not raining, not warm, not cold. The broken stone walls of the buildings looked abandoned years ago, already with a patina of mossy green on the insides, but beneath the roof slates on the dark brown earth the as yet unrotted roof timbers told of a more recent desertion. ‘They only used grenades’ Luigi said knowingly. ‘It wouldn’t be hard to rebuild these.’

‘But the Germans would notice it’ said the captain. ‘They’ve already been up here since the thaw.’ The boy’s composure was suddenly lost. How did the captain know that? ‘Didn’t you see their tracks on the way up? If you hadn’t been so busy chattering you might have noticed them. About twelve sets? Or their footprints in the entrance to the first hut?’ Luigi’s eyes shot around the camp. He looked about to run. ‘Don’t worry. Half the tracks were made on the way back down the hill.’

‘Shouldn’t we go then? There’s no point in your staying up here if they’re still patrolling.’

‘Maybe not, but if we follow the trail they took while they were up here, we may find something out, something useful. And we’ve got all day to do it. We can’t go back to Sannessuno before it’s dark. Shall we go hunting for the route they took?’ Luigi brightened at the prospect of learning more. ‘Let’s head for the spring’ he said. ‘They’re bound to have checked that out.’

So they headed over the spur and gradually along and down the ridge linking the mountain the camp was on to the higher mountain, following the upper edge of the pine forest. Each time they reached the muddy ground, the open parts where shepherds grazed their flocks in summer, more tracks appeared. At the spring itself, where there was deep soil fertilised for centuries by the droppings of the sheep, there were single tracks wandering all over the site. ‘You’ll find cigarette butts here, Luigi, if you look. This is where they had their break. But let’s keep moving.’

They followed the shepherds’ trail through the knotted clumps of dwarf oaks, the tangle of thorns and bushes in their undergrowth, always the grey-green pine grove to their side. It followed on a mile before they descended down into a gully scoured out by centuries of melting snow and thunderstorms, its slim trees slanting downhill, the uphill bases of their trunks slimed green, and up the other side to the path leading up to the main peak. The German patrol had turned down the mountain here along a steep winding path. Skid marks in the leafmould told of soldiers losing their footing, swearing, wishing this pointless bloody patrol in the damp and mist would soon be over. Then the path joined the main track back down to the village. Above the track the pine forest loomed; below it the mountain fell quickly away into the valley thousands of feet below them, still lost in mist.

‘Why did they go round the pine forest, Roberto? Why not go through it? It’s an easier route.’