The Art of Waiting (14 page)

‘Do you think I give a fuck? Italians, Germans, you're all the fucking same!' yelled the younger man, hammering the tabletop with his wounded hand, sending the severed fingers leaping into the air again. He howled with pain and grabbed the fingers and hurled them one by one into the stove and banged his forehead up and down on the table and wept deep noisy sobs as the woman put her arms around him and whispered futile consolations in his ear.

‘Seriously, though. Stay here for the night,' said the older Russian. ‘Let's take a pause from the war, just for a few hours.'

So they stayed. The kitchen was the warmest room in the house and they slept on the rug on the floor, beneath the table, as close to the stove as they could get, the older Russian nearest the source of the heat, then the younger one, then the woman laying herself down between the men, a civilising buffer to stop the bloodshed, not wanting to mop men's blood from her floor again in the night,
then Aldo and Luigi and Gianni and the sergeant. They lay in the darkness, seven bodies sharing each other's warmth, while the last embers of the fire fought back the cold that slipped in under the door. Several times in the night Aldo felt movement beside him, but it was just the woman rising to place another piece of wood in the stove, then lying down again quickly between the men as they slept. And in the silence outside, the snow continued to fall and the rest of the column continued to struggle through the night beyond the far end of the village, unaware of the
izbas
that lay just out of sight in the blizzard. When Aldo woke, dragged cold and aching from the brief refuge of sleep, the Russians had gone and the woman was heating milk.

‘When did they leave?' he asked.

‘Before dawn. The young one really did want to cut your throats, you know. It's only the older one that stopped him.'

‘And you?'

‘There's been enough blood spilt in this house already. Now drink your milk, boys, and take your guns and go. And don't ever come back.'

So they drank their milk and they took their guns and they left. The snow had stopped and the sky had cleared. They walked up through the village in the half-light of dawn and they rejoined the column and trudged again towards home under an endless dome of frozen sky.

On a dark and foggy night in February the Russians came at them in a vast swathe of tanks and men. Aldo ran and ran as the tanks hammered through and he found himself alone in the eerie night, the sound of the fighting some way behind him now. The rope hung limp from his waist, severed by something he hadn't seen.

‘Luigi!' he shouted. ‘Luigi! Where are you?'

‘Shut the fuck up!' came the immediate response, the sergeant somewhere nearby in the fog. ‘Shut the fuck up or you'll get us all killed!'

Aldo called out again.

‘Shut up, damn you! You won't find him now.'

‘Fuck! Fuck!' shouted Aldo, and he tore off what remained of the rope.

Then Gianni's voice, coming nearer. ‘Which way from here, sergeant?'

‘Fuck knows,' said the sergeant, as Aldo and Gianni made their way to him. ‘Anyone got a compass?'

No one had a compass.

‘I don't believe it, stuck out here in this fucking fog and we don't even know which way we're meant to be going.'

They walked for hours, seemingly in a straight line but probably around in circles. Aldo followed the sergeant, watching his back in the gloom, step after step into the night, then looking down at his own feet for a while, kicking up the snow as he walked. Occasionally in the distance he heard the sound of an engine or a burst of gunfire or the plaintive roar of a tank in the night answered by a scream, but he couldn't tell from which direction any of it was coming. Then he heard a tank's gears grinding in the fog. He crouched down with the others and silently prayed. The noise grew until it seemed that the tank must be nearly upon them and then it passed just yards away and began to disappear again into the gloom. The sergeant stood up and ran after it, looking over his shoulder and yelling back at the others, ‘Come on, you two! It's a Panzer!'

Aldo stood up and ran after him, stumbling and slipping over the frozen ground, desperate for a free ride to somewhere else, anywhere but here, anything preferable to wandering through the night just waiting to be picked off by a Russian patrol. The hatch on the hull of the tank was flung open and a head rose up like a skull from a tomb. The skull began to shout at them in German, gesturing them up onto the back of the beast, and they hurried after it and pulled themselves aboard. They spent the rest of the night huddled together upon its freezing hull, and as daylight dispersed the fog, Aldo saw the interminable white steppe stretching out all around him, looking as if it could swallow the world.

‘Where are we going, sergeant?' asked Gianni.

‘Fuck knows,' said the sergeant. He looked up at the pale sun. ‘But we're heading west, boys. We're heading towards home.'

In mid-afternoon their tank met up with a column of German armour.

‘Izium? Izium?' said the tank commander to the men crouched on the hull.

‘Do we want to go to Izium?' said Aldo.

‘Where the fuck's Izium?' said Gianni.

‘Fuck knows,' said the sergeant. ‘But what the hell, let's all go to Izium. It's sure to be a laugh.'

Towards the end of the day the Panzer left Aldo and Gianni and the sergeant somewhere in the outskirts of Izium, where hundreds of Germans were setting up a defensive line. A man in a filthy uniform came over and started shouting at them. They looked at each other, then back at the German's beetroot face. Eventually he left them, still shouting to himself as he walked away.

‘What the hell did he want?' said Gianni.

‘Who cares? We don't take orders from bloody Germans,' said the sergeant. ‘We're Italian, so I give the orders round here.'

‘All right, then, so where now, sergeant?' said Aldo.

‘Fucked if I know,' said the sergeant, and they laughed.

‘Seriously, sergeant, what are we going to do now? There'll be fighting here soon. Do we really want to join in again with all that?'

‘Yes,' said Gianni. ‘What on earth are we doing here? We should never have left the column.'

‘What column?' said the sergeant. ‘There is no bloody column, not now, not after last night.'

‘But what about all the others? They must still be out there somewhere.'

‘Sure they are. The dead ones. And the prisoners. Come on, let's find some food. There are bound to be more like us round here somewhere.'

Aldo looked at the gutted buildings and the blackened brick chimneys as they walked. Then he heard music and as they turned
a corner he saw a group of Germans in the ruins of a building, huddled around an upright piano covered in dust, its top strewn with stone and brick. A medic was sweetening the air with the sounds of Chopin, Mahler and Brahms as others stood around him and stole back a few minutes of their lives. Aldo listened, his eyes lost in a far-off personal place, the music transporting him back home to Venice, and in this way the doctor cured, if just for a few moments, a small part of the pain that had built up inside him. Aldo looked at the man's hands as he played, long fine fingers, delicate hands, not so much those of a soldier as a surgeon, and he thought about how, when the shells rained back down, the doctor would go down again into the cellars, down among the rats to repair the broken bodies of men, and up on the surface of the earth a shell might fall close beside the piano and it would disintegrate in a shower of keys and wood and wire, and its final note would be one of jarring and conflict drowned out by the noise of the bombs and the dying.

And sure enough, the attack soon came, and Aldo and the others fell straight in with the Germans. The nights were punctuated with bright white and orange flares and when the sun rose over the buildings, soldiers who had spent the night hunting down Russian patrols slid back to their positions among the ruins. They resumed their patrols when night returned, when everything was dark and confused and the crack of gunfire echoed around the wasteland. And then, eerily close, Aldo heard the roar of a tank and then the artillery started up, the Russian shells landing in waves that swept across the lines and sent the cowardly and the brave alike diving into shell-holes, wide-eyed with fear, a pushing, shoving herd, and when the bombardment finally stopped, the Russian tanks were there, the dark shapes of men all around them. The shattered defenders flung themselves once more in desperation at their guns and amid the chaos and the noise a tank was hit, then another, blocking the advance, and at last Aldo saw the Russians pulling back and he slipped where he lay into something like sleep, only to be prodded awake again by an irate man lying next to him, shouting something at him that he did not understand. So Aldo sneaked
away into a cellar and lay down there with the dead and the dying until he was woken again by the skeletal hand of someone hungry for his own temporary oblivion, telling him to get up and take his place out there in the world, and so he went back out again and looked out to where the fires still burned and some lost soul still groaned his life away in no-man's land.

It went on that way for what seemed like ages, and then the Germans pulled out and Aldo was left among hundreds of men trapped in a pocket on the edge of town. In the watery light of a February dawn the Russian tanks reached them and Aldo and Gianni and the sergeant cast aside their weapons and the last of their hope. As he scrambled out of the trench that had been fashioned out of rubble, Aldo saw the Russians close up for the first time since that night in the
izba
in the snow, but this time there was no sharing of soup, no civilising influence of a peasant and her stove, just the hard eyes of men who had been fighting too long. He saw the red stars on their caps, the padded jackets of their uniforms, insulating them from the cold in a way his worn-out coat could no longer do, and the blue-black metal shine of the barrels of their guns and a man with a bayonet as long as his arm. The man shoved his rifle butt into Gianni and then into the sergeant and he was about to do the same to Aldo when Aldo shouted something at him in Russian.

‘What did you say?' the man said. ‘You a
hiwi?
We shoot traitors here!'

And he lifted his rifle and pressed the tip of the bayonet against Aldo's chest, holding it there, and there was fear in Aldo's mouth, a sudden taste of iron filings.

‘I'm no traitor,' he shouted back. ‘I'm Italian! Italian!'

And he heard the sergeant shouting at him too, then Gianni, a torrent of words. He snapped back at them, desperate, not knowing what to say, and the Italian words tumbling from his mouth saved him, the Russian withdrawing the bayonet and hitting him instead with the rifle butt. Aldo got up and stumbled back, falling several yards away, and the sergeant and Gianni were around him and the Russian's attention was distracted by another scuffle away to one side.
They hurried away towards a larger group: safety in numbers. Blend in with the others, Aldo thought. This is the last place on earth you'd want to stand out from the crowd. The prisoners shoaled together and stood around waiting, the hours dragging by until the long march back east started up, the long march home in reverse, retracing the steps of the previous weeks, and with each step Aldo felt the whole panorama of pain, not just the bruises where they had hit him but also the ache of exhaustion, and the hunger and the cold, and the agony of hopelessness where previously some faint hope had been.

They walked in long lines, the guards constantly urging them forward with ‘Davai! Davai!', Aldo walking behind the sergeant, then Gianni behind Aldo, almost out of habit, their usual formation, watching the motion of the boots of the one in front, and the occasional sound of someone nearby collapsing in the snow, a soft thumping noise of a man too weak to go on, who no doubt would lie there in the wilderness until the animals spread his bones across the steppe. At night they were allowed to stop and rest, but there was no shelter, no
izbas
, no hope, nothing but the snow and the ice and the wind. The ice froze so hard and so brittle that Aldo heard it split like glass, puncturing the night with the sharp crack of its breaking. To lie down would be to die, so the men stood together like horses in a field, sleeping on their feet, each propped up by those around him. Those on the inside of the huddle stole most of the shared warmth and each night someone who had been clinging to the outside of the group would topple over and in the morning they would see him lying frozen and stiff as a board on the ground.

The Russian spring came early that year, and the snow turned to rain and the ice turned to mud and the land became a great mire of water, but the prisoners continued their march, ever slower in the quagmire, and one morning it was the sergeant – and his glorious victory, the start of a new empire – whom Aldo saw lying cold and dead and heavy in the mud. As Aldo and Gianni set off again a heavy rain fell and when Aldo looked back the sergeant's body was just one more muddy contour on the surface of the earth, and when he turned again he couldn't even tell which of the contours was the sergeant.
As he trudged on, Aldo dwelt on how one day some peasant might till the earth and find the sergeant's bones, and one day probably Aldo's too, and as bones bear neither flag nor uniform, the
muzhik
would not know whether to curse them or consecrate them, and so instead he would consider them for a moment and then cast them aside and continue to sow the seeds that would tide him through another endless winter on the steppe.