The Art of Waiting (15 page)

They came to the outskirts of a small town where thousands of men stood in the mud, penned into barbed-wire enclosures. Aldo could no longer distinguish between the nationalities of the prisoners – Italians, Hungarians, Romanians, mostly Germans – as their uniforms were all caked with the same filth that lay for hundreds of miles around them and they hid themselves beneath whatever extra clothing they had been able to steal during the retreat, swathing their heads in rags wrapped like shrouds. Aldo and Gianni sat in the mud and waited. Aldo watched as a man took a fragment of mirror from the pocket of his tunic and tried to reflect the weak sunlight onto his face, magnifying the sun's feeble rays, then turning away as if disgusted at his own reflection. Aldo turned to a small group of Italians a few feet away. One man sat leaning forward, his arms hooked around his knees, his chin resting on his wrists. He was staring at Aldo.

‘He's dead, of course,' said another man. ‘Can't you tell just by looking at him? He was talking to me just now, and he stopped right bang in the middle of a sentence. See, his mouth is still half open.'

‘Oh, yes, you're right,' said Aldo. ‘He's certainly dead.'

‘You know what the last thing he said was?' said the man. ‘We were sitting here in all this mud, and you know what he said?'

‘What did he say?' said Gianni.

‘He said . . . you'll never believe this . . . he said the most beautiful thing he ever saw was the Pantheon in a snowstorm. Can you believe that? He spends all winter out here in the snow, and the most beautiful thing he's ever seen is the Pantheon in a snowstorm. Isn't that just fucking nuts? I mean, how often does it snow in Rome anyway?'

‘I used to live right next to the Pantheon,' said Gianni. ‘My
mum and dad still have a little flat right next to it, just down from that statue of the elephant, you know, the one they built with its arse pointing towards the church. When it rained I used to look out and watch the water pouring off the walls, floods of it, and all the people below hurrying to get out of the rain, their ice cream falling into the road, all pinks and whites and yellows, and sometimes that pale-orange melon flavour, you know the one? All washed away in the rain . . .'

The man shivered at the thought of it, then smiled wistfully. ‘I'm Pietro, by the way,' he said, and they shook hands, pressing their bones against each other.

‘It's a pleasure,' said Aldo. ‘Well, you know what I mean . . .'

‘After the war,' Pietro went on, ‘after the war, the two of you must come to my house, all right? In Umbria. And I'll show you what a good Umbrian girl can do when she's in the mood.'

‘I can't wait,' said Gianni.

‘I was a postman, you know,' said Pietro. ‘Back home in Umbria. A decent job, something you could look up to. A uniform and everything.'

‘Who wants a fucking uniform?' said Gianni. ‘After all this.'

‘Well, I did then,' said Pietro. ‘And I looked great in it, the colour really suited me. I used to get all these looks. And it had the nicest buttons! And, lucky me, I used to deliver to the farms and there was this girl, she had the best smile you ever saw. Used to give me milk. Warm it was, straight from the pail. Then one day she took me into a field of poppies, and she popped open those buttons and we popped ourselves out of our clothes, you know, as you do . . .'

‘Yes, as you do,' said Aldo, and he was suddenly thinking of Isabella.

‘Yes, just as nature intended, and we lay there all day in the sun, in the grass, told each other jokes and stupid stories. And her beautiful white skin, lying beside me in the sun . . .'

And Aldo dwelt on the thought of Isabella, of her lying there beside him in her bed, the warmth of her, in the darkness of her room in the silence of the night.

‘. . . and this girl, in the sunshine, just looking at me, and the poppies and those little yellow flowers, the ones you get in springtime. I can still smell her hands, warm milk and cows' udders.'

He sniffed his filth-caked hands and tears welled up in his bloodshot eyes. ‘We got married last year.'

‘Congratulations,' said Aldo.

‘Thank you,' said Pietro, pulling back his tears.

‘Any little ones?'

‘One on the way when I left. A boy, as it turns out. I had a photo. Looks just like his dad, the wife says.'

‘Must be a good-looking devil,' said Aldo.

‘Oh yes, I guess he must be.' Pietro laughed, tears all over his face now as he wiped at them with muddy hands. There was mud all over his face too now, but it seemed that he hardly noticed it, and why on earth would he care? They all looked the same now anyway. He just sat there, looking glum, looking away towards the horizon, looking towards the west. Most people usually looked that way round here, thought Aldo, given the choice.

They sat in the mud for the rest of the day and every so often more prisoners blew in with the rain that came in off the steppe in squalls. During the night they heard the whistle of a train, then again, and then the sound of its engine again as it drew off into the night with its haul of men. Finally it was their turn and they stood together in the mud beside the track. The doors of the cattle trucks were pulled back and they clambered in, grey-faced commuters off to the suburbs of hell. The doors were slammed shut, and Aldo, Gianni and Pietro stood pressed up together, no space to sit down, each man standing in his square foot of space, leaning against the shoulder of another who in turn leant against the next, and the last one leant against the wooden wall of the train, and the train moved off and the men swayed. No one spoke and no one slept and time slipped by on endless rails and Aldo's legs went numb. After a day and a night the train slowed and then stopped, and Aldo stumbled out and fell to the ground and shook life back into his limbs. In the distance, to the east, always east, he could see a large village and
then the confused line of the horizon, the steppe merging into a dark blur of forest beneath a watercolour sky. Aldo found Gianni and Pietro and helped them to their feet, and the three of them stood leaning against each other again in the watery sunshine of spring. Then the guards came round and shoved at them and the column gathered again and began to inch its way towards the forest and the barbed wire and the watchtowers that awaited them.

The Prisoner

Tambov Prison Camp 188, March 1943

Aldo lay on the concrete floor of the bunker, his stomach aching and empty, his body wracked with cramps. He stared up towards the ceiling but it was too dark to see it. No light would get in until the guards hurled the door open at six, and the ceiling wasn't much to write home about anyway – just branches and packed earth. But you certainly wouldn't worry about the craftsmanship, Aldo thought, not from his perspective now, down here on the floor, staring up at it, just wanting to sleep. A roof over his head, that was all, and at least it was that. And he certainly didn't care what wood it was, not now, not these days. He couldn't care less. Probably some fucking Russian wood, he thought, birch or larch or something like that. Rough bunks lined every wall but even with three or four men to each rotten mattress there was never enough room and the floor was covered with sleeping bodies, piled together for warmth. Aldo sniffed, then regretted it. You didn't want to go breathing in too deeply here, not this pungent rot – vomit and dysentery and the smell of feet that had been too long in damp and mud-filled boots. You couldn't leave the bunkers during the hours of darkness, so you just had to breathe it in, just had to live with it, and the smell was strongest towards dawn when you could hardly bear it any longer. When the bunker door was finally unlocked, Aldo would be the first out, gulping down the air that blew in from the Urals, looking around him as he did so at the other prisoners who were doing the same, grey ghosts loitering on the fringes of existence, their eyes hungry and raw. Aldo had eaten nothing for a week now and it felt as if his stomach had shrunk to the size of a walnut. It ached constantly.
He and Gianni and Pietro had survived on the rainwater that collected in a barrel under a downpipe. They spent the few minutes before work began sitting on the ground outside in the sun doing nothing, saying little. When they spoke, it was usually to bitch about the other prisoners, or the guards.

‘The Hungarians are the worst,' said Gianni, drawing out his words, tiredness elongating them, the growing weakness that Aldo had noticed in Gianni's speech since they arrived at the camp. Soon he would be nodding off again, unannounced and sudden, just like yesterday and the day before that.

‘The Hungarians?' said Pietro. ‘What about the Germans? It's their fucking fault we're here in the first place.'

‘It's
Il Duce's
fucking fault we're here,' said Aldo. ‘Don't you hate him most of all?'

‘Didn't use to. Do now.'

‘Snap,' said Gianni.

‘Or the Russians,' said Pietro. ‘The fucking guards. Why can't they bring us some food? I could eat a horse, and I'm not bloody exaggerating.'

‘I'd eat anything,' said Gianni. ‘A rat, even.'

‘Or a hedgehog?' said Pietro.

‘Definitely. Spines and all.'

‘And a mole?'

‘Of course. I'd eat one raw, no problem at all. I'd even eat worms if I could find any of the fuckers.'

‘I'd eat the hand off the end of my wrist,' said Aldo. ‘And then I'd eat my arm.'

He glanced over towards a group of men sitting nearby, the ones who had been in the camp since the beginning, who had claimed the top bunks where the body heat of others drifted up in the cold of the night. There was something about them, something he hadn't been able to put his finger on. But now he saw it – oh yes, he saw it now, they'd eat the hand off the end of your wrist, and then they'd eat your arm – and he recognised them for what they were, saw it for what it was, that subtly different look, a spark glinting in
their eyes, eyes that were as desperate and crazed as all the others, but somewhere in their depths was the worm of stolen hope and he could see it now and it twitched and it squirmed. He'd noticed them in the burial area, always eager to usher away the dead ones, preparing them, seeing to it that they had a burial but exacting a price for it, a price of which the dead knew nothing and from which the living averted their eyes. Until now. Aldo had seen it; their cheeks were blushing a confession. He stood up and took a pace or two towards them.

‘I know what you're up to!' he yelled at them. ‘Keep away from me, you bastards! Keep away from me. And from my friends!'

They looked at him, threatening, nothing too much, just an obvious confidence in what they could do to him if no one stopped them. And no one would. He hurried back to where Gianni and Pietro were sitting. Gianni's eyes were closed now, tripping around the edges of sleep. They would want him soon if he carried on like this. They would have him. He shoved Gianni's arm and Gianni woke up and then his eyes slipped shut again. Pietro was staring into the distance now, turning away from reality again, wanting none of it. Every day he got worse, more sudden lapses into gibberish, and he was raving now, in a whisper, and Aldo was going to snap him out of it, snap him back into the world.

‘Pietro, listen! We have to keep an eye on Gianni.'

‘Yes, I know. Keep an eye on Gianni. We must keep an eye on Gianni. Keep an eye on Gianni.'

‘No, listen, Pietro! Listen to me!'

‘What?'

‘I mean we have to keep a good eye on him.'

‘Oh, yes, we do. I know.'

‘He's too weak, Pietro. They might take him.'

‘Yes, they might take him. They might take him. Who might take him?'

‘Haven't you noticed?'

‘Yes, I've noticed. Noticed what?'

‘Look at that lot over there. Look at their faces. Don't you see?'

‘Yes, I see.'

‘What do you see, Pietro? What do you see? Look at them closely.'

‘Yes, I see.'

‘What do you see, damn it?'

‘Come on, Aldo, don't shout at me. I'm tired.'

‘Look at them, damn you! Can't you see they're not dying? Can't you see it? Why aren't they dying?'

‘Why aren't they dying?'

‘Yes, why aren't they dying?'

‘They aren't dying? Why the fuck not?'

‘Because they're eating them.'

‘Them?'

‘The dead. They're eating the dead.'

‘No.'

‘Look at the colour in their cheeks. Where do you think they get that from?'

‘Please don't shout at me, Aldo.' Pietro turned his head away.

‘Do you know what goes on in the other bunkers, Pietro? Have you been in them? Have you seen the dead being buried, up close?'

‘Not recently.'

‘I mean here, not out there, not before. Here, here at the camp.'

Pietro shook his head.

‘So how do you know they bury the whole body? Maybe they take a piece first, slice a bit off, here and there, cover it up, bury the evidence. Or eat it!'

‘No, no, I haven't heard anyone mention anything like that. Nothing at all.'

‘But who would tell us? They probably all know what's going on.'

‘No, no, impossible, ridiculous. I was a postman in Umbria, you know.'

Aldo stood up and began to shout, ‘Cannibals, fucking cannibals!'

He walked across to the group of men again. ‘Who did you have for dinner last night? Taste good, did he? Taste good, you sick bastards?'

A guard walked over and pushed Aldo away, and he went back to Gianni and Pietro and forced them up and pulled them a few
yards away, behind a maintenance hut, and sat them down there and watched as they closed their eyes, and then he shut his own and breathed in the air and listened as Pietro talked nonsense about Umbria.
Nothing makes sense, Aldo, nothing makes sense. Remember that, and you'll always be all right
. How right she had been, he thought, wise old Isabella. If only he could be with her now, that would help, it certainly would. But he would never see her again, not now. He was sure of that, not a chance. Make the most of me while you can, she had said, but he hadn't, not really. Too many thoughts getting in the way when he was with her, too many moments wasted. If he ever got the chance again he would remember that, he would make sure he made the most of his time with her, every second of it.

That night he lay closer than usual to Gianni and listened to the sound of his breathing, irregular and hoarse, imagining it was Isabella's heart that rose and fell beneath him, his head on Gianni's chest in the dark as it rose and fell in time with his breathing, and he recalled the waves of Venice and its lagoon and the boats of his life rising on swells and sinking into troughs: his grandfather's fishing boat; the launch that took him and Luca and Massimo and his dad to Mestre for that last hunting trip; and the one that carried Luca to the cemetery on San Michele in the rain; the gondola nodding its approval beneath the arched windows of Isabella's room; the
vaporetto
that stole him away to war; and the fishing boats of the carefree years of his youth, now down in the silt that life left behind as it washed everything away downstream. He listened to the sound of Gianni's heart until its rhythmic beating filled his head and became the only sound in the universe, wiping away the grunts and moans of the weak and dying men who lay all around him in the shallow grave of sleep. The next night Gianni's heart beat more faintly still and by morning he was dead. The vultures of the camp had gathered, alerted by some dark instinct, and when Aldo flicked open his eyes he saw them perched on an adjacent bunk.

‘He's gone,' one of them said when he saw Aldo looking. ‘Let us take him and bury him.'

‘He's my friend, not yours,' said Aldo, guessing what they meant.

‘But you're too weak.'

And then Aldo really woke up and he threw himself at them, thrashing at them with his arms. The vultures flapped about, backed away towards the door, but others came in from behind and hauled up Gianni's limp body as Aldo wheeled around, striking out, held from behind by someone as they carried Gianni outside.

‘Stop! Stop!' Aldo screamed, and he saw Pietro slumped in the corner, staring out through wide vacant eyes.

‘I was a postman in Umbria,' he was saying. ‘I was a postman in Umbria. And what a uniform, what buttons I had!'

‘Pietro! Wake up! Help me! They've taken Gianni.'

‘I was a postman in Umbria, you know. A person of dignity.'

Aldo stumbled outside but there was no sign of Gianni now. He crashed in through the door of the nearest bunker. ‘Where is he? Where have they taken him?'

The men looked back at him in the half-light, passive as a flock of sheep. He rushed into the next bunker, then the next, and then he found one with its door wedged shut and he banged and yelled and bestial voices bellowed back at him from inside. The guards, hearing the noise, hurried up and dragged Aldo away as he screamed out his accusations in Russian.

‘Not again!' said one of the guards. ‘Animals.'

‘Pigs,' said another.

They hammered down the door and dragged the cannibals out, leaving Gianni's body stretched out like a banquet on the floor, knife wounds in his thighs, toothmarks on his arms, his blood running in streams across the concrete floor. The guards took the guilty men out through the gate and to a patch of bare earth and ordered them to dig a pit in the ground. The men looked at Aldo as he dug Gianni's grave beside them and he was afraid they would lift their spades high and split his head open in a final futile act of barbarism, but the guards were standing close and the vultures were not yet certain enough of their own fate to act, and when they were finally certain, it was too late, because when the men had dug a hole that the guards deemed large enough, they shot the men and kicked
their bodies in. Aldo continued to dig Gianni's grave and a guard stood and watched him digging, and then the guard helped him to lower Gianni into the ground.

‘Was he a good friend?' asked the Russian.

‘The only one I had left,' said Aldo.

‘A good one, then.'

They walked back into the camp together, the guard locking the gate behind them.

‘Couldn't you just leave that gate open for me one day? Just for a moment? Turn a blind eye, let me go.'

The guard looked at him, uncertain. For a moment it almost looked as if he was considering it. ‘But they'd shoot me too if I did that,' he said. ‘I'm just as much a prisoner here as you.'

That night Aldo lay down in a small space on the floor and pressed his ear to the ground. The concrete lay silent and cold beneath him. He pulled back his sleeve and looked into the eyes of the pig on his arm, its eyes burning bright in the night, and he seized it in his teeth and shook it until it bled and then he wiped its bloody tears away, and all he heard was a humming in his head as the spinning earth spun him into a black sleep.

Two days later, food began to arrive at the camp. Too late for Gianni, Aldo thought. Sod the lot of them, why couldn't they have sorted things out sooner? Bloody bureaucrats, somewhere comfortable behind the lines with their requisition sheets and their systems. At first there was just bread, stale crusts and offcuts, barely more than a mosaics of green spores. Aldo chiselled it down with yellowing teeth until the pain of it stopped him, then he softened it in the barrel of water beneath the downpipe and cursed the crumbs that broke away and lost themselves in the water. He spent long hours now by the perimeter fence, staring out at the woods, taking his lump of bread and sucking at the corners, savouring the taste, rolling the hard lumps around in his mouth until they disintegrated on his tongue, sucking at the grit and the dust, ignoring the mould, letting his mind carry him away over the horizon. He spoke to no one now. He didn't understand the Germans or the Hungarians or the
Romanians, or whatever the hell they were, and the guards ignored him. He couldn't be bothered to get to know any of the other Italians now – there were thousands of them, but what was the point? They'd all be dead soon anyway. And Pietro spent his days curled up in a corner facing the wall, chucking out random utterances in Umbrian dialect, so Aldo's conversation was limited to brief exchanges of views with the tattooed thing that lived on his arm. As Aldo looked out past the wire, unblinking, the world lost itself behind a film of images that rolled before his eyes, and occasionally he would almost smile at the sight of a fond memory from what seemed like another lifetime. Towards dark he would return to his place on the floor of the bunker, where he closed his eyes and tried to conjure up the images again, but in the dark oppressive confines, among the groans and the moans and the bodies, his mind could not see beyond the darkness and instead he thought of Fausto Pozzi, and his greatest fear was suddenly that he would never see the bloody man again, but then the wild pig that the war had almost purged from his mind winked at him in the night and Aldo winked back, and they quietly reconsummated their love in the blackest corner of his heart, the only part of him that still had the strength to carry on.