The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (105 page)

(page 28)
Both of my parents attended the fire, they knelt with the neighbours on occasion to pray – for guidance, or a clean wind to lift the fire.

(page 29)
The Americans, and later the British landed their armies in the south. Swallowed the islands, overran the east and spread like cholera with dangerous and undeniable speed. I do not remember the war, and while its history is physically marked upon the buildings – if you look above the boutique and shop windows you will see bullet holes in the stone and blast damage to the cornices and carved decoration. In some districts, close to the docks, there are still vacant spaces, sockets left by the bombing raids – the vacant lots soon grew a scant kind of grass, so that the city took on, in my early memory at least, a damp aspect, damaged and melancholic.

(page 32)
The Americans took the Royal Palace and made the surrounding government offices their headquarters, leaving nothing for the British when they arrived a week later. The British settled at the outskirts, right under the city walls, and chose as their hub the vineyard, to use the old farmhouse and outbuildings as their command base. They managed to settle the land without destroying the vines, seemed to occupy us with an apologetic air. Later, on negotiation with the Americans, after the end of hostilities was formalized, they moved into the city proper and shared the government offices. In their absence, gypsies, who had been encouraged to settle, occupied the vineyard, growing in number from a few makeshift huts and huddled caravans into a larger encampment. They refused to settle in the houses and chose instead the outlying fields. They cared little for the vineyard, and the fields, which had survived the war, were soon spoiled. Our rooms looked down on an undisciplined, unkempt, unsanitary arc of tents and trailers. The vines were cut for fuel. The carefully tended embankments levelled. The irrigation ditches in-filled, so that the terraced field became nothing more than a mud flat.

I remember distinct moments from this period. The fire. The women. The women, brought from the south, were either camp followers, or women traded on the route through the country, from the beaches. Wherever they landed the men, who found almost no resistance, distracted themselves with women, and rather than discard them, collected them, adding to each regiment a sizeable retinue of girls. They were housed in the basement rooms at the palazzo, and I spent my time watching from the courtyard window as the women gathered and washed, or simply spent their days, a kind of endless waiting as if idleness stuck to them, glued them into deeper inaction. The soldiers had gathered women without any particular eye, taking, by criteria, women who were young first, comely second. The trek along the beaches, then inland across the malarial swamps, through the lowlands and foothills, and later, the mountains, had meant that few were lost through combat, but along the way the skinnier girls had become lost, or abandoned, or did not have the fortitude to last.

I have no real idea about how the women came to be in our palazzo. I know only that they were, and how they appeared thinner than seemed reasonable, and how they followed the soldiers without complaint. They washed; they worked on their backs. The British soldiers appeared not to enjoy this. The American, the Polish, the French all took to these opportunities, and there was no small amount of abuse, shouting, little displayed physically. But the women were spoken to as imbeciles. They were paid in food. Badly. Stale bread. Dried meats. Processed foods that were shipped in, offloaded and left to cook in their cans on pallets on beaches further south. One can of corned beef would service as pay, so that these women were worth less than canned meat. These women were worth less than rotten scraps. As supplies improved, so did their pay. One night a week the Americans would arrive and back a truck into the courtyard, and on this truck they would hold a barbecue, cook meats; they were uncommonly generous.

(page 34)
Because of the dead the city was overrun with rats. Many had been trapped in basements when the bombing started, others were caught in catacombs, in the churches, in what passed as shelters, so the city took on a sweet smell which sank into a rank stench, recognizable as decay. The Americans brought us cats. This was one of their first gifts. Cats to kill the rats. The rats who had grown fat and large on the dead were easy to catch, and we were soon overrun with cats, who without live rats to hunt, turned to the same food source. They became aggressive and seemed to hold designs upon the living.

(page 35)
The Americans reported the truck missing. They came another time in separate vehicles, but the truck was taken, assumed sold, as most other provisions and equipment were stolen away and resold, sometimes back to them. In this instance the truck was found, and inside, littering the truck-bed, were the bodies of cats, necks snapped, slaughtered in the hundreds. As for the rats we would find our own solution.

(page 36)
The loss of D— had a profound effect. While we did not play together, knew each other in passing, I thought of her as someone close, similar. Her proximity and encouragement (while she was free), and a discouragement (when she was incarcerated). Once she was gone – or unavailable – I turned to my brother A— for company. At that time I needed a compatriot. I needed to know I was not alone.

(page 40)
Here I must speak about my sister. Here everything comes together and I should speak of the third woman who has held influence over me. So far E— has been absent, and there are many reasons for this, not least of all the considerable pain I feel at remembering her.

The episode of the cats caused a change in how the Americans treated their women. They viewed them afterward more coldly, as a resource, the men arrived now with briskness, as if keeping to an appointment, and no longer delayed to joke and play games, to tease. They also began to play small but cruel games. Through the Americans the black market thrived. In opening the city they brought back trade in two tiers, honest and expensive, dishonest and more various, and double the price. One young recruit, a handsome willowy man, a private from Kentucky, from whom I would not have expected such cruelty, brought with him packets of stockings which he gave to the women, there was one girl he was fond of, young, very small, from the mountains in the south, who had fine and dark features, and was known among the women as Mouse. The youth held back one packet, which he handed over with a kind of pride. Unlike the other sets of stockings, these were coloured, a faint but handsome pink. The women, at first delighted by the gifts, perhaps believing that some normalcy was now returning, that they had been forgiven for the episode of the cats, soon appeared puzzled, and as I watched a wave of doubt flickered through them. While the stockings were in packets, they were not new, some were rolled, and others carelessly folded, a sagginess to them that showed that they had been worn. These stockings, it later became known, were taken from the bodies of the dead or stolen from the homes of the absent. A whole new economy grew about the houses and apartments which had been abandoned, and also the houses of the dead. These places were looted – and I will not lay the blame solely at the feet of the Americans, I will not say that this was entirely about finding treasure, about taking trophies, but they caused this need, and the houses which had remained secure until now were plundered.

The women received gifts from the houses of the dead. Lamps. Carpets. Clothes. L— dressed now in a fine patterned silk nightdress, and wore over this a sheer white nightgown with cascading frills, a silly pretty thing which suited her. I watched as she received this gift, from a commander, who gave it to her in a box, wrapped in tissue paper, so that it appeared as a gift a lover might present his mistress, a fine token brought from Paris, to signify a small, perhaps intimate, occasion. It was of course no such thing. Shortly after other such boxes appeared and we learned that one of the boutiques on via F—, which had remained shuttered and unbothered through the barricade, was now forced open and looted. But this made a better gift, something she was happy to accept as it came from no one’s home, from no other body.

She stretched the fine material over her arm, allowed it to smooth over her, the weight fitting itself to her body. In wrapping her arms about the commander she looked up and caught me watching. With one finger she gave a small tick-tick wave, indicating that I should not watch. I should keep out of this business. I should not be involved, because, clearly, all this would invite would be trouble. But even with this small admonishment, I had to admit to a fascination.

L— kept a good eye on the women. She did not interfere in squabbles, but quelled them quickly if they appeared to stay unresolved, or if the irritation escalated into a fight. More like the sultan than the chief of the harem, she signalled her displeasure and her pleasure with gestures: sent girls away, picked men when they arrived. An authority on her that even the soldiers obeyed.

She also gave advice: ‘Would it be better to be dead?’ ‘If he enjoys you now, he won’t hurt you later.’

On occasion a darkness fell over the group. The girls would become unhappy, or some incident, an argument with one of the men would infect the air. L— was not immune, and I learned when and when not to observe them.

One night L— came to our door. My father answered and shut it immediately.

My mother and sister wanted to see the visitor, and came after him to the door. I watched also, and saw, with a confused pleasure that it was L—. I could hear her laugh before the door was opened, and sure enough she stood in the landing with arms carrying something wrapped in a shawl. She offered this to my mother – and what might have been a baby proved instead to be supplies provided by the Americans.

Up close L— was pretty, the face of a china doll, round, with sweet small lips, blue eyes. Her cheeks a little chubby made her face while it was settled appear even jolly, although I had seen on a number of occasions that this was not always the case, and that she could set herself from silk to steel in a simple moment.

My mother wanted to refuse. I could sense this, so L— had to drop her hands to let the weight settle in my mother’s arms. My brother came forward and took the bundle from my mother, and nodded his gratitude. His face as flushed as mine.

She offered us milk. Packaged eggs. There were cigarettes, she admitted, but they used these to trade for produce. There was no telling what the soldiers would bring, and rather than allow this to waste she thought we might make good use of the food. There were perfumes (she smelled so sweet herself), stockings, scarves, clothes, but it did not seem a good idea to offer those, unless they could be traded. But trade here, she seemed to indicate the building, is not safe.

On seeing my sister L— looked quickly at my mother and whispered, I am sure I heard it. ‘You should not keep her here. You understand me? Take her to relatives. She is not safe.’

After this warning my parents did not allow my sister to pass through the courtyard unaccompanied. They attempted to keep her to the apartment, but found this impossible, and needed in any case the money she would bring in. She had to work. They hatched between them another plan, a fatal idea, that they could buy a pass for her so that she could leave the city, work elsewhere, somewhere safer. These passes were almost impossible to acquire and were gained through the permission of an adjutant, one of the military administrative over-class. I accompanied my mother to the offices, and we made our way through the vast lobby of what was once the central office for pensions and war relief, less than insects in the shadows of these lofty windows, which made me certain that this endeavour would not succeed. In front of us, a man who had once been a neighbour, who spoke without bitterness about how he had needed to choose between his daughters, whore one to save the other. He was there, on this occasion, to barter for his wife, and had brought with him what remained of her jewellery: her wedding ring, her engagement ring, a pair of diamond stud earrings, which he feared would not be enough.

The queue ran through the corridors, my mother told me to keep in place, then checked for herself and despaired when she saw that this line of people ran a ring about the entire floor then through the stairwell to rise, and who knows, run another circuit about that floor, maybe others also. The people appeared comatose, and this frightened her; resigned to whatever they might need to surrender, they brought with them small packages, clothes, food, boxes of jewellery, all to ensure that their daughters and wives would escape the city. It was not clear how many days we would have to wait, and if that wait would in the end be successful. Another plan needed to be devised.

This failure sent my mother into a depression. E— could not remain in the building, it was not safe, neither could she leave. To confirm her vulnerability E— had been stopped that morning by the soldier from Kentucky. Clear that his tastes ran to the more delicate, the more defenceless of the girls, he singled out my sister as she brought water through the courtyard. The man watched as she passed, turned his whole body as she moved alongside him and toward the stair. He looked up as she made her way up the stairs, then gave a long and low whistle. The kind of whistle a hunter might give his dog, a signal that there was quarry to be had here. He had found something to hunt.

A short time after this, perhaps one or two days, the Americans performed a search of the entire building. Whether this was for security, as they claimed, a kind of census taking to ensure who and how many people populated these palazzi. They came to the door in their uniforms. Four men. Clipboards and rifles.

‘This is how they find their women,’ my mother fretted. Clearly they wanted more than women. They catalogued the rooms and contents, checked our food resources. It was certainly how they found their goods. And we listened afterward as they broke in to the empty apartments. Once those doors were breached, the contents would be pilfered. During the night we could hear the vacant apartments being looted, the soft bumping of furnishing, the splintering of wood: we dared not see who this was.