Wolf on the Mountain (10 page)

‘They weren’t looking for an easy route. They were looking to see if anyone was back at the camp; or hiding in the undergrowth amongst the smaller trees. They wouldn’t be looking amongst the pines. There’s no undergrowth in there, except for the odd clump of bracken, so you can see between the trunks. There’s nowhere to hide in there.’

‘So it’s better, if you’re going to build something, to do it amongst the scrub?’

‘Not really. Do you remember the morning the Germans stormed the camp? Some of the partisans rushed into the scrub, the Germans fired machine guns into it and the partisans had to surrender. It’s standard procedure when they think people are hiding in it. We saw it happening all the way down Italy. It’s very effective.’

‘But you got away by hiding in the scrub.’

‘Only because there were so many other people surrendering. The Germans could easily assume that they’d caught us all when so many called out to them to stop them firing and came out with their hands in the air. Why waste time searching for an eleventh - who might not be there - if you’ve already caught ten and you’ve stopped firing to allow them to come out? But if I’d been the only one in there they’d have carried on firing.’

‘So there’s nowhere up here for you to hide?’

‘Not necessarily. Let’s go back up to the camp.’

They swung off into the pine forest and climbed up through it, the captain distracted all the way, and then the last rocky scarp up to the camp.

Luigi sat on a low broken wall and looked on as the captain began to rummage amongst the rubble. Just two months ago the camp had been a thriving place of sixty or seventy men, three huts warmed by wood-fires, mutton simmering in cauldrons for days until it fell off the bone. All the anti-fascists of the village had pooled their resources and given their young men the provisions to keep them happy, warm and well-fed until the spring, or sooner if the Allies broke through, when they could swoop down from the mountain and visit their revenge on the Germans and their fascist collaborators. Evenings would be spent drinking wine and smoking and playing cards, and when the mighty Vincenzo played the
sette bello
, the seven of money, the trump card, everyone thought the table would collapse. In the mornings the women would come up with fresh bread and other treats. Good times until they were betrayed. So many of those men were now in labour gangs, treated as slaves and locked up at night in the factory down the valley, its fences now reinforced with barbed wire and searchlights and watchtowers.

‘Where are all the pots and pans, the bedding?’ asked the captain.

‘The families came up and took back what the Germans hadn’t stolen or destroyed. You can’t waste things like that.’

‘They missed one.’ The captain held up an old blackened pot. ‘This could be useful. So could the roofing timbers; and the corrugated iron roofing section over there; and there’s a pile of old sacking in that storage clamp. I’m going to take some of it back down to the village to dry it out.’

‘You mean you think you can live up here?’

‘The partisans were planning to.’

‘But they had shelters. And fires. They could stay indoors.’

‘That funny pope lived up in these mountains without a fire.’

‘But he was crazy.’

‘Let’s go home. By the time we get there it’ll be dark.’

So they set off back down the mountain, the captain carrying under his arm a roll of sacking, looking to all a man prepared to scavenge for anything.

Elvira has already done her morning chores, has topped up the mighty flask in the kitchen with water from the pump in the street outside, has rinsed the hard dry beans for the evening’s casserole now simmering on the kitchen range. She is sitting at the kitchen table sewing the captain’s sacking into an overcoat with coarse string while he doodles with pencil and paper his designs for his hiding place on the mountain. Her mother is dozing in a chair set back against the wall. ‘Do you want pockets?’ she asks.

‘No. Just leave a few strands of string hanging down inside, strings I can hang my things from.’ She looks at him quizzically. ‘An old army trick for when you’re captured. Hide your valuables on bits of string inside your trousers, so they won’t be looted by your captors.’

She picks up his wrist. ‘They found your watch.’

‘That you have to leave on, because they know you’ve got one. You don’t want them looking for where you’ve hidden it. And who needs a watch in a prison-camp?’

‘For Radio Londra’ says Elvira and then remembers: ‘but of course you didn’t have radios.’ They look up at the grandfather clock. It is half an hour until the morning radio broadcast from London to the hidden wirelesses of Italy; twenty or so minutes until they move the table, roll up the rush mat beneath it, lift some floorboards, take out the radio and rig up its aerial and its power supply and wait for the old slow valves to warm up. Perhaps there will be some encouraging news today. There has been nothing about Italy for days now, only reports of bombings of German cities. ‘Worse for us’ she says. ‘They’ll have less food to send to their troops here, and they’ll be stealing again.

‘The history of the Abruzzo is a succession of foreigners stealing from us. The Greeks, the French, the Spanish, now the Germans. We were always a colony, there to be pillaged by some foreigners or other. And then there were the years of the brigands, when the colonial powers couldn’t be bothered to police the mountains and robber bands started up. People treated them as heroes because they were rebelling against the colonists, even though they were stealing from the local people as well. There’s always been someone to steal from us. It’s why every house was built with hiding places for the food; if the produce of your harvest has to last a year you’ve got to make sure you’re the only people eating it. It’s one thing you can say in favour of Mussolini: it was only Italians stealing from us.’

‘Tell me about the teacher’ the captain asks.

‘What teacher?’

‘Natale Giobellini mentioned something about an incident some years ago. An unfortunate incident, he called it. He seemed embarrassed to talk about it, so I didn’t press him.’

‘Embarrassed?’ She swears the most blasphemous oath he has ever heard. ‘He should be more than embarrassed. Unfortunate? I’ll tell you how unfortunate it was.’ She puts her sewing down and hunches across the table.

–

‘It was in the early days of the fascists, in the 1920s, when Mussolini was still establishing his power. He was using gangs of blackshirt thugs to intimidate all opposition. The gentry in the outlying towns and villages were conniving with him, so they could keep their own power. Orders came from Rome that all teachers were to wear fascist uniform and teach fascist ideals to their pupils. Our teacher wouldn’t. He believed that we’d only have a just society if young people, including the peasants’ children, were able to read and write and do sums and think for themselves. One night the blackshirts attacked him in the street and beat him badly, dosed him with castor oil and delivered him home in a sack, covered in his own filth. He should have taken it as a warning, started wearing the uniform to make the thugs think he was doing as they said, and quietly gone on teaching as before. Those stupid bullies wouldn’t have known the difference. The only ideas they understand are hate and the fun of frightening people.

‘But he wouldn’t. An older man would have, but he was young, idealistic. He just went on as before. One day the blackshirts came into his class and ordered the children out. They hanged him from a beam in the classroom.

‘The doctor was one of those children. He was the cleverest boy there, the teacher’s favourite, the boy he said would do great things in his life, and the boy loved him in return. He was the first child back into the classroom, while the others ran for help.

‘All the parents were outraged. People who’d never dared to do anything about the blackshirts suddenly came forward and told the carabinieri who the thugs were. The police had to arrest them. But the charges were for breach of the peace, not murder. The teacher had hanged himself, they said. No-one in the court asked how he’d done it with his hands tied behind his back. So breach of the peace it was. They were sentenced to just a few months in prison, where they had an easy life.

‘It was the event that changed our village for ever. Everyone now knew that the police and the judges were collaborators with the thugs. Everyone knew that the village was now a lawless place, just like in the days of the brigands. Everyone was scared. Some just joined the conspiracy, the rest were cowed into silence, and the village was divided between the two.

‘It changed the doctor. He dedicated his life to becoming all the things the teacher had hoped he’d be, to exceeding even the teacher’s ambitions. He’d work by candle every night until his parents pleaded with him to go to bed. He taught himself to read in English, in French, in German, so that he could learn all the knowledge of the world. He read books by philosophers, and it was inevitable that one day he’d read
Das Kapital
. Where he got it from I don’t know. Like so many books it was banned by the fascists. At one stage they went into the school to check what books were there and burned many of them in the yard.

‘But by then there were secret communists in the village. People saw them as the only party that could ever protect them against the fascists. One of them must have given him the book and the boy read it. He saw that the oppression of the masses that Marx wrote about was happening here too, to the peasants. He wanted to help them. He decided he was going to be a doctor, but not like the leeches we have here. He’d be one who’d treat the poor for free. From each according to his capacities to each according to his needs. He told one of the doctors in the village that he wanted to study medicine and the doctor, then growing old and looking for someone to sell his practice to in a few years’ time, lent him books to read.

‘Whether he knew it or not it was a wise thing to do. People had seen that he was becoming a sallow, withdrawn boy, that he was wearing ever thicker spectacles, and stupid people are always frightened of clever ones. He was in danger, while people like the fascists wondered what he was reading, of being labelled a potential subversive. To find that he was studying to become a doctor was reassuring to them. It brought him relief from their curiosity.

‘The time came for him to go to medical school. He was so clever that he went to one in Rome, but there it all went wrong. They found out that he was more interested in helping people than in making money from his diploma and he came under ever greater suspicion. His fellow pupils started spying on him. They found out that in his last year he was treating the poor people in the area without asking for payment, doing the local quacks out of their precious income. His name went onto the list of unreliable people, the list which the ruling classes whisper behind a man’s back. He was the best student there, so they couldn’t fix his exam results and show he’d failed, but when he qualified they made sure he couldn’t find a job.

‘He ended up joining the army. They needed doctors and they could keep an eye on him there. He went to Abyssinia when Mussolini invaded that poor country. Every stupid military expedition that our wonderful leaders sent the army on, the doctor was there. He’s only thirty-two, but he’s seen a lifetime’s worth of death and mutilations. He knows everything there is to know about war wounds. He found the comfort he could give a dying conscript as much reward for his skills as the help he could have given a peasant at home. When the Italian army surrendered last September he was in southern Italy. He came home and went into hiding, made contact with the local communists, and set about doing what he’d always wanted to do, help the peasants here.

‘The local doctors don’t even know he’s doing it. Now the peasants have even less money than they had before, they ignore them completely. So they don’t know they’re being looked after by someone else. But I suspect they’ll find out soon enough. Even they are running short of food. They’ll soon be prepared to remove an appendix for a bag of flour.’

–

She realises that she has said too much, leans back and slaps her palm to her forehead. The captain had only asked what had happened to the schoolmaster, but she had been carried away by her admiration of the doctor and said enough to betray his anonymity. ‘You must forget what I’ve just said. No-one who is an anti-fascist uses their real name anymore. We all use false names in case… and yet I’ve told you who the doctor is. The fascists would know he was back if they caught you.’

‘I wouldn’t tell. I know as much about you now. You’ve all done so much for me that it would be easier to betray…’ He tries to think back to the things he had dreaded betraying when he was in his army.

Elvira senses his quandary. ‘Don’t worry, Roberto.’ She leans across the table and places her hand on his wrist. ‘I know you won’t betray us. Perhaps that is why, secretly, I wanted to tell you about the doctor. You’re a good man, but you are different from us.’ She sighs and turns away. ‘You’ll do good things for us, either by leading the partisans in the spring, or by getting back to your own people and fighting the Germans with your own army. But when you go back you’ll be an English officer again. I know you don’t approve of communism, English gentlemen don’t. I just wanted you to know why…’ She stops herself. ‘Maybe I hoped you’d understand.’

He awakes early the next day after another restless night of dreams of chase and capture, of the terrible events in the schoolroom. He needs distraction and starts at once to work on his plans for the hide: a trench dug into the side of a steep slope so that any water coming down from above will drain itself out; a sheet of corrugated iron for the roof, held up by roofing timbers; the spare soil used to camouflage the sides; some kind of hinged door to enter by. But how will he keep his bedding dry? How will he camouflage the door? How will he insulate it from the cold? Things to consider, to doodle on paper with, so as to pass another long day of imprisonment.

Then suddenly there is the familiar sound of bombs, faint thuds, on the railway junction further up the valley. The captain stops, then resumes his work on his plans. A minute later there are more exploding sounds, this time louder, nearer. The cat scuttles under the table, cowers.