Wolf on the Mountain (12 page)

everyone is crying about their homes

roberto says theyre trying to destroy the train lines

they did that the first day

why do they keep coming back

–

In the evening a motorbike and sidecar comes along the street outside the house, the passenger barking into his megaphone a warning to everyone, on pain of death, to stay indoors and keep their shutters firmly closed. It is followed by the sound of one-ton trucks, the kind used to ferry infantrymen, dozens of them. ‘This must be the only way left through the village’ says Carlo. The din grows: the full-throated sound of the heavy traction engines of tank transporters, the shouts and curses from the traffic police as the articulated trucks have to move back and forwards to negotiate the corners of streets only made for horses and carts. For hours the clamour goes on, the revving of heavy engines, the troops singing Nazi marching songs - forever full of pomp and arrogance and power - to keep up their morale as their lorries are held up in the traffic jam in the cold damp night. For hours the engine fumes, trapped in the narrow street, rise and insinuate themselves through the shutters and windows of the cold houses, making the locals wheeze for breath.

‘Panzers,’ says the captain, ‘a full division of them. There must be something big happening on the west coast. They wouldn’t be moving that lot unless Rome was under threat.’

Suddenly the bombing had had a purpose, but the show of German military might, its power still to resist the Allied armies, was as frightening to them as the bombing itself.

–

The next day the captain completed his new identity card with a photograph from one of the Golvi albums and a rubber stamp, good enough to pass a cursory inspection, carved against a mirror on a scrap of motor-cycle tyre. He resoled his boots, greased their leather uppers with a block of tallow, and finished his plans for his hide between the bombing raids.

In the evening he did not stop shaking, only breaking his silence to ask for a mattock, a saw, a hammer and some nails, and as much food as the Golvis could spare. He could not stand the bombing any more. He was going back up the mountain next morning. If he was going to die, he would rather die in a little peace and quiet, not at the hands of his own side.

The captain slipped from the village well before dawn, following a German patrol going out to check the southern approaches, his boots in his hand until he left the cobbled streets. The night-time frosts had not yet returned, so trenching should not be too difficult today, and the Golvis had lent him a good strong mattock, now over his shoulder in the style of every peasant going off to his fields. Under his sacking coat, on the string tags left by Elvira, hung his tools and slung over his back were a bag of boiled potatoes and a roll of the remainder of the sacking retrieved from the camp and now dried out.

He reached the camp soon after dawn, relieved to see no more recent footprints than those he and Luigi had seen a week before. As was to be expected: the Germans would be too busy repairing their railway for the next few days. He had time to build his hide if the weather held out. He rigged up a makeshift shelter in the ruined buildings of the camp, somewhere to sleep tonight, for it would take him more than a day to build the hide.

It took until noon to pick his site in the pine forest, the area the Germans saw no need to walk through. The slope of the ground had to be just right to provide the drainage he needed to prevent the hide becoming flooded and at the same time conceal its lines. He marked his chosen spot with his mattock and set off to look at it from all the angles from which a patrol might look, touring it in increasing loops until he saw that it was good. There was even bracken near it. He cleared the pine needles from his ground, sweeping them with his mattock into piles well clear of the area he would need for the soil and stones he would be lifting out, and started digging his trench into the mountain-side. The further down he went the colder and harder the earth he found; the thaw had only gone down a foot and although the pines had been crumbling the soil for decades there were still rocks and stones to work his way around and lift. By evening he had finished the hole, nearly the width of the corrugated iron sheet he had found in the camp, and slightly longer, a trench like a cutting into a railway tunnel. He walked back up to the old camp to eat a cold potato and to sleep. He dreamt of sleeping in the hide and its roof collapsing.

–

The next morning he went straight down to his trench and found none of the night’s rainwater still in it. The drainage worked. He went back up the hill and dragged down the iron sheet, then the joist timbers he needed. He planked the sides of the trench, splay-nailed cross-members across the top and bottom and duck-boarded the floor, then laid the iron sheet across the top and weighed it down with rocks. It had taken all day to get this far, but he could sleep in it tonight and see if it was weathertight.

All night it rained, the raindrops exploding on the metal above his head, but the steep angle of the roof down the slope - he could kneel with his back straight up at the inward end - meant that he stayed dry. At first he could not sleep, forever thinking he had just been hit by a drop of rain finding a way through his roof, but he slowly grew more confident of his work and at last fell into the deep sleep of the working man.

–

He awoke after dawn not wet, not cold, but hungry. It was his third day out of the village, the third day away from the bombs, away from the fear of being betrayed. The ringing in his ears from the bombs had gone, driven out by manual labour and the tranquillity of the mountain. Luigi would be coming up to the camp at noon with more food. He set to work with vigour, relishing the thought that when the job was done he would at last, after weeks of idleness, have achieved something, be less dependant on the people in the village for his survival.

First he had to camouflage the hide. He piled the soil he had dug from the trench over his roof and down the sides where it stood proud from the slope, stamping it down with his feet so that the contours would not sag as the soil settled. He wandered fifty yards this way and that to see if his work was obtrusive in the grove, returned and shifted the soil again to smooth the contours. He went off in search of wintering bracken to uproot and plant around his site. Then he scattered his piles of pine-needles and cones over the top. All was now concealed except the entrance. It must be nearly noon he thought, and so he piled bracken against it as a stop-gap and went up to the camp, whistling the folk song Luigi had taught him as a call-sign.

–

He stops some way beneath the camp and from above hears the same song being whistled. He whistles back and Luigi comes down to meet him. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Come and see.’ He takes him down to the grove, convinced of the imperfection of his work, surprised at the lad’s failure to spot it straightaway.

‘Where is it?’

‘You’re standing next to it.’

Luigi looks around, still baffled. The captain bends down and removes the bracken covering the entrance. ‘Surely you saw it? I don’t need compliments. I need to know if it’s easy to spot it if you don’t know where it is.’

‘I didn’t see it, honestly.’ Luigi kneels down to look inside. ‘It’s fantastic. A real carpenter’s work. Is it warm?’

‘No, it’s not. But when I was staying in charcoal-burners’ huts in the north they were using bracken to line their walls. If I can find some which is dry I can make it a lot warmer; and the sacking we dried out at your house will be very useful as well once I’ve got some bracken down.

‘Have you brought any food? I’m starving.’

Luigi opens his sack and spreads out on the ground some bread, some cheese and two thin slices of mountain sausage. ‘Mamma said you’d need cheering up’ he says and reaching into the sack pulls out a flask of wine. He flicks away with a sudden jerk of his wrist the film of olive oil sealing the wine and in turn they swig a toast to the captain’s new home.

‘Now eat.’ The captain waits for him. ‘You need it more than I do, Roberto, you’ve been working. Eat.’ The captain falls on the food and wolfs it down.

–

Luigi has been up to the camp to retrieve the cooking pot they had seen the week before while the captain has been finishing the door to his hide, some smaller planks of wood crossed and nailed together, then hinged to the roof with bent nails. ‘I’ve brought up some beans and potatoes for you to cook. They should last you a few days. I’ll be up again the day after tomorrow, in the morning. If it snows before then, come to the spur above the nearest church at sunset. We’ll use the same song.’

The captain spent the following days scouting the mountains, learning the layout of the valleys, the German dispositions, the routes to take to avoid the bare moors where a man can be seen from distance, the places to hide and the routes of escape.

But he never went to look at Sannessuno. He told himself that he didn’t need to because he already knew every rock on the way. He knew it was a poor excuse, that he dreaded seeing what was happening to it, feared for his friends and the partisans’ families. He wondered if he would ever dare go back amongst them after what the air force had done.

Then the time came for Luigi’s next food-run, when they were to meet at the spur above the village, not at the old camp. He arrived early. Looking down he was appalled by the destruction. The mountain and the angle of descent of the bombs had spared the buildings below him, even the street in which the Golvis and the Giobellinis lived, hence the Germans using it to drive their panzers through, but beyond this lee, by the river and the railway line, the village was a shell. The thickness of the lower stone walls had saved so many buildings from total collapse, but walls above higher windows had fallen and roofing timbers given way.

It could have been a village long deserted but for the swarms of people moving the rubble into piles, searching for the bodies of their kin to give them proper burial, hunting their stores of food hidden in the secret places of their shattered homes. Everywhere there were shanties improvised from the ruined fabrics, makeshift tents and lean-tos open to the weather and to prying eyes, people improvising meals in pots cooking over fires of timber too shattered to be of use in rebuilding their lives. All comfort and dignity seemed gone. Even the barefooted children were simply standing around, dazed, not playing.

Luigi arrived with empty hands. The doctor wanted to see the captain and he was to spend the night in the Golvis’ house. Luigi would lead him down to the edge of the village and they would then, for safety’s sake, split up and the captain follow Luigi a corner behind him.

‘I don’t think you need worry quite so much about the Giobellinis now’ Luigi said as they started walking down. ‘The Germans raided their stores on the last day of the bombing. Presumably they’d been annoyed to find the house locked earlier in the week, so they came back, broke down the door and cleared out their cellar. You should have seen Natale. He was beside himself with rage. He stormed round to his friend the mayor and demanded that he tell the Germans to return the food. “Tell them who I am. Haven’t I been one of the leading lights of the fascist party hereabouts, even before the time of the Great March on Rome that brought the Duce to power? How can I be treated like this?” The mayor replied that there was nothing he could do, that Natale should be grateful that the stores would be used by the brave soldiers defending the fatherland.

‘So now he’ll be scraping for food just like the rest of us’ said Luigi. ‘If the same happened to all the other fascists in the town, we’d soon be rid of the whole pack of them, Germans and all.’

–

They eat their supper by candlelight in the dining room, the captain, the doctor, Carlo and Elvira. For the first time in over a week the captain has washed himself, has had a fire in a room closed to the wind to warm his hands by and Elvira has cosseted him as best she could. It seems strange to eat at a table again, to sit on furniture, to have room to pace indoors, to face the prospect of sleep away from the howling of the wind and the wolves.

‘What’s it like on the mountain?’ the doctor asks as they finish their supper, a meagre one but warming.

‘Cold, damp, windy. I’m grateful to be down for the night.’

‘But habitable? Luigi has told me about your hide.’

‘I don’t think I’d be able to stay there for long if it was snowing at that height. It’s only the ability to light a fire outside that keeps me alive. And when it snows I leave tracks to follow.’

Elvira looks concerned, is about to say something, but the doctor raises his hand, pulling his rank. He has something to say and the Golvis are to remain silent. He fiddles with his glass, distractedly running his thumb and finger up and down its sides. ‘We have a problem. We need to be able to move some of the young men out of the village. Too many of them are being flushed out into the open by these bombing raids. I was wondering if something could be done for them up there.’

‘How many of them are there?’

‘Getting on for twenty.’

The prospect of so many men, all untrained in concealment and survival techniques, blundering around the area of his hide troubles the captain. ‘It would be too easy for the Germans until the weather improves, doctor. I can only stay concealed because I’m alone. More hides like mine and they’d be more obvious. And how can you conceal the fires for twenty men, their tracks? If the Germans find evidence of the group re-forming they’ll patrol the mountain even more. Then it will be harder to set something up in the spring.’

‘I suspect you’re right, but it’s hard for them down here. It’s hard for us all.’

‘How many people have been killed?’

‘Maybe a hundred, if you include the ones who were injured and would have survived with decent medical care. And then you have to consider the ones who’ll die from disease.’

‘Porca miseria! Even with the village evacuated in the day? How are the survivors taking it?’

‘It’s hard to say. They’re not like soldiers, used to being under fire. But what I’ve seen is completely different even from shell-shock. The apathy of people who don’t know what’s happening, why it’s happening, how anything so inhuman could happen to them. In these mountains, they’re used to people dying. Minor illnesses kill poor people. And from time to time we have earthquakes: when an earthquake comes, people just shrug their shoulders, like they do when another tax or law comes from Rome to make them even poorer. But this is worse even than an earthquake. An earthquake is an act of god to them, something they must put up with. This is an act of man.