Wolf on the Mountain (20 page)

One of the men has collected firewood and another stew is simmering on the new grate. They sit around in their capes smoking cigarettes, contented and warm. ‘We’re better off than most of the people in the village’ says one.

‘As snug as you were up here until December’ says the captain. ‘And the same thing could happen again. You thought you were well hidden then, but the things that hid you then hid the Germans when they came to take you.’

‘You’ve been up here for weeks’ says Ugo. ‘Vincenzo came up looking for you and couldn’t find you. You stayed hidden. So will we, if you tell us how.’

‘It’s easier the fewer people you are. On your own you don’t talk. I heard your conversation from a long way off yesterday morning. I heard it because I was listening for any signs of danger. You have to learn to be silent, to listen. You have to be as attentive as the animals you hunt. They spend their lives listening, sniffing, looking for any sign that predators are close. Your predators, the Germans, are still patrolling these mountains, will do it more often as the weather improves.

‘But even if you’d been silent I’d have known you were here yesterday. I knew there were six of you from the footprints around the spring. I followed the footprints up here, just as for weeks I’ve been following German footprints to find out the routes of their patrols. Vincenzo will tell you that we knew this hut was off their route because I’d been following their tracks. You have to learn, when you’re walking, to look for stones, low plants, to step on. Anything that won’t keep a footprint. Avoid muddy soil. If you can’t, use a branch to brush away your prints. And even if the soil is hard, remember that when there’s a dew you leave a trail in the grass. If you have to cross wet grass, don’t walk in a straight line. Meander across it, with your legs apart, like a grazing animal does. Only men walk in straight lines.’

‘You make us sound like hunted animals.’

‘You are, Bruno. Forget it and you’ll die like a hunted animal.’

–

The next day a new man, Salvatore, joins them in the camp. He had escaped from one of the gangs clearing the bomb damage in the village, his mother sent him to Vincenzo’s mother and she has sent him up the mountain to join the group. He tells them of the damage in the town, that people are still dying from their injuries in the makeshift shelters the old women are running as first aid stations. Families have been making tents in the ruins of their homes. Many of the sewers in the main streets have been destroyed and everywhere there is still the stench of rotting flesh and excrement. The mayor and his friends are doing nothing.

‘That’s the worst thing,’ says Vincenzo, ‘those fascists doing nothing to help the people. They’re probably just looking after their own things and damn the poor. If the party were in power something would be done. Don’t the people understand that?’

‘They’re all still too dazed. And the Germans are putting out propaganda saying they’re better off with them than they would be with the Allies. “Look what they’ve done to you” they say.’

‘Do the people believe them?’

‘Some do. Others just pray the Germans will get sick of it and leave. They reckon the Allies have got a radio operator near here.’

The captain is suddenly attentive. An Allied radio operator? Someone he could make contact with? He asks question after question. Salvatore says that the Germans reckon the man is directing the bombing raids. There are posters everywhere offering a substantial reward for the man the posters call the English captain. The captain translates the sum into sterling, a hundred pounds, five years’ income for the poorer people in these parts.

‘That’s five times as much as the normal reward for an English soldier.’

‘No-one’s betrayed a soldier yet.’

‘But this is a fortune. They must want him badly.’

‘They do. They caught him in Sannessuno last week, but he beat up a couple of their traffic policemen and escaped.’

Traffic policemen? The village? The captain’s hope for an English companion, a saviour with a radio, is dashed. Worse, he is suddenly aware of his own greater danger now that there is such a large price on his head. Vincenzo watches him closely, scratching his beard, his eyes close to tears. Suddenly he can contain himself no more and a great laugh bursts forth. He puts his arm around the arrival’s shoulder: ‘Salvatore, meet our distinguished guest, the English captain
.
Don’t you remember him from before the old camp was raided? I’m afraid he doesn’t have a radio.’ He turns to the Englishman: ‘Don’t worry, Roberto.’

‘Why not? Anyone could betray me now.’

‘What are you worried about? Don’t you realise what just happened? Salvatore thought you were one of us. If you can fool one of the locals you can fool anyone.’

It has snowed on the new camp for three days. The cottage roof is weighed down by inches of snow. There are snakes of white along the branches of the little trees and their twigs. The landscape is once again reduced to black and white below a grey lowering sky. At least the Germans will not be coming up the mountain for a while, but the mothers stinting their families in the village in order to feed their heroes on the mountain are unable to bring provisions up.

The peasants’ sons are used to scrounging food from the hills. Salvatore has been exploring the trails through the woods, following tracks in the snow, and has snared a rabbit. He sharpens his clasp-knife on a stone and starts to prepare it for the pot. He removes its feet with a twist of the wrist, slits open the skin on its belly and starts peeling off its pelt like a glove, pulling the legs one way and then the other to ease the passage, teasing it over the shoulders and the head with his knife. He slits the belly wall, removes the organs too bitter to be cooked, and throws the rabbit to Ugo for the stew. It has taken barely more than a minute. Ugo cuts it into small pieces, one for each man. The fool will be the one who takes the largest piece, the head.

‘Only a rabbit. The hunting’s bad in this weather.’

‘We’re going to need to find more food up here’ says Ugo. ‘That bombing raid has destroyed a lot of stores that were hidden in the walls, and the Germans are looting again. Nothing’s coming down to them from the north. There hasn’t been a train in the valley for a week. Now when the peasants go off to dig their fields, to get them ready for the crops, the Germans are watching them, to see if they’re digging up any of their hidden provisions. Of course the peasants know they’re doing it.’

He turns to the captain: ‘Their families have been hiding food from landlords and other brigands for generations. You’ve noticed how every field has a pile of stones in the corner, dug up from the soil over the years? Every one of those piles hides a jar of something or other, but unless you know where to look you’ll never find it. And they’ve eyes in the backs of their heads to tell them if someone’s watching. All the lads up here come from peasant families. It’s why we’ve got more food than most. You put most of it in your cellar after the harvest, but you hide some of it as a matter of course when times are bad. A lot was hidden even before the Germans started stealing it.

‘But now there are so many more mouths to feed. All the sheep and cows and goats are gone. The flour’s running out. People are going back to making bread with bran, anything they can lay their hands on. Apart from that it’s just beans and potatoes. No meat, no other vegetables. People are eating the cats in the villages now. It’ll make things worse because the mice and rats will have a freer run at what’s left. We have to hope that the snow goes soon, so we can hunt. Every week there’ll be more mouths to feed up here.’

–

Another two escapers from the work gangs arrived the next morning. Vincenzo said that they could be up to twenty soon. ‘We need to start organising things, Roberto. What do you think?’

‘Twenty’s too many for this hut. Too much evidence around for the Germans if there are that many here, and we’ll need somewhere else to hide if they’re seen coming in this direction. We’ll need to find another hut, get it ready now. And we’ll need to have someone organising the food for everyone. But at least with that many we can start a look-out system.

‘The trouble is that we can’t
do
anything yet. The Allies won’t be here until May, so we can’t risk attacking the Germans, even sabotaging their communications yet. We can’t move around easily in this weather. It would take too long and we’d be leaving footprints everywhere. They’d just start taking hostages and shooting them. All we can do is lie low until the weather improves and hope they don’t find out we’re here. To do that we have to be as inconspicuous as possible. Twenty people all in one place can’t do that.’

‘Keeping our numbers down’s more easily said than done. The young men in the village are desperate to get up here. It’s too dangerous for them down there, with all these German round-ups to find more workers. And then there are the boys coming up to military age. They’ll have to hide from the press-gangs too. We’re going to have to find a way.’

The captain was unhappy. After their stew he slipped away to sleep in his hide.

–

When he returned next morning only Vincenzo, Ugo and Salvatore were still at the hut. The others had slipped back to hide with their families until the weather improved. All agreed that it was for the best. It would be easier to remain undetected, easier to make their meagre provisions last. They played cards to pass the time, told anecdotes.

‘You should have been there when the Germans arrested Vincenzo. It was just after the Armistice. They were marching a group of Allied prisoners they’d caught in a sweep of the mountain along the road into the village. Vincenzo thought they needed cheering up and gave them the V-for-victory sign. Some of the prisoners cheered and the Germans arrested him. There was a girl there, a stranger. She went up to the German sergeant: “Please don’t arrest him, signore. He’s my brother. He’s simple. He doesn’t know what that sign means.” They let him go.’

‘I didn’t know whether to hug her or to shout at her for insulting me. “Simple” indeed!’

‘She should have said “crazy”.’

The evenings were the talking time as the men relaxed around the fire, talked country matters and politics, their hopes for the time after the war. The captain was asked about the oppression of the workers in England, how the rich ate five meals a day while the workers starved. ‘So you believed Mussolini’s propaganda?’ he asked.

‘The same thing was happening here. Why shouldn’t it happen in your country as well?’

‘We’re not a fascist country.’

‘But when you had workers’ strikes, wasn’t the army used?’

‘Only to prevent riots.’

‘That was the excuse Mussolini used.’

–

‘Easter without lamb. To think of it. Everyone, even the poorest peasant, has lamb on Easter day. It has been cooking all night on a low heat in a large pot with some water and onions and herbs. We are good Christians. We respect the fast of lent, although in this poor country there’s never much to eat anyway. We follow the stations of the cross on the Friday, fast on Saturday. It’s so hard when Mamma is already cooking the lamb and the smell fills the house. And then on Sunday we go to mass, come home and Mamma breaks eggs and ewe’s cheese into the pot and we eat our fill.

‘To think of it. Easter without going to church. Of course we can’t go. The Germans would round us up, the godless people.

‘Or are we all now godless people after these years of war? God has sent us the worst winter anyone in the village can remember. April and a foot of snow outside the hut. It almost reaches down to the village. And these Germans. And the bombing raids. It’s like the plagues of Egypt. Will the waters turn to blood next?’

‘German blood, maybe’ Ugo intervenes, ‘but it won’t be God who does it. It’ll be us. And forget this superstition, Salvatore. Didn’t Karl Marx say that religion was the opium of the masses? Think like that and we’ll never change anything.’

‘Are we not Christians?’ Salvatore responds.

‘Christians?’ Ugo sneers sarcastically and spits. ‘Christianity’s for the ruling classes. Priests always protect the rich. What do they say: the devil always hides himself behind the cross?’

The captain remembers the camel and the eye of the needle, makes to have his say, thinks better of it. Everyone is imprisoned by the snow, huddled in blankets or sacking, cannot go out in the daylight and make tracks, can only hope, or pray, that the smoke from the fire over which their beans are stewing will be dispersed by the fierce wind before it draws attention. It is better to avoid argument, but to the others there’s nothing else to do until the weather improves.

When will this winter end? Last year in the prison camp you could only see snow on the highest distant Alps by now. It was already getting warmer, the poplar trees around the fields already orange with their first leaves, the weather in which generals say it’s time to advance.

–

‘It was such a good harvest this year. The old people were saying that God was rewarding us for ending the war. The trees were laden with pears, figs, nuts. The maize was plump, the beans and onions and potatoes plentiful. The women were boiling tomatoes into paste for days. And the grape harvest! People were treading the grapes well into the night, there were so many of them. Everyone was exhausted getting it all in. We thought we’d have a winter of plenty. And of course we thought the Allies would soon be here.

‘But they weren’t, and there were all the escaped prisoners to feed. There were so many of them. I suppose that if they’d all left at once and headed south, they’d have got through and the food would have lasted longer, but they’d been told by secret radio messages to stay where they were and wait for the English troops to come. The villages in the south were full of them, hundreds of men all needing to be fed. A lot of them came north and stayed at our camp. Sometimes we had as many as twenty of them.

‘Then things started to go wrong. The autumn rains came early. It poured for weeks. The Allies didn’t come. Then the Germans started taking our food. They came round counting everyone’s animals. Some they bought with chits the farmers could take to their barracks and exchange for money. But they couldn’t. When they went to the barracks the Germans refused to pay, saying the men who’d given the chits were Allied prisoners who’d stolen German uniforms. Then they gave up the pretence of giving chits. They were doing the same to the shepherds in the hills, taking their sheep.