The Partisan Heart Page 13

  ‘We were almost at the meeting place.’ Luigi grimaced as a wave of pain shook his shoulder. ‘We were early. I will say one thing for that English capitano, Sandro, he was brave. I could tell he was finding it hard going, but he carried on without complaining.’

  ‘Here, try some of this.’ Sandro held a cup of broth to Luigi’s lips and he drank from it.

  ‘But we were almost there and, you know, I sensed something wasn’t right. I could almost smell it. We rounded the side of a small hill just above Cerese and they were waiting for us. The Englishman was felled by the first volley. I fell back at once, heading off the trail, but a stray one caught me.’ He winced, shifting position on the bed on which he lay. ‘I didn’t really notice it because I was so preoccupied with getting away from them. But when I stopped to get my breath back I knew all about it. It hurt like hell.’

  ‘The Englishman …?’

  ‘Oh, he was a goner. I could see as soon as he hit the ground. He took a lot of bullets, poor man. They were on the track in front of us. I thought the only thing was to try to get back here to your mother’s house. Christ, I thought I’d never make it.’

  A little later, Sandro went back into the bedroom to see how Luigi was, all thoughts of going to see Angela having disappeared from his head.

  ‘Sandro, I am feeling better,’ he said hoarsely, ‘but there is one thing that is worrying me.’

  ‘Yes, what is it, Luigi?’

  ‘Well, you know I sent you back here because I figured you hadn’t seen your mamma in quite some time and I know your father, God rest his soul, is only recently deceased. I did it with the best possible intentions and I really didn’t think the Germans would be out and about in such weather. What we were doing was a piece of cake.’

  ‘Yes, and I feel guilty as hell for not being there.’ said Sandro, shaking his head.

  ‘Exactly, Sandro, my lad. And I’m worried now that there will be repercussions. The English capitano was carrying a substantial sum of money and that is now lost to the Germans. I could get into serious trouble with headquarters for being casual in my approach to this exercise.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Luigi, I should have insisted …’

  ‘Unless …’ said Luigi, looking steadily at Sandro.

  ‘Unless what?’ said Sandro, guilt lacerating his mind.

  ‘Unless we just forget to tell anyone that you were not there?’ He smiled now, smoothing down the blankets in front of him.

  ‘Forget?’

  ‘Yes, forget. After all, what difference would it have made if you had been there? The Germans would still have been waiting for us. The Englishman would still be dead. In fact, you might be dead also and, yes, it is terrible that the Englishman is dead, but it would be worse still if a good partisan were also out of action.’

  Captain George Bright’s bespectacled face entered Sandro’s head at that moment and the smiling face of the daughter he had not seen for so long and who he would never see again crossed his mind.

  ‘Well, if it’ll help. I suppose it wouldn’t really have made that much of a difference if I had been there.’

  ‘Exactly, lad. Exactly. Now we will just forget that you weren’t there. Eh?’ He lay back on the pillow behind his head, closed his eyes and drifted into sleep once more.

  Once again, Sandro leaned on the wall beside the front door, smoking a cigarette. There was something gnawing at the back of his mind like a dog with a bone, but he had no idea what it was. He feared that he no longer trusted the man who was sleeping in the room behind him, feared that he had never trusted him or his humanity, ever since Angela had told him about the beatings that she took from him, ever since he had disappeared into the trees with those two young Germans. And even now. He had no reason to doubt what Luigi had told him, but there was something inside him warning him that he should take everything this man said with a pinch of salt, that Luigi somehow saw himself standing outside of the rules by which other people lived.

  There were moments, he realised, when he considered Luigi to be as much the embodiment of evil as the Nazis.

  Waging war, taking lives, places blinkers over your eyes, he realised. You enter a tunnel that is walled by violence and death. At no point do you step back, step outside the cycle of death and violence to weigh up exactly what is going on, exactly who you are killing and what this killing is doing to those who are wielding the weapons. The valley, the Valtellina, still existed, its walls climbing up towards jagged peaks. The tracks that he had walked as a boy still led to the same places on either side of the valley. But so much, so much had changed and would never again be the same.

  He went back into the house, put a flask of water in his pack, picked up his rifle and said to his mother, ‘I am going out for much of the day. I think he will sleep. If he wakes up tell him I will be back before nightfall.’ He could not bring himself to utter Luigi’s name.

  She nodded and returned wordlessly to the pot that was boiling on the range.

  As he climbed towards the track that Luigi and George Bright would have taken, he calculated the time that they had been en route. His years, as a boy, of tramping across these mountains gave him a unique and innate ability to work out how long it would take to get anywhere.

  He considered Luigi’s wounded stumble towards his mother’s house and added it to the time at which they had separated, high on the valley side. Eventually, after walking with measured steps for five hours, he arrived in an area that felt right to him, that by his calculations should be where the ambush had taken place yesterday.

  The trees were skeletal and regular, as if they had been placed in the ground as part of a plantation. The earth was russet with the leaves that had remained there since last autumn and above it all, the sky was cobalt-blue. It was cold in the early morning, but it was at least still, without any wind. Later, it would probably even become quite warm, he thought, bringing the first intimations of the heat of spring.

  He started to make a sweep of the area around the track, in long strips, zig-zagging back and forth, his eyes darting from right to left, in search of anything that looked at all unusual. He indicated each strip with a wooden marker and reckoned he could carefully search about ten feet on either side as he walked.

  He had stopped for something to eat at about eleven-thirty in the morning and sat on a stone, sweating, wondering what on earth he was doing, what he was hoping to find. Or was this all about hoping not to find anything?

  Three hours later, however, he did find it. It was about twenty feet from the main track, on the south side of it. He saw it from a distance, hoping it was something else, but knowing that it was not. A pile of leaves, a beautiful golden-brown heap, bathed in spots of sunlight that sprinkled down between the branches of the trees.

  He walked up to it and bent down to brush the top layer of leaves away, tears falling from his eyes onto them.

  The dark English uniform had mud splatters on it from the hike through the mountains and the face was grubby from the leaves that had lain on it for a day.

  George Bright wore a surprised look on his face, his eyes staring out in an almost quizzical manner and his mouth open as if in the process of saying ‘What …?’

  As Sandro tried to lift the Englishman’s head he felt, with a sinking stomach, his finger disappearing into a space in the back. He bent down to have a look, turning the already stiff neck, and found a small, round hole in the back of the head, just above the neck.

  He uncovered the rest of the body and examined it for other wounds, but, as he had feared, found none.

  ‘He took a lot of bullets, poor man. They were on the track in front of us.’ Luigi’s words reverberated in his head.

  Captain George Bright had taken only one bullet and that was in the back of the head.

  It had been dark for several hours by the time Sandro returned home. He had sat for a very long time in the forest, thinking about what he should do, but continually revisiting the guilt he felt about Angela. But he also h
ad an overwhelming desire to see her again. He felt he could hardly do that if he were to have her husband killed, which was, in effect, what would happen if he were to tell the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, the body who controlled all partisan activity, what had really happened to George Bright. Against this, of course, was weighed the photograph of the Englishman’s daughter, smiling out at a world filled with hope and promise and not the world filled with death and despair that Sandro felt he now occupied.

  He walked into the house still undecided, but, within moments, heard himself saying to the figure that lay on the bed, ‘Luigi, my friend, how are you? Is it any easier?’

  *

  Sandro’s boots left a trail of dark prints on the snow that dusted the rocks across which he walked. There had even been a fall of snow down on the valley floor. That meant that it would be even heavier up amongst the higher peaks. which for the last few days had been shrouded in impenetrable cloud.

  It was without too much fear of discovery, therefore, that Sandro descended the side of the valley with the intention of once more falling into Angela’s arms under the familiar rock overhang. It was cold, but these days the partisans were well-clothed. The Allies had provided coats, warm clothing and boots before Christmas and Sandro no longer had to rely on the unpleasant necessity of plundering the bodies of dead Germans. It didn’t stop some of his colleagues, however.

  From high up its northern slope, the valley looked wonderful this particular morning. He rarely found time now to wander at will like this, as he used to, but a number of the group who had taken part in several operations recently had been stood down for two days and they were all making their way to visit loved ones. Sandro was hoping to meet up with Angela. She went to their clearing after lunch each and every day just in case he somehow was in the area. In the last few months they had met only twice and even then for a very short time, in which they held each other so tight that the breath had almost deserted their bodies.

  His anticipation increased the closer he came to the clearing. He had found, during the last six months, that the very thought of Angela was his saving grace. She entered his head and cleared it of all the misery of the war, all the conflicting feelings that he endured. He thought of her as he lay down at night, attempting to sleep, wrapped in layers of blankets as protection against the mountain chill; fantasised about a different life with her and baby Antonio, in another place far from the Valtellina; imagined going home to her each night; felt, even in the cold mountain air, the heat of her embrace beneath blankets in a warm bed.

  As he rounded a small hill close to her village, however, he experienced a familiar feeling. It was a feeling of dread, of danger. It was almost as if he had developed a sixth sense over the past months and could smell danger like the smell of a wood fire from a distance.

  And, in fact, the first confirmation he had that something was actually wrong was the smell of burning wood. His nostrils twitched and then his eyes widened as he rounded the hill above the village in which Angela lived. A plume of dark smoke climbed out of it, drifting lazily into the sky.

  He stopped dead in his tracks, trying to control his muscles. His hands shook and his knees trembled as if he had just climbed a steep slope. Then he started out again, increasing his pace, coming down the hill. His fear for Angela and Antonio was almost tangible. A foreboding within him told him that it was already too late, that this was the end of the best thing that would ever happen to him.

  He heard someone moving towards him on the same track. He or she was moving at speed, crashing into branches and bushes. He stepped to one side, fearing that it might be a German.

  Suddenly, around the corner ran an elderly woman, clutching a baby to her chest. Her eyes were wild, looking in every direction and her breath was being dragged out of the very corners of her lungs.

  Sandro stepped out in front of her, his arms open wide to halt her headlong rush.

  ‘Madonna, cosa fai …?’ she gasped, knocking Sandro back a few paces.

  ‘Signora, what’s wrong? Calma … calma. Why are you running …?’

  ‘The Germans …’ she gulped in oxygen and slumped to the ground, clasping the child to her even more tightly. ‘They came about an hour ago … herded us all out of our houses like cattle … and started setting fire to them. Old Salvatore Pezzo protested and they shot him. They just shot him! He did nothing …’

  ‘Easy … Calma …’ He knelt beside her, holding her shoulder and shaking it. ‘Why did they come? Why did they do this?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re starting to hurt us for what the partisans do. Two days ago, they took hostages in the next village to ours and shot a dozen of them.’

  ‘Did they take anyone from your village?’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t know why. They only took one. I don’t know what she had done …’

  ‘Who was it?’ he asked, knowing full well what the answer was going to be. ‘Who was she?’

  ‘She has done nothing. She has a baby …’

  ‘Who? What was her name?’ His voice rising. He knew already.

  ‘Ronconi. It was the Ronconi woman. The wife of Luigi who has the garage down on the Sondrio road. They took her and her baby. The baby was screaming and she was shouting at them. I ran with my daughter’s baby. I don’t know what they’re doing to the rest. I was at the back of the crowd of villagers and I sneaked away. Ohhh …’ She collapsed into torrents of tears, her fists bunched into her eyes as if to rub away the sight she had just witnessed. ‘This damned war! When will it end?’

  ‘Come with me. I’ll take you to my mother’s house.’

  He half-carried the old woman and her granddaughter the few kilometres to his mother’s house and by the time they arrived there she was exhausted by both the walk and the events she had witnessed.

  Sandro bade his farewells to his mother and returned to the burning village.

  He slid like a shadow along the sides of the buildings on the outskirts, rifle at the ready – it was carried at all times now – heart pounding, concerned that there would still be Germans in the village. Smoke billowed into the sky from a few of the houses, but a ghostly silence reigned, as if the world had been emptied of birdsong and the everyday sounds that held the houses together like mortar between the bricks – the echoing sing-song voices and the sounds of cooking implements; the shrieks of children and the deep-voiced grunts of the men, home for lunch.

  He looked out from behind one building and there was the village square. The church, a dilapidated dark grey building with an imposing front door stood on one side. Houses looked out from the other sides, smoke drifting lazily from the windows of one of them. In the centre of the square lay a body – the old man, Salvatore Pezzo, no doubt, of whom the old lady had spoken – but apart from that there was not a movement.

  Reckoning that the Germans had departed, Sandro walked out towards the body, his gun still at the ready and shouted, ‘Ho! Is anybody there?’

  Not a sound. Again, he shouted:

  ‘Ho! Anyone!’

  There was a movement behind him and he turned swiftly, his finger tightening over the trigger of his rifle. But it was a young woman with a child. Then to his left, an elderly couple appeared and following them an entire family of men, women and children; all shuffling out of their homes silently, staring at him in terror.

  *

  Angela shifted position again. The old man to her left had fallen asleep and his head had come to rest on her shoulder. She shivered as she felt it roll uncomfortably against her collar bone. He smelled awful; his breath was rank and his body stank. But then, she probably did not smell very good either, she thought, letting her head fall back against the wooden slats of the carriage, staring up at the roof.

  The train had not moved now for many hours. It had stopped in the last hours of the night and the hundred or so souls in the carriage had watched the first shafts of light begin to splinter the gaps between the planks of wood that made up the walls and roof of the carr
iage.

  At first it had been good to stop moving. The endless bumping of the carriage across the tracks jarred bones and stretched already aching muscles. After the silence of the night, the light had instigated a fresh round of sounds from the huddled group, like a human dawn chorus. From one corner a woman had talked endlessly, a stream of words in a language that Angela could not understand, words that seemed to have no gaps between them. She imagined a long, thin stream of paper being pulled from the woman’s mouth, covered in the strange letters of an unknown alphabet. From other corners came the sound of weeping and the deep, gruff sounds of men’s voices trying to calm their sources.

  Gradually as the morning had worn on and turned, she presumed, into early afternoon, an eerie silence had descended on the carriage. She looked at the faces around her. They were grey and dirty. Children stared back at her with sunken eyes. They stared at her but saw nothing, helplessness and hopelessness forming cataracts over their vision. They earthed themselves in their parents, clinging desperately to them as if in the grip of a huge wind that was going to tear them away, lifting their tiny bodies into the sky like paper kites.

  Antonio slept in Angela’s aching arms. For the two days she had been in the carriage, she had held him to her breast as if she were trying to force him between her ribs to make him a part of her. He had cried with hunger yesterday, at first angrily and, gradually, more and more hopelessly, staring into her eyes, pleading for something to eat. Eventually, his tears had dried into dirty, salty streaks on his face and he had gone silent, resigned to this new feeling of constant hunger.

  In the middle of the night, they had been given water, which had been passed around in silence, politely almost, as if they had been sitting round a kitchen table, eating dinner.

  At last there were shouts outside: the harsh vowels and consonants of the German language and the train shuddered into movement once more, slowly at first and then faster.