Love and War in the Apennines (20 page)

‘I must confess,’ he went on, ‘that there are some aspects of my countrymen’s character that I cannot pretend to understand. I do not speak disloyally to make you feel more friendly to me because, no doubt, you, also, do not always understand your own people, but surely only Germany would employ a professor of entomology from Göttingen with only one lung, whose only interest is
lepidoptera
, to give lectures on Renaissance painting and architecture to soldiers who are engaged in destroying these things as hard as they are able. Do you not think it strange?’

‘I wouldn’t say that,’ I said, ‘I’m sure we do the same sort of thing and, if we don’t, I’m sure the Americans do.’

‘Really,’ he said. ‘You surprise me. You would not say that it is strange?’

‘The intention is, of course,’ he continued, ‘to make us popular with the inhabitants, but that is something we can never be. For instance, I came to that village down there by car. I suggested to the driver that he might like to accompany me up here; but he is not interested in the countryside or
lepidoptera.
Besides he told me that there is a regulation against leaving military vehicles
unattended. I did not ask him to accompany me because I wanted his company but because I knew that he would not enjoy himself in that village, or any other. When we arrived at it no one would speak to us. There was scarcely anyone to speak to anyway, which was very strange because it is a Sunday. They must have thought I had come to make some kind of investigation. It might have been better if we had not been wearing guns; but it is a regulation.’

I could visualise the state of panic the village must have been thrown into by their arrival, with young men running from the houses and the
stalle
and up the mountainsides, like hunted hares.

‘It is not pleasant to be disliked,’ he said, ‘and it is very unpleasant to be German and to know that one is hated, because one
is
German and, because, collectively, we are wrong in what we are doing. That is why I hate this war, or one of the reasons. And of course, because of this, we shall lose it. We must. We have to.’

‘It’s going to take you a long time to lose it at this rate,’ I said. ‘Everything seems to be going very slowly.’

‘It may seem so to you,’ he said. ‘But it won’t be here, in Italy, that we shall be beaten. We shall hold you here, at least through this winter and perhaps we could hold you through next summer, but I do not think there will be a next summer. What is going on in Russia is more than flesh and blood can stand. We are on the retreat from Smolensk; we are retreating to the Dnieper. According to people who have just come from there we are losing more men every day than we have lost here in the Italian peninsula in an entire month. And what are you doing?’ he asked.

I told him that I was on my way south towards the front. There seemed no point in telling him that I was living here. Also I was ashamed.

‘If you take the advice of an enemy,’ he said, ‘you will try to pass the winter here, in these mountains. By the time you get to the battle front it will be very, very cold and very, very difficult to pass through it. Until a few days ago we all thought we would be retiring beyond the Po; but now the winter line is going to be far south of Rome. It has already been given a name. They call it the
Winterstellung.
’

‘Tell me one thing,’ I said. ‘Where have we got to now. I never hear any news.’

‘You have Termoli and Foggia on the east coast, which means that you will now be able to use bombers in close-support and you have Naples; but take my advice and wait for the spring.’

I asked him where he had learned his English. He told me that he had spent several summer vacations in England before the war.

‘I liked England,’ he said. ‘And the English. You do not work hard but you have the good sense not to be interested in politics. I liked very much your way of life.’

He got to his feet.

‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘it has given me great pleasure to have met you. Good luck to you and, perhaps, though I do not think it probable, we shall meet again after the war at Göttingen, or London.’

‘Or Philippi,’ I felt like saying, but didn’t.

‘Now if you would be so kind,’ he said, ‘please give me the empty bottle as I cannot obtain more of this beer without handing the bottles back. Bottles are in short supply.’

The last I saw of him was running across the open downs with his net unfurled, in the direction from which I had come, making curious little sweeps and lunges as he pursued his prey, a tall, thin, rather ungainly figure with only one lung. I was sorry to see him go.

When I got back to the Pian del Sotto that evening everybody had already returned, except Armando, and the sole subject of conversation was the arrival at the village in the valley of
Oberleutnant
Frick and his driver and their subsequent departure from it. The bush-telegraph was working well – it was a pity that it operated in two directions, outwards as well and inwards.

As I imagined it would, the panic created by their arrival had sent all the men of military age in the area rushing off to the woods and in the time that it took someone who had a kinsman in our village to climb up by some secret path over the cliff and down to it, the
paura
had begun there and with similar results – even Armando had skedaddled – and it had been communicated to the occupants of every other village within walking distance. It was as if a stone had been thrown into a pond and the splash it had made became ripples moving outwards in concentric circles, one behind the other, as more messengers had gone out bringing the latest reports on the situation, what in our army were called ‘sitreps’.

In the village in the valley the
paura
had begun to diminish as soon as the
Oberleutnant
had assembled his butterfly net and had begun to move out of the village on what he imagined was the way up the mountain. Officers were known to be addicted to outdoor sports, it was the one thing that officers were known to have in common, whatever their nationality, and this one was obviously a fisherman, though what he hoped to land with such a flimsy net and no rod in a river which had hardly any water in it at this season, no one knew and no one dared to ask. None of them had ever heard of butterfly hunting, or laid eyes on a butterfly hunter, so that when he asked a man and his wife who were on their way to attend mass in the village, for by this time there was no one else in sight to ask in his painstaking Italian what was the best way to the top of the mountain, they thought he must be a
lunatic to want to go fishing on the top of a mountain which was over four and a half thousand feet high. And when they heard this in the village everyone was much relieved that he was only a soldier whom the war had made wrong in the head, for he was not the first to be deprived of his senses in this way. And when he returned, in what sounded like a state of euphoria, with what he had apparently described as
alcuni esemplari rari
, some rare specimens, their curiosity had got the better of their fear and he was made to display his catch before departing in an atmosphere of goodwill. For him it must have been the end of a perfect day, a German whom nobody loved.

As is usual in such cases, only the bad news that there was a German in the neighbourhood had been circulated, the fact that he was a lunatic fisherman and the later news that he was a butterfly hunter had only just got through to our village and the Pian del Sotto when I arrived, so that, unknowingly, the
Oberleutnant
had spoiled the Sunday for goodness knows how many people. And everyone at the Pian del Sotto professed surprise at the news that he was harmless, except Luigi.

‘Just what I always said about Germans. They’re not all bad lads,’ he said. And he looked at the rest of us as if we had all been labouring under some kind of delusion, of which he was the only one who had not been a victim.

‘I never heard you say that,’ Agata said, unkindly.

‘Neither did I,’ said Rita. ‘He never did.’

As they seemed about to break into one of their internecine feuds, and not at this moment feeling up to it, and having decided not to mention to anyone that I was a friend of
Oberleutnant
Frick, I took the opportunity to unpack the great sweaterful of fungi which I had been lugging about with me all day and was now thoroughly sick of, and spread them on the table. Immediately, the question of whether some Germans were nice or not was forgotten.

‘Don’t do that! They’re poisonous!’ they all screamed, the first time they had ever shouted at me in the way they did at one another, when I produced the lurid variety and the other sort with the blood-red under-belly, which as a precaution, I had wrapped in paper and kept separately from the others.

‘Well, you don’t have to eat them,’ I said, with some show of spirit. ‘I only wanted to show them to you. I want to know what they are.’

‘Take them outside! They’ll poison the table!’

The work of identification was carried out in the yard but although they all seemed to know something about fungi there was still a good deal of difference of opinion amongst them, about which sorts were edible. They all agreed about the ones that were poisonous –
velenoso
and those that were undoubtedly good to eat – ‘
mangereccio
’ or ‘
buono
’ they said, and some they were not sure about and they said
‘Ma!
’ which expressed grave doubt, with which opinion, now that I realised that they were actually intending to eat the specimens that passed their inspection, and that I would be eating them too, I associated myself most strongly.

In the end it emerged that the best ones were those with the blackish brown caps which they called
porcini neri
, little black pigs, and some of the paler ones which were just plain
porcini.
None of them liked the idea of eating the lurid variety and they were all agreed that the one with the white cap and the blood-red underparts, which they called
malefico
, would finish you off. I would have liked to have fed one to Nero.

‘You should have brought more of the good ones and not so many of the poisonous ones,’ Agata said, and she wasn’t joking.

‘Where did you harvest them?’ Luigi said when the women had taken the ones that were
buono
into the house to prepare them. His manner was severe, that of a schoolmaster with an errant
pupil. When I told him he was aghast, or pretended to be. I suspected he knew already.

‘You know what that is, where you’ve been harvesting them?’ This was the word he used, harvesting, as if they had been growing in fields like wheat. ‘It’s old so-an-so’s fungus bed (he called it
fungaia).
He’ll be very angry, old so-and-so will.’ And so on.

‘But they were all growing wild.’

‘Of course they were growing wild. That’s the only way they do grow. They’re all wild. Doesn’t make any difference whether they’re wild or not. He makes his living by harvesting fungus. He has to have a permission from the
commune
for that bit of forest, and he has to pay for it. No one else is allowed to touch them. When he goes up there tomorrow and finds a lot of them are gone he’ll think one of us did it (and he would be right, I thought of saying, but I decided not to). They’re worth a lot of money these days, fungi.’ And he named some fantastic price a kilo. But when Agata had fried them all together, the
porcini
and the
porcini neri
and some other varieties, in a vast, shallow iron pan, which she told me, was only used for cooking chestnuts and fungi, I noticed that he tucked in with the rest of us. They were delicious.

While on the mountain that day where I had gone, really more than anything to commune with myself about what I should do, I had decided not to try and reach the line by walking to it but to stay where I was, at least for the moment while things were fairly quiet. It was a difficult decision to take and perhaps a selfish one so far as the people at the Pian del Sotto were concerned, but I had learned to respect Wanda’s judgement in these matters and, if what
Oberleutnant
Frick had told me was true about the
Winterstellung
being stabilised south of Rome, it would be difficult to get close enough to pass through it before the snow fell, and
if I did try, so far as I could see, it would mean walking down the main ridge, most of the time very high up, at least five thousand feet. To try and travel at a lower level would mean crossing perhaps hundreds of subsidiary ridges and the deep valleys in between them, most of which would be at right angles to the direction in which I would be travelling, if the country towards Bismantova, which I had seen from Signor Zanoni’s orchard, was in any way typical. If only I had some maps.

I asked Luigi when the snow came.

‘Here? Usually about the middle of November, sometimes earlier, sometimes later; but that’s not the big snow. The big snow comes in December, towards the end of December.’

‘And on the mountains?’

‘Always by the middle of November and often very much then on the main ridge (he called it the
crinale).
And sometimes on the top of our mountain, too. Why do you ask me this about the snow?’

‘I am just interested. How do you get about when the snow comes?’

‘In the big snow you must have skis. Not many of us older men have them now. Without them you have to stay where you are, except that most of the paths down to the valley are always kept open.’

Then he said, ‘I am afraid for you when the snow comes, Enrico, because when it comes …
(Quando viene la neve
…)’ He left the sentence unfinished. It was the first time he had ever called me by my name, and it was the last.