Love and War in the Apennines (27 page)

Her father’s situation had been more serious.

‘I said that I would get him out,’ she said, ‘and I did; but it wasn’t easy. I thought and thought and then I went to see the Gestapo. I wasn’t frightened because I didn’t know anything about them and what went on in that house, until it was over. I was frightened then.

‘I saw the big man in it. He wore civilian clothes. He looked quite angry. I told him about my father, almost everything: that he was a Slovene whose second language was German, that he had been in the Austrian Army and that we had been deported by the Italians. It wasn’t difficult to give him the feeling that my father didn’t care much for them without actually saying so. I did this because I knew that the Germans needed interpreters. There had been a notice in the
Gazzetta di Parma
ordering everybody between the ages of eighteen and fifty who spoke German to present themselves to the
Presidio Tedesco
in Parma, but, of course, hardly anyone had. My father was more than fifty; but I didn’t think it would matter much, and it didn’t. It was a big risk to take because I didn’t know why they wanted German speakers, and who wanted them. They might have been planning to send them to Germany; but I had to take it.

‘When he heard this about my father having been in the Austrian Army and speaking German he became very friendly.
Until then, I didn’t realise how much the Germans despised the Fascists. He managed to make German-speaking Slovenes seem superior beings, a new feeling for people like us. It was a pity my German was so bad but he spoke good Italian. He was Austrian, from Innsbruck, and he was one of the most horrible men I have ever met.’

‘It was nothing to do with the Gestapo, he said. “It was the Army which needed interpreters to help them when they were buying things. They needed someone who could help them fix a price.”This is what he said. I didn’t know whether to believe him.

‘In the end, he agreed to free my father so that he could do this work. But, of course, there was a condition. This is their way. There’s always something more. He said that he would let him go on condition that I would report to his headquarters once a week and tell him anything that I had learned that might be of interest to them, small things but important. He told me exactly what they wanted. It was horrible, but it was lucky I went. They were going to send him to Germany the following week. It was lucky, too, that they didn’t know about my cousin. He’s in Dachau, or was.

‘I’ve been going there ever since. Every Monday, and they don’t forget, at least they didn’t for the first two weeks. I have to tell them something which sounds interesting, but not too interesting for them to do anything about it except write it down in a book, and there can never be any names. I think they’re getting tired of me. They think I’m a silly girl. Luckily, there’s a new man in charge now and I don’t think anyone really knows now why I keep coming to see them, I’m glad the other one went away. He asked me to go out with him.’

‘Good God, did you?’ I said.

‘Do you think I’m mad?’ she said. ‘Do you think I want to be shot by my own people?’

‘What happened about your father?’ I said.

‘He did one or two jobs for the Army. I must say the Gestapo told me the truth about that, at least as far as my father was concerned. All they wanted was help in buying food for an officers’ mess, on the black market, of course. Then he caught a big chill on the stomach and he had to get a medical certificate. They haven’t been near him since.’

‘Was he really ill?’

‘No, of course he wasn’t. He’s well, or as well as anyone can be in these days. But things are becoming very difficult, not only for us, but for everybody. The bread ration is two hundred grammes a day for people like us who don’t work with their hands, but as you know bread is a very important thing here. The sugar ration is two kilos, if you can get it, and that has to last from now until next March. The
pasta
ration is two thousand grammes a month. Fuel in the Plain is very, very short. All private motor-cars have been confiscated and, of course the doctor has lost his, but he can hardly grumble about that. He’s lucky not to have been shot. He’s somewhere in the mountains now. And the Germans took my bicycle when my father was arrested. I got it back, though. They’d taken it off to Salsomaggiore in a lorry, to the place where their
comando
is. (And that of
Oberleutnant
Frick, I thought.) So, I went there on a bus and when I saw an important-looking officer, not too young, I told him what had happened and he got hold of one of his men, a sergeant, who took me to a place where there were hundreds and hundreds of bicycles, all stolen by the Germans from people like me, and he told me to take my bicycle. Of course I couldn’t see it and he told me to take any bicycle, the newer the better. It didn’t matter, he said, none of the owners would ever get them back again, so I chose one like my own which was not at all new, although there were lots of beautiful ones and he said I was silly. Do you think I was silly?’

‘Yes, very,’ I said.

‘Now there are no more bicycle tyres; but luckily the ones on the bicycle I chose are good. I couldn’t get on without my bicycle.

‘The black market is bigger than it’s ever been. Every day people are arrested at the railway station for carrying food they can’t account for; but things are even worse up here. I was speaking to Signor Zanoni. People are having to make long journeys on foot, for days on end, to get what they need. The thing everyone is most short of on this side of the Apennines is salt. Over in Massa Carrara they have salt but no food.’

I asked her what was happening in Italy and how the war was going. ‘The Fascists are back in power now,’ she said. ‘Or that’s what the Germans let them think; but because they’re Italians they’re too clever to believe it, and that makes them behave worse. The war is not going very well. Your people are stuck between Rome and Naples; but there’s a lot more bombing now, especially at Genoa. The only ones who are really attacking at the moment are the Russians. There’s a big offensive in the East. And that’s about all I know,’ she said. ‘I’m not very good at these things. One thing I am sure of is that I gave you the wrong advice. As you didn’t want to go to Switzerland you should have gone south, which reminds me.’

She produced a dog-eared picture postcard of an Alpine valley. It was of a place called Champoluc in Piedmont and it was signed by three or four people whose Christian names I recognised, even though they had been rendered into Italian. One of them was the colonel’s.

‘The
capitano
with the pipe took them up,’ she said. ‘They crossed from the top of the valley by something called the Col de Theodul. The next day they were in Zermatt. I’m only telling you this because I know that you’re not sorry you didn’t go.’

‘No, I’m not sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m only sorry to have been such a nuisance here.’

She ignored this remark and changed the subject. ‘What was it like up at the farm?’ she said, in the same sort of mocking tone that the girls up there had employed.

‘I hear that there were two very pretty girls. And the one I gave my letter to was very good-looking, too. Not a skeleton like me. I expect you’ve been enjoying yourself. Men are all the same, everywhere, especially soldiers.’

‘They were really nice girls,’ I said. ‘Very kind.’

‘Ha! Ha!’ she said. ‘But I believe you. Am I stupid to do so?’

‘I didn’t think you liked the word.’

‘I learned it from you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘Now you really are trying to make me angry,’ she said. ‘Why do you do it? But I won’t be, there’s not time. There are two other things which I must tell you before I go. The first is that you had a great friend called James in the
Orfanotrofio.
Everyone called him ‘Yams’ so he was re-named Giacomo. Well, the last thing the doctor managed to do before he was put in prison, the day after he took you to the mountains, was to take Giacomo. He wanted to bring him here, so that you could be together, but he wasn’t very happy about making the same journey two days running, after what happened in Parma, so he took him up into the next valley, and now he’s somewhere on the other side of your mountain. And he knows where you are more or less.

‘The second thing is that we’ve heard that a British submarine took some people off from the west coast, somewhere between Rome and La Spezia. I’m going to try and find out more about it. Of course, it may not be true, but I’ve managed to get you some very good maps, although only enough to get to the coast, south of La Spezia; you would need dozens for the whole of it. It was difficult to get any at all because they’ve all been withdrawn from the shops. The Germans are afraid that they might be used
by the
bande.
What I think you should try and do now is work out a route to the coast. If you could get as far as the top of the Apennines and see the country on the other side of it, it would be useful. Then, if I did get some real information, before the snow comes, you could go. But don’t go down the other side now. There’s hardly any food and it’s getting worse every day.’

‘What about the
bande?’
I said. ‘There aren’t any here, so far as I know.’

‘I don’t know much about them,’ she said, ‘but there aren’t any in this valley, and I don’t think there are any in Giacomo’s either. At the moment they are mostly in the big mountains, in places like Piedmont.’

‘Tell me, truly, what do you think the chances are?’ I said.

‘Of what, the submarine?’

‘No, generally.’

‘I know you want the truth. Then I must tell you. When the snow comes, unless you can get a roof over your head, or find a
banda
that is well organised, then your chances are very, very bad.’

Signor Zanoni was back, looking at his watch, looking the other way, fishing about in his big pack from which he eventually extricated a very large package done up in newspaper, and while he was doing this Wanda spoke her last words to me in English.

‘He is a good man and he will do everything he can for you. Did you like his house? I was there this afternoon. That is the sort of little house I would like to have, Eric, and one day I will. He has a very good woman for a wife and she told me to tell you that they both want you to come when you can, on a Saturday night, and you can stay until Sunday evening. Now kiss me properly,’ she said. ‘That’s if you want to after kissing all those other girls.’

Signor Zanoni had gone outside. I kissed her. I knew it was for the last time and so did she. There was nothing to say except God
bless you, which we both said. Then I embraced Signor Zanoni. He took down the lantern and extinguished it, and then they were gone, leaving me with a parcel done up in newspapers. And when they were gone, and I was left alone with my parcel, I began to cry, something I had not done for as long as I could remember.

As soon as I got back to the cave I lit a big fire and hung up my wet clothes and dried them, and while I ate some bread and sausage and drank some acorn coffee, I unpacked the parcel which Wanda had brought up from Fontanellato at great risk because, although there was nothing in it which could actually incriminate anyone by name, the contents would have been more than enough to ensure that whoever was carrying it would immediately be arrested and imprisoned if they had been stopped and made to open it.

Among the contents, some of which I have now forgotten, were a tiny compass, a pocket watch, four military maps, the Italian equivalent of our own Ordnance survey maps, on a scale of 1:25000, about two and a half inches to the mile, a pre-war tourist map of the province of Massa Carrara; a brand new Italian Army blanket; two vests sent by the
superiora
, together with a little, unsigned note of encouragement of the sort that the nuns in the convent used to enclose with our clean washing; some socks – of which I was in great need; a shirt, needles and thread, a large piece of
parmigiano
, an apfelstrudel made by Wanda’s mother and, most remarkable of all, the second volume of a two-volume edition of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
, with
my own signature on the fly leaf, which I had left in the
orfanotrofio
on the ninth of September, and in which Wanda had inserted a piece of paper on which she had written the words,
Che Combinazione!

I spent a long time over the maps. They covered all the country between the mountain and the
crinale
, the main ridge of the Apennines. They were extremely detailed and extremely difficult to read. They were executed in black and white and the general effect was rather as if a band of centipedes with inky feet had spent a day scuttling over a sheet of paper. The most complicated thing about them was the conventional signs of which there were something like a hundred and twenty, all set out at the bottom of each map, many of them such minute variants of one another that it was impossible to memorise them. There were twelve different conventional signs for twelve different sorts of trees alone. Nevertheless, they were marvellous maps and I decided to set off as soon as I could make the necessary arrangements. There were, in fact, no arrangements to make, except to tell whoever came up the following morning that I was going, otherwise they might think that I had gone for good.

It was very fortunate for me that it was Francesco who chose to come, because it was rare for the men to do so. They had too much to do. He came on this particular morning because he had missed Signor Zanoni the previous evening when he went to the village and he wanted to find out if all had gone well.

I told him what I proposed to do and why, but without making any mention of submarines, and he immediately offered to come with me. I was tempted to let him do so but I had two very strong reasons for travelling alone. The principal one was that I had to travel in daylight and it would be dangerous for him to be seen with me. The second, which I kept to myself, was that I wanted to make the journey alone in order to prove to myself that I was
not just something which had to be lugged about by other people from place to place at great personal inconvenience to themselves, something which I had been ever since the Armistice. This was very important to me and correspondingly difficult to explain to Francesco, which was why I didn’t try. I told him that I would leave early the following morning, providing the weather was good enough, and that I didn’t know for how long I would be away but as it only appeared to be about fifteen kilometres to the
crinale
, I expected to be back the following night.

He didn’t say anything to this; but then he asked to see the maps, of which he could make very little, which was not surprising.

‘I don’t say that you can’t do it in two days,’ he said, ‘because I have done it myself in less, when I was a younger man; but this is not an easy journey, Enrico, and you don’t know the mountains. First tell me which way you are thinking of going.’

I said that I had thought of going down over the edge of the cliff until I was on the eleven hundred metre contour where, according to the map, there was a mule track which continued right round the side of the mountain under the summit at this level and then continued along the side of the long ridge which extended down from it towards the south and which, eventually appeared to lead up to the
crinale
, at a point between two prominent peaks which I remembered having seen from the Castello del Prato that afternoon when I was recuperating from my chill.

If it is possible to imagine an eagle smiling, this was what Francesco contrived to do at this moment.

‘And what made you think of doing that?’ he enquired sardonically. I told him that I had been studying the map.

‘Well, it must be very old, that map,’ he said. ‘No one’s used that mule track these fifty years, certainly not in my lifetime. It doesn’t go anywhere. It stops under the summit. There was a big landslide, the whole of that face of the mountain went and it took
the track with it. And even if it hadn’t you couldn’t use it. You’d never get through the woods. They’re the thickest in the Apennines, on both sides of the ridge. You wouldn’t do it in a week. You’d drop dead first.

‘I made this journey many, many times when I was a young man, Enrico,’ he said. ‘I know the places on the way that you must look out for and the names of them, and how long it takes, and if you will listen to me I will tell you what I know, and you can mark the way and the times on your map but you will have to be very, very careful not to go off the main ridges because there are many, many others and they all look very much the same. You can do this very easily if you’re in a cloud, and then you will be lost and your map won’t be much help to you then I can tell you, because in the valleys there are no landmarks as there are on the tops, and you won’t be able to tell one from another. And be very careful on the
crinale.
If there’s a big wind, then you must keep below it on the north side, the south is very steep and you’ll be blown over the edge. It wouldn’t be the first time this has happened. The other thing is lightning. If you hear thunder while you’re up there, or you think a storm’s coming on, don’t lose a moment. You must get off it immediately, as fast as you can down the north side, and either shelter in one of the shepherd’s huts or else under the rocks. If you stay on the ridge you have very little chance. It’s worse than being in a bombardment. Now take your pencil and I will tell you the way as I remember it.’

At this moment, if Francesco had renewed his offer to come with me I would have accepted it.

‘Don’t mark the first part of what I tell you now on your map,’ he said. ‘Then, if you’re taken whoever it is won’t know where you came from, except the top of the mountain. You might say you’re an angel just come from heaven.’ He gave me one of his hungry, aquiline smiles.

‘Now, can you see Punta Perdera? It’s on the ridge that goes south towards the
crinale
, the one you wanted to go along the side of,’ he said, relishing the memory. ‘Just have a look down the cliffs on your left on the way down and remember what I told you.’

After a bit I found it on the map, a sort of bulge on the otherwise narrow ridge. It had a deep gorge running down from it into the valley on the east side, the one
Oberleutnant
Frick had driven up to start his great
rastrellamento
among the
lepidoptera.
‘Say half an hour down from the summit to Punta Perdera, that’s two hours, altogether. It’s a very open place but with trees round it. Abramo’s place, La Maesta, is down in the valley on the east side. I’m only telling you how long it will take if you keep walking, not how long it will take if you stop on the way.

‘There are cliffs all the time on your left and on the other side it’s forest almost up to the ridge. But right on the top there are firs. They started planting them before the war as an experiment but they never finished. You have to be very careful here, all along this ridge, in case you meet a
Guardia Forestale.
If he sees you he’ll take you. You can be sure of that. You must keep your eyes open all the time and be ready. Be careful on the passes – they all go from east to west across your path from one valley to another. A lot of mule drivers use them.’

He went on in this way for nearly an hour. It was a brilliant, detailed re-creation of the journey to the
crinale.

‘Nine and a half, ten hours. If you have four rests of fifteen minutes say, that should be enough, otherwise you’ll get cold. Eleven hours altogether,’ he said at the end of it.

‘You had better keep my watch,’ he said. ‘You must have one for a journey like this. And take some wine. I think you have some. Whatever you do, don’t drink water when you’re hot, and if the weather’s like it is today, don’t go; but I think it’ll be better tomorrow.’

I told him I now had a watch of my own.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I didn’t really want to lose mine (another smile). Tomorrow’s Tuesday. We’ll begin to worry about you on Friday, but if you don’t come back we shan’t come to look for you. It would do no good, we would never find you.’

The outward journey was more or less as Francesco had said it would be in his itinerary. It was as if I was using a sort of Bradshaw of the mountains which kept me going whenever my strength began to fail, in case I missed my connections.

It began inauspiciously because I started an hour late, at five o’clock instead of at four, having overslept; but I made up for it in this early stage by reaching the Castello del Prato fifteen minutes earlier than the scheduled time, at five thirty.

The
baracca
was still there. Not surprising really, having been so recently abandoned; but already, it had begun to decay, unlike the one in the clearing down by the Colle del Santo which was protected from the elements, and by the following spring there would be nothing left of it but the bare frame and, like the clearings made by the
carbonari
it already had the sadness of an abandoned place. The moon was setting now and Venus was a brilliant morning star. There was no wind, the air was cold and there was a great silence, except for a faint sighing in the trees, as if they were breathing lightly and easily in their sleep, not yet ready to wake. For a moment the world seemed at peace and if ever I felt the presence of God walking in it this was the moment. If only it could have lasted forever.

At a quarter past six I reached the summit of the mountain which, sometimes, I had thought I would never reach. There was nothing much there, a cairn of stones, some rusty tins; but the dawn was beginning to break now and the sky to the east beyond Bismantova was pale and trembling as if it was alive, and the peaks on the main range were the colour of pearls, looming up more
and more clearly out of the darkness which was draining away every moment that passed.

Then I went down the ridge to the south over the buoyant turf towards an open flat-topped place among the trees that was like a frying pan with a handle stretching away from me, with the sky growing brighter and brighter, and with steep cliffs falling away to the left where the landslip had been and where the mule track had been and the thick woods were, in which Francesco said that I would have been lost, and he was right.

I must have thought that I was moving faster than I really was, because it was nearly seven o’clock when I reached the Punta Perdera, the weird plateau with the fir trees growing up around it which looked like a frying pan. The sun was up now but not yet high enough to shine into it and the glow of it above the tops of the trees made the clearing so unnaturally dark. What had looked like the handle of the pan was a long ride between the trees and this was the route I had to follow along the ridge.

Chance, or instinct, made me keep to the dark side of it, although it was not more than twenty yards wide, and it was at this moment that I saw a figure coming down the ride towards me from the opposite direction on the lighter side of it. I ought to have seen him before, but his clothes blended too well with the trees. I could see now that he was wearing some sort of uniform and that he had a gun slung over his shoulder. It was too short to be a rifle. It was either a machine-pistol or a carbine.

Whoever he was he had not seen me. It would have been difficult for him to have done so against the rising sun which was brilliant now, illuminating the upper parts of the trees on his side of the ride, and I quickly went into the wood, which was full of bracken, and got down under it, close enough to the edge so that I could look out between the fronds.

He was almost abreast of me now. He was a man of about fifty,
tall and thin, and very fit-looking. He was wearing a long, drab military raincoat and a peaked cap, and I could see now that it was a carbine that he had slung over his shoulder, and I lay there sweating and praying that he didn’t have a dog with him. This must be one of the
Guardie Forestale
about whom both Francesco and Signor Zanoni had warned me. He moved very silently over the ground, more like a shadow than a human being, but, fortunately, his thoughts were elsewhere, and after I had waited until I could see that he had reached the Punta Perdera and was going on up the mountain I, too, went rapidly on my way. If it had been ten minutes later and I had met him on the open down below the summit he would have got me.

He had given me a terrible fright and I kept on looking round to see if he was pursuing me like the Hound of Heaven but there was no sign of him, only the long, narrow ridge with the great mass of the mountain at the end of it, and I went on so fast that I was on the Passo Cornale before half past eight, wishing now that it was not such a clear, sunny day. But although there were a lot of mule droppings on it, some of them fresh, there were no people and it was the same at the Passo Mallachio, which I reached before nine o’clock, well within Francesco’s schedule, going downhill gently all the time.