‘I did.’ Vita coughed in the smoke. ‘And I want to do more. Please. Let me help. Teach me how to use it, for a start.’
‘Out of the question,’ said Lenin. ‘This is men’s work.’
‘The girl is brave,’ said the wood-whittler. ‘To come up here alone.’ He nodded at the pistol. ‘Resourceful too. I think she has a good heart.’
‘What if she’s a spy? Eh, girlie? How d’you even know we were here?’
‘I used my initiative. Plus I’ve been here before. With my papà.’
‘Who’s your papà?’
‘Mario Guidi. I’m Vita.’
‘Christ,’ said Lenin.
‘Who?’ said Puccini.
‘You know Mario. He made the cavity cart.’
‘Oh, Mario MacCavity! The Paisley boy?’
The whittler wiped his knife on his trousers. ‘So. . . if Mario’s your dad. . .’ Vita saw him glance at the other two. The cabin smelt of unwashed men.
‘Then Giuseppe Guidi must be your—’
‘Tiziano will never agree to it,’ said Lenin quickly. ‘We can’t decide without him.’
‘For Godsake!’ Vita kicked her foot out, spilling their coffee pot. It rolled across the cabin, spattering dark globs. ‘Don’t you understand? I’ve got nowhere else to go. No one left.’
‘Do you know, then? About your cousin?’
‘Fucksake, Puccini,’ said Lenin.
Vita stared at her wrists, at the fluted bones there. ‘I saw you once before, Lenin. Didn’t I? You were in that ambulance with Joe.’ Smoke stung her eyes, the dry skin on her lips. ‘What happened? Will you tell me about Sant’Anna?’
Puccini took her hand again. ‘It was a massacre, bella.’
Voices, rumbling. Vita, hot, then cold. Merciless. Airless. Smoke-filled faces. Five hundred souls. The wall of voices kept battering her: very quick, Puccini, then Lenin, and revenge and next time. The clammy cold kept coming, clouding together, so the cold became shivers and it felt like water was in her ears, her mouth. Vita bit down, focusing on the stove light. Her teeth hurt. Dario had baby teeth, scalloped and neat. Marino’s teeth were crushed against the big ones forcing their way in. He would have tried to protect his brother. Vita knew he would. Carla too. And Joe would have tried to save them all.
‘You owe us then.’ Her breathing was sore. They seemed surprised she’d spoken.
‘Owe who?’
‘The bloody Guidis. We’ve sacrificed my father, my mother and now my cousins too. And people like Signor Tutti, and – even Andromeda.’ And then she was weeping, weeping for a brave old donkey.
A rough hand patted her knee.
‘You want me to die too? Because I have nothing, and nobody left. Please. I need to do something. To. . . fight all this death.’
‘The Bloody Guidis.’ Lenin scraped up the coffee grounds with the lid of the pot. Bits of dirt and leaf mould came too. ‘What?’ he said. ‘It’ll add to the flavour.’ Then he smiled, briefly, at Vita.
Puccini nodded.
‘So,’ said the whittler. ‘I’m Fredo by the way. You want to be a staffetta? Work with us?’
She scrubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. ‘I do.’
‘Ah, girlie,’ sighed Lenin. ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
‘You want some vinata, stafetta?’
‘She’ll need a code name.’
‘How about Dolcezza? That’s what Guiseppe called you, wasn’t it?’ said Lenin. ‘Dolce Vita. How’s that for a code name?’
Vita took a raw swig of the wine-gloop. Her tongue felt thick. ‘Sure. Why not.’
Lenin began handing round small pills. ‘Simpamina. For energy. We’ve a long night ahead of us. Not you, Dolcezza. We’re meeting with the Allies.’
‘Tonight?’
‘Yup. They’ve made it to Bagni di Lucca. Hopefully with some decent radios. No offence, but your transmitter’s rubbish.’
‘Why don’t you rest here, then go back down when it’s daylight?’ Puccini saluted her. ‘And await orders, soldier.’
Too spent to argue, Vita nodded. They were mumbling and arguing as they left. She didn’t know if it was about her. Didn’t care. She extinguished the stove. Better to freeze than choke. Lay on the pine fronds, vinata-porridge filling her with dopey, alcoholic warmth. It softened her limbs and pushed out the clamour, the imagined scenes she could not bear. She just wanted to be numb. Concentrating on the smell of woodsmoke. She thought of favourite foods, but food led back to family and—
The door juddered, letting the wind through. Vita drank the vinata to its sloppy dregs. It was like blood clots. The wind song outside turned to cries, Joe’s cries, the children’s. All of them dead because of her. She wedged the door shut with her foot. Shoved her hands into her eye sockets, and clung to the image of the americano. It was a new, good memory. Keeping his face behind her eyelids, pressing him over the fiery reds and bursting white comets and whatever else came into view. Finally, she lay back on the pine boughs. Finally, she fell asleep.
Exhausted, Vita slept through the roar of the bombardment that grew deeper and nearer in the night. On a mountain top, the wind moaned louder than guns. Vita slept through the first of the morning bells, the Duomo ones that tolled in the valley below, warning the townspeople of impending doom. She slept through the movements of the German scouts who scurried from the Duomo’s campanile and sped off; she slept through the self-important bustle of the Brigate Nere as they closed their headquarters and fled Barga.
At the second carillon, Vita woke. Barga’s bells were telling time. They were giving her people thirty minutes’ grace between the sound of the bells and the blasting of the bridges. Plenty of time for folk to grab everything they loved and run away. Plenty of time before the wail of the drill gave way to small explosions, then to gasps and tearing and creaks as the dynamite was shoved deep in and Barga’s guardians prepared to die. As Vita was climbing back down the mountain, she heard the bells toll on, a funeral dirge to guide her home, while down in Barga, people were boarding up their houses, chucking furniture, linens, children, dogs, onto carts, their panic filtered with deep grief, with anger, murmuring old curses as they passed tedeschi sappers.
People gathered in the safe places they could find, with friends and neighbours, with family and refugees. The bells stopped. Silence fell. And the silence was worse than the drilling, because the silence became a well into which the people poured their dread, their impotent rage, until the air fizzed with the silence; it sparkled like a lit fuse, even as the Germans were lighting their own fuses, were standing back to admire their handiwork, and then the silence exploded in a terrible, grinding roar. Barga gasped, heaving as her bridges’ keystones flew up, hurled down, smashing past the campanile, into the Duomo door, ripping up Piazza Angelio, tearing into Angela’s mother’s house with such a fury that half the house fell, the ugly floral wallpaper of their salotto revealed to all. Barga’s streets were pounded and doused in broken brick, smashed tiles, wood, twisted shutters, the pirouette of crackling, live wires. Homes and shops beside the bridges were blasted open; even the church of San Rocco, where the tedeschi had worshipped, teetered on collapse.
From the Giardino to Barga Castello, the town lay wrecked and split. The pretty ravine they called Fontanamaggio, verdant as a park, became a massive slagheap, filled with debris and straddled by the stumps of broken bridges – including Ponte Vecchio, which they needn’t have hurt at all. The sole remaining bridge was at Porta Macchiaia; a single thread by which the town hung together, given grace to remain.
By the time Vita was nearing smoke-dusted Barga, the Germans had rumbled out of town. Is it really true? whispered the townsfolk, hardly daring to believe it. Perhaps this pain would turn to a blessing. If they were free, they could rebuild. But war is not clean, nor fair: the older folk knew this, and refused to see a silver lining. Their pessimism was rewarded moments later, when the bridge at Catagnana was blown, the aqueduct destroyed. Thank you for having us, wa
ved the tedeschi as they left.
A pause. A vacuum opening, a few heartbeats when their city was their own. One week of dazed nothing, like gauze on a wound.
Then came the first of the bombs.
Autumn 1944
Chapter Nineteen
‘Don’t touch that,’ said Comanche. ‘It’s his girlfriend.’
‘Fuck off.’ Frank raised his head. He was lying on his back in the mud. ‘And put it away. I don’t want it getting wet.’
They were bivouacked outside of a place called Piano. Cue bad jokes about music, and acting in concert. Bivouacking was just camping with no tents. Moving day on day, it didn’t make sense to pitch up properly. A shakedown in a foxhole, under a tarp if you were lucky, a sojourn beneath a dripping tree if you were not. Four hours on, four hours off, in grey, incessant rain. Sometimes you slept standing, propped against a wall with your helmet down. To most of them, sleep, real sleep, was a half-forgotten promise, but that was no bad thing, because the hazy, mouth-furred blur that rocked you on meant functioning in a half-life, where you were never sure if what just happened was dreamed or real. And that offered occasional absolution.
Routine was: no routine. Morning, night, no longer mattered. It was the inching forwards and the flushing out which counted, daily, hourly. Aggressive patrolling against the backdrop of shells, rifles, machine-gun echoes ricocheting through the sodden hills. Sometimes you were bait, luring Nazi stragglers, the snipers who lurked trigger-happy. Sometimes you were bulldozer. Your day’s labour could be trying to take a rocky outcrop above a river: two steps forward, three back. Run and duck. Two steps forward. Retreat. Four steps, charge, skip over your dying colleagues. And hold.
Seravezza had been the worst. Fanging its way into Frank’s brain whenever he closed his eyes, taking on different, venomous shapes. They had reached it in a pitch-black thunderstorm, rain teeming, sky louder than any guns. Four hours to get two miles, and every inch of them terrifying. Krauts firing their cannon from on high, incessant, deadly; the river a swirling madness, impossible to ford. So blind in their fumbling movements that every crater was a crevasse; tipping two feet in the dark felt like thirty feet in your head, cloying mud and lightning all fuelling the disorientation. Men drowned that night. The town itself was shattered. But securing it was not their aim.
Seravezza sat below Mount Caula. Caula was the prize, so important that Colonel Sherman himself came to wish them well. The commander took pains to tell them the Germans would machine-gun them as they climbed. Stay silent and unexposed. Sure thing, boss. Try staying silent as you’re scaling a mountain in the dark, actually climbing up ladders lashed to rock, armed to the teeth, while your buddies cry and fall beside you, slipping, being shot in the back, while your front is lacerated by the cliff face and the rain whips down and the wind howls up. Shrapnel stuck to your skin, hot metal searing as the shells explode. Cordite burning up your throat while a cloudburst of explosions on the ridge became a waterfall of fire, of pouring black and orange, so all you could do was huddle in and pray for it to pass.
Frank wasn’t sure how many men they lost that night. But they never made it up the mountain. In the first-aid station afterwards, they’d been baying for blood; Frank’s was the type that could mix with anyone’s. Automatically, he’d offered up his arm to the doc, to the white officer screaming in the bed. Heard his spit-flecked words. Don’t give me no nigger blood.
Two steps forward, three steps back. Yet, somehow, the Buffs kept nudging forward. As they limped across the Tuscan countryside, the Krauts melted back. Frank couldn’t help but wonder if they were being led to a cliff edge.
While the Buffaloes were fighting their way up the Serchio, the Brazilians were battling to take Lama di Sotto, a fierce-toothed ridge of serrated mountains. The Krauts had all kinds of cannon hidden there. Dragons, maybe. Lama meant blade, Vincenzo said. He was their go-to guy, a teenager in bare feet who had tagged along with them since Lucca. The quartermaster found the kid a pair of boots, and now Vinnie followed the Buffs like a love-struck pup. He translated for them, briefed them on the terrain, the towns they passed through. All fascisti bastards, he’d say of one innocuous village, urging the men to rest up closer to the next one. Nice girls there, he’d grin. And grappa. Vinnie’s advice was good. Frank had watched, powerless, from a foxhole way above a village they’d been told to avoid, as a truckload of GIs drove in. And were instantly ambushed by Krauts, firing from the surrounding houses. Encircling and mowing till nobody moved. He’d made it down in time to help collect their dog tags.
Out near Bologna, the Buffaloes had managed, briefly, to break through the Gothic Line. When the news came, guys here went nuts. But nowhere had been breached since. All along the lines, the German defences held. They had the soar of the mountains behind them, and reserve after reserve pouring in, while the Buffs slogged on with no rest and few supplies.
A raindrop splashed on Frank’s forehead.
‘Man,’ said Ivan, above him. ‘That girl got wet plenty times, I reckon. Look how she crinkles.’ He shook the paper. ‘With your jizz.’
‘Fuck off.’ He made to take the picture, but Ivan was too quick. He’d been rifling Frank’s tunic for smokes. Found the little sketch instead. Frank had done several drawings of the girl, one after the other, trying to capture what it was he’d seen. But she was elusive. Vee-toh-ree-ah.
He slept with that name, rolling it around his mouth. He would dream the rolled-up sweater he used as a pillow was her hair. This small, square pencil sketch was his best attempt; it was her face half-tilted as she’d turned to say goodbye. Whip of hair across her mouth, the spike of chin and sharp, straight nose which balanced out the cheekbones; it was more a sense of her than a likeness. Flash flash flash. She was a blade, slicing mineral-lit air. The girl was all glimmer at the extremities. She was not real.
‘What she called?’
‘She’s called mine.’ Frank cuffed Ivan on the side of the head, the way he might cuff Willis. Keeping it cool. ‘Now give.’
‘Whoah, man. What you doin’? Don’ hit a brother like that.’
‘You ain’t my brother.’
‘No?’ Ivan crumpled the sketch, deliberately mangling it in his fat-fuck hand. ‘You make me real sad. Boo-hoo.’ He made to blow his nose into the paper. Frank knew Ivan wanted him to charge head down into his belly. Gather a mob of cheering grunts. Oh, the exhilaration of losing yourself in mindless assault, with an audience to see your finest work. Plenty of guys loved it. Unless you got mentioned in dispatches, who’d record your warrior status otherwise? Staying alive didn’t make you a good soldier, any more than hiding did. When every waking minute in this fucking war was unfinished business, it was no wonder guys went insane. From day one, Ivan had been a jerk. He was always switched to self-destruct, unless he could get others to do it for him. Since Seravezza, Ivan was rage personified. He would rant at the wind when the guns went quiet, punch walls when he couldn’t punch people. He was pretending to wank into the picture.
Comanche put his hand on Ivan’s shoulder. ‘Just give it mothafuckin’ back.’
‘Hark at the corporalle.’
‘Corporeal.’
‘Corpodick.’
‘Suck my dick. Give.’
‘You boys!’
‘Sir, yessir.’
They stood to attention as Captain Dedeaux appeared. The man was always louche, hands in pockets, shoulders slumped. He poked at Ivan’s mummy bag with his polished toecap.
‘What you all hollering at?’
‘Hollering, sir? Us, sir?’
‘Yessir, you, sir.’ Dedeaux stuck his chin in Comanche’s face.
‘Not us, sir.’
‘You in charge here, boy?’
‘Yessir. Corporal Barfoot.’
‘Well, Blackfoot. How’s about I break up your little party? You go find your good ole sergeant and tell him I need two men dispatched to the 366th. As of yesterday.’
‘Yessir.’
If th
e Buffs weren’t being whittled by injury, they got fucked up by transfers instead. Frank had lost count of the number of platoons turned to squads, of battalions plucked to scrawny companies; men, good men, who disappeared in the night to fill a need in some other unit.
‘Two more of you dumb fucks disappearing. And I’m still s’posed to. . .’ Dedeaux kicked Comanche’s rifle over. ‘Ain’t all the reasons you disappear, is it?’ He circled behind Frank, sniffing like a hog. ‘No, sir. I can smell it. Oozing. Wha’s your battle-cry, soldier?’
‘Um. . . Deeds not Words, sir?’ Frank could smell liquor on the man’s breath.
‘Bullshit. Will I tell you what your motto is, huh, soldier? Huh?’
‘Sir. Yessir.’
‘Unass the hill! Because the black man is afraid. All you boys do is run and hide. Why the Good Lord painted y’all shit-brown. So’s you can hide you miserable goldbrickin’ nigga faces in the nigga-fuckin’ mud.’
As motivational speeches go, Frank had heard better. Like Axis Sally, you just tuned Dedeaux out.
‘Don’t I know you, boy?’
‘Sir?’
‘Aint you the nigger gave me grief back at Lucca? ’Bout some puttana?’
Frank kept his fists tight.
‘Sir,’ Comanche interjected. ‘PFC Chapel is an excellent soldier, and a key member of our squad, sir. I can personally vouch for his integrity and—’
‘Hey, Blackfoot. Good for you. Guess we found ourselves our first volunteer to go supplement the 366th. As you were, men.’ Their captain mooched off. An insignificant fuck whose uniform wore him. If you were on neutral ground; if Frank was one on one. . . You could snap Dedeaux’s neck like a twig.
‘Give me the fucking picture, man.’
Ivan relinquished the drawing to Comanche, who gave it to Frank.
‘Coulda bust your mothafuckin’ balls anyway, Chap.’
‘That right?’ Ivan was big, but he had no finesse. Frank did chin-ups on the shower rails; he did daily push-ups and crunches, no matter how tired he was. Ran when he could, even if it was just sprinting loops in a field. Comanche offered to shoot at his feet, to speed things up. He couldn’t keep clean, but he could keep fit. Self-respect, order, that extra push that got you over the hill – it was his own version of Ivan’s need to provoke. Unspilled energy had to go someplace.
The Sound of the Hours Page 23
