by Greg McGee
She had no idea whether they’d received news of her father’s illness, but the ravages of chemo and the bone marrow transplants were writ large in the deep ravines of his face and his skinny angularity, and you could hear his attempts to drag energy into his voice, which made his words all the more poignant. They all knew there’d be no encore.
He’d stopped speaking, she realised, seemed exhausted. ‘Bravo,’ the men said, ‘bravo, Bruce.’
Aldo lumbered to his feet and hugged her father and they stood there for some moments comforting each other, before Aldo began singing in a powerful baritone. Everyone stood, Renzo included, and sang with passion.
O che bea Venezia
Non posso andar’via
M’hai fatto ’nammorare.
At the end, they raised their glasses of prosecco and toasted ‘Broochay’, then Beatrice and Aldo’s sons arrived with the first course, prosciutto and melone.
Clare felt as if she’d witnessed something special, but also bewildering, that underneath the tears and laughter of nostalgia there was something melancholic, perhaps even tragic, that she hadn’t understood.
Gemona 1943
8
When Joe regained consciousness, he could hear a voice through the lingering fog. He lay there listening. His body felt heavy but comfortable. Warm. He couldn’t feel his ankle. If the sounds were German, he wouldn’t open his eyes, he’d let himself drift off again without attracting attention. But there was no mistaking the Italian, even though it was too low to distinguish many words. It was a woman’s voice and Joe thought he might somehow be back in hospital with the suore. When he ventured a glance, there was only a young woman in quarter profile looking down at something, her head bowed and angled towards the low light, her lips moving. Joe strained to see the baby Jesus in her lap. When he lifted his head, her serious hazel eyes left the book she’d been reading and he realised she wasn’t a heavenly illusion. Beyond her was a very ordinary room: one curtained window, rough plastered walls and wooden furniture, a small table with a bowl on it, and two straight-backed wooden chairs facing his bed, the closer of which she was sitting on.
‘Eccolo!’ she called out to someone. Here he is. He understood that.
Presently, her face was replaced by a man’s, older, perhaps her father’s, a big forehead pressing creases around the same widely spaced eyes. He could understand the man’s carefully enunciated Italian. ‘Come stai?’ How are you?
Joe tried to say something, but initially no sound came.
The man said ‘Permesso’, put a callused hand to the back of Joe’s head and lifted it to a long-necked bottle. He drank as much water as he could.
Finally he croaked ‘Bene’, his voice giving the lie. He felt the weakness and lassitude that he’d known in the Benghazi hospital and then in the drain of urine and shit. He shivered. How had he got from there to here? How long had he been here? Maybe the room was a cell, but the three people now in the room — the man and young woman had been joined by another woman, older, perhaps the mother — seemed more like a family than jailers. He must have been looking alarmed. The man put a finger to his lips, said, ‘Stai tranquillo.’ Joe could see his relief when he indicated he’d understood.
‘Dove sono?’ he asked. Where am I?
‘Lei parla italiano?’ asked the younger woman.
‘Un pochino,’ he said, a little, though he hoped it was better than that. The man told him he was safe, for now. He should rest, he’d been very sick, he should sleep.
He must have. The next time he woke, there was just her. She was sitting in the chair, again reading, but ready this time for his return, her face front on, looking down. He had time to take her in, dark lashes above broad cheekbones, and below them, down almost to her jaw, the scars of what must have been smallpox. The curtain was drawn back a little, letting in daylight, giving the tresses that framed her face a copper sheen. When she sensed his eyes on her, she looked up and smiled at him and called softly — ‘È ritornato.’
The older man and woman came back into the room. ‘Sei inglese?’ the man asked.
‘Neozelandese,’ Joe croaked.
They stood there looking at him, a grave little circle. This must be the family who lived through the wooden door that adjoined the stable he’d hidden in. Joe’s ankle had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer put any weight on it and Harry had left him propped against the main entrance to the stable while he crept to the door at the far end. When he came back he said there were people in there, they had to be quiet.
The man was holding out his hand to Joe. ‘Mi chiamo Bepi,’ he said.
‘Piacere,’ said Joe, grateful that this big square hand had found him. So far the family had not betrayed him, were giving him food and shelter, but he knew the Germans would still be looking for him and wondered if he should tell them his name. They had found him covered in shit, freezing, cleaned him, warmed him. Whatever happened, they had saved him. ‘Mi chiamo Joseph,’ he said.
‘Joseph?’ said Bepi, then pointed to himself. ‘Giuseppe! Joseph, Giuseppe!’ The coincidence seemed to give him huge pleasure. He introduced his wife, Nina, and daughter, Donatella.
‘Piacere, Signora, Signorina,’ said Joe.
Bepi explained with much gesticulation that the Germans had completed their rastrellamento of their house and stable, tipping over beds, stabbing the hayloft with bayonets, without finding him. After they’d gone, Bepi had gone down to check they’d latched the stable door behind them and had noticed the build-up of urine in the drain. He couldn’t make out what the obstruction was in the darkness so he put his foot on it. Bepi mimicked a low moan or groan and stepped back, startled. ‘Che cosa è?’ What is it?
Harry had been right. He’d left Joe where the Germans wouldn’t find him, but someone else would. What happened now?
Bepi seemed to understand his anxiety. ‘Stai tranquillo,’ he repeated. ‘Noi,’ he said, indicating the three of them, ‘Noi siamo amici. Capito?’
Joe understood. We are friends. He was safe, for the moment.
He must have fallen asleep again in front of them. When he next woke, it was dark and he was alone. He was busting and pulled back the covers and laboured into a sitting position. The privy would be outside, if he could find his way there. He could flex the ankle when it had no weight on it so he tried to stand up. The blood immediately filled the damaged tissue so that he almost swooned with the pain and sank back onto the bed and waited for the throbbing to subside. He’d seen a basin at the end of the bed: he’d use that.
Bepi had been reassuring, but he had no idea that there had been two of them out there being hunted by the Germans. Where was Harry? If he’d been caught, Joe’s refuge here was on borrowed time. They were after them both: one would not be enough. They’d come back here to where Harry had left him, find him right next door to the cow byre. And then Joe himself would not be enough: this little family would also suffer.
He consoled himself with the thought that Harry was the bravest man he knew. The Germans were brutal and efficient but it would take them a long time to break Harry, even if they caught him. Harry had always been intent on escape, and finally he’d managed it, although it’d taken him the best part of a year to do it. He wouldn’t have been retaken easily.
9
When the prisoners had been herded onto the train heading north out of Bari, Harry ended up in the same cattle truck as Joe. It was the first time Joe had seen him since they’d arrived at the camp two or three weeks before. He was much stronger than when Joe had last seen him, hardly limping and simmering with a belligerence that threatened to provoke any guards in his vicinity. For that reason, Joe tried to keep his distance but Harry, oblivious, passed on to Joe the consensus: they were going all the way to Germany. ‘Not how I thought I’d get there,’ said Harry.
They were in the cattle trucks for two nights, not alway
s moving, and had no idea where they were when the doors were rolled back and they were ordered out. The wintry blast of air and grey-green landscape might have signalled a different country, it was so unlike Bari and North Africa. When they saw the name of the station, Cividale, on the pale yellow wall of a verandahed two-storey building that looked to Joe like a grand homestead, they realised they were still in Italy. Joe had been aching for green and relief from the heat but as they were marched from the station, the seeping cold and the trees standing bare bones against a grey sky made him suddenly homesick for colour and light.
Campo Prigionieri di Guerra 57 at Grupignano was a huge purpose-built prison about a mile from the railway station. There were rows of wooden barracks, administration and communal buildings, all surrounded by intimidating twenty-foot-high barbed wire, arc lights, machine gun posts and sentries. It was late November by the time they got there, and PG 57 was already home to four or five thousand, most of them Australians and New Zealanders, but also many South Africans and Canadians.
That first night Joe climbed into a top bunk and watched the man below him, Ernest he said his name was, put striped pyjamas over his underwear and kneel in whispered prayer beside his bunk. Joe could see the bald spot on his crown. He looked older than most, mid-thirties perhaps, though it was hard to tell because he was so gaunt. When he finished his prayers Ernest stood up, said, ‘Ah well, that’s that then.’ He walked past the wood stove to the door of the barracks. Joe thought he must be going to the dunny, but shortly after they heard, directly outside, shouts of ‘Halt! Halt!’ from the guards, then the chatter of sub-machine guns. The other POWs rushed outside — Joe made sure he wasn’t among the first. Ernest, in his blood-splattered pyjamas, was lying out in no man’s land almost under the first wire.
Captain Calcaterra had addressed them en masse the next morning. They were shivering and hungry. They didn’t have to know a word of Italian to understand that he was another vainglorious peacock of a carabiniere, stocky enough to stay upright under the weight of medals strewn across his chest. The translation made it clear that he was also a ruthless martinet: the men should stay at attention until he was finished speaking; any interruption would be dealt with severely; they would salute any Italian officer they encountered and stand at attention when the Italian flag was raised and lowered at the beginning and end of each day. Joe had been relieved at the restraint Harry showed, restricting himself to a muttered ‘The man’s a fucking joke’.
Calcaterra had a persuasive weapon in his arsenal. Hunger. The prisoners got enough to keep them upright and ambulatory, but nowhere near enough to encourage energetic pursuits like digging or running or even calisthenics. Food became of overpowering importance that winter. In the morning the prisoners received a cup of what they called coffee to wash down a small bread roll, and in the evening a ladle or two of skilly, a thin, watery soup with bits and pieces of pasta or green stalks in it, or, once a week on average, some small shreds of what might have been meat.
Joe supposed that it depended what you were used to, and would never have said so to the other men, but he came to think that PG 57 wasn’t too bad. The huts provided adequate shelter, there were beds, ablution blocks, latrines, plenty of drinking water, enough food to stay alive, and time. Joe had never had much time to himself; the closest he’d come to it was at school. His regret at having to leave so young had never gone away, and he was keen to resume learning, something, anything. The prisoners were organising all sorts of activities and courses. Joe went to every dramatic performance, musical, lecture and quiz, but didn’t have the confidence to participate in any of them.
He looked at courses in accountancy, agriculture and French, because he wanted something challenging, the kind of learning that would burn up the oxygen in his head that might otherwise feed the embers of El Mreir and the Nino Bixio. He decided that he knew as much as he wanted to know about agriculture, so chose accounting, where he was drawn to the logical symmetry of double-entry bookkeeping.
Arch Scott, a lanky, genial native of Papakura, and his best mate, Paul Day, were fluent in French and running classes, but Arch persuaded Joe that if he had to learn one language in his present predicament, with escape a possibility, Italian might be more useful.
But the winter still seemed interminable and so much colder than home. Devil’s Bridge was relatively sheltered, though the easterly would rush from the sea up the valley to Ngapara, or a southerly blast would coat the foothills with snow and close Danseys Pass behind the town, but it never felt as cold as this. At PG 57, there was a stufa, a heater, at one end of each of the bunk huts, but neither the stufas nor the men huddled around them ever had enough fuel inside. As stomachs contracted and fell, bladders came under pressure and many men lay in their beds in agony, trying to hold on until dawn rather than going out to piss in the snow.
Joe didn’t see much of Harry, for which he was grateful. Harry’s contempt for the guards was unsettling. He would mutter that he’d been captured by ‘Jerry, not these buffoons’ and Joe sometimes felt that Harry would have been happier in a German camp, where the guards would be worthy of having him as a prisoner.
When their paths next crossed, Joe told him about the Italian lessons and suggested they might be handy if he was still planning to escape.
‘What’s Italian for “escaped”?’ Harry had asked.
‘Scappato,’ said Joe.
‘That’s me,’ he told Joe. ‘Scappato. Gone.’ It was a clear day and they could see the formidable Dolomites enclosing them to the north and right round to the west. ‘We’ll go for the mountains,’ Harry said. ‘Switzerland. One day.’
Venice 2014
10
As the courses proceeded at Aldo’s bar — a meat dish that was just that, a pork chop on a plate, unadorned, followed by a separate dish of salad — and the prosecco and verduzzo and merlot were drunk, different groups coalesced and dispersed as her father moved among them.
Renzo showed her a team photograph, framed and glassed, that was being passed from hand to hand like a precious relic. She could recognise some of the faces around the table, and Aldo, standing to one side, the proud manager. It wasn’t a formal pose and it was after the game: the players were muddy and dishevelled, and the beaming smiles indicated they’d won. ‘They’d just beaten Rome in Rome at the Foro Italico,’ Renzo said, the wonder still in his voice.
The grinning men in the photo confirmed what she already knew, as a childless, relationless woman who wanted a family: age is a tyranny. Most of the faces were adorned with such ridiculously big hair and moustaches and sideburns that they looked as if someone had drawn them on, but underneath all that they were so young and so happy that their joy caught in her throat. She couldn’t bring herself to look across the table at her father: the contrast was too awful. In the photo, he had his right arm over the shoulder of the most striking figure in the shot. He was stockier than her father and not quite as tall. He had shoulder-length black curls tied back with a red bandana and a full black beard from which perfect teeth flashed a wide white smile. ‘Franco,’ confirmed Renzo.
The photo had been signed by all the players. She recognised her father’s signature, though it had a lot more of a flourish than the one he put on his letters. Under his and Franco’s signatures, someone had written a phrase in Italian, ‘I Due Coglioni di San Pietro’.
When she pointed to it, Renzo laughed. ‘The two balls of San Pietro.’ He told her that it referred to an expression in Italian, ‘Non rompermi i coglioni — Don’t break my balls. When the balls were broken, so was San Pietro.’
By the time they got to the tiramisu — ‘pick me up’, according to Renzo — her father was back beside Aldo. His Italian seemed much improved as the two men had what seemed like a very intense conversation, sotto voce. He looked as if he was asking for something and Aldo was shaking his head. This seemed a strange dynamic after what had gone before, when the keys to
the town seemed to be Broochay’s for the asking.
Whatever was going on seemed to become a stalemate. Her father began visibly fading, and she worried about how much he’d had to drink. Aldo, too, was looking at him with a worried expression, and at Renzo.
The timing may have been entirely coincidental, but when Renzo excused himself to go to the toilet, Aldo immediately called Beatrice over and whispered something to her. She disappeared into the kitchen and returned soon after with a folded piece of paper, which she slipped to Aldo, as if discreetly giving him the bill for the evening. Renzo came back and she thought no more of it until they filed back outside the bar and her father was farewelled by being passed from hug to hug, from kiss to kiss. Last in line, before the rear door being held open by her, Aldo gripped her father’s right hand in both of his, pulled him close and kissed him. She saw him quickly look down at the piece of paper Aldo had palmed him, before his fist closed over it. She saw the look of gratitude on her father’s gaunt face as he hugged Aldo again.
Once they were back in the car — her father had insisted on the back seat and quickly slumped into exhausted quiescence — Renzo talked to her mainly about New Zealand, its economic situation, its health system. He seemed extraordinarily well informed and she had the feeling, though he was too polite to say so, that none of what she told him was new information. He was curious and empathetic and gradually they segued to more personal subjects. She found him easy to talk to and told him far more than she’d intended about the break-up of her marriage and the end of her business partnership. Until now, it had all seemed too raw to talk about except with her counsellor, and she was surprised that she was able to navigate her shitty stuff without bursting into tears. Maybe the high emotion and tears of her father’s speech had provided a kind of balm. Her father was slumped against the window and a subdued snore indicated he was asleep. She could only hope that the rhinos and bull elephants wouldn’t start calling to one another before they got to Venice. Let him sleep, she thought, it’s been such a big night for him — and for her.
