The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  Joe wanted to explain to Nina, so that she wouldn’t think he’d had no one looking after him, that in some ways having so many of his aunts around had meant he’d had many mothers, but it was too complicated for his fledgling Italian. It was easier to say sì.

  ‘Poveretto,’ said Nina again, with a clucking sound, and made him lie back down. This time Donatella didn’t disagree with her mother, but lifted Joe’s head so that she could plump the cushion underneath.

  For a moment Donatella’s hair fell forward and enveloped his face. He breathed her in and felt as secure as he could ever remember feeling.

  22

  For three weeks, Joe scarcely left Bepi and Nina’s house or the cobblestone courtyard that connected the Bonazzon house and stables to the similar sized Zanardi house and stables about twenty yards opposite. There was a long implement shed on the third side, through which an arch opened onto the gravel road. On its fourth side, the courtyard led to a dirt track between two fields, one planted in maize and the other in grapes, and more fields beyond, working up the hill towards a steep slope on which, further to the west, the town had taken root. Bepi explained that the two families farmed under the mezzadria system, which Joe understood to mean that they worked the land for an absent landowner or padrone, who took a share of all they produced.

  The Bonazzons and Zanardis operated as one big family. Bepi and Gigi Zanardi had grown up together locally, and Gigi had eventually married Nina’s much younger sister, Marisa. Nina and Marisa, from the Bolzano area, up in the mountains, were striking women with olive skin, but blue eyes and dark blonde hair. ‘Austriaci,’ Bepi joked. Gigi and Marisa’s children, Paola and Leo, aged seven and five, were often cared for by Gigi’s seventy-year-old mother, Nonna Isabella, who also lived with them. There surely would have been discussions while Joe was still bed-ridden, but he’d been accepted without question and with unfailing hospitality, even though there were constant reminders of the risks they were running. He didn’t want to leave, but knew he had to.

  They hadn’t suffered any further rastrellamenti since the night Harry had left him in the culvert, but the troop trucks had come up their road several times, stopping at farms further up. News would come back of German or Republican troops raking through houses and stables and storehouses with knives and bayonets. The word was that the Republicans were worse, because they had local knowledge. Each time they’d heard the trucks grinding up their road, Joe had limped into the casotta, a little bivvy Bepi had made out of stalks and hay in the middle of the maize, and stayed there until Donatella or one of the Zanardi children came to tell him it was safe.

  Although the paranoia was difficult to live with, for Joe those weeks were idyllic. He tried to earn his keep, once the ankle could bear his weight. Bepi had held his ankle just like Harry and twisted the foot this way and that while he pressed his other hand palm down on the joint, ‘listening’ for signs of bone damage. Satisfied, he offered his shoulder to Joe and they hobbled outside, across the courtyard towards the fields. Joe knew it was the vendemmia, the grape harvest, but felt Bepi would be optimistic if he thought Joe could get through a day on the ankle out among the vines.

  Instead, Bepi stopped at a tall vat with rungs up the side. Gigi was at the top, tipping a basket of red grapes into it, helped by Donatella, who was standing inside. When Gigi came down with the empty basket and crossed back to the vineyard, Bepi turned to Joe. ‘Puoi andare dentro con lei?’ he asked. Can you get in there with her?

  ‘Venga,’ said Donatella, leaning over the side of the vat and holding out her hands.

  Joe removed his shoes and socks, then looked doubtfully at his dirty feet, but Bepi, untroubled, helped to push him up the ladder as Donatella pulled, with many exhortations of ‘Dai! Dai!’ which, after some initial alarm, Joe realised was dialect for ‘Come on!’ or ‘Go for it!’.

  When he reached the top, he saw that Donatella had her skirt tucked into her pants and was up to her calves in a soggy purple mass. She helped Joe lower himself into the sludge and demonstrated the stamping motion that pressed the grapes through the filter at the bottom of the vat. The ankle was sore to begin with, but the repetitive and almost weightless tramping motion in the squelching morass soon freed it up. The other inspiration was being so close to Donatella. That proximity didn’t last long, because once Joe had proved he could do the job, Bepi reassigned Donatella to the harvest, where her quick hands would be more useful. Joe tried not to watch as she climbed out of the vat, but couldn’t help but admire strongly muscled white thighs that had seldom seen the sun.

  Joe’s mobility improved rapidly after a couple of days in the vat, and he was able to help scrape the residue from the top of the filter, stalks and leaves and skin, and load it into another smaller vat. There it would ferment and become the fiery spirit, grappa, which Bepi called ‘graspa’, and to which he ascribed magical properties.

  Bepi had a limp that imposed itself late in the day and he would sigh and take a swig of what he called ‘un po’ di riscaldamento’. Joe translated that literally as a little reheating, so when Bepi offered him a swig of the clear liquid at the end of a long day cutting maize, he accepted. When the stuff hit the back of his throat, it burned like liquid fire and he almost spat it out. Gigi, particularly, and Bepi almost wet themselves as he staggered and sweated. Thereafter, the offer of un po’ di riscaldamento, and Joe’s refusal, were a source of great mirth.

  Bepi was a big man with a high forehead and eyes that drooped like a bloodhound’s, but any appearance of dolefulness was alleviated by his happy, upturned mouth, even though it threw out curses like corn for the chickens. If God wasn’t a dog, Dio cane, the Madonna was a pig, porca Madonna, or a prostitute, Madonna putana.

  At the end of the day, when he began limping, Bepi could become testy with both Gigi and Joe. Gigi told Joe not to take it personally: Bepi had an old war wound that gave him trouble still. Joe had read articles in the Oamaru Mail commemorating Anzac Day, stories of Gallipoli and the Somme, but had never heard a whisper of the battles Gigi told him about, Caporetto and the Battle of the Solstice on the Piave River, and Vittorio Veneto. He said the Austrians and Germans and Hungarians had pushed the Italian population of Friuli south to the Piave and razed all the land between here and there. Bepi was a hero, because he was one of the indomitable warriors who had stopped the Austrians and Germans at the Piave in June 1918 with a last-ditch counter-attack from the Montello plateau.

  There was a place on the Piave, Gigi said, a shingle bank called L’Isola dei Morti, The Island of the Dead, where the river was still giving up bones. That was where Bepi and his fellow heroes had used the stacked bodies of their comrades as cover to finally stop the Austrians. There were sayings and songs that commemorated that famous victory: ‘E’ meglio vivere un giorno da leone che cent’anni da pecora.’ It’s better to live one single day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep. And the song of the Piave: ‘Il Piave momorò, non passa lo straniero.’ The Piave murmurs, the foreigner shall not cross. ‘Yet here we are,’ muttered Gigi, ‘not thirty years later, reliving the same nightmare, and our heroes now old and crippled.’

  Gigi said none of this near Bepi, who never talked about the Island of the Dead, but simply said that Italy should be fighting on the side of the British against the Tedeschi, as they did in the Great War.

  * * *

  After the grape harvest, Joe made himself useful around the animals. So many of the rhythms and routines were similar to those he’d grown up with. Milking, feeding, mucking out. The cows never left the stalle, so he didn’t have to bring them in from the fields in the morning, just milked them where they stood, then separated the milk from the cream by cranking the churner. The separator was similar to the one they’d used at home and just as hard to clean.

  The Bonazzons and Zanardis were self-sufficient in milk, cream and butter, just like the Lamonts, and grew most of the rest of what they needed in a
vegetable garden close to the houses. Out beyond the Zanardi house was a sty for the pigs, from which the salamis hanging in the cupboard behind the kitchen were made.

  At Devil’s Bridge, Joe and Dan had hunted rabbits with Dan’s pet ferret, which would flush them out of their burrows. The rabbits were mostly fed to the dogs, but here they were hung, then cooked over a coal range in the kitchen that also supplied the hot water, just like at home.

  Nina and Marisa’s day went much like Molly’s and the aunties’, from daylight until dusk and beyond, milking cows, gardening, washing, ironing, knitting and sewing, in the light from candles and lamps. At their side for most of the time was Nonna Isabella, wizened, grey hair in a tight bun, dressed in widow’s black, but in some ways quite unconventional: she told Joe she didn’t believe in God but went to church every Sunday just in case. In other ways, she was very conservative. When Joe attempted to wash the dishes after an evening meal, Nonna was affronted and chased him from the sink with a broom. When Paola and Leo recognised a similarity with a picture book they were reading and called ‘Strega! Strega!’ Witch! Witch!, Nonna put the broomstick between her knees and rode across to the children, who pretended to be scared witless.

  Although so much was the same as at Devil’s Bridge, it was also incalculably different. Orders were seldom given, voices seldom raised, except between Bepi and Gigi, whose constant banter and discussion and cursing was carried out at a volume that at home would have ended in punches being thrown. Gigi was taller than Bepi and wiry, not as outgoing, but the pair worked like a left and right hand with a mutual knowledge that looked instinctive but was born of thousands of man hours together. There was an easy rhythm to their tasks, whether out in the fields or repairs and maintenance in the implement shed when the first winter rains came. Work seemed to be an integral part of a joyful life, not an obligation to be tackled and beaten.

  Books were precious and the whole family embraced the education of Donatella and Paola and Leo. The teacher at Ardgowan had let Joe take the odd school book home to read, but if old Mal had caught him reading, he’d find Joe some work to occupy his hands, ‘Or I’ll give ye this book around yer bluddy ears!’

  Every evening, as the temperature dropped, both families would gather in one house or the other while dinner was being prepared. The houses were virtually identical, with the bottom storey divided into the stalle for the animals and a huge flagstoned room that served as kitchen, dining and sitting room. Behind the kitchen was a small room where meat was hung and food stored. In the aromatic warmth of the range the school books would come out and Donatella would go through the children’s homework exercises, with everyone joining in. Joe quickly realised that neither Nonna nor Gigi could read or write and the others were semi-literate at best. So a circle of curious adults, including Joe, tried to pick up as much as they could, and often asked questions.

  By all the standards that Joe knew, Paola and Leo were spoilt rotten, always the centre of the adults’ attention and, as far as he could see, much the better for it. There was no evidence of sibling rivalry, no tantrums, no tears, and when they got home from school at lunchtime they did their jobs in the afternoon without being ordered to or even asked and then did their homework with Donatella when she got home from the convent school in the evening.

  She would insist everyone joined in the action song that ended homework. They would all hold hands and sing about the pecorella, little lamb, Cibin, who kept getting lost and had to be looked for everywhere, in the river, the mountains, the sea and the forests. Really, Paola was already too old for the song and they all acted it out for little Leo, whose dark blond hair shone in the lamplight.

  One evening Donatella asked Joe for a song. He was about to tell them there had been no singing in his house, not even hymns, when he remembered his first day at school, when the teacher had asked the new entrants to join hands in a circle and they sang, ‘Ring a ring o’ roses, a pocket full of posies.’ Paola and Leo loved it, especially when Joe did the exaggerated sneezes, ‘A tishoo! A tishoo!’, then threw himself on the floor for ‘We all fall down!’. The song became a favourite and Donatella and the kids clamoured for another.

  The only other one Joe could remember was ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’. When he mimed looking up into the heavens, ‘Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky’, Paola and Leo both gazed skywards in wonder too, though they couldn’t understand the words until Donatella translated them.

  Although it wasn’t as much fun as ‘Ring a ring o’ roses’, ‘Twinkle, twinkle’ became a much requested lullaby, and several times Joe went up the stairs in the Zanardi house with Donatella and they sang the song to Paola and Leo in their beds. He couldn’t remember all the verses but the ones he knew stayed with him as he lay under the photograph of the absent son Luca in his Alpino hat.

  When the blazing sun is gone,

  When he nothing shines upon,

  Then you show your little light,

  Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

  As your bright and tiny spark,

  Lights the traveller in the dark.

  Though I know not what you are,

  Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

  Joe would wish for the innocence that believed there was only one burning sun in the sky, and that it disappeared at night.

  One evening when he was singing the lullaby to the kids Donatella took his hand in the darkness and held it between her own. He perhaps imagined that he saw her looking at him fondly sometimes but she seldom touched him in a family where touching was like breathing and she always called him the formal lei, in a family where they all called each other, and Joe, tu. He called her tu, partly because everyone else did, and partly because he knew more of the verb endings for tu. That night, he cautioned himself that he shouldn’t read too much into Donatella’s touch. It was an instinctive thing, he knew, a response to a magical moment with the kids.

  When the children went to bed, the families would retreat to their respective houses. Donatella would get out her own books and practise her English with Joe. To his embarrassment he wasn’t able to answer some of her questions about grammar but he was at least able to help her conversational skills. She laughed easily and often, a throaty sound that belied the softness of her voice. Joe had never really known love, not even what Ida had called puppy love at school, but he instinctively recognised the feeling that rose in him at the sight and sound of her.

  23

  The constant threat of rastrellamenti by the Germans and Republicans was probably more difficult to live with than Bepi and the family let on. Paola and Leo had to be told not to mention the stranger to their friends or at school. Joe had to make sure he wasn’t spotted by passers-by on the road and if visitors came through the arch he would high-step to his casotta in the maize field so as not to leave a track.

  Bepi had told him that there were known sympathisers on the farms around them and known fascists, but most of their neighbours had learnt not to declare themselves politically after two decades of Mussolini. Bepi called them ‘Chi lo sa’, the Who knows.

  Joe still might have tried to stay on had it not been for news Donatella brought home from the convent school about two and a half weeks after he had arrived. Once the children were in bed, she told them there’d been a scandal at the church further up the hill from the convent: Don Claudio, the priest, had been found dead in his presbytery. ‘Strangolato.’

  Joe had never heard the word before, but it was an easy enough translation, and he had to be careful how he responded. He’d said nothing as Donatella repeated the gossip: that there’d been rumours about Don Claudio’s sexuality, and he may have been the victim of a sordid lovers’ tiff. According to Bepi, it was also common knowledge that Don Claudio was a confidant of the district Gestapo commander, known universally as Il Pazzo, The Madman, because of the savagery of his reprisals.

  Joe had told Bepi and the
family very little of what had happened in Gemona that night, or about Harry. He’d just said that his friend had run off after trying to save Joe by covering him in shit. Bepi had asked few questions: he understood that it was safer not to know.

  Joe had heard nothing from Harry, but he remembered the corrupt cookhouse wallah at the Bari prison camp who almost died with Harry’s hands clamped around his neck. Don Claudio’s death and the manner of it was surely confirmation that Harry had escaped the SS and their dogs, and had gone back for vengeance on the priest.

  There were no rumours about any connection between escaped POWs and Don Claudio’s death, but a day or so after the body was found Bepi returned from the big market, where he had sold beets and greens and the last of the potatoes, with a copy of a poster he said was plastered all over town. It showed sketches of Il Capitano Neozelandese, who was supposed to be Harry, and Il Caporale, who was supposed to be Joe. Neither was very accurate, apart from the scar running down the side of il caporale’s temple and cheek. The Gestapo could only have got those details of Harry and Joe’s ‘new’ rank from Don Claudio. In Joe’s mind, the timing of the posters confirmed that Il Pazzo and the Gestapo suspected that he and Harry had been involved in the priest’s death. Joe remained silent, but knew that if he were captured, he would be recognised and interrogated by the Gestapo, and the reprisals suffered by Bepi and the others would be unimaginable.

  Bepi, translated by Donatella, told Joe of other developments that upped the ante. Joe knew from Don Claudio that Mussolini had set up a fascist republican government on Lake Garda under German control, but he had no idea that the Venezia–Friuli–Giulia region had been informally annexed by Germany and was no longer part of the Italian state. The existence of the Adriatisches Küstenland, as it was known, incensed Bepi. It was administered by an Austrian Nazi who hated Italians, and particularly Venetians and Friulians, whom he considered alien even to the Italian race. ‘Twenty-five years after we stopped the Austrians at the Piave, Mussolini has delivered us to them!’ lamented Bepi. In response a clandestine Comitato Liberazione Nazionale had been set up in Milan, determined to expel the Germans and eliminate fascism. Part of the CLN’s brief was to assist Allied prisoners of war and Bepi asked for Joe’s permission to approach the local cell and get advice.