by Greg McGee
Joe listened with interest but said nothing. It was one of the few times Charlie also kept his mouth shut. Donatella was the only one who had the courage to get between her brother and her ‘cousin’, usually on Harry’s side.
She would ask her brother about the communist position on the emancipation of women. Luca would turn the good side of his face away from the light, and Bepi would put his head in his hands as his daughter harangued his son about the difference between theory and action: that Harry helped with the dishes and made his bed every morning, while Luca would not lower himself to do any housework because in his peasant heart he believed, just like all the rest of the men around here, that it was women’s work. Donatella told her brother that his narrow ideological view was unrealistic and inhuman. And indeed there was something otherworldly about Luca in the soft lamplight of the hayloft. The burnt-plastic side of his face had no wrinkles or expression. He would sit there severe and still under Donatella’s criticisms.
Joe noticed that her attacks on her brother usually came when Luca had been deriding Harry, whether simply because she’d had enough of her brother’s cold ideological analysis, or out of some elemental sympathy for Harry. He didn’t wonder until later how Donatella knew that Harry made his bed up in the Zanardi loft.
Harry spent most of his time in the Zanardi house. Marisa smiled when he called her ‘Blondie’, and he could even make Gigi laugh. For the children, Paola and Leo, ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ and ‘A tishoo, we all fall down’ seemed long forgotten as Harry showed them how to do magic tricks he’d learnt from Charlie. Joe watched the little boy become entranced by the charismatic straniero. When not at his lessons, Leo followed Harry around the campi, or to the implement shed, where Harry spent time hack-sawing off the muzzles of the Mauser semi-autos they’d captured, to eliminate the muzzle trap system that jammed too easily and corroded on dirty damp nights. Leo would sit patiently watching Harry work on the weaponry, or listen as Harry and Joe talked. Though he understood next to nothing of their rapid New Zealand speech, he did notice that one person’s name seemed to keep coming up. Once he asked them ‘Qui é questo Farkinell?’ Who is this fucking hell?
As far as Joe could tell, the Zanardi house was happier for the presence of a fictional son, whereas the real son’s return to the Bonazzon household had changed everything for the worse.
Joe could understand why there were no more sympathetic ‘poverettos’ for him once Nina’s own son came home so damaged. No foreign mother had stepped in to save her beautiful son. The worst had almost happened and she devoted herself to him.
Nina was the one person who didn’t warm to Harry. Perhaps, Joe thought, she couldn’t help resenting what the war had done to her son, while Harry seemed to sail through everything untouched. She’d tried to ask him about his family, but Harry had been vague and uninterested. Joe knew from his sisters’ discussions about their beaus that they loved trying to put together the full picture of a man. In their case not knowing or knowing a little and guessing the rest had been part of the attraction, but Nina’s perspective was that of a matriarch whose family had invited a dangerous stranger into their nest, a man who could at any moment of any day bring fire and death down upon them. She felt she had a right to know who he was.
Bepi seemed diminished by Luca’s grim presence. Everything was more tenuous under the constant threat of rastrellamenti, and there were no more invitations to un po’ di riscaldamento in the Bonazzon kitchen, though Bepi quite often brought a bottle of grappa up to the hayloft.
Joe would still help Bepi and Gigi in the fields when they were working far enough away from the road. After long nights in the hayloft Bepi seemed too tired to bicker much with Gigi, though sometimes they regurgitated the debates from the previous evening. Joe found Bepi’s humane socialism easy to respond to. His ideal world might not, in essence, have been that different from his son’s — one of equality and mutual respect, where accident of birth didn’t give one person an advantage over another — but Bepi’s way of expressing it emphasised the results, not the ideology. In Bepi’s world everyone had enough to live happily and with dignity, with un po’ di riscaldamento to help keep them warm.
These times in the fields with Bepi and Gigi were the best of it for Joe. They’d tell him stories from years before as if he’d been there, or assume he knew who they were talking about. To them he’d become Gianni Lamonza and they almost seemed to have forgotten that he’d once had a different name and life. Sometimes he forgot himself. His dreams were in Italian, but the nightmares were still in English.
That winter, as 1944 coldly expired into 1945, Joe noticed that the families no longer joined each other after dinner. The men and Donatella were often in the hayloft debating ideology or discussing plans, while Marisa and Nonna Isabella tended to the children in their house, and Nina sat alone in hers with her knitting and her thoughts. Maybe Nina saw before anyone else what was happening between her daughter and Harry.
Joe could understand why Donatella would like Harry — he was a less damaged and less ideological version of her brother. And he could see why Luca and Harry maintained a mutual respect, no matter how much they argued: they were both warriors. Harry was happy to accept Luca’s orders because his experience as a sergeant in the elite Alpini gave him authority. And Luca seemed to understand that, just as Harry Spence had castrated pigs, put distressed beasts out of their misery, slaughtered and butchered sheep for home kill, shot dogs that didn’t deliver, Rico Zanardi now found it meant no more when there were Germans or fascisti in his sights. After watching Harry at close quarters firing and under fire, Luca understood that his superficial motives for wanting to fight didn’t make him any less of a warrior, any less unwavering. Joe could understand why Luca trusted that.
Charlie hadn’t been so lucky.
47
From the beginning, Charlie had frequented the local taverna with Luca, Bepi and Gigi. Donatella occasionally went with them and Harry too, as Rico Zanardi, Gigi’s oldest son and Donatella’s cousin. The locals knew Gigi didn’t have such a son and, if he had, he would have spoken better Italian than Rico. But Rico had an easy smile and a way about him that they liked.
Harry had to be careful because most able-bodied Italian men were at the front or on a train to slave labour camps in Germany. The locals had heard the bush telegraph on Luca, though, and if Rico was under his protection, that was enough to make them think twice before they said anything. The Luca they had known as a child and a youth wasn’t the same man who’d come back from Spain and Russia.
Despite Luca’s protection, Joe didn’t go to the taverna because he lacked even the ghost of a story to link him to either the Bonazzon or Zanardi families. Luca had been as good as his word and had supplied Harry, Charlie and Joe with carte d’identità, but they weren’t up to detailed examination: they were only ever supposed to be a sufficient distraction to draw a pistol or a knife and kill whoever was looking at them. And there was the poster that made Joe’s scar so recognisable.
Charlie had used the local taverna to get his confidence up and had then ranged further afield. In one of the tavernas in town he’d befriended a young German lieutenant called Klaus, who was in some sort of administrative post. Charlie was quite open about his pal Klaus, said he was ‘a regular guy’ who wanted to ‘get to know the natives’. Charlie saw all sorts of potential benefits from having a friend among the enemy and managed to convince Luca to meet the man.
That meeting at the local taverna early the previous summer had been a success. Luca spoke fluent German and Klaus was delighted to meet a genuine war hero who had fought the enemy on the dreaded Russian front. He was determined to share with Luca his worries and anxieties over how or whether German plans would succeed in stopping the Allied advance in its tracks. Klaus was also introduced to Donatella and Rico. Klaus’s Italian was worse than Harry’s so he was none the wiser about this cousin who spoke only inc
omprehensible dialect. Two nights later it became apparent that Luca hadn’t been the only one to impress Klaus.
Charlie brought an invitation home from Klaus, requesting Donatella’s company at a local dance. She protested but Luca had already seen that Klaus was useful and told her she couldn’t refuse to go. Harry was laughing at her dilemma and Joe wanted to believe that it was this that did it: Donatella told her brother that she would go to the dance with Klaus if she could be chaperoned by her ‘cousin’ Rico. Luca considered that too dangerous but was persuaded by Charlie — he’d be there too, and he and Donatella could ensure that Harry’s Italian wasn’t too exposed.
Joe didn’t know exactly what had happened at the dance but when Charlie got back to the cave around midnight he told Joe that Donatella had danced with Klaus but had eyes only for Rico. And her infatuation hadn’t gone unnoticed by the German, who’d told Charlie at the end of the evening that Rico was lucky indeed to have a cousin who held him in such high esteem.
Joe had been trying not to notice how much time Donatella was spending at the Zanardi house. Paola and Leo’s homework gave her every excuse to be there but Joe couldn’t always be sure whether Harry was with her. Harry had a smaller burrow further along the hillside which was big enough to crawl into, but he used the main cave as a dressing room. He had to make sure he didn’t leave any clothes or other evidence of his presence in the Zanardi house.
The night Charlie came home from the dance, Joe waited until he’d talked himself out. Charlie said Klaus loved his stories about America, which Charlie told him he’d heard from his relatives who’d emigrated. In his cups Klaus had told Charlie he might go to America after the war, that Germany was finished and a vengeful world would extract a high price from the Fatherland. Klaus was a dentist and was sure he could make a lot of money working on American teeth.
‘He kept wanting to look at mine!’ exclaimed Charlie. ‘But I couldn’t let him because he’d see work that he’d know could never have been done in Europe.’
So Charlie had kept filling Klaus with beer and schnapps and had obviously had quite a few himself in the process, as he fell asleep soon enough.
Once Charlie was happily snoring, Joe went out into the moonlit night and checked Harry’s burrow. If Harry was there the door would be open to the night. But the pile of vine prunings hadn’t been disturbed. Joe walked back down the track between the fields to the houses. There were no lights on in either house.
As he watched, the Zanardis’ front door opened. Donatella closed it quietly behind her and began crossing the courtyard. She was wearing a floral print dress that left her shoulders bare and was barefoot, carrying her shawl and best shoes. Joe stood transfixed. If she’d looked his way she would have seen him in the moonlight. When she reached the middle of the courtyard she held her shawl and shoes to her breast with one hand and swept the other in a wide arc, and her bare feet followed the sweep of her arm. Joe realised she was dancing to music she was hearing in her heart. He had never seen happiness so pure.
He stood where he was long after the lamp in her room had flickered off. He couldn’t drag himself back into the cave with Charlie and instead sat out in the vineyard on Bepi’s wooden barrow and convinced himself of the rightness of Donatella loving Harry. The smile in Harry’s blue eyes when he was happy. The power in that strong, dry touch. Joe had once thought he’d loved Donatella, but if that was true he ought to be feeling angry and jealous. The only emotion left to him seemed to be fear, a low-level icy dread that was almost unworthy of being called an emotion. It felt more like a void, a hole where feeling used to be. The terror of his nightmares of El Mreir and the Nino Bixio were almost reassuring, reminding him that he was still alive. But even they were receding and changing.
* * *
After Major Ferguson’s arrival on Monte Canin at the end of summer, it had become apparent that Charlie was pretty much redundant. They didn’t need nitroglycerine for Joe’s homemade dynamite; it arrived in tins courtesy of Fergie, along with the detonator pencils that made timing easy. They didn’t need any more tobacco to pay for nitro, nor money to buy weapons and ammunition: Fergie gave them whatever they needed.
With Fergie’s explosives they blew up a munitions factory in Buia on the other side of the Orvenco. Then they crossed the snow-choked hills to Maiano to immobilise a silk factory making German parachutes.
Charlie couldn’t help himself, asked Luca if they could take a good swag of silk back across the hills to Gemona. At the time, Joe had wondered why Luca had agreed: they’d had to battle through snow with the mule train to get to Maiano and lugging even silk back across the hills wouldn’t be easy. Indeed Luca had said no but then, unusually, had changed his mind when Charlie began wheedling like a spoilt child. Maybe Luca just wanted to shut Charlie up, but most of the time he could do that with one look. He seldom spoke to Charlie or even acknowledged him and it had crossed Joe’s mind that for all Luca’s talk about the brotherhood of man and an Italy free of class and prejudice, he shared the same elemental suspicion and dislike of Charlie that Joe had seen from the townsfolk. Or it may just have been that Charlie was an American and a capitalist, and so obviously enjoyed being both.
So Charlie got his silk, which he took to town to sell to his contacts. When he brought the proceeds back to Luca, the notes were Reichsmarks not lire. Luca stared at the German currency for some moments, trying to come to terms with what Charlie seemed to have done. ‘You sold the silk to the Germans?’
‘Klaus,’ said Charlie.
‘Do you imagine the Germans won’t know where that silk came from?’
Charlie said Klaus knew he worked through middle men.
‘Don’t you see?’ asked Luca, very calm. ‘To the Germans, you are the middle man.’
Charlie just shrugged as if it wasn’t a big problem. Luca said nothing more, and in Charlie’s world that meant the problem was over.
Perhaps it would have been if next day Joe hadn’t discovered Charlie’s hoard under the slats of his bed. Joe had been trying to get rid of the stink of cordite that hung over everything in the cave from the old dynamite mixing days and had lifted Charlie’s bedclothes off the slats to get at the floor underneath. There he found an old dynamite box full to the brim with lire and Reichsmarks. The box said that Charlie hadn’t been passing on all of the proceeds from his deals, he’d been skimming, and it also said that the silk wasn’t the first deal he’d done with the Germans.
Joe showed Harry before Charlie got back from town. Harry got Joe to put the box back where it had been. He’d said nothing to Joe but obviously told Luca. Yet neither man had spoken to Charlie that day, nor even that night, when Harry shot Charlie through the back of the neck.
* * *
Joe knew the Gestapo had arrived when Harry crawled into the cave beside him. Someone outside pushed the wooden hatch into place, then piled the vineyard prunings on top. He heard Donatella’s voice say, ‘In bocca al lupo.’ In the mouth of the wolf.
Harry pulled a tommy down off the rack and began loading it. When he’d finished that one, he started on the next weapon, working his way along the rack. Joe understood that there was to be no surrender. That if they were discovered here they would die here.
That was no longer a shocking concept. Directed by Il Pazzo, the Nazis and fascists had come down hard on the partisans with the snow and ice of that terrible winter. They heard Il Pazzo had set up a direct relationship with the San Sabba prison in Trieste, run by a butcher called Colonel Globocnik, who had built an oven. Anyone of consequence taken locally now ended up at San Sabba. Code names were always used these days and the partisans had taken to carrying hidden revolvers so that they could shoot themselves if capture looked imminent. Donatella, the messenger between the various cells, knew more than any other single partisan, particularly since the other staffetta had become terrified and withdrawn her services. One night in the hayloft Donatella
had broken down. She said she feared that she wouldn’t be able to resist giving the Nazis information if they caught her. Luca had procured a cyanide capsule for his sister and thereafter she carried it with her.
Soon they heard voices that didn’t pass on but stayed at a consistent volume. Joe and Harry knew that if the Germans were paying attention to this one spot, they must be discovered.
Harry didn’t stop, just moved more slowly, loading weapons off the rack, but not pushing the bolts home. He had a line of loaded weapons along the ground in front of them facing the door. With a gesture he offered Joe first choice. Joe saw he was smiling, eyebrows raised. How about this, eh?
Presently, there was another sound. The soft splatter of liquid. A rivulet of urine trickled into the dirt under the hatch.
‘Must have a bladder the size of an elephant,’ whispered Harry.
The voices faded and they sat there in silence for a long hour, until they heard someone outside, removing the branches, quickly, carelessly. The hatch was thrown aside and in one movement, Harry rose into Donatella’s arms.
‘They’ve taken them!’ she said.
* * *
Donatella told them that when the Gestapo burst through the door of the Bonazzon house, Luca and Bepi were standing there in full uniform, showing all their service medals: Luca as sergeant of the elite Alpini, Bepi in his black shirt from the heroics of Montello.
Il Pazzo was a small man with pince-nez glasses and a squint. Donatella thought he looked like a desk clerk or a Jesuit priest. He was initially taken aback by the uniforms, particularly when Luca told him that he hadn’t seen any Gestapo in the battles he’d fought in North Africa and on the Russian front.
‘Ha sbagliato, Luca,’ said Donatella. He made a mistake. He’d shamed Il Pazzo in front of his men and now the little major would have to prove to them how ruthless he was. One of his men had pushed Klaus the dentist into the kitchen and asked him if Luca was the man he’d spoken to, the man who said that Rico Zanardi was his cousin. Klaus said it was, as Gigi and Marisa and Nonna Isabella and the children were brought across from their house.
