The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  He closed his eyes for a long time, and I knew I was lost. I knew what he was going to say when he opened them. I knew what he was going to say but no idea how he was going to say it. In mangled English, with a sort of Kiwi accent which he must have picked up from Dad. The words were like boulders on his tongue, each one prised off with enormous effort.

  Your father was a great warrior, in battle the bravest man I ever saw. But he destroyed the two families who gave him refuge. His recklessness killed two sons who didn’t need to die.

  This wasn’t what I’d come to hear. I remembered two head-stones, of Leo Zanardi, 8 and Luca Bonazzon, 26. The ones killed by the Nazis? I ask him. That’s what their head-stones say, he said.

  He didn’t offer anything more. I wanted to say that according to Arch Scott my father had been a hero of the partigiani, but that wasn’t what Signor Gianni was disputing. The bravest man I ever saw. In battle.

  Then there was Donatella, where my father had shown neither courage nor honour. I have her letters to prove that. Una parola, she’d written in her last letter, in February of 1946. Just one word and my beautiful daughter and I will wait for you.

  One word.

  I said it. Cinzia?

  Yes, he said.

  Clare read the words again, trying to make sure she’d understood the meaning of that last ‘Yes’. The simple ‘Yes’ that meant her grandfather was Cinzia’s father. The ‘Yes’ that meant Cinzia was her father’s half-sister. The ‘Yes’ that meant incest. There it was. The crime, for which this diary was ‘explanation but no excuse’, though in fact it was both. He had blindly, unknowingly, fallen in love with his sister.

  She had read the last passages in silence. Now she leaned over him. ‘You loved your sister,’ she said. ‘There are worse crimes.’

  If he’d been listening, he’d have to respond. But there was nothing.

  56

  December 20, 1976.

  I don’t know what to do. I do know what I have to do, but I’m not sure I can do it.

  Cinzia’s been leaving messages at Aldo’s bar. Aldo is pleased that I have un’ amica, he thinks that seals the deal and I’ll stay. He has no idea that tutto e cambiato, again.

  I keep thinking that there’s an easy way out of this. The truth shall set you free and all that: I tell Cinzia the truth and we’re embarrassed for a while but stay friends for each other. On any real scrutiny, it’s bullshit. We’re lovers. The image of Signor Gianni keeps coming back to me, crying out of his one good eye, the other one dry, telling me he’s lost his wife and son and pleading with me not to take his daughter. He doesn’t mean don’t take her to London, he means don’t tell her that he isn’t her father.

  Cinzia was never told the truth. I can’t make a judgement on that, it’s too late and I wasn’t there in the terrible confusion after the war when these decisions were made. I could pretend I come from the new world where this sort of old shit doesn’t get oxygen, and I can pretend not to understand the sort of society that needs all these secrets and lies to avoid shame. Vergogna. Brutta figura.

  But even as I write this, I realise how ashamed I am of my father. I don’t have any idea what part he played in the death of those two sons on the head-stones I saw, and I’ll never know. I came here to find something good in him. Instead, all this distance away, at the other end of the world, I can sense his awful shadow over all of it, and over me still, and I know now I’ll never escape him. He didn’t have the courage to once acknowledge the declarations of love by Donatella in her letters, or acknowledge his daughter. The bravest man Signor Gianni ever saw in battle ran away from his child like a coward.

  I told Signor Gianni that my father knew what he had done and it had eaten him. I don’t know whether that helped. But it’s some help to me, I think, that I know where my father’s howl on the Moon Man’s soles came from.

  I’m glad it ate the bastard up, because his cowardice has wrecked me.

  Signor Gianni is asking me to do exactly what my father did, run away. This time there’s no child. This time, he says, it’s the honourable thing to do, to save Cinzia from losing her father after having just lost her mother and her brother. Signor Gianni says she has loved before, she’ll love again.

  I had to hold down my anger at his dismissal of our love as just another of Cinzia’s liaisons, but what could I say?

  Mi fai, tu. Mi fai.

  It makes a terrible sense now.

  December 21, 1976.

  This morning I handed the keys to the apartment and the Opel back to Aldo. He was crying. I call him the uncle I never had, but I never had a father like him either. His two sons were there, holding on to his trouser legs. They’re lucky buggers. I said goodbye to the boys last night at the bar. They all came, apart from Beppino — I lied to Aldo, that I’d said my goodbye to him in Venice — and there were tears and I wanted to tell them why I was going, but had to let them think I had been shamed by being sacked and being told I wasn’t wanted and couldn’t get over it. The worst thing is, they understand, they think that’s a correct way to respond to my sacking and reinstatement. Vergogna, the brutta figura. They hold no grudges and I’ve promised them a mate I know in London will come in the New year. Eric’s a running fullback with a prodigious boot and will do better here with his young wife and new baby than in London. They’ll love him. I’ve told Aldo to shift Paolo from fullback to cover Franco’s centre position. What about you? asked Aldo. How will we cover you? I told him it was nice of him to pretend that was a problem.

  This morning he handed me more messages from Cinzia, who now knows something’s terribly wrong and will go to her grave thinking I’m a bastard. Her last message was simple: no pleading, no declarations of love like her mother made to my father. Dimmi qualcosa, caro. Tell me something, love. Tell me something.

  But if I tell her anything, I’ll have to tell her everything.

  Signor Gianni said a broken heart is a wound that heals. Shame is forever. This way, it all dies with me.

  I ask Aldo to give her a message from me: Mi fai, tu. Mi fai.

  I’m writing this on the train somewhere west of Bologna, where any trace of Franco’s blood will have been washed off the cobblestones by now. I’ve got the hang of this Italian keyboard since I was last sitting here, but what’s the point. I won’t be writing any more.

  * * *

  Clare laid the last page in her lap, took her father’s cold hand in hers and held it against her wet cheek, feeling his sense of loss across the decades. ‘Oh Dad,’ she whispered. ‘You poor man.’

  She stayed like that for a long time, in the gentle measured rhythms of the hospital hum. The syringe driver nestled beside him on the bed made no sound. Nor did his breathing. She put her cheek close to his and felt the intermittent flutter. She sat back. Slowly it came to her: she had an aunt, if Cinzia was still alive. And there was more.

  One of those names her father found on the gravestones at Gemona. She’d seen somewhere else. Somewhere close.

  She reached into her sunshine yellow bag, drew out her wallet and took Renzo’s card from where she’d stashed it among her receipts. She’d never had to use it — Renzo had always arrived before she’d needed to — but now she read it, understanding for the first time what it might mean. Professore Lorenzo Lamonza.

  The Antipodes 1945–50

  57

  His memory often played tricks, in league with his emotions. Sometimes he’d find himself crying, then couldn’t remember what he’d been thinking about when the tears came. Often Franco, he suspected. Or Donatella. Or the wasted years of estrangement from Beppino. Certainly he could remember crying for little Leo and Luca, as he stood there so many years ago in front of the burnt remnants of the Bonazzon and Zanardi houses.

  After taking Donatella’s bicycle from the implement shed, the only building on the farm that the Gestapo hadn’t razed, he’d ridden ea
st towards Trieste with a vague notion of offering himself to the Gestapo at San Sabba in return for Luca’s release. His bargaining chip would be Major Ferguson’s unit up on Monte Canin. They were soldiers and could take care of themselves and, besides, the war might be over before the Nazis could do anything about them.

  On reflection, he could see it was a stupid idea — the Nazis held all the cards, and they’d have imprisoned him as well as Luca if he’d offered himself to them on a plate. But his guilt in bringing Harry and the fire down on the families who had given him refuge overwhelmed whatever reason he had left and drove him east.

  The Germans had turned the main road to Udine into a one-way highway going north as they tried to get their surviving troops and materiel back up through the Brennero to a last stand in the Fatherland. RAF and American aircraft were strafing and bombing them, and as he rode east through the burnt-out towns of Nimis and Attimis and Faedis towards Cividale, Joe could feel the earth shaking and see the columns of smoke delineating the highway over to his right and curling up through the crisp April air.

  Joe rode past PG 57 at Grupignano and on towards Monfalcone unchallenged. All eyes, Italian and German alike, had turned inwards, trying to survive until the end of Armageddon and imagine where they might sit when that day came. A foolish peasant on a bicycle moving towards rather than away from the action was of no interest to anyone. He slept in abandoned sheds and empty storehouses, under the rafters of burnt-out homes, once in a bomb crater, relying on the improbability of two bombs landing in exactly the same place. There was no food and very little uncontaminated water. The plains of plenty had been laid waste, poisoned, scourged by the tide of ravenous black ants and by those who were hiding from them and by those who were pursuing them on land and from the air.

  He was so weak that it took him several days to pedal to the main road between Venice and Trieste. Thirsty and ravenous, he approached a scout car under cover in a copse on the side of the otherwise deserted road. The soldiers were mending a puncture and he could smell tea. When they saw him they levelled their rifles, then told him, in English accents, to fuck off.

  ‘I’m Private Joseph Lamont,’ he told them, dredging the words from what already seemed long ago, ‘of 24th Battalion, New Zealand Second Division.’

  They were from the 12th Lancers, forward scouts for the Div and therefore honorary Kiwis, they said, as they gave him sweet tea and bread. When they discovered that he could speak Italian and the local dialect, they strapped Donatella’s bike on the back of the car and took him with them, speeding north and east towards Monfalcone.

  They caught the rest of the Lancers just after midday, stalled at the entrance to the long bridge over the Isonzo River. The Germans had prepared it for demolition and the Lancers were waiting for the sappers to come forward to defuse it. The Brits feared they’d be too late because they could hear the time fuse ticking on the nearest bulwark.

  Joe knew it was something he could do, and he no longer cared what happened to him, so they lowered him over the parapet above the mine on a rope. He was so malnourished it only took one Lancer to hold him: they’d drawn straws, he remembered, and a lance corporal called Billy Mason had held the rope. Joe unscrewed the detonator and Billy hauled him back up and shook his hand, said he was good luck. Billy transferred Joe and Donatella’s bike to his armoured car and the Lancers crossed the Isonzo and roared on towards Monfalcone.

  They drove past the railway station at Ronchi dei Legionari, where he and Arch Scott had knocked on the door of the stationmaster’s house, and then on into Monfalcone, where crowds lined the street to cheer the Lancers’ armoured cars through, held back by troops wearing the red star on their caps.

  These, and the pro-Tito slogans plastered on the walls, seemed to speak of Tito having beaten the Lancers to Trieste. But they soon came up against a German roadblock at an intersection and while they waited for New Zealand Bren carriers and tanks to come forward and force the Germans to hoist the white flag, the Brits speculated on how the Slavs could have come from the east and got past the Nazis and into Monfalcone. Joe, recalling the encounter with One-Eyed Jack, pointed to the low range of hills shadowing the curve of coast. ‘The hills are theirs,’ he said, ‘they don’t need the roads.’

  There was more German resistance at Castello di Miramare, where the coast road tunnelled under a bluff, and Joe watched from a distance as RAF fighter bombers worked over the defenders. While they were waiting a troop of tanks fired out to sea and sank two German motor torpedo boats. When he was sure they’d finished firing, Joe asked one of the drivers sitting on the hatch of his Sherman if he’d come across Daniel Lamont, last heard of in Tuscany. The man, who introduced himself as Alby from Dunedin, said he hadn’t heard of ‘Dan’ but told Joe he’d ‘find out soon enough when HQ gets established in Trieste’.

  There was another pocket of resistance on the skinny road along the cliff above the sea, but after a brief firefight the German commander marched towards them with a white flag. The Lancers told Joe that the man who walked out and accepted the German commander’s surrender was Colonel Haddon Donald of the 22nd Battalion, Harry’s battalion. Where was Harry now, he wondered, repatriated or back with his old unit? He would have moved heaven and earth to stay in the war.

  Joe was no longer sure of the sequence of events after they got to Trieste. For the Lancers and the Kiwis Trieste was supposed to be the triumphant final flourish of a long and brutal campaign, but instead it was messy and dangerous. The radio messages coming in to the Lancers said that Tito’s Slavs had been there for two days already. They hadn’t managed to quell Nazi resistance but were shooting Italians on the street, anyone they suspected of being fascist. Partisan Italians were shooting fascist Italians and vice versa and there were also Chetniks there, fascist Slavs fighting Tito’s communists. When Tito’s soldiers saw the New Zealanders arriving, they turned their weapons on them and made it clear that Trieste was now part of Yugoslavia and they weren’t giving it up. The Germans had retreated to four or five strongpoints within the city and wanted to surrender to the Kiwis, not the Yugoslavs.

  One of the strongpoints was the Tribunale building on a square fronting the wharves, which the Lancers were directed to. Radio traffic said it was full of SS types who’d been ordered to surrender by the German area commander but had refused.

  In the stalemate, Joe asked for the bike to be untied. One of the places highlighted on the Lancers’ maps was La Risiera di San Sabba, the SS prison. They’d come in from the west and he reckoned San Sabba was about ten miles to the east of where they were. That side of the city was held by Tito and Billy was adamant that Joe should hold off until the Allies took full control, but Joe couldn’t sit and wait. He unstrapped Donatella’s bike and set off. Billy had insisted on giving him a Lancer’s battle tunic and cap so that he wouldn’t be mistaken for an Italian and shot by the Slavs. But Joe stuck the cap in his back pocket and tied the tunic around his waist, believing he had more chance of getting there as an Italian.

  He’d ridden about a mile along the waterfront before he hit the first Slav roadblock. There was always an Italian-speaking Istrian among the Slavs, and Gianni Lamonza, Italian partigiano trying to get to San Sabba prison to save his brother-in-law, the leader of the Friuli brigade of the Garibaldis, was given directions and ushered straight through. The second roadblock was further round the coast, when he tried to turn inland up a street lined with squalid old industrial buildings. When he told them his story, the Slav sergeant said he was too late but gave him directions to a site further up that road, cordoned off by more of Tito’s troops.

  Behind the cordon was what was left of a six storey red-brick building with smaller three-storey wings on either side. The Germans had dynamited it two days before to obliterate the evidence of what had gone on inside. He was told there were no bodies so far but that two sacks of bones and human ashes had been recovered from the area at the front of the talle
r building, where the oven had been.

  In 1975, the year before the terremoto wrecked his life again, he’d taken Nina, Donatella, Cinzia, Franco and Beppino back to San Sabba when it was opened as a museum. It looked as squalid and menacing to Joe as it had that day in 1945. They were shown the underground entry passage and the death cells where those awaiting execution and cremation were kept, often sharing their quarters with cadavers waiting for the ovens. There were seventeen smaller cells, the first two of which were used for torture and stripping the prisoners of their clothes and papers and watches and jewellery. Luca’s identity papers had been found among them, the only evidence that he had died there.

  Joe had stared unseeingly at the red brick walls while Nina had wailed for her son and Donatella, Cinzia, Beppino and Franco had broken down and cried with her, along with many of the families of others who had been murdered and burned there, Jews and partisans, Slovenians, Croats, Italians, political prisoners and hostages. Five thousand people, they were told, in a little over a year. Unable to join Nina and Donatella and Cinzia in prayer, Joe had stood there silently, still paralysed with shame thirty years later . . .

  Now they were all dead too, Donatella, Nina, Franco and Beppino. Only Cinzia remained, and he himself, somehow.

  58

  Joe couldn’t remember riding back along the waterfront to where he’d left the Lancers, but he must have done. The Lancers were gone, but the man Joe had been told was Colonel Donald was approaching the front steps of the Tribunale building carrying a white flag. Joe could see windows partly open with machine gun barrels pointing from them. The massive doors opened a crack and two SS officers appeared, unshaven, their tunics unbuttoned. One had a sub-machine gun and the other held a Luger in one hand and a half-empty brandy bottle in the other. There was an exchange of words, then the door slammed. Donald walked calmly back across the square with SS machine guns trained on his back, everyone watching expecting to see him torn in half at any moment.