by Greg McGee
Joe was about to ride on to find the Lancers when he heard the clank of tracks on hard concrete and had to stop himself from running. Instead he forced himself to watch as about twenty Shermans came into the square from the other end, worked their way to vantage points around the Tribunale building and began firing. Joe fell to the ground, clawing at the flagstones, then scrambled to his feet and ran.
He woke up on stone steps among the wharves that ran along the front of the city. It was dark and silent and he was hungry, thirsty and cold. He put on the Lancers’ battle tunic, pulled the cap over his head and walked back towards the square. The tanks had gone and Colonel Donald had obviously decided to leave any surviving SS to Tito. Soldiers with the red star on their caps were swarming in through the holes punched in the three-foot-thick walls by the tanks.
At a loss, Joe walked back through a succession of big squares towards the western end of town, hoping to find the Lancers, other Kiwis, or maybe even Dan. There were few people on the streets and those who were carried weapons. Joe wondered if there was a curfew but was past caring and plodded on unarmed through an urban no man’s land towards he knew not where. Trieste didn’t feel like Italy. The piazze were too big and plain and so were the buildings. Grand and square and Teutonic. He felt like an alien: an insubstantial speck of half-life, drifting through the streets unseen. That must have been why no one shot him.
He climbed up through the city, hoping to reach the countryside and find a sheltered place where he could rest. As he ascended, he came to a residential neighbourhood of substantial villas and then, ahead of him, were lights and voices. It was a large taverna or dance hall with a terrazzo looking out over Trieste. Weak and thirsty, he hovered at the door, listening. Most of the raised voices he could hear were female and Italian.
He’d heard that sound before when Luca had taken him into Gemona to buy more chemicals for the dynamite. They’d passed a corner taverna and Luca had stopped. ‘Senti,’ he’d said. Listen. Joe could hear a babble of voices, men’s. Joe would have said they were confidently holding forth and spoke good Italian, much more complex than he’d heard used among the partisans. ‘That is the voice of fascism,’ said Luca. ‘It’s not parade-ground ranting, it’s not Mussolini on the dais, it’s this vanity, this entitlement, these words like silk thread weaving a web to stifle liberty.’
When Joe put his good eye to the glass of the door in Trieste, he saw uniforms inside and a black kiwi on a shoulder epaulette, so he pushed inside and grimaced as he was hit by the light. He drank wine and beer because it seemed to be free, though each glass just made him thirstier for the next. There were a few Lancers there, but no one he knew. A Reg and a Johnny slapped him on the back and were too drunk to realise that he was a Kiwi underneath the tunic, with peasant shirt and pants and working boots. But the Italians they tried to introduce him to knew instantly where he’d come from and quickly moved on. They were well-dressed men and women and their daughters, who didn’t look as if they’d suffered much. The war they were clearly worried about was the one that was about to begin, between Tito’s communists and Italians who’d supported the fascists. Reg and Johnny were delighted that the Div, and the Lancers, had been offered billets by these wonderful people in their wonderful houses. They were a class of Italian whom Joe had never seen among the partigiani, and he drowned his ire with more wine when he realised that the naïve Kiwis and English had become their de facto protectors.
Joe said very little, tried to concentrate on eating and drinking and breathing away his anger, until, out on the terrace, he saw a tallish frame he thought he recognised. Joe pressed his way through the throng towards the man, who was talking in Italian to two beautiful young women dressed up to the nines, and tapped him on the shoulder, which bore a Kiwi epaulette and a lance corporal’s stripe.
When the man turned his blue eyes on Joe, and blew out the smoke of the cigarette he’d been drawing on, Joe blurted, in dialect so that the young women would not understand, ‘Luca e Leo li gà copài i todeschi, ’e boarìe le stà brusade, ma Donatella, che Dio a benediga, la sè drio spetarte.’ Luca and Leo have been murdered by the Gestapo, the farmhouses have been burned, but Donatella, God help her, is still waiting for you.
‘Have we met?’ asked the man.
59
Could he be sure it was Harry? He had been once, but age hadn’t helped his recall of the man whose face had turned to his that night. Back then Joe was unused to drinking. He’d been found comatose in his own vomit on the street next morning and had been delivered to one of the Div’s mobile hospital units, where he woke with a sore head, dry retching. When he’d managed to keep some soup down, a neat wiry man, balding, came and sat down beside his bed. He introduced himself as Captain Foley from N Section, whose responsibility it was to repatriate Kiwi prisoners of war.
‘We’re at a bit of a loss here,’ said Captain Foley. ‘Who are you?’
* * *
Joe was interrogated and processed by N Section and given new ID papers, but stubbornly refused to hand over his false carta d’identità for Gianni Lamonza. They gave him a psychological test that he struggled with in his own language — he found he’d forgotten idiosyncratic English and when he was trying to collect his thoughts he would say, ‘E allora’ and Foley would say ‘What?’ and he would say ‘Niente’. And Foley would say ‘Can you please speak English?’ and he would say, ‘Magari’ or ‘Perforza’ or ‘Certo’ or just ‘Sì’.
When he told Foley about the heroic partigiani of the Garibaldi brigade, the captain asked, ‘Aren’t they communists?’
He also told them that he had fought alongside another New Zealander and watched Foley’s eyes very carefully when he mentioned Harry Spence. There wasn’t a flicker of recognition so he said no more. The captain asked for the names of the families who’d given him refuge and the partisans he’d fought with. Joe was so conditioned not to supply this information that he hesitated to name them, but Foley said there might be some way to recognise their contribution, so he described what had happened to the Bonazzons and Zanardis and wept again when he spoke of Leo and Luca.
‘Can you believe that?’ he asked Foley. ‘The Gestapo has a gun to your only son’s head, and still you say nothing about two soldiers from the other end of the earth. Can you believe that?’
Foley asked whether he might be suffering from battle fatigue. Joe said that he hadn’t been in many battles, tried to explain that it was a different sort of war, being hunted, having a poster displayed everywhere you turned with your face on it and a huge reward for your capture. The captain had been interested in the poster. When Joe gave him more details, Foley’s only question was why Harry Spence had impersonated an officer, and Joe a corporal.
* * *
Joe was sent to Bari to wait with the rest of the troops for a ship home. He felt like an impostor in his stiff new uniform and found it difficult to fit into the military way, and was laughed at when he sometimes finished his sentences in dialect. He wasn’t sure what assessment Captain Foley had made of his state of mind, but it must have been positive because in Bari they gave him the official notification of Dan’s death.
They told him that Dan had died instantly in his tank on 27 July 1944 at La Romola in Tuscany, and they gave him a letter that had been found on his body.
This didn’t make sense: incineration would have killed his brother. There were burn marks around the edge of the letter, and dried mud, which proved to be dust mixed with blood. By then he’d seen so many grotesque cadavers that he was grateful for the kindness of those who had decided that Dan’s death had been quick and unknowing. The letter was written the day before he died. 26th July 1944. Castellare, Tuscany.
Joe,
We’re sweating blood for every inch of land we take. They’re using Tigers like mobile gun emplacements. We have to send waves of Shermans against them. It needs 4 or 5 of us to take out every Tiger, so it’s not
a pretty equation for us tankers — three or four of us are dead ducks every time. The first one we came up against 3 days ago near Romita took out four of us before its own crew blew it up. The wreck was covered in hits, all our armour-piercing shells had bounced off, apart from the one that got in through a weld seam. I can’t find out anything about you. You’re not on any Red Cross lists. I hope you’re somewhere safe, in Germany maybe, feeding up on sauerkraut and blood sausage. Hope the bastards are treating you good. We’re coming to get you, little brother. Stay safe till we get there.
Dan
What had he been doing on the 27th of July the year before? Had he felt a tremor in his soul at Dan’s passing? It would have been midsummer on the Bonazzon campi. He’d have been living in his cave out the back of the property and helping Bepi and Gigi in the fields before the sun got too high. Would it have been too early to be cropping beet? The maize would have been high enough to hide in. July was a couple of months before Major Ferguson arrived, so the Garibaldis would have been operating under Luca’s directions, blowing up pylons and points with Joe’s homemade dynamite.
There might have been a shadow on his soul about that time, he decided, but it wasn’t Dan’s. It must have been about then that Donatella had been invited to the dance by Klaus and later that night he had seen her pure happiness after she’d made love to Harry.
He couldn’t sleep for the first five days after the ship left Bari for fear that if he closed his eyes he would be engulfed once again by the fire and flame of the Nino Bixio. But as time settled heavily on the placid ocean, and continued to pass as if nothing had happened, Joe gradually lost his fear of the sky. He walked round the deck most days and lay up there most nights, watching the men get bored with crown and anchor and begin schools of two-up, which ran for twenty-four hours. But Joe never played and no one pressed him on it: he wasn’t the only one on board who spent the days staring out at the horizon, seeing pictures he couldn’t talk about.
As time went on the manner of death, the how of it in that torrent of paranoia and shifting allegiances Joe had left behind on the northern plains of Italy, seemed to matter less. Death had come or it hadn’t. The thing he couldn’t understand was why it hadn’t come for him. Or perhaps it had, but in a different way. The fear and dread that had been his companions for so long seemed to dissipate, and with them went any feeling at all.
60
His brother’s widow Sandy had been waiting for him on the wharf at Wellington. There were cheers from the crowd and a band playing as they disembarked with their kitbags. Joe left his empty bag on the ship and walked off with Dan’s letter, both his IDs and his paybook in his pockets.
Sandy was in a big coat with the collar turned up against the sharp edges of the wind. She hugged and kissed him then they clung to each other and cried for Dan. Despite the coat, in that close embrace there was no hiding the fact that she was pregnant.
She took him to a department store where old ladies with blue rinses sat sipping tea and eating pikelets with whipped cream and strawberry jam. Away from the excitement of the wharf everyone whispered in public, as if they had secrets to keep. Sandy whispered to him that she’d fallen in love with an American soldier she’d seen sitting by himself crying at the dance hall the nurse aides used to go to. He’d been about to embark for the islands next day. He’d told her the marines were being used as human waves against the Japanese and he would certainly die. ‘But he didn’t,’ she said, smiling through her tears.
Joe was thinking that it had been almost a year since Sandy would have heard about Dan and become a widow. He was thinking that’s just what happens in war. People lose their children, their brothers, their fathers, their houses, their fields and their husbands, and somehow have to go on.
He had been going to show Sandy Dan’s last letter but it didn’t seem right to do that, with his blood still on it. He could see that she was past that. She said she’d saved as much money as she could and was about to join her man in a small town in Arkansas so the baby could be born American. She’d withdrawn all Joe’s army pay from the bank and handed it to him, the notes all neatly folded into a fat white envelope. ‘You should check it’s all there,’ she’d said, but he didn’t.
She asked him some questions about what had happened to him, why they hadn’t heard anything for so long. Joe tried to explain, but couldn’t find the words to describe the kind of war he’d been involved in. It already seemed like a dream, particularly afterwards, when he walked back through Wellington’s cold streets past soldiers who looked just like him. They were happy, mostly drunk, some singing, some dancing with girls or with each other, some fighting.
Something about him must have alarmed Sandy. At one point she put her fingertips on his scar and shook her head and asked him, ‘But what will you do, Joe?’
He’d not said goodbye. When Sandy had excused herself to go to the ‘bathroom’, she’d left her coat over the back of the chair, so he’d slipped the envelope of money into one of the side pockets and left.
He walked over the first hill to the botanical gardens. The night sky was obscured by low cloud: anyone up there looking for him would be blinded, so he lay down in a grassy glade and slept. Before he fell asleep, he remembered thinking how strange it was to be here. Back in the tearooms, when he’d been working out how much time had passed since Sandy had been told she was a widow, he’d realised something else about time. Out on that ship, maybe when they’d been crossing the Indian Ocean to Fremantle, he’d turned twenty-two.
61
Perhaps Sandy had been right to be alarmed at Joe’s prospects. Perhaps she’d seen something in him that wouldn’t sit easily in the world that awaited him back home. For what followed were lost years, he could see that now. He was like flotsam from the Nino Bixio, blown apart by the explosion but still floating, unable to find form or substance. He’d got a taste for the way alcohol softened not just memories but the sharp edges of the present.
The newspapers said New Zealand had lost more soldiers per capita than any nation other than Russia, but the scars of loss weren’t visible. The country showed no sign of the terrible convulsions Joe had ridden through on Donatella’s bicycle, the ash and smoke and rubble, the cratered roads and fields and wrecked vehicles, the burnt-out villages and a hungry terrified population made homeless refugees in their own land. In New Zealand, it seemed to Joe, a people not given to overt emotion were able to put it all behind them and continue on as if nothing had happened, and he became lost in the silence, a ghost more haunted than haunting, moving through the pristine emptiness of the landscape.
In Gemona he’d dreamt of going home to Oamaru, back to the mine at Ngapara. But although he’d never thought of it consciously, home had meant the proximity of Dan and Sandy, the remnants of his family. Sooner or later Malachy would die and loosen his grip on Ida and the others, but that might be years away yet. In the meantime there was no one for him down there.
Instead he went north through a land of plenty spotted with rickety wooden houses that looked as if they would not survive next year’s spring growth. At Huntly, in country so flat and winter-wet it could have been the plains of the Veneto, he found a coal mine.
The Huntly East mine followed a split of the Taupiri seam that was twenty yards deep in places. In one shaft, already four yards high, an older Scottish miner on his shift, Robert Laing, told him that there were another eight or nine yards of coal under their feet. Robert had been in New Zealand since he was eighteen, had married here, but had never lost his tangy Scottish accent. He had keen black eyes separated by an angry red bulb of a nose, kept from exploding by deep veins of coal dust in the enlarged pores.
It was a much larger mine and workforce than at Ngapara, with lift cages and electrical jiggers that were all new to him, but the drilling and shovelling were constants. Joe liked being part of a larger body of men and although every miner had to keep his wits about him and know
what he was doing, his name was just one of many tabs hanging on the day-shift board. He had a hut in the single men’s quarters and kept largely to himself when not working, drinking in the local bar and falling easily into sleep.
As time went on, the fire of El Mreir largely left him alone and his dreams and nightmares and memories and imaginings became indistinguishable. He’d be singing ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ to Leo and Paola. Leo would be looking up at the imaginary heavens for his star when his eyes would fall on Joe and he would ask Donatella, ‘What does this man want, Aunty?’ Or he’d remember Luca in a debate in the hayloft with Harry, except that instead of Harry it was Il Pazzo with his glasses smashed and it wasn’t a debate, it was an interrogation. He dreamed of Bepi and Nina, Gigi and Marisa, and wondered if they’d rebuilt their houses and replanted their campi. Mostly he dreamed and thought of Donatella, what had become of her, whether Harry had contacted her, whether her baby was a boy or girl. Either would have been welcomed by the extended family, he knew, but if its illegitimate provenance was known by the community, it might be easier for a boy to live with that. Besides, the Bonazzons and Zanardis had each lost a son.
After a year, he decided to write Donatella a letter. He wasn’t sure how to write dialect and he knew the teacher in her would prefer to read Italian, but that was already slipping away. The letter looked clumsy to him when he reread it but he posted it anyway to the address he remembered and hoped that the houses had been rebuilt and there would be someone there to deliver it to.
He wasn’t expecting a reply, but many months later one of the men told him there was a letter for him up on the board in the dining room. His heart had raced until he saw that the envelope was his own, returned to sender.
