The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  62

  One late summer evening he was dozing on his bed. It was still twilight outside and he heard excited shouts. He ignored them for a while until something hit his hut with a thump. His startle response was still there — on the rare occasions anyone came to his hut, he’d be awake and on his feet, fearful and angry, before a hand had touched the door. On the rare occasions he lost his temper, he’d learnt to ask himself what he was afraid of. Fear was the trigger for fearless fury. But this time it was only a rugby ball that had hit the wall and was now lying a yard or two in front of his step. Nearby were several men in shorts and assorted rugby jerseys, hands on hips or knees, breathing heavily.

  ‘Sorry mate, can you throw it back?’ asked one of them. ‘We’re a bit knackered.’

  Joe picked the ball up, flicked it around till his right fingertips had the seam, then spiralled it back to the nearest player. There was complete silence until he turned to go back inside.

  ‘Taihoa!’ He heard the ball being booted and turned back just in time to catch it.

  Jack Taumata and Ernie Jones, Jonesy, were the main men behind the game of pick-up that happened most evenings until the start of club training. They insisted Joe join their games, then when autumn came they took him along to the Huntly clubrooms for the senior trials.

  Rugby unlocked something in Joe he’d thought was dead — a childlike joy, an ability to lose himself completely in the moment. He’d been anxious before the first match, almost backed out, but from the time the ref’s whistle blew for the beginning of the bruising, bustling, chaotic game he lost whatever was broken and watchful inside him and grew quiet and focused.

  It was in the clubrooms that he met Robert Laing’s daughter Iripeta. A big woman with the face of an angel, Peta already had a child, a toddler called Andrew. She said the boy’s father had ‘slung his hook’ on hearing she was pregnant and was planting pine forests on the Central Plateau. Peta was tender and funny, earthy and easy with Joe. When she realised he was a virgin, she made sure his first experience was one to remember ‘because mine was shit’. At twenty-five a late convert to that pleasure, Joe became a zealot. Sex, he discovered, was another way of losing himself and living in the present, but he was always careful to wear frenchies, even though Peta didn’t seem overly concerned.

  Through Peta, Joe was gradually absorbed into the Laings’ family circle. Although Robert had no relations in New Zealand, Peta’s mother Huia was part of a big Maori family with connections to the Ngaruawahia marae and endless cousins would identify themselves in the opposition teams or over drinks in the clubrooms afterwards.

  Robert was a keen fisherman and owned a large dinghy with an outboard. After Joe had turned down a couple of invitations to go fishing, it had become easier to accept than to admit he was still a bit wary of boats. On an Indian summer’s day, they’d caught no fish in the Waikato, broad and slow moving like the Kakanui and Livenza but about ten times larger, so they’d collected Huia, Peta and Andrew in Robert’s old Bedford pick-up and driven to the launch ramp at Lake Ohakuri.

  The sun shone down on them as they drifted across the placid waters and Robert tried everything he knew, spinning, then trolling without result. When he finally admitted defeat, they had a beer and sandwich picnic in the boat, then Joe had dived into the water in his clothes.

  Down in the deep brown he finally felt the Nino Bixio let him go. When he surfaced, bursting up, he roared something ecstatic but unintelligible. Peta looked at him and giggled. Joe began laughing and it was infectious — Andrew, then Huia and finally Robert, pissing themselves about they knew not what, save that something had released its terrible grip on Joe and they were happy for him.

  63

  Joe had often wondered if he might have stayed in Huntly, built a life there. He’d gradually burrowed his way into the community, made a small space he could stand tall in, propped it with fellow miners and rugby team-mates, none of whom would regard him as a close mate — his failing not theirs — and with Peta and her extended family, Robert and Huia. When he was in Peta’s welcoming arms he could think of nothing else but her, but when she wasn’t there it was always Donatella’s quiet eyes searching his. Old Mal had always said, ‘Don’t want what you can’t have, boy’, but in his dreams it was Donatella who was looking to him for something.

  Joe didn’t talk about the war with Peta because he didn’t know what to say about it, how to describe it. The only conventional war he’d fought had finished at El Mreir, where he’d conclusively proven himself to be a coward. His lack of words wasn’t a problem: none of the ex-soldiers down in the mine wanted to talk either. When Peta caressed his scar it didn’t need any more explanation than the returned soldier with one leg who worked as a pay clerk in the mine office, or the missing brothers and husbands who had never come back. The war quickly became an unspoken narrative in the collective memory, a pain best forgotten, and Joe might never have talked about it again, but for a chance meeting with Arch Scott.

  After a pre-season friendly against one of the South Auckland teams, it might have been in Manurewa, he saw a tall blond figure he recognised at the bar in the clubrooms. Arch Scott was carrying about four stone more than when Joe had last seen him at the station in Ronchi dei Legionari but the long friendly face was unmistakably the same. They found a couple of chairs at the end of a varnished chip-board table and talked, with a jug of warm draught between them. They began in English, swapping courtesies about their present situations, but gradually switched to Veneziano as their conversation ranged back to places and incidents they’d lived in that language and now found impossible to describe in English.

  When Joe bought Arch another jug, Jonesy and his team-mates seemed to know what was going on and stayed at the bar so that Arch and Joe weren’t disturbed.

  Joe discovered that he and Arch had had very different wars behind enemy lines. After liberation from PG 107/7, Arch had stayed close to San Pietro di Livenza, where he had counselled and practised non-violence, for fear of the retribution the alternative might bring to the Italian families who’d sheltered them. He’d spent his time in the service of other prisoners, organising food and shelter, and trying to get them back to Allied lines. Two Kiwis had been caught and executed in his area, one of them, Dave Russell, quite close to him. That had knocked him, but he’d got forty-seven men off Caorle beach by British motor boat and submarine. Harry Spence hadn’t been among them, which, in Joe’s mind, made it more probable that the man he’d spoken to in Trieste had been Harry.

  Arch said word of the heroics of Rico Zanardi and the Garibaldis had travelled south to San Pietro, that he’d been stunned by some of what he’d heard: the blowing up of a major rail bridge and engines in shunting yards and the execution of a Gestapo officer. He’d often wondered if all he’d heard could be true. When Joe confirmed it, Arch said it was a story that had to be told.

  Joe agreed but wasn’t actually sure. The bare facts of what they’d done were one thing but what had happened in and around them was quite another. Joe wished he’d gone back to San Pietro with Arch after the encounter with One-Eyed Jack above Monfalcone. If he’d done that, he wouldn’t have brought Harry and Charlie down on the Bonazzons and Zanardis, and Luca and Leo would still be alive, and Donatella wouldn’t have fallen in love with Harry.

  Joe had had a question for Arch Scott that he couldn’t ask anyone else. He’d wanted to ask Arch whether he felt anything, whether the feelings he could remember having before the war had come back. But once Arch began telling his story, Joe’s question seemed redundant.

  * * *

  Arch had stayed on in San Pietro as interpreter and assistant for an English military governor who spoke no Italian, so he was present at the disbanding parades of local partisans, now called patriots, and sat in ‘courts’ dealing with long queues of people with queries and difficulties they tried to resolve, and helped to organise the delivery of food and commodities t
o a population who’d been caught in the crossfire of two huge armies fighting to the death.

  ‘At first, I was happy enough to be involved,’ Arch said. ‘Happy to act as a peacemaker between my mates the patriots and the fascists they wanted to kill. I preached peace and tolerance, an end to fighting and hurting, asked them to forgive and forget, to try to look ahead towards a new Italy of harmony and love.’ Arch shook his head hopelessly at the memory. ‘Then the Allied Military Government held a reception at Portogruaro for local dignitaries and anyone else in the upper echelons with enough money or prestige to have himself invited. Watching those fawning sycophants that night gave me a gut’s ache. Some well-to-do people were anti-German and had been very kind to us, but most of them were backing the winning side, you know? Good time Charlies, remnants of an effete aristocracy. There wasn’t one partisan leader at that reception, but many British and Italian officers, resplendent in their uniforms, and of course plenty of lovely-looking Italian women ready to grab them by the balls. A stiff prick has no conscience, Joe,’ said Arch, ‘and the penis is mightier than the pen or the sword.’

  ‘The same thing happened in Trieste,’ said Joe.

  Arch said he’d argued with the naïve military governor who began granting perks and preferences to these new acquaintances. It might have been why his repatriation orders suddenly came through.

  ‘To those that have shall be given,’ said Arch. ‘I could see us winning the war and losing the peace. The northern Italians had been waiting for us with open arms until they saw former fascists giving parties and dances to high-ranking Allied officers, making millions of lire working for the Allies today as they had with the Germans yesterday. After two months of Allied occupation all the ordinary Italians saw was more unemployment, lower wages for workers and a huge black market as all the stuff hidden during the German occupation saw the light again.

  ‘That reception at Portogruaro was the last function I attended. I turned down all the invitations to dine with people who wanted to sting me for favours, and spent any remaining spare time I had with my family and friends in San Pietro.’

  Arch had tried desperately hard to stay in Italy and help where he could, arguing with Divisional HQ that they needed someone on the ground who knew the people, knew who was who and who had done what, but to no avail — he’d been forced to accept repatriation and go to England. He felt so let down that he told his OC that he no longer wanted to hold rank in the New Zealand army and handed in his one stripe.

  Three months later he was put on a ship that stopped at Taranto, below Bari. Arch had planned to leave the ship there, abscond from the army and walk back to the Veneto. But the time in England had dulled his anger and his desire, beaten him down, enough for him to stay on board and go home. ‘Just enough,’ said Arch.

  But since he’d been home he’d often wished that he’d jumped ship at Taranto. He felt that he’d deserted his family and friends back there and still felt bitter about how little the aftermath of war depended on the men who had fought it. But he’d written letters to the Antonel and Cusin families and friends who had supported him, and to the heroic priest, Don Antonio Andreazza, who had feigned madness when the Germans tortured him and had spent more than a year in an asylum out in the lagoon. And he’d sent another rugby ball over to San Pietro, after the one the prisoners had received in the Red Cross parcel at PG 107/7 had finally given up the ghost.

  By the time Arch had finished talking, Joe had fallen back into a deep pool of feelings and memories that he’d been flitting fearfully across for five years like a dragonfly, skimming and touching without disturbing whatever was dwelling in the water below.

  Back in his hut, the thing that stayed with Joe was what Arch had told him right at the end. ‘Some never came back,’ he’d said. ‘The Hare Battalion. N Section never found them all.’

  ‘Some would have died alone, unknown,’ said Joe. ‘Quite a few tried to cross the mountains into Switzerland, didn’t they?’

  ‘Some decided they didn’t want to be found,’ said Arch. ‘Decided they preferred their Italian lives.’

  That stayed with Joe. He didn’t think consciously of going back just then, not until the shadow of Harry Spence fell across him once again.

  Treviso 2014

  64

  At 10.21 whatever within her father that was still clinging to life let go. There was no discernible change but the absence of breath. The butterfly wings had stopped beating. She stroked him, called to him, then remembered the button. A nurse arrived, checked for vital signs, then crossed herself and took Clare’s hand. Clare kissed him and whispered, ‘Bye, Dad’, then had to brush her tears from the cold concavity of his cheek.

  They left her there with him, she didn’t know how long. She felt strangely at peace, as if this was a moment she’d lived before. Many times in fact: over the past eighteen months, it had seemed inevitable and imminent. At some point, Signor Abruzzi came and said, ‘I’m sorry’ in English, then spoke soothingly in Italian, words she didn’t understand but in a tone of such sympathy and understanding that she wept again.

  Then the nurses came back, along with the white-haired nun, who stood well back and watched, whispering what sounded like prayerful consolations to herself as the nurses clicked off the brakes on the wheels of his bed. Clare was past trying to protect her father from what might be nothing more than a customary blessing in a Catholic country. She looked at her father’s face as he went. It seemed looser in death, less taut. Death is peace, she thought, life is pain. She wasn’t sure whether she was thinking of his release or her future without him.

  As they wheeled him away on the bed the nun touched her sleeve, whispered ‘Thank you’ in English, and was gone.

  Clare sat there alone, seeing herself almost objectively as a woman in a chair in a hospital room with no bed, surrounded by flowers from people she didn’t know. She was sure that if she waited here the person she’d thought she knew, even a little in so short a time, would come on cue, as he had since they’d arrived in Venice.

  She knew she’d been clinging too hard to the sense Renzo gave her of a life beyond the mesh of bad relationships and dirty commerce. She’d hoped that somehow he might be a key to finding a new way, something more profound. It was an impossible burden to put on anyone, particularly someone you’d known for only a week, but to find that he was part of more duplicity was ruinous. Renzo had pretended to share what he knew, significant information about the truth of things. When he’d talked about particles that misbehaved when they weren’t being watched, had he been talking about himself? Had he been using a professional code that she was supposed to be able to crack?

  He was a Lamonza. He hadn’t assigned himself to her and her father by accident. He was the son of Beppino — or of Cinzia — and had kept his name. A terrible thought struck her. That if he was Cinzia’s son and had kept her name, it was probably because there was no father around. Fuck. Could he be her father’s incestuous love child? Could history possibly repeat like that? She tried to calculate how much older he would have to be than her, whether he’d said what year he went to MIT, and felt a red blush at the remembered kiss. How could he have allowed that to happen? Then she remembered him saying that his father had died. She felt guilty at the relief that memory afforded her . . .

  There was a tap on the door, as she knew there would be, and he let himself in, wearing his perfectly preppy uniform and his caring facade and crossed to her, with his heartfelt ‘I’m so sorry’s’, then tried to kiss her.

  She rose from her chair in alarm, held him off with stiff arms. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  He at least had the decency to look crestfallen. Then he reverted to that curious formality. ‘I, too,’ he said, ‘am looking for the answer to that question. You must excuse me, Clare, for expecting to find it in you.’

  65

  Renzo drove her up towards the Dolomites. Clare didn’t
bother asking where they were going; it didn’t matter. Presumably at the end of the journey there’d be some kind of explanation, but she felt washed out and quickly fell asleep in the warm peace of the car, waking only when he veered off a winding secondary road onto a rutted shingle track climbing up through russet vines.

  The Audi scrambled up for about a kilometre to a crude wooden sign at the edge of the vineyard, Osteria senza Oste. ‘Hostelry without hosts,’ he told her.

  She didn’t really understand until he’d jammed the car’s nose between two rows of vines and led her up a narrow path. A couple of hundred metres from the car was a simple wooden shelter built on a terrace with a couple of tables and chairs out front. There were gently undulating hills as far as she could see, covered in vines, turned golden in the autumn sun.

  ‘You’re looking due north,’ he said, ‘at prosecco country. It used to be a well-kept local secret in your father’s time and these vintners weren’t rich. Now these hills are a gold mine, but they’ve tried to preserve some of the old traditions. Come,’ he said, ‘I’ll show you.’

  Inside the shelter were bottles of prosecco and other wines, fresh bread, cheese and prosciutto on a board, with glasses and cutlery and a small basin.

  ‘It runs on honesty,’ said Renzo, putting some euros in a cup.

  ‘How ironic,’ she said. ‘In Aldo’s bar at the reunion, you pointed out Franco’s photo and told me who he was, but never once said that he was your uncle.’

  ‘Sins of omission, yes,’ he said. ‘I apologise.’

  ‘But why keep it a secret?’

  ‘I didn’t make a secret of who I was. I gave you my card and my name, but I admit that I wasn’t forthright about how I was connected, and who to.’