The Partisan Heart

by Gordon Kerr

  He opened his eyes from one of these snatched periods of restless sleep to find the sky at the mouth of the cave light and his comrades stirring. They crawled out from beneath their blankets, yawning and cursing. One stood at the mouth of the cave, urinating into the morning, whistling a familiar tune.

  ‘Let’s be having you then,’ growled Luigi, already up and checking the workings of his rifle, which lay across his knees. ‘Check your weapons, make sure everything is in working order. Let’s have a drink – Sandro, there’s a bottle of my father-in-law’s grappa in that bag over there – have a slug yourself and pass it round. It’ll warm you up, lad, put lead in your pencil.’ The other men laughed and began to pack away their blankets.

  Sandro uncorked the bottle and, taking a long draught of the clear liquid, felt its warmth slipping down his throat and into his stomach. He shivered, passed the bottle to one of his comrades and began to get his kit together, rolling his blanket and tying it to the top of his rucksack.

  Twenty minutes later, they were spread across the hillside above the stretch of road that had become so familiar to Sandro in recent weeks, their eyes trained on the bend in the road, their ears straining for the sound of an engine. They had felled a tree and it lay across the road, blocking further progress by any approaching vehicle. Once stopped, the car and the lorry would be unable to turn on the narrow road and would be sitting ducks. Beside Sandro, a couple of yards to his left, Dino lay, eyes straining to see round the corner on which their attention was focused.

  ‘Dino!’ Sandro whispered his friend’s name.

  ‘Sandro. What’s up?’

  ‘It’s incredible, isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s incredible?

  ‘All this, us, fighting the war, when just a few years ago … well, we were at school, wondering what would become of us.’

  ‘Oh, you mean like whether we would be adulterers, Sandro. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Oh, don’t start on that again …’

  ‘What do you mean – ‘don’t start on that again’?’ he hissed. ‘You’re the one who started it and you are the only one who can finish it. I don’t know how you can look a good man like Luigi in the eye. It’s a terrible thing you’re doing.’

  Sandro rolled onto his back, his rifle lying across his chest, his eyes fixed on the sky from which a light drizzle was beginning to fall, a light drizzle that seemed to have been falling for weeks now.

  ‘Oh, Dino, you … you don’t understand. I can’t just stop it. I love Angela too much. When I even think of stopping it, of not seeing her again, it hurts so much. And she loves me. Not Luigi. Anyway, when this is all over we’re going to move away from here, she, me and Antonio. We’ll go to Milan or to Rome.’ He rolled onto his side, his head resting on the palm of his hand, wishing he had never confided in Dino.

  ‘You’re a fool, Sandro,’ Dino growled and then added with even more anger, raising his body up and resting on his elbows: ‘It’s not going to happen! She’s married to Luigi! Madoooonna, she is the mother of his only child, she can’t leave him. And anyway, do you think Luigi would let her leave? He would track you down, Sandro, and, in the meantime, if he finds out, he’ll kill you. And her. I fear for you. Believe me, I fear for you and for Angela.’

  Footsteps approached from behind them.

  ‘Basta, ragazzi! Basta! Enough! – gossiping like a pair of old washer women at the river!’ Luigi knelt beside them, a cigarette dangling from his lips. His steely gaze never left the bend in the road to their left. ‘Concentration, lads, concentration. Not long to wait now and then there’ll be little enough time to gossip. What are you two getting so excited about? The girls that gather in the piazza on a Saturday night? Although, I tell you, there are a couple of those beauties that I wouldn’t mind taking into the cemetery and lying down on a gravestone with, myself!’

  Dino smiled complicitly, but Sandro stared ahead, unsmiling, disgusted by Luigi’s comments.

  ‘Now, let’s be having your full attention on the job in hand, ragazzi. It might just save your life.’ He moved away, crawling through the boulders towards the others. Dino shook his head in Sandro’s direction and resumed his surveillance of the road.

  An unnatural silence seemed to descend on the hillside. They could almost hear each other’s hearts beating and the occasional screech of a bird made them start. It was uncomfortable. The drizzle of this chilly and damp November was now steady and seemed to have set in for the morning. Sandro took in the familiar view, diminished though it was by the low clouds and the rain that fell from them. What would she be doing now, he wondered? She was in that part of her life of which he knew little, in which he took no part – the only time he was part of her life was during the brief, snatched hour or so after lunch every second or third day when their feelings for each other would remove them from reality for a short time. Why was life so complicated? Why could he not just have her, for always?

  He was stirred from his reverie by the sound of a stone rolling down the hillside, dislodged by Dino as he tensed.

  ‘Sandro! Can you hear it?’ he whispered. ‘They’re coming!’

  The low murmur grew in the distance. Sandro looked across at his friend who had closed his eyes and was crossing himself. He followed suit, pleading with God to let him get through this, not that he really believed, but because it seemed the right thing to do. With trembling fingers, he checked his rifle and his ammunition, laid out beside him. He raised the rifle to his cheek and stared down the barrel towards the bend as the sounds became more distinct as the engines of two vehicles. His insides began to churn and he prayed that he would not be sick.

  It seemed like an age as they waited for the car and the truck to round the bend. The world was split into two. The sound of the engines in the distance and the quiet around them. The forest below them wore a cloak of impenetrable silence and only the hiss of the rain tied their senses to the earth and the moment they were in.

  Suddenly, it was there. First, its bumper and then its bonnet and then the rest of it, green and shiny with the rain, slowly climbing the hill, the protests of its diesel engine shattering the silence. Behind it, the lorry emerged from the corner, a tarpaulin roof rolled halfway up the side of the lorry providing cover for the troops inside – estimated at usually no more than six by Sandro during his long days of watching.

  They held their breath. Luigi’s instructions had been to wait until he gave the order to fire, but it seemed never to be coming, that command. Surely he should be telling us to open fire now, they all thought. A stream of tension linked them, almost visibly. They had trained as much as possible for this exercise, but most of them had before they joined the partisans been used only to shooting rabbits or the occasional deer, if they were lucky. To fire on men, they had found, was different: exciting and horrific at one and the same time.

  The driver of the staff car saw the tree trunk stretched across the road in front and stopped. He then seemed to be trying to reverse and turn in the road at the same time, shouting out of his window at the lorry behind. But his gears crunched as he searched in vain for reverse. And anyway, his efforts mattered little because Luigi chose that moment to scream ‘Fuoco!’ and a fusillade of shots ripped into the front of the car and into the lorry. The car lurched forward and came to a crunching rest against the tree-trunk, while bodies scrambled out from under the tarpaulin and hid behind the lorry, leaning out to fire blindly into the boulders that littered the hill facing them. Meanwhile, the car engine roared, the driver’s lifeless foot jammed on the accelerator.

  Dino and Sandro fired round after round at the unseen targets that were crouched down behind the lorry. Everything was happening at twice normal speed. They shifted positions to get a better angle on their targets, fired at shapes moving behind the felled tree. Leaves danced on the damp ground as bullets ripped into them. The air was alive with gunfire and the whistling of bullets grazing the boulders that sheltered them.

  ‘Make your ammunition co
unt!’ Luigi screamed. ‘Don’t waste it!’

  Sandro rolled over onto his back to reload his weapon. His heart was pounding like a piston against his chest and he could hardly breathe. He had somehow gone beyond fear. Rather, he was exhilarated, enlivened and almost liberated from the earth by this experience.

  Rolling back onto his chest, he caught sight of a German trying to crawl into the forest behind the lorry, no doubt attempting to circle around to the side of them to take them by surprise. He was in full view of Sandro for a moment. Sandro hesitated before raising his rifle to his cheek and letting the sight at the end of the barrel fall on the middle of the German’s back, between his shoulder blades. He squeezed the trigger, as his father had taught him when he was ten years old. The report from the rifle sounded almost insignificant, too quiet and ineffectual to do any harm. It seemed to occur outside the other noises going on around him – the reports of rifles and shouts of men – but the body of the German arched the moment it was unleashed, arched and then fell forward, his hands reaching out to grab a fistful of wet leaves. Then it fell still, crucified against the ground.

  Sandro lowered his rifle and stared at the body he had just dispatched.

  ‘Well done, lad! Great shot!’ It was Luigi behind him, with a huge smile on his face as he crawled along to get a better shot at the Germans still hiding behind the lorry.

  Sandro lifted his rifle’s cold, damp stock to his cheek once more and resumed firing on the Germans who remained alive, as did his comrades, a barrage of shots raining down on the truck and ripping holes in its tarpaulin and its metal sides.

  The two remaining Germans lasted only a few minutes more before throwing their weapons out from behind the lorry and waving a white handkerchief of surrender.

  ‘Okay, lads,’ shouted Luigi, standing up. ‘Let’s go down and get the general. He’s on the ground behind the car. Take no chances with these bastards, though.’

  They all stood up and began to make their way gingerly down the slope towards the two Germans who had emerged from behind the lorry. On approaching, Sandro was amazed at how young they were. They could have been not much older than him and their eyes were filled with fear. They looked like the terrified young of a deer that Sandro had once shot dead a few years ago on a hunting trip in the mountains. He had come upon them sniffing at the dead body of their mother and they had looked up at him as he approached, staring at him in abject terror before fleeing into the trees to goodness knows what fate.

  ‘Damn!’ A shout came from the direction of the staff car where one of the partisans, Carlo, was leaning in through the open door.

  ‘Cosa, Carlo? What’s wrong?’ shouted Luigi.

  ‘The bastard general’s only fucking dead, that’s what’s wrong.’ Carlo replied, looking across the roof of the car towards Luigi.

  ‘Ah, shit!’ exclaimed Luigi, kicking the side of the lorry hard.

  It was at this point that Sandro noticed that Dino was not with them. He sought the familiar, slightly overweight figure of his friend amongst the men who stood in a semi-circle around the lorries.

  ‘Dino!’

  ‘What?’ asked Luigi, now leaning again the side of the lorry, a look of the utmost anger on his face.

  ‘Where’s Dino? He’s not here.’ He turned and ran up the hill towards the boulders behind which he and his friend had been sheltering, his feet sliding and scattering small stones and boulders as he scrambled towards them.

  His worst fears were realised as he rounded the boulders. Dino was stretched out on the ground, his breath emerging in gurgling sounds from his throat. A dark stain was spreading across his chest.

  ‘Dino … ah, Dio, they got you.’ Sandro knelt down and took his friend’s head in the crook of his arm. Dino’s eyes fluttered and then opened. They were filled with fear. He smiled up at his friend.

  ‘Ah … Sandro … when will this … rain stop … eh?’ He squeezed the words painfully between his teeth. A shudder then seemed to pass through his body and his head rolled to one side, the life leaving his eyes. Sandro grabbed at his head, cupping it in his hands and shaking it as if he could bring life back to it.

  ‘Dino, Dino. No …’

  He felt a hand on his shoulder and Carlo was pulling him away from the body.

  ‘He’s dead, Carlo. They’ve killed him.’ He buried his head on Carlo’s shoulder and began to sob.

  Suddenly, however, a shot rang out from down below them.

  ‘What …?’ Sandro lifted his head as a second shot echoed through the forest. Looking down, he saw Luigi emerge from the forest, putting his pistol back in its holster at his waist. The two young Germans were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Carlo …?’ He looked imploringly into Carlo’s eyes.

  ‘They would have done exactly the same to us, if they had caught us, Sandro.’ Carlo grabbed Sandro’s shoulders.

  ‘But, we’re not animals like them, Carlo. This is what we are fighting against, this kind of barbarism.’

  ‘This is a war, Sandro. Not a debate about morals. The fewer there are of those pigs the better for all of us.’ Saying this, he turned and walked back down the hillside to where his colleagues were collecting guns and clothing from the dead Germans. A good pair of German boots was a unit of high currency in the Valtellina these days.

  Sandro stared across the valley, wiping the rain from his face where it had mingled with tears for his dead friend.

  A peal of laughter came from down below and he looked back to see Luigi slapping one of the others on the back, his mouth wide open in a huge grin, his teeth gleaming in the rain.

  7

  8 November 1999

  Talimona

  North Italy

  Even when Ignazio Mazzini was a boy, he had been huge. By the age of twelve he already stood six inches taller than his father and they were calling him il gigante. He was a man amongst little boys when he played with his friends and he often hurt them as a result, more often by accident rather than design. He simply did not know his own strength, had not had the opportunities offered by experience to try it out in different situations, to understand the extent of his control over it. Consequently, he garnered a reputation as a bully. He would fall on top of one of his friends during a bit of rough and tumble, the friend would run home in tears to his mother complaining about il gigante Ignazio and the mother would brand him a bully.

  So, he grew into the mould created for him by others as a rather frightening and short-tempered man. Being as large as he was – by the time his body had decided to stop growing, he measured six feet eight inches – he attracted the wrong sort of attention from drunks and hard men throughout the valley. Night after night in his late teens and early twenties he would be called upon to dispatch a couple of likely lads in a display of strength that became something of a freak show and which drew crowds from miles around. The owners of bars would vie for his custom, knowing that he would attract a good crowd in anticipation of a fight.

  Of course, Ignazio soon grew tired of it all and retreated into himself, not even emerging when his family married him off to a not very bright girl called Silvia, in whom he lost interest on their wedding night.

  He remained, however, an imposing figure of a man who still cast a longer shadow than anyone for miles around and when it fell across the desk of Sovrintendente Cosimo d’Annunzio, it felt to the policeman as if the sun had been switched off.

  The station sergeant had been dozing over some paperwork which had ceased to be urgent some days ago when it had been due to be completed. It was cold and damp outside as it had been since autumn. The one bar electric fire that heated the room was hardly adequate, but it was the best they were going to provide him with in this little village police station in which he had to spend three hours every second day, providing a police presence for the scattered local community.

  At first, he thought he must be dreaming. In front of him stood a giant cradling a baseball bat in his arms like a baby. The giant’s nose had been
broken in a long-forgotten brawl and it rose out of the centre of the huge face like a broken-backed mountain soaring out of a valley.

  ‘Buongiorno,’ the giant was saying. ‘Buongiorno, Sovrintendente.’

  D’Annunzio blinked.

  ‘Ah, buongiorno, signore.’ He shifted his body in his seat and sat up, adopting a better angle from which to view this man mountain.

  Ignazio wore his customary clothes – in fact, his only clothes – a suit that had seen far better days. The trousers shone and the jacket was stained. His large head was topped by an unruly tangle of jet-black hair and his unshaven face was etched with lines that the weather had carved into it over the years he had worked the land. It was a difficult face to love and, indeed, Silvia had never loved it, even before their relationship had descended into silence on the first night of their marriage.

  ‘How may I help you, signore?’ asked d’Annunzio, his eyes flickering nervously from Ignazio’s face to the baseball bat.

  ‘I wish to confess to a crime, Sovrintendente.’

  ‘A crime?’ D’Annunzio’s eyebrows arched in surprise, but he truly felt a sense of relief that this was not, as he had first feared, a madman, come to beat him with the bat he held in his hands. Still, he thought, he should not relax too much – he was still carrying it.

  ‘I can no longer stand it,’ growled Ignazio, becoming suddenly angry, slapping the end of the baseball bat into the palm of his left hand.

  ‘Calm down, now, signore. We don’t want you committing another crime, do we?’ d’Annunzio replied with a laugh, immediately regretting the attempt at humour. ‘Now, if you don’t mind I’ll take some details. Please, sit down.’ He gestured with a hand to a seat on the other side of the desk at which he sat.