The Partisan Heart

by Gordon Kerr

  Once again, she coaxed him to his feet and manhandled him to the outside door of the kitchen where a slab of cold night air hit them. It seemed to revive Michael slightly. He lifted his head and inhaled deeply, filling his lungs.

  Moving forward, they started to descend a couple of flights of rickety, wooden stairs. It was the most difficult part, so far, of their traverse of this house. The stairs were noisy, creaking underfoot and Michael almost fell headlong down them on more than one occasion.

  The sound of the lake’s small waves came closer as they got to the bottom of the stairs. They descended the last step and found themselves on a shingle beach. What light the moon threw at them from between the passing clouds, showed that behind them was a high wall from which the kitchen steps emerged under a small arch. The wall had the legend ‘Hotel Royal Victoria’ stencilled on it in large but faded letters above an iron gate that led back into the garden of the building, brooding darkly behind. A memory of a different time. This was the only means of escape from the beach, apart from the way they had just come. She set Michael down on a large rock that lay in the middle of the beach and he watched her or, through the double vision that the drug still gave him, watched her and her twin perform a perfectly synchronised walk to where the water met the beach. They looked into the darkness to their left and then to their right.

  ‘A boat!’ The lips of both figures moved, but only one voice emerged as they ran to a low, concrete shelf, jutting out from the wall where the circle of shingle beach came to an abrupt end. She came back to Michael and once again pulled his limp body to its feet.

  ‘Come on, Michael, we can get out of here without having to risk a trip through the garden.’ The familiarity of that voice, he thought again, in the mist of his weary brain. She half-dragged him towards the boat, but as they reached it she could hold him up no longer and he fell forward into it, his head making sharp contact with the piece of wood that acted as a seat. She folded his legs into the boat, loosened the knot that fastened it to a rusted, iron ring on the wall and, the water soaking her shoes and the bottoms of her jeans, pushed it off the shingle and out into the water. When its bottom was floating free of the shingle she jumped in, fitting the oars into the rollocks, and, with difficulty began to row the boat away from the beach towards the centre of Lake Como.

  13

  April 1944

  Upper northern slopes

  The Valtellina

  North Italy

  Something was sliding slowly across Sandro’s face, leaving a trail behind it that felt sticky and faintly disgusting. At first he was unable to do anything about it. He was drifting, somewhere out on the edge of consciousness, the sun splashing down warmly on him between the branches of the trees that were all around him. He could feel that, at least. It felt good, the sun hitting his face like spots of rain, being diffused by the branches above him. He tried to raise his left arm and, to his surprise, found that he could not. There was no feeling in it. In fact, he felt as if he did not have an arm at all. This was a curious feeling and he turned his head to make sure that his body did, indeed, still exist. Gratefully, he could see the arm stretched out beside him, but it was bent at an unusual angle that he was certain was wrong. It looked like a child’s drawing of an arm.

  With increasing horror, he felt the thing on his face slither towards the corner of his mouth, which was open and which, given that his body did not appear to working as it should, he worried he might not be able to close. He turned his head to the right and tried the other arm, with more success this time, although he could only raise it with difficulty and not without considerable pain. Haltingly, he raised it to his cheek and pulled away whatever it was that was crawling across his flesh. He looked at his fingers and saw between them a large worm, almost a snake, in fact, bulbous at one end and gleaming darkly in the sunlight. Suddenly tiring, he allowed his hand to flop to his side, dropping the worm amongst the mulched leaves on which his body lay.

  He had regained something approaching consciousness some time before, although, in reality, he had, at first, thought that he was actually dead. This thought – that he was dead – had entered his head and had not seemed at all strange or even worrying. He had lain there, not feeling anything for a while and either unwilling or simply unable to move – he did not know which.

  Gradually, as the sun climbed higher in the sky, feeling began to re-enter his increasing consciousness. It came back at first only in surges of pain, especially down his left side. Pain shot up and down his arm and there was a sharp ache in his side, in his ribs, if he breathed too deeply. His left leg, too, throbbed painfully with almost every beat of his heart, as if the blood that was being pushed through his veins was too great a quantity for them to hold.

  With consciousness and pain came thought, and, eventually, and worst of all, memory. He moaned, horribly, when his facility for memory returned, turning his head to allow tears to roll from the corners of his eyes, down the side of his face and into his ear where the salty water entered a cut he had, causing him further pain.

  He closed his eyes and saw it all again. The faces of all his comrades floated in front of his vision and then spun off, leaving only the face of the German officer, smiling.

  How often in his life would he relive this dawn? How many times would he stage the scenes he had witnessed like a perverted film director in his own private cinema? Who could he possibly tell what he had seen? Who would believe him?

  They had seemed to be running short of oxygen as the night wore on. Their breathing became shallower and for Sandro it felt as if his heart was going to burst the very ribs in which it was caged. As the Germans drifted off to sleep one by one, changing sentries every couple of hours, the partisans became more alert, alert to the slightest changes in the light as dawn approached and with it, who knew what? One thing was clear to them, however – they were unlikely to survive the day that was about to begin.

  A watery sun rose excruciatingly slowly over the far mountain peaks, throwing long shadows across the rotting leaves that carpeted the earth. A thin gossamer curtain of mist hung amongst the trees.

  ‘Steh ‘auf!’ shouted the officer, rising to his feet and spraying commands around the waking bodies of the soldiers as they began to throw off their blankets and clamber to their feet.

  The officer spoke for some time to one of his men, gesticulating now and then towards the partisans. Sandro looked around the men, whose eyes were sunken and lined. Carlo’s nose was swollen, both his eyes were black and his face was caked in dried blood.

  They picked one of the older men first – Guiseppe Montella, a man of the far side of the Valtellina who had fought in Ethiopia and then in North Africa. Finally, like many others, he had deserted and, returning to the mountains he knew, joined the partisans. His ropes were untied and he was dragged unsteadily to his feet and held by three German soldiers while the officer spat questions at him in Italian. Where was the group’s camp? How many of them were there? Where were the other groups located? What operations were planned?

  Montella was a hard man who had seen a lot of life and he stared relentlessly and deeply into the German’s eyes while the questions were thrown at him. Then, the German approached him and struck him hard across the face with the back of his hand.

  ‘Tell me!’ he screamed.

  Montella smiled, spat in the German’s face and said as calmly as if he were in an argument in a bar, ‘Go fuck yourself.’

  By the time they had finished with Montella, he was barely conscious. His crumpled body was returned to the seated group of bound partisans and another was cut loose and faced the same barrage of questions.

  Five of them underwent this routine of questioning and beating before the German tired of it. No one answered his questions. All of them stared contemptuously at him while the blows rained on them. Sandro breathed a sigh of relief when the German gave up on this approach, as he would have been next in line for a beating.

  The officer spoke briefly on
ce more to his second in command and then stood in front of them again, his face red from his exertions and his anger, his hands held tightly behind his back.

  ‘You obviously didn’t listen to me last night when I urged all of you to consider certain things.’ He took several paces to the right and stared out across the valley which stretched a couple of thousand feet below him. ‘Such a beautiful sight, this valley of yours and such a shame that you will not wake up to see it ever again. Unless you re-consider.’ His voice had risen as he had spoken, but then he spoke very quietly. ‘Let’s see if we can encourage that, eh?’

  There was another fusillade of commands in German and a scurry of activity. The soldiers went to their packs, which were scattered around the clearing, took out the small shovels they carried and started to dig seven holes about three feet apart.

  They dug for twenty minutes or so, sweating as they encountered tangled roots and large stones, while Sandro and his comrades looked on with puzzlement. Puzzlement because at first, naturally, they thought that they were watching their own graves being dug. However, it soon became evident that the holes that were being created were not wide enough to hold a body and were very deep.

  Eventually, one by one the soldiers clambered out of the holes and threw their shovels down, using their hands to brush the dry earth from their uniforms.

  More sharp words issued from the officer’s mouth. The soldiers took Carlo, untied his legs and dragged him to the nearest hole. They dropped him into the hole, his legs doubled up painfully behind him and began to fill it in. At first, a shudder ran through the partisans’ bodies as if they were somehow connected on a grid, as they began to think that Carlo was going to be buried alive. Then the soldiers stopped piling earth in on his body at the point where only the top of his shoulders and his head showed above the ground. The Germans then proceeded to do the same with all the other partisans, the officer barking commands at them as they did so.

  Sandro was the last to be taken, but as they started to move him towards the final hole, his colleagues staring at him from their hellish positions, the officer stopped them.

  ‘Nein, nicht dieser junge Mann!’ And then in Italian, ‘I think it might be useful if this young man reported back to his other colleagues just what we Germans do when we are disappointed.’ A slow smile spread across his face and he instructed a couple of his men to tie Sandro to a tree about fifteen yards away from his compatriots.

  Sandro watched as the German stood in front of the strange crop of heads sticking out of the earth.

  ‘One last chance, gentlemen. Is there one of you who would like to give me the information I require? I’ll give you thirty seconds to consider your situation.’ He strode across to his second-in-command and spoke quietly to him.

  The seconds passed like a slow train. Carlo struggled to escape from his heavy tomb, but with his hands tied behind his back deep in the ground, was unable to do anything more than loosen some of the earth around his shoulders. Sweat broke out on the foreheads of the others and tears rolled down the face of one of the younger partisans. Several closed their eyes and their lips moved in silent prayer.

  ‘Oh you are such fools!’ shouted the officer, ‘Such fools!’ He then walked away from them and came over to Sandro. ‘Now watch carefully, young man. You owe us that, at least, for sparing your life, don’t you think?’

  Once again he walked over to his second-in-command who handed him a grenade and it suddenly dawned on Sandro and the beleaguered partisans what was about to happen.

  Sandro’s life ended in that moment just as much as his colleagues’ lives ended. He saw their eyes widen, their mouths open, and heard screams and curses and prayers. He screamed himself, the sound escaping from his body, having become animate and almost visible. He closed his eyes as the officer nonchalantly pulled the pin from the grenade and lobbed it like a tennis ball into the centre of the group of heads. He did not even watch, half-turning as he threw it, not reacting when the ground shifted under the force of the explosion, merely walking towards Sandro and kicking him high on the leg and then punching him hard in the ribs. He then picked up a piece of wood that lay nearby and mercilessly beat him until a red cloud descended slowly and mercifully over Sandro’s eyes.

  He was looking at his house, smoke gently rising from its chimney in the early dawn. He had little idea how he had got there and even less idea why or even what he was looking at. There were only vague memories of intense pain cracking his body as he rolled helplessly down slopes, or dragged his injured leg across the ground, half-hopping, half-crawling like a wounded animal on all fours. His leg was grotesquely swollen in several places. It felt as if the bones were trying to burst through the blue, black and yellow skin that covered them. His arm flopped at his side, sending razor-sharp messages of pain to his brain whenever it swung against his side. Each time he fell and the air was jarred from his lungs, forcing him to inhale deeply, his shattered ribs made him scream, the scream itself vibrating painfully inside his broken frame.

  It had taken him all day and most of the night to get here. Sometimes he had passed out and each time he awoke he was unsure as to exactly how long he had been unconscious. Now he watched, delirious, not really understanding where he was. It had been as if he had been gripped by a homing instinct, had been following an invisible cord that had led him back to where his life had begun. And now, in a moment of shocking clarity, he realised once more how that life had ended. Once more he saw the faces of his comrades, detached from their bodies, swimming through the space inside his head and he retched dryly into the long grass that hid him from view.

  And another face swam across his fogged vision. A dark, handsome face with just a hint of cruelty to it. Tears began to roll down his face. This time they were not tears of pain. They were tears of helplessness and anger.

  ‘Falcone,’ he croaked, ‘Luigi. Why?’

  14

  17 November, 1999

  Lago di Como

  North Italy

  Michael came to in the half-light of early dawn. He was being gently and pleasantly rocked and the sound of water was still with him.

  At first he thought he was still in the room and that someone was trying to shake him awake. He expected to look up and see the familiar reflection of both his dream and now reality, rippling the ceiling. But when he looked up he saw nothing but sky. Puffy, white clouds spotted the blue, which presaged a beautiful day.

  He sensed someone near him and, rolling painfully over onto his back, looked up from what he now saw was the bottom of a rowing boat at a figure, the figure of a woman, slumped over a pair of oars, her long blonde hair hanging lankly forward over her face.

  ‘Who …?’ His voice was croaky and caught in the back of his throat to the extent that he thought he might throw up. He coughed and her head stirred and began to rise.

  ‘Who are …? He stopped in mid-sentence and almost burst out laughing at the absurdity of it. There she was in front of him, with those same brooding eyes and dark eyebrows and that same lambent smile that he had first appraised across the reception desk of the Lighthouse Inn.

  ‘Good morning, Michael.’

  This time he did laugh – until tears began to roll down his cheeks. ‘I thought to myself, why not? I’d burned my bridges with the Lighthouse Inn, and, anyway if I saw another piece of bloody lighthouse memorabilia, I was going to turn into Grace Darling!’ She laughed, raising to her lips the bottle of local beer she held in her hand. A jolly, rubicund Tyrolean character with a stein of frothy lager leered at Michael from the label. ‘I decided not to wait for you to get in touch.’ She smiled as she said this, ‘I didn’t phone because I knew you’d try to put me off – you English are so damned reserved. But it was obvious when I got to your flat there was no answer. So, I decided to try the newspaper.’

  Michael grabbed a handful of crisps from the giant bag that lay on the table in front of him, and stuffed them into his mouth. They, along with the beers, had been all that they
could find to eat and drink in an all-night petrol station once they had landed the rowing boat close to Beldoro in the early morning. They had then walked back to the hotel in the back streets of town that Helen had booked into on her arrival, and he had sneaked upstairs to her room while she distracted the night porter who was gratefully coming to the end of his shift.

  ‘So I phoned the Post and after a load of trouble got through to a lovely Welshman who told me you were here, in Beldoro, but he wasn’t sure exactly where you were staying.’

  She took another swig of cold beer, sighed deeply and went on. ‘To tell you the truth, I was curious, Michael. I fancied an adventure – perhaps not quite as much of an adventure as this one, mind you.’ She stared into his eyes, ‘And I kind of like you. My mother says I always have a soft spot for people in trouble. I have this terrible urge to help them. She swears it’ll get me into serious trouble one day.’

  ‘I think we could safely say it almost got you into serious trouble tonight, don’t you think?’ he asked, smiling broadly.

  ‘Oh, I can’t imagine how breaking into a strange building, dragging a drugged, semi-comatose man that I have known for about six hours through a houseful of armed thugs and rowing him in a tiny boat across a huge lake in the middle of the night could be construed as getting into trouble.’ She laughed again.

  ‘But how did you find me? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘I packed my bags next morning and booked a ticket to Milan – honestly, Margaret, my friend, thought I was insane. Unlike me, she’s really sensible. Anyway, I hired a car and drove up here but when I arrived in town I realised it wasn’t going to be that easy to find you. But I started to ask in all the hotels. Not difficult at this time of year, of course, because there aren’t that many open. And, in fact, on my first day, I walked right past yours because it looked closed. There was scaffolding on the outside and it was obvious they were decorating. It was only when I had exhausted every hotel in town that I realised it was actually open. The guy at the desk told me you were here but I explained that I wanted to surprise you. He was reluctant at first but he’s Italian, appreciates a bit of romance like they all do, and let me know what room you were in. So I went upstairs and was walking along the corridor to your room when I saw these two guys in the corridor ahead of me, standing in front of your door. I didn’t want to share the moment with them so I stepped into this kind of alcove and peered out. God, Michael, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They poured something onto this cloth they were holding.’