There's No Home

by Alexander Baron

  ‘Father, how far have we come?’

  ‘Coraggio, coraggio! We have already come six kilometres, and soon we shall leave the main highway. You want to rest?’

  ‘Oh, no, pappa. Look at Vittorio! He is not tired. He likes the country. He has never been so gay before.’

  Vittorio had abandoned his usual pose of sullen dignity and was bounding ahead of them, rushing into ditches, exploring farmyards, leaping easily to and fro across the dry-stone walls.

  ‘It is not good for a dog to live all his life in streets. Look, he is bringing us a stone. I hope he does not decide to bring us back a hand grenade. There are many in the ditches here.’

  ‘Is it here that the soldiers fought, pappa?’

  ‘Here, yes, but principally to the south. Soon you will see.’

  Aldo was filled with joy at the strength in his father’s voice. Everything was happening as he had foreseen. At the outset of their journey, Aldo had been fearful and doubting at the sight of the familiar, hopeless droop of his father’s shoulders and at the weary pace at which they had moved; but, with the town behind them and the sun on their faces, pappa had already straightened his back, was swinging his arms and stepping out more briskly, and was speaking as if the world about him once again held some interest for him.

  ‘The plain is rich, is it not, Aldo?’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Look about you. Those wide, brown fields have borne wheat. There, as far as you can see, are groves of olives. There, and there, and there, are plantations of oranges, figs, peaches, lemons, almonds. From the hills comes sulphur, to the factory by the railway. Those fat, yellow melons that you love are grown here. Do you see the vineyards? They are too many to count, are they not? And the maize. The earth is rich – but the people are poor.’

  ‘Why are they poor?’

  ‘I am ashamed that you ask, Aldo. Have I not told you? Men and women raise all these riches, but not for themselves, nor for their children, nor for us. The land is owned by a few, and the riches are taken by a few. Those who work gain nothing but the food for their next day’s labour, and little enough food at that. There is no difference between them and the oxen they employ. They live together with their oxen, and it is fitting that they should live thus, for they are all the oxen of their masters.’

  ‘Why do they not work the land for themselves?’

  ‘The masters are too strong.’

  ‘But you said that the masters are few.’

  ‘The masters have police and soldiers.’

  ‘But the police and soldiers are from the people.’

  ‘They obey. Look! Vittorio! Hey, Vittorio, here Vittorio! Why does he obey? Too many men are dogs.’

  Aldo trotted at his father’s heels, feeling crushed at his inability to answer this argument and offended at the slighting reference to Vittorio. He was disturbed by vague memories of a time when his father had spoken differently, but the memories were elusive and he could not take hold of them. He tried to work out for himself the differences between dogs and men, but he could not make his protest articulate. ‘There are no birds in the sky,’ he said. ‘An hour ago the sky was full of birds. I could hear them singing everywhere, even when I could not see them.’

  ‘The heat is too great for the birds. They are all in hiding. It is not good to be in the heat. That is why we started early. The birds rest, but not the peasants.’ He pointed to the tiny figures of people working in the distant fields.’

  ‘Nor the soldiers.’

  ‘Nor the soldiers. Nor those…’ he pointed to the slender green lizards darting to and fro on the white walls.

  ‘Nor the mosquitoes, pappa,’ said Aldo, excitedly, making a game of it, ‘nor the cicadas.’ The silence thrummed with the sound of insects.

  A British lorry rushed down upon them, its tailboard clattering, and dwindled along the road, leaving a long plume of white dust spreading behind it. Aldo felt the dust settle on his face and licked the metallic taste from his lips. For seconds after the lorry had vanished the puny sumach trees at the roadside trembled, their leaves in a silvery disarray. The dusty leaves of the olive trees caught the sunlight like tinsel. There was a sound like a battle and a motor cycle hurtled past, and again a cloud of dust wreathed out towards the ditches. Aldo’s heart banged with excitement at the glimpse he had caught of the rider crouched over the handlebars in goggles, gauntlets and grim, smooth helmet. The heat beat down on the road, the routed silence crept back and time slowed down again.

  They turned off into a side road whose rutted and flinty surface made walking an ordeal. The dust lay so thick that the sound of their footsteps was muffled and a little white smoke followed at their heels. There was a rattle of wheels and a peasant cart overtook them. The cart was painted all over in brightly coloured pictures of local legends, and it was pulled by a reproachful-looking donkey which wore a collar of silver bells and tall plumes of red and green. The driver’s seat was empty and the donkey’s master lay fast asleep among the sacks in the back of the cart. Aldo hoped that his father would ask for a lift, but his father said, ‘Let him sleep.’

  They were alone again, but Aldo was no longer bored or timid, for there was much to look at. The ditches now were cluttered with the rubbish of war: cartridge cases, helmets, articles of clothing, tins and cartons with English and German labels on them. Little trenches were cut, neatly as slots, into the banks, and dugouts burrowed like rabbit-runs. Beneath a huge cactus that raised its spiky leaves like warning hands against the sky. Aldo found a rounded sap in which rows of little bombs nested in holes cut in a wooden shelf. He would have taken one, but his father called, ‘Come away from there. There are mines buried in those ditches.’

  Now the fields were pitted with round holes, each hole with a rim of yellow-burned earth. Here and there were to be seen untidy little clumps of graves, mounds of brown earth each surmounted by a crude wooden cross, a broken rifle and a heap of soldier’s equipment that was usually covered with a black gum of sun-dried blood.

  The farmhouses that were outlined against the blue sky were burned and ruined. Tanks lay, blackened and half-sunk in the soft earth. Aldo could not imagine that they had ever moved; they looked as if they had been here as long as the squat oak trees.

  It was all very interesting; but disappointing, too, for there was nothing here in this empty desolation which Aldo could associate with the highly coloured pictures of war and glory that he had seen so often in illustrated magazines. He looked for the dramatic, and instead he saw these occasional patches of untidiness around which the vines and the maize were already closing again, screening the marks of destruction with their fruitfulness, and amongst which the peasants moved slowly at their work, driving their oxen and tending their crops as if the rhythm of the seasons had never been interrupted. Families were living in the smashed farmhouses, and from the gaping walls he could faintly hear across the fields the sounds of work, of altercation and of screaming children.

  He felt a little happier when Vittorio came leaping at him to lead him to a discovery; something more like what he had expected. A corpse lay on its back under a cactus hedge. He went close up to it and studied it with great interest. Under the German helmet was something that looked like a mouldering black pudding. The tunic was filled out by the ribs, but the stomach had fallen away so that the waist of the trousers lay as if empty on the ground. The arms were outflung, but instead of hands there emerged at the wrist only shining white bones, the fingers driven in a death-grip into the crumbling earth. Vittorio sat on his haunches and growled with distaste, but Aldo looked round him for a stick with which to poke at this strange object. He was curious to find what it was that swarmed out of the blood-blackened holes in the tunic like rice from a bursting sack. His father explained, ‘Maggots,’ and drew him away.

  He ran on to inspect an abandoned machine gun, and it was only later, when they were near to their destination and the vineyards around them were filled with the noise and movement of people, that
he remembered the dead man and pitied him for lying all alone and forgotten in that great emptiness.

  The world shrank again as they followed the path through the vineyards, and he forgot the dead man and the bare, brown plain. On either side the vines loomed above him, leaning on their sticks under the weight of the black bunches of grapes, shaking and whispering at the ceaseless attentions of the harvesters. Behind the pattern of writhing vine-stems and shrivelled foliage, Aldo could see a ceaseless, busy movement of people, and every few seconds a woman would come out on to the path and walk proudly away with a big basket of grapes on her head.

  They were welcomed by Turi the overseer, his father’s friend, a man like a great tree, with a face as dark and knobbly as the face of a tree, who moved from place to place as massively and as deliberately as if he had to drag up his roots each time he stirred. Aldo was fascinated by his leather waistcoat, with its rows of cartridge-pouches. Aldo was ill with heat and exhaustion. Great, burning hands seemed to be pressing down on his head and shoulders. The sweat made his eyes smart and blurred his vision, and his skin was chafed by his dusty, sodden clothing, but delight revived him as he saw the two men above him clasping each other powerfully and exchanging news and greetings in deep, strong voices. It was as if Turi were conferring something on his father.

  Turi led them out of the dust and the glare, and they rested on a cool stone bench in the shade, while he brought them water with which to bathe their faces, wine, and bread and hard-boiled eggs. Later, while the men talked and smoked, Aldo went off with Vittorio to inspect his surroundings.

  The rest of the day passed in a delirium of exploration. The faint headache with which the heat had left him only served to augment his excitement. He crept among the men who bustled to and fro in the yard of the wine-factory, looking up with wonder at their size, their strength, their faces so dark and leathery that they might have been brother-mastiffs of Vittorio’s, and the thick, black clothes with which they muffled themselves against the sun. He went into the big, gloomy barn where the wine was being pressed, enjoying the sickly, intoxicating smell and envying the men and boys who stood with their trousers rolled up to their knees trampling the heaped grapes while the dark juice filmed the sloping floors and gurgled away along the gutters. He wandered among the vines, eating grapes until his hands and clothes were sticky with juice, lingering to help fill a basket until impatience or an outburst of distant laughter sent him on his travels again, bragging to the women, telling them importantly what was happening in the town, inexplicably warmed by their sad, kindly glances and by the touch of their warm, rough hands. He met almost-forgotten uncles and aunts who laughed and wept over him, and a horde of cousins who, with the other boys and girls of his own age, paused to pelt him with grapes and draw him into screaming, joyful battles that lasted until a grown-up arrived to drive them back to work. He watched, wide-eyed, while two men killed a big, black snake with sticks, dodging and beating at it while it lashed about with incredible speed and strength. They chopped it in two with a spade, and the pieces still writhed. Long after they had shovelled it into a fire, Aldo crouched and watched the white, coiled skeleton glowing in the heat.

  In the evening the people gathered in the courtyard, the old men wearing their black coats like cloaks and puffing at long pipes, the children as tireless and noisy as ever, the young men and women in separate groups. Aldo found his father sitting among a group of friends who were listening with respect as he told them how things were going in Catania.

  ‘Do you think the war will come back?’ they asked him anxiously, and they were happy when he assured them that the Germans had been driven back almost to Messina and would soon be gone.

  ‘And the English?’

  ‘The English, too. They will follow to fight in Italy.’

  ‘Here,’ said Turi, ‘it is as it has always been. As soon as the soldiers went the people came down from the hills. There are mines in the vineyards, but we gather, and there will be wine. There are mines in the fields, but we sow, and there will be crops. The roads and the bridges will be repaired. We shall rebuild our houses. There will be wars again as there will be storms. But next time let it be somewhere else.’

  Afterwards there was singing and drinking. When it was dark the people ignored the law that the soldiers had made and lit a big fire. There was more music, and some of the men danced. They grew hot as they danced, and they took their shirts off and danced bare to the waist. They made a trial of endurance of it, keeping up the furious step interminably. One man swung a child on to his shoulders; others snatched up children; the first man took up a second child; and they danced, with their burdens, while one after another dropped out, the people clapping and stamping all the time until only one man was left, to be acclaimed like a hero.

  Young men and women were talking to each other on the outskirts of the crowd, shyly, watched by their parents. One lad seized a girl by the arm and tried to draw her away into the dark. The girl screamed, and Aldo jumped for joy as one of her brothers leaped forward and there was a clash of knives in the firelight. The combatants were separated as soon as blood was drawn, and for minutes afterwards there was a tremendous hubbub of screaming and quarrelling between the two families and their supporters, with the women outdoing the men.

  ‘Pappa,’ Aldo asked fearfully, ‘what will happen?’

  ‘Nothing,’ his father chuckled, ‘but I think that he will marry her.’

  ‘But the other one might have killed him!’

  ‘Then he would not have married her,’ replied his father, and all the men around roared with laughter as if his father were a great humorist.

  The fire died down and people drifted away to bed, the families to the stables or ruined hovels which they occupied, the unmarried men to a big barn.

  Aldo lingered for a while in the darkness, enjoying the cool air and pretending, in the starlight, that he was a lone adventurer in a strange, ghostly land. Lizards scuttled in the cactus hedges, not the delicate, beautiful little creatures that he had seen in the sunlight, but ugly monsters, a foot long, with slug-like white bellies, rough backs and bulging eyes. He squatted on his haunches close to them and imagined that they were as big as crocodiles. Far away in the darkness white flashes flickered like lightning, and coloured lights rose and died mysteriously in the night. The olive trees were like witches dancing. He shivered, and assured himself that Vittorio was near.

  He went back to the barn and was glad of the thick, smelly warmth. A hurricane lamp near the door cast a little splash of light that was just enough to make all the darkness flicker and the shadows dance. The sleeping men were like great black bundles heaped about the floor. He crept under his father’s blanket and took Vittorio in beside him, in a grateful embrace. Between the warmth of his father and the heat of the dog he lay for a while in a happy dizziness of fatigue, remembering confusedly the endless white road, the fierce sunlight, the stir and clamour of the vineyards, his father’s face lit from within by manhood, the gleam of steel in the firelight, the red glow on the skins of the dancers, the hideous eyes of the lizards; then he slept.

  His father woke him early in the morning. They took the bundles of food with which their friends had provided them, and the box in which Aldo had two little green lizards, and climbed up on to a cart that was going in the direction of Catania. The cart was stacked high with barrels and Aldo sat on top with his father, holding on to the binding ropes to keep his balance and looking proudly down from what seemed an immense height on the people who were waving and shouting goodbye to them.

  All the way back Aldo was beside himself with pride and happiness. He could hardly wait to see his father come face to face once more with Nella, and Ciccio, and all those people in the street. He talked incessantly, shouting to every passer-by, bawling songs, banging with his fists on a barrel as if it were a drum, playing king-of-the-castle on his perch, day-dreaming a dozen adventures as the sun rose in the sky and the parched fields crept by.

&nb
sp; The carter set them down at the cross-roads outside the town and they continued on foot along the straggling Via Acquicella, past the outlying huddle of alleys and shanties, to the town gate. They made their way through the streets, and the nearer they came to home the more impatiently Vittorio bounded on ahead, while Aldo, also prickling with impatience, tugged at his father’s hand and tried to hasten his step.

  His father, although the effort had been so much less than yesterday’s, resisted and slowed down his pace, hesitating to look vaguely at shop windows, mopping his brow and saying in a gruff voice, ‘There is no hurry, the sun is up.’

  They turned at last into their own street. Aldo, who, unable to contain himself, had raced on ahead with Vittorio, halted and looked round. He was surprised to see his father so far behind. He waited, his heart thudding with breathlessness and with a strange, cold premonition. He seemed to be waiting for ever. He cried, ‘Pappa!’ His voice was still bright, feigning a childish impatience, but he was stricken with panic and disbelief. ‘Pappa!’ His father hardly seemed to be coming nearer, and the sick thumping of his heart measured out an eternity of time. He tried not to hear the tell-tale, melancholy footsteps, or to see the too familiar shuffle, the sagging shoulders. He ran back, smiling eagerly up at his father and taking hold of his sleeve. The English sergeant came by and Aldo smiled at him, too, blinking back the unbidden tears.

  His father half-turned, as the sergeant passed them, and extended a hand. Aldo cried, ‘No!’ and pulled at his father’s sleeve. His father ignored him, and whined, ‘Buon giomo, signor sergente. Una sigaretta, per favore? He plucked his sleeve away from Aldo’s grasp, and as he took the cigarette he muttered peevishly to his son, ‘Leave me alone, I am tired after that journey. I need a cigarette.’

  Aldo did not answer. He walked beside his father, trembling a little. The tears were gone; his eyes were hot and dry, and he felt as if he would never cry again.