Between Enemies

by Andrea Molesini

  The lieutenant said nothing but just started walking a little faster.

  When we re-crossed the river, day was already dawning. We stripped bare and wrung out our clothing. The lieutenant handed me a hunk of cheese and I held out the tin of marmalade. Then we ate some dried figs. We set off again with our wet clothing sticking to our skin. We needed to move quickly and find a hiding place before the bivouacs stirred to life: we were too close to the Piave to be able to walk around in broad daylight.

  I kept the revolver in my left jacket pocket so I could grab it faster with my right hand. I’d managed to keep it from getting wet. Even if I was afraid of it, something drove me to want to use it, to be forced to kill in self-defence. I could feel a dark, molten mass building up inside me. I was strangely aroused.

  We stopped around nine. We gulped down the last few pieces of polenta and shared out the cheese that Luisa’s mother had given me. For a few minutes, as I sat eating, I thought back to her, and Giulia. Their faces appeared before me, and I was astonished that I couldn’t clearly remember the moments of pleasure, only certain scattered details that poured into my head, only to slip quickly away.

  ‘Get down!’

  I flattened myself to the ground behind a log. I saw that the lieutenant had his revolver in his hand. I pulled out mine. The voices were coming from the trail. Two, three. One voice was a woman’s. Then a shout: ‘No!’

  I looked at the lieutenant; he was tense, motionless, listening.

  The German voices exchanged short phrases, imprecations. The woman had started screaming, and her screams grew louder and louder. From his position the lieutenant could see, but I couldn’t. I craned my neck: a soldier had grabbed a girl and was dragging her into the ditch. The other soldier was laughing and tagging along; he laughed and laughed.

  ‘They’re raping her,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t move.’

  The screams died out, resumed, then fell silent.

  ‘Aren’t we going to do anything?’ I didn’t realize I had raised my voice.

  ‘Shut up!’ said the lieutenant, but it was too late. A soldier was coming towards us, his rifle levelled, bare-chested with his belt undone.

  The lieutenant emerged from his hiding place and fired. The soldier fell forward, face first. I was frozen in place. A second shot made me jump. The lieutenant dropped right in front of me. I looked up. Not five metres away, the other soldier was taking aim. He was practically naked, that’s the only thing I noticed – that and the rifle barrel pointing straight at me. I lifted my left hand to the gun that I was already aiming and I pulled the trigger, once, twice. The soldier fell to his knees, his rifle splayed in the middle of the path. Without thinking twice, I walked towards him. He had one hand pressed against his chest and the other held high, in a gesture of surrender. His eyes were large and dark. And he was looking at me. I stopped two metres away from him. He was looking at me, shaking his head no as blood oozed down onto his belly, his exposed genitals. My right hand was shaking. Once again, I raised my left hand to the grip of the revolver, but the barrel of the gun refused to stay still. He was looking me straight in the eye, with one hand held high: ‘Nein,’ he said, ‘nein!’ and he shook his head nein too, over and over again. He wouldn’t stop. I don’t remember pulling the trigger, but the bullet blew his face wide open and blood splattered everywhere.

  I took a step back. My mouth was dry. I looked around. There was no one on the trail. I leant over the lieutenant. The rifle shot had splayed his throat open right up to the chin. His eyes were staring at the sky, opaque. I closed them. My hand was no longer shaking.

  The girl’s jacket was torn. She was barefoot. Her hair and her face were smeared with mud, and her features were pinched in an expression of extreme alarm. Her eyes were fastened on my revolver. I realized I still had it clutched in my hand; I pocketed it and took the hand the young woman was holding out to me. We started running, running through a field of corn and there, in the middle of the field, we stopped to catch our breath. I dropped to the ground and, from a sitting position, took off my rucksack. She squatted down, pressing her hands between her legs with a grimace of pain. The shocks of corn rustled overhead.

  When her grimace faded, I saw that she was pretty. She had a high forehead, unlined, and pronounced eyebrows, blue eyes that looked straight ahead of her. Her fine nose was well shaped. Her fleshy lips were pressed together in anger and disgust. Only then did I realize that she couldn’t have been older than sixteen or seventeen, at the most.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Ti…te parli da sior…e ti gà le man de quei che no gà mai lavorà.’ She said in dialect that I spoke like a gentleman, and that I had the hands of someone who’d never done a day’s work.

  ‘My name’s Paolo, what’s yours?’

  ‘You don’t need to know my name.’

  Without the lieutenant there was no point trying to reach Mercatelli.

  ‘I have to get to the river,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll take you.’

  She was on her feet and walking before I could get the rucksack back on my shoulders. It wasn’t easy to keep up with her. She moved through the corn, and then through the woods, like a wild animal whose den was there.

  The darkness and the pouring rain forced us to take shelter in an abandoned sheepfold, about thirty metres above the cart road that ran parallel to the rampart of the levee: the Austrians had fortified the levee and equipped it with machine-gun nests, plazas for light artillery, and munition dumps. From there I could see the oxbow curve of the river Piave. Not even the furious rain was loud enough to drown out the sound of the river flowing past.

  ‘If it keeps up, it’ll be hard to get across the river. The water is quick to rise.’

  She told me not to try to cross here, where soldiers might see, but to go further on.

  I objected that I needed to rest for a little bit, that I didn’t have it in me to take another step. The girl nodded and slipped all five fingers of her right hand into her mouth to let me know she was hungry. I shared with her the cheese and the marmalade, greedily gobbling down my portion. Then I stuck my cupped hands out so that they’d fill with rain. I’d lost my canteen. The girl asked me to give her my knife. My objections met with complete indifference: without that knife she wasn’t willing to stay near me. When I gave it to her, she waved it in my face, then she demanded that I put the revolver under the rucksack, and then she pretended to go to sleep. I tossed and turned on the straw. I was drenched, exhausted, and – enveloped in the stench of manure – I did my best to get my thoughts straight.

  Thirty-Eight

  WHEN I OPENED MY EYES I TURNED TOWARDS THE GIRL: she was watching the raindrops bounce off the stone enclosure of our shelter, while the tip of the knife blade struck the upright supporting the lean-to roof overhead, rising and falling in time with some inner cadence. She didn’t look at me, and if she had, she wouldn’t have seen me. Before me I saw the blank eyes of Lieutenant Muller, then the soldier I’d killed, even though he was trying to surrender, even though his eyes, his face, and his voice kept telling me not to. I imagined a noose tightening around my neck. The girl kept driving the tip of the knife into the wood.

  I picked up the rucksack to get my revolver.

  ‘Where did you put the revolver? My revolver!’

  The girl kept chopping the tip of the blade against the wood, faster and faster. She was far away, she couldn’t hear and she couldn’t see. I tried to speak to her in a gentle voice. I spoke in dialect. But she went on driving the knife into the upright supporting the rafter. I looked outside: the rain was falling harder and harder, and the river was roaring.

  I felt a spurt of something hot on my face, I clapped my hand to my cheek and I turned to look at her: she’d sliced her throat open and the blood was still spurting out. Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe, and I shouted: ‘No-o-o!’ I yanked the knife out of the girl’s rigid hand. I don’t know if she was already dead, she was no longer convulsing,
and that cut throat gaping open was something horrifying to behold. I ran outside. I wanted the falling rain to wash me clean; my face and hair must have been covered with blood. I cleaned the blade by rubbing it on the grass. Luckily, there wasn’t a soul in sight. I was shaking, I was sobbing. Finally I fell to my knees. And I stopped crying. I wanted to stay alive. I couldn’t seem to think. It was raining so hard that I couldn’t even see the cart road, and I practically couldn’t hear the river any more. I started walking, after sliding the knife under my belt. The rain was blinding me. I walked for ten or twenty minutes; I wanted to put some distance between me and all that blood. Without meaning to, I found myself standing in the middle of the cart road. I crossed the road and headed for the river. The barbed wire fences were in the midst of the stream, and at this point, the levee had collapsed. I realized that I had wound up amidst the enemy’s defensive structures. They seemed to have been abandoned, the bunkers were empty. The Austrians must have taken shelter in some nearby house to stay dry. I knew that all the civilians within a distance of two or three kilometres had been evacuated. I ran my tongue over my lips. I still had the taste of blood stuck to my skin. I rubbed my face with my hands and I drank water by tipping my mouth up towards the sky. It was out of the question to try to ford the river. I was a good swimmer, but I knew that stronger swimmers than me had drowned in that river. I ventured down the levee that had been washed away by the current. There was barbed wire sticking out of the water here and there, and I imagined the spine of a sea monster lying on the riverbed. I went into the water, putting just my shod feet in first. I wanted to test the strength of the current. I had no alternative, I decided to run the risk.

  ‘I have to get past that stretch of wire fence and stay on my feet while I’m doing it,’ I said to myself, ‘otherwise I’m finished.’ The water was up to my knees, I’d got within a metre of the iron barbs. ‘I can do it, I have to!’ I said.

  A shot.

  ‘Halt!’

  I turned around. There were two rifles aimed at me. I looked at the river, I saw an islet.

  ‘Halt!’

  I felt someone grab me by the shoulders. There was an arm around my neck. I twisted free. There was a sudden pain, dull and powerful, in the middle of my chest.

  The pain climbed up from the back of my neck to my forehead and my temples. I was lying flat on my back. I moved my hands. Straw. I half-opened my eyes. There were men standing and sitting just a few paces away from me. I couldn’t hear any sounds. I’d gone deaf, completely deaf. I laboriously lifted one hand to the nape of my neck. It hurt. I was wet. I could feel water in my shoes. I was cold, I was trembling. I could feel the tremor in my chest, on my lips, in my elbows, in my knees. And I slipped into a state of lassitude that shut my eyes.

  A sharp jerk brought me awake, and I realized that there was a very heavy blanket on me. To the right and left I saw two rows of seated soldiers, four on one side, five on the other. Someone spoke to me, but it was in German and I didn’t understand. A second thump confirmed that I was riding in a lorry. The sun was shining. I saw it because the grey canvas was raised on both sides. I was breathing fresh air. I hurt all over.

  The soldiers stood, silent. Every so often one of them would look at me. I lifted my left hand to my belt: the knife was no longer there, and deep inside I blessed the girl who had hidden my revolver from me.

  The lorry was moving slowly, but it kept bouncing and jerking and every jerk was a stab of pain to my chest and back. I shut my eyes. They’d certainly searched me, someone must have read and deciphered Don Lorenzo’s letter, that is unless the water…I hadn’t even read it, because I wanted to make sure the seal remained intact, but the curate’s words surfaced in my mind: ‘If they catch you, this could save your life.’ Perhaps they were taking me back to Refrontolo. That’s good, at least I wouldn’t die among strangers.

  Thirty-Nine

  BY THE TIME I WALKED INTO THE BARON’S OFFICE, I HAD regained my strength. My head, chest, and back no longer hurt. They’d locked me up in a little room over the inn for a couple of hours, across from the Villa, and no one had come to visit me. I had eaten two mess tins full of boiled potatoes and a round-eyed corporal with reddish whiskers who reminded me of an owl had offered me ‘a drop of dark-red wine’. During the months of occupation, he’d learnt the language of the peasants, and he spoke it fluently, practically without accent; he was in the same line of work, and he told me about his home near Salzburg; he also said that the peasant girls along the Soligo were more beautiful than so many Madonnas, and a little less holy, luckily for him.

  The corporal led the way into that office wallpapered with maps of the Veneto region, of Trentino and Friuli, where the old boundaries were outlined in pink and the rivers were a bright blue; on the desk, which looked as if it had just been neatened up and had a vague scent of wax, a portrait of the emperor with his young son sitting in his lap enjoyed pride of place. The non-commissioned officer had me sit down in front of the baron’s desk, then he stepped back a pace and stood at ease. And so we found ourselves contemplating together, in the room’s dusty half-light, the sepia-tinted photograph of Karl I, over which the evening light, filtering through the dirty glass, extended a grey film.

  The baron entered the room like a mountain stream in spate. He sat down without glancing at me. The collar of his jacket was unbuttoned. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and signed a sheet of laid paper densely covered with an angular handwriting. Only then did he raise his head and look at me. He pushed his shoulders against the backrest and caressed the armrests. He dismissed the corporal with a wave of the hand.

  ‘So we’re supposed to believe you’re a novice? Whose idea was that letter? Your grandmother’s or Madame Maria’s? That doesn’t matter…I’ll lock you up with your grandfather and Major Manca, I have no choice in the matter.’ He swivelled the chair so that his back was turned to me for a few seconds as he looked at his emperor, and he added: ‘The corpse of a young peasant woman was found…in a sheepfold by the river Piave, not far from where you were arrested…Would you happen to know anything about it? She had a revolver hidden between her legs…two of the bullets in the cylinder had been fired, one of which, in all likelihood, had killed a private…You see, Signor Paolo…there aren’t many revolvers of that kind, it’s Spanish, and I know that the Italian army imported quite a few…but I’d imagine you know nothing about it…’ There was a half-smile playing about the baron’s lips. ‘Ever since you became a novice, weapons are no longer of any interest to you, I believe…That peasant girl was lying dead less than three hundred metres from the point where you climbed down into the river…Her throat was cut with a knife blade, and you had a knife on your person when they caught you…An unusual hilt.’

  I said nothing.

  ‘You can smoke…I have some tobacco…’

  ‘I’m afraid I lost my pipe in the river.’

  The major opened the desk drawer and pulled out a small burlap bag tied up with a hemp cord. He loosened the knot with studied slowness. He thrust in his hand and pulled out a balled-up handkerchief, then a leather pouch and my Peterson pipe. He leant against the backrest and looked up at the ceiling. ‘This is what they found in your pockets, Signor Spada.’

  My fingers were trembling, I felt my face turn red, and my head was spinning a little. I cleared my throat and doing my best to speak in a normal voice, I said: ‘Yes…I’d be glad to have a smoke…but the tobacco…must be drenched.’

  ‘Try some of mine…I almost never smoke…Only when I feel too much alone.’ And the baron pulled a tin box with a yellow label out of the drawer: ‘It’s Dutch tobacco, blond and dry.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I hope the water didn’t ruin the pipe.’

  ‘It’s a handsome pipe, I’d admired it already…before… your escape…Is it a gift from a woman? Perhaps the Candiani woman, your friend?’

  ‘No. I got it from…Grandpa.’

  ‘Ah, your grandfather…a singular man.’


  I filled the Peterson with the baron’s tobacco, and my hands were no longer shaking, but it was as if my head were stuffed with cotton balls. I lit it, hoping that it would help calm my nerves, but my hands started shaking all on their own. I blew out the smoke in a puff meant to draw a curtain between me and the officer.

  ‘Well, what do you say, did the Piave ruin it?’

  ‘No, it draws wonderfully well.’

  Von Feilitzsch looked at me with a mocking smile: ‘Wonderfully well? Yes, I believe you…’

  Suddenly it dawned on me: I hadn’t had the pipe in my pocket, I’d left it in the rucksack, and I’d left the rucksack in the sheepfold, near the woman with the slit throat.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you, Major,’ and I stuck the lit pipe into my pocket, snapping the lid shut with the heel of my hand.

  Two sharp raps at the door. The corporal stuck his head in: ‘Fräulein Spada.’

  ‘Paolo! God be praised!’

  The baron stood up.

  ‘It’s all right, I’m fine,’ I said, walking towards my aunt. As she embraced me, I felt myself being swept away by a sense of euphoria, as if a weight had just lifted.

  ‘Have a seat, please, Madame.’

  The corporal closed the door behind him on his way out.

  My aunt pushed her chair against mine and gave me a long, searching look. She’d overdone it a bit with her eau de Cologne. Anguish and tenderness were battling in her gaze. On the Sangallo lace that lined the collar of her white blouse was the enamel pin with the soaring swallow and the blue sky: she was convinced that the motto in the oval – Je reviendrai – brought her good luck.

  ‘Even far from here, your boy got himself noticed.’

  ‘He ran away…who wouldn’t have done the same thing, Baron? And you won’t even let me see Uncle Guglielmo…how is he? Donna Nancy is worried to death.’

  ‘He’s all right, I gave orders to allow your cook to make food for the prisoners…including Signor Paolo…now.’