Between Enemies

by Andrea Molesini

  Aunt Maria caressed her temple, and her fingers lingered over a hint of a wrinkle that marked her forehead.

  ‘Madame, I know why you’ve come here…uninvited.’

  ‘I have to talk to you.’

  ‘After the time we spent together…Our walks, the horses…’ The baron held out his right hand until it almost brushed her left hand, lying white upon the black desktop. ‘Yes…our horses…but here we all have to make a special effort,’ and he withdrew his hand while hers slipped down onto her knees. ‘I…I, Madame…’ the baron’s face twisted slightly, and suddenly he seemed to have aged ten years, ‘I saw my men come up in that river, bob to the surface out of that water, like your potato gnocchi in the pot, do you understand me, Madame? Gnocchi in boiling water. By the dozens, by the hundreds, the men I commanded came up, bobbing to the surface like gnocchi, my soldiers…and General Bolzano, my general, lost his mind. I watched him lose his mind, he wound up among the Italians, killed with his own dagger, and so I led the soldiers back myself. The retreat over the river…the pontoons torn to piece by the mortar fire, and the planes with their machine guns strafing us over and over.’ With his right hand he covered his mouth. Then his whole face. ‘I saw my boys die, platoon by platoon, as they were boarding their boats, as they ran over the footbridges from one islet to another, and the screams…the cannons were tearing everything to pieces, everything, bridges, pontoons, soldiers… and the heavy machine guns…those bodies in the stream…’ – he looked at me for an instant, lifting his face from his hands – ‘young men like you…all that blood…bobbing to the surface like gnocchi.’

  Then her eyes sought his. And his eyes saw hers, those dark green eyes, underscored by black crescents.

  ‘Madame, listen…Soldiers were murdered in occupied territory. The law of war demands that I have Major Manca executed by firing squad, along with his accomplices, your uncle and your nephew. That’s without adding that, during his escape, the young man…further aggravated his…’ Our gazes met for a moment. ‘I am responsible for the lives of the soldiers I command. There’s the laws of war…and that serving girl, whatever her name is’ – and he waved his right hand as if shooing away a fly – ‘told us the whole story, in front of my officers. That girl hates you, she wants to see you suffer, all of you. Major Manca claims that he did it but…I found the Englishman in your attic, with Signor Guglielmo and Signor Paolo.’

  ‘Baron, listen…Rudolf…listen to me, I beg you.’ Leaning slightly forward, my aunt placed her fingertips on the edge of the desk. ‘Renato’s life for the lives of your soldiers…why can’t that be enough? It was him’ – and she swallowed a gob of spit – ‘not Uncle Guglielmo who killed those men, and Paolo here… he wouldn’t even know a revolver if he saw one…’

  The officer cocked an eyebrow.

  My aunt stiffened her back and placed both hands on her knees. She was trembling.

  The baron stood up and put both hands behind his back. Then, with three taut paces he rounded the desk and came even with my chair. Leaning forward stiffly, he placed both fists on the black desktop and lifted his eyes to the portrait of his emperor. The sepia was faded, Karl had both arms around his little archduke who was staring out wide-eyed at the world and holding his right hand pressed against his father’s knee while his left hand vanished into the large hand that, on the ring finger, bore the dynastic seal. The young emperor wore the uniform of a Hungarian general and at the centre of his chest, bedecked with medals, was the Prussian Iron Cross. His gaze wasn’t especially imperial, it was just the gaze of a concerned father looking at his little boy. There was no joy in the monarch’s features: the rotund face, the jug ears, the fleshy, unsmiling lips. The baron lifted his fists from the desk and opened both hands, palms upward, pointing to the photograph. ‘Madame,’ he said, ‘do you think that this man looks like a sadist, or particularly bloodthirsty?’

  ‘No, he has the face of a good man.’ Donna Maria stood up and looked her adversary up and down. ‘A sad man…and gentle.’

  ‘I think he’s a good man, but the soldiers still love Franz Joseph, even if he uncorked this bloodbath’ – and he bowed his head for a moment – ‘they don’t feel protected under Karl. You see, Madame,’ and the baron resumed his seat behind the desk, while my aunt remained standing, ‘I believe that subjects are like children, and soldiers more so than anyone else. They want a firm hand on the reins, a hand that never falters, they can never forgive that…and they’re right, because dithering and indecision, in wartime, cost lives, and pity can seem…and believe me, often is…like the doctor’s pity…what is it you say in Italian… the doctor’s pity lets the wound become infected…right? If the prince gives the impression that he doesn’t know what’s best for his soldiers, for his realm, then the magic of the royal throne flickers out and everything collapses. Do you understand what I’m trying to say, Madame Maria?’

  His eyes sought hers. And her eyes responded, green, absolute.

  ‘Rudolf, I beg you’ – her voice was breaking with emotion, as I did my best not to breathe – ‘at least spare this boy…If your emperor were here, he wouldn’t deny this pardon.’

  The baron coughed into his hand. He stood up, but immediately let himself fall back onto his chair. With nervous fingers, he pushed aside the sheet of paper that I’d seen him sign and, after clearing his throat, he said in a firm voice but without looking up: ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Baron’ – my aunt’s voice had darkened and roughened – ‘I’m not indifferent to you, there is a’ – she looked down and shot me a glance out of the corner of her eye – ‘a certain feeling…that has grown between us, in these terrible, endless months. But now I’m imploring you for a favour, imploring you! You can’t deny me this. You mustn’t, there must still be some way to…’

  The major looked her in the eyes: ‘There isn’t.’

  I was tempted to say something.

  ‘He could escape,’ said my aunt, ‘and they could start looking for him the morning after he runs away…That would give him a few hours’ head start. Austria would still have her revenge, Renato is a soldier; my…uncle is a Spada, you’d have their lives to set an example!’

  ‘There’s already been an escape, and it cost more blood. Innocent blood.’

  ‘Rudolf, I beg you, I’m on my’ – my aunt looked at me, and put her hand on mine, without sitting down, and then looked the baron straight in the eye – ‘I’m down on my knees.’

  ‘I have murdered soldiers to avenge, and an enemy pilot who was given safe harbour, and—’

  ‘Major, war is murder, always and invariably…all you want is to set an example: killing gentlemen isn’t the same thing as killing peasants! After the battle, the troops’ morale has hit bottom; your high commands fear the uprising of the populace, once the final clash has begun, isn’t that right? Moreover, you’ll have an easier time confiscating the crops if the peasants see their masters dangling from hooks high atop poles. That’s what you think, and that’s what the field marshal thinks, that’s what General Teodorski thinks. But by refusing to show mercy, you contribute…I’m talking to you, Baron von Feilitzsch, because you’re here…You contribute to the destruction of the civilization to which you and I…and this boy…belong, and that civilization is more important than the fate of the Hapsburgs themselves, or the House of Savoy. You won’t like the world that is coming into existence any more than I will: there will be no room for pity, nor for that gentility of manner that we care…so much about. With your severity you think you’re doing justice, but it’s the other way around, Baron, you’re just blazing a path to a time when a corporal will claim the title of general, and the people will make fun of us, of you…because we’re children of the horse, not of the plane…’ My aunt was a dynamo, and I sat glued to my seat, listening in astonishment. ‘But when our courteous manners are long forgotten, when the superfluous is viewed with contempt and haste rules the world, foolish brutal men will wield the sceptre and therefore, when the univ
ersal deluge washes over us, there will be no ark in readiness.’

  ‘Madame…Madame…’

  Donna Maria went to the door and pulled it open. But before she left she turned around with stormy eyes: ‘God damn you to hell, Rudolf von Feilitzsch!’

  Forty

  THEY LOCKED ME UP IN THE SILKWORM HATCHERY, ALL alone. No delicacies from Teresa: they gave me black bread, dried polenta, and very weak coffee. The smell of sulphur that still impregnated the plaster mixed with the odour of the tobacco that the red-whiskered corporal had given me. It smelt slightly of the stables, but I didn’t really mind. That man had taken a liking to me. ‘You’re a good kid, you know…even if your nose looks a Genoa jib.’ One time he stopped to talk, and he told me that one of his sisters had died, that he hadn’t been able to attend her funeral, that in Vienna these days they’d been eating dogs and smoking straw for months, and that it was just stupid to carry on the war.

  The window was tiny, the glass was filthy, and the light that chased away the darkness in the morning was just a strip of dust containing all the colours of the rainbow. Everything had happened as if in a movie, where you can see the images but the reason for what happens remains, at least to a certain extent, unknown. I felt responsible for Lieutenant Muller and for the peasant girl who had slit her throat with my knife. I thought about Giulia, Grandpa, and Renato. I thought about death, and the noose that awaited me. Sometimes I’d stand up, put my face just a few centimetres away from the wall, and breathe slowly. Then the picture of the Austrian I’d killed would surface in my mind. He’d tried to surrender, he’d tried to say no, with his face, with his eyes, with that raised hand, with the other hand pressed against his wounded belly, but I’d fired anyway, and I’d enjoyed doing it. I told myself that it wasn’t true. But what I remembered was a sense of euphoria, not pity: I’d acted confidently, obeying a will that I had a hard time believing was mine, and the sensation of triumph was there, horrifying. Then I’d throw up, spitting saliva and remnants of undigested food into the bucket we used for our excrement.

  I remained there three days until, on the morning of the fourth day, the corporal with a red moustache came to get me, accompanied by a soldier with a rifle slung over his shoulder. We crossed the courtyard: it was drizzling and there was a good scent of wet grass. I thought about Grandpa, and I decided that certain people are like hundred-year-old oaks. When they’re felled, they leave a hole in the earth, a hole that the seasons struggle to erase. The corporal opened the storeroom door with a key that was a hand’s width long. The soldier shoved me inside and shut the door.

  ‘I can’t say I’m happy to see you again.’

  It was Renato’s voice, followed by Grandpa’s embrace.

  In that big room, the harrow and the plough sat rusting. The floor was rammed earth and there was a small high window from which you could see the treetops and a small patch of sky. There was also a pallet made of dry straw, which we managed to make serve as a bed for three, as well as a table, four stools, a pump that spat water only when it felt like it, and a tin pail that served as a chamberpot. There, for years, the demijohns of olive oil and small barrels of vinegar had been stored, and the whitewashed walls gave off a rancid stench that turned the stomach, though I quickly became accustomed to it. The meals, thanks to our cook and Grandma’s silver coins, were reasonably plentiful and tasty, and Renato was starting to recover. The baron had learnt very little from him, but what little he’d learnt was enough for him to make a good show with his superiors.

  Teresa was the angel of victuals, our tie to the outside world. Grandma and my aunt had been permitted only one visit, and they had devoted their time with us to Grandpa’s ankle, which was swollen: when they arrested him, he had resisted, and he had a swollen cheekbone too. The medical officer had stopped by for a minute and a half, and he’d said that what was needed was ice, ice and time, but the icebox was out of order and the time remaining to us little and shrinking.

  ‘There’s that serpent of a daughter of mine, who’s no longer my daughter,’ Teresa would say each time she set the mess tins down on the table. Until finally one day Renato, tired of hearing her grumble, whispered something in her ear. Teresa glared at him with black thunder in her eyes, then lowered her head and for the first time left the room without a diambarne de l’ostia and without asking if there was anything she should report back to the mistresses.

  When I told the story of my escape, I said nothing about the death of Lieutenant Muller, I just said that he had managed to get away. Renato understood that I was keeping something from him, but he pretended he hadn’t. He told me that Giulia was a spy too, that she’d been working with him in the I. S., and that my suspicions were foolish. I, in turn, pretended to believe him. Grandpa always looked at me with large, sad eyes. And I never knew what to say to him.

  We did what children, ostriches, and savages do: we said nothing about our impending executions, we talked only of the errors made by General Cadorna, the Church, and the Widow’s Sons; and about the Socialists and the downfall of the Romanovs.

  Time passed slowly in prison.

  At night, I heard Renato talking to himself, and Grandpa snoring as he’d never snored before. In my dreams – and I dreamt with my eyes wide open as well as when I slept – I saw Giulia, and those few, intense, precise moments of passion came back to me, as I watched and listened to them again. The thought that she wasn’t the woman for me, that I’d never wanted to grow old with her, did nothing to console me, I still loved her, I loved her even though she’d betrayed me.

  Certain memories crushed me with their weight: I’d seen the Czech kicking as he dangled from the hook, and the other one shot, and all those men who’d died in the church, all those broken men begging for water, and who knew what they were seeing. And I’d killed, too.

  The things I’d miss would be the electric smell in the air after a summer thunderstorm, I thought to myself, the smell of new mown grass, the smell of Teresa’s spezzatino, and the smell of Giulia’s hair. From time to time I’d think of how upset Grandma would get because I was a donkey when it came to arithmetic, and how my aunt would take the slightest phrase as a pretext to slip into one of her brown studies.

  We took turns sweeping the cell with a sorghum broom, while the major and I shared the duty – from which Grandpa was exempted – of cleaning the tin pail at the pump, a pump that heehawed vigorously but produced very little water.

  At first light, the guard brought us a mirror and a razor. Grandpa let Renato shave him, but Renato preferred to do his own shaving. I also managed to take care of my own shaving, even if the mirror was a fragment no bigger than my hand. And when the guard, who watched over the ritual with his rifle at his foot, confiscated the mirror and the razor, he pretended – he did it every time – to listen to our complaints about the broken pump.

  It wasn’t long before I started keeping my ration of grappa for myself instead of giving it to Grandpa. I started to develop a taste for alcohol. I liked that sense of giddy sleepiness, the pleasant illusion of freedom you get from slightly disjointed sentences. Finally, one morning, around seven – we’d just had our coffee – we were driven out of the cell by three bayonets: one poking at each back. I assumed the time had come.

  The cool of the night had vanished. And the white sky was turning light blue. We understood that our turn hadn’t yet come when they marched us up to three caskets: the baron wanted to make us witness the funeral of the murdered soldiers. They lined us up, between the latrines and our little cemetery which had only seven headstones of ours, surrounded by thirty or so untidy mounds of dirt.

  ‘They’re empty,’ said Renato, in an undertone.

  ‘What?’ I murmured.

  ‘Those coffins.’

  They were made of roughly nailed deal planks, and the infantrymen who carried them weighed less than the boards themselves. They lowered the coffins into the grave one atop the other. The baron put together a brief speech and the platoon snapped to
attention. All told, the ceremony couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. They took us back to our cell.

  ‘How did you know they were empty?’

  ‘With this heat and without ice, how could you keep three corpses? Freshly unearthed some time ago, to boot.’

  ‘Have you seen the road?’ asked Grandpa. ‘White, empty, without so much as a barking dog, without a single cat on the walls. And outside the stables there were three men with carbines at their feet and bayonets.’

  ‘The soldiers must be starving,’ said Renato.

  Grandpa and Renato talked about politics a lot. They did it to stave off the fear of death. At first I found it offensive, because they tended to exclude me from their discussions, but in the end it wound me up and every so often I’d weigh in myself, on one side or the other.

  As far as Grandpa was concerned, the king had staged a coup, sidestepping parliament, and had driven us into that bloodbath even though he was well aware that Italy lacked both the military and financial resources to sustain a long war – and even the deaf and the blind knew, back in April and May of 1915, that this was not going to be a lightning war. Renato retorted that the king had had no choice, that Italy relied on France and England for its supplies of raw materials, from wheat to coal, to say nothing of the debt of honour that the country had towards Queen Victoria’s empire.

  ‘France and Prussia helped us out, but only at two points… there was a common advantage…but you can’t forget that that follower of Mazzini, without the English, would never even have been able to land at Marsala.’

  I jumped in: ‘Look out, if you touch Garibaldi, Grandpa’s liable to…’

  But that time Grandpa’s counter-attack failed to drive deep, after a moment of hesitation that robbed his offensive of all its impetus, he almost seemed to go over to the enemy’s side: ‘Maybe Italy is a failed ambition…nothing more than a geographical expression…Metternich was right…and the plebiscite that legitimized the annexation of Venice to the newborn Kingdom of Italy was a fraud: who really believes that so few voted against it?’