by Ben Pastor
“I anticipate nothing will go wrong.”
“The truck will be here tomorrow. It’s your job now.”
Guidi’s men had recovered the dead vagrant’s body. It lay now in the mortuary chapel of Sagràte, a miserable sight, next to which Guidi sat with hands on his knees. Bora was right, he recognized the victim. It was a poor old widower who lived as best he could, sometimes begging on the church steps on Sundays. There were no relatives to contact, no property to dispose of, no preparations to make, if not for a pauper’s burial. Simple enough.
Simplicity followed death, at least for this man.
“If you could only tell me something.” Guidi actually said the words under his breath. “You’d make my job easy if you could speak. Or if that Lisi son-of-a-slut could.” Then he was ashamed of sounding weak to his own ears.
What had Bora said about a dignified death? In his profession, Guidi was yet to see one. Painlessly he called to mind the snapshots taken of his father after the Mafia had ambushed him in Licata, the snapshots his mother had never been allowed to see. His father lying belly up in the sun-gorged square, legs and arms spread like a marionette pulled every which way, with a bloody puddle on his crotch that in the black-and-white print looked like he’d shit himself.
He’d probably done that, too. Guidi groaned. How wrong Bora was, in squaring his jaw against pain, hoping that it would guarantee him the beautiful death. In the face of death, it was easy for Guidi to feel indulgent toward everyone. Not only Claretta, who played stupid because she had to. Toward everyone else. Even the madman who killed and took the shoes off the dead, or De Rosa, the likes of whom the mob would surely lynch as soon as the war was over and lost. Guidi was even able to dredge up some understanding for Lisi, who made up for paralysis with whores, and – this was the easiest of all – for the ragged man shot in the ditch, with stale bread in his pocket. Guidi felt mercy for himself too, but less than for others.
He realized Turco was standing behind him by the odour of cheap army cigarettes. Without turning from his bench, Guidi said, “That’s all right, Turco. Start the car, I’m coming.”
Ignoring his mother’s insistence that he be home early for once, he stayed in his office until late at night.
She was still up when he returned. Guidi tried to ignore her, answering her questions in monosyllables. Finally he said, “Ma, it’s late. You’re tired, and so am I. Why don’t you go to bed?”
“Because civilized people have supper before they go to bed, and if you get home late I have to stay up to serve you.”
“Can’t I help myself? I’m not hungry anyway.”
She poured soup into his bowl. “Nonsense, Sandro. Why shouldn’t you be hungry? Have you had supper somewhere?”
“I’ve been dealing with dead bodies, Ma. I’m not hungry. And where else would I be having supper, anyway?”
“You tell me. You’re the man of the house.”
Until now her mood had made no sense. Now from a remote, well-visited corner of his memory, Guidi fished up the image of Claretta wiping her eyes and lips with his handkerchief. So, that was the matter. Damn. He had meant to rinse it himself in the bathroom sink, but then he’d forgotten all about it. So, his mother had noticed the lipstick, and now wanted to find out more.
Without removing his attention from the much-laundered tablecloth, Guidi could sense that his mother had the handkerchief in the pocket of her apron. Standing by the wood stove, she’d use the handkerchief as a weapon. Whether she pulled it out or not, the challenge was on.
“God forbid I should ask what you do in your free time,” she said. But her words were planted like segments of a stockade against him.
“I told you I’m tired, Ma.”
“Go ahead then, go to sleep. We have plenty of time to talk during the day, don’t we! Every time I see you, you’re either chewing your food or getting ready to leave. I see Turco more than I see you.”
“Ma.” Guidi put his hands on the table, palms down. “Ma, if you have something to tell me, tell me right away. If you have something to show me, out with it.”
“What should I show you? I have nothing to say.”
“Good.” Guidi stood up from his chair and walked toward the door of the kitchen. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
Reaching over, his mother took him by the arm. “No, no, no. Wait, Sandro. Let’s not argue. You know all I want is for you to be happy.” Her hand slid up to his shoulder, with the concerned, kind touch he seldom resisted. “Let me put my heart at ease. Tell me who she is.”
Guidi felt he could cry out, like someone who’s been forced to his knees, to an uncomfortable place where he does not want to be held down. He slowly freed himself from her hand and walked to the dining room. “I’m turning the radio on, Ma. Do you mind?”
“Who is she, Sandro?”
A froth of spite brimmed in him as he spoke the lie out loud. “She’s a street-walker. Would you believe they use handkerchiefs like the rest of us?”
From the radio, there came the grave, neutral voice of the nine-o’clock news announcer. “Following the 14 November Carta di Verona, Article Seven, according to which ‘All belonging to the Jewish race are foreigners, and in times of war they belong to an enemy nationality’, His Excellency the Minister of the Interior has issued Police Order Number Five. As by Order Number Five, all those belonging to the Jewish race are to be arrested and interned in concentration camps.”
Guidi heard the news, and – because there were no Jews in Sagràte – reacted to it with a glum lack of interest. His mother watched him from the door, hands clasped. “That isn’t true, Sandro, is it?” She, too, not referring to the Jews at all.
Bora’s radio was on at that same time. He heard the news by accident, having walked into his office for the first time since that morning. Instantly he found himself in a cold sweat. The errands of the day – run in solitude, as he’d learned in Poland and Russia – took frightful proportion as he listened to the announcer’s words. What dinner the men had readied for him had to wait now for the most important task of the evening. He sat at the desk, rearranging his duties with unerring haste. Two phone calls followed, in Italian – a few words each. “Let’s go,” he then told Nagel, who waited outside his door. With him, he drove to the church, where, in the presence of the bewildered sexton, he arrested Monsignor Lai.
By the time he telephoned Guidi, it was well past midnight. He made no mention of the arrest, or the radio news. “You asked me to go through Lisi’s bank accounts,” he said. “I have done so.”
Guidi was just as cagey. “Anything of use, Major?”
“No. They don’t help us in any way. Even rounding up the sums here and there I cannot find any consistency, any meaning to them. I gathered the amounts in temporary groupings, drew means among the intervals of time between deposits and withdrawals. I calculated interest rates. There’s no order, no logic to them.”
Late as it was, Guidi heard the shuffle of his mother’s slippers outside his door. “Maybe it’s because you calculated the official interest rates,” he said.
“Well? What else should I calculate?”
Flop, flop. Outside the door, Guidi’s mother had probably realized that he wasn’t speaking to a woman, and was returning to her room. “I can tell you’ve never been poor, Major Bora.”
“I have never been poor.”
“And you never had to borrow money in a pinch.”
Bora didn’t reply to the obvious. “As for the rest, yesterday I spoke to the intern who performed the autopsy, as well as to the medics who assisted Lisi. More about it when we meet. I also found someone for Olga Masi to stay with in Verona for the time being, and caught De Rosa right in front of headquarters. I first secured a time for us to interrogate Lisi’s maid, and then gave him a dressing-down he’ll remember for the rest of his Fascist life. I know the sentinels will, and likely the tenants of the house next door. Look, even without my watch I know it’s bloody late. I haven’t slept a
wink in more than forty hours, and doing maths has never been my favourite entertainment. I’ll see you tomorrow or whenever.”
“Sleep well, then.”
Bora put the receiver down. Sleep well? He hadn’t slept well in over a year. There was no chance of sleeping at all tonight. Monsignor Lai, the well-educated, bright cleric who’d heard his confession every week, was under guard in the room at the end of the hallway. In the morning, Fascist guardsmen would bring a truckload of Italian Jews bound for the South Tyrol. The SS officer, who hadn’t so much as given his name, had said on his way out of the command post, “Don’t I know you from somewhere, Major?”
Somewhere was the Russian district of Homyel.
Bora went to wash up. He was still tempted to use both his hands for these simple tasks, and his surprise at being unable to do so angered him anew. What had been a given – loosening his collar, clasping the buttons of his braces, undoing his breeches – now required a retraining so basic that his sense of worth was bruised. Doing better at it day by day was not enough. Tonight he felt his injury more than ever, and not just because the harness holding the prosthesis chafed the skin. It was the intimacy of the loss, what it meant to his relationship with Dikta, how he would go back and face her, face his mother. Only his general-rank stepfather would understand, and that was not saying much.
His troubled reflection stared back from the mirror. Unlike so many, he’d consciously chosen soldiering. Yet medals and ribbons gave the lie to the fact that for five out of his seven years in the service, he’d betrayed his soldier’s oath. How well the SS knew this, and could come asking him to escort Jews to a concentration camp, and expect him to say yes.
In his bedroom, Dikta’s photograph stood for all he might yet lose. Bora took out pen and stationery, but did nothing with them. He could not write to his wife, or to his mother, or anyone else. It repelled him to put thoughts on paper for others to see. Even today’s entry in the diary he’d kept ever since Spain, bulky and soiled, and written in minute Gothic script, required an effort. Still fully dressed, he sat on his bed. No, not his bed – but the bed he’d requisitioned as he’d requisitioned this building and so many of the objects he used now, scraps of receipts signed and distributed as if any of the debts would be honoured any time soon.
He managed at last to pray, although those mental words, too, disgusted him, to the extent that he sat in complete stillness. Guilt made him intolerably clear-minded, as risk made him drunk. How do I, as a soldier, justify… There is no justification. I may invoke whatever authority I choose, it still doesn’t help. It doesn’t help. I can’t get out of it, and there’s no one I can talk to.
After turning the light off, his recollection wandered. Places, people. Actions taken and not taken. Dismal seasons. Dismal days. He recalled the impalpable, breath-thin wraiths of Russian snow snatched by the wind off the tops of trees and bushes. Had it been at Shumyachi? Two years earlier, already. The shots at Shumyachi had reverberated under the hospital’s vaults as far as the tree-lined expanse across the street, where his car was idling. A dazzling spray had trembled off the bare branches then. The sight of wind-borne minutiae had remained with him ever since, as the flash of sunlight on one of the hospital windows, opening and closing in the icy breeze. No one remembered his name at Shumyachi, if anyone had ever even known it. Why should he think of it? It did no good. But the godforsaken town was a wound he carried around no differently from his other injuries.
Snow was melting on the roof of the command post, and all around the eaves dripping water created a necklace of sound in the dark. Bora had made up his mind hours ago. This was the agony that always followed such decisions. These were the times when he felt most distant from his wife, nearly lost to her and to any hope they would ever reunite. Time collapsed onto itself until their days together – few, so comparatively few – were a kaleidoscope that at will could be reconfigured, but in the end remained nothing but bits of bright foil and coloured paper. He had stood in the face of imminent death, and had not feared it as he struggled through these endless moments between choice and action. Lost, lost. He was lost to Dikta, to his mother, to everyone who’d ever loved him. Of him, as in the stark black-rimmed death notices, it would be said, “He will return to us no more.” He’d given himself up for dead long ago, so why was he so tempted to expect a different end? He’d said yes, meaning it as much as he meant anything these days. The answer was immense, a world in itself. Hell could not be larger than the gulf contained in saying yes.
Nagel came and went, without rapping on his door. Bora recognized his step, his refraining from the knock on the door. The room was cold and no longer identifiable by shape. Only the limned strip under the door marked the existence of reality. Bora bent over from where he sat, feeling around for the bootjack. After taking off his boots, he began to undress, until he was naked, and, without prosthesis, he lay motionless under the covers.
There had been a season, still fresh in Bora’s memory, when the fastidiousness of German uniforms would have put to shame the Italian Militia. This late morning of 1 December 1943, it was all washed-out field-grey. Everywhere. He could look at the truck pulling into the place in the street where yesterday the SS car had sat, and judge vehicle and men alighting from it as no shabbier than his own soldiers. I’ve done this before, he thought, I’ve done it before and know how to manage it; there’s no great expenditure of emotions once one has done it the first time.
He went downstairs and into the street, where the truck rattled in idle. The driver saw him through the window and hopped out, baggy trousers and ankle boots mud-spattered. He gave the Fascist salute, and presented a piece of paper signed by one high official or another. Bora no longer looked at names; it made no difference what the alphabet combination might be – it was all power about to slip away, and not even history’s footnotes would pick up those names tomorrow.
“These prisoners are to be delivered to Gries,” the driver said. “So we need an escort.”
“I’ve been informed.” Bora walked around the truck. The guardsman who was in the back had also alighted and was standing at cramped attention, his black fez impossibly stuck to the back of his head, as if nailed in. Without a word, Bora indicated by a short wave that he wished to have the canvas flaps lifted. When it was done, he looked in from where he stood. “How long have you been riding?” he asked the guardsman, as if the information were no more than a formality.
“Ten hours, signor maggiore, with eight more to go.”
Bora was in full sight of those sitting in the truck. Indistinct faces were within, people he had no desire to get to know. In the frigid morning it made him unusually comfortable and secure to be warmly dressed, well dressed, to appear every inch authoritative. “Jews, all?”
“All of ’em.”
Bora turned on his heel and went indoors. When he returned outside, Nagel was with him. The guardsmen had got Sondermischung cigarettes from the German soldiers. The driver, resuming the at-attention stance, said, “Signor maggiore, we haven’t had anything to eat since last night.”
“That happens, at war.”
“We could use something to eat, if you could spare some.” And, because Bora didn’t answer, “The prisoners haven’t had anything in forty-eight hours.”
“What’s that to me? You have a schedule to keep. It is already an imposition for me to give you two of my men as an escort. You should have organized yourselves better, and brought provisions.” But even as he said so, Bora ordered a soldier to get some food ready. “Go inside,” he said in Italian to the guardsmen. “It will be charged to your command. So will the petrol for your vehicle, since undoubtedly you carry no extra fuel.”
The guardsmen wasted no time going indoors, while Nagel drove the truck to the back of the building for refuelling. Bora followed him there. He commanded the flaps of the truck to be lowered again. How many times had this happened, with small variations? A vehicle bringing prisoners from somewhere to somewhere, his
part in it. “Take care of everything, Nagel,” he said. “You know how. When you’re done, go upstairs, and get Colonel Habermehl’s cognac from my room. Open it and give it to the Italian guardsmen. Monsignor Lai is to join the prisoners – no special treatment.”
Turco, who happened to be in Lago on an errand for Guidi’s mother, had caught the last moments of the transfer from the German command post.
“Gesummaria, Inspector, it was a terrible sight. You wouldn’t expect it of our major,” he reported to Guidi at midmorning.
“Our major? Since when is he our major?” It irritated Guidi that the Sicilian should imply that he trusted Bora. “He’d do the same thing to you or me if he were ordered. It’s a good thing he didn’t ask us to participate, given what came over the radio last night.”
“Cosi di cani. Di cani! He wined and dined the guardsmen until two o’clock, but he wouldn’t give the prisoners the time to get a sip of water, or do what nature commands.”
Guidi slammed his hand on the desk. “It won’t make much difference to them, going where they’re going.” But it bothered him. Not because he trusted Bora. Because it confirmed what he suspected about him. “Do you think it’s the first time he does this? Partisans, Jews, priests – it’s all the same to him.”
“The sexton says the Germans dragged Monsignor Lai out of church right after the broadcast. Charged with having a good radio, as far as anyone can tell. To think the old women bragged about the major being so devout, spending all that time in confession every Sunday! Cosi di cani.”
“Goes to prove he needs confession more than most, Turco. Speaking of which, I’m off to Verona to meet Bora. If he doesn’t mention the Jews, I’m not about to bring them up. We don’t need to give him any ideas. Tell my mother I’ll get back when I get back, not to stay up, and while you’re at it, remind her I don’t want you to go grocery shopping for her.”
