How Fires End

by Marco Rafalà

  “Pictures,” I said. “Pictures will not save your children when the bombs fall.”

  “The bombs,” he said. “The bombs are not for us. They are for you. Take off that ugly uniform. Put on some good clothes, hardworking clothes.”

  Pasqualino began to play again, the same song on his guitar. Nino covered his ears and petitioned heaven to intervene. “Raphael,” he said, when it was clear that heaven would not answer. “He will listen to you. Everyone listens when Raphael speaks. Make him play something else. I beg of you.”

  “It was not so long ago that you wore the black shirt,” Raphael said. “Do not ask me for favors.”

  And with that, Nino ripped the guitar from Pasqualino and smashed it against the trunk of the olive tree. The musician shot up from his chair, and the two men fell wrestling to the ground.

  Salvatore emerged from the darkness of the cave like some ghost of my childhood, black eyes burning in his dirty face. “Take the gun, Papà.” His words, thin and anxious.

  Raphael dropped his cigarette, grinding it into the dirt with the toe of his boot. “Go,” he said to me. “You’ll lose your life out there. And for what?” He waved me away with a violent sweep of his arm. Then he took Salvatore by the shoulders, his hands a bridle, and led his son back into the cave. They rejoined the wavy shadows of their family. The boy’s voice echoed from the cave mouth, “Why didn’t you take the gun, Papà?” and the father’s voice followed, “Better to be a swine than a soldier, Turiddu.”

  If I had only listened to Raphael, I could have disappeared among the people of Melilli. To the British I would’ve been just another Sicilian peasant. And when the Allies liberated the island, that day in the orchard with the twins, I would have been there still. Maybe I could have prevented that tragedy, or the ones that came after. But I did not stay.

  Back at the farmhouse, I stood over the bloated corpse of the American. Flies swarmed the face and the bulging eyes. The mouth hung open and the flies crawled inside. The soldier regarded me with an opaque, milky-white stare. One man against half a dozen men. I placed two flat stones on his eyes and returned to my place in the house by the window on the second floor. I found the Germans in my rifle scope. They climbed up the goat path. I followed them. The curved butt of the gun fit smoothly against my shoulder like it was a part of me. And it was a part of me. I fingered the trigger. I could take maybe two of them out before the third got me.

  Lieutenant Krause waved as they drew near, his fair hair dazzling in the afternoon sun. I set the rifle aside and went out to greet them. We were low on ammunition so we fashioned grenades out of food tins, nails, and gunpowder from hunting rifles left behind by the peasants. The lieutenant told us the British name for them-jam-tin grenades. We found enough spare material in the neighboring houses to make one for each of us. Then we headed to the bunker and took up defensive positions there. Krause believed a division of German soldiers would be here soon. But I had a feeling-someone like Nella might call it a premonition-that the enemy would be here before long. Two days, maybe less before we would be uprooted and lost like so many trees before the fury of the flood.

  “And if the British get here first,” I said. “What then?”

  “We kill them,” Krause said to me in Italian. “Or they kill us. There is no alternative. We will not let them murder us with our hands in the air. Or have you forgotten what I told you about what the Americans did at Biscari?”

  Krause had been at Biscari, hidden in one of the airfield’s outbuildings. He’d watched Americans massacre Italians and Germans who had surrendered. It was a wound still fresh in his mind—and he made it our own, too. If we were to die, he wanted us to die fighting.

  Night fell. Tracer fire crisscrossed the sky. A barrage of artillery rumbled up from the low ground around the village. Two batteries, by the sound of it, and who knows how many infantry, lurking in the brush and cratered terrain. I dropped my journal and covered my head with my arms. The mountain trembled and then shook like an earthquake. The blasts of those big guns rattled me from my boots all the way to my teeth. We would not last long. If the Germans did not get here soon, we would die having never seen the faces of the men who killed us. They were out there, just as blind as we were. Men who dispatched death with heavy mortars, who readied the next shell in time with each tremendous jolt of those damned machines. These were men with just one idea.

  The barrage came in waves. We hunkered down, waited it out. Time passed, maybe an hour, maybe more or less. It was difficult keeping track. A minute here was a lifetime when shells whistled overhead and cratered the earth. Explosions like that, they were always bigger than you ever imagined. The war stories that captured your youth never made it personal. They were never meant to kill you, those stories, only trap you. It was fantasy for bullies and small men.

  Moonlight filtered through the gun ports, laddered with cement dust from the ceiling. Outside, a German platoon crept along the mountainside from the south. Krause believed that now we had a fighting chance. But the white glow of a flare arched overhead and soon proved his chimera false. The platoon scurried for cover, frantic under Allied fire from the high western ridge.

  Krause shot wild bursts out the gun port, and the pop and prattle of small arms fire answered him in the night. His men joined the fray, but their efforts were futile. The enemy had already cut the Germans to pieces. We could do nothing but listen to the dying cries for help from the men not killed outright. The shelling that followed was a mercy for me. They whistled overhead. Brackets of mortar fire like dogs on the hunt, sniffing out our position. It was only a matter of time now. Each explosion grew closer. The last one sent a rain of dirt and debris through the gun ports.

  The muzzle blast of an enemy howitzer flashed. And Krause emptied his submachine gun at it. That was it. The fool had just a pistol now with its eight bullets. These Germans were like blindered horses. They saw only the path in front of them, and that led to one place.

  When the shelling subsided, Krause scanned the ridgeline with his binoculars. His men clutched their MP40s in slick, sweaty hands the way toddlers clutched blankets. Like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, Krause would have his men die with him, entombed in this slab of concrete. A mausoleum to fools.

  “This is madness,” I said. I picked up my journal and stuffed it in my pack, slung the pack over my shoulder.

  Krause drew his Luger on me. “Where are you going?”

  “We’re just four men,” I said. “Against a battalion. This is suicide. I don’t want to die for nothing.”

  “My men do not desert,” he said. “Run and I’ll kill you.”

  “Take it easy.” I moved to set my pack down, but then swung it at Krause. It hit him square in the chest, knocked him back a step.

  I ran from the bunker, pulled myself up and over the embankment, my legs kicking out behind me. But I was too slow. Krause shot me from the doorway. Pain ripped through my knee, muscle torn away from bone. I hit the ground, screaming. I had never heard a sound like that come from me before. It filled the bay, as if the bay itself had shrieked at the sight of blood so close to its shores.

  Krause’s men sprayed the tree line with covering fire so he could reach me. “You coward!” he shouted over a hail of bullets. My face wet with his spit.

  I drew my pistol and shot him. The bullet tore into his belly. He slumped over, hands covering the hole I’d made in his abdomen. The widening patch of blood flooded the canals between his fingers.

  The other two scrambled out of the bunker trench. An enemy rifle blast rang out, striking one of them. The side of his face sprayed across the soil. The other crept through the trench, hunched down, helmet bobbing in and out of view. His arm swept up and he tossed a grenade at the tree line. Then he swung himself over the embankment and rolled onto his belly. He wormed his way forward while the whole area drew fire.

  Krause tried to speak but only sputtered bubbles of blood and spit at the corners of his mouth. His pupils dilated almost to
the size of marbles, the way an animal looked when it knew it was about to die. He reached out to me but I recoiled from his touch. His eyes rolled back in his head to show him the blackness of what came next. His eyelids fluttered. He choked out his last breath, and when he died, he hissed like a snake slithering unseen through tall weeds.

  When the last German reached me, I still held the gun in my hand, still pointed it at Krause. He was a kid, no more than nineteen. He stared down at his dead lieutenant. “Please,” he said in his simple Italian. He wasn’t fluent in my language, and I did not speak his, but I knew what he meant. He wanted to live, same as me. I holstered my weapon, watching him for signs of betrayal. None came, but that could change in an instant if faced with a choice between his own life or mine. I knew what I would choose.

  4

  Under cover of darkness, we made it to a stream and rested beneath the canopy of a massive fig tree, its slender branches drooping down around us. My head pounded in time with the pounding ache in my leg. I cut the pant leg open. The wound wasn’t as bad as it looked—or felt. The bullet had torn up the side of my knee, grazed the kneecap on the way out, fracturing the bone. At least it was not shattered. The German said something as he cleaned and dressed my wound. He knew I could not understand him and yet he spoke anyway in that dirty, guttural voice, full of spit and scorn. A cat coughing up a hairball.

  I scanned his face for some clue that would translate his words for me. His eyes darted around our position. Was he running the numbers, working out the odds, asking himself if I would slow him down, get him killed? How long would he wait to take me by surprise with a knife to my throat in the night? Or would he take the easy way out and turn me in to the next German unit we found? A weak smile crossed his lips. He’d made his choice.

  My fingers searched beside me, feeling the earth, an above-ground root snaking out from the trunk, and then a stone. My arm came up fast with the stone in my grip, striking the side of the soldier’s head. He went down. And I struck his head over and over again until it split open like the shell of a soft-boiled egg with all the yolk oozing out.

  I took his pistol and his pack with its ammunition, rations, and the map of Sicily he’d stolen from some municipal building during his scramble to escape the British. I gave no thought to the pack I’d left behind in the bunker in Melilli. I did not think of the journal inside, the one that spelled out exactly how a boy in pain could make a bomb. One soldier’s pack, it seemed then, should be as good as any other.

  I covered the German’s face with his blanket. The sight of his skull cracked open like that made me sick to my stomach. But this, this was the only way I knew how to live.

  Four days I hobbled north with a walking stick cut from the fallen branch of an almond tree. I felt like an old man, older than my twenty-four years. In Adrano, a village at the foot of the volcano, I attached myself to a new Italian regiment. Their medic checked my wound, said I was lucky it hadn’t been worse. He patched me up the best he could.

  Three more days and the regiment broke under Allied assault. But I didn’t hear bombs dropping, or bullets whizzing over my head. No mortar fire. No cries from the wounded or frightened soldiers. I heard nothing at all, not even my own beating heart. Silence shrouded me. And I remembered the myth of the hundred-headed monster buried deep inside that mountain. Looking around at all those helmeted men, I saw how the story might be true, how their heads-our heads-made up that creature.

  5

  We retreated through the rocky backbone of the island, my new regiment in tatters, and made contact with German positions in an abandoned village called Randazzo. It would be in flames before the week ended, bombed out and burning. At night on the narrow, winding road down the mountain-another withdrawal in a long line of withdrawals-Etna smoked and spewed lava, and you couldn’t tell the molten glow of the mountain’s fury from the dying embers of Randazzo.

  On the coast, in Messina, a military evacuation of the island was underway. Allied mortar fire pursued us from one position to the next as we pulled back. The bastards knew even the places where we tried to steal a few hours of sleep. Their shells whistled overhead and the thunder sounded, all day, all night. Boom. Boom. The ground always shook. We lost several good men in a barrage of machine-gun fire the day we learned the king had deposed Mussolini. From that moment on, the Germans looked on us with suspicion. They wondered if we would go against them now, and for good reason. Even our king knew the end was coming.

  But these Germans were smarter than Krause. They understood that the earthworm cut in half grows a new tail. We set our jaws and disappeared into the mountains. We traveled off road and only at night, without light. Following the ridgeline, we came to Messina. Dirty seagulls circled the ships in port and greeted us with their cries. We were not soldiers, mere food for gulls.

  6

  I escaped into the Italian countryside before the Allies crossed the Strait of Messina and landed on the mainland. Outside the fishing village of Scilla, I found a derelict farm among the olive trees, the stable and the sheepfold deserted. I stole civilian clothes from the farmhouse. The shirt fit loose in the shoulders, and I had to make an extra notch in the belt with my knife to keep the pants from falling down. The jars of preserves and honey and dried figs lasted a week. The Allies controlled the village, and the distant gunfire became more sporadic and indistinct as the Germans abandoned the toe of the Italian boot.

  In the piazza, I stood in line as Americans handed out rations and supplies to the local population. A soldier glued a placard to the wall of the municipal building. In Italian, it decreed all citizens to surrender their weapons and ammunition in two days. The mayor, a man with a round belly that spoke little of the hardship around him, introduced himself to the lieutenant in charge. They spoke through an interpreter. The mayor complained about the rations, and the lieutenant scolded him, told him that the days of eating well at the expense of his neighbors was over. The mayor raised his hands and cried, “You misunderstand. I am no Fascist. Ask anyone here and they will tell you, that man, he is no Fascist!”

  I stepped forward in line, accepted the meager provisions. What would Raphael think of me now-unwashed in dirty peasant garb like some peripatetic puppet in an impromptu street show.

  The next evening, four soldiers arrived at the farm—I was the last stop on their house-by-house sweep of the farmlands surrounding the village. A skinny Italian American asked if they could come inside. His Italian was pretty good, though his three compatriots didn’t speak a word. They appeared haggard and worn, shaken as if each man sensed his own impending death. The price for taking Sicily from us. I asked the Italian American if he thought the war would be over soon. His expression told me that it would be a long hard slog up the boot. The Allies had suffered heavy losses at the Salerno beachhead, and the Germans now occupied Rome. And then the bad news, it got worse. It turned ugly. The whispered talk of death camps jittered on his lips. I told him to stop telling me rumors and nonsense. Then the soldier slid a picture across the wooden table at me.

  “Got that from a German photographer,” he said. “Can you believe it? The last decent Kraut in this world, and he had a camera.”

  My stomach curdled at the dull and grainy mound of the dead piled one on top of the other, skin and bones and nothing more. Did he think that I knew about this barbarism? How could I have known? It was impossible for me to know of such a thing as this. I pushed the picture back toward the soldier. “Germans,” I said. “They have no honor. They’ve brought nothing but death and destruction to my country.”

  From the cupboard I took a loaf of stale black bread, traded from a boy whose father wanted Chesterfields. The soldiers spoke in English behind my back. Did they see through my disguise? Could one soldier see the soldier in another man, beneath the swine? What was it my father used to say? Better to eat black bread at home than white bread in someone else’s. My parents warned me, but I didn’t listen. They understood nothing good would come of this war. My m
other cried the day I left. She held the back of my hand up to her cheek and begged me. Flee Rome, she said, go into the country, hide. Your father and I, we’ll help you.

  What was a nation if not a family? And when your family needed you, would you not do your best for them? Give them whatever you could, even if that meant spilling blood, your own or someone else’s? When my country called my name, I stood at attention, proud and ready to fight. But I had no country now. This alliance with the Germans had seen to that. My right as a young Italian man, a son of the she-wolf, to carve his place in this world had come to nothing. That the king betrayed Il Duce and approved the armistice disgusted me. This was true. But I had betrayed my own parents when I chose my nation over them. Against those two powerful forces in my life, caught between Scylla and Charybdis, what was I to do? Maybe I should’ve run when my mother asked me to. It was an impossible choice.

  Where were they now, my mother and father? Were they still in Rome? Were they even alive? I could only hope that my parents had moved somewhere safe, that they had gotten out of the city long before the Allied planes dropped their bombs, the streets filled with gunfire, and the Germans occupied the capital.