A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  The improvised field hospital, crammed with enemy casualties not yet interrogated, was Bora’s target of opportunity for fact-finding. It occupied a two-floored square house of ugly bricks – the whole town was bricks and two-floored square houses – packed with beds and pallets among which an army surgeon moved wearily.

  All day Bora had smelled and recognized the odors of battle, and walking into the hospital dismayed him with the realization that he’d missed them: sweetish, intimate, sour and hard, the odors of wounded and dead flesh, painful and offensive but a part of him for so long that even their offensiveness was welcome. The surgeon – a Captain Treib, bleary-eyed, with some days’ worth of blond growth on his face – stared at the Polish and Russian campaign ribbons on Bora’s chest, and let him do the rounds of the crowded floor. Artillery fire, coming from somewhere westward (Bora knew where: the flat and muddy stretches reclaimed and planted forcibly, Mussolini’s claim to greatness) had started up again full force. A closer blast caused the incongruously ornate ceiling lamps to swing; windowpanes rattled, plaster crumbled and fell. An amputee from across the room said in English, “My God,” and then cried out the words again at the top of his voice. Bora turned to look at him.

  And at that moment, even as he straightened from leaning over an American’s bedside, a direct hit reached the corner of the building. Space, time, words seemed to explode. A metal basin came flying, smashed into a shelf, glass and iodine and phenol erupted all around. Pieces of masonry, tiles and stones jettisoned downwards, one of the lamps dropped with an armful of plaster and wires attached to it, the windows were obscured by the roof crashing down in sheets. Through their shattered panes a fury of debris burst in. Dust, glass, metal bits shot inside, rubble cascaded from the upper floor in heaps that clogged the stairs and blocked the door. A fretful high-pitched howl screamed into a second explosion, and the shock wave rocked and broke through the debris of the stairwell. Choking clouds of smoke and pulverized plaster flew into the room with it. The ceiling caved in from the center out.

  This time Bora was thrown back against the wall, pinned to it by a rage of collapsing lumber. Through the wreckage, he saw flames leaping high from the truck parked outside the blasted window and a storm of plaster dust circling the room, where the one lamp still hanging swung like a censer in its own smoke. He tried to free himself and couldn’t, to stretch enough to reach for the half-crushed bed and couldn’t. Steadying his breathing was all he could do, guarding nausea was all he was able to do. Fear had no place in this. It was physical revulsion at being caught, his neurotic body response of the Stalingrad days, where the hopelessness of having no way out made him throw up before action, as if his animal shell had to empty itself to claim autonomy from starvation and defeat. He knew it well and it threatened to rack him out of control even as he stood there, the nape of his neck driven against the wall to keep check on himself and his breathing.

  Other explosions followed, with the banging and cracking of things that break and trundle and fall in. Bora found enough room to slide down and crouch on the floor with his back to the wall, so tightly in control now; even panic was preferable to this being crammed inside by discipline, possessed by it and unable to let go.

  “Oh my God!” the voice was crying from the ravage of the room.

  Billows of dust rose and fell, obscuring even the closest object. In the extremity of his tension Bora was hardly aware of pain in his left leg, but when he groped for his knee, his hand met blood. The warm stickiness had had time to soak the cloth and leather of his breeches. His left boot was already filled with it. Pain was slow in coming, traveling through his stunned body. Bora wondered how he could have not noticed, though he had, his breathing had been affected by it. He fingered the blood and smelled it, that private touch and odor of self, frightening and known. Cold sweat beaded over him as in his Russian days, but fear did not follow. His mind neither elaborated nor anticipated things, so that each moment was its own disastrous self, bearable in its brevity, done with, and what came next was what came next.

  It’d have been better had you died, his wife had said. And long ago – long ago, it seemed to him now, as far back as Poland, and her first silence – his heart had told him that she was out of love with him.

  Airplanes were tearing overhead. Bora recognized the sound of mid-range bombers, deadly accurate. All around, bombs came down in clusters, devoured each other’s echo until one felt no obstacle of skull or flesh between the wracking noise and one’s brain, and the din grew beyond hearing. With a bone-cracking effort Bora reached for the bed through the lumber, and grasped the frantic hand of the man lying there.

  Bora’s cool-faced secretary looked uninterestedly at Guidi. “The major is not in, and is not expected to be in today. He left no message for any civilian.”

  Guidi took her dryness and accented Italian in his stride. “Has he set aside a packet for me?”

  She gave him an annoyed look. Under the military cap her hair was accurately combed in two rolls on her temples, shiny as if cast in metal. “Guidi, you said?” She extricated her shapely, silk-sheathed legs from under the desk and stepped into Bora’s office. Guidi heard her shuffle some papers, and return empty-handed. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing.”

  Guidi took a deep breath. “There ought to be a bundle of letters.”

  She had again sat at her desk, with a pretended air of absorption, placing a blank sheet in the typewriter. “Letters? Then you should have said you were seeking letters.” From a drawer she took out a sealed manila envelope, marked Briefe in Bora’s handwriting. Without wasting time in further conversation, she gave it to him and began typing.

  Inside the envelope were the translations of Magda’s letters, and a note from Bora which Guidi chose not to read before leaving the building. Nervous after the early-morning air raid on the railway across the Tiber, the Germans were rude and inquisitive, and Guidi especially disliked the Gestapo uniforms gloomily staining the hallways.

  Bora had written down the first names of two men mentioned in Magda’s recent correspondence. One, Emilio, was Italian and “very young, now out of town.” The other was German, still in Rome, and his name was Egon, a captain in the SS.

  I believe it’s Captain Sutor, but don’t know how useful my mediation with him would be, the note concluded. If needed I will put you in touch with him. Should things not work out in the next couple of days, get in touch with SS Colonel Eugene Dollmann, whose phone number my secretary is instructed to give you.

  Guidi read through the lines that Bora had at the time of writing entertained at least some doubts about returning from wherever he was about to go.

  14 FEBRUARY 1944

  The heads of fat, brown-faced sunflowers rose and fell in waves over the black earth, swinging back and forth on endless stems. Deep sky, whitewashed farmhouses under roofs like trimmed haircuts of straw. Birds and airplanes stitching the sky like wounds, hands parting the shafts and hairy leaves, and no one stopping him. A yellow laughter of light seemed to run through the sunflowers even as they bent and fell over to uncover more sky and earth – they cheered and clapped with their bearded leaves. They billowed and tried to overwhelm him in black and yellow on the way, but there was no stopping Bora from what he would find.

  The fin of the tail rudder stood, stark and green, high against the sky.

  If only the sunflowers would close again and trap him as one who wants to drown. But they rose and fell away, and no one stopping him, no one stopping him.

  “In God’s name, Bora, are you alive?”

  Bora had to stare at the man shaking him before he recognized General Westphal at his bedside. He had no idea of where he was, though obviously Westphal had found his way there. The general kept shaking him. “I’ve been knocking on your goddamn door for ten minutes, and finally got the concierge to open with a skeleton key. I thought you had given up your damn ghost! When did you get back, and what in God’s name...? There’s blood all over!”

 
With much effort Bora pulled himself up against the headboard. He felt empty and nauseous, but was starting to remember. “No time to change,” he apologized, “I know I’m late,” and other words that were nonsense even to himself.

  When he tried to get off the bed, Westphal prevented him. “Don’t get up, you fool,” he said, and to someone on the threshold, invisible to Bora, “Get a physician right away.”

  16 FEBRUARY 1944

  In Guidi’s reckoning, the “boy” Professor Maiuli had started coaching in Latin was well past high school age. He was likely a university student, since classes were not running these days. Home early by coincidence, after crossing Rau on the stairs Guidi asked the professor, “How did he avoid the draft? It’s remarkable that the Germans haven’t taken him as forced labor.”

  Maiuli touched his chest. “Bad lungs. You needn’t worry about Antonio, Inspector. I saw his university papers – all’s in order. He lives with his parents near St Lawrence’s.”

  “A fine place to get bombed. And he comes clear across town to be coached?”

  “He heard how good the professor is,” Signora Carmela spoke up. “There’s nothing strange about that.”

  Francesca had stayed home with a headache, though she hardly looked in pain. With an undefinable little smile she’d been listening to the exchange. “He has a beautiful profile,” she said. And when Guidi turned his attention to her, she added, “Well? He does.” She filled her mouth with a piece of bread and put her coat on. “I’m going to see my mother. Don’t any of you wait up for me.”

  There had been several air raid alerts in the past few hours, and only the day before the police station at Monteverde had been hit by errant bombs. “Why don’t I drive you there?” Guidi suggested.

  It was raining, dark and close to the curfew when they reached the address. Little was visible of the house except that it looked like every other house front along the Via Nomentana, a lonely spot where the remains of a brick kiln marked the old city limits.

  Guidi rolled his window down. “Who really lives here?” he asked.

  “My mother, I told you. Why?”

  His resentment was up. Guidi didn’t know what to do with it and grew bold. He said grumpily, “I just don’t want to be driving you around to your lover.”

  Francesca was a melancholy presence in the small car, faceless but for the glare from an incoming truck’s headlights. The headlights were blackened into slits by paint, and only cut a sliver of murky yellow across her cheek. “Why, what would that be to you? It’s not like I have to answer to you about my life.”

  After she stepped out, and the house absorbed her, Guidi remained in the car. Chilly rain came in through the open window, and still he looked out toward the house. Francesca knew Antonio Rau well, that was clear. A look, a word half-said, the way they brushed past each other in the hallway. Three times Guidi had seen him, and he did not like him. Rau was her lover, or her contact with the underground, or both. Three times he’d been about to face him, and only the awareness that Francesca was involved dangerously, to the immediate risk of the household, and he’d have to act upon it, had held him back. The Germans were the enemy, now more than ever – it wasn’t that. But where that put him with Bora, Guidi didn’t even want to think.

  Back at Via Paganini, Pompilia Marasca, candlestick in hand, met him on the stairs as soon as he walked in. She said, “I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” one hand on her hips and hard to avoid.

  “It’s almost ten o’clock. Can’t it wait?”

  “As a good citizen, I don’t think so.”

  In the semi-darkness Guidi looked without interest at her skin-tight black dress. “Well, what is it?”

  “It’s that new, Jewish-looking visitor that you have at your apartment. Three days now he’s been coming and going freely, whatever he comes here for, or whomever. Don’t you think the neighbors watch? People are being turned in to the Germans for less than that.” Her eyes narrowed and she spoke through graciously rounded red lips. “You ought to tell the young lady to mind her acquaintances, before somebody does something unneighborly.”

  “I appreciate your concern,” Guidi said dryly. “Continue to keep an eye on things.”

  Careful to keep her candle steady, Pompilia took a reticent step back. “If nobody acts on it, what good is my observing things?”

  17 FEBRUARY 1944

  On Thursday, Bora, back at work for the past two days and limping again, phoned SS Captain Sutor to invite him to lunch.

  Sutor sounded wary. “What’s the occasion?”

  “Other than rejoicing about our parade of Anglo–American prisoners yesterday? I’m headed to see what damage the Allies did yesterday to the Colosseum and the Protestant Cemetery. Since I’ll be passing by on my way to St Paul’s Gate, I thought you might want to join me.”

  “Why should I want to join you? I don’t give a fig about those old ruins. And you, I thought you’d have little taste to see what bombs do after Aprilia.”

  Bora kept his temper. “I hear Montecassino was far worse. Well, don’t let me take you away from your job. If you change your mind, I will be at the Colosseum at 1200 hours.”

  And indeed, at noon it did not surprise him to see Sutor’s Kfz 15 drawing near his Mercedes on the Palatine side of the Colosseum. “I’m glad you could make it after all,” Bora said, pointing to damage on the venerable archways, and to the pumice-packed scaffolds around the Arch of Constantine.

  “What are you going to do, tell me the story of the Colosseum?”

  “If you wish. It was not my intention, however. We don’t know one another, I thought, and probably should. Our positions in Rome are similar enough.”

  Sutor removed his cap long enough to slick his blond hair back. “You get around much more than I do, it seems to me.”

  “Only because I speak the language. But I don’t fraternize much.”

  “Well, what’s keeping you?”

  “Force of habit.” Bora looked straight at Sutor, and neither man had his mind on the ruined walls. “After five years of married life it’s awkward to start again.”

  “Why are you telling me all this? I’m not your confessor.”

  “No, but you’re well introduced.” They began walking around the formidable arena, unhurriedly. “Let’s face it, Captain. You’re about my age, have been here longer than I... There’s a party, the day after tomorrow, at Dollmann’s house, and I’m sure we’re both invited.”

  “So, you’re looking for a lay. Why, don’t you trust Dollmann’s judgment in the matter?” Sutor grinned at his own joke. “Maybe you should try your secretary, Major. She’s a nice piece.” Seeing that Bora kept a friendly mien, however, “I do know most of the women who’ll come to the party,” he ended up boasting. “What are you looking for?”

  Bora shrugged. “A well-built woman. Athletic, you know. Not fat, but nicely built.”

  “Is that all?” Sutor laughed. “I can’t believe you’re so simple in your tastes!”

  “The physical is all that matters when there isn’t to be more than that, Captain.”

  “Blonde or brunette?”

  “I have no preference.” Bora kept silent a while, wishing he could believe a small part of what he was saying. His left arm hurt. He still ached from the bruises of the air raid, and the shrapnel fragment in his leg had reawakened all the pains of his September wounds. Letting Sutor prod him, he did not rush to answer. “Since you insist,” he said when they’d come nearly full circle around the Colosseum, “speaking of secretaries, I was thinking of someone like the poor Reiner girl. As you know, I’ve been handling the paperwork for her parents. I had a chance to see photos of her. One can’t judge her personality, but the appearance was attractive.”

  Sutor’s wariness was up, and immediately down again. His feline blondness made him look smarter than he was; of this Bora was convinced. “She was a damn pleasant girl,” he said.

  “Well.” Bora stepped away. “Here’s my car, and ther
e is yours. Should we continue on to the English Cemetery or go to lunch?”

  “Wait a minute, Major. What’s the last word on how she died?”

  Bora walked to his car. “You heard the doors were locked. She must have killed herself after all. Cemetery or lunch?”

  “That can’t be all.” Sutor held him back. “You know something else you’re not saying.”

  “I don’t. And I’m truly sorry I brought up the issue.”

  “Then there is something else. Look, I knew her well; I think you ought to tell me.”

  “It’s not my place to tell. Please forget the matter, and if it’s all the same with you, let’s drive to St Paul’s Gate.”

  Sutor kept Bora from closing the car door. “No. Lunch. You said lunch, and lunch it is.”

  At the restaurant – he had insisted on going to Dreher’s – he resumed the argument. “Now that you brought it up you must finish it. Come on, what has emerged from the investigation?”

  “I am not the one in charge of it. It’s Inspector Guidi, of the Italian police.”

  “How do I get in touch with him?”

  “You embarrass me, Captain. Why would you want to become involved in an ugly story? You know policemen and their stupid questioning.”

  “So what? Do you think I couldn’t handle questions by him? I may have information he’s interested in. I have nothing to hide. Hell, I’ve got a career to think of!”

  Bora looked down, with the excuse of unfolding his napkin. He thought of the sad rooms of Via Tasso, and his heart was sick at Sutor’s words. “I will give you Guidi’s number. But kindly do not tell him how you got it.”

  That evening Guidi stayed at work until late. At his return home, Francesca was the only one still up, reading Città in the saint-strewn parlor. It was as good a time as any, and Guidi reported the gossip he’d heard from Pompilia the night before.