A Dark Song of Blood

by Ben Pastor

  The convoy pulled into a depressed space right of the road, where a ledge concealed pits or caves. The shots came from there. At the glare of lanterns Bora distinguished twenty or so men huddled by the entrance to the caves. They neither moved nor spoke, while the guards watching them were as loud as drunks. They took notice of him, but did not stop him from approaching. In a yellow shaft of light Bora saw Captain Sutor walk out with two soldiers, and at the same time, from his tall figure and sloping shoulders, he recognized Guidi in the group of prisoners.

  The rest was like a fast-paced dream. Bora ordered the closest SS to free the tall man, receiving a stuporous look in response. Guidi might have heard, but did not react at all. When Bora yanked him from the group, he also jogged the two men bound to him back to back. Relief and frustration ran so high in him, Bora could no longer manage them. With the switchblade he hacked at the rope, careless of wrists and hands. After the rope gave way Guidi still did not move. Bora pulled him to himself, and Guidi, whose feet were bound, fell on his knees. Exasperated, Bora threw the switchblade at him. “Here! Run to my car when you’re done!”

  “Not without the others —”

  “Fuck, Guidi! Get to the car!”

  Guidi’s companions were desperately trying to hopscotch away when the guards began to make hazy sense of things and fired at them. The men fell, and the whole group of prisoners was frantic now. Sutor turned on them, shouting. Then he saw Bora and flew at him.

  “Are you out of your mind?” he howled. “What do you think you’re doing?

  Bora’s gun swung up from the holster. “I’m carrying out Kesselring’s orders. Try to stop me.”

  Guidi was staggering in a daze when Bora came running, jostled him forward and at the inertia of his response put the gun to his head and forced him to race to the car. Still Guidi absurdly resisted entering it, but Bora’s toughness was like metal under the uniform. By brutal kicks he drove the prisoner in at last, knees crashing against him until he was inside and the door locked.

  When Bora went to open his door Sutor’s face floated out of the dark into the shaft of light behind him, a disembodied mask of strain. He was trying to maintain some check on himself, but his mouth twitched hard. Bora entered the car and gave gas to the running engine. As he backed up to regain the road, Sutor spoke over a small burst of gunfire from the caves.

  “You think you got something, Bora. Do you hear those shots? They just put two bullets through your General Foa’s skull.”

  The car roared out of the gravel-strewn space. Its tires spun and flung rocks around as the guards herded the last prisoners back toward the cave with the butts of rifles, Sutor at the lead, blaspheming and throwing punches into them.

  They had come several miles through roads unknown to Guidi before Bora drove off the pavement and braked on a rise in the land. He turned the motor off.

  Sweat drenched his armpits and stomach; his face was bathed in it. He let go of the wheel and rested his shoulders against the seat, too tense to shiver, the whole of him keyed hard for the fight and unable to relax. He glanced over to Guidi, slumped on the seat by him.

  Dark and complete silence, though Guidi was breathing – he could hear that. The front lay silent Anzio’s way, but a reflection from burning fires was a mockery of dawn. Cool night air trickled from the window. Young trees with new leaves made soft sounds as of paper.

  Bora feared letting go. He sat up because he feared letting go and growing weak thereby. An extreme need to weep mounted in him, which he held down by anger but not very well. He swallowed his need to weep, feeling as if someone had flayed him open and exposed the raw vulnerability beneath, his intimate self turned inside out like a jumble of guts for people to see. Had Guidi said something at least, he needed to hear talk. But Guidi was still and silent.

  Around the car, above it, the night wove on looms of silence and untenable emptiness. Bora looked up at the cruel star-pricked sky without turning his head, and the effort of rolling his eyes to one side sent shooting sparks of pain into his temples. He could not let go.

  Men’s life was nothing, nothing. At any time the stars could crush them from their pointed and multiform distance, a cascade of worlds against their weakness. It was only anger that kept grief at bay, but the emptiness was untenable. The silence, absolute. Bora looked in disgust at the pitiful tangle of his soul. It was like bloody offal and deserving mercy only in the measure he could give mercy to any human being for failing himself and others. He deserved nothing if he let go.

  And yet, one by one, by physical process, the knots of his tension began to fray. One, then another and another, and he was terrified to come unstrung when the work was not yet done.

  When he tried to fight it he began to ache from within his contracted shell, a deep mortal ache and strain of all his muscles, as if his body were a wound crying for him. Bora did not let go.

  Neither would he drive back to Rome. He went to Donna Maria’s country house, sitting by itself on a hillside. He parked in the yard. Through the dark soft night he walked to the house, opened the door.

  Guidi did not move until Bora swung the car door wide and said, “No one will look for you here. The bedrooms are upstairs. Go to sleep. I’ll come tomorrow as I can.”

  At the Flora only some of the offices were manned. Dollmann’s message on his desk was over nine hours old. Bora called Soratte and spoke to Westphal, who said, “Get a hold of Dollmann at once.”

  As Bora sat down to dial the colonel’s number, Dollmann called from the Excelsior.

  “Bora, thank God you’re back. Get here immediately. No, I can’t tell you. I’ll meet you upstairs.”

  Like a machine, Bora got up. He had no idea of how he looked until he stepped by a mirror in the lobby of the hotel and saw his face. Even then, he merely took care to tuck the scapular under his tunic and to straighten his ribbons on his way to the elevator.

  Dollmann greeted him outside of the banquet hall. “Wait in the next room. Kappler is here, and so is Wolff. I will keep you informed. You must call the field marshal as soon as this is through, and before the conference breaks. If you think what you witnessed is bad, wait until this is done with.”

  In a daze Bora watched the colonel re-enter the room. He was too tired to stand, but did not dare sit down lest he fall asleep. So he walked the floor back and forth, the line of marble tiles waving before his eyes as he did. He was too numb to ache by now.

  It was eleven before Dollmann came out. Bora had crawled to an armchair and was trying to steady his hand enough to drink coffee without spilling it on himself.

  “Bad news,” the colonel said. “We’re still discussing the situation, but it seems as though the consensus is to deport all Roman males. Envision that.”

  Bora was appalled, but things were entirely out of proportion in his mind, and he found nothing to say. Two more hours passed, which he could not recall as anything but a blur, though he managed to stay awake. He even stood up at Dollmann’s next appearance.

  “It’s coming soon now, Bora. We’re approaching a decision. Himmler will be called next. At my message you must rush out of here.”

  Bora said he would. Less than twenty minutes later Dollmann came out in a hurry. Bora was sitting by a small table with his head on the folded arms. A fourth cup of coffee sat by, untouched. Gently Dollmann shook him with the news.

  “The last trip for today, Major. Then you can go to bed.”

  It was past three when Bora walked into his room at the Hotel d’Italia and stumbled across his bed. It had been forty-six hours since he had last slept in it.

  Two hours later, when the alarm went off, Bora cried tears of exhaustion as he struggled up, because he did not want to face the day. In the shower he turned the water on and – having found it warm – he let it grow warmer, then hot, and stood under it in a cloud of vapor, scalding his neck and shoulders until they painfully turned red. Then he wore the dress uniform required for the SS funeral and went to work.

 
; 6

  25 MARCH 1944

  When he drove to the service, an SS lieutenant tried to prevent him from dismounting. Bora pushed him aside with the door and the lieutenant pinned him against the side of the car.

  “You shouldn’t be showing your face here after yesterday!” He was a very young and angry man, red-eyed with crying or fatigue or both, and the only way Bora knew he had not been one of the executioners was that his breath didn’t smell of alcohol.

  “Do me the favor,” Bora elbowed him to step onto the sidewalk. Being held back by the sleeve infuriated him. He pushed back the SS and found himself grabbed again. Sutor watched from the church steps. Relatives of the dead soldiers, flown in from the Tyrol, were looking on also. Bora shouldered the lieutenant hard, and couldn’t have kept from creating an incident had Dollmann not appeared with his sarcastic face like a keel pointed to the disturbance.

  “Ah, Bora,” he said from the steps, raising a glove in hand. “Are you coming in?”

  Grudgingly the lieutenant stepped back. Bora joined the colonel, who preceded him inside.

  “I’m starting to think you lost your paw by getting too close to the lard jar, Major, like the cat in the Italian proverb.”

  “If that’s the case, you know it is human lard this cat has gotten too close to.”

  “Sh, sh. Don’t you become impertinent. I have my troubles as it is. You look awful.”

  “Colonel, you have no idea.”

  “I heard Kappler’s report. It’s best left alone. Where did you take Guidi?”

  Bora told him. Dollmann nodded. “Stay in Rome. I’ll go fetch him. After all, we met at the party, so he shouldn’t be alarmed by the uniform.”

  During the service Bora wished he could crumple somewhere out of sheer emotional weariness. He stood apart from the SS, who formed a hurt and bloodshot-eyed cluster of their own. It was impossible to let his guard down when he expected to be provoked again at the end of the ceremony. His grief was of compounded losses, personal and shared. All pains and deaths were mirrors of it; there was no end to them. The thought of mangled bodies in the coffins, the thought of how the butchered piles in the caves must look now was overwhelming. In the presence of those who had done the killing, a chill went through him as of his own death.

  But outside there was no incident. The SS merely went their way, and he to his office.

  Back from Soratte, Westphal dismissed him early. Bora drove to his hotel, where he slept until eight in the evening. At this time he brushed his teeth, shaved, put on a fresh uniform and went downstairs to get drunk.

  As for Guidi, he arrived at his doorstep on foot, since Dollmann had discreetly left him at the corner. As chance would have it, no one was in the apartment. Guidi walked to his room and lay in bed. Without thinking, his mind a forced blank, as though a piece had been taken out of it in self-defense: the hours elapsed between his arrest and the moment he had come to in Bora’s car, parked in the dark stillness of the death-bearing night.

  He slept for hours, as he had done in the country villa to which Bora had driven him. Only in the middle of the night did he awaken, still numb enough not to feel hunger, or thirst, or other physiological stimuli, his whole system jealously shut down. In the obscure shapelessness of the room, what he’d replied to Dollmann’s warning floated back to him, but recalled as if someone else had acted the part. “Do you expect me not to talk?” The SS colonel had not flinched. “I expect you to pay your debt to the living. The dead don’t give a damn about you or me or what’s been done.” Then Guidi slept again.

  In the morning, news of his return traveled fast. Within moments there were tenants at all doors, a crowd in the Maiulis’ parlor that risked toppling the saints from under their glass domes. Questions poured like water from a faucet, and in the flow Guidi said nothing other than he had been detained by mistake after the accident they had all heard about. Everyone wanted to congratulate him. Only Francesca, out with friends, was not there. Words jumbled on words. “They say the Pope asked the SS not to do it,” and, “The doorkeeper thinks her cousin was killed with them.” Pompilia Marasca came insufferably close, breast thrust under his nose. “Have you heard what happened to other prisoners? The Germans took them and tied them inside a Roman tomb and buried them alive, hundreds of them!”

  Guidi tried to swallow, and could not. He flung his arms to get free of her and the other well-wishers and went coughing out of the parlor as one about to smother. After hacking and spitting in the handkerchief by his bed he was again able to breathe, but did not rejoin the company. He found a cowardly comfort in staring at the mirror until his face became a blur: the face nondescript, featureless, of one who – of hundreds – had been chosen to live.

  26 MARCH 1944

  When Bora began to sit up in bed, the room reeled upside down around him. The corners formed a see-saw where the light from the window was blinding, even though it was early in the morning. He lay back on his elbows, trying to steady his vision if not the rest of the world.

  It was his room, at least, whatever had happened meanwhile. The last thing he remembered was ordering English gin, and plenty of it. He sat up finally, though he had to shield his eyes from the brightness of the room. Perceptions bobbed up to the surface like buoys that have been forcibly kept below, popping out and floating. He remembered nothing, really.

  It was not his habit sleeping naked, but he was. And there was perfume in the room, in the pillow. A nauseous head-splitting pain laid him flat on his back again. Cheap perfume. And something on the mattress pricked his shoulder blade. He held up a woman’s hairpin. His eyes opened wide and he looked at the ceiling swing back and forth for a while. He didn’t have the slightest idea of whom he had brought to bed last night. For once he had not kept wise control. For the third time he hoisted himself on his elbows. Looking around he saw there was no evidence of his using a prophylactic, and he thought he must have really been drunk, then. He reached into the drawer at the right of the bed where was a sealed packet of them – as if he couldn’t tell already by the state of the bed that he had used none.

  It was one thing sitting at the edge of the bed with his feet on the floor, and another getting up from that position to reach the bathroom door. The doors were no steadier than the walls. Bora managed to lean over the bathtub and pour a bath. There was water, and it was hot. He sat in it to soak. He knew he’d start worrying as soon as his head cleared enough to remind him that this was no place and no time to have intercourse without protection.

  Cardinal Hohmann was livid and looked dead with his eyes closed, unwilling to listen to what Bora told him. Never had such as this been done. Never. In the shadow of Peter’s and Paul’s grave, no less. He was dismissed. Dismissed, dismissed. There was no message for General Westphal, and he was dismissed.

  Bora, still nursing his hangover, was not about to be dismissed. “May I point out to Your Eminence that seven Italian civilians were killed along with our soldiers, some of them children? One boy was cut in half by the explosion.”

  “Do not sicken me, Major. As if you cared. This is how you observe your open city status.”

  “It doesn’t mean we’re to be bowled down without redress, Your Eminence.”

  “Ten to one? You call it redress?” Hohmann’s eyes opened behind the spectacles, and it was as if sharp bits of metal were boring holes out from his devastated old face.

  “All we want is for L’Osservatore to present a balanced statement toward the army.”

  Hohmann closed his eyes again. The splendid sunshine only carved hollows in his countenance this morning. “Dollmann has already been here to ask.”

  “Dollmann is SS. It’s because the army wishes to distance itself from what has happened that we must have assurance there will be no overt criticism of us in your press. Hard feelings breed unadvisable actions, and these breed hard measures.”

  “None of your sophistry, Major Bora. Come out with it – what do you offer in exchange?”

  “We wil
l pull some troops out by Wednesday,” Bora said through his teeth.

  “What kind of troops – the non-essentials?”

  “Everybody is essential now.”

  “How many?” Bora presented a typewritten piece of paper and Hohmann read. “So, do you also get involved in blackmail these days, Major Bora?”

  “We must do what we must do, both of us. Do I have Your Eminence’s word?”

  Disgustedly Hohmann set the paper on his lap. “All you have is a heartsick old German’s word. It is disgraceful for you to be here, and for me to listen to you. I hoped better of my students.” When Bora clicked his heels, Hohmann sighed deeply from his sparrow-like chest. “Tell me, what was your dissertation, in the end?”

  “Latin Averroism and the Inquisition.”

  “And your position on the non-eternity of the world?”

  “I agree with Aquinas, Your Eminence – Sola fide tenetur.”

  “It isn’t all we manage to hold on to by faith alone, Major.” Hohmann waved him away. “You disappoint me more than I can tell.”

  Bora left through the ornate door, without looking back.

  Crossing the waiting room of the cardinal’s residence, flooded by the brilliant Roman morning, with a swell of the heart he recognized Mrs Murphy standing there. She was dressed in black, and Bora caught himself impractically hoping she might have somehow become a widow meanwhile; but she was simply in the required attire for a papal reception. She saw him and nodded in reply to his salute. Bora was still turned toward her as he stepped past the threshold. Here he ran down a group of Japanese nuns waiting to see Hohmann, to whom he profusely apologized though they did not understand a word he said.

  27 MARCH 1944

  Guidi returned to work on Monday to find that three of his men had been arrested by the German Army. “Do you mean the SS?” he questioned Danza. “No, army. Major Bora led them.” Instantly on the phone, Guidi reached Bora. Any expression of gratitude was so buried in him by disgust and hatred that all he did say pertained to his men’s release.