Wolf on the Mountain (5 page)

Everything was inconsistent with everything else.

At least Nonna was a familiar grandmother, toothless, wizened, wisps of grey hair sprouting from her wandering leathery chin and from out below the black headscarf she always wore, screeching her sibilant instructions in the kitchen, staying silent in every conversation. She in turn studied him with a benign caution, Nonna who had lived long enough to know that silence preserves one’s options, enables one never to appear surprised.

–

He might have been reassured if he’d known that he was as much a two-dimensional mystery to them. Yes, he was tall, taller than anyone in the village except Vincenzo, but shorter than many of the English they’d seen, or Germans for that matter. Dark hair, good; blue eyes not so good, but there were others in the village; a pale complexion, a problem; the way he moved a bigger problem.

But what perplexed them most was that he didn’t seem like an officer. Vincenzo had come back from the war saying that if the Italians and the English had swapped officers they’d still be in Libya. And the English had kicked the Germans out of Africa, out of Sicily and up to Naples. Yet this man had no swagger at all. He was almost, well, listless.

If only they could speak with him.

–

The signora looked over to his unmade bed with a shrug for another lazy man.

‘
Io lo facire, signora
.’

‘
Infinito’
she sighed,
‘Non c’e bene. E l’infinito e “fare”.’
It was his turn to sigh: another verb with a different infinitive from the Latin he’d learned at school. And she wasn’t satisfied with his using the infinitive; like a good mother she was going to stretch him:
‘Io lo faccio.’
Good God, it
was
back to ‘I do’ in Latin. She pointed at him:
‘Tu lo fai’
; then at one of the photographs:
‘Lui lo fa’
and as her hands toured the room we
facciamo
, you plural
fate
, they
fanno
. He swore; apart from I and we ‘to do’ was nothing like the Latin.

Later it would occur to him that the other four were nearer to French and he remembered some of the tricks those who’d been to the Italian classes at the prison camp had taught the others as they were liberated: use the Latin nouns, Latin infinitives as verbs, French infinitives, with ‘eh’ at the end if the Latin ones don’t work; in fact add an ‘eh’ to anything for the avoidance of doubt, speak it like a tenor doing
recitativo
at the opera, and don’t forget to flap your hands.

The tricks had worked well enough on the journey south. The pronouns had been added to the infinitives to conjugate them,
domani
added for the future tense and
ieri
, yesterday, for the past. And every day his vocabulary had grown. But not the grammar. The simple stuff was all he’d needed as they’d sped on their way, never stopping anywhere for more than a few hours and he’d never needed any more than what was needed for the preliminary stages of happy families: as soon as their hosts discovered that Mike’s father was a farmer the city boy was out of the conversation as Mike was plied with questions on English lambs and grass and a series of how-do-you?s when they learned that there were no olive trees in his country. So Mike’s Italian had been constantly improving while his own had stayed stock still.

It hadn’t mattered until now, because of the division of labours between them: Mike had been the interpreter, he the navigator because infantry men are used to being on patrol in hostile territory, used to picking the best routes, the place to slip across a river or a road unseen, used to noticing the sounds or visual clues which presage danger and then finding cover. The doctor had asked him why they hadn’t practised the verbs as they walked; he’d replied that the only time Italian countryfolk fell silent was when there were Germans or suspected spies around; how would you notice the silence, or the sound of an approaching lorry, if you were reciting the future tense?

But now it mattered. Mike was no longer with him and every attempt at future escape started off in a town full of German soldiers and fascist spies. Every common irregular verb was a matter of life or death, a chance to betray himself and his protectors.

–

At least there was one character in the no man’s land between the uncomprehending cultures, the family cat, a scrawny tabby. Cautious at first, it soon assumed that the Englishman could be a source of food and would snake around his legs. Why do cats always head for men who don’t like them? But this cat had an advantage over all the family: it neither spoke nor understood a word of Italian, used the same gestures to deliver its commands as English cats, purred and snored time away in the same language. He had always left cats to the women at home, but now he remembered their play and found that he could communicate with it by scratching its throat, flaring its whiskers, pinching its tail as it slunk past his calves.

It took to settling in the same room as he was in, graciously accepting his presence, seeming to ignore his struggles with his grammar, secretly pleased to have him to play off against Anna.

The older members of the family, to whom it was no more than a mouser, saw the relationship as a further sign of the craziness of the English. The cat soon took to sleeping on his feet at night. He did not mind: it kept them warm.

Each day was like the one before. Meals were always the same: yesterday’s leftover bread and coffee for breakfast; bread and cheese and dried sausage, sliced from one of the hands hanging down from a hook on the kitchen ceiling, for lunch, washed down with young wine from a glass flask; pasta and thick vegetable soup for supper, again with wine.

But all his daytime efforts with his new language were of no avail when the family sat down together. They talked so quickly and so loudly as to distort the clear sounds which Anna had been teaching him. Every linguistic success of the day became as nothing when the family were talking amongst themselves.

–

Anna’s
pazienza
was renewed each morning and lasted longer each day as she grew fonder and more protective of her new secret uncle; and Luigi, whose big dark eyes lurched between inquisitiveness and daydreams, was impressed to spend less time with his friends and work in shifts with her. For the first time in his life he was thankful that he had done Latin at school, even for Tweaky White’s torture with the short hair above his ears: at least it had taught him to conjugate. The household nouns started to fall into place, the pronunciation to improve. His hands even began to move, albeit in stilted fashion, to emphasise a point.

But the verbs remained a problem. The regular verbs were easy: his schoolboy
‘amo, amas, amat
’ had become
‘amo, ami, ama
’ but, unlike Latin, the really useful verbs all seemed to be irregular.
Andare,
to go: I
vado
, you
vai
, he
va
, we
andiamo
, you
andate
, they
vanno
.
Potere
, can: I
posso
, you
puoi
, he
puo
, we
possiamo
, you
potete
, they
possono
. ‘Jesus Christ, mog, how can anyone explain that? As if you could care. But it doesn’t concern you, does it? You don’t care what anyone says, English, Italian, Swahili. Meaningless!’ He slams the book shut. The cat cares about that, a sudden violent sound. It jerks its head up, looks all around it for danger, snorts, narrows its eyes again and recomposes itself, resettling and resettling its paws. ‘No, its all the same to you, isn’t it? Bloody language. I spend hours learning these bloody verbs like a parrot, never seeing any logic in them, forgetting them in minutes. Jesus, what a language!’

Needs drive. Every time he sat down to eat he looked up at the calendar on the kitchen wall and counted another day off until Christmas. Take away two days, perhaps three, for the walk through the mountains and the time taken to find a way through the German positions and the minefields, and time was getting short to convince the doctor that he could be allowed to leave the house. It drove him through the boredom, the constant hectoring of the youngsters over his stupidity in forgetting words and sounds, the longing for fresh air, to stretch his legs and simply be alone. His temper was becoming shorter; and every time he raised his voice in frustration and slammed the table with his hand the signora smiled her approval.

The doctor returns on the fifth night, having sent no word. The captain had begun to wonder if he too had been taken by the Germans. The family leaves him alone with the captain. He will only speak to him in Italian, slowly and clearly and using only simple constructions, but gradually accelerating, as he checks the healing of his patient’s wounds.

He turns to English as he blows out the candle. ‘Good. Roberto DiGiovanni is making progress.’

‘DiGiovanni?’

‘Johnson in Italian. Your new name. A good Italian one, easy to remember. You need to use it all the time now. Forget your English one. You can’t pass yourself off as an Italian unless you start thinking of yourself as one.’

He smiles reassuringly. ‘I have some good news for you, about your friend Mike. He is alive, uninjured, although he is now on his way to Germany, a prisoner-of-war again. He and his Italian comrades in the camp were very lucky. The commandant had taken your concerns about the South Africans to heart and, although his look-outs let him down, he had taken the precaution of moving the weapons away from the camp. When the Germans came they only found one rifle and in the end, after what passes for interrogation of our men, assumed that it was just for hunting food and that all they had found was another bunch of army deserters they could put to work as slaves. Everyone has been very lucky.’

Lucky? thinks the captain. If the Germans had come a day later he and Mike would have been away, perhaps slipping through the lines while the Germans were retreating.

‘And we were lucky you were there when those South Africans came. They were in German uniform for the raid.’ He sees the captain tensen, waiting for recrimination that he’d sent them away. ‘Don’t worry. You were right that they’d already known the camp was there. The Germans had an Italian interpreter with them, someone who’d come a few days earlier claiming to be a refugee from the north. Your South Africans were obviously on a final reconnaissance for the attack. It’s fortunate they were brought to you as soon as they arrived, and were sent away before they could see any guns. If they saw only one rifle on two visits they’d have assumed their interpreter was exaggerating. We have much to be grateful to you and Mike for. It saved the lives of many men. The Germans are not averse to shooting people. In one village a few miles south of here they shot a hundred….’

He stops, closes his eyes, swallows deeply. He takes off his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose, sniffs deeply and makes to continue as if nothing had happened: ‘But, since they thought our men were only deserters, they were all taken off to a labour camp south of here: to work clearing up the damage from the Allies’ bombing raids on the railway. The boys in the camp, the ones whose identity cards showed they were below military age, were simply sent home, Luigi amongst them. It’s a shame you don’t speak much Italian yet. He could have told you this days ago.’

‘It’s getting better.’

‘It is, but even at the progress you’ve been making these last few days it will take a while before we feel safe letting you go.’

‘Even for Christmas?’

The doctor is suddenly himself impatient. ‘What’s so special about Christmas? It’s something war changes, you know. Were you with your family last Christmas, or the one before?’

‘Of course I wasn’t, but each time my family and I knew we were all still alive. This year they haven’t had a letter from me since August. And each of those Christmases I’ve sat around with my friends wishing that we were at home, wondering what the point of war was. And the average German soldier was doing exactly the same. He’ll be doing it again this Christmas, on the line south of here. Apart from anything else, it could be the easiest time to slip past.’

‘Or play football with him in no man’s land?’ The doctor immediately regrets his sarcasm and offers the hope ‘We’ll see. We owe you something, and your parents. Work hard and we’ll see.’

The doctor goes to the kitchen and returns with a flask of wine and two tumblers, pours them both a full glass, toasts their healths in Italian and lights another cigarette. ‘My patients pay me in these now, Roberto, and with food. Once upon a time it was only the poorest peasants who paid me in kind. Now it’s the bourgeoisie as well.

‘Food is now our money. It’s more precious than gold. Everyone’s hoarding it. Clearly the Allies see this winter as a siege, starving out the Germans, even though they know that the Germans will steal Italian children’s food before they’ll go hungry themselves. Everything is in hiding from them: men, animals, sacks of flour, hams, jars of oil or salt or dried beans. You’re not that special.

‘And yet you think that just by walking south you can escape that siege. Didn’t you try once before, with your friend Mike, and weren’t you warned what difficulties you’d find? The locals too frightened to help you because of earlier German reprisals? The patrols? The minefields? The deep snow on the passes? You were fired on twice? … You didn’t eat for four days? … You had nothing to drink except snow? … You had to find a cave to sleep in every night?’ He looks to the captain for a response after every question. ‘You know that I was once a military doctor?… No? I was, but that’s for another time. Italian army manuals describe the line the Germans have established as the perfect winter defensive line. The signora tells me that you have a map. Is it here?’

The captain takes his last possession from his pocket, his most treasured, a map he and Mike were given by a priest on their journey south. Everything else that had succoured their trek, his photographs and his letters from home, had been in the camp when it was attacked, but he had brought the map with him when he came to the village to listen to the wireless so that he could place any towns mentioned in the broadcast. So often sodden, so often carefully dried. He gingerly opens it on the table.