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Four notes: whistled. Duno stands and returns the notes, higher. Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! The signal was Duno’s idea. He has loved the aria since he was small, when his father booked an opera company touring Turandot. Duno knows now what the lyrics mean. Nessun dorma! No one sleeps! Appropriate, he thought, for those who keep watch.
When Pierino rounds the last switchback, Duno hurries to meet him, Beretta in hand. “Pierino, watch me strip this—!” He skids on the gravelly slope.
Pierino’s not alone. Tall, blond, and powerfully built, the man with him looks like a recruiting poster for the SS. Swallowing his surprise, Duno says, “I know you! I was at Sainte-Gisèle. You’re Jakub Landau!”
Everyone in Sainte-Gisèle knew Jakub Landau’s story. He was a Polish Jew, but one who spoke perfect German and looked so Aryan that a gauleiter actually believed Landau’s claim to be a Volksdeutscher named Hans Obermüller, whose papers had been lost in the bombing of Warsaw.
Landau looks hard at Duno. “Yes. I remember. You’re bigger.” He gestures at the Beretta. “Show us.”
Duno kneels and closes his eyes. His whole body shakes with cold, but he does the job with cool competence, and his chest swells when Landau is impressed. “I can do the Breda, too,” Duno brags, “ma due minuti—two minutes for the machine gun.”
Pierino points to Duno’s right hand: if you lost your left, could you manage with your right?
“Not as fast yet,” Duno admits, “but I will be. I’m learning to shoot, too. We need bullets, Pierino. Some of us need more practice.”
Duno doesn’t mention what the other boys say about him: that he couldn’t hit dirt if he fell out of a wagon. He suspects they’re just teasing him— nobody could see the kind of targets they pick out for him. This leaf, that stone…
Pierino unslings the mailbag and pulls out a sweater wrapped around several loaves of bread. He gestures for Duno to put the sweater on. Shuddering with cold, Duno considers it, then refuses. “There are others who have less,” he says stoutly.
“Il postino told me you would be a good comrade,” Landau says, his Italian heavily accented. “Wear it on sentry duty,” he suggests. “Then share.”
“That’s fair,” Duno agrees.
He’s started to put the sweater on when a cautious voice calls from somewhere to his left. “Duno! Who’s that with you? He looks German.”
“That’s my relief,” Duno tells Landau. “Va bene, Nello! Pierino brought him.”
Circling a bald boulder, Nello Toselli reveals himself: short and baby-faced, the sort who’d be a fat kid, given a decent meal even once a day. “I was just making sure,” he says. The rifle he clutches is unloaded, but a stranger wouldn’t know that.
“Good discipline,” the blond man notes, “for boys.”
Nello shoots him a look and is about to say something rude when he notices what Duno is wearing. “Ei! Duno! Nice sweater! Did your girlfriend bring it up here?” It’s only a joke, but Duno flushes. Giggling, Toselli smacks him on the shoulder. “So that’s why you volunteer for sentry duty! You’ve got una bella fica coming up in the afternoons, ne?” He gestures obscenely. “Fare la chiavata?”
“Bastardo lurido!” Duno sneers. “Go to hell with your dirty mind! Pierino brought the sweater, and bread, too.” He waves a loaf in Toselli’s face. “I was going to give you some,” he taunts, snatching it back when Toselli makes a grab for it, “but after that remark—”
“Ei! Duno! I was only giving you a hard time,” Nello whines, making another try for the bread Duno holds just out of reach.
The blond man grabs the loaf and tears off a small piece for Nello. “Sometimes we must impose a tax, ei, comrade?”
“The rest goes into la no
The San Mauro Brigade of the First Alpine Division of the Armed Anti-Fascist Resistance, that’s what the boys here call themselves. Their “brigade” is seventy-one short of a hundred-man company and they’re armed with a haphazard collection of shotguns and hunting rifles that belonged to someone’s no
“Comrades!” Jakub Landau calls out, his voice cutting through their murmur. “I ask hospitality of the brigade!”
They leap to their feet at the sight of this blond stranger. A Republican deserter holds a Carcano ’91 at the ready. Landau recognizes Attilio Goletta’s son Tullio from descriptions: he is hairy as a boar, and just as attractive. A tall old woman, slender and severe in black, comes forward to place a hand on Tullio’s gun barrel. “Pierino and I have met with il polacco before, boys. We can vouch for him,” Lidia says, as Landau bows over her hand.
“I am called il polacco because I am from Warsaw in Polonia,” Landau tells the boys.
“Pierino brought this from your mamma, Tullio!” Duno holds the bread high, then adds it to the basket of food la no
Even here, in a cave, they mind their ma
His voice is ordinary, factual; his Italian ungrammatical, but adequate. “I have no family,” he says quietly. “The Germans, they kill all my family. My wife, my children, my parents, my brother, my sisters. Why?” He looks up. The boys are listening, wide-eyed. Softly, caressingly, he says, “Because they are ebrei.”
Standing, he speaks now with the tone of a man who expects no reply. “Four years, I was alone. Four years, I was afraid. Four years, I ran. No more.” He points toward the Soviet Union. “Like the sun, an army of patriots rise in the east. In Russia, in Polonia, in Yugoslavia, in Greece— the people rise against fascisti everywhere. I have joined my fate to theirs.”
If the San Mauro joins this corps of liberation, he promises, they’ll become part of a genuine brigade: three companies, each divided into platoon-sized units officered by a lieutenant in command of three squads: thirteen men each with a sergeant and corporal. Company commanders, subcommanders, logistics and intelligence officers will support the fighters.
Tullio Goletta scratches with a furry hand at the lice in his hair. “I had enough of officers when I was in the army.”
“I have heard of Attilio Goletta’s son,” Landau says, looking at Tullio. “People say you and your babbo are two loaves from same dough. Both fearless, both strong. But Babbo’s jokes are better.” The boys all laugh. “In the Corps of Liberation,” Landau resumes, “officers do not order any personal slavery. Italy don’t shine Germany’s boots, and men of the corps don’t shine officer shoes. We tell them, You officers: you clean your own dishes! Wash your own stinky shirts!” When the laughter dies down again, Landau adds soberly, “And you fighters: respect the peasants! They are mother and father, grandparents and sisters of the armed anti-Fascist partisan movement. You do not steal from them! You leave the women pure!”