Страница 92 из 109
“You came at the worst time, signora,” one of the housegirls tells her as they wash dishes together. “Winter is easier. It’s all handwork then. Knitting, sewing.”
Before that promised respite, there will be the grape and olive and chestnut harvests, but Mirella smiles briefly, grateful for Giova
You can wear out or you can toughen up, Mirella tells herself sternly, and under the circumstances—
Twin beams of light slash through the darkness. Drying her hands, she feels the rush of anxiety provoked by anything unexpected, but relaxes when she recognizes the yellow-and-white auto. The major’s visit is two weeks early, but that’s hardly a cause for panic. “Iacopo!” she shouts like the contadina she’s becoming. “Il maggiore is here!”
Mirella sends Giova
“I–I thought they were Africans!” Don Osvaldo’s voice cracks. “I thought, There can’t be Africans in San Mauro. Rabbino, they were burned black! Fused together by the heat— hundreds of them. Hundreds!”
At Osvaldo’s side, Iacopo looks up and sees his wife. “There has been a battle in Valdottavo, Mirella. Don Leto is among the dead.”
Mirella cries, “Oh, Valdo. How terrible!”
“There’s more bad news,” il maggiore says, pacing in front of the fireplace. “The Germans arrested most of the Milan network last week, and in Turin—”
Iacopo takes the tray from Mirella’s hands. “Go to bed,” he says in his velvety baritone. “I’ll join you later, cara mia.”
The men talk far into the night, but when Iacopo comes to bed, Mirella is still awake. He slides under the covers, and she puts an arm over his chest, giving comfort, seeking it. Silent, he lies on his back, his hands behind his neck, staring at the ceiling. She holds the sheet to her breasts and sits up in the darkness. Waiting.
“The Waffen-SS and Gestapo have begun a coordinated campaign to root out Jews, partisans, and anyone who helps them. Mirella, they’re arresting priests— someone must have talked.”
Hardly breathing, Mirella closes her eyes.
“There’s no choice, cara. We have to consider—”
“No, Iacopo!”
“Osvaldo is doing the work of six men.”
“I won’t listen to this. You risked your life for months. You were arrested twice. For God’s sake, Iacopo— you have a family! You have children!”
“How can I hide here when other men—”
She shakes her head stubbornly, eyes brimming, chin trembling. “I have never said no to you before. Never! But I do now. No, no, no! Promise me you will not do this!”
“Mirella, I can’t—”
“Promise me!”
He turns on his side, his back to her. She bites her lip, determined not to cry, and after a long time, lies down next to him.
Merely a handsbreadth of lumpy mattress between them, but they are each alone.
Christmas, Mirella tells herself, like everyone else in Europe. It will be over by Christmas. If we can just get through a few more weeks…
Cadenza d’Inverno
Winter 1944–45
Rome changed hands two days before the Normandy invasion, and just like that, the Italian campaign dropped off the world’s front page. A sideshow, newspaper editors decided. Barely worth a mention. Four hundred thousand men, forgotten.
They’d get letters from the folks at home. “Is the fighting finished there? We never hear anything about Italy.” Soldiers would try to tell them what it was like on the Gothic Line, but the words would fail, or disappear beneath a censor’s thick black lines. So they wrote back about the mud.
Once the autumn rain began, it never stopped for long. Bridges washed out. Rivers flooded their banks, and fields disappeared under water. Torrents roared down mountainsides, and mud sloped by the ton onto civilian highways already hammered by heavy military equipment. Engineering battalions worked day and night, digging drainage ditches, plowing the syrupy mess to the sides of roads. They blasted rock from Ape
Wet for weeks, feet would swell something awful. Men would limp into a town hoping for shelter from the endless goddamned rain, and there’d be nothing left. Not a building untouched. Whole houses blown to hell: splinters and gravel, that’s all. Nothing alive except maybe one poor damned cow, udder full to bursting, bellowing as she roamed through the muddy wreckage.
And then they’d get to the front. Christ— even the air was muddy there, but nobody at home would read about that. The censors wouldn’t let them tell how mines and shells sent geysers of the stuff into the sky, how mud-covered birds fell to earth with bits of man meat and twisted metal. Boots and socks, bearings grease, blood, crankcase oil, vomit, shattered corpses— everything churned, liquefied, sucked into the mud.
A few days of that, and everybody began to break down. Madman-hero or chickenshit draftee, they couldn’t think straight, couldn’t follow what the officers were saying. Men were court-martialed for disobeying orders they couldn’t remember having heard.
In General Headquarters, topography and armies were represented on maps by tightly packed contour lines and geometric shapes, but armies didn’t fight in that campaign. It was companies at best. Platoons. Squads. Clusters of individual men struggling up narrow fingers of steep and stony mountains toward dug-in troops who could see them coming, and defended every goddamned inch.
In that murderous, soul-killing, relentless way, the American Fifth took one mountain after another, while the British Eighth fought its way through the vast watery maze of Romagna’s swamps. By October, Highway 65 to Bologna was wide open and the Bre
They could see the end. That was the hell of it. Whether they looked for victory or defeat, they could see the end. A breakthrough was days away, and then—
Supplies and reinforcements were diverted from Italy to other theaters. The Allies reassigned their best generals to the western front and Greece. A few nights later, Kesselring’s staff car collided with a piece of towed artillery, and he was out of action, damned near killed. The sideshow was handed over to second-tier generals: the Allies’ colorless Leese, the Reich’s lackluster von Vietinghoff.
Neither could win. Neither would yield. And then it began to snow.
Across Europe, dense fog and deep cold encased every branch and twig in icy armor. Generals used the bone-chilling, heart-freezing winter of ’45 to consolidate broken units and hurl them against the enemy again, and again, and again. The infantry’s dream of “home by Christmas” became the Great War’s nightmare of stagnant lines and pointless slaughter.