June 1944
Sondrio
North Italy
The streets of Sondrio were slick with summer rain. They shone darkly in the late afternoon. The rain was keeping people indoors, not that there was much reason to be on the streets. Such shops as were open, whose owners had not been killed in the war or who had not migrated to places of greater safety, did not offer very much at all. Desultory displays sat moodily in shop windows and an atmosphere of pointlessness hung over the entrances to such establishments. On the whole, though, businesses were mostly closed down, their markets and suppliers having dried up or their services having been rendered redundant by the hostilities.
Sandro leaned close in against a wall, which offered scant shelter from the rain. Taking a deep draw from a damp cigarette, he smiled to himself, emphasising the deep lines that were now etched incongruously on his young face. He felt close to some kind of resolution.
This satisfying thought was confirmed by the sight of a figure emerging from the gate of the building opposite where he was standing. It was an old school building which the Germans had turned into their headquarters. The figure, clad in the grey uniform of an Obersturmführer, stopped outside the gate, as he did every evening, and removed a silver cigarette case from his inside pocket. He opened it, took out a cigarette and tapped it several times on the lid of the case, looking up and down the street, as if expecting to see someone he knew. The cigarette lit, he took it from his lips and turned left, his shoulders hunched, walking into the teeth of the rain, which was now driving quite hard down onto the town from the peaks of the surrounding alpine massifs – the Bernina, the Disgrazia, the Adamello and the Redorta.
As he had done for the past week, Sandro turned in the same direction and began to follow at a distance that was unlikely to cause concern to the grey-clad figure ahead of him. This was made all the easier because he knew exactly where the German was going.
Sandro’s partial recuperation had taken almost two months. His arm and leg were still not fully healed and, in fact, he was unsure if they ever would be. He walked with a limp in his left leg, unable to straighten it fully when he took a step. As for his arm, he could not raise it more than a few inches from his side. Both still caused him pain, especially at night and he slept only fitfully. His face, too, bore the scars of the beating he had taken that day in the hills. It had left a pronounced depression in his left cheek and he was no longer the handsome young man with whom Angela had fallen in love. Angela, who had long since disappeared from his life, but whose memory remained clear in his mind.
His mother had nearly fainted when she opened the door to her son’s almost lifeless body that night. She had tended to him without a break for four days as he hovered deliriously in some distant place, mouthing obscenities and telling her the story of the preceding few days, but telling it with the wrong words in the wrong order, so that she understood nothing. Finally, some strength seemed to return to him. Then he would not talk. He had disappeared to a place somewhere deep within himself. It was a place peopled by ghosts. Visions of that moment of the explosion in the hills that had ripped apart his comrades’ bodies troubled both his waking as well as his sleeping moments, until he could no longer tell the difference between being awake and being asleep. The faces of his dead colleagues floated across his eyes; the abject horror of those hellish moments never left him.
He had been visited after a few weeks by a partisan commandant who stared stonily at him as he retold his story, calmer now, accepting that it had actually happened. As he ended it, an uneasy silence hung between the two men.
‘As you say, it would seem someone has been informing. Those good men have been lost because someone has gone over to the side of the Black Brigades.’ The Black Brigades were a Fascist paramilitary group.
‘But who?’ answered Sandro, not voicing his own suspicions that it had been Luigi who had informed on them.
‘We are investigating,’ the commandant said abruptly, but there was something about his way of saying it. Just for a moment the commandant’s gaze flickered away from Sandro’s and he knew then that he was the one under most suspicion, simply because he had survived. ‘You will receive further visits from us as we attempt to ascertain what exactly happened.’
The commandant had left, but Sandro had an uneasy feeling. They obviously had doubts, or else they would already have taken action against him. However, he was resigned to the fact that finally they would not believe him and that they would probably also link him with the San Giorgio catastrophe.
But had it been Luigi? Why would he have done it; why would he have given the Germans details of the partisans’ operations? The only reason was that he had obviously become deranged by the loss of his wife and son. Luigi blamed himself for it, blamed the life he had chosen to lead in the last six months. Perhaps he blamed the bloodlust that he had discovered within himself. Perhaps Luigi had wanted to revenge himself on the person he believed had informed on him and if that meant that the whole battalion of partisans was to be wiped out in order to eliminate that one person, then so be it.
There were no further visits for the next few weeks. One evening, however, Sandro was walking in the woods not far from the house. He was watching a deer grazing amongst the trees. She nuzzled the ground, stirring the damp leaves with her snout, her large, dark eyes gleaming.
Suddenly she had looked up, her body frozen to attention, her ears twitching and her nostrils flaring as she searched for the direction of a scent or perhaps a sound. Then, all of a sudden, she was gone, kicking up dirt and dust, which spun lazily back to earth through motes of fading sunlight. Something had spooked the deer and Sandro’s chest immediately tightened. He slid behind a bush and scrutinised the spaces between the trees in the opposite direction from the one which the deer had taken. It could be hunters, he thought. But hunters of what? Deer or men?
He moved silently from tree trunk to tree trunk. He may have been incapacitated by his injuries, but this was his territory and he understood it like an animal would. He knew where and how to place his feet on the earth, knew how to move without attracting attention, knew how to use the light and shade of the forest to swallow his movement. He became a mere shadow.
After a few moments he saw them – a large man, followed closely by a much smaller man, moving through the trees about twenty metres distant. One of them, the large figure, he recognised instantly – Cavalcanti, a giant of a man with a huge beard, clad in a goatskin waistcoat, which exaggerated his girth even more. He carried a rifle and a bandolero of bullets was wrapped around his body from shoulder to waist. He was known as l’Assassino and was used by headquarters, as his nomme de guerre suggested, to take care of embarrassments, to permanently remove those of the cause who had transgressed.
Sandro had never seen the other man before. He was thin and weedy, wore spectacles on the end of his nose and a fur cap that sat awkwardly on his head. His clothes seemed wrong for the terrain, too considered, too stylish. The two men moved slowly and carefully through the trees, the last remaining flashes of sunlight spraying onto them like rain in a spring shower.
Sandro knew at once why they were here. Somewhere far away, in Milan probably, the evidence, such as there was, had been amassed and a decision had been made by a roomful of men. He fully understood. In the absence of any substantial evidence it had to have been him who had informed. Why had he appeared to have been ill in the days leading up to the incident, if not to have escaped the consequences? Why had he alone survived? Injured admittedly, but in all probability that was only to make it seem that he was not involved. In the absence of anything else, surely it would be far better to do something than to make no decision at all. It was good for morale. It would teach a lesson to anyone considering such activity. Send l’Assassino to take care of this ugly business as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Sandro had taken to the woods up above his mother’s house after dinner simply for a smoke and some gentle exercise. He was, consequently, unarmed. But he feared for his mother although he was certain they would not harm her. Their instructions were to kill him and they would never hurt an old woman, even the mother of an alleged informant. He knew what would happen. They would burst into the house and ask her where he was. When she said he wasn’t there, they would then disappear into the night again, as if they had not been there. There was little he could do, because if he showed himself, he was a dead man. And, at any rate, they were now very close to the house and there was no opportunity for him to get back there to warn her before they announced their presence.
His chest tightened even more. He could barely breathe as he watched them slide across the clearing that led up to the house, the house where he had played as a child, where he had clambered around his mother’s skirts as she hung out washing, where he had helped his ailing father in his work; this clearing which he had crossed on so many early mornings, a smile of anticipation on his face, on his way into his beloved mountains, such a short time ago, it seemed.
Suddenly, he had a presentiment that something terrible was about to happen and, without thinking of the consequences, started to move. They, meanwhile, stood in front of the door, looked at each other and then threw it open. Sandro was running now, or, at least, running as much as his bad leg would allow, but he was still quite a distance away and the house was lost from view behind the undergrowth. He shouted as he heard the first shot, his voice lost in the echo of the gunshot as it ricocheted around the forest. He had stopped dead in his tracks by the time the second and third shots rang out, his mouth frozen in the act of screaming silently.
At that moment, he fell to the ground. His body had still not properly healed. He lay there for an instant, catching deep breaths. There was silence from the house as, he presumed, they searched it for him, and then they re-appeared at the door. They stopped and looked around, rifles raised, scanning the surrounding forest. He stopped breathing for a moment as their eyes turned in his direction, but he was well hidden, low down in the evening shadows. After some moments, they turned and quickly disappeared into the trees on the other side of the clearing from where he was positioned.
Sandro stood there for what seemed like a long time, the dampness of the early evening beginning to seep upwards from the earth into his boots and his trousers. It was as if he had taken root and would remain there forever. In fact, he did want to remain there forever, because the alternative – moving, finding out what had happened in the now silent house – was just too terrible for him to contemplate.
Mist began to tumble through the branches of the high trees, falling down the sides of the hills drenching everything in its path like an avalanche. Branches trembled as droplets formed on them. Bird sounds faded into silence and the billion noises of the forest melted away as the sun slipped behind the peaks.
Finally, he had regained the ability to articulate his muscles and tendons. First one leg, very slowly. Then the other. And then he was plunging through the trees. He again stumbled and fell to the ground at one point, ripping his trousers on a branch, felt the jagged point stab his thigh like a sharp knife. The pain, however, did not touch him. He had gone beyond feeling anything in the last few weeks. He clambered to his feet again without even reaching down to touch the sticky hot flow of blood that ran down his leg inside his trousers. He ran on, through the clearing, through the door and into the house.
And there, where she had cooked and cleaned and knitted and sewed and cared for his father and for him, he found his mother, the essence gone from her, spread around her in the pool of drying blood which haloed her head. One of his shirts was draped across her shoulders. It had hung across the back of a chair and she, feeling the cold, must have put it on as she worked in the kitchen. They had run in, Cavalcanti and the other man, had seen a figure with its back to them, clad in a man’s shirt, had presumed it to be him and had shot his mother.
He knelt beside her and did the only thing he could – cradled her lifeless head in his hands. Softly, he began to hum the old valley song that was one of his first memories. The song that one of his doomed comrades had been whistling on that fateful day when they had set out to their deaths just a few short months ago. The song she had sung while hanging clothes out to dry.
Outside, a sharp burst of a solitary birdsong rang out in the distance before fading away until it was only an echo. The silence of twilight cloaked the forest.
He sat there until dawn, reliving every moment of his life, humming now and then. And, as the sun clambered up above the high peaks, casting long shadows across the valley below, he dug a grave behind the house and placed his mother’s body carefully in it, kissing her on the cheek and brushing the hair off her forehead, as she used to do unconsciously as she stirred the contents of a cooking pot on the stove, or darned one of his socks. He then shovelled the dirt over her body, sprinkling it with great care over her face, which he had covered with a handkerchief, as if he was putting makeup on her. That done, he went back into the house, packed a haversack with a few things, took the small roll of bank notes and fistful of coins that his mother kept in a box under her bed, locked the door and walked across the clearing without once looking back.
It would be fifty years before he would see that house again.