A Merry Dance Around the World With Eric Newby (15 page)

These feelings were not entirely one-sided. Now, when we were alone together, we sat as close as we dared to one another on the seat in the garden, knowing that we were under observation by one or other of the
suore
but on several occasions I managed to kiss Wanda in one of the dark corridors on the way back to my room.

With my lunch, which was brought to me on a tray by one of the more forbidding-looking
suore
, who had been specially selected for this dangerous mission by the
superiora
in order to discourage the
carabinieri
from rooting amongst its contents, came a message, hidden under an almost redhot dish. It was unsigned but I recognized the style. ‘Get out!’ it read, in English. ‘Tonight, 22.00, if not Germany tomorrow, 06.00. Go east 500
metri
across fields until you reach a very little street, then torn right and go on 500
metri
until you reach a bigger street. Wait there! Don’t worry about clothes.’

These were less ambiguous orders than most of those which I had been accustomed to receive during the last few years and, what was best, they left the method of executing the escape to the discretion of the person who was going to carry them out. They had, in fact, been drafted by Wanda’s father who had not been an officer in the Austrian Army for nothing, and she had rendered them into English.

They were not difficult to carry out. At 21.57, after having eaten a formidable last dinner at 19.30, I opened the door of my room for the tenth time that afternoon and uttered the magic words,
Ho mal di stomaco
to the solitary
carabiniere
on duty. They no longer stirred him to mirth, or his companion either, when he was on duty. After a few hours spent in a dark corridor sitting on a pair of chairs of a hardness which only the Roman Catholic church could devise, outside a labour ward from which awful sounds came from time to time, they had decided to each do stints of two hours on guard, while the one off duty sat below in the entrance hall. Whichever one of them was on duty now ignored me completely.

As soon as I had hopped into the
gabinetto
I locked the door, and after a short interval began to make various groaning and grunting noises which I hoped were appropriate, having practised them already that afternoon on nine previous visits, at the same time hoisting myself with some difficulty through the high, narrow window which I had already opened, and slid with surprising ease, down a convenient drainpipe, bootless and in my pyjamas, like someone leaving a burning house in an early Keystone film, to land with a great clonk on my plastered foot on the path below.

There was no need to worry about making a noise. The croaking of innumerable frogs, and the chirping of crickets were deafening; but I was no less apprehensive for that. Wishing that I had with me the crutches I had used in the
ospedale
, I rushed across the path and crashed through a hedge into a large field of stubble, over which an enormous moon was just rising. It was horribly bright and, as I began to cross it, I heard violent banging noises from the interior of the
ospedale
, which must have been the
carabiniere
hammering on the door of the
gabinetto
. I set off across the stubble at a terrific rate, which was extraordinarily painful with one bare foot, like walking on nails, so fast that I failed to see a large, concealed ditch, into which I plunged up to my waist in black slime. The 500 metres to the very little street where I was to ‘torn’ to the right seemed longer than I had imagined they would, but eventually I reached a rutted track which led away to the north, and there was no doubt that this was it.

I followed it for a quarter of a mile or so, past a farmhouse with a yard full of savage, barking dogs, until I reached a place where three roads met. There, at the junction, I found a motor car with two men hovering impatiently about it. One of them was the doctor, the other was someone whom I had never met before, a man with grey hair
en brosse
, whom the doctor addressed as
Maestro
. It was Wanda’s father.

‘You are late,’ he said in Italian with more than a hint of severity, just as I imagined he did to the boys and girls in his class. He had the same high forehead and the same stubborn expression which I had seen on her face when she had been trying to make me work harder at my Italian, except that he looked as if he wore it permanently. I would have liked to have asked him how his daughter was but this was not the right moment, exposed in the moonlight at a treeless crossroads, with a hue and cry beginning less than half a mile away.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. It sounded feeble and for a moment I thought of adding some flippant, mock-heroic remark about having had to go to the lavatory on the way, but I was not yet sufficiently good at the language, and if I had I would probably have found myself being bent over the bonnet of the Fiat and being given ‘six of the best’ with a Slovene cane for impertinence.

‘Well, get in!’ said the doctor. ‘Don’t stand there!’ He sounded just like a doctor who has been called out in the middle of the night to minister to some trivial complaint which, in effect, he had. Neither of them commented on my extraordinary appearance, wearing nothing but pyjamas and covered in filth. Fortunately they had somehow contrived to get my boots and clothes from the
ospedale
.

As I got into the back of the car I noticed for the first time that the door panel had a Red Cross painted on it. This at least partly explained how the Doctor was able to drive about the countryside during the curfew without being riddled with bullets. But now, if we were stopped and I was found travelling with these rather severe-looking middle-aged men who addressed one another formally as
maestro
and
dottore
, who, as Wanda had told me, first became friends because of their longstanding mutual distaste for Fascism, there was little doubt that they would be shot.

Before I left for the mountains I had one last encounter with Wanda. She brought disastrous news, having cycled twenty kilometres to a wood in which I had spent the night to do so.

Early that morning before it was light and while everyone was still in bed, a mixed force of Germans and Fascists had descended on the neighbourhood of Fontanellato and surrounded the house of a farmer called Baruffini in which they found several prisoners. Then they beat the surrounding fields in which a number of others were sleeping under the vines. Altogether their total bag was thirteen. But worst of all one of the prisoners had been mad enough to keep a day-to-day journal of all his doings in clear, which gave the names of a number of people who had helped him and which he had not even had the presence of mind to hide or destroy when he was taken. As a result of this, further arrests had been made and more were thought to be imminent.
^*

The other news was not good but it was less tragic. At the same time as all this was going on, the Germans had requisitioned the
castello
, in which Wanda had succeeded in arranging that I should be taken on as the gardener’s boy, in order to turn it into a military headquarters, it was said, for Field-Marshal Kesselring. I was lucky to have got out of the
ospedale
when I did. Once the castle became a headquarters for someone as important as Kesselring, all the roads for miles around would have blocks on them.

‘Pity you didn’t go there before,’ Wanda said. ‘No one would think the gardener’s boy in a German headquarters could be English.’ It would certainly have been a joke if I had already been installed in the
castello
and had been taken over by the Germans, with the rest of the staff, to help look after the Field-Marshal.

The last piece of information she brought concerned the
carabinieri
at the hospital. They had been saved from severe punishment by an extraordinary circumstance. On the night that I escaped from it another British prisoner had been brought to it suffering from some serious complaint and they had simply substituted him for me.

‘I know you never wanted to, but you won’t be able to go to Switzerland now, perhaps you never will,’ she said. She spoke in Italian. ‘And none of us may be able to help you any more. We may not be here to do so. No one, except the people who have got it now, know how many names that stupid wrote down in his little book. The doctor could be in it and so could my father.’

And so could she. My blood ran cold at the thought of it.

‘Look,’ I said in English. This was no time for language lessons. ‘You must give up trying to help me, all of you. If I’m caught all that will happen is that I’ll be sent to Germany and be put in another camp; but if any of you are caught helping me you’re quite likely to be shot. It just isn’t worth it. I’m protected by the Geneva Convention. They won’t shoot me. And my ankle’s fine now. I can look after myself.’

‘I don’t know anything about your Geneva Convention,’ she said, ‘but I know more about Fascists than you do and if they take you and send you to Germany, you may be there for years and years the way things are going and you may never come back. What we’re going to try and do is get you to the mountains tomorrow, and when things have quietened down a bit I’ll try and take you down closer to the line myself.’

I tried to argue with her and for the first time since I had known her she became very angry.

‘You’re a stupid young man,’ she said, ‘almost as stupid as the one who kept a little book with all his stupid thoughts in it and all those names, and if we’d known he was doing that he would have been killed I can tell you. It’s a pity we didn’t know. Do you really think the doctor and my father are helping you just because they like the colour of your eyes? It’s because this is the only way at the moment in which they can do anything against the Fascists. They really hate them, those two old men. Much more than I do.’

‘And what about you?’ I said. ‘Is that the only reason why you’ve done what you have?’

She took my hands in the darkness and held them. ‘Oh, Hurruck,’ she said, ‘when I said that you were stupid I didn’t really meant it. Stupid in Italian,
stupido
, is a very rude word which gives great offence, as I told you when you were in the
ospedale
and a word that you just never use to an Italian; but it is an expression that I have learned from you who always tell me that to call someone stupid, “don’t be so stupid”, is what you always say to one another in England, is just another expression like
“luk slipi”;
but now you really are being Italian stupid to say such a thing to me.’ By now she was crying with vexation.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It was a silly thing to say.’ She let go of my hands.

‘Sorry! That’s all you English ever are. Sorry to have troubled you! Even,’ she said, ‘if they go through a door in front of you that’s all they say. Sorry! Why do they go through it first if they know they’re going to be sorry afterwards? It’s a word like stupid. It doesn’t mean anything. When you and your friends say “sorry” I feel like hitting you!’ And she began to cry even harder.

There was nothing I could say and if I did say anything it would be all wrong. I put my arms round her and held her close to me among the tall maize for a long time until I had to go back to my hiding place.

‘I must go now,’ she said, ‘because of the curfew; but wherever you go, whatever happens, I’ll see you again. Never forget it.’

After some time spent hidden in the woods, Wanda told me that the doctor was going to take me to the mountains. He proposed to drive me down the Via Emilia, the main German line of communication with the battlefront, a hazardous business.

‘Get in!’ the doctor said as soon as I reached it, which were about the only words he ever seemed to address to me. ‘We can talk later!’

‘I don’t think you ought to be … ’I began to say, but he cut me short.

‘IN THE NAME OF GOD, GET IN!’
he said. ‘This place is swarming with Germans. It’s like Potsdam.’ I got in. There was nothing else to do.

I was not the only passenger. In the back seat of the little car there was a very small, toothless old man, wrapped in a moth-eaten cloak, a garment which is called a
tabar
in this part of the world, and with an equally moth-eaten hat to match. Both had once been black, now they were green with age. What he was, guide, someone whom the doctor had recruited to lend versimilitude to the outing, or simply an old man of the mountains on the way back to them from a black-market expedition I was unable to discover because, during the entire journey, he never uttered a word. He simply sat there in the back with a heavily laden rucksack on his knees, either completely ignoring the doctor when he addressed some remark to him in his dialect, or else uttering what was either a mindless chuckle or something provoked by the workings of a powerful and possibly diabolical intelligence.

Eventually we arrived at the junction of the minor road, on which we had been travelling, with the Via Emilia. Blocking the entrance to it there was a German soldier, probably a military policeman, on a motor cycle. He had his back to us and was watching the main road on which a convoy was moving south towards the front. Knowing what sort of man the doctor was, I was afraid that he might hoot imperiously at him to get out of the way but fortunately he simply switched off the engine and waited for the man to go, which presently he did when a gap occurred in the interminable procession of vehicles, roaring away on his machine in pursuit of them, and we followed him.

‘Sixteenth Panzer Division,’ the doctor said. ‘Reinforcements.’ How he could know this I could not imagine. There were no insignia on the vehicles to proclaim that they were part of Sixteenth Panzer Division, but he said it with such authority that I wouldn’t have dreamed of questioning what he said. He was not a man given to making idle remarks.