Fire in the Hills (3 page)

He couldn't understand his own behavior. The night the American warship had brought him to Sicily, he'd run straight through the middle of guns and bombs on that beach. Past flames and wounded, screaming men. Past mutilated bodies. Now the guns and bombs were distant, yet now he trembled worse each time he heard them. He couldn't help it; he couldn't win against his mounting terror. It immobilized him. Not even the pounding drive to get home could get him going again. Only the need for food—the fundamental need for survival—finally spurred him on.

The battles weren't the only reason his plan for getting home wasn't working out, though. Even without that hateful noise in the distance, he couldn't walk for more than a few hours at a time. His strength was failing; hunger sapped his energy.

It wasn't for shortage of farmhouses. No, he'd gotten used to rubbing his lips and pretending to think—the half-wit, struggling to seize on a vague memory—while women talked at him, always women. Everyone worried about a son, a brother, a father, a nephew, each one sent out by the Fascists to fight the Allied powers, because . . . because . . . Because that's what you did. You fought, even if you couldn't remember why.

He worked hard for these women—repairing roofs, lugging stones for walls, picking cactus pears, anything they wanted. But they were increasingly poor. They gave him a tomato. Or a lemon to suck on. Or dried figs, crunchy with wasp bodies. Or olives. He gnawed on rock-hard brown bread and tried to fool his empty stomach into not twisting, while he listened respectfully as the women talked and scratched behind the long ears of Nubian goats, their eyes limpid with held-back tears.

They talked of the Allies gobbling up Sicily. They welcomed each invasion, because the more battles won, the sooner this cursed war would end and their men could come home.

Welcome invasions. Incomprehensible.

Roberto spied a sign over on the road. He walked across the hillside and read it. It was hard to believe: that city down there was Siracusa. Great Siracusa had fallen to the Allies.

Roberto hugged himself and watched the scene in the city below. Smoke still rose from a cathedral on fire. People rushed in and out of a large army hospital tent set up in a piazza.

Other people cheered in the streets. They threw flowers from windows down under the feet of the British soldiers.

Welcome invasions.

It was already noon or later. And Roberto hadn't eaten anything but wild fennel and carrots for days. He needed to knock on a door soon.

He walked along the road till he came to a house set back a ways. He knocked.

The woman opened the door without asking who it was. The very act chilled him.

She looked him up and down and smiled. It seemed she almost expected him. “Come in.”

On the table was a bowl of broth with bread soaking in it and a spoon tipping out. He'd interrupted her meal, sparse as it was. His mouth watered. He forced his eyes away.

The woman clapped her hands together once, a sound that made Roberto wince, and moved briskly about the kitchen. She set water to boiling and took a jar of something from her pantry and heated it and put out a second bowl, but this one with a fork beside it. She talked as she worked. She muttered about prices.

Roberto strained to hear. He wanted to appear polite. He wanted not to stare at the stuff she'd put in the pot, not to think only about the fact that she'd put out a fork—a fork for something solid, not just a spoon.

“The cost of pasta has tripled since the war began. Did you realize that? You're a country boy and you don't know how prices work, of course, but you know that's bad, don't you?” She didn't pause long enough for Roberto to answer. “The cost of oil has multiplied by eight. Bread, by five. It's killing us. Day by day.” She looked at him and nodded.

He nodded back instinctively. And he felt like a liar. If he opened his mouth and his accent revealed he wasn't from Sicily, would she throw him out?

But she didn't ask him anything. Not what he was doing there, who he was. Not what he could offer in exchange. Nothing.

Roberto stood, mesmerized by the smells that came from the stove, by the movements of the woman's arm as she stirred, by her words that went counter to her cooking. He had to press his lips together to keep his jaw from hanging open.

“Sit now.”

He sat at the table, and she placed a heavenly bowl of pasta with sardines in front of him.

He ate.

She took out a bottle of oil and poured a dollop in Roberto's bowl. “My son worked in town for a month to buy that oil on the black market.”

So why was she giving him this precious food? Roberto felt guilty about eating it. But he was too hungry to stop. And he knew in his bones that the woman couldn't bear it if he stopped.

She sat across from him now, and her hand ran up and down that oil bottle, up and down, up and down. Her voice was thin as a blade of dry mountain grass. She'd crush to powder with the least bit of pressure. She needed protection—somebody strong.

A heart-piercing sense of déjà vu made Roberto pause, his fork halfway to his mouth. The first woman who had fed him rolled an apricot in her dishcloth. This one ran her hand up and down the oil bottle. They were variations on a theme, music that snaked inside his head.

Only this woman didn't ask if he'd seen anyone. Oh, Lord.

When he finished eating, she told him to nap on the kitchen floor while she went inside. He waited till he didn't hear any movement beyond the door, long enough that she was probably asleep—he hoped she was asleep, at least—then sneaked out and returned to following the train tracks at a distance.

Home, he keened to himself to drown out the desolate, crying music of the women, all these women, home home home home. Every step took him closer.

5

R
OBERTO WANDERED THE STREETS of Messina, looking for an opportunity. He'd walked all the way here on feet that now were so callused they were numb as stumps. And there it was: a storage shed with an unlocked door. He squeezed past ropes and canvas into a corner, squatted, and slept instantly.

The next morning he woke early. He stretched as best he could, without knocking anything over, and slipped out into the empty predawn streets before the owner of the shed could come and scold him. He turned up the narrowest alley he could find and leaned against a wall. It wasn't as narrow as the alleys in Venice—he couldn't touch both sides at once—but it felt good to stand there anyway.

The city was quiet. Whoever stirred inside these homes moved like cats. No one wanted to be noticed. Of course not. That was the trick these days—blend into the background, disappear.

And that was another reason why he liked narrow alleys. The dawn sun didn't reach him here. If someone glanced up this alley, they wouldn't see him unless he moved.

Roberto looked down the length of the alley, out to the cement walkway along the water, where two Nazi officers leaned over a metal railing and peered through binoculars. One of them had a grenade tucked into the top of his boot.

The day before, when Roberto had first walked the train tracks into Messina, he'd watched steamers carry retreating Italian soldiers across that water to the mainland of Italy. Now it looked like German soldiers were going to retreat, too, otherwise what were those officers doing there?

The land on the other side of the strait was easily visible, the hulk of a hill blue against the rising gray of morning. It was far, but not that far. And every single boat crossing the strait was full of soldiers, every single one of which he wanted to avoid. That's why Roberto had finally decided he had to swim it. Maybe tonight.

He was a good swimmer. Most Venetian boys were. He'd never swum that far before, but he could float when he needed a rest. It wasn't that far.

He'd been in Sicily probably two months by now—at least two months. He had to get off this island, on the road home. Yes, he'd swim the strait tonight.

“Want to make some money?”

Roberto had learned not to flinch at unexpected voices. It made you look suspect, and worse—smart. He turned slowly and assumed that vacant look in the eye that had served him well in Sicily so far.

The voice belonged to an Italian soldier with a festering cut across his face, high on his right temple, through the red ball oozing pus that was his eye, to the flange of his nostril. “Take me home with you,” he said. “Just till the Allies get here and I can surrender. It won't be long.” His accent made Roberto think of Maurizio; he was Roman, for sure. Another Roman deserter.

Roberto shook his head.

The soldier grabbed him around the throat with both hands. “Take me home, or I'll kill you.”

“I don't have a home here,” croaked Roberto. He yanked down on the man's elbows and broke his grip. It wasn't hard; the soldier was as weak as he looked.

The soldier absently ran the fingers of his left hand over his grimy front teeth. “You're not even Sicilian. Listen to you. You're Venetian, right? What are you doing here? A kid like you. Hell, you didn't make the mistake of actually joining the army, did you? Idiot. Complete idiot.” And he cried. His shoulders curled forward, and his head slumped and he bawled.

Roberto quickly stepped close. “Don't do that,” he whispered. “People will look at us. We'll get caught.”

The man put his hands over his mouth and nose. His body jerked with sobs. But he didn't make noise anymore.

“Listen,” said Roberto softly, “I wish I could help you, but I can't. I'm going home, to Venice, and I'm going to swim that strait. You aren't strong enough to make it.”

“Swim the strait?” The man dropped his arms as though they were dead things. The stench of his breath made Roberto turn his head away. “And then what? Walk into the hands of the Germans?”

What did he mean? “Once I get on the other side, I'll never have to look at another German again.”

“Don't you know anything? Haven't you heard?” The man clutched Roberto's arm. “Back in July the Allies made an air raid on Rome. A thousand civilians died. One thousand. The people couldn't stand it anymore. They're fed up with the war. They threw stones at the king, so he had Mussolini arrested.”

“Arrested?” Roberto couldn't have heard right. “Prime Minister Mussolini's in prison?” The famous duke in prison?

“You bet. People danced in the streets when Mussolini fell. Let that devil rot.”

“So we're with the Allies now?” asked Roberto.

“If only! The king stayed with the Nazis. But Hitler hates us now—he always did, only now it's in the open. And the Allies hate us, too. The whole thing's a mess. The army has gone to hell. No one has ammunition or food.” The soldier shook Roberto's arm passionately. “In these past few weeks the Germans have occupied us to keep Italy from being used for Allied bases. They've occupied us. Like they occupied France. They're all over Italy, all the way down to Naples.”

Roberto's stomach clenched. “Are the Germans in Venice?” Were his parents okay?

Roberto instantly pressed his back to the wall and turned his head to face the German soldier, who pointed a pistol at them. It was the officer with the grenade in his boot. He didn't have to say it again—Roberto wasn't about to move.

“
Wir sprechen eben
,” Roberto said, hoping that meant “We're just talking”—his German was so poor, despite all the time he'd spent with Germans over the past year. He tried to keep a calm tone.

But the German officer's eyes were hard on the Italian soldier. Roberto dared to look at the Italian beside him. He had raised his hands in surrender. How dumb of him! By raising his hands, he was admitting he was a deserter. Roberto knew too well what Nazis did to Italian deserters—what they'd done to Maurizio.

Roberto moved closer to the Italian soldier. “
Verwunden und verlegen
—He's dazed and confused,” he said. He held out his hands toward the German officer in plea. But hands couldn't help enough; German words were too hard to get out of his mouth. He gave up and spoke in Italian: “With his eye all messed up, he can hardly see you. He doesn't know what he's doing.”

The officer shot the Italian soldier in the head.

Roberto jumped backward in reflex. His head smacked against the wall. His mouth stuck open in silent horror.

Roberto stared stupidly at the crumpled heap of soldier. Blood pooled under his head. Roberto couldn't do anything for him now. No one could.

“Komm mit!”
It was a shout now.

But Roberto didn't want to leave the Italian soldier. He couldn't just leave him there. Like garbage.

The German officer grabbed Roberto by the arm and pulled him, stumbling, down the alley.

They came out on the waterfront. German troops flowed onto the docks from every street and alley. They streamed into ferries that had suddenly appeared. And other kinds of boats, too—steamboats, and motor rafts.

Hundreds of German soldiers crossed the strait. Thousands. Crowded and crushed and crazy.

Roberto crossed with them, his hands tied behind his back, his vision blood red.

6

T
HE TRAIN PULLED INTO NAPLES in the middle of the morning. “Get ready,” Kurt, the German officer, said to Roberto in that clipped German of his. He took the cigar out from between his teeth and dropped it on the train floor. “The people in this city are stupid. They don't know a word of German. You say something as simple as
‘Halt,'
and they keep on walking. So you're my voice on everything here.”