The Secret of Santa Vittoria (39 page)

Traub was already running up the steep stone stairs, but when he could see well enough to realize that he could see all the way up the tower to where the bells hung and all the way down to where the captain stood, he came slowly back down and then they went out into the Piazza of the People and back across it to Constanzia's house.

“It was worth the effort,” the captain said. They got out the map of the city and with a good deal of satisfaction they eliminated the campanile from the list of possible hiding places.

Sometime during that same night, although they had already searched Santa Maria of the Burning Oven once before, the captain woke Sergeant Traub and sent him down the Corso Cavour to the wine cellar to get the other men. It was something that Bombolini had said, about the church having been built on the ruins of an even more ancient church, a Roman temple which, in turn, had been built on an Etruscan foundation. It stood to reason, von Prum told the sergeant, that there was an ancient cellar, down below somewhere, which they had overlooked. They searched the rest of the night until the dawn.

At dawn he thought of the water tower. It had not even been on the list. It was almost painful to watch the things they did that morning. It made people tired watching the work they did. Ever since the people here have been willing to admit that a German is a person capable of a great amount of painful work. It was Private Zopf who made the climb and he regretted all the stories he had told about the days he had spent traveling with a circus through Bavaria and how at one time he had had a bright future as a high wire walker. He went up the narrow ladder of the water tower in surprisingly swift time, but at the iron catwalk he stopped.

“Go ahead,” von Prum shouted. “What are you waiting for?”

“I'm tired, sir. I've run out of strength, sir,” Private Zopf called down. “I haven't slept in two nights.”

“Take a rest, but hurry,” the captain ordered.

Eventually the soldier worked his way onto the catwalk and then up onto the roof, where he found a small door. By a great effort, since the door handle had turned to rust years before, he opened it and looked down into the tower.

“It's only water, sir,” the soldier shouted down.

“Have you tasted it?”

“No, sir. But I know it isn't wine. It doesn't smell like wine.”

“Are there any bottles in the water? There must be bottles in the water. Thousands of bottles in the water.”

In the end Zopf dropped through the doorway and suspended himself over the water by his feet. It was a dangerous thing to do. If he had slipped he might have drowned in the tank.

They didn't wait for Zopf to come down but went instead, at a very fast pace, back up to the Piazza of the People. The sun was up by then and another day was well underway.

“Allow me to ask him,” Corporal Heinsick said to Traub.

“He doesn't want to hear things like that,” Traub said. But in the end he allowed the corporal to speak to the captain.

“Let me have one of them, sir,” Heinsick said to Captain von Prum. “Let me take charge of one of these people.”

The captain looked at the corporal as if seeing him for the first time.

“What do you mean,
have
one?” the captain said.

“We've got to start hitting someone soon, sir,” Heinsick said. “I'll take some woman or some child. It won't take much, sir. It will be all over this morning. I'll just stick someone's hand in the fire, sir.”

Von Prum almost struck the corporal. As it was, he shouted at him. He told him that they didn't do things that way, that the Russians did things that way and barbarians acted that way, but that Germans didn't act that way because Germans didn't need to act that way.

“We don't use muscle, we use the mind,” Captain von Prum said. “It's the difference between us and all of them.”

Sometime in the morning Sergeant Traub thought of the priest and he went to Captain von Prum.

“A priest
can't
tell a lie, sir,” the sergeant said. “Ask him where the wine is, and he has to tell you. Otherwise he goes to hell when he dies.”

“In Germany the priests don't lie,” the captain said, “but in Italy the priests lie. But go get him.”

Polenta was frightened when they came to get him because he is afraid of physical punishment and he feared what they might do to him.

“A lie is a sin,” von Prum said to the priest, “and as a priest of the Holy Roman Catholic Church you are forbidden to lie. Do you know where the wine is?”

Polenta stared at them with amazement.

“Notice, Father,” von Prum said, “I don't ask you to reveal where the wine is. I merely ask do you
know
where it is?”

Polenta shook his head and waved his hand in the direction of the Cooperative Wine Cellar.

“There is the wine,” he said.

They got a Holy Bible after that, and they told the priest to put one hand upon his heart and to lay the other hand upon the sacred book.

“I ask you once again, as a man of God, as God's representative here on earth, who can knowingly commit no sin in the face of God: Do you know of the wine?”

“No,” Polenta said. “As a man of God I give you my sacred word. I will do better.”

He had brought along a cross as a shield to hide behind, and he held it up and made the sign of the cross, and he also blessed them with the cross.

“This cross is made from the wood of the True Cross,” Padre Polenta said. “I paid five hundred lire for it and it ought to be sacred. Upon this cross, as God is my witness, I tell you there is no other wine.”

Von Prum struck the cross from the priest's hand.

“May you burn in hell for that lie,” he said.

But it bothered the men after that morning. It bothered them that the captain had struck the cross, and it bothered them the way that Polenta had answered the questions.

“They can lie,” Sergeant Traub told them. “Priests are only men wearing skirts.”

“I don't know. I don't understand it,” Heinsick said. “He stood right there and told us, a man of the cloth, ‘I tell you there is no other wine.'” Heinsick shook his head.

“How could he hold the sacred cross like that, the True Cross, and lie?” Private Goettke said.

“They can lie, but not when they hold the cross,” Private Impossible said. “If you lie on the cross or the good book, God sends a sign so everyone can see. Your tongue turns black. The words strangle in your throat. It's like telling a lie in the confession box. They always know.”

“It is impossible to deceive the cross,” Heinsick said. “Do you know what I'm thinking? I think there is no wine here.”

Zopf had come down from the tower, and because he had done the dangerous thing he was allowed to say things the others wouldn't say.

“I think someone is going out of his mind,” the soldier said, and several of them, when Traub was not looking, nodded their heads. Heinsick had been drinking wine, and on the wall of the room with charcoal from the fireplace he wrote:

Ein feste Burg ist unser von Prum.

It can still be seen there. We found out much later what it meant. “A mighty fortress is our von Prum.”

“You had better take that off,” Traub said. “Men have died for less than that in this army.”

But Heinsick only shrugged. He was a good judge of human nature.

“He'll be flattered by it,” he said, and that afternoon, when von Prum came running down the Corso with another inspiration, he read the words. He looked around at the men, who were hiding the wine bottles behind their backs. For one terrible moment they knew terror.

“Thank you,” the captain said. “It reinforces me.”

That afternoon they began to dig around the burial vaults of the Malatesta family in the burying grounds beyond the city walls.

*   *   *

It was educational to the people of Santa Vittoria to watch what was happening to Captain von Prum. He became a lesson to us; and to this day, when a person runs about trying vainly to do the impossible we say that he is “doing a von Prum.” We didn't understand it then, but his trouble was that he didn't know how to fail. Roberto said that he hadn't been raised that way.

When the people here want something and find they can't get it, which happens all the time, they convince themselves they never wanted it in the first place. After that they become scornful of the thing they wanted and spit on it. It's a matter of being ridiculous. To want something that you can't have is to be ridiculous and in a town such as Santa Vittoria to not look ridiculous is sometimes all that one has.

Von Prum became ridiculous. He could not believe he couldn't find the wine his own way, he could not believe that sometimes men, even himself, can fail, and so he didn't know how to stop what he was doing.

He changed in those five days. In that one week he appeared to us to age ten years. He didn't eat and he didn't sleep, and he lost weight, and all at once the fine lines of his face appeared not fine but bony and old, and we had a look at what he would look like if he ever grew old. Because his clothes had been tailored for him, when he lost weight the uniforms so tightly fitted before sagged on him.

“If he lasts one more week,” Constanzia Pietrosanto, who did his cooking, said, “he'll die of old age.”

We began to worry about him then, not for himself but for us. If under the pressure his mind were to break, we would be the ones to suffer for it. We tried our best to calm him down and to help him sleep and eat. If someone was fortunate enough to stumble on something good to eat we gave it to Constanzia to cook for him. She made him little dishes, the way one gets a child to eat, a little fresh salad from the field, green beans cooked in melted cheese, a live trout from the Mad River they brought up in a pail, pigeon eggs, a rabbit which was stupid enough to come down on the terraces, frog legs, and then, since it was late October and the songbirds were flying south, the people netted little finches and wild canaries and nightingales and cooked them to a crisp in olive oil so the little bones would crunch in the mouth. He looked at the plate of finches and he cried for them.

“He's like a toy now that's been wound too tight,” Babbaluche warned. “One more turn of the key and the spring will snap. The son of a bitch will fly apart.”

The captain began to write things down all of the time, letters he didn't send, notes to himself, notes to the soldiers.

“They want me to act like a barbarian and I refuse,” he wrote to someone, perhaps his brother Klaus. “Nations with a culture need not do things that way. I will remain true to myself.”

He turned, instead, to bribery. In the late afternoon of the fourth day he called the soldiers together.

“What above all things do the people here hate most?” he asked them.

“Us, sir,” Private Goettke said.

The captain ignored him. The thing we hated most, he said, was the mountain. It was the mountain that kept us poor, that destroyed us, that robbed us of our youth and our strength. At the end of a day's work there was the exhausting climb back up the mountain, the daily enemy.

“And what shall we offer them?” He looked at them with a triumphant smile, the first smile they had seen in many days. “We offer them something to overcome the mountain.”

They rolled out the motorcycle with the sidecar, and they put it in the center of the Piazza of the People, and then they invited the people to sit in it, sit on it, and even feel its power while the engine roared and throbbed beneath their legs.

“Yes, look at them,” Captain von Prum said. “They adore that machine. They hunger for it, they lust after it. They can't wait for the cover of darkness to come and tell us their secret.”

There were many ways to tell it. Soldiers were stationed in the dark quiet lanes; and the back doors to von Prum's house and the Cooperative cellar were left open. And no one came.

It was not a matter of virtue. It would be good to pretend that it was. But bribery is a good tool to use on a people who have nothing. If flattery will always get you somewhere in this country, then bribery will do the same if the price of the bribe is right. There were people who went to bed that night sweating and dreaming of flying up the mountain past all their bent-over brothers, seeing themselves sitting around in the piazza picking songbird bones out of their teeth after their supper, when the rest were just stumbling their way into their houses and starting up the fires for their soup.

The captain stayed at his door, sitting alone in the darkness all of that night, and no one came to him.

“I don't understand it,” he said to Sergeant Traub in the morning. “I don't understand it.”

Traub said nothing, but he knew. The price of the bribe was not correct. With the key to the motorcycle went a shroud and a coffin.

“It is a very good offer,” Heinsick said to the sergeant, “just as long as you have a regiment to guard you.”

“He'll turn to muscle today,” one of the soldiers said.

“He'll break some heads today,” Heinsick said. “It's all that he can do. And when he does I know who I want. I want that cobbler, that Babbaluche.”

“No, no. The one with the big eyes, the soldier. The one that looks at you that way.”

“Tufa,” Sergeant Traub said. “He's the one to get.”

“And her,” Heinsick said. “The one who looks at you as if you were scum.”

*   *   *

It was the fifth day, and on that afternoon, as they expected and as we expected, a messenger came from Montefalcone. There were two messages in all, and they are in the archives of the city.

One was from his brother Klaus. It is not a letter at all, but a card, on the top of which, in black crayon in the hand of a child, is drawn a dark wing.

The angel of death calls me and I fly to her.