A Harvest of Secrets(53)

It was warm in the cell. He took off his shirt and wrapped it around his head, dimming the noise but not shutting it out completely.

He turned onto his stomach, the gruel sitting poorly there, his feet aching, and forced his thoughts back to the vineyard.

From the time they’d been children, he and Vittoria had enjoyed a kind of telepathic connection. He’d be in the stables and somehow sense that she’d come out onto the manor house patio, and he’d step outside and catch her looking for him. Before her father had forbidden her from coming to the barn, she’d somehow know if he was in the keg room, or with the horses, in the smaller barn, or out back gathering chestnuts, and she’d find him wherever he was and help him with whatever he was doing, or just sit beside him and draw (something she loved to do) and talk. Later, they were separated—her father ruled over her and the workers like another Duce—and Carlo had felt her absence like an ache, so much so that, at times, he’d make a point of not looking at her across the courtyard, not looking down from the vines, trying not to think of her. But then, later still, when they’d started to arrange their secret meetings, all it would take was a nod, a certain kind of glance, and they’d know where and when to meet. Once he’d learned to read—so much later than she had and with her help—Vittoria would leave him short notes, often with a sketch included, and hide them in various places around the property where she knew he’d find them. We were put together by God, she’d say, and at those words, written or spoken, he’d feel a thrill go through his arms and down into his fingers.

Listening to the harsh notes of the radio broadcast, and, in moments when it paused, to the equally harsh, if quieter, notes of an animated conversation from the office (were they deciding whether to kill their prisoners?), Carlo wished he possessed Carmine’s easy confidence, the certainty that he’d be with Vittoria again, see that land again, that he’d go walking through the mountains with Enrico, or hunting pheasant, rabbit, and boar with Old Paolo. But a cloud dimmed the light of those memories. He was a prisoner; he and Carmine had made the same mistake. Their hopes—not so different—were confined now to a smelly concrete room in a dusty little town in the sorrowful interior of Campania.

The radio was kept on all night, and he slept fitfully. Even Carmine was eventually awakened by it; Carlo could hear him cursing on the next bunk. In the morning Carlo was exhausted to the point of delirium, his belly throbbed with hunger, his tongue felt as dry as paper, and by the time a soldier came, unlocked the door, and led him down the short hallway, he was thinking it wouldn’t be so awful to be shot.

Shirtless still, he was led into a small room with an empty wooden chair in front of a table, and a German officer with a huge head sitting on the opposite side. “Sit,” the officer commanded in good Italian. “Water?”

Parched to the point of being unable to speak, Carlo nodded. The officer poured him half a glass and pushed it across the table with an enormous, fat hand. Carlo drank it in two gulps and, though the pitcher was clearly not empty, the Nazi offered nothing more.

Carlo was asked his name, and provided it. Asked what part of the country he came from, and answered, barely able to sit upright and completely unable to keep himself from staring at the empty water glass and the pitcher. The man opposite him had a perfectly shaved face, and the hands and head of a monster.

“You fought?”

Carlo pointed to the patch over his eye.

“With us?”

Of course, with you, he wanted to say. Who else was Mussolini going to make me fight with, the Algerians? He nodded.

“Sit up straight. You deserted?”

“I didn’t desert. I was wounded in the first battle, at Licata. The man beside me was killed. I was unable to move for many days. A family cared for me.”

“And now what? You’re returning to your regiment?”

Carlo felt too tired to lie again. He shook his head. “Going home.”

The officer let out a short, bitter snicker through his nose. “This,” he said, “this is why we’re having the trouble we are having with our brave Italian allies. They don’t fight. They want to go home, eat pasta, drink wine, play music, have sex. Meanwhile, my men are being killed.”

Carlo shrugged, slumped again.

“Sit up!”

“I wouldn’t be of much use now, fighting,” he said. “Could I have more water?”

The officer ignored the question. “Hold your right hand on the table,” he said.

Carlo placed his hand there and the officer took it, as if in some bizarre ritual, soldier to soldier. “Squeeze as hard as you can,” he said.

Carlo squeezed. In spite of everything—the exhaustion, the hunger—he hadn’t lost all his strength, not in his hands, at least. Fifteen years of scything and shoveling and clipping vines six days a week had made them into steel tools. The officer was clearly trying to break his hand, but Carlo squeezed back, squeezed back, refused to surrender or cry out, and held eye contact, as if the very last bit of pride inside him was making a final stand. After a full minute, the Nazi grinned and let go. “You won’t fight,” he said, “but you still have strength. Which is lucky for you, because if you didn’t, I’d have you killed. Today. This minute. You’re strong. We heard your friend say he can cook. Lucky for both of you because we have a pile of your dead countrymen behind the building, rotting in the sun, too cowardly to fight, too weak to work. You and your fat cellmate will have the honor of building the weapons that will ensure the victory of the Reich. Say thank you, and I’ll give you water.”