A Harvest of Secrets(65)
Another fantasy. He’d be shot within seconds, and how would he open the door in any case? As he had when being marched down the hill by the German soldiers, he realized that, even in misery like this—the stink, the hunger and thirst, the terror—he and the others wanted to live. There was some deep force inside them, not the fear of death so much as the insistence on living out their allotted time, grasping another hour, another week, another year, taking their last breath in a less hideous setting.
Minute by minute, the situation grew more difficult to bear. The thirst, the hunger, the crowded darkness, the wailing of kids and weeping of women, the putrid flood swinging back and forth against his feet with every shift of the train’s center of gravity. He himself had added to the stinking puddle. They all had, or soon would.
Two hours north of Rome, Carlo was startled out of his standing half sleep by the sound of a man at the end of the car, singing a phrase in a strange language. To his surprise, Carmine, pressed close beside him, answered in what sounded like the same language, and then almost everyone in the boxcar was chanting together, some kind of sorrowful hymn or prayer. It took Carlo a few seconds to understand what language it must be, what kind of prayer. But women and children and old men! he thought again. Of what use will they be in the Nazi factories?
The prayer concluded, and in a short quiet moment, Carmine said, “It’s Friday night, Carlo. Our Sabbath.” And then someone started praying loudly again, in Italian this time.
“Benedetto sii Tu, o Signore, nostro Dio, Re dell’universo, Tu che ci hai santificato coi Tuoi comandamenti e ci hai comandato di accendere le luci di Shabbat.”
Blessed are You, Adonai our God, Ruler of the universe, who has made us holy through God’s commandments and commanded us to light the Sabbath candles.
Carlo could see that two men at the other end of the car had ignited their cigarette lighters—he’d seen such a device only once, held by his Signore to light a cigar—and were holding them high above their heads.
Less than a minute after the darkness was broken by those two frail lights, Carlo felt a terrific jolt, and the car tilted violently sideways, as if the God of these people had been called upon to save them, and was responding. In a ghastly chorus of screams the world tipped over sideways, and the wall to his left slammed hard against the earth, throwing him and Carmine violently down against it. Carmine’s body cushioned him, the world seemed to bounce slightly, and then the whole car was skidding downhill, their bodies sliding unstoppably toward the ceiling, people crushed against each other, the air filled with screaming. The car slammed hard against something, and in the mad crush Carlo realized that the ceiling and wall close to him had split open and Carmine had disappeared. A horrible mass of bodies pressed on him, a jagged edge of metal passed just in front of his face, water poured in through the opening. He was pushed out and through it by the weight behind him, the eye patch ripped from his face, and the shirt and skin of his left shoulder sliced away as he went. Another second and he was up to his neck in cold water, a mass of bodies behind and around him in the darkness, complete chaos, then gunfire, machine guns, men screaming in German, what sounded like a battle raging on the other side of the ruined train.
Everyone was caught in a state of panic. He thrashed his arms, his feet slipping on rocks. His head went under. There were bodies against his legs, a current tugging at him, gunfire when he surfaced, shots returned, a spotlight shining on the other side of the train, throwing eerie shadows. It was worse than any nightmare. He pushed on madly, blindly, at one point circling his left arm instinctively around a small girl to keep her head above the surface. A second later he went under himself and swallowed water, and she slipped out of his grasp. He reached for her in the darkness, but she was gone. He swam a few strokes, blindly, crazily, coughing and gasping, and finally felt the bottom beneath his feet. A few more bursts of gunfire well behind him, people yelling everywhere, frantically calling out names in the night. He reached the far bank and clambered up a short distance on his hands and knees, turned back to pull two women and one old man up after him. The spotlight had been turned off or destroyed in the gun battle, but in the moonlight, he could see bundles and packages abandoned everywhere, shadows running toward a dark line of trees, a few men calling out, a few stumbling back, searching for a child or spouse or brother. He looked for Carmine and didn’t see him, watched a dark body float past, face down, yellow dress matted above bare lower legs. From the other side, where the exchange of gunfire had now ceased, he heard one shouted “Viva Italia!” He stumbled toward the river, calling, “Carmine! Carmine!” but didn’t see him among the scrambling crowd. He tripped and fell onto his chest, slipped down the bank and went face-first into the water, clambered up again and crawled with the last of his strength into a row of bushes. He lay there, exhausted, soaked, bleeding.
He awoke at first light and turned onto his belly so he could look back at the river. The scene before him, still mostly in shadow with only the tops of the trees touched by a grayish light, was a vision from the paintings of hell he’d seen on his one visit to the Montepulciano cathedral. A hundred meters to his right, the locomotive lay three-quarters submerged. Behind it, eight train cars rested on their sides in the mud like sleeping animals, some intact, the rest damaged in one way or another. One of them—his, it must have been—was bent and broken almost in half against a massive oak tree, and there was a jagged split along the car’s roof. There were bodies everywhere he looked, in the water, crushed and sticking out from beneath the cars. On the far bank, two light-haired little boys, twins perhaps, lay side by side, facedown, still as death.