A Harvest of Secrets(71)
Second by second, Vittoria became aware of her surroundings: the pitchfork, standing there like a tilted, perverse grave marker, so close she could have reached out and taken hold of the smooth wooden handle. Paolo came over, touched her on the shoulder as if gently waking her from sleep. She turned, and saw everything there in his face, everything, all of it, the people they’d once been and the people they’d become, the terror, the horror, the awfulness of the scene. She hesitated one second and then took him in a tight embrace and held him and shook and wept. After a moment, she felt his strong arms encircling her, but even then she could sense the mix of tenderness and hesitation she’d always felt with him, as if, in daring to touch her that way, even now, even after everything that had happened, he might be banished from the property.
When Vittoria opened her eyes again, she saw that her lips had left bloody stains on the top of Paolo’s shirt, and she saw that the deserters were standing in a tight knot, holding each other, and that the uniformed German soldiers were splayed out on the ground in grotesque positions, as if caught in the middle of some satanic ballet, arms bent backward beneath them, faces half-gone, bodies still as stone. She had to close her eyes again, and when she did, she heard Eleonora’s voice, speaking in German, and one of the deserters answering.
It all had the feeling of a dream, photos, moments, voices, against a vague, timeless background. She let go of Paolo. Enrico had gone over to comfort the horse, who was pulling violently at its lead.
Eleonora turned to her, hands clasped in front of her chest as if in prayer, lips trembling. “Signorina, they are going to take the truck and go. They . . . look!”
Vittoria saw that the deserters were frantically stripping the clothes from their former comrades—boots, trousers, belts, even the bloody shirts. Another moment and they were stripping off their own clothes, down to the underwear, and dressing themselves in the uniforms.
“Tell them,” she heard Paolo say to Eleonora in his foreman’s voice, “that their own uniforms are hanging in a canvas sack in the ravine, hanging from a bush, or on the ground near it. Tell them to take these four bodies and dump them there, then they can take the truck and go.”
Eleonora spoke to them. One of them spoke back. “They don’t want to,” she told Paolo, shifting her eyes to Vittoria. Then to Antonio, who’d just come down from the attic, still carrying his magical weapon. “They say they’re leaving. Now.” Antonio stepped from body to body—the dead soldiers were half-naked—prodding them with the toe of his boot, silent, grim, satisfied that they were dead. “Tell them they have to, Eleonora,” he said, without emotion. “They have no choice. Remind them that we saved their lives. Twice. Tell them to take the bodies and throw them into the ravine, as Paolo said, and then come back here and clean up before they leave. The clothes, the bloody dirt—tell them to clean it.”
Another German exchange, this time more heated. When the deserters hesitated, Antonio raised his gun lazily, with one hand, and swept it across the three of them, as if he were all too ready to shoot them where they stood. A few bad seconds passed, and then one of them went and backed the truck over close.
One of the other soldiers yanked the pitchfork out of the captain’s back, tossed it aside, and then spat loudly, one time each, on the four bodies. They loaded the bodies into the bed, Paolo pointed the direction, and the truck lumbered off.
“They said they were caught two kilometers from the convent,” Eleonora said, “on the Zanita Road, it sounded like. At night. They were brought to the police station and beaten until they told we helped them, but they said they didn’t tell about the nuns. They say that the other SS men—from Montepulciano—know they came here today, and they’ll come back and— Are you all right, Signorina?”
Vittoria nodded, yes, then shook her head, no, and hurried into the barn. She ran to the toilet and sat there, lips bleeding into both hands, and it seemed that everything was leaking out of her, the past half hour already beginning to replay itself, vision after vision, detail after detail: the Nazi captain’s furious strength, the lust and hatred in him like a force of nature, the smell of his face against hers, the horror, the complete sense of the most intimate vulnerability—how many thousands of women had experienced these things? Then the scream, his body going rigid. She looked down and saw three evenly spaced spots of blood on her stomach. The tines had gone through him and through the front of her dress, just barely breaking her skin. She turned her upper body sideways and vomited.
Soon, as Eleonora said, the others from the Montepulciano house would come looking for their comrades. They’d see the blood on the ground; they’d guess what had happened. Outside again, she saw Eleonora and Antonio hurrying toward the manor house and she wanted to call out to them to take all the food they wanted, to take the candlesticks and silverware, to take anything they thought they could sell. Enrico was trotting after them. Paolo was staring out over the vines.
“We have to leave,” Vittoria said to him. “Now. Immediately. All of us. We can take the wagon. I know where we can go.”
He turned to her, and in his face she saw again what she remembered seeing there from her earliest years. Arms hanging at his sides, he seemed different, however. Eerily calm, less servile, boring his eyes into her, intensely but tenderly, his lips pressed tight together.
“Why did you lie to me?” she heard herself ask, through the pain on her lips.