The Wedding Officer

41

THE BOAT left from the harbor at Gaeta, speeding without lights through the water. There were about a dozen women on board, escorted by two men from A-force, one British and one Italian. From the way the two men spoke to each other Livia realized they had made this journey before. There was no shelter on board and the women, in their flimsy dresses, were soon drenched. Huddling together for warmth, they said little as the boat bounced and twisted over the waves.

Livia watched the outline of Vesuvius recede into the distance and wondered if she would ever see Naples again. There were no lights because of the blackout, but she could imagine all too easily the little cluster of houses at Fiscino, her father and her sister…. And James. She wondered what he was doing now, and if he even knew that she was missing.

Suddenly there was a shriek. One of the girls—Bianca, the one who had been raped by Moroccan soldiers—had run to the edge of the boat and thrown herself overboard. The British officer swore and cut the engine, bringing the boat about. The other women crossed themselves, muttering prayers under their breath as the men searched the water. But without lights there was little chance of finding her. After a few minutes the officer gunned the engine again, and they left the area.

The other officer drew his pistol after that, and announced he would shoot anyone who tried to throw themselves out. It was, Livia thought, a ridiculous gesture—Bianca had meant to kill herself, not to escape, since they were miles from shore, and a bullet would hardly be a deterrent in such a case—but no one else tried to follow her example.

Livia had given up trying to make plans. Fear had dulled her mind to the point where she was incapable of thought. What lay ahead—the Germans, the inevitable eventual discovery, the recriminations that would surely follow—was too horrible to contemplate. Easier just to wait, to be told when to sleep, when to exercise, when to eat, when to move.

But a small voice in her brain reminded her that this torpor was only temporary, that sooner or later there would be chances for escape. When those chances came, she would take them.

The night was moonless, but the sea gave off a faint phosphorescent glow, and she could tell when they were nearing land again because the shoreline stood out black against the purple sky. The boat slowed to a walking pace, and the British officer went to the bow to peer into the water, looking for mines. For several minutes they proceeded like this, and then the officer was evidently satisfied, because he turned and raised his hand.

The boat accelerated: There was a “chunk” sound as it hit something in the water, then a flash from under the boat—like underwater lightning, Livia thought; it flickered and was gone again. A great bulge of water seemed to rear out of the sea, barging the boat into the air. She heard screams, splintering wood, and only then, it seemed, the crack of an explosion. Cold water poured over her head and she was swimming—swimming, she suddenly realized, in the wrong direction; what she had thought in the darkness and confusion was up was actually down, and now her lungs were bursting. For ten agonizing seconds she thought that she wasn’t going to make it, that she was going to have to open her mouth and inhale nothing but salt water, but then, like a cork, she felt herself popping to the surface. Her head struck a splintered bit of wood, she felt oil from the engines coating her hair, but there was air, and her tortured lungs gratefully sucked it in.

Around her others were coming to the surface, too, grabbing onto bits of wreckage. Livia looked around. The shore was less than a hundred yards away. Wearily she turned onto her back and began kicking in that direction.

Eight of them made it to the beach, including the officer who had been standing in the bow when the mine exploded. He was bleeding heavily from his chest; it was a wonder, Livia thought, that he had possessed the strength to swim at all.

They made him as comfortable as they could, taking off his wet clothes and making a shelter from branches. Only Renata, the Neapolitan girl from the slums, refused to help. “He wanted to shoot us,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, he got what he deserved.”

“He was carrying out his orders,” Livia said. She fetched some more branches. It made no difference: The man died before daybreak. They had no spades to bury him, but they said a prayer together over his body.

“Now what?” It was Adelina who asked the question. “Shall we find a German and give ourselves up?”

“And then what do you think will happen?” Renata said scornfully. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re worse than spies—we’re saboteurs. Being shot would be the best we could hope for.”

“But we didn’t choose to come here.”

“Do you really think that will make any difference? Most of the Germans didn’t choose to come here either. No, I know what I’m going to do.”

“What’s that?”

“I’m going to find a town and try to earn some money. Where there are men, a woman doesn’t have to starve.”

“What about you, Livia?” Adelina asked. “What do you think we should do?”

Livia thought for a moment. “In my village, there were men who had walked back from prisoner-of-war camps in the north. They slipped through the German lines without any trouble. If they can do it, so can we.”

“We don’t even know where we are,” Renata objected.

“We know we have to go south. And we’re women—at least no one will be trying to shoot us.”

“But look at the way we’re dressed,” someone said. It was true: They were wearing the kinds of clothes their captors had thought appropriate for whoring, not walking.

“Well, I’m going to chance it,” Livia said. “Anything’s better than doing what those officers wanted us to do. Who’s coming with me?”

“I will,” Adelina said.

To Livia’s surprise, Renata, too, said, “Oh, all right. I might as well give it a try. I can always stop somewhere on the way if I change my mind.”

Another girl whose name Livia did not know said, “It’s too far. I’m staying around here.”

The other three girls also decided that it was too far, and too dangerous, to try to get back to Naples, although none of them seemed to have any clear plan of what they would do. It was as if they had been ordered around so much, and for so long, whether by the men they slept with, their pimps, or the A-force officers, that they had lost the power of independent action. Out of fear and inertia, Livia realized, they were probably going to end up doing just what the Allies had expected of them. Livia did her best to change their minds, but there was no point in trying to drag them off against their wills. The journey would be hard enough without that.

Livia, Adelina and Renata walked inland until they came to a village, where they asked directions. It turned out they were just west of Rome. Hearing this, Livia’s spirits lifted a little. They were probably only seventy miles from the front line, and then it was another seventy miles after that to Naples.

It soon became clear, however, that there was a big difference between Renata and the girls from the country, Livia and Adelina. The former had never had to walk farther than a mile or two in her life, and after half a day she was complaining of blisters and exhaustion.

Livia was exhausted too. “We can rest,” she said, “but we can’t stop for long, or we’ll never get back.” They sat down on the grass and took off their shoes.

Then they heard the sound of vehicles coming toward them. Livia would have hidden, but the trucks were on them before they could move—a convoy, each lorry filled with German soldiers. The men in the back of the trucks waved delightedly at the girls, the drivers tooted their horns, and Renata stuck out her thumb. The last truck slowed down and stopped.

“What do you think?” Adelina said anxiously. “Is it safe?”

“Well, I’m going with them.” Renata ran toward the back truck. After a moment Livia and Adelina followed her.

The men at the back of the truck pulled them up, their faces cracking open into broad grins as they shouted things back and forth to each other in German. From the laughter, Livia guessed that the comments were lewd ones. And there was nowhere to sit—the soldiers were pointing to their laps, and suggesting that the girls sit on those. Livia shook her head, only to go sprawling as the truck moved off.

She felt hands pulling her up, and a huge soldier gently but firmly pulled her onto his lap. Opposite her, Renata and Adelina were already seated on two other soldiers. The one she was sitting on smiled at her and said, “Ich Heinrich.” He pointed at Livia interrogatively.

“Livia,” she said nervously.

“Bella Livia.” It seemed to be the only word of Italian he knew. “Bella.” He bounced her on his knees as easily as if she had been a baby. When she gasped, he stopped, and looked apologetic.

They sat on the soldiers’ laps for twenty miles, and in return had to endure little more than the occasional shy kiss, some out-of-tune singing, and much raucous laughter. When the trucks finally pulled over and set the girls down, all of them were sorry to see the Germans go.

There had been no food all day, and by the time they had walked another ten miles it was getting late. They had nothing to lose, so they stopped and knocked on doors in the next village. The people were poor, their crops devastated by the war, but despite the girls’ appearance they gave them a little bread before showing them to a barn where they could spend the night. Near the barn there was an apricot tree. Livia filled her stomach, and went to sleep thinking about the apricots of Fiscino.

The next day they were on the road again soon after dawn. All day they walked. It was baking hot. There were no soldiers to give them a lift today, and apart from a dogfight between two airplanes at midday, no signs of the war. Only the absence of any animals in the pastures, and the fact that none of the vines had been tended, indicated that there was anything unusual about the peacefulness of the landscape. But it was noticeable that the villages they passed through were strangely silent. Often not even a dog barked.

Across the valley a pillar of smoke hung on the horizon. As they got nearer Livia began to wonder what had caused it. Something to do with the war, she wondered, such as burnt-out vehicles? There seemed to be no obvious dangers, so they kept on the way they were going.

It was only when they got much closer to the smoke that they found out what had caused it. It was coming from a village. There was no one about as they entered the outskirts, yet someone, Livia was sure, was cooking. She had not eaten for so long that her senses were finely attuned to the smell of food, and she could swear that the wind was bringing her a waft of roasting meat, like when a bufala was roasted on a spit. Her mouth watered. “There’s food,” she told the others. “Let’s see if we can beg some.”

They rounded a corner, and saw that the smoke was coming from the church, which was on fire. It was only then that Livia realized there was something wrong with the smell. It was like roasting meat, certainly, but there was something acrid behind it, something that caught at the back of the throat, and it was coming from the burning church.

“Oh, no,” she said, horrified, her hand at her mouth.

The door to the church had collapsed, blackened. Inside, the roof had burnt through, and the sunlight that streamed in made it easy to see what was there. Some of the twisted, blackened bodies had been incinerated, but others had only partially burnt. Some were clustered around the altar, which had itself been reduced to a charred stump by the fire. Others were lying by the door, as if they had been trying to escape. Most, Livia noticed, were women and children.

As she turned away Livia saw an old woman sitting in the road. She was rocking back and forth, as if she were cradling a baby, but there was no baby in her arms. Livia crossed to where she was, and sat down next to her. “What happened here?” she asked gently.

“Partisans,” the old woman said numbly.

“Partisans did this?”

“No. It was the Germans. They said that we let the partisans take our food.” The woman struck her own head. “What could we do? We asked the partisans to go away, but they kept coming back. So the Germans came and put everyone in the church. They threw grenades in. Then they set fire to the church.”

“How did you escape?”

“They left me here to tell the partisans what happened. I’m the only one they spared.” The old woman blinked. “My family, my neighbors, my granddaughter—they’re all dead. They even burnt the dogs.”

There was nothing they could do for her. They left the empty village and walked downhill in silence. On the horizon, on other hills around the valley, half a dozen more plumes of smoke curled into the air. When darkness fell, they huddled together under a tree, but none of them slept much that night.

The next morning they walked again. Livia no longer felt hungry. Every time she recalled that smell, she felt ill. Occasionally they passed evidence of more military activity—a troop truck lying twisted by the road, a huge crater showing where it had been blown onto its side; a sudden scattering of machine-gun casings and empty ammunition boxes; a man tied to a tree, naked, his swollen body riddled with bullets and left to the birds and foxes. Only when Adelina began to faint from lack of food did they dare to knock on doors. Remarkably, they were given some—a woman took them into her kitchen and gave them a little boiled rice. Livia thanked her profusely; she could see that the woman would not be eating any better herself, and presumably even to offer food to strangers here was to risk German reprisals.

The woman waved away her thanks. “I’ve got a son fighting in Russia,” she said. “If I turned you away, perhaps he would get turned away. If I feed you, perhaps God will make sure that someone feeds him.”

That night, Livia sat and watched what she thought was a summer thunderstorm lighting up the horizon to the south. It was only when she noticed there was no pattern to the flashes that she realized she was looking at the two sides shelling each other on the front line.

The next day they saw a convoy of German armored cars on the road ahead, and decided to make a detour rather than risk being seen. Getting hopelessly lost, they spent the whole day negotiating a steep ravine in order to get back to the path only meters from where they had started.

The way was all uphill now. Livia’s muscles felt like lead, and her head felt thick and groggy. Looking at Adelina, she could see that she was in an even worse way. Her skin was shiny with sweat, her gait was unsteady and her eyes unfocused. Livia went to offer her an arm, but as she did so Adelina stumbled and fell. Livia felt her forehead: She was burning. She must be getting another bout of the infection. Renata came forward to take Adelina’s other arm, but they made even slower progress as they half carried her between them.

A man’s voice said, “Where are you going?”

Livia looked around. She could see no one, and for a moment she thought she must be hallucinating.

“If they are a trap,” a second male voice said, “they are a very nice-looking one.”

Two men stepped out from the bushes. They were wearing a few scraps of faded uniform, but their feet were shod in the traditional sandals of mountain peasants, with straps that crisscrossed their calves, and at their throats were bright red neckerchiefs. Each had a rifle, and they were pointing them at the women. “Where are you going?” one said.

Livia was too tired to be frightened. “We’re trying to get to Naples.”

The man considered this. “Well, you can’t go this way,” he said. “You’ll meet a tedesco observation post about two miles down the road.”

“Is there a way to get around them?”

“Only by going over the mountain.”

“We need somewhere to rest,” Livia said. “This girl is ill, and the rest of us are exhausted. Is there somewhere we can stay the night?”

“What do you think?” the man asked his companion in a low voice.

The other man must have agreed, because the first one turned back to the women and said, “You can come with us. But if I think you’re signaling to anyone, you’ll get a bullet in the back.”

He stepped forward into the road and gestured for them to follow him.

“Come on, ladies,” he said humorously. “We’ve got a long climb ahead of us.”

They walked for another hour, taking it in turns to help Adelina. Eventually they reached a dense chestnut wood where their guide called a halt.

“Well, this is it,” he said, looking around him. “Welcome to our casa.”

Livia didn’t understand. Why were they stopping? Then, looking around her more carefully, she saw that there were a number of wigwamlike tents dotted among the trees, each one camouflaged with leaves and branches. People were emerging to look at the newcomers. Some were in uniform, some wore peasants’ clothes and some wore what looked like homemade sheepskin jackets. All of them wore the same red neckerchief as the man who was their guide.

A young man detached himself from one of the groups and walked toward them. “Welcome, comrades,” he called. “My name is Dino, and you are now under my command.”

Dino was young, about twenty-two, but he had the confidence and charisma of a natural leader. Initially he was suspicious of the three women’s sudden appearance in his camp.

“If you’re working for the fascists,” he said flatly, “you’ll be dead before dawn.”

Livia explained again that they were simply trying to get to Naples.

“Now is a bad time to try to cross the line,” Dino said. “If the Germans don’t get you, the Allied artillery will. You’d do better to wait a few weeks. Then the Germans will be forced to retreat past us.” He waved expansively toward the south. “After that there’ll be nothing between you and Naples.”

“Can we stay here while we’re waiting?”

“We can’t afford to keep visitors. If you eat, you work.”

“Of course.”

“What can you do? You look like whores, if you don’t mind me saying.”

“Some of us are,” Livia admitted.

“Then you are the victims of capitalism and you will not be exploited here. Can you cook?”

“I can,” Livia said with a shudder, “but at the moment I’d rather not.”

“Can you shoot?”

“Yes. I’m from the country—I’ve been shooting hares since I was a child.”

Dino unshouldered his rifle and handed it to her. “Shoot that tree,” he said, pointing to a chestnut fifty yards away.

Livia’s hand shook as she raised the gun to her shoulder. It was heavier than her father’s, and she was weak from lack of food. But she planted her feet properly, as her father had taught her, and breathed lightly as she squeezed the trigger. The recoil thumped her shoulder, and a split second later she heard the crack as the bullet hit the trunk.

“Could you do that to a German?” Dino asked laconically.

She thought of the burnt, blackened bodies in the church. She could shoot the people who had done that. Then she thought of the innocent, shy soldiers who had given them a lift, and sung out of tune. Could she shoot those men? And what if they were one and the same people, the singers and the murderers?

“Yes,” she said, “I could.”

Dino nodded. “Good.”

He took her to a tent and showed her a heap of stinking clothes to look through. She chose what uniform she could find—a pair of khaki trousers and a rough serge shirt.

He handed her a red neckerchief. “Whatever else you wear, always wear this. We are Garibaldini, and we wear the revolutionary flag. The Badoglini, the monarchists, wear blue neckerchiefs. If you would rather be a blue, you don’t have to stay here—we can send you to a different group.”

“So you’re communists?”

“Yes. Do you know anything about communism?”

“Nothing at all,” Livia confessed.

“We’ll teach you. If you want to stay with us, that is.”

“I’ll stay,” Livia said.

The partisans had cooked a stew made from mule meat and chestnuts. Livia had thought she was starving, but when she was given a bowl of the stew, she found herself quite unable to eat it. It was not that it was badly made—considering how little they had to work with, the cooks had done a remarkable job, tenderizing the mule meat with slow cooking and flavoring it with forest herbs and myrtle leaves, as well as chestnuts and a few mushrooms. But the smell of meat, once so delightful to her, made her gag. She picked out a piece of mushroom and a few chestnuts, then set the plate aside.

The men in the camp were of many nationalities. Some were local farmhands, forced to make a choice between joining the resistance or being taken by the Germans. Some were escaped prisoners of war, Russian, Polish and British, tired of walking south to rejoin the Allies. There were women, too, and these fell into two distinct groups. There were the hangers-on, the girlfriends and cooks, their long skirts grubby from the forest mud. Then there were a smaller number who were fighters. They wore the same clothes as the men and were treated by them as equals. Some of these women smoked pipes, which made their tiny tobacco allowance go further, and like the men they had elaborate noms de guerre, which were sewn into their red neckerchiefs. It was this group of women which Livia had joined.

The next day, she got her first taste of resistance fighting. The partisans went to a road the Germans were known to use and set up an ambush—a captured German land mine hidden in the dirt at the side of the road, which would be detonated by someone pulling a wire at the right moment. The other partisans, around forty of them, arranged themselves in ditches and behind trees, waiting. When the convoy of trucks approached, their headlights reduced to tiny blue slits to avoid drawing air attacks, Dino let half of it go through before giving the order. The explosion blew one of the trucks right off the road into a ditch. Immediately the partisans rose up out of the darkness, firing at the trucks that had been forced to stop, which themselves disgorged men with weapons who fired back.

Within moments, the air was a cat’s cradle of bullets flying back and forth. Livia, crouched behind a tree with her own rifle, heard the thuds as German bullets smashed into the trunk. There were so many of the enemy, and they had the better weapons. Some of them were trying to set up a machine gun behind one of the trucks, but one of the partisans’ few grenades took care of that. Then Dino gave the order to withdraw, and the partisans melted away into the woods. They had lost two men, but thought they had probably killed half a dozen. They would not know for sure until the Germans carried out their reprisals. Since the Germans always executed ten civilians for every soldier killed, knowing how many had been murdered in reprisal was an efficient way of keeping score.

Every afternoon, when the German patrols were at their most active, the partisans stayed in the camp and formed into small groups for seminars on communist theory. For Livia, it was a revelation. All her life, politics had been a subject for men, which women were kept well away from, and which seemed to consist in any case simply of moaning about the corruption of so-and-so and the impossibility of getting a fair deal in this world. Now, for the first time, someone actually sat down and explained the basic building blocks of society to her—the difference between the factory owner and the factory worker, and why the former was always trying to reduce the wages of the latter, but with the proviso that it was nothing to do with him if the factory worker ended up starving or out of work; and why women were treated like property, and why the many always ended up working for the few. With a suddenness that took even her by surprise, Livia became a convert. At last there was an alternative to the poverty and exploitation she had been surrounded by all her life. Italy was a country blessed with resources; all they had to do was distribute the wealth fairly, instead of allowing it to be siphoned off. If proof were needed that the communist system was an effective one, you had only to look at Russia. It was Russia whose armies had turned the tide of the war for the Allies, Dino pointed out, and that was because the Russian soldiers believed in the system they were fighting for. If the Italian communists could show that they were equally organized, they would inevitably form the first postwar government, and the country could begin to reorganize itself along more egalitarian lines.

What was more, the communists actively encouraged women to see themselves as men’s equals. Just as no one should be allowed to own another man’s labor through a contract of employment, so no one should be allowed to own a woman’s body through a contract of marriage. Marriage and prostitution, Dino explained, were two sides of the same capitalist coin—if anything, prostitution was the less immoral, because a man who hired a woman gave her freedom back to her when the transaction was over, like a man employing a laborer by the hour, whereas marriage was slavery.

Livia did not totally agree with this—it seemed to her that there were some men who saw marriage as a partnership of equals, not as the acquisition of property, but she had to admit that such men were rare, and that the law and the church, whatever they might claim, were fundamentally united in treating a woman as her husband’s chattel. The partisans were the first organization she had ever come across that treated both sexes the same. “The rifle does not care who fires it,” as Dino put it. “And the German corpse does not care who shot him, whether male or female.”

Looking back at the events of the past few years, it seemed to Livia that there was a simple inevitability about her newfound interest. It had been politics that had trapped Italy between the Allies and the Germans; politics which had taken her husband away from her, but also politics which had dictated that she marry so young in the first place. Politics had influenced the Allies’ invasion of Italy; and it was the corruption of local politicians which had allowed people like Alberto to gain and wield power over her. Politics had ennabled the A-force officers to treat the women they rounded up as though they were of no more account than a box of ammunition, to be fired at the Germans. Now, as Dino said, the ending of the war, together with the death of Mussolini, would bring a political vacuum in which for the first time ordinary Italians had a chance to take on the big businessmen, the Mafia, the state and the church to create the kind of society for themselves that they wanted.

All her passion channeled into this new outlet, Livia drank in every word, and soon she began asking questions. Asking questions was always encouraged, because it was only through dialectic, or debate, that truth emerged, just as history was a process of revolution and counterrevolution which gradually led to progress. Soon she was raising points that Dino couldn’t answer, and she was having to work out the answers for herself. But that was all right, because communism provided you with a set of mental tools which helped you to answer most questions in the end.

One thing in particular continued to trouble her, though, and she took the opportunity to raise it with Dino privately.

“What about the reprisals?” she asked. “On the way here, we saw some terrible things. The Germans are killing innocent people because of what you do.”

“Yes,” Dino said. “They have committed many atrocities in this area.”

“Couldn’t you…” Livia hesitated. She had no wish to be told to leave the only shelter she had, but she needed to ask. “Couldn’t you let the Allies do the fighting, and then there would be fewer reprisals against Italians?”

“And wait for the Americans to do our dirty work?” Dino’s face darkened. “This matter has been considered at the very highest level, and by the Allied commanders. Our orders come from them, and they say they need us to continue. In any case, what’s the alternative? Do we let ourselves be blackmailed by the Germans into doing nothing while other people fight over our country? Italy disgraced herself when we helped those fascists in the first place. Now we have to be the ones to get rid of them.”

Despite their political differences with the Allies, the partisans regarded themselves as part of the Allied forces, subject to the same discipline and orders as any other unit. Sometimes their orders came by code from London on the World Service. After the news, the announcer would read out a list of messages for “our friends in foreign lands.” “Mario, your brother’s cow is unwell” meant attack a fuel depot. “Your grandmother has influenza” was an order to do a traffic count. “The sky is red” meant to increase activity.

There was one endless topic of conversation amongst them: When would the Fifth Army arrive? It was said that in Rome the graffiti artists were even making jokes on the walls: “Americans, hold on! We’re coming to liberate you soon.”

For their part, the Germans remained confident that resistance activities would never amount to much. Everybody knew what Major Dollman, one of their commanders, had quipped to his superiors: “As far as the partisans go, we are quite safe. The Italians dislike rising, whether from their beds or against an enemy.”

It was hard to keep the lice out of her hair, so Livia had one of the other women cut it short. Most of the fighting women had already done the same. As the weeks passed, she began to look more and more like them.

As for James, she tried not to think about him anymore. That part of her life was surely over. It had been a pleasant but brief interlude in a series of tragedies, and when she tried to remember the time they had spent together it seemed as unreal as a dream.