The Wedding Officer

44

THE FUSELAGE of the B-17 was crammed and very noisy. It was crammed because of the huge piles of crates containing guns, ammunition and food strapped down in the bomb bay. There were no seats: James and Jumbo were wedged between a couple of crates, holding on to the webbing which lined the rear of the plane. James was clutching a knapsack and a small suitcase. One of the smaller bomb doors had been left open, and occasionally they could make out rivers and lakes as the Italian countryside passed underneath them, illuminated by a sliver of moon.

“We’ll be going in at two angels,” Jumbo shouted over the din. “It’ll be fine.”

James nodded with what he hoped looked like confidence. He had never done a parachute drop before, and from what Jumbo had told him he gathered it was best done from as high as possible. Two angels—two thousand feet—was hardly time to open the main parachute, let alone sort out the reserve if something went wrong. But as the plane banked and turned north toward the mountains, he felt his heart racing with an excitement that was due to more than just nerves. He hoped desperately that Livia had got his message, and that she had not already moved on.

Officially Jumbo was the one being dropped to liaise with the partisans, and James was merely there to assist with the unloading. According to the report the pilot would file later, James would overbalance and fall out of the plane whilst pushing out a crate. It was, Jumbo assured him, a fairly standard way of moving people around without going to the bother of getting official permission.

After twenty minutes James felt the plane start to descend. Jumbo got to his feet. “Time to get this lot unloaded,” he yelled.

They cut the webbing and pushed the crates toward the bomb doors. As they swung open, a small bonfire on the ground flickered into life, tiny as a firefly. “There’s the signal,” Jumbo shouted. “Heave.” They pushed the first crate out. It wobbled in the slipstream, then sprouted a khaki-colored jellyfish of silk, slowing its descent. James only hoped that his own jump would be as straightforward. But there was no time now to think about that. Together they pushed the boxes out one by one, until Jumbo gave the signal to stop. The plane banked, and came around again. “Heave,” Jumbo yelled, and they resumed their work. Eventually the crates were all gone.

“How are you feeling?” Jumbo shouted.

“Fucking terrified,” James yelled back. Jumbo evidently thought he had said something quite different, because he gave him an encouraging nod and a thumbs-up.

Clutching his suitcase to his chest, he stepped to the open door. Below him, the hillside seemed very distant. He was struck by how very wrong it was, hurling oneself into the sky like this. Then Jumbo gave him a firm shove, and he was tumbling head over heels through the void. There was a moment’s panic, then he righted and felt the blissful tug as his parachute filled with air.

Below him, crates floated slowly through the sky. He looked up. Jumbo was twenty feet above him, to his right. Beneath him, he could see dark figures already carrying crates out of the drop zone. And then he saw a familiar skinny figure, running toward the place where he was going to land, and his heart soared way above the clouds. “I love you,” he called down to her. “I love you.” It sounded rather wonderful in Italian, so he shouted it again. “Livia, I love you.”

Gently the ground came up to meet the two angels, one of whom was later heard by the partisans to be laughing even as he hit the ground and rolled. And then she was in his arms, the silk of the chute billowing around him as he held her, saying over and over, “Livia, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I let you go, but I’ll never let you go again.”

They sat on a tree trunk, a little away from the camp. “I brought you some things,” he said. He opened the suitcase. “From the black market in Rome. Bread from a bakery on Piazza Trilussa. And—look.” Carefully he took out his prize. “A whole mozzarella. It must have come into Rome from some farmer in the countryside. How extraordinary is that?”

“We need guns, not food,” she said sternly.

“From the look of you, you’re in dire need of both.” She was even thinner than when he last saw her. He broke open the mozzarella and held some out. “Try some.”

She ate a little. “It’s not very good,” she complained. But she ate some more. “It’s a bit stale,” she added. “And not very well made. Thin and watery. Not like proper mozzarella from Campania.”

“It’s the best I could find.”

“You shouldn’t have wasted your money.” She ate a bit more. “After the war, I’ll need to find a replacement for Pupetta. It takes years to make a decent milker, you know. This cheese probably came from some decrepit old ox.”

There was only a very small bit left, so he broke it in two and tried some. Perhaps it wasn’t as fresh and full of flavor as hers had been, but it still filled his mouth with the sweet, creamy tang of wet pastures, dense with lush grass and herbs.

“And it’s small,” she added, finishing off the last bit. “Trust a Roman to sell you an undersized mozzarella. I hope you didn’t pay more than a few lire for it.”

James, who had paid all the contents of his wallet for the cheese, shook his head.

They sat together for a long time, his arm protectively around her shoulders.

“James,” she said with a sigh, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

“I know about Alberto. Marisa already explained.”

“But you still came?” she said, surprised. “You’d be forgiven for wanting nothing more to do with me.”

“It isn’t like that anymore, though, is it? This war’s made everything different. We’re going to have to rethink everything now—decide for ourselves what’s right and what’s wrong.”

She nodded. “The people here say we have to rid ourselves of bourgeois hypocrisy.”

“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “that’s maybe taking it a bit far. You don’t have to be bourgeois to be a hypocrite. And you don’t have to get rid of one to get rid of the other.”

“Dear James,” she said. “Always so rational.”

There was a long pause. He wondered what she was thinking. She said, “There’s something you need to understand, though. Things are different for me now. Coming here—fighting—seeing what’s been happening—it’s made me look at things in a different way. Here, I’m a communist first, and a soldier second, and a woman—well, probably not even third: Being a woman comes way down the list.”

“But you won’t always be a soldier.”

“I think perhaps I’ll always be a communist now. And that means being a soldier, in a way. Who do you think is going to put it all back together, after the war is finally over and you people go back to where you came from? Someone’s got to stop people like Alberto from doing what they like with this country.”

“Ah,” he said. “Do I take it you still think England isn’t the place for you?”

“I can’t leave Italy. Not after this. Not after what the people here have been through. I’m sorry, James.”

“That’s interesting,” he said. “Because I won’t be going back to England either. Or at least, not for any longer than it takes me to demob and get myself back over here.”

She looked at him, unsure that he really meant it.

“I want to stay in Italy,” he said gently. “With you, if you’ll have me. Without you, if you won’t. A person can’t choose where he’s born. But he can choose where he spends his life, and I want to spend mine here.”

There was a problem with the supplies that Jumbo and James had brought. The crates contained rifles and pistols for small-scale actions, whereas what the partisans required if they were to take on the might of the retreating German army were Sten guns, grenades and semiautomatics.

“We’ve been asking for these weapons for months,” Dino explained, his face dark with anger. “How can you have got it so wrong?”

“It’s just an administrative cock-up,” Jumbo soothed him. “Probably someone else somewhere is complaining about an unwanted delivery of Stens. I’ll get onto HQ and order up what you need. In the meantime, there’s plenty of planning to be getting on with.”

The leaders of the other partisan forces in the area were called to a meeting, at which Jumbo produced a map and, with James as translator, explained what each section was to do. There were questions, but no dissent. The partisans’military discipline was absolute. In addition, James saw, Jumbo was good at this. He had the ability to see the coming battle in physical terms, as a combination of weaponry and geography: moving that group toward that piece of high ground, which would provide cover for a different section taking that river…

The only muttering came from Dino, who pointed out again that the plans depended on his group of partisans having enough heavy guns to stop the Germans in their tracks.

“Exactly,” Jumbo said. “And heavy guns we shall have. They’ll be dropped by plane long before the Germans get here.”

The German retreat coincided with a heat wave. Even here in the hills the heat was oppressive, and many of the partisans went bare-chested apart from their red neckerchiefs. Some of the women partisans wore men’s vests in lieu of shirts. James noted, though, that they never seemed to have any trouble with the men. They were all kept busy with preparations.

Fire trenches were dug, and here James was able to give advice based on his experiences at Anzio. A few of the men grumbled when he insisted that some of the trenches be dug ten feet deep, with tree trunks and sandbags for extra reinforcement in the roofs. They simply could not conceive of the explosive power of a German ’88. Despite the grumbling, however, the digging always got done in the end. Dino made sure of that.

Dino himself, though, was still fretting about the delivery of the big guns. “We can dig the emplacements,” he told Jumbo, “but when will we get the weapons to put in them?”

“Soon,” Jumbo assured him. “HQ will make sure that we have them in plenty of time.”

Privately, though, he was becoming rather anxious himself. “I’m hearing some very odd stuff on the radio,” he confided to James. “Apparently we’ve just withdrawn seven divisions from Italy to open up a new front in the Med.”

“But that makes no sense at all,” James said. “Why let them outnumber us, just when they’re almost finished?”

“It beats me too,” Jumbo admitted. “I’m just hoping—well, that someone hasn’t decided to make things more difficult for the Italians.”

“Why would anyone do that?” James asked. Then he was suddenly struck by a thought. “Actually, I already know the answer to that.”

“What is it?”

“Jumbo, I think we need to get the commanders together. We need to tell them why those big guns they’re waiting for might never arrive.”

“When I was in Naples,” James explained, “I saw a document. A top-secret document. At the time I didn’t understand why it was secret—it was just an assessment of what the political situation in Italy was likely to be after the war.”

He paused, gathering his thoughts. Dino, Jumbo and the partisan section leaders waited for him to continue.

“Basically, it said that amongst the Italians the most organized and disciplined political group are the partisans. The writer thought that after the war the king would abdicate, and the communists would take power. He wasn’t very happy about this—he foresaw a communist super-state stretching from Moscow to Milan, as he put it.”

“So?” Dino asked. “This is hardly a secret.”

“The report wasn’t just an assessment,” James said. “It was an action plan.”

There was a long silence while the partisans digested this. “You’re saying that we are being betrayed,” Dino said at last.

“I’m saying that it would suit some people if the Garibaldini have their numbers and strength reduced by the Germans. As far as they’re concerned, the war in Italy has already served its purpose—it’s tied up twenty-five German divisions that otherwise might have ended up in France. Now the war is almost won, they’re pulling Allied divisions out of Italy, leaving the communists to take care of the Germans—and vice versa. It’s what my CO used to call a two-birds, one-stone scenario.”

“Jumbo?” Dino said quietly. “Can this be true?”

Jumbo nodded. “It makes sense, I’m afraid. At the end of the day, the army commanders have to do what the politicians tell them.”

“You’d better call off your attack,” James said. “Whatever supplies are dropped, I’ll bet they won’t include the big guns you need.”

“We can’t call it off,” Dino said. “Knowing that our deaths will serve some politician’s purpose makes no difference. To our shame, we welcomed the fascists into this country. We can’t simply sit back now and watch the German army go by without striking a blow against them.” He looked at the other commanders. “Are we all agreed?”

One by one they nodded their heads.

James and Livia did their turn at patrols, just like everyone else. One night, there was a crackle of gunfire from the darkness ahead of them. Some partisans had run into the Germans. James and Livia dropped to the ground, lining up their guns to provide covering fire as the main body of the partisans retreated to a better defensive position. The firefight was brief and intense.

“You fight well,” Livia said grudgingly as they got to their feet.

“So do you,” James said. “Though somehow that doesn’t surprise me.”

“I must say, these partisans are turning into quite a nice little operation,” Jumbo said proudly, coming back along the road to join them. “When we started out here they couldn’t even load a weapon on their own. Now they’re quite capable of showing me a thing or two.”

The German traffic on the roads through the mountains was now mostly going north, away from the front. But these were supply lorries and logistics units. The partisans waited, biding their time for the fighting divisions to appear. There was a palpable air of tension in the camp, the familiar mixture of lethargy and terror that precedes any battle.

James took the opportunity to walk with Livia in the woods. It was the only way to get any privacy. They found a cherry tree, and gorged themselves on the firm, sweet fruit while they talked. Livia had still not responded to James’s statement about wanting to come back to Italy after the war, and he had decided not to press her. Instead, they discussed her newfound political beliefs.

“First Italy must be free. Then her people must be free,” Livia explained. “The factories and farms must be given to the proletariat, not the other way around.”

James ate another cherry. Livia’s tendency to talk in slogans since she had joined the Garibaldini was rather trying, though understandable in the circumstances. “What if the proletariat don’t want them?” he objected. “Or what if they take them and loot them?”

“The proletariat only steal because in an unjust system they have been given no choice,” she said sternly. Then she remembered how annoyed she was when people stole things from her. “Of course, there will have to be leaders,” she conceded. “The Party will need to provide direction to the people.”

“And will these Party leaders be elected?”

“Democracy has already been shown to be a flawed way of distributing power.”

“Yes, Hitler spotted that as well,” he murmured.

“Well, perhaps there will be elections then,” she said. “The communists will win anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.”

“But then you’d have democratic communism.”

“So? What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s just that I thought you communists didn’t believe in all that.” He had to admit, though, democratic communism was a deliciously Italian idea, and in Italy it might just work. “And what about religion? Presumably you’d close down all the churches, like Stalin did?”

“Of course not,” she said, shocked.

“So you’d have a sort of Catholic democratic communism?”

“Why not?”

“And what if the proletariat don’t want their women to go on being emancipated?” he asked innocently. “Presumably you’d go along with their wishes?”

“If the proletariat don’t want that,” she said, “they can go hang themselves.” Then she saw what he was doing. “You’re teasing me.”

“Of course not,” he said. “I never rib Italian girls. They’re much too serious.” She punched him on the arm. “Ow.” She had, he noticed, rather a hard punch, her body wirier than he had known it previously. She punched him again. “That hurts,” he protested.

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll just have to punch you back,” he said, punching her lightly in the same place.

“That’s not a punch,” she said. “This is a punch.” She hit him in the other arm, even harder. This time, though, he grabbed her arm and tried to twist it behind her back, and then they were wrestling. Her laughing eyes were very close to his, and her laughing lips were close enough to be kissed. He slid his hands under her vest, and suddenly there were her breasts, brown from the sun, the nipples red as the inside of a fig, ready to be kissed and gently rolled between his teeth.

“Stop,” she said, pulling away a little, “I want to talk about politics some more.”

“Oh,” he said, rearranging himself. “Well, all right then.”

“James?”

“Yes?”

“I’m teasing you.” She came back to him, her shoulders arched to offer him her breasts again, and then her cool fingers were slipping inside his own trousers.

A little later, when they were both naked, and she was doing something rather nice that he remembered from their afternoons in Naples, it was he who stopped her. “Actually, I had something else in mind,” he murmured.

She came up to kiss him again. “Like what?”

He picked his shirt off the branch of the cherry tree where it had ended up and undid the breast pocket. “It wasn’t only cheese I brought with me from Rome,” he said. “I brought some of these along as well.”

She looked at the packet of rubbers in his hand. An eyebrow shot upward. “Oh? So you simply assumed I’d sleep with you?”

“Not assumed. Hoped,” he said humbly. Then he saw her expression. “You’re teasing me again, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” she said, taking the packet from him and tearing it open with her teeth. “But I am genuinely cross with you as well.”

“Why’s that?” He gasped as she took the condom and put it on him.

“Because if you’d told me about these when you first arrived,” she said, slipping one leg over his, “we wouldn’t have wasted so much time talking about communism.”

Afterward they lay in each other’s arms, letting the sweat dry from their bodies in the shade of the tree. There was red on Livia’s stomach, but when James looked more closely he saw that it was only a smear of fallen fruit, crushed under her as they made love. He bent his head to lick it off, and felt Livia stir.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, and went on doing it.

“That doesn’t feel like nothing.”

“What does it feel like?”

“It feels—quite nice.”

“Then I shall go on doing it.” He licked until all the fragments of crushed fruit were quite gone, then looked around. There were more cherries all around them, and he gathered two large handfuls. “Now,” he said, “I wonder what we can do with these?”

A lone German fighter plane circled overhead in the endless blue sky. James opened his eyes drowsily and looked at it. He wasn’t concerned: They were too well hidden to be seen. After a few minutes the plane dipped its wing and drifted away.

In a day or two, he thought, we may both be dead.

He looked at Livia, nestled against his arm, one of her hands closed protectively around his balls. Her shoulder blades, sticking out from her spine, were as symmetrical as the wings of a butterfly. When this is over, he thought, she’ll need feeding up. He smiled at the contradictory nature of his two thoughts. However much one expected to die, there was something in the mind that just refused to accept it as a certainty.

He remembered the person he had been when he first came to Naples, before he met her. What an unbearable prig he must have been, he thought ruefully.

“What are you thinking?” Livia asked sleepily.

“I was thinking about Naples. What are you thinking?”

She cupped his balls lightly. “I was thinking that if it wasn’t for testicles, there would be no war, but also no sex. I was just wondering if God made the right decision when he invented them. And I had decided that, on balance, he probably did.”

“Your thought was much more profound than my thought,” he said, impressed. He lay back. “This is like living on Vesuvius, isn’t it?”

“In what way?”

“Because we might get killed at any moment, and we don’t know when.”

She rolled over, propped up on her elbows, so she could look into his eyes. “Yes. So how are you finding it?”

“I think,” he said, “that a life like this is worth ten lived any other way. So long as it goes on including you, of course.”

She was silent for a moment. “James?”

“Yes?”

“After the war, if you ask me to marry you, I’ll say yes.”

He thought for a moment. “But that doesn’t make sense,” he objected. “Why not say yes now?”

“You haven’t asked me, for one thing.”

“Livia Pertini, will you marry me?”

“No.”

“But you just said—”

“I said ask me after the war. It’s bad luck to say yes now.”

“How can it be bad luck?”

“Well, for one thing I’d need a piece of iron in my pocket, because bad luck doesn’t like iron. And we’d need to have our heads covered, so that the evil spirits can’t see how happy we are. And you should never make any decisions about who you marry on a Tuesday.”

“You made that last one up.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“But it doesn’t make sense to say—”

“If you’re going to marry me, James,” she said sleepily, “you’re going to have to get a lot less attached to sense. Anyway, getting engaged the day before a fight with the Germans would just be tempting fate.”

On their way back to camp they met Jumbo, who was busy cleaning the partisans’ only machine gun. He gave James an interrogative look, and James gave him a thumbs-up.

Later James went to give him a hand. “So everything’s all right with you and Livia?” Jumbo asked.

“Better than all right.” He couldn’t help beaming. “She wants to wait until after the war, but I think we’re going to get married.”

“Congratulations, that’s wonderful. I hope you’ll be very happy.” Jumbo worked on his gun for a few minutes. “You heard about Elena’s little problem, I suppose. This long-lost husband of hers.”

“She did mention something along those lines,” James said awkwardly.

“Now Rome’s free I suppose we’ll be able to get it sorted out.”

“I suppose so. Though, er, it might take a while. Probably a bit of a backlog.”

“Thing is,” Jumbo said, “she can’t really go on being a whore if she marries me. It’s not what people really look for in a tart, is it, the fact that they go home to a devoted husband every night and cook him his dinner.” He caught James’s look. “I always had a pretty good idea. It just seemed like one of those things it was better not to mention.”

“I’m sure you’ll work something out.”

“I suppose so. Shame this bloody war can’t last a bit longer,” Jumbo said wistfully. “Well, not from your point of view, I suppose. But I’ve had the time of my life.” He regarded the machine gun, which was now reassembled. “There, that should take care of a few Jerries.”

Gradually the trickle of German units north became a torrent. Traveling mostly by night—the Allied fighters were still harassing them by day—they swept through the mountains as if a dam had burst, the growl of truck engines and the stamp of marching feet echoing through the darkness.

“Not yet,” Dino said. “Wait for the infantry.”

So the partisans, concealed, watched the endless procession of gray uniforms pass by, and waited.

Two days later their spotters reported that a column of troops had been seen moving up from the south.

The partisans waited until dusk. Then a growling sound, wafted on the still air, heralded the arrival of the convoy. A little later, the sound of singing could be heard.

“Troops,” Jumbo said. “Troops and trucks. Quite a lot of them, from the sound of it.”

“Good luck everyone,” Dino said. “Wait for my order.”

The sound of the Germans got louder as they advanced slowly up the valley. Then, dimly, they could be seen as well. In the pale light, it was like a river of gray lava flowing uphill toward where the partisans waited.

The first trucks were almost past the partisans’ position when Dino said, “Now.” Immediately, rifle fire spat from the concealed trenches. The Germans scattered and took refuge behind what shelter they could. Only then did the second group of partisans, concealed on the ridge behind them, open fire, forcing the Germans to move back. But this initial success was short-lived. An armored car began returning fire, and the disciplined and experienced German soldiers began to form into small fighting units.

If the start of the battle had been messy and noisy, now it was chaos. Men were firing as they advanced until the barrels of their guns glowed like hot pokers. James looked anxiously for Livia, but couldn’t see her. Then they were in amongst the German position, fighting hand to hand, and there was no time to think or look for anyone except the men on the left and right of you.

He heard a familiar chainsaw noise cutting through the din. It was a sound he had come to know and dread at Anzio—the sound of a Spandau heavy machine gun. The Germans had swung down the sides of an MG42 truck farther down the column and were firing indiscriminately, mowing down their own men and the partisans alike in their desperation to regain the upper hand. James dived for a ditch, where he found himself alongside Jumbo.

“That Spandau’s going to be a problem,” Jumbo said. “Think I’ve got the answer here somewhere.” He produced a German mine from his pocket. “Any minute now, they’ll need to change the barrel.”

“I’ll come with you,” James said. He started to feed another clip into his weapon in readiness.

“Don’t do that,” Jumbo said. “Might be a bit hairy. Besides, you’ve got Livia to look out for.”

“Don’t be an ass. You’ll need cover.”

“Give Elena my regards,” Jumbo said, heaving himself over the side of the ditch. James cursed, slammed the clip in and followed, crouching low and firing in short bursts left and right. There was a sudden sharp pain in his left shoulder, knocking him backward. He was just in time to see Jumbo coming under fire as he hurled the mine at the machine gun. Then there was a flash, and the gun truck exploded, turning into a fireball that consumed yet more German soldiers.

Within ten minutes it was over, the remaining German trucks either dashing back to the safety of the valley or captured. But victory had come at a ridiculously high price. The partisans had lost over half their men.

James went to find Livia, running from body to body to see if she was among the wounded. Eventually he found her sitting on the mountainside next to Jumbo’s corpse. He sat beside her, and for a while they said nothing. When at last she spoke, her voice cracked with exhaustion.

“I want to go home.”

The next day, as they were burying their dead, another column of men was seen moving up from the valley. But this time their uniforms were not gray but khaki, and Allied flags fluttered from the radio masts on their vehicles.

James went with Dino to act as interpreter, his arm in a sling where the bullet wound had been dressed. He explained what had happened, and the commanding officer thanked them.

“By the way,” he added to James, “where did you learn your English? You speak it pretty well, for an Eyetie.”

James opened his mouth to explain, then for some reason he heard himself say, “Well, I was born in England. But I grew up in Naples.”

“Thought so. Anyhow, we’d best be getting after the Jerries. Thanks for everything.”

As they walked back up the hill, with its lines of neat crosses, Dino said, “You didn’t tell him you were British.”

“No,” James said shortly.

Dino gave him a thoughtful look. Then he stopped by the line of graves. “So many crosses. But you know, there’s room for another one.”

“Where?” James asked, not understanding.

Dino pointed. “There, on the end. A nice spot to be buried, don’t you think?”

“It’s very pleasant.”

“Perhaps you could be buried there yourself, next to your friend Jumbo. What do you think? ‘Here lies James Gould, an officer of the British Army, who gave his life in gallant action with the partisans, et cetera, et cetera.’”

“Dino,” James said, “Are you saying I should just—go missing?”

Dino took something out of his pocket. “Look,” he said, unfolding it. It was a partisan’s red neckerchief. Embroidered in the corner was the name “Giacomo.” “He was a good man,” he said quietly. “One of many good men who died here. I don’t think he would mind you having it. It’s almost as good as a set of identity papers, don’t you think? One of these, and a letter from me thanking you for your help, will open many doors in Italy after the war.” Dino pressed the red neckerchief into James’s hand. “Take her home, Giacomo. Take Livia back to Naples.”