The deserters were looking up at him eagerly, their faces marked by a degree of hunger that was a close cousin to starvation. Paolo could think of nothing to do but make a reassuring gesture—cupped hand to mouth—signaling that they’d be fed, and then take the uniforms into his arms and carry them away. The men could eat and sleep in the attic, but had to go downstairs to use the toilet, so there was always a chance Umberto SanAntonio, who made rare visits to the barn, would see them. Or that someone else—the Signore’s rich friend, a deliveryman, a visiting wine merchant—would happen by and look through the doorway at just the wrong moment. In one of his tormented hours of half sleep, Paolo had imagined the SS officers from Montepulciano demanding to search the premises. It seemed to him that every waking minute he could actually feel the presence of the three men, as if, instead of blood, his heart was pumping the risk of death into his arms and legs. And not just risk for himself: all their lives were at stake now, everyone on the property. He’d promised Vittoria and the others that the deserters would leave very soon, but what, exactly, he was going to do with them, he wasn’t sure. Simply chasing them back out into the world seemed cruel, a breach of Italian peasant morality, another sin.
The gray-green cloth, the strange insignia, the smell of sweat and dirt—it seemed to him, as he shoved the uniforms into a canvas sack two floors below the men, that the material was soaked in the putrid vapor of death.
Just as he was tying the sack closed, Marcellina appeared in the doorway. An unattractive woman, with an unattractive husband, off in Russia now, she believed, a good daughter and two rambunctious boys who avoided work whenever they could, she was always loud and bursting with complaint. In their small society of peasants and house servants, the foreman stood one step higher than the others on the ladder—a step below the village priest and local tradesmen, two or three or five steps below members of the landowning families. Without anyone ever talking about it, they all understood their places, but from her low place on the ladder, Marcellina was continually throwing stones and mud into the shallow pond of their little society, spreading circles of discontent among the others.
Wide, strong, bristling, she stood in the doorway, backlit by the first morning light. When she spoke, the words came out in a low hiss. “You’re putting all of us in peril, Old Paolo. And for what? For three Germans!”
Paolo didn’t answer, watched her move closer. He could feel the anger and impatience radiating from her body like actual heat. But—another chapter in this strange day—the cool air of pity he’d felt in the attic seemed still to be surrounding him. Instead of the Queen of Complaint, La Regina dei lamenti, as people called her behind her back, he saw, in Marcellina’s bloodshot eyes and pinched face, a woman also caught in the teeth of war. No husband, misbehaving children, endless work, a life without a scrap of pleasure.
“You’ve gone insane,” she hissed. “They’re killing our people. My husband. Carlo, Matteo, Giuseppe—they’re killing all of them. They’re raping our women . . . and you give them food! And you protect them! What has happened to you?!”
By this point, Marcellina had approached to arm’s length. Paolo could see the spittle at the corners of her mouth, and tremors of anger shaking her shoulders and heavy breasts. She started to say something else, but Paolo reached out and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against his chest. For a second she stood still, cold and stiff as iron, surprised, resisting, and then she burst into the most terrible weeping. Sobs, tears, uncontrollable shaking. Paolo held her and held her and let her cry, and at last she wrapped her arms around his waist and sagged against him, and they stood there like that until she quieted. “Feed them,” Paolo said to her. “One more night they’ll stay, and then, I promise, they’ll be gone. Christ would want this of us.”
He felt her nod against his shoulder, once, and then she turned away, wiping her face with the bottom of her dress, and climbed the stairs toward the kitchen.
Paolo carried the sack into the stable area and dropped it in a corner. While he used the toilet, washed, and ate a bit of bread and the tomato that had been left for him on the table, the bundle sat there, crumpled in the straw, a living creature breathing fear into the world.
Germans in the attic, Marcellina driven to the edge of insanity, Vittoria almost assaulted in her own bedroom, the SS officer, the terrible assignment from The One with No Name—carrying the weight of all of that and exhausted from the difficult night, Paolo brought the sack with him to the far field, holding it casually over his shoulder with one hand as if it contained nothing more dangerous than the shavings of a carpentry project. As if they guessed what it actually held, none of the other workers asked about it. For the rest of the morning and into the afternoon he worked the wheat, his mind spinning. When the day was finished and the others were returning to the barn, he thought of starting a fire to burn the sack, but that would have required too much effort. Instead, he brought it to the edge of the ravine and attempted to throw it to the bottom. But his arms hurt, he was exhausted, the sack looped out weakly from his hands and, halfway to the bottom, was caught by its strings in a gooseberry bush. The deadly bundle hung there, out of reach, swaying side to side in the wind, the tip of one pant leg sticking out. Perfectly visible.