Thirty-Four
The boxcar was completely dark, savagely dark. Carlo couldn’t tell how many other men were in there with him and Carmine—twenty, he guessed, from the brief glimpse he’d had when they’d first been shoved through the open door at the station in Pietramelara. All of them had moved to the far south end of the car because the north end was where several of the men had already relieved themselves. On the plank floor near the side wall, he and Carmine sat in silence, in darkness, the train rumbling along, the air filled with the stink of sweat and urine and the sound of nervous conversation. They’d gone less than an hour when Carlo felt the train slowing down. The wheels squealed against the tracks. He and Carmine were jostled sideways, there was the screech of brakes, and the car slowed still further and lurched to a stop.
“Roma,” Carmine said.
Someone nearby exclaimed, “Sì, sì, Roma!” as if he thought Rome was the end of the line and any minute the big door would slide open and they’d all be greeted warmly and let out for a meal of spaghetti and Chianti.
But the door didn’t open. A few minutes passed, an hour passed, two hours. Men stood and stretched their legs, or apologized to the others and went and pissed at the far end of the car, tracking the smell back on the wet soles of their shoes.
A third hour passed in the darkness. Carlo was beginning to sense an angry, frightened restlessness in the low voices around him, and feel the same emotions in himself.
“When they open the door,” someone to his left said, “we should rush them all together and overpower them.”
The suggestion was met with silence at first, and then, another voice in the darkness: “They have guns. We’ll be slaughtered.”
“It’s either that, or be worked to death in the cold,” the first man said, but those words only echoed against the metal walls and drew no response.
Carlo was horribly thirsty, and very hungry. A strange state of mind had taken hold of him. Not defeat, exactly, but what felt like the leading edge of a vast resignation, a prisoner’s patience. On some of the wine deliveries with Gennaro Asolutto and Old Paolo, he’d ridden past big lakes—Bolsena, Trasimeno, Bracciano—and, though he was a poor swimmer, having learned only by jumping into the deep sections of the Chiana on fishing trips, he’d find himself dreaming that he was required to swim across those lakes. In the dreams, he’d be struggling for breath after a few dozen strokes, arms and legs already growing heavy. It would be impossible to turn back: he’d either make it to the far shore, or give up, breathe in water, and let himself sink. As a teenage boy and young man, he’d had that same dream many times. He remembered telling Vittoria about it. She couldn’t swim well, either, and found the dream terrifying.
He remembered the dream now, in the dark boxcar, started to mention it to Carmine, but Carmine was quietly snoring.
Carlo felt now that he was stepping into the lake of his dreams. The water was cold, the other shore too far off to see, the idea of making it all the way across—of surviving the work camp and eventually getting home—next to impossible.
It seemed likely that the Nazis were going to ship them all the way to Germany without giving them anything to eat or drink, and then keep them in the prison factories or camps, making bombs until the war ended. Days, the ride could take. Years, they could be kept prisoners. Some of the men would die en route, he was sure. And more of them would die in the northern cold.
As if she were standing there, just outside the boxcar, pounding on the door, Carlo could sense Vittoria at the edge of his thoughts. He turned his mind away. If the odds of making a life with her had been small before his capture, they were minuscule now. He wouldn’t give up, wouldn’t let himself sink to the bottom of the lake. Not yet. But he felt he had to steel himself against the future. From this moment forward, he’d have to live minute by minute, wrapping the dream of her into a tight ball and pressing it down into the depths of his thoughts, keeping it there, out of sight.
Three or four hours they’d been waiting when the door finally slammed open. The light from the station blinded him for a moment, but with his eye closed, Carlo could sense a commotion at the door, German and Italian voices. When he could open his eye, and stop the fast blinking, when he’d adjusted to the light, Carlo was amazed to see a crowd of people climbing into the car. Women, small children, and then men, some of them white-haired and frail. Almost all of them were carrying something—bundles, small boxes wrapped in twine, books. One man was holding what appeared to be a case for a musical instrument. Behind them, Germans in uniform were yelling in a tone of voice that Carlo had never heard used on a human being. Even the vineyard animals weren’t spoken to that way. Half the children were crying. The teenage girls, the women and men, every one of them had terror painted on their faces. By instinct, Carlo stood, but he would have had to stand anyway in order to make room. They were all pushed in close to each other, and by unspoken agreement, the men sidled toward the north end of the car and let the women and children stand in the cleaner south end.