Everyone was caught in a state of panic. He thrashed his arms, his feet slipping on rocks. His head went under. There were bodies against his legs, a current tugging at him, gunfire when he surfaced, shots returned, a spotlight shining on the other side of the train, throwing eerie shadows. It was worse than any nightmare. He pushed on madly, blindly, at one point circling his left arm instinctively around a small girl to keep her head above the surface. A second later he went under himself and swallowed water, and she slipped out of his grasp. He reached for her in the darkness, but she was gone. He swam a few strokes, blindly, crazily, coughing and gasping, and finally felt the bottom beneath his feet. A few more bursts of gunfire well behind him, people yelling everywhere, frantically calling out names in the night. He reached the far bank and clambered up a short distance on his hands and knees, turned back to pull two women and one old man up after him. The spotlight had been turned off or destroyed in the gun battle, but in the moonlight, he could see bundles and packages abandoned everywhere, shadows running toward a dark line of trees, a few men calling out, a few stumbling back, searching for a child or spouse or brother. He looked for Carmine and didn’t see him, watched a dark body float past, face down, yellow dress matted above bare lower legs. From the other side, where the exchange of gunfire had now ceased, he heard one shouted “Viva Italia!” He stumbled toward the river, calling, “Carmine! Carmine!” but didn’t see him among the scrambling crowd. He tripped and fell onto his chest, slipped down the bank and went face-first into the water, clambered up again and crawled with the last of his strength into a row of bushes. He lay there, exhausted, soaked, bleeding.
He awoke at first light and turned onto his belly so he could look back at the river. The scene before him, still mostly in shadow with only the tops of the trees touched by a grayish light, was a vision from the paintings of hell he’d seen on his one visit to the Montepulciano cathedral. A hundred meters to his right, the locomotive lay three-quarters submerged. Behind it, eight train cars rested on their sides in the mud like sleeping animals, some intact, the rest damaged in one way or another. One of them—his, it must have been—was bent and broken almost in half against a massive oak tree, and there was a jagged split along the car’s roof. There were bodies everywhere he looked, in the water, crushed and sticking out from beneath the cars. On the far bank, two light-haired little boys, twins perhaps, lay side by side, facedown, still as death.
Not one living soul was visible. Nothing except the water moved. There was no sound beyond the twittering of birds in the trees and the gentle plash of the river against the metal of the locomotive and the gray rocks. The doors of every boxcar stood open to the sky. He watched the light change, gray to pale yellow, and suddenly understood what every other survivor must have understood in the night: he had to get away before the Germans figured out where the train was and sent soldiers.
He got to his feet, slowly, painfully. The blood on his shoulder had dried, but his left sleeve was mostly torn away, and his clothes were still wet. The air felt cool against his skin, and against his eye socket. He could walk, though his knees ached. To his left, beyond the last train car, he saw a shallow rapids. He limped in that direction, made his way across. He was upstream from the bodies and so he knelt and cupped handfuls of water into his mouth, one after the next after the next.
On the far side of the tracks, he saw a different hellish scene: bodies—German soldiers, strewn in bizarre poses of death. They’d been stripped of their guns and lay in a ribbon of grass and weeds between the toppled train and a little-used farmer’s road, two dirt tracks, that ran parallel to the river. An automobile rested on the shoulder there, windshield shattered, doors pocked with bullet holes. Carlo approached it warily. In the front seat were two dead men, faces mutilated. Hell, it was. He couldn’t make sense of any of it, but by instinct he hurried along, limping, on the road at first, and then, as it turned away from the river, he realized the Nazis would have to use it when they came, and he angled immediately toward the forest. A few steps into the trees, he stopped and looked back. Again and again he ran his eye over the scene, held there by the horror of it, even as he listened for the sound of a car or truck engine in the distance.
After a minute he realized that he knew this place. As a boy, he’d fished this stretch of the river. He’d swum here. The Chiana. He recognized the cliff face on the far side. The way the river bent away from the old road and formed a deep pool before it disappeared into the trees. There was a gorge farther north, he knew that.