Forty-Three
Carlo awoke at sunset, angry at himself for sleeping that long, and, in the twilight, made it as far as a stream he knew. It was more a narrow river than a stream, spotted with deep, cool pools where he’d fished and swum with Giuseppe and Gianluca, both of them at war now. Il Sussurratore, they called it, the Whisperer, for the sound it made as it lost some of its force in summer. He drank handful after handful of water, crept back into the trees, crouched there and made sure of his bearings while there was still enough light. Across the river stood an expanse of harvested wheat field, and then a wide, gentle slope covered with the DellaMonicas’ hazelnut trees, planted in perfect rows. There was still that hill to climb—he could eat some nuts, at least, to give him strength—then more woods, then their own wheat field, and then a last rise, from the top of which he’d be able to see the manor house and the barn. Five kilometers, no more.
But as full darkness fell, the moon already high, he was struck by a deluge of bad thoughts. He would arrive back at the barn looking as filthy and ragged as a rabid fox. Enrico and Paolo would welcome him, Umberto would let him go back to work. Most likely the Germans and OVRA wouldn’t come to the vineyard looking for him, not for a time, at least. But what would Vittoria think when she saw him? What if he ended up spending the rest of his life working the grapes while she lived in the manor house, married to another man?
He stripped off his clothes—the worn-out shoes, the too-short Sicilian work pants and rope belt, the shirt with one torn, bloody sleeve—and washed himself in the cold river. He tore off a piece of the hem of the shirt and tried to fashion some kind of covering for his eye, but it didn’t work, and after trying it different ways, he threw the scrap of cloth angrily aside.
The bad thoughts had full hold of him then. Facing Vittoria, he felt, facing what might await him at the vineyard, would require more courage than climbing out of the foxhole beside Pierluigi. All this way he’d come, all these things he’d survived, and now, this close to the dream that had sustained him, he wasn’t sure he could summon the will to start walking again.
He’d rest then, gather himself, start for the vineyard at first light.
Forty-Four
Vittoria would recall those moments in the barn and the courtyard only in broken-up flashes. Still photos, framed and set in a line on some interior side table, they would haunt her, to one degree or another, for the rest of her time on earth. It was one thing to feel the clinging fingers of guilt every time she thought about the role she’d played in Massimo’s death, but something else entirely to have squeezed the trigger and blown Tobias’s skull into bloody pieces. It was something else entirely to feel the savagery in her when she did that, the fury, the desire to eliminate him from the earth. She’d dropped the pistol immediately, almost as if she wanted to go back to her other self; it landed in a puddle of bloody sand and gravel. She was aware of Enrico—heroic, marvelous Enrico—sobbing violently, clasping her right arm in both his strong hands; she’d have bruises there for a week. He was half hiding behind her right shoulder, as if he worried the Nazi would rise from the dead and seek revenge, or as if he, too, were shying away from the person who’d wielded the pitchfork, that other part of him, like that other part of her—vicious, murderous—planted, watered, and harvested by war.
Second by second, Vittoria became aware of her surroundings: the pitchfork, standing there like a tilted, perverse grave marker, so close she could have reached out and taken hold of the smooth wooden handle. Paolo came over, touched her on the shoulder as if gently waking her from sleep. She turned, and saw everything there in his face, everything, all of it, the people they’d once been and the people they’d become, the terror, the horror, the awfulness of the scene. She hesitated one second and then took him in a tight embrace and held him and shook and wept. After a moment, she felt his strong arms encircling her, but even then she could sense the mix of tenderness and hesitation she’d always felt with him, as if, in daring to touch her that way, even now, even after everything that had happened, he might be banished from the property.
When Vittoria opened her eyes again, she saw that her lips had left bloody stains on the top of Paolo’s shirt, and she saw that the deserters were standing in a tight knot, holding each other, and that the uniformed German soldiers were splayed out on the ground in grotesque positions, as if caught in the middle of some satanic ballet, arms bent backward beneath them, faces half-gone, bodies still as stone. She had to close her eyes again, and when she did, she heard Eleonora’s voice, speaking in German, and one of the deserters answering.