The Cipher, page 19
As he approached the ground, the landscape appeared like a child’s drawing of miniature farmhouses, haylofts, fields and forests that grew until his field of vision focused only on the bonfires circling a clearing where he hit ground, and sank deep into snow. For a moment, he gave himself up to this strange sensation.
“Hurry! Germans!”
As if awakened, he stood up, stripped off his parachute and plodded towards the voice, his feet sinking deep into the soft snow, until he reached a group of partisans who pulled him forward urgently, while others rapidly gathered the parachutes, and the arms and ammunitions dropped.
“Help!” Jules called.
Nino turned. Jules had dropped heavily and was now half-buried in snow. Nino moved towards him, but one of the partisans took his arm. “Keep moving. Too late,” he said. “Germans will be here in a moment.”
“But—”
“Move or you’ll get us all killed,” Rowan’s voice said.
Nino shook his head. “I’m not leaving him,” he said, and started once more toward Jules, who, realizing what had happened, waved him away. “Go!” he said. “You’ve got the radio. You can’t be taken.”
Rowan grabbed Nino’s arm and pulled him forward, away from Jules, whose panicked eyes burned into Nino’s brain. He turned and hurried along behind the partisans, away from the clearing until they reached a hill, dense with trees and shrubs that formed a canopy above them. Two of the partisans took the arms and ammunitions and left, to store them in a church in a nearby village.
From here, they had a clear view of the road where now, a jeep and a truck of German soldiers were headed for the clearing. Then a shot rang out.
Jules! Nino forced himself to breathe, hysteria rising in his chest. Two partisans stood next to him, the others gone.
“Quick,” one said, and motioned Nino to follow him to a barn up a small hill, where he settled into the hayloft, shivering with cold and misapprehension. How could it end like this, so abruptly, so unforeseen? He closed his eyes and saw Jules beside him in Sicily, Salerno, Pistoia, Monopoli, Bari, his face, the panic, recalled their pact of a trip to Etna when the war was over, their feet sinking into the burning earth. He cried silently, suppressed tears for Jules, for their friendship, for Olivia, for himself, for not risking more, for being alive while others perished.
Something scurried in the barn. Rats. He was certain the Germans would no doubt be searching for them all. A rastrellamento. Rakes scraped across his restless dreams, stamping out fires. At dawn, two partisans awakened him from a fitful sleep, and led him to the others in the hills. The partisans were constantly on the move. Familiar with hills and terrain, they mostly managed to avoid capture.
At their meeting place, Rowan patted his back, head shaking. “We’ll get him home,” Rowan said.
Nino set up at Casa Rosa, a large farmhouse. On the hill above it, hidden by trees and rocks, was a half-ruined shack that, for the past year, had been a wireless station. He settled in to send and receive messages. The ciphers told of civilians shot or arrested in nearby Turin, of German trains moving through tunnels, of armament drops and trip movements, of supplies intercepted by the Germans, of agents killed or taken prisoner, of atrocities being perpetrated in Trieste by Tito’s Partisans against Italians — ciphers Nino relayed to HQ. Each day, he also sent Olivia the same cipher — my warlike spirit sleeps / though yet within me roars.
He received no reply. No cipher mentioned Jules. No cipher told of Olivia’s whereabouts.
Through February, March and early April, they were constantly on the move, evading ambushes, while sabotaging roads and bridges. Each day or two, Nino crept back to the wireless station above Casa Rosa to relay their progress and pick up messages from HQ. Of the four agents left after Jules’s death, one had been captured, one had been shot during a rastrellamento and now, only Nino and Rowan remained.
The days blended one into the other, and Nino was constantly on edge, listening for the sound of Germans approaching, ready to flee into open fields, to hide in cowsheds, or haystacks, or woods, or caverns. High on adrenaline and fear, he responded instinctually to the dangers around him, following the partisans’ lead, often into caves with concealed entrances. Nino and the partisans huddled there, sometimes for days, without food, while listening to the Germans’ footsteps as they patrolled, throwing hand grenades into the mouths of these caves. Nino held his breath in those moments, imagining his throat aflame, thinking about death, how vulnerable they all were, not only in wartime, but in their everyday lives, when they least expected it: a car accident, a heart attack, a fall from a ladder, a forest fire, a flood, an avalanche of peril lurking in every living moment. How did he end up here, cold and alone, in his own unrecognizable country, fighting a foreign occupier? Were they destined to never live in peace?
In mid-April, Nino, Rowan and the partisans slowly moved towards Milan, where chaos was evident: fascists were fleeing, trying to reach the Switzerland border to save their skins; demoralized German troops wandered about listlessly. Then on the 28th of April came word that Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci had been arrested while also trying to flee to Switzerland, and were executed by a partisan, without trial. The foreign press considered this an act of barbarism, but for Nino and the Italians who had lived for twenty-five years under Mussolini’s brutal regime and had suffered countless casualties, Mussolini’s was a deserved end. Mussolini’s and Petacci’s corpses were then driven to Piazzale Loreto in Milan, and dumped in the square where months earlier, Germans had dumped the bodies of partisans. A mob kicked, beat, spit, and shot at the corpses before hanging them upside down from the metal girder above a service station in the square.
Soon, Nino received a cipher urging that under no circumstances were the partisans to occupy the cities until the Allies arrived. However, the partisans, having done all the fighting here and shed their blood for this victory, were not going to let the Allies take the credit. As the Germans began to pull out, the partisans immediately entered towns like warriors, strutting down main streets lined with crowds who cheered and clapped. Nino and Rowan followed, resigned, and, as they neared Turin, they heard gunfire, and soon came upon a grisly scene: in the gardens of a large mansion, partisans had shot fascists and half-buried them, so their arms and legs stuck out of the ground. Inside Turin, the firing intensified. Fascists occupied the top floors of buildings and were firing down on them. For twenty-four hours they fought, until the partisans rushed buildings and killed every fascist in their sights. The following day, the first Allied troops marched into the city.
At the end of April, Nino and Rowan returned to SOE HQ, which had moved to Siena while they were on their mission. Once again, Nino sought news of Olivia in vain. It was as if she had vanished. Could she have deserted and joined the partisans? But this, surely, his superiors would know. Perhaps when she went home, she had found her brother and joined him.
He took a week’s leave and boarded a train for Monopoli, where he wandered aimlessly, as if he’d find Olivia in the abandoned Villa Grazia, or the Bari Lungomare, or the seaside hotel where they’d spent Christmas, or Lama San Giorgio where he’d last seen her. He tortured himself with scenarios he could not substantiate, and when he returned to Siena, despite the camaraderie of colleagues and agents, all rejoicing that they’d survived the war, Nino held himself apart, still reeling from Jules’s death, and the fears that populated his dreams. The war’s final days proved brutal. Revenge killings, enraged killings — no one knew who killed whom. The partisans, after years of fighting and being hunted, did not spare fascists or collaborators.
Nino had been in Siena only a couple of weeks, when to his surprise, Antonio arrived. Nino had not seen him since Kenya, though he’d assumed Antonio had been sent to another country perhaps.
“You’re surprised to see me,” Antonio exclaimed, pulling Nino into a bear hug.
“Where have you been?” Nino asked, pleased to see a familiar face. “Did you ever poison that Farinacci?”
Antonio shook his head and laughed. “I wish.”
“Too bad,” Nino said.
“It’s good to see you, my friend,” Antonio said. “Let’s go for a ride.”
Nino pulled his light jacket from the back of a chair and followed Antonio to his motorcycle. They rode down the hill to the centre of the city and found a small bar.
“And where have you been since I saw you last?” Antonio said.
Nino sighed. “In more barns and woods than I care to remember.”
“Italy, I presume?”
“Yes,” Nino said. “And you?”
“Yugoslavia, mostly.”
“That’s where most of the drops went,” Nino said, recalling the repeated requests for arms and ammunition that didn’t come. “I should have known you were involved. Thank God the war is over.”
“It might be over here, but it’s not over everywhere,” Antonio said. “I’ve just returned from Trieste.”
Nino nodded and leaned forward. “What’s it like?” he asked.
“Occupied. By Tito’s Communist Partisans.” He ran a hand through his hair. “The Yugoslavs have been arresting Italians, seizing bank accounts and property, requisitioning large amounts of grain and other supplies.” He shook his head. “And worst of all,” he said, “several thousand people have vanished — both Italians and Yugoslavs who opposed Tito’s takeover —sent to Yugoslav concentration camps, or murdered and dumped into mine shafts and sinkholes in the Karst.” He took a deep breath.
“How is it possible?” Nino said, though he knew these ethnic cleansings had persisted in the area for decades. During the Italian occupation of the province of Lubiana a couple of years previously, Italian soldiers had shot thousands of people, burned hundreds of villages, imprisoned, tortured and deported citizens — an ethnic cleansing of fifty thousand Slovenians the generals were proud of. “We are killing too few!” General Robotti had said. Soldiers had brought back horrific photographs of men, women and children on their knees, their praying hands raised, imploring the soldiers not to kill their loved ones. Nino shuddered. “An eternal history of reprisals,” he said.
They sat in silence, sipping their beer, until Antonio said, “The Allies will soon arrive and push them out. After that, I’ll be stationed in Trieste with the Allied Military Government. Special Branch, Security Section. They’ll be administering military rule until things settle.“
“I wouldn’t mind working in Trieste,” Nino said. His SOE colleagues were all returning to their countries and lives, their friendships and loyalties easily abandoned now that the war was over, as if they had never been real.
They chatted a while longer, then mounted Antonio’s motorcycle to return up the hill to HQ. In a curve, the front wheel skidded, slid five metres along the ground and toppled in front of a small crumbling church.
“Damn!” Antonio said. He’d been knocked clear of the bike and was struggling to get up. “Are you okay?”
“I think so,” Nino said. He’d been flung against the church door, and when he tried to stand up, he felt a sharp pain in his left leg. He gingerly massaged it, to no avail. Then he raised his pant leg, and struck a match. A deep gash slashed across his knee.
“Ouch,” Antonio said. “That’ll need stitches.”
Nino shuddered at the blood, and to test the extent of the injury, moved his leg a little. “At least the bone’s not broken,” he said.
Antonio hobbled to the motorcycle and righted it. “Can you get back on?”
“I think so,” Nino said again. After a painful struggle, he was able to remount the motorcycle and the two of them rode to the hospital emergency, where a doctor sewed eighteen stitches into his knee.
Antonio had fared better. He had several scratches and bruises, but was able to return to work. “Hope to see you in Trieste,” he said to Nino, and rode off.
Over the next three weeks, trapped in bed, because any movement would open his wound, Nino began writing letters to Olivia, and although he thought she might never see them, the act comforted him. Not an instant goes by that my thoughts aren’t turned towards you, who are my everything, my only reason to go on living, he wrote. If only tonight I could dream of you, I’d lose all my pain. But the more time passed, the more despondent he felt, as if he were once again imprisoned. His yearning for Olivia created its own suffering, his life a void without her, a suspended state.
One afternoon, a knock awakened him from a listless dream.
“I heard about the accident,” a woman’s voice said. “How terrible.”
“Claire!” Seeing her stirred him. “I thought you were in Bari,” he said.
“I was. I am. But I’m clearing up some paperwork, then getting married.” She smiled. “I’m going to stay in Italy.”
“Congratulations,” he said, then after a moment, “Viola? Any news?”
She shook her head. “I know what you know,” she said, which was simply that she had not returned from Musadino last November. She sat on a chair beside the bed, and took his hand. “You have to move on, Nardo.”
He closed his eyes. “I can’t,” he said. “I need to know what happened.”
Claire frowned. “Unless she was captured — which we probably would have heard about — what likely happened is that having heard about your engagement, she decided to remove herself from a harmful situation.” When she saw his surprise, she added, “Of course she told me about your fiancée. What do you think?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he said. “You don’t know the story.”
“I don’t need to know your particular story. It’s the most common of all — the fiancée back home, the wartime affair.” She shook her head. “Viola wasn’t cut out for that…”
“I never intended to marry this fiancée,” he said slowly. “It was all a misunderstanding…”
“Nardo, listen to me,” she said gently. “You need to let go. Whether Viola is alive or dead, she is now beyond you.”
“You’ve heard from her!” he said, half rising in the bed, then falling back from the pain.
“No. I’m just saying, if she’s alive, she knows where to find us.”
Claire stayed on for an hour or so, talking about people they knew in Monopoli, in Bari, and about her coming marriage to a young Italian agent there. Nino listened, downhearted.
After she left, he lay there thinking about her words: You have to move on. Well, he didn’t want to move on, though he knew he had to. For one, there was Bianca, who he still had not dealt with. She would now be expecting him to go to her. The thought chilled him. Every few days now, he received letters from her, sometimes four or five at once, written weeks before. Nino my love, she wrote, I haven’t heard from you. What’s happened? Don’t you know when you are so far away and I’m waiting, every moment seems like a century? Why do you want to worry me? Can you not at least send me a postcard? I love you so much Nino. Don’t break my life. My Nino, reassure me. All my love, your Bianca.
If only Olivia were here. Sometimes he wanted to fall asleep and not wake up… other times he was seized by fits of fury against himself, against everyone, against this wretched war. He needed her presence, her comfort; he needed pure air, wide seas, much sun. Instead, he struggled, his heart bleak as the sky.
Finally in early June, when he’d healed, Nino’s service with SOE ended, and he was given two weeks leave, before being sent for training in Gorizia for the Allied Military Government Civil Police. As Antonio had predicted, the Yugolavs were pushed out of Trieste by the Allies on May 1, with military rule established by the AMG. Nino was pleased to continue his service with the British. He gathered his few possessions and boarded a train for Pozzecco, anxious to see Aunt Isabella, anxious to start working again.
The train chugged through a devastated landscape of towns, factories, bridges, villages, all destroyed by the bombings — his country a wasteland. In early evening, he neared an Udine he hardly recognized, made of burned-out buildings and rubble.
When he reached his family home in Pozzecco, his breath caught in his throat: the two-storey rectangular building was pockmarked by gunfire, windows boarded up, and the large wooden doors chained and padlocked. Abandoned. How could it be? He had heard from his aunt a couple of months ago. Something must have happened. He stood perplexed for a few moments, looking around at other houses, some of which were also boarded up. Finally, he knocked on a neighbour’s door and asked.
“You must be Nino,” the woman said. “Praise be the Lord you’re alive.”
Nino nodded. “My aunt? Donna Isabella. Do you know where I can find her?” He pointed to the house.
The woman grasped his arm. “The Germans…” She paused, and her eyes filled with tears. “Donna Isabella was helping partisans… I’m sorry,” she said.
A roaring began in Nino’s ears — explosions and fire. No. Not Aunt Isabella. “Are you sure?” he said, hopefully.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said again, and moved aside. “Do you want to come in?”
Nino shook his head. “How long ago?”
“A couple of days before the end of the war,” the woman said. “Many were killed in those final days… my daughter…”
“Where can I find her?”
The woman pointed to the church several blocks away. “Padre Pio took care of the burials. He probably has your house key, or maybe try city hall. They had to board everything up. Looters, you know.” She made a sign of the cross. “Is there no decency left?”
He thanked the woman and walked slowly towards the church, his feet heavy, his heart exploding with grief. Padre Pio led him behind the church to the cemetery and after a blessing, left Nino alone.
Nino stared at his aunt’s grave, unable to reconcile the freshly dug black earth with her vibrant being. Had she predicted her own demise? Awaited it? Aunt Isabella was his anchor, the one person who loved him unconditionally. That tie now severed, he found himself unmoored. He sank to his knees. He had lost everyone he loved. What was the point of carrying on? His tears fell into the earth, until his heart felt empty and compressed into a hard little ball. He had crossed a boundary and would never be able to return to himself.
