In the Wolf's Mouth (16 page)

Hundreds of men were having their orders shouted
at them. They were moving out. As the fighting men were marched or driven away, the Allied Military Government units gathered together. Someone slapped Ray on the back. It was Tony Geminiano, a boy from Queens who everyone called ‘Gem’ and who hadn’t been in battle before. He was joining the war here, now, at this point. He looked strangely exultant. Holding his gun in both hands, he inhaled sharply into his nose. ‘Ooh, mamma,’ he said. ‘We’re here. The boys are here.’ Ray slowly understood what he was saying and nodded.

The first problem the AMGOT teams faced was a lack of transportation. The fighting units had taken every vehicle and so they spent all morning on the beach watching the traffic moving out and the small waves shifting back and forth at the edge of the sand with a thin shine. The sun grew taller. The men’s voices quietened in the heat.

After some time, Ray’s legs relaxed and he sat down. They were told to eat and they all did, washing down bread, cheese and chocolate with tepid water from their cans. Political men, US brass and Sicilian advisers, kept apart, each one standing with the bearing of a general, occasionally looking presumptuously round at the troops. It reminded Ray of the way his brother and his friends sometimes stood about, surveying everything, assuming command, keeping their secrets. When they smiled it was for each other or themselves and it meant
we’re better than you little people
. They thought they were big men. But these were the big men, Ray realised. These were the boys grown up and they were in charge.

Eventually there were trucks and Ray was inside one looking out of the open back, staring at that bright changing screen. He thought of the men far away now in the fighting, each of them locked in the limited square of their perception. That was what it was like in battle: things happened very far away or lethally close. The only place you could move was a small cell, your hands, your weapons, the space of a few steps, people either side of you. In that cell you lived and died.

White dust closed the view. It blew away to reveal a phalanx of marching men white with that dust sinking backwards into the distance. The truck swerved and more men could be seen, smaller, further away, moving across country. One of them jumped in a red cloud. As the sound of the explosion reached the truck, two other men could be seen lying on the ground and around them men cringed, stopping still. They all froze in a moment’s image that vanished as the truck turned again and they were out of sight. Ray felt himself covered in sweat. He panted. He tried not to but he couldn’t stop himself, he had to, he flung himself forward and vomited out of the back of the truck, his loose fluids whipping back and disappearing onto the speeding ground. When he was done he got up again. He was handed a canteen of water.

6

Will lingered over a sentence in the
Invasion Handbook
.

The women are sometimes charming, petulant, witty and gay, with more than a soupçon of orientalism, very feminine, rather helpless and appealing
.

He saw dark eyes, smiling lips, a long neck, a cloud of crinolines. She was smiling as she gave way beneath him. In his imagination, he wasn’t in contact with her exactly. It was not so much physical as a dreamy enacting of the word ‘yielding’. She yielded before him, sinking backwards, smiling.

Will found this pleasant to consider. Nothing else to do with Sicily was particularly attractive. The
Invasion Handbook
warned of ‘the pushing business man, the more pushing middle-class loafer, all gloves and cane and collar and tie, a vulgarian if ever there was one. He is from every point of view appalling, and there are many of him.’ These did sound repellent but it struck Will that the same attitude might appraise him as a pushing, middle-class man and Will felt a stab of dislike for the anonymous author and his officer-class hauteur. The handbook went on to taxonomise the aristocracy and warned of city crime and rural vendettas.

The language had been easy enough to acquire. In the classes given to the AMGOT servicemen, Will found Italian to be Latin pronounced with the exaggerated swooping accent of an ice-cream seller.

Will had shared those classes with some Americans. They were all to work together to build peace on the island after the invasion. Will found the Americans slovenly and overconfident and horribly well fed. Also on some level he didn’t quite believe in them. Their accents sounded put on, as though they were pretending to be ‘Yanks’, imitating the people in the Hollywood pictures. He had the thought that on their own, speaking honestly, they would sound quite different. This seemed to be particularly true of the Italian-Americans among them. They were immigrants and their American-ness came and went. All Americans were immigrants, more or less. They were all pretending to be American.

Will lay back on his bunk with the
Invasion Handbook
on his chest, one finger keeping his place. The sea sank beneath the ship, tilting his feet up and his head down. Over the water the invasion was happening, the Americans unleashing their unbelievable masses of firepower. The ship floated upwards and dipped. Beneath him a Sicilian coquette smiled and yielded, again and again.

7

Cirò was not home. He didn’t know this place. He’d never seen this part of the island before, with sulphur mines, sore and yellow openings in the ground. There were foreign soldiers in large numbers. In New York he’d occasionally had nightmares in which he returned to Sicily. In them, he felt the motion of the boat urging forwards, the sun on the water, the breeze. Then he went through the door of his home, his heart beating in his chest like the wings of a dove. He ran to find Teresa. Her round back was turned to him. He spun her around. She looked at him with fear and without recognition. She was old. Sometimes she had the clouded eyes of a blind woman, sometimes a witch’s penetrating stare of judgement.

Along the coast he could hear the dull, crumpling sound of German shells. Cirò and his people were heading away from them, through areas the war had cleared days before. They passed a Fascist truck lying on its side, its tyres exploded. There were bodies not yet cleared away, blackening and bloating, some also exploded.

They drove that day though a world that outstripped his imagination and his urge for revenge. He forgot how much he wanted it, seeing those sights. He even pitied the bodies. It was the Fascists’ fault. These poor
boys had been duped by the Fascists, tricked into death for nothing. The sun swung from side to side overhead as the road snaked. They passed bodies, smashed rocks, burned equipment. They drove up into mountains.

That night they requisitioned a house at the edge of the village, a large brick house that seemed to be stumbling up the slope. They made a fire in the hearth and cooked their rations, soldiers running around doing women’s work. Aircraft flew overhead on sorties, dragging sheets of sound.

Cirò elected to sleep downstairs on the shelf of the hearth, keen to show the military boys that he was as tough as they were – tougher, in fact, a native. He set his pistol down beside his head. Still the planes went over. It was like the air was a flat surface and they were grinding it, like the slow scrape of a millstone. He lay for a long time staring up at the ghostly shape of the ceiling, thinking about things. He thought about Cathy pale as milk in her bed, lonely again without him, the little bird in the glass-cage office. He thought about Teresa and what she might look like, and what he might do with the peasant Silvio. Muffled voices could be heard upstairs. Why would anyone still be up and talking? He listened, pushing himself up off the couch so both ears were unobstructed. The voices weren’t coming from above. And they were speaking Italian. As quietly as he could, he pulled out his gun, lowered his feet onto the floor and stood up. He went upstairs and knocked on Major Kelly’s door. The major’s expression didn’t change while Cirò explained that there were people hiding in the cellar. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s go winkle them out.’ He gathered his spectacles from the
bedside table and put them on, winding the steel arms behind his ears.

Two more soldiers were collected. With a flashlight, they found a small wooden door that seemed likely to be the way into the cellar. Against stifled protests, Cirò pressed his head to the wood. He could feel them in there, their shifting animal presence. He nodded.

Major Kelly was not a coward. He arranged himself in front of the door, lifted the latch and gently pulled it open. With the flashlight in his left hand and his pistol in the right, he stepped in and down. After a few steps, the others heard him say. ‘Okay, you two, get up and move or I shoot.’

Cirò shouted the phrase in Italian and heard them move. Some bumping and scraping and two men now climbed the steps ahead of Kelly. An old man held up his arms as though to ward off blows. One of the soldiers grabbed his collar and yanked him out. The other was a boy of fighting age. He grabbed the lapels of one of the soldiers and started pleading. The soldier pushed him off.

‘Please, please, please don’t. We’re innocent. We’re just peasants. We’re not …’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He’s saying they’re innocent.’

‘Yes, yes. Innocent.’

The old man bowed rapidly, affirming this. He reached out and put his hands on Cirò’s shoulder, large, dirty hands, the fingers knotted and kinked by years of labour. Cirò didn’t move. He looked the old man in the eye and said quietly, ‘Don’t touch me.’ The
old man started backwards. He looked at Cirò then looked carefully away, his mouth open. Cirò smiled. He was a man of respect. They still knew. Cirò was home.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he told the major. ‘They’re not going to be trouble. They live here.’

8

North Africa had been like a sports field for war, a baseball diamond for the movements of tanks and planes and eighty-eights. At night it was floodlit with flares. Sicily was terrible, so crowded. There were refugees on most of the roads. Having been dispossessed of their truck by an artillery unit, Ray’s group resorted to appropriating a couple of carts and mules from some fleeing peasants. Brightly painted with figures and scenes, the carts looked like something from the funfair. Their owners stood on the side of the road with their luggage round their feet and new packets of cigarettes and chewing gum in their hands. Ray and the AMGOT officers now pursued their course at the sway-backed, breathing, ancient pace of farm animals. Geminiano had taken the reins on Ray’s cart. He whipped them up and down, shouted ‘Giddeyup!’ and pretended to spit like a cowboy, ‘Hwit-ding!’ Ray shouted up at him, ‘Hey, this is Italy, remember. Don’t you know your own country?’

‘Not mine. This is Sicily. Come on, horsey.’

‘Not mine either.’

The whole place was ancient, just like his parents had said. Passing through the liberated towns, the doorways were full of hungry children who came out to beg for food and cheer them. Their clothes and
faces – they looked exactly like the children in the family photographs in the dresser in the hall, stiff cardboard images of rigid Pugliese families, dark eyes, moustaches and oiled hair, heavy beaded dresses, hands immobile forever on knees and solemn children standing in knickerbockers, thick socks and polished boots. Most of these clothes, his mother explained, would have been hired for the occasion. Here these children were now, famished in the middle of a war. On the walls behind them, already defaced, were posters of Mussolini. They shouted at Ray in his parents’ language.
Believe! Obey! Fight!

9

The peace was colliding with the war. AMGOT Civilian Affairs Officer William Walker had run into the thick of it. There was shellfire, minefields, wreckage, prisoners sitting on the side of the road with their hands on their heads. There were people and parts of people around stains of burning. The force of it was insane, the excess of it. It came out of nowhere, out of the air, out of the ground. It was what everybody here was supposed to do. People ran with stretchers.

They were stuck now, delayed. Ahead of them was a battle over a bridge, Germans on one side, Allies on the other, like a game you would play with lead soldiers or the war Will’s father fought in. The battle was stubborn and grinding. It had two jaws. It was eating men. Vehicles raced towards it. Samuels suggested playing cards while they waited.

They waited for two days. The sounds were terrible. Will was increasingly angry. The lassitude, he thought, was making him sensitive. He could feel his heart pumping in his chest, the sweat forming on his skin. He looked at his hands, the fingers in three parts, curling towards him. He heard the men being killed. Ambulances raced. It was horrifying, horrifying and boring. Maybe this was what produced his father’s
heroism: boredom, all those hours in the dugout, in the mould and damp hearing the weapons and doing nothing, going out of your mind. In the end you were bound to break out. Will fancied that he could have done the same, rushed out and taken a machinegun nest on his own. He clenched his molars together hard, stifling a yawn.

Will walked around. He spoke to people. He smoked cigarette after cigarette, his pulse becoming light and fast.

The fighting changed in intensity. A spastic firing dropped away almost to silence, a quiet spattered with light gunfire followed by some bursting shells then quiet again. Will heard that on the third night they had stopped fighting and through some negotiation agreed to let each other come forward and collect their dead. He was told this by a soldier who couldn’t stand still. In the darkness his cigarette brightened and faded as he pulled on it. He thanked Samuels for the booze and swallowed it. He said that the men had walked past each other in silence, ignored each other, picked up the dead and the larger parts of the dead by torchlight and carried them away. They did this for a few hours. Afterwards, in the widening light of dawn, they began firing again.

Eventually, somehow, the Allies pushed through. The Germans were outkilled. The bridge was repaired by engineers and the weight of the stalled invasion rolled slowly forwards. Will didn’t look at the place as they drove through. He didn’t want to see it. It ought to be private in some way or concealed. It was obscene and degrading what had happened there. It felt possibly
contagious. Will didn’t want to breathe in until they were through to the other side, in clearer air, picking up speed.