The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (104 page)

What of the farm, which is now long gone? The owner, whose father had built the property, was killed early in the war, at the docks during an air-raid. On his death his family managed to buy their way out, and left all of the business (the managing of the land and farms, the harvesting and selling of its produce) to unscrupulous managers. But so productive were these holdings, and so rich the land, that even in the thick of war there was produce available – until, naturally, the final year, when the outmost fields abutting the river and mountains became the front line and the harvest was left to rot.

I have less useful information about my parents than I have about the place in which we lived. Both were sentimental, suffered at every slight grief or injustice, and easily took on others’ troubles as their own. Before the war my father worked as a handyman whenever and wherever he could and was periodically busy and absent, or without work and constantly at home. When he was busy he lacked the wherewithal to collect what was owed to him – as this seemed to pain him, and people quickly learned of this weakness and took advantage, delaying and sometimes denying payment whenever possible. Unskilled, he dug graves, trenches, irrigation ditches, and never received his proper wage. He laboured at the harvest, repaired walls, drains and roofs, and was always, in every instance, short-changed. I remember him in dirty, worn clothes, hands stained by labour, the skin on his face, hands and arms commonly rough and dark from the sun, the rest of him remained whiter than a plucked chicken.

My mother worked for charities and good causes, and before the war she avoided the city proper and worked in the local towns. Coming from the south we were used to working on the land, and while we lived in the city, we looked outward and worked the trades and activities that we understood in the neighbouring fields. Similarly, my mother worked at foundling nurseries and in the hospitals, she cleaned, learned to administer basic care. A skinny woman, she walked bent, peasant-like, head down. Prideful enough to henna her hair, she wore it high and drawn back tight. The pair of them, my parents, made little sense, one constantly robbed, the other constantly burdened as if grieving – and in the evenings they would bring each other to tears, and so, as I have said, they were largely useless.

Was I loved? I suppose so. They bragged over our achievements, small as they were, celebrated their children to others, held us up, but in such a limp way they always seemed on the edge of an apology. My younger brother sang in church, at fetes and fairs, travelled for a while with my mother and then with a band of penitents, and my parents talked about him as you might talk about a man who slurs or stutters, or a man who drinks, with a little shame, as if this were also a small failing, as if he could not help himself, knew no better than to sing in the way he did – and underlying this, always, a warning to my brother that this would not last, or that his ability to sing more beautifully than other boys was also a cause of pride which was to be monitored and kept in check.

The truth is that my sister and brothers gave my parents so few opportunities to celebrate that they were unused to it, and as a consequence did not know what to make out of the small pickings we offered them. A joke in the palazzo that my parents were related, brother and sister, which is patently untrue, helped to explain their simple pleasures, their inability to soundly reason, their love for the church, how they were able to dutifully abide the pressures of the times when others wilted under it. If I’m giving the impression they were attentive: they were not. Our education was a scattered affair. We were taught, sporadically, at the local school by a fraternity of monks, who delighted in my older brother and my younger brother (too stupid on one hand, too naive on the other), but whose interest I managed to escape. We shared the same tutors, the same amount of schooling, each of us managed the rudiments of reading and writing, and the most basic arithmetic, but we were needed in the fields in the spring to plant, train and prune, in the late summer for harvesting, in the autumn for storing – whatever influence the holy fathers had over our young bodies and minds, remained, at best, minimal. Our education came in the fields through practical labour: first we understood the length of the day, our own energies, we quickly trained in agriculture, assisted in making cheese, wine, and then we understood the currency of our bodies, that our labour, four children, was not enough to sustain the family, the fact our combined labours were worth less than the work of one man meant that we were obliged to pilfer food.’

(page 15)
‘My younger brother’s birth came alongside the first suggestion of war. I should impress on you that once the country was overtaken by war, life became a wholly different matter. First there was the skin, the day-to-day fact of it, and second there was the underlayer, the continuation of regular life: births, deaths (unassociated with the war); people continued to marry, breed, labour, sicken – and in this regard we existed almost as we had before.

My mother, a thin woman, took on a translucent quality when she was pregnant. Her skin became unnaturally pale, as if something fed on her and threatened her life. As her belly grew she became increasingly fragile – and looked, very much, like a fish, a sprat, with some bubo attached, so that she appeared infected. Our neighbours, all farmhands and labourers, bred hard – so little else to do – and as these women grew they took on an unsuppressed vitality and health, of which my mother appeared to be the exact opposite.

My brother’s birth came in February. I watched her in the courtyard, cranking the mangle and managing sheets through the rollers, then all of a sudden doubled-up, hand to her belly, and brought to her knees. Secured in her room she bled heavily, and we waited for news, we sat in the kitchen as the midwife boiled towels, brought out spoiled sheets and bedclothes. Her yelps lasted through the night and were accompanied by deep guttural blows that sounded like wind on a roof, a rising storm that came in answer to my mother’s cries, a kind of call and response of two animals. As she howled, the sky bellowed – and so my brother was brought into the world. These booms, this noise was neither thunder nor wind, but the artillery of the 112th sounding from the mountains. Already in view of the town, too far to effect damage, they made their guns sing to us little songs of threat, a boom, a drumbeat, an unrealized threat.

One detail. We needed a doctor. Three lived in the palazzo, so my brother and I were sent first to one, and then to the other, and finally, begging (as it looked as if both the child and mother would perish) to the last. While these good men were home, one assured us that he was called out elsewhere, another that he was sick himself, and the third that he would attend (he did not), and that we should return to my mother.

( . . . ) On this first assault the Americans were repelled. Perhaps if they had not announced themselves they would have surprised the city, and if the city had fallen then, the region, and maybe the country would have slid quicker into their hands – but no, they told us where they were and were repelled. ( . . . ) Four years later they would not repeat their mistake. The 112th returned with fresh battalions and with the British in tow (somewhere, dallying behind, paddling up the beaches, moving in like hyenas after the kill). The Americans dropped their troops in the mountains from great aircraft and a great height, scattered them like dandelion drifts along the farther crests, speckled the ledges with paratroopers, and so they silently took the heights ringing the city, and from this vantage they prepared to kill, maim, starve, and punish. The lights of the city can be seen across the plain at night as a condensed and distant sparkle. Intensely signifying the kind of life, the plenteousness of the city, which they must have looked upon with hate: planning, night after night, how they would reduce it.

But this, this is four years ahead still, four years away from the night of my brother’s birth.’

(page 19)
‘I cannot talk about the American army without mentioning my sister – who I should have more properly introduced. E—, named after my mother’s German grandmother, had her own mischief and needed watching. She could be still, as sound and static as a tree, and then gone. If you did not keep your eye on her you would miss her. But I cannot think of her right now. Not at this moment.’

(page 20)
‘Against expectation, A— (they gave him a Spanish name) was not a fat baby. The first time I saw him he appeared greasy and paler even than my mother, run through with fine capillaries, as if made of goose-fat and red thread, infinitely vulnerable. So frail and vague he was not expected to live. Announced by the Americans boom, boom, boom, A— brought into the house a new and focused anxiety as we expected him to expire at any moment. As a consequence we lived those moments and felt them dearly, and sustained him second to second, minute to minute. For this period I remember being happy, and my devotion toward A— grew.

This birth brought little joy to my father, who would not approach my brother, feared any further attachment, and resented that the birth had cost so much physical trouble for my mother. As my mother recovered, A— remained delicate, and we all worked toward his welfare, either in the home or at what work we could find.

It is possible that A—’s frailty caused my father to ignore him. He robbed milk from my mother, leeched her limited vitality, he cried through the night, a thin noise, pathetic and unbroken, lamb-like. The midwife kept returning and brought with her chestnut oil, nutmeg oil, light scents to coax the baby to sleep. Even so, I do not remember my brother sleeping, he seemed to fight it, on the understanding, the midwife fancied, that he would be taken the moment he surrendered. While awake, he still lived.

I am not the man they claim. This is the evidence. I lived for my brother. I kept vigil over his cot – so small he was coddled in half a suitcase. We watched over him, and paid him every attention. I learned to feed him a weak broth on which he was weaned, anything to encourage and draw life into him. We raised my brother in the same way in which we had raised cast-off lambs.

(page 24)
Here now is a version of an incident that has been used to demonstrate how black a people we are. ( . . . )

The first assault by the Americans brought unintended consequences. In landing on the ridges, overtaking the small villages in the mountains on that first salvo, the Americans inadvertently woke a long-standing resentment. This resentment has no logic, or that logic is now lost and there is no pure reason why the cities in the plains mistrust the villages on the mountains (accept that they are thieves; known cheats, unreliable in business. They are cunning as gypsies, oily, calculating, and equally unclean. The women are loose and unprincipled). Accept that this grudge exists: to welcome a man from one of these villages into your home would corrupt your name, spoil your reputation. There is between the city and these villages no trust and no common ground.

Imagine the reaction, shortly after the birth of my brother, when it was discovered that these villages lay within kilometres of the American army. Think also of the outrage when it became known that not one man sought to warn the city (they claim not to have known, and were as surprised, as alarmed as the people in the city when the Americans began to sound their guns). Imagine what nonsense they expressed as justification. The simple fact that an entire battalion of Americans could spread through a landscape they did not know seemed too incredible to accept. These villages, these villagers must surely have helped.

In order to protect ourselves it became necessary to clear these villages. To move the inhabitants elsewhere so they could no longer provide opportunity and support to our enemies. As documented in film, in photographs, the houses of two of the villages were systematically destroyed. While there are a number of other villages, V— and C— were chosen, being positioned at either end of the crescent ridge. A seven-day warning was given to the inhabitants of V— and C—, and so they were driven out of their farms and houses: once vacated the villages were razed to the ground.

The occupants of V— and C— had nowhere to go, and no means of travel. Their animals were slaughtered, and given the poverty of the villages, it is unlikely that more than a few of them could have afforded to leave, or have bribed the officials to provide them with passes and identification. Instead, they came down from the mountains and set up encampments on the outskirts of the city.

By this time many had fled the city, as I have earlier described. And this train of refugees – as this is surely what they were – was moved from place to place and not allowed to settle. The hope being that they would move somewhere distant.

One group, of perhaps forty, certainly no more, men, women and children, settled on the roadside beside the farm in full view of our palazzo.

These people were wretched. They wandered ghostlike without complaint, sat by the roads and track without energy. Idle and indolent, they did nothing to support or help themselves. Discussions in the courtyard of our palazzo grew hot.
These people might seem passive, but they need food, they need water, and they will soon come to us for provisions and who knows what else.

In less than a week these fears began to be realized. Small shacks were built, from our waste – spare boards and wood and cardboard were fabricated into shelters. The encampment pushed a little into the field, a semi-circle overtook one of the vineyards (it has to be said that no damage was afforded to the vines), and they stretched their squalor alongside the road as an affront.

My mother, familiar with such degradation from her work in the hospitals and hospices, was no better than our neighbours. In practice her charity did not extend far, while her sympathy might have reached other cities and other situations, it did not travel so much as one step in their direction. Her fears, numerous, of disease, theft, murder, were slowly realized with more misery than she would have imagined. First an outbreak of measles, then an unnamed fever the source of which appeared to be the fetid pond that grew in the bald centre, which took with it the babies and the elderly. And then, one night, a fire broke out, which razed five of the eleven shacks. Imagine us gathered at our window to watch the fire. Imagine our attention on the rising brightness, how people fled, approach and ducked, shied from the heat, of how they sought help but found none. This emergency certainly drew out the good people from our tenement who grouped at the road, and seemed for a moment to be ready to set aside their resentments at these gypsies. But no, they did not assist. Instead, as the emergency vehicles made their attempt to approach, our neighbours valiantly held them back, delayed them, detained them from reaching the encampment. What of the police? What of the fire brigade? What of our army? It is true that they arrived in great numbers, a battalion of trucks and water wagons, but while the fire spread they appeared to discuss the situation with our neighbours so that it seemed to be the army, the fire brigade, the police who were manning the very barricade which blocked them from the fire.