The Longest Winter (35 page)

‘Only tonsillitis,’ said Carl.

‘There, that is what I said, Mama.’ Pia burst softly in on the little conference. ‘Tonsillitis, yes,’ she said to Carl, ‘she had it once before.’

‘As your doctor may not be able to come,’ said Carl, ‘I’ll have an army doctor call to see her. Just to make sure, and to give her a draught to get her temperature down and make her sleep.’

‘Thank you, Major Korvacs,’ said Signora Amaraldi gratefully.

‘We’re only guessing,’ said Carl, ‘we’ll have to get that doctor. I’ll walk down to the hospital.’

When he had gone Signora Amaraldi confronted Pia in the drawing room.

‘Listen to me,’ she said. ‘We must take people as we find them. I must, at least, it’s my nature. And you should. I don’t wish to fight battles with Major Korvacs by being distant with him. It’s unnecessary. He won’t be here very long, he’ll be sent back to the fighting soon enough. It would have been better if you’d made no fuss, if we had accepted him graciously. But you will insist on things being done your way, you are so like your father. Well, now I am going to do some insisting for once. I am going to insist on all of us being hospitable to Major Korvacs.’

‘That’s the same as being hypocritical,’ said Pia, ‘we wish to be free of Austrians, not to make friends with them.’

‘What is being free, as you call it? We have all managed to live together so far and not everyone is as anxious to separate as you are.’

‘Or as Father is.’

‘Your father has always been single-minded. I can’t understand you, girl. You’ve always been ready to smile on any Austrians when you’ve wanted something. Why is it so difficult with Major Korvacs?’

‘He’s here, in the house, he has forced his way in—’

‘Nonsense,’ said Signora Amaraldi.

‘He’s in the way. Any Austrian in this house is in the way. We must see that Mariella doesn’t get too friendly with him.’

Signora Amaraldi threw up her hands.

‘You make no sense, Pia. What am I to do with a daughter who has no sense? To be hostile is to make him suspicious. To be hospitable is to make him our friend.’

‘I can’t make friends of arrogant men,’ said Pia.

‘Arrogant? What are you talking about? He’s a man who’s been in the war a long time, he’s had to fight hostile enemies for years and anyone can see he’s not going to put up with hostile civilians as well.’

‘The sooner he’s gone the better,’ said Pia, defiantly entrenched. ‘He looks at one.’

‘Looks?’

‘As if one is inferior,’ said Pia.

‘Ah, that’s it,’ said her mother and became excited. ‘That’s it, but it isn’t inferior he finds you, it’s idiotic. He’s right. There’s no sense in your attitude, none.’

‘I am not idiotic!’

‘You’re as close to it as you can be!’

‘I’m not going around kissing him, if that’s what you think I should do!’

Signora Amaraldi’s laugh was short and exasperated.

‘Well, if I were your age,’ she said, ‘I’d rather go around kissing a man like that than have him look at me as if I were a stupid donkey.’

‘Oh, so now I’m a donkey!’ Pia was flushed and angry.

‘Like your father, as I’ve told him to his face more than once.’ Exasperated mother and angry daughter squared up.

‘Stop it,’ cried Pia, ‘you’re upsetting me.’

‘Listen to me, girl. Major Korvacs has been kind, he’s bringing a doctor to Mariella. That’s enough for me to know I’m not going to be distant with him any more.’

‘Well, you’re still a handsome woman, Mama,’ said Pia, ‘so perhaps you could go around kissing him. That would make him feel very much at home.’

‘Girl, girl!’ Signora Amaraldi threw up her hands again. ‘You are hopeless, hopeless.’

Pia vibrated, her mother shook a finger at her. Suddenly they laughed and the confrontation collapsed.

The army medical officer confirmed tonsillitis. He provided Mariella with more medicine and a draught to make her sleep. Signora Amaraldi was grateful, demonstrably so. She conversed amiably with Carl over the evening meal. Pia made an effort too. Carl did not make the mistake of thinking they had taken a sudden liking to him. Simply, because of Mariella, he was less unacceptable. He was tempted to be frank towards the end of the meal.

‘You’re Italians?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Pia firmly. Her black hair, her dark eyes, and her skin which tanned so easily, proclaimed her ancestry.

‘You were born in Italy?’ said Carl.

‘We were born here,’ said Signora Amaraldi, ‘our family has always been here.’

‘Then you aren’t Italians but Austrians of
Italian descent,’ said Carl. ‘Has no one pointed this out to you?’

‘We should not argue about these things,’ she said.

‘Signora, that isn’t argument,’ said Carl, ‘it’s fact.’

‘We are Italians,’ insisted Pia.

‘Pia,’ said her mother, ‘it’s better—’

‘We are not Austrians,’ declared Pia.

‘I see,’ said Carl. ‘You’re saying that the Normans who settled in England from the time of William the Conqueror are still French?’

‘That is not the same,’ said Pia, wishing he would not give himself such an air of cold superiority.

‘You mean it doesn’t suit your argument,’ said Carl. ‘You wish the Trentino to join with Italy?’

‘It is right it should,’ said Pia, ‘the population is mainly Italian.’

‘You mean that if the population of America should become mainly Italian, then America must become part of Italy?’ Carl was caustic. ‘You mean that if enough Hungarians were to emigrate to Australia, then Australia must accept Hungarian ownership? I should think such Hungarians had an obligation to become Australians. You obviously think otherwise.’

The logic was unassailable. Pia knew that to say no was to invite ridicule and to say yes was to destroy her argument.

‘The Tyrol is not Austrian,’ she said.

‘It has been for six hundred years,’ said Carl, ‘and it has never been Italian. You have settled
here. Now you want to take it from us. Do you think you have a good argument?’

Pia’s expression was almost fierce with frustration. Her mother smiled a little. Pia had never discussed the matter with Austrians, only with Italians whose points of view coincided with her own.

‘It is not the same,’ she said again.

‘What isn’t?’ said Carl.

‘What you have said about other people and other countries.’

‘Naturally, you must stick to that or you have no argument,’ said Carl. ‘Well, as far as I’m concerned, signorina, I’d not want Austria to keep you. You may shout your slogans, draw your knives, throw your bombs and cheer for Italy. But you will take a long time to grow up. You will excuse me?’ He put down his napkin, stood up, gave Signora Amaraldi a little bow and left the room.

Pia burst into anger.

‘There, now do you say he isn’t arrogant? Did you hear him? Everyone else is wrong, only he is right!’

‘He’s right about one thing. You will never grow up.’ Signora Amaraldi shook her head. ‘Your father never has. He’ll still be making bombs when he’s a hundred, if one doesn’t blow him up first. I’m going up to look at Mariella. She’s the sensible one in this family.’

Just after dawn the vibrating thunder of guns woke Pia. She sat up, listening to them. They
heralded another fierce battle for the pass. The rumbling was cavernous, it made the house feel as if it was standing on trembling earth. She heard a hammering on the front door. She got out of bed and slipped on a warm dressing gown. Agitatedly she emerged on to the landing and met Major Korvacs in trousers and shirt. In the dim light her hair was a loose black curtain of softness about her shoulders, her eyes big in her startled face. But her warm Italian beauty was lost on Carl as he made for the stairs.

‘Who is it, what do they want?’ She was alarmed.

‘I think they probably want me,’ he said.

It was a runner from Headquarters. Major Korvacs was to assemble his company and march at once to reinforce Lamonte Ridge. The Italians were mounting an offensive. He had thought it was their turn.

He had his officers and men assembled and on the march forty minutes later. They reached the series of snow-covered ridges in an hour and in single file climbed tracks slippery with ice. The air was freezing, the morning grey and bitter, the dawn sun blanketed. They saw the gun flashes like tiny sparks of light far to the south, and the fire and smoke of shells bursting among the Austrian positions. The Austrians had their heads down. The reverberations travelled, rolled back and came again. The dull white slopes high above the valley were smitten by the shock waves of sound. Dislodged snow slowly spilled and banked, tumbled free and poured
downwards in white masses. Above these masses, avalanching and roaring, powdered snow rose and hung like clouds. With the Italian guns reaching a crescendo of aggression, the scream and explosion of shells assaulted the outraged mountains and tortured the human ear.

Carl, at the head of his company, halted on a high ledge. Lamonte Ridge lay a little way beneath them, the long broad pass far below. Shells were bursting around the ridge, a wide rocky bastion of positional advantage manfully fortified with sandbags and stone, the sandbags now as hard and solid as the stone.

‘We’ll wait,’ he said to Captain Freidriks. To climb down now would be suicidal. The shrapnel would blow them off the mountain.

‘It’s damn cold, waiting,’ said Captain Freidriks.

‘Frozen feet or shot-off head,’ said Carl, ‘we’ve got our choice. We’ll wait.’

They waited. Their frosted breath hung until the icy shock waves fractured it. They watched the barrage, the running flashes, the flying snow, the splintered ice. The Austrians, dug in, kept their heads down as valley, heights and emplacements were pounded by the flame and steel of bursting shells. The Alps shuddered and bellowed like outraged giants.

The barrage eased, the flashes ran back. The guns became silent. The frozen sky brooded. In the south the Italians began to emerge like dark tiny spiders from the scarred lines of their redoubts. They came over their ridges, over
their slopes, manoeuvring to outflank the broad frontal defences of the Austrians. Carl took his men down. Nailed boots bit into ice and snow, each man watching his comrade in front, to pull him back or rope him back if he slipped. The immensity of space and silence after the numbing, confining roar of the guns was an awesome assault on the nerves. One anticipated, after such a barrage, that an inferno of new noise would follow. Silence seemed the last thing the war could offer. The sudden sharp cracks of rifle fire that broke it were always conducive to absurd light relief.

Out they came from their cold holes, the Austrians, to man their sandbag trenches, culverts, blockhouses and emplacements. Carl had his men in position. Woollen-gloved hands beat together to make the blood flow and bring life to trigger fingers. Numbed toes squirmed around in woollen socks and cold boots.

They watched the distant Italians. Through his binoculars Carl saw them dark against the white, for even those who wore the camouflage of the mountain fighter could never, in movement, match the white of the snow. Their advance looked neither quick nor purposeful. They seemed to appear, disappear and reappear, creating constant patterns of changing movement. The desultory rifle fire stopped. The Austrians waited. Rifles opened up again, bullets flying from the south. Useless, thought Carl, from that distance. What were they playing at? His nerves began to crawl. The silence became complete again, and
ominous. He knew what it might mean, that the Italians had drawn the Austrians out into the open, if those ledges and ridges and redoubts could be called open. Lamonte Ridge could.

He ordered his company back. There was one advantage about mountain fighting. You were not locked in a trench as on the Western Front. If you needed to move, and if you could, you had freedom to initiate a change of position, providing it did not constitute a retreat or the makings of one. He had the 3rd scrambling back off the ridge when the Italian guns opened up again. The shells began their whistling and screaming, and the thunder to roll. Shrapnel ranged over valley and heights, Austrians diving for holes and fissures, or walls of protective snow and ice. That was when a man hated the enemy. When he departed from the accepted formula and played tricks.

Carl, at the rear of his withdrawing unit, was still on the ridge when a shell burst behind him. The blast hurled him forward, lifting him from his feet. He felt as if a great hand had plucked him up and thrown him. He landed in snow, his head pointing downwards, and the space below was a limitless whiteness except for grey, jutting crags that the wind kept coated with ice but naked of snow. They whirled, those crags. He blinked his eyes. He was over the edge, with nothing before him but space, and the snow was already a warm wet bed under him. His lungs whistled to retrieve the air that had been driven from them. He felt no pain, only a loss of physical ability. His mind returned to work. It told him
that if he moved he would begin his slide into the white void.

The guns roared, the slopes vibrated and the snow quivered and trembled. He heard exploding shells. Beneath him the snow lost all crispness as it yielded to the warmth of his body. It began to move. A rope came and landed softly by his head. He did not know if he could use his arms. He felt a wetness on his right jaw. He knew it was blood. He looked at the rope as the snow sank under him. Above the noise of the gunfire he heard Captain Freidriks call.

‘Carl! For God’s sake!’

It was his body that was slowly moving, not the snow. His numbed nervous system awoke. He reached for the rope just as his legs began to swing sideways from above. The rope frictioned through his gloved hand. He gripped hard, brought his other hand over and held on. He looked up. He was fifteen feet below the ledge. Captain Freidriks and several men, exposed to the gunfire, hauled him up, the rope twisted around his right wrist and both hands clinging to it. They brought him to the top. He was shaken but unhurt, and he moved quickly with the men into cover behind a sloping shelf above the ridge. The rest of the company were higher up.

Carl brushed snow from his greatcoat. He looked at Captain Freidriks and the men.