Fire in the Hills Read online

  “I’m joining the partigiani—the resistance fighters. I’ll go behind the enemy lines into occupied Italy. I’ll kill those Nazis. With their own pistol.”

  Their own pistol. So that pistol Ivano had was from a German. Did he get it the same way he got the guns and ammunition that were hidden in the metal trunk? There was a time when Roberto had never seen a real gun. The police in Venice didn’t carry them. But for so long now, guns had surrounded him. Guns and grenades and bombs.

  “I’ll go all the way to Venice,” said Ivano.

  Roberto wished he could see Ivano’s eyes in the dark of the barn—the bright wetness of them. He had the eerie sensation of talking to a disembodied voice, the voice of a dead man. “Does your mother know?”

  “No. I won’t tell her. I’ll help with the grapes and the wine. Then I’ll just leave.”

  Roberto wanted to say, Don’t. Don’t do that to your mother. But he knew Ivano by now. There was no point. He turned back to the oxen.

  “All the way to Venice. Your city.” Ivano came up beside him and rested his forearms on the top of the stable half-door. “Come with me.”

  Back into the middle of war.

  Roberto had once planned to join the partigiani. He and Maurizio were going to do it together. Like brothers. Maurizio would have made a terrific big brother. Roberto squeezed his eyes shut for an instant—please please let his real big brother be alive still. Let Sergio be fine.

  “You know you want to. Come on, Roberto.”

  “No.”

  “You have almost as much reason to hate them as I do.” Hate? Roberto felt too tired to even think about hate. Ivano left.

  Roberto lay down on his mattress. The oxen chewed. Their bellies rumbled. Their dung fell with a splash. Hour after hour he listened to them shifting their massive weight.

  11

  ROBERTO WOKE TO DAWN AIR, warm from oxen breath. Breakfast was the remains of last night’s bread broken into bowls of warm buffalo milk with sugar. Today they would pick the lightly shriveled grapes, sometimes one by one, and drop them into the handcart.

  Angelo said picking grapes earlier in the season was easy compared to this—you just ripped off the whole bunch, stems and all. He smiled. “It’s worth it, though. The wine from these grapes, ah, it tastes like honey and oranges. It’s spicy. It deserves to be called holy.”

  They picked all day long. Roberto had no time at the end of the day to lie in the grasses. But boys from neighboring farms had come to help, so at least they finished the harvesting. Women Roberto didn’t know joined Rina in spreading out the grapes on straw mats to dry even more.

  After dinner, Ivano and Angelo came into the barn. “Get up,” said Angelo.

  Roberto got up and followed them around the little pond. Geese hissed at them. The boys had never led Roberto anywhere at night before. Still, he was neither afraid nor excited. His only thought was that he didn’t want to get too close to those geese.

  The boys walked in such a tight band that they could smell one another’s hair and hear one another’s breath. They walked a long while, then climbed a hill and sat in a row. Ivano pointed.

  Lights. Headlights. Roberto could make out the black snake of a road way down there. Now he saw a second set of headlights.

  “Nazi trucks,” said Angelo.

  “I’m going to blow up trucks just like those,” said Ivano. “See that?”

  A third set of headlights came along the road, smaller ones, closer together.

  “That’s a staff car. Officers are in it. If it were daytime, you’d see the mottled camouflage. I’ll blow up staff cars, too.”

  Nazis. Trucks and staff cars and airplanes. Somewhere out there a war was still going on. And Ivano wanted to be part of it. Ivano and Angelo had killed four German soldiers. Maybe they’d killed others, too, before that ambush of the convoy that Roberto was in. He didn’t know. But four was enough. Four was too many.

  Roberto put his chin on his knees and stared through the air, out over the treetops into nowhere.

  Two days later they made wine. Roberto climbed into the vat when it was his turn. His scrubbed feet sank into the pulp, all the way up to his knees. He stamped, lifting his knees high and coming down as hard as he could on the toughened grape skins. The remaining pips and stray stalks resisted. The juice was thick between his toes, sticky like blood. A trough sloped out of the bottom edge of the vat, and juice ran into a bucket. The bucket filled fast. Then one of the boys turned the spigot off and put his hand under it for security while another boy took away the full bucket and a third boy put an empty bucket in place. Now and then a boy put his mouth on the spigot and let the juice run right in. Usually it squirted up his nose and all over his face, as well.

  The buckets were emptied into a wooden vat in the back of the cellar. It was so tall, there was barely enough room between the top and the ceiling to turn over a bucket.

  Like before, the work took all day long, with no time for lying in the grass at the end. That was all right with Roberto. Exhaustion was a welcome thing.

  That night Ivano came into the barn again. “You should have listened to the radio tonight.”

  “I don’t want to know about the war,” said Roberto.

  “You’re the one who had a Jewish friend.”

  Roberto pushed himself up to sitting. “What happened?” “The Nazis sprayed bullets over the Jewish ghetto in Rome today. And they arrested more than a thousand people. They’re going to send them by train to Germany and Poland.”

  Roberto put his hands on top of his head and dropped his chin to his chest. He knew about the death camps in Germany and Poland. He wanted to scream at Ivano to stop talking.

  But he didn’t have to. Ivano left.

  A few days later Angelo brought Roberto into the cellar to put his ear to the vat. It rumbled. Angelo smiled. “It’s working.”

  They skimmed off the impurities that had risen to the top of the vats. Clouds of tiny red-headed flies circled there. The air was alcohol. They squeezed the rubbish and put the solids into the slop jar for the pigs. They saved the liquid, and the next day they mixed it with water and drank it in the middle of the day. Rina called it mezz’ vin—half wine.

  Life on this farm was continual toil. Blessed toil from Roberto’s point of view; work kept thoughts at bay. The only one who didn’t have to work was Emilio. He was ten. Rina said that when he turned twelve he’d work like the rest of them. Till then, she spoiled him. It was a good system. Ten was little. Roberto could hardly remember being ten, but he could tell from Emilio’s smile how little ten was.

  Roberto helped Rina spoil the boy. He became an expert at making the pancakes Emilio loved. He warmed the special tongs in the fireplace. Then he brushed them with oil and dipped them, hot, into the bowl of batter. He pressed the two sides together. Little bits of batter sizzled out at the sides. He opened the tongs and dropped the pancake right into Emilio’s hands. The boy ate it with soft cheese. Then a second and a third and a fourth, before they even called in the other brothers for their share of the treat.

  Less than a week after picking the grapes for that wine, Ivano disappeared. Rina pressed her forehead against the doorframe and sobbed. Her fingers curled around the frame. Her body seemed to collapse in on itself.

  After that, Roberto worked doubly hard. Especially since Angelo wasn’t working anymore—because he had to go back to school. Roberto was needed on this farm now, truly needed. He took over the job of mucking out the hog barn, even though the mean pigs scared him and the stench turned his stomach.

  And he joined the others around the radio at night. But there was no news of Allied progress in taking Italy back from the Nazis. Nothing. What were the Allies doing? Why weren’t they helping Italy?

  Weeks went by. Months. In November the Jews in Florence and Bologna were deported. In December the Jews in Milan, Verona, and Trieste were deported. Children were doubled up in classrooms to free up whole schools as prisons for Jews. When that wasn’t
enough, abandoned castles served as prisons. Jews’ belongings were sequestered. And the Vatican said nothing—as Rina put it, “The pope sits on his hands.”

  All this time, and Ivano still didn’t come back. Christmas and New Year’s came and went. Rina sent the boys out in the bitter cold to ask everyone they knew for news of Ivano. The harshest winter Italy had seen in decades drew to a close. And still no word. And still Rome was occupied by the Germans. And still everything north of Rome—including Roberto’s beloved Venice—belonged to the Germans. And still Jews were being deported, three thousand of them, four thousand, five.

  No word from Ivano. Nothing nothing nothing.

  The Allies didn’t come and didn’t come and didn’t come.

  The Jews were rotting who knew where.

  Italy was occupied.

  The war went on.

  12

  PLOUGHING IN THE RAIN WAS HARD. Roberto and Manfreddo and Angelo screamed at the oxen to make them move. The boys tugged at the nose rings. Their feet slipped in the mire. The oxen didn’t budge. It was as though they’d formed a pact between them. Their breath made hot clouds around the boys. Their tracks—like huge swallows without tails—puddled with cold rain.

  “Eat,” called Rina. She stood at the edge of the field with an umbrella in one hand and a basket in the other. Usually on a Sunday like this, the only day when school wasn’t in session, Emilio would be at her side, holding a basin of water for them to rinse their face and hands in—but not today. It was raining too hard today.

  The boys wiped their hands on their trousers, then held them up to the rain to finish cleaning them. They ran to Rina and unwrapped the cloth in the basket to find hot pizza—thick dough, flavored with the earliest spring onions. They gnawed on hard cheese between bites of that pizza. They drank wine thinned with water. It was so good to eat—so good. When your belly was empty and your arms and back ached from work, nothing was better than pizza.

  Manfreddo watched Roberto and Angelo eating. “Look, it’s raining too hard to get those lazy oxen moving. Angelo, you unhitch them and let them wander back to the barn. Then rub them down and clean off the plough and put it away before you come out again. Roberto and I will finally work the hill field. The oxen are no use there anyway.”

  It sounded to Roberto as though Angelo was getting the harder task. Dragging that plough back to the barn in this mud would take so much strength. But he followed Manfreddo obediently to the barn and accepted the hoe he was handed. It had a blade as long as his forearm.

  They walked to the sloping field, the only one that hadn’t yet been touched this spring. Manfreddo swung his hoe and slammed it into the wet earth. It came up caked with clay. He swung again and again. After every five digs, he wiped off the clay.

  Roberto mimicked him. But he quickly found that he had to wipe his blade after every other swing. Otherwise the clay clinging to the blade made it too heavy for him. In minutes, he was covered with sweat despite that cold rain. This was bitterly hard work.

  Spring.

  Spring in Venice was birdsong and a return to playing in the sand on the beach island—the Lido—and lots of sparkling sun on the water.

  Spring on this farm was work. Oh, the birds came, too. Shy jays in pink and black with flashes of white and blue on their wings. Green woodpeckers and wagtails over by the stream. Hawks above the meadows. And the night was full of the delight of fireflies. But mostly spring meant work.

  That was good, though. Every part of Roberto’s body had been strong in the autumn from all the farmwork. Winter had softened him a little. Now he was getting strong again. This was good. And the rain meant the earth would be ready for planting. This was what a farm was all about. He swung his hoe rhythmically: swing, swing, wipe; swing, swing, wipe.

  The work filled his brain. It overflowed. There wasn’t room for thought. Nothing existed in the world but this earth, this hoe. But, then, he hit a stone. A gray stone. Flat on one side and rounded on the other. He picked it up.

  A Jewish girl had given him a stone like this one in Poland so long ago. He tossed it away. He wouldn’t think about it.

  Swing swing wipe.

  But that one memory was like the single shot at the start of a battle; memories rushed him, things he’d promised himself he’d never think about again.

  It was almost two years ago, June 1942. Roberto was in a movie theater. A normal day. Normal kids at the movies. Then Nazi Secret Service soldiers marched down the aisles and gathered all the boys. They forced them onto trains going north into Germany. Without even telling anyone. Roberto and his brother and his friends—all kidnapped.

  He was separated from his brother early on, and he prayed Sergio had made it home. Otherwise his parents might still have no idea what had happened to their children. That thought drove Roberto crazy sometimes—that image of Mamma crying in the circle of Papà’s arms.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  Roberto and his friend Samuele were sent to a work camp near Munich. They built tarmacs and loaded planes. Then they got moved to Poland and built barbed-wire pens—like the one the Polish girl was imprisoned in. Roberto remembered her bone-thin arms, the little girl that clung to her, the food he sneaked them both, the stone she’d given him in return. A gift. A talisman.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  They moved on to a work camp in Ukraine, where the snow made the German soldiers shiver as hard as the Italian boys. Where Samuele died, protecting Roberto’s shoes from a thief. His friend died. His best friend. And Roberto had had enough. He walked away, expecting to be shot in the back by the Nazi soldiers in charge of the boys.

  Instead, he tramped through snow for days, got shot and captured by Ukrainians, escaped, and made it down the river in a boat he’d found under a bush. That’s where he’d met up, by chance, with Maurizio, the Roman deserter, who saved him from the infection in his bullet wound.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  Maurizio told him about the partigiani. They vowed that when they got home, they’d join up and help sabotage the war; Hitler had to be stopped.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  They went in that small boat along the coast of the Black Sea, and cut across the narrow passageway through Turkey into the Mediterranean. That’s where villagers got the better of them. They were stupid enough to think a fisherman had overlooked squid eggs in his cast-aside net. While they were busy eating the eggs, the villagers stole their boat. It was easy to get tricked when they were so hungry they’d been chomping on pine needles, as though a jaw could be fooled simply by the act of chewing. Maurizio had mumbled, “A couple of cows, chewing our cud.” And he laughed. His laugh used to make Roberto feel almost happy.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  Walking home would have been impossible; it would have taken months, and they were hungry. So they pirated away a sailboat and its Turkish captain. No, that made it sound romantic. What they did was steal; they stole the boat. Roberto didn’t want to. He was a Venetian—and in Venice no one was lower than a boat thief. But it was a big, rich boat. Like the ones he’d watched wealthy Americans sun themselves on in Venice before the war. That wasn’t as bad as stealing a fishing boat, someone’s livelihood. It wasn’t.

  Roberto had never before been so far out at sea. In every direction indigo water met cerulean sky, with sun dazzling dazzling, like the world was ready to flicker into flames at the first rasping wind. He loved it.

  He remembered looking down off the side of the yacht at light glancing off a reddish brown oval just under the surface. And there was a second one. And a third. Lots of them. Turtles! They darted around and under the boat, their strong fins making them soar, so that Roberto half expected them to leap into the air. He laughed.

  He was happy then, not almost, but really. The captain had agreed, under duress, to take them to Italy. These turtles were their escort.

  But the captain delivered them, instead, into the hands of a German ship off Crete. Captured by the Germans again.

&n
bsp; Maybe that’s what a boat thief deserved.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  The German officer at the base on Suda Bay spoke Italian. He looked at the stuff from their pockets—a knife and compass from Maurizio’s, the Polish girl’s stone from Roberto’s. He called them spies and put them in separate corners and grilled them. When they wouldn’t speak, he said they were deserters, and he’d shoot them.

  Roberto clutched at the chair he sat on. That couldn’t be. You don’t shoot prisoners. You put them behind bars. You don’t shoot them. No one shoots them.

  The commander barked an order in German.

  “Wait,” said Maurizio. “Roberto’s a child. You can’t kill—”

  They shot him midsentence.

  “Maurizio!” Roberto ran toward his friend, but he fell, pushed from behind. His teeth smacked on the floor.

  A black boot rolled him onto his back. “If you had come yesterday, I’d have greeted you with a Happy New Year celebration,” said the commander. “But gunshots a day late aren’t so bad, eh?” He picked up the stone and slammed Maurizio’s head with it. The Polish girl’s gift stone.

  It didn’t matter, Roberto told himself, it didn’t matter, because Maurizio was already dead. The blood on the stone glistened in the sunlight. The commander threw it out the window.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  No one deserved that. Not even a boat thief.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  Swing, swing, wipe.

  They put him to work in the kitchen. Without realizing he was doing it, Roberto became an eavesdropper. He knew a little German from the work camps, and one day he found he’d somehow absorbed enough German so that he could get the gist of what was said. The German soldiers talked about battles. Roberto hated it. He was on no one’s side. He must have been crazy to have ever thought he could join the partigiani . Maurizio was a soldier—he had the heart of a hero. But Roberto couldn’t shoot a gun. He wouldn’t. He hated war.

  Spring came to Crete, and somewhere in there his birthday passed. Then one day the German ships loaded up and went to fight the Americans and the British in North Africa. They took Roberto to his first battle.