The Gorge

The Gorge

But now the San Martino boys got wise. Seeing that we had come up the gorge, they placed sentinels at the breach in the wall. It is true that we could get almost right up to the wall before they were aware of us, but only almost: the last few metres were in the open, through blackthorn scrub that slowed our progress, giving the sentinel enough time to raise the alarm. They were ready at the end of the lane with sun-baked balls of mud, and they launched them at us before we could gain the walkway.
It seemed a shame to have worked so hard learning to climb the gorge only to have to give it all up. Until Durante said, “We’ll learn to climb in the fog.”
Since it was early autumn, there was as much fog in those parts as a person could want. On foggy days, the town of Solara disappeared, and the only thing that rose above all that gray was the San Martino bell tower. Being up in that tower was like being in a dirigible above the clouds.
Climbing the gorge in the fog was much harder than climbing it in sunlight. You really had to learn every step by heart, be able to say such-and-such a rock is here, watch out for the edge of a dense thorn thicket there, five steps (five, not four or six) farther to the right the ground drops away suddenly, when you reach the boulder there will be a false path just to your left and if you follow it you will fall off a cliff. And so on.
We made exploratory trips on clear days, then for a week we practiced by repeating the steps in our heads. I tried to make a map, as in an adventure book, but half my friends could not read maps. Too bad for them, I had it printed in my brain and could have traversed the gorge with my eyes closed – and going on a foggy night was essentially the same thing.
After many test runs, we attempted our first expedition. Who knows how we made it to the top, but we did, and there they were, in the piazza, which was still free of fog, shooting the breeze – because in a place like San Martino either you hang out in the piazza or you go to bed after eating your soup of stale bread and milk.
We entered the piazza, gave them a proper pelting, jeered them as they fled to their houses, and then climbed back down, victorious and exultant.
After that we risked other raids, and they were unable to post sentinels even when it was just dark, because most of them were afraid of the dark, on account of hellcats. We who attended the Oratorio could not have cared less about hellcats, because we knew that half a Hail Mary would basically paralyze them. We kept that up for several months. Then we got bored: the climb was no longer a challenge, in any weather.
It was noon on a Sunday. Something was happening, everyone already knew: two German trucks carrying soldiers had arrived in Solara; the men had searched half the town, and then taken the road up toward San Martino.
A thick fog had settled in early that morning, and even the voices of sparrows in the tree branches came to us as if through cotton wool. There was supposed to be a funeral, but the people in the procession would not venture onto the cemetery road, and the gravedigger sent word that he would not be burying anyone that day, lest someone make a mistake while lowering the coffin and cause the gravedigger to fall into the grave himself.
Two men from town had followed the Germans to find out what they were up to, and had seen them make their way slowly – headlights on but penetrating less than a metre – as far as the start of the ascent toward San Martino, and then stop, not daring to go on. Certainly not with their trucks, because they had no idea what was on either side of that steep incline, and they didn’t want to roll off a precipice – maybe they even expected treacherous curves. Nor did they dare to attempt it on foot, not knowing what was where. Someone, however, had explained to them that the only way up to San Martino was by that road, and in that weather no one could possibly get down any other way, because of the gorge. So then they placed trestles at the end of the road and waited there, headlights on and guns levelled, so that no one could pass, while one of them yelled into a field telephone, perhaps asking for reinforcements. Our informers said that they heard him repeat “volsunde, volsunde” a number of times. Gragnola explained at once that they were certainly asking for Wolfshunde; that is, German shepherds.
The Germans waited there, and around four in the afternoon, with everything still a thick gray but also still light, they caught sight of someone coming down, on a bicycle. It was the parish priest of San Martino, who had been taking that road for who knows how many years and could even come down using his feet as brakes. Seeing a priest, the Germans held their fire, because, as we later learned, they were looking not for cassocks but for Cossacks. The priest explained, more with gestures than with words, that a man was dying on a farm near Solara and had called for extreme unction (he showed them the necessaries in a bag attached to the handlebars), and the Germans believed him. They let him pass, and the priest came to the Oratorio to whisper with Don Cognasso.
Don Cognasso was not the sort to get involved in politics, but he knew what was what and, in just a few words, told the priest to tell Gragnola and his friends what there was to tell, because he himself would not and could not get mixed up in such matters.
A group of young men quickly gathered around the card table, and I slipped in behind the last few, crouching a little to avoid notice.
According to the priest, there was a small detachment of Cossacks with the German troops. They had been taken prisoner on the Russian front, but for reasons of their own the Cossacks had it in for Stalin, and many of them had been persuaded (motivated by money, by hatred of the Soviets, by a desire not to rot in a prison camp, or even by the chance to leave their Soviet paradise, taking horses, carts, and family with them) to enlist as auxiliaries. Most were fighting in eastern areas, like Carnia, where they were much feared for their toughness and ferocity. But there was also a Turkic division in the Pavia region – people called them Mongols. Former Russian prisoners, if not actually Cossacks, were roaming around in Piedmont, too, with the partisans.
Everyone by now knew how the war was going to end, and, besides, the eight Cossacks in question were men with religious principles. After having seen two or three towns burned and poor people hanged by the dozen, and after two of their own number had been executed for refusing to shoot at old people and children, they had decided that they could no longer remain with the S.S. “Not only that,” Gragnola explained, “but if the Germans lose the war, and by now they’ve lost, what will the Americans and the English do? They’ll capture the Cossacks and give them back to the Russians, their allies. In Russia, these guys are kaputt. They’re now trying to join the Allies, so that after the war they’ll be given refuge somewhere, beyond the clutches of that Fascist Stalin.”
“Indeed,” the priest said, “these eight have heard about the partisans, who are fighting with the English and the Americans, and they’re trying to reach them. They have their own ideas and are well informed: they don’t want to join the Garibaldini; they want to be Badogliani.”

2018-08-21T17:23:07+00:00 August 3rd, 2007|Categories: Prose, Literature, Blesok no. 55|0 Comments