Finally I said yes. After all, it was an adventure I would later be able to tell stories about, a partisan thing, a coup unlike any of Flash Gordon’s in the forests of Arboria. Unlike any of Tremal-Naik’s in the Black Jungle. Better than Tom Sawyer in the mysterious cave.
But, since I had a good head on my shoulders, I immediately set a few things straight with Gragnola. He was saying that, with eight Cossacks in tow, we risked losing them on the way down, and so we should get a nice long rope to tie everyone together, as mountain climbers do, and that way each could follow the next even without seeing where he was going. I said no, if we were roped together like that and the first man fell, he would pull everyone else down with him. What we needed were ten pieces of rope: each of us would hold tight to the end of the rope of the person in front of us and to the end of the rope of the person behind us, and if we felt one of them falling we would immediately let go of our end, because it was better that one should fall than all of us. “You’re sharp,” Gragnola said.
I asked him excitedly if he was going to come armed, and he said no – in the first place, because he would never hurt a fly, but also because if there were, God forbid, an engagement, the Cossacks were armed, and, finally, in the event that he was unlucky enough to get caught, they might not put him up against the wall right away if he was unarmed.
We went and told the priest that we were in agreement, and to have the Cossacks ready by one in the morning.
I went home for dinner around seven. The rendezvous was for midnight by the little chapel of the Madonna, and it would take me forty-five minutes of brisk walking to get there. “Do you have a watch?” Gragnola asked. “No,” I told him, “but at eleven, when everyone goes to bed, I’ll wait in the dining room where there’s a clock.”
Dinner at home with my mind aflame, after dinner a show of listening to the radio and looking at my stamps. At eleven, the house was immersed in silence, and I was in the dining room, in the dark. Every now and then, I lighted a match to check the clock. At eleven-fifteen, I slipped out, and set off through the fog toward the little chapel of the Madonna.
Gragnola was there, and complained that I was late. I realized he was trembling. Not I. I was now in my element. He handed me the end of a rope, and we began climbing up the gorge.
I had the map in my head, but Gragnola kept saying, “Oh, God, I’m falling.” I moved my feet as if following the score of a piece of music; that must be how pianists do it – with their hands, I mean, not their feet – and I did not miss a step. But he, even though he was following me, kept stumbling. And coughing. I often had to turn around and pull him by the hand. The fog was thick, but from half a metre away we could see each other. If I pulled the rope, Gragnola would emerge from dense vapors, which seemed to dissipate all at once, and appear suddenly before me, like Lazarus throwing off his shroud.
The climb lasted a good hour, but that was about average. The only time I warned Gragnola to be careful was when we reached the boulder. If, instead of going around it and rejoining the path, you mistakenly went to the left, feeling pebbles beneath your feet, you would end up in the ravine.
We reached the top, at the gap in the wall, and San Martino was a single invisible mass. We go straight, I told him, down the lane. Count at least twenty steps and we’ll be at the rectory door.
We knocked at the door as we had agreed: three knocks, a pause, then three more. The priest came to let us in. He was a dusty pale color, like the clematis along the roads in summer. The eight Cossacks were there, armed like bandits and scared as children. Gragnola talked with the one who knew Italian. He spoke it quite well, though with a bizarre accent, but Gragnola, as people do with foreigners, spoke to him in infinitives.
“You to go ahead of friends and to follow me and child. You to say to your men what I say, and they to do what I say. Understand?”
“I understand, I understand. We’re ready.”
The priest, who was about to piss himself, opened the door and let us out into the lane. And at that very moment we heard, from the end of the village where the road came in, several Teutonic voices and the yelp of a dog.
“God damn it all to hell,” Gragnola said, and the priest did not even blink. “The toadies made it up here, they’ve got dogs, and dogs don’t give a rat’s ass about fog – they go by their noses. What the hell do we do now?”
The leader of the Cossacks said, “I know how they do. One dog every five men. We go just the same, maybe we meet ones without dog.”
“Rien ne va plus,” said Gragnola the learned. “We do go slow. And we do shoot only if I say. We prepare handkerchiefs or rags, and other ropes.” Then he explained to me, “We’ll hurry to the end of the lane and stop at the corner. If no one’s there, we’ll go right through the wall and be gone. If anyone comes and they’ve got dogs, we’re fucked. If it comes to it, we’ll shoot at them and the dogs, but it depends how many they are. If, on the other hand, they don’t have dogs, we’ll let them pass, come up behind them, bind their hands, and stick rags in their mouths, so they can’t yell.”
“And then leave them there?”
“Yeah, right. No, we take them with us into the gorge, there’s nothing else for it.”
He quickly explained all that again to the Cossack, who repeated it to his men.
The priest gave us some rags, and some cords from the holy vestments. “Go, go,” he was saying, “and God protect you.”
We headed down the lane. At the corner, we heard German voices coming from the left, but no barks or yelps.
We pressed flat against the wall. We heard two men approaching, talking to each other, probably cursing the fact that they could not see where they were going. “Only two,” Gragnola explained with signs. “Let them pass, then on them.”
The two Germans, who had been sent to comb that area while the others took the dogs around the piazza, were going along almost on tiptoe, with their rifles pointed, but they could not even see that a lane was there, and so they passed it. The Cossacks threw themselves on the two shadows and showed that they were good at what they did. In a flash, the two men were on the ground with rags in their mouths, each one held by two of those demoniacs, while a third tied their hands behind them.
“We did it,” Gragnola said. “Now you, Yambo, toss their rifles over the wall, and you, push the Germans behind us, down where we go.”
I was terrified, and now Gragnola became the leader. Getting through the wall was easy. Gragnola passed out the ropes. The problem was that, except for the first and the last in line, each person had to have both hands occupied, one for the front rope and the other for the back rope. But if you have to push two trussed Germans, you cannot hold a rope, and for the first ten steps the group went forward by shoving, until we slipped into the first thickets. At that point, Gragnola tried to reorganize the rope system. Each man who was leading a German tied his rope to his prisoner’s gun belt. Each who was following held onto the prisoner’s collar with his right hand, and with his left held onto the rope of the man behind him. But, just as we were preparing to set off again, one of the Germans tripped and fell onto the guard in front of him, taking the one behind with him, and the chain was broken. Under their breath, the Cossacks hissed what must have been curses in their language, but they had the good sense to do so without shouting.