And he was gone.
Day Five
I
‘You have a patient, nurse,’ Major Scipione di Montefalcone told Fabiana Bacigalupe, who was working in the village that was now battalion headquarters. ‘We don’t know what he is; he’s wearing a mixture of uniforms. He was found by the patrol lying out on the ground, his horse standing over him. He might be one of the Schuma, I suppose. You better check if they’re missing anyone but it’s chaos over there today.’
The major was a count from Tuscany, the sort you would find only in the grandest cavalry regiments. His father had commanded the Savoy Celere and so, when the war came, Montefalcone chose the family regiment. Fabiana sometimes sensed that with every breath he took, Montefalcone was accompanied by all the cardinals and princes in his bloodline, even though his grandfather had squandered all their castles and paintings. He and his wife lived in a house not much better than a turreted cottage, but he loved to hunt with his retrievers Pushkin and Potemkin. Yes, as he sometimes discussed with Fabiana, he’d always loved Russia, always wished to visit, but not in this way.
‘You know the partisans got Mandryka yesterday?’ he asked now.
Fabiana straightened up. Wearing her white nurse’s uniform with the big Red Cross on the right side, she stood beside the major in the street outside the peasant’s house where she had been staying. ‘I heard.’
‘The man was an animal,’ said Montefalcone, making no attempt to lower his voice in front of his effete batman. ‘But it doesn’t excuse the Soviet partisans, let me make that clear. But Mandryka was worse than a beast. Now there’s a Russian woman lording it over them who’s worse than all of them – she was once a nurse, they say.’
Fabiana nodded and looked up into Montefalcone’s swarthy, oval face and the loose chins that wobbled as he wiped the sweat with a crested handkerchief.
‘Oh, look who’s here.’ A skinny mongrel, not unlike a starved fox, trotted in confidently and poked Montefalcone with its nose. ‘We’ve adopted this one,’ he said as he stroked it lovingly with his soft hands. ‘Jacopo, bring Anastasia some milk,’ he called to his batman. What a kind man he was. For a moment, Fabiana longed to be treated like the fox-red dog. Her mother had dreamed of her marrying such a man, an aristocratic connoisseur with puppy’s eyes. How different he was from her husband Ippolito – not to speak of Colonel Malamore.
Now she was on the Don steppe where the dust itself was thick with blood, not just of soldiers but of women and children. And her husband was dead. And Malamore visited each time he rode through, several times in the last couple of days. His intentions were clear, she thought, and shivered.
‘Don’t you want to go home?’ Montefalcone asked her.
‘Si, signore. But first I must bury my husband.’
‘Of course, of course. We will find him. Then you must go home. I can arrange it for you. Let me, my dear, let me. This is no place for a girl like you…’
Fabiana wondered what sort of woman he took her for. What did they all take her for? She guessed they all presumed there was some shady story, perhaps a father who was a Milanese industrialist, or a mother who was the mistress of some war profiteer. She did not realize that in her mid-thirties she had become beautiful, because in her teens she had been plain and awkward. Girls who are plain in their teens never believe they can be anything else. And there was no glamorous mystery: her father was the custodian of the Venetian State Archive just round the corner from their home, a fourth-floor apartment in Campo San Stin.
She sees herself running to the nearby Campo dei Frari to that shop with the big oil-painted signs of salami and cheese, or walking with her mother to the Rialto market. She has flashes of colours and crowds and the smell of incense while crossing the votive bridges of boats with her family during the Festa del Redentore and every Sunday her mother takes her to San Rocco church. She smiles at the thought of her mother, an elementary teacher, teaching at the school on the Vignole island. The old boatman rows them there every day.
Words form Fabiana’s world. Love for her is expressed in things of beauty and shaped in words. She always checks the bookshop Tarantola on Campo San Luca for editions of Luigi Pirandello, her passion. She is fascinated by his characters for whom there is not an objective reality but only a subjective one that crumbles when in contact with the truths of others. The eccentric owner lays out Pirandellos which she can’t afford, but she puts her hand on them, smells their paper. Her mother took her there first but now, daringly, she goes on her own everywhere, walking around the SS Giovanni e Paolo church to look at the tombs of the men who made the Republic of Venice into the Serenissima of cities, or the Palazzo Ducale where she admires the suits of armour, the cannons, the frescoes and the paintings of doges. She is proud of her Venetians: Florence has Michelangelo but Venice has Tiziano. She takes the vaporetto to the cemetery and lays flowers on the tombs of Stravinsky and Diaghilev: it was they who encouraged her to learn Russian – and to come to Russia.
‘Fabiana?’ Montefalcone asked her now.
She roused herself, remembering where she was. ‘Si, I want to go home. Soon. But while I’m here, I want to help.’
‘Good, good. We are short of medical personnel. We lost a nurse in that Russian raid and we lost a good officer too – oh, of course you know… Excuse me, I… Oh! Maremma maiala!’ He cursed his own tactlessness.
‘It’s all right, really. It is,’ Fabiana said, not minding that he was referring to her husband. A fool, but a sweet one.
‘Bene! Time to get back to work. Take your mind off everything. Are you ready?’
‘I think so,’ she said.
‘The medical tent is just beside the stables. Take a horse and ride over there. Your patient needs you. There’s no doctor here at the moment. You’ll have to organize it all yourself. You’re on your own. Can you do it?’
Fabiana stiffened her back and wiped the sweat from her eyes. ‘Yes, yes I can.’
‘I have no doubt you can. The new offensive is about to start again and I fear you’ll have too much work to do then. Listen, you can hear the guns on the Don and can you hear the engines? They’re German panzers driving east.’ Adopting the tone of one of the propaganda newsreels, he declaimed: ‘On to the Volga! On to Stalingrad! TUTTE STRONZATE! IDIOTI! All shit! Idiots!’ He waved a hand. ‘Oh, we have no business being here…’ He stood up and bowed.
Fabiana saluted but, when she looked back, Montefalcone was further down the little street talking to some of the Kalmyk scouts. Once again, she was on her own.
As she passed the camels, two of them pulled back their lips and showed their yellow teeth and started to nuzz. Hideous beasts, she thought. They unsettled the horses. She took her fine horse, a palomino named Violante, its body gold, its tail and mane white, out of the stables and rode around the village to the edge of the steppe where they had put up the khaki Red Cross tent. She tied Violante outside and looked on to the plains. Although still morning, the sun was beating down, the horizon was long and stark, so deep an azure that it was almost like cold marble.
Planes, flying in perfect formation, crossed the sky – she saw the German crosses. Across one panel of sky in the east, over the Don, rose jet-black smoke like a dark curtain pulled across a window. The factories of Stalingrad perhaps? She heard the uproar of engines, suddenly close as dust enveloped the village. A column of German tanks, self-propelled guns, and trucks, too many to count, was approaching. The tanks, wearing dark khaki, juddered and growled, black exhaust pumping out, their caterpillars crunching over the sandy road. Riding on their backs, German soldiers, sunburnt young men in Wehrmacht grey-green, some with rifles, others with anti-tank bazookas, grinned at her as they passed and blew kisses and made signs of devotion.