Deep and Silent Waters

Vittoria shut her eyes and deliberately stuck the sharp point o

f the needle into her finger, then screamed, holding up her hand, blood spurting.

With sick relief she saw them turn. Even from a distance she could see sadness in their faces and didn’t understand that, either.

A moment later her mother hurried into the room. Vittoria sobbed, ‘The needle went in my finger!’

Anna looked at the blood, ‘Oh, poverina …’ She gently wiped it away with a clean handkerchief. ‘We must put some disinfectant on it, darling.’ To Frederick she said, ‘She’s always doing it. Look at this poor handkerchief! When it’s finished it will have to be washed and washed to get the blood out.’

He smiled. ‘At least this blood will wash out.’ He was always saying baffling things. Vittoria looked at him with hostility, and he bent to kiss her forehead. ‘Be safe, bambina, I hope I’ll see you again one day. We must all pray for an end to this war. Give the boys my best wishes.’

Vittoria stayed obstinately silent, glowering. She wasn’t going to pretend she was sorry he was going away: she did not like the way he looked at her mother, or the way her mother looked at him.

When Anna told the boys that Signor Canfield had been at the house to say goodbye, Carlo scowled. ‘Lucky he’s going. At school they say Il Duce is going to put the English in prison if they haven’t gone by the end of the month.’

‘Probably going to shoot them,’ little Niccolo said, with bloodthirsty glee. ‘I never liked him.’ He mimed machine-gunning. ‘You’re dead, Signor English,’ he shouted, capering about.

Anna slapped his face. ‘You stupid little boy! You don’t begin to know what war is about. Soon you won’t talk so cheerfully about killing people.’

Niccolo’s eyes filled with tears and Carlo glared at his stepmother. ‘Don’t you hit my brother! He’s right – we’ve put up with too much from the English over the years. They’ve talked down to us and laughed at us for the last time. Let them try it now, after this defeat in France. In a week or two they won’t have an army. Hitler will smash it to smithereens, and when he’s finished taking over France, he’ll invade England. This war will be over by Christmas. I want to get into it while I can.’

Carlo should have gone to university in the autumn of 1940, but once Mussolini had declared war, on 10 June that year, every able-bodied young man was expected to join one of the services as soon as he was eighteen.

‘We have to be there, fighting side by side with Hitler before he grabs the whole of Europe for the Germans,’ Carlo said. The next day he joined the army and vanished off to officer training, as did so many other young men.

Alfredo, who was still only sixteen, ran away to join up, too, not wanting to be outshone by his elder brother. He gave a false name to make sure his father could not stop him.

Leo Serrati tried to track him down, even getting Carlo to ask questions of every soldier he met, follow up every whisper of a clue, but Italian men were being drafted in every direction and it was impossible to get answers out of the overworked, muddled bureaucracy of the army. Leo came back, looking worried and angry.

‘They won’t, or can’t, tell me anything. When I do find that boy, I’ll kill him myself!’ It was later that he burst out, ‘You know what I heard in a bar in town today? They say thousands of Italians who joined up were sent to Germany, not into the army, to work as slave labour for the Germans. Some of my workers have vanished, you know. They just disappear without saying a word. I’d assumed they were going off to fight, but now—’ He stopped, his face drained of colour. ‘It can’t be true. Il Duce wouldn’t allow it.’

No word came of Alfredo until a year later when his father received an anonymous letter from Germany, from another Italian. He and Alfredo had joined up together. They had been put into a cattle truck on a train and sent off to Germany where they had been forced to work as cleaners in an army training camp. After a few months Alfredo had tried to run away. He had been caught and shot as a deserter, as a warning to other Italians not to do the same.

Leo Serrati tried for months to find out the truth. He pulled every string he had without success. They never heard anything of Alfredo again.

He was the first of the Serrati boys to die. Carlo fought in the Balkan states and every so often they got a letter from him, telling them as much as he could. Men died around him every day, dirty, bloody and screaming in agony, but somehow Carlo survived to be sent to North Africa for yet another hopeless fight. In the desert he was so seriously wounded in the back and legs, when a shell exploded right beside him, that he was sent home on a stretcher in June 1941, a few days before the news broke that Hitler had attacked Russia.

After a year in various hospitals Carlo came home, paralysed, knowing he would never walk again. For him the war was over, except as a civilian facing food shortages and spiralling inflation. By then even bread was rationed, although a rich family like the Serratis could buy anything on the black market: millions of forged ration cards were in circulation, and stolen food was available, too, if you knew where to go. The Serrati family did better than most, especially at first.

Anna had always spent her days gracefully performing social duties, working in charity committees, sewing, running the house, choosing clothes, shopping. Now she was up at first light to hurry off to nurse, part-time, in a service hospital, doing jobs the trained nurses felt they could delegate to these society women whom they openly despised as ‘playing’ at their profession.

On her way home, she would stop to buy whatever she could find in the shops, then cook lunch for Leo and Carlo, the two younger boys and Vittoria. She gardened in the afternoon, since now they had to grow most of their own vegetables, mixed the food for the hens and ducks they had begun to keep. Vittoria loved feeding the pig, who lived in a little sty and ate any scraps left from their own meals. Carlo had to guard the animals at night, with his service revolver, because black-market gangs were always on the look-out for home-raised animals.

As the war went on, life in Italy became worse. People were starving in some parts of the country, while it was said that in Rome all the classy, expensive restaurants were packed with rich people eating their heads off. The newspapers did not report any of this, of course, it was all rumour and gossip – but, as everyone said, there’s no smoke without fire. Some of the whispers had to be true: Mussolini had lost control; II Duce was dying; people who saw him that winter said he was pale, haggard, losing weight.

Leo Serrati knew many of the top medical men in the country and soon had the truth. ‘Poor man, suffers agonies from dysentery. Picked it up in Africa when he went there in July.’

‘One of the other nurses told me she’d heard he’s having an affair with some whore who’s given him syphilis.’ Nursing had changed Anna Serrati: she had seen and heard things that made her view life without rose-coloured spectacles.

Leo bristled. ‘Will you stop talking like that? Ears, remember, ears!’

Anna looked at her daughter, apparently absorbed in nibbling her rough brown bread and a tiny piece of cheese, made from their own goats’ milk. ‘She isn’t listening – and if she was, she wouldn’t know what I was saying.’

‘And I don’t want her to! It’s a lie, anyway! These pains he gets are all in the abdomen, some internal problem … Cancer, maybe?’

‘This war is responsible for many terrible things.’ Anna looked sad, and Vittoria, watching her, remembered the Englishman, whose face was beginning to fade in her memory now. That was how Mamma had looked as she walked with him in the garden that day. Where was he now? Fighting the Italian army somewhere? Maybe it had been his shell that exploded near Carlo in the desert. She had never loved her half-brother, had never even liked him much. Carlo could be cruel, teased and pinched her, pulled her hair. But she had hated Frederick Canfield from the first moment she saw him, because she loved her mother.

Venice, 1997