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‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Oh.’ I am, now he says it. I’m shaking so hard that the mattress is juddering. I take a breath but that’s juddery too.
Marco leans forward and puts a hand on my thigh. ‘Tell me what’s wrong. Please?’
He looks so concerned. More than concerned. There’s something in his expression, something tender. It pulls at me. If I start talking now, I’m going to tell him everything; and if I tell him everything, he’s going to know how broken I am, and then all he’ll feel for me is sorry. And I couldn’t bear that, so I take another breath and manage to say: ‘Nightmare.’ (Which isn’t a lie, not really. It’s a fair description of the situation.)
Marco doesn’t seem convinced by this. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘You don’t want to talk – you don’t have to talk. Can I hug you instead?’
‘Yes.’
He opens his arms and I sink into them, bury my face in his neck. I can’t stop shaking. I can’t stop. Marco pulls me into a tight embrace.
‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘Whatever it is, it’s all right. I’ve got you. I’m here.’
24
Stella
It was the first one that was the worst. Agnese’s son Matteo carried down the stairs by two of his comrades, his shirt red and soaked from the knife wound in his belly. I cradled his head as Davide worked to stop the bleeding, but no amount of pressure could save him. He bled and bled until he died.
I stayed there stroking his hair, looking into his vacant eyes, until don Anselmo took my arm and pulled me gently but firmly to my feet. ‘I’ll take care of him,’ he said. ‘You go and clean up.’
‘Come on, Stella,’ Davide urged. ‘Quickly now. We have to be ready.’ I took the soap he held out to me and plunged my hands into the nearest bucket of water. ‘Get right in between the fingers,’ he instructed, ‘and don’t forget your thumbs, either. Good, that’s good. Ready for the next one?’
I rubbed my hands briskly with the rough towel as if I could shock myself back to life. ‘No,’ I said.
‘It gets easier.’ Davide’s voice was calm and steady. ‘You had a rough start there, but in an hour or so you’ll feel like you’ve been doing this all your life. Really you will.’
I wanted to believe him but I didn’t know how. I sat down on the hard floor of the cellar with my back to the wall and stared at my feet, trying to clear my mind of what I’d just seen and experienced. A few feet away, don Anselmo knelt over Matteo’s body, murmuring his prayers. Some while later – it could have been ten minutes, it could have been an hour – there were shouts and clattering feet, and the whole process began again.
*
As impossible as it seemed, Davide was right. After that first nauseous shock, a kind of routine set in. Soon I had stopped noticing blood, stopped seeing faces and become entirely focused on my work. I remember keeping a cloth clamped to a minor gunshot wound in someone’s leg and watching as Davide deftly tied strips of fabric above and below and secured the ersatz windlass – a silver soup spoon – tightly in place. Only when the tourniquet was fastened and the crisis was over did I realise that the leg belonged to a girl called Giulia, who’d had a little romance with Achille the summer before. I don’t know whether she recognised me. I rather hope she didn’t, because it had all ended badly between them in the way those adolescent passions sometimes do. At any rate she was fine, though shocked and in pain, and was sent off to be looked after by Assunta, who was running an improvised recovery room at the other end of the tunnel.
I was like an automaton. I sprang into action when every new patient appeared, and the rest of the time I sat against the wall, waiting. I ate and drank whenever Davide or don Anselmo prompted me, but I didn’t feel thirst or hunger, only a sort of numb determination. And then eventually it was over. Footsteps thundered down the stairs, but this time there was no limp helpless body, no wound to treat. There was only Achille shouting joyfully that we were free.
All around me, celebration broke out. Don Anselmo hugged Davide and they both hugged Achille. At the far end of the tunnel, the invalids cheered and whooped. Someone began to sing the Internationale and the others joined in, their voices echoing off the stone walls. I stood there not really comprehending, not knowing what to do with all this sudden excitement.
‘Stella!’ Achille was before me, concern on his face. ‘Stellina, are you hurt?’
I looked down. The front of my cotton dress was spattered and smeared with stiff brown bloodstains. ‘It isn’t mine,’ I said. ‘The blood. It isn’t mine. I was helping Davide.’
‘Thank God,’ he said, and swept me into a hug. ‘Come on, sister liberator, let’s get you some fresh air. Enzo’s safe, in case you were wondering. He and Sandro are up at the town hall helping our new government get settled in.’ And he began to talk about the wonderful things we would do, and how Romituzzo would be a Red town again just like it was when our parents were very young, before the Fascists took over.
But an awful thought had come to me. ‘Where’s Agnese?’
‘Agnese? Right in the middle of it all, just as you’d expect her to be. Why?’ His eyes followed mine to the shrouded shape of Matteo’s body, which was lying in the corner. Three more blanket-covered figures now lay alongside it. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, no. I heard he was hurt, but I thought… I hoped he’d make it.’
We stood there for a moment, quite lost, until don Anselmo rescued us. ‘I shall break the news to Agnese when the time is right,’ he said. ‘I have a few hard conversations ahead – but that, dear children, is for me to worry about. In the meantime, Achille, I should be glad if you would run and fetch Dr Bianchi. Assuming he’ll come, of course.’
‘He’ll come,’ Achille said, hefting his rifle.
When old Dr Bianchi arrived a few minutes later with his black bag, he looked around at our makeshift hospital – the bloody towels, the blankets everywhere, the instruments soaking in alcohol – and he shook his head as if we had somehow failed him.
‘Very poor conditions, very poor indeed. Do you really lack the manpower to bring these patients of yours to me? I fear there’s little I can do for them here.’
‘I’m not moving them until they’ve been examined.’ Davide’s voice was cold. ‘We have three bullet wounds and at least one serious knife injury. They need a proper assessment.’
Dr Bianchi sucked his teeth. ‘Well, I can only say that this is a highly irregular set-up.’
