To Find a Mountain Read online

  Papa and I continued to make our way around the room. Many of the faces were familiar; men from Casalveri who asked about their families. I was able to tell them what I knew which wasn’t a whole lot.

  More men filed out of the cabin and soon they had their fill of breakfast: a thick slice of stale bread and one more cup of coffee. Faint shafts of sunlight began to filter into the room and one by one, the men started to leave.

  “Where does everyone hide?”

  “We all have our own places. It is good not to know where everyone is, just in case.” Papa replied.

  Just in case the Germans find one of the men and torture him into telling about the others, I thought to myself.

  “Isn’t it safe here?”

  “It is not safe anywhere in Italy.”

  “Do the Germans know about this place?”

  Papa shrugged.

  “It is safe to assume they do, that’s why we leave during the day and hide deep in the woods. The Germans do not come out at night, they are scared of the ribellí.

  “The men here…” I started to ask.

  Papa shook his head.

  “We are not part of the Resistance. There have been many talks, many arguments in this very room about this matter. Some of the younger men want to fight, to sabotage, but the older men like me fear too much for their families.”

  He washed down the last hunk of bread with his coffee. The look on his face betrayed his dislike for the flavor.

  “If we were to raid a German supply convoy and men from Casalveri, even one man from Casalveri was captured — ten people in the village would be executed. Colonel Wolff told as much to me. I believe him.”

  Papa looked into his empty coffee cup.

  “The men here, we are ashamed.”

  “Papa…” I started to object.

  “It’s true, Benedetta. We are ashamed. We are men. We all, young and old alike, want to fight the Germanesí. I love my country as much as the Americans love theirs. But they don’t have Germans in their homes, with guns pointing at their families.”

  He tried to pour any remaining coffee from the pot, but dregs plopped out into his cup.

  “It may be dishonorable, but blowing up a German truck is not worth the price of my family, or anyone else’s family in Casalveri.”

  I went to him and sat on his lap, throwing my arms around him.

  “It is your duty to be a father, to make it through this war in one piece,” I said. “Fight to stay alive, Papa. That is the battle you need to win.”

  He kissed my forehead.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked, pulling on his boots.

  “Where to?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You will spend the day with us and the night, and then very early tomorrow morning, you will return to Casalveri,” my father said.

  I hugged him for the fiftieth time.

  “I am so happy I don’t have to go back right away,” I said. “Zizi Checcone said Wolff would be gone for several days.”

  “But we don’t want to take any chances,” Papa said. “One day we will spend together, and then you must go back.”

  “Are we going to hide?” I asked.

  “We are going to work,” Papa answered.

  The men of Italy who had scattered to the mountains had little to do there, save for one important thing: staying alive. Most of the men were simply hiding, but a minority formed themselves into guerrilla bands known as ribellí. Some of the ribellí were politically motivated; they received some payment from their organization’s political party affiliations. In additional to a small monthly stipend, they received food and clothing, news of their home and families all routed to them through a complex chain of communications. Mostly, the women and children of the villages carried messages hidden beneath their hats, in their shoes, even tucked underneath babies in carriages. It was an extensive support network structured to keep the partisans alive in order to disrupt the German military machine while also keeping any support well-hidden from spies.

  For men like Papa, however, who did not belong to a partisan political unit, survival was a much more rigorous job, as he told me the situation when we set out from the cabin that morning.

  “The few people who live here are friendly to us, and help us when they can. They won’t hide us, though. For that, they would either be killed, sent to the front, or sent back to Germany.”

  “Sent back to Germany?” I asked. “For what?”

  “Slave labor. I heard the Germans at the front talking about it. There are many dangerous jobs in the munitions plants in Germany, factories that make things for the war,” he said. “Apparently, they have killed too many Jews, and now need Italian slaves to do the work. Naturally, the jobs are the most dangerous they can find, and workers usually only last a year or two. That’s why there is such a demand.”

  Every day, it seemed to get worse. I thought of families being torn apart, couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be sent to Germany to work and probably die in one of their factories. It seemed to me that just because the Germans didn’t kill you, didn’t mean that your life wasn’t going to end.

  I thought about that fact as Papa, Dominic and I walked deeper into the woods at daybreak, heading due East through thick brush and fallen trees where there was no trail. We picked our way carefully, trying to avoid any kind of poison ivy and the worst of the brush that could slice open skin.

  After almost an hour of walking, we came to a particularly dense patch of forest with many freshly fallen trees, probably knocked down by either a bomb or a bad storm.

  Papa quickly selected a tree and he and Dominic set to work. With ancient axes, they chopped the thick branches off from the main trunk; reducing them to pieces of firewood perfect for a country fireplace. I stacked the pieces in neat pyramids.

  Dominic did most of the chopping, his young but wiry arms swung the ax with precision and a surprising abundance of force. Soon, there was more than enough wood to carry, in fact, we left many pyramids to perhaps retrieve later.

  While Dominic chopped, my father had fashioned crude packs of burlap, each man carrying as much wood as he could manage, considering the hike would take a fair amount of time.

  We walked upward then, higher on the mountain and at a crosscut angle from the direction in which we had come. Finally, after many rests for my father who was huffing and puffing far worse than myself, we arrived at a crude farmhouse. Dominic, who had barely broken a sweat on the hike even though he had by far the heaviest pack, approached the front door. There was no answer to Dominic’s knock, and we discussed the possibility of it being abandoned, but soon an old man came around from the back and gestured with a hand that we should follow him, which we promptly did.

  We went around the house and unloaded the wood on a pile of firewood that looked like it too had been chopped recently. This had obviously been done before for the same reason we were doing it; although Papa said he personally had never brought wood for this farmer but that the farm’s location had no doubt made the list of other groups hiding in the area as a place that was friendly toward the mountain hideaways.

  The old man was short and stooped, his shirt collar buttoned all the way to the top button and he had a crude pipe from which curled tobacco smoke.

  Almost on cue, when the last piece of wood hit the pile, an old woman, looking eerily similar to the old man, except without the pipe, opened the back door of the house. She had a small bag in her hands which she handed to Papa.

  “Grazie,” said Papa.

  “I wish we had more to give but we’re running low, too,” the old man said with a shrug.

  “It is more than enough,” Papa said even though he hadn’t looked inside the bundle yet. When he handed it to me, I didn’t look inside, either.

  “Do you have any news?” Papa said.

  The old man looked at us and I noticed that one of his eyes was milky white. His other eye focused on us c
learly.

  “Some planes flew by several days ago and they dropped parachutes. I think there were many dropped, but it looked like one was late getting out of the plane. It landed somewhere over there,” he said, pointing a gnarled finger in the general direction of a meadow surrounded by steep, rocky hills. The hand shook slightly in the air.

  “I would have gone and looked for it, but it is too far and these aren’t what they used to be,” he said, gently slapping his knees.

  Papa and Dominic exchanged looks. They seemed to have reached a decision, because Papa spoke.

  “Did you tell anyone else about the parachute?” he said gently.

  The old man shook his head.

  “Do you know what color the parachute was?”

  “I think it was yellow,” the old man answered. “But this one is completely useless,” he said pointing to the cloudy eye. Then he pointed to the other one, “and this isn’t much better.”

  “Enough of this talk!” the old woman said. “You sound like an old mule waiting to die! Should I put you out in the pasture?”

  “You don’t make it any easier, woman!” the old man retorted. “If I can survive your cooking this long, I’ve cheated death for too long already!”

  He shot a wink at us.

  “Well, we don’t have time to go off chasing parachutes,” said Papa. “Thanks for the supplies, though.”

  The old man reached out with gnarled hand and shook Dominic’s and Papa’s hands. Then he and the woman retreated inside the house, muttering to each other.

  Once we were out of earshot of the house, Papa turned to Dominic and myself. He was smiling.

  “This is too good an opportunity to pass up, no?”

  We both nodded in agreement.

  Chapter Twenty

  I walked with Dominic because I wanted to. Maybe it was the way he had led me up the mountain, or maybe it was because Papa was older and would not move as quickly as we could. Besides, there was a bit of a thrill to the chase and a part of me wanted to be the one who found the parachute and all the surprises that might be inside.

  When we got out of sight from the farmer’s house, we circled around and paused briefly to decide the best strategy to find the parachute. We decided Papa would wait at the starting point, and Dominic and I would walk out and back, slowly covering the area.

  As soon as Dominic and I started walking, I asked him about the color of the parachute and why it was important enough for Papa to ask the old man about it.

  “The Americans use different colored parachutes to identify what kind of cargo is inside. I don’t know all the different colors and what they mean, but I do know a few,” he said. “Black is the most important and the most dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “Black parachutes, from what I’ve heard — I’ve never actually found one, supposedly have radio equipment and disassembled weapons. Rifles, pistols, machine guns, hand grenades.”

  “They’re dangerous because they might explode upon landing?”

  He laughed.

  “No, no. Because if the Germans catch you with either a radio or a gun, they will execute you immediately. Especially the radio. They hate radios, more Germans have been killed because of ribellí radioing locations of German soldiers to the Allies that they take revenge upon anyone they find with a radio,” he said. His blue eyes blazed in the shade of the trees. “And if they find you with either one, radio or gun, it is not just you they will go after. Friends, family, children. No one is immune.”

  “They assume you’re spying…”

  He nodded. “Just for having those things in your possession.”

  Suddenly, I wasn’t so eager to find the parachute.

  “Red parachutes usually have medical supplies,” Dominic continued, changing the subject.

  “And yellow?” I asked.

  “The best one of all for us: food. Coffee, sugar, flour, cigarettes and even chocolate.”

  “That’s why we’re going to try to find this one?”

  “That’s why.”

  We scrambled over a large rock pile choked with weeds, possibly the remnants of a misguided bomb. I was once again amazed by the devastation the war was having on the land itself. Like the people who inhabited it, nothing was left untouched.

  As we picked our way through thick brush and the occasional rocky outcroppings, I was struck even more by the easy grace of Dominic Giancarlo. His long body moved with a fluid motion, never seeming to bring down all of his weight on his feet, constantly springing from one step to the next. Supple strength and a mind accustomed to walking in the mountains gave him that ability.

  When the going was easy, we walked side by side. When the rough path we were following narrowed, Dominic would lead the way. If we had to climb over a steep bank, he would climb over, then reach back and pull me up; I noticed how his big hands wrapped around my forearm, his fingers like iron on my skin.

  We talked as we walked, mostly about him because he seemed to know a lot about me already, having spent time with my father.

  Dominic told me about Roselli, about where he lived, and that he was the third child, with two older brothers. They, too, were in the mountains, he said, but were staying with a different group for the time being.

  “Do the men in the mountains move around much?” I asked.

  “Yes. I have been with my brothers at their hideout, and they have been with us. Our plan was to spread out and see where the best place to hide from the Germans would be, but the truth is, they’re pretty much all the same. Isolated areas of farmland where there is very little food and water, rough conditions, but thankfully, few Germans. That last bit is the most important part.”

  Dominic related to me the story of how he had managed, along with his brothers, to escape to the mountains immediately upon the Germans’ arrival. A young couple from Roselli had been on the outskirts of town late at night and heard the sound of the German vehicles approaching.

  “What were they doing, the young couple?”

  Dominic looked at me strangely, then raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh,” I said, blushing.

  He said that they had been able to warn the people of Roselli, an even smaller town than Casalveri, that the Germans were arriving and the message spread like wildfire.

  “My mother woke us up,” Dominic smiled, remembering. “She was practically screaming at us to run. She scared the hell out of us,” he laughed, rolling his eyes. “My brother Antonio took forever to wake up. Momma practically broke off one of his toes trying to get him awake. He snores so loud it’s ridiculous. I think the men hiding with him in the mountains are ready to turn him over to the Germans.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh.

  “Anyway,” he said, “Momma threw some extra clothes at us and gave us all the bread in the house and sent us on our way.”

  “She didn’t want to take any chances with her sons…”

  He nodded. “Some of the other younger men in the village didn’t make it. They got caught on their way out, and went to the front two days later. Most of them are dead now.”

  “Is your father in the mountains, too?” I asked, realizing that he had not mentioned his father at all yet. Normally I wouldn’t have brought it up, but I wanted to know everything about this young man.

  At the sound of the word “father,” Dominic’s stride hesitated. He stopped and looked me in the eye, then, as if coming to a decision, he answered.

  “My father disappeared many years ago. From what people told Momma, he was just an unhappy man. Didn’t want to work the land, and so he did what he wanted; he left.”

  “I’m sorry, Dominic, I didn’t mean to…”

  He waved a hand.

  “No, it’s all right. We did fine without him. From what Momma said, he wasn’t much help anyway.”

  We walked on for quite a while in silence. Up ahead, a distant peak continued to loom larger as we approached. It was our compass point. The old man said that if we walked
straight toward it, we should come across the parachute, it had landed directly between the old man’s farm and the mountain ahead. It was difficult to see too far ahead because the land rose and dipped so frequently, we couldn’t get a real glimpse of what lay ahead until we topped the jagged and unpredictable hills.

  We climbed a constantly shifting hill of soft clay, small rocks and thick stands of juniper bushes. Dominic went over the hill first and when I followed him, reaching the bottom, I crashed into his back. We both went down in a heap and when we stood up, there was the parachute on the ground wrapped in its thick fabric.

  There were animal tracks around it, but for the most part nothing seemed disturbed. The depression in which the parachute lay was guarded on both sides by the steep banks, and the thick grass, along with shadow, made the bright yellow less visible. It was easy to understand why it had gone unnoticed for this amount of time.

  From the way the parachute sat on the ground, it looked like the cylindrical metal tube containing the cargo had cracked on a rock and shattered into many pieces. Boxes were strewn around the small depression. One had split open and cartons of American cigarettes were spilled onto the ground.

  Dominic turned to me.

  “I’ll start bundling these things together. Go back and get your father. Hurry. We don’t have much time.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I topped out on the first rise, the one Dominic and I had fallen down together, and looked back toward where we had left Papa. I felt a small surge of fear; I hadn’t paid good enough attention to where we were going when I walked with Dominic, I was too busy thinking about him, about his hands, and lips. Stop! I told myself. It was time to concentrate, to find Papa, get the goods from the parachute, and then get back to the cabin.

  Working my way back, I hurried, hoping to find him and get back as soon as possible. I had never seen anything like the cargo inside the parachute! All that food! There was enough flour in that barrel to feed a family for a year. Not to mention the goodies: the coffee, the cigarettes, and the chocolate! Oh! I felt like telling Dominic and Papa to keep everything, but give me the chocolate.