The roof creaks above him, protesting from the weight of water. And somewhere within the house he senses a change. He is not alone. It wasn’t the thunder that woke him, but the door blowing shut—the door he had closed earlier.
It has been rare in recent years that he has not been aware of every movement around him in the night, senses heightened since his first Italian campaign in the deserts of North Africa. But his body desperately craves rest, something lately he finds difficult to fight against, despite the rawness of his nerves that may never disappear. He reaches out toward the dark space that holds his bag, and his hand finds an empty patch of floor. Someone has entered the room and seen them both sleeping. Someone now has his things.
Stefano steps cautiously and swiftly out to the landing to see a faint glow from the floor below, which grows stronger closer to the bottom of the steps and near the open doorway of the kitchen to his right. He stands back a foot from the entrance. The living area to his left is dark and empty, no signs of movement. He moves slowly to peer into the kitchen, but the tip of a rifle, just inches from his face, prevents this, the weapon pushed farther toward him, forcing him to take a step backward. The bearer of the rifle is tall like Stefano, though fair. He appears ominously larger from the doorway, blocking out most of the light now behind him.
Instinctively, Stefano puts his hands in the air. The fair man remains very still, the rifle unmoving, raised toward Stefano.
“What are you doing here?” asks the man in German, louder above the rain.
“Trying to sleep,” replies Stefano in the defeated language. There were many things he could have said, but this seemed the most reasonable.
Behind the man with the rifle, in the dim yellow light of a lantern, Stefano can see his bag unopened on the table. He assumes the man has not yet had time to examine its contents.
“Give me a proper answer.”
“I am on my way home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Italy.”
“You are a long way from there.”
“I came from a hospital in the North,” answers Stefano.
“Why did you choose this house?” he asks. “Out of all the houses to sleep in.”
“It was pure chance. I did not want to sleep near the main road, and the path led me here. I was going to sleep in the shed behind, but it looked too broken with rain about to fall.”
“Roll up your sleeves.”
Stefano does so slowly. It always comes down to this. What you are, not who you are, and the numbers on your arm.
“Which prison?” asks the German.
“Sachsenhausen.”
“Were you a deserter?”
“No. I was a soldier in the Italian army. I left Italy to join the German army in the North when I realized that the rest of Italy would shortly fall into Allied hands.”
“Why were you put in prison?”
“They made a mistake.”
“You sound like a deserter to me.”
The German continues to stand very still. The rifle does not waver.
“The war is over,” says Stefano calmly, holding back breaths. “And you would have seen that I have a child with me.”
In the moment of silence, Stefano wonders if this is where it will end for him, and he does not imagine his own death but that of others, of those he has let down. Of the fruitless, senseless way that death might roam.
The fair man lowers the gun, and Stefano breathes out silently, with his brain still wired with fear and memories stretching beyond the ransacked house.
“It doesn’t matter now, yes?” says the man lightly. “It doesn’t matter what we were before the war ended.”
“I want my bag.”
“Of course,” the man says, and steps aside to allow Stefano room to pass.
He does not move straightaway but watches the eyes and movements of the other man. Stefano is used to tricks. He trusted someone once—someone close to him—and others ended up dead.
The fair man rests the rifle against the wall. “There are no bullets in it anyway. But I cannot be too careful. People still want to harm me.”
Stefano walks past him to the table to examine his bag. He unzips it, looks briefly inside, then zips it up again.
“Is the child yours?” the man asks.
“I found the boy on the side of the road, his mother dead.”
“And why would you take him if you are going to Italy?”
“I was trying to find him a home.”
The fair man is thoughtful, silent for a moment, perhaps attempting to find sense in such a task, which Stefano himself has yet to find. Stefano wonders briefly if he would have been woken, perhaps killed, if not for the child asleep nearby.
“My name is Erich. I was a German soldier,” the other man says, “captured by the Russians and then released.”
“Released?” says Stefano.
“I agree it sounds unbelievable. I was captured before the end of the war. I helped them with information. For that I was rewarded. It does not mean I was let off lightly. I had to pay for my sins.” He does not elaborate, nor does Stefano query. They are strangers yet. “An Italian soldier?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a name?”
“Stefano,” he says, viewing Erich carefully as the German moves away to begin clearing pieces of wood that lie strewn across the kitchen floor. He is slightly taller than Stefano, narrower across the chest. Fair hair that is almost white, his skin darkly tanned from months in the sun. It is difficult to see the eyes, in the dim light. He suspects they are much lighter than they appear.
“Do you live here?” Stefano asks.
“Yes. Sometimes.”
And then as if Erich has remembered where he is, he explains the house. “It is bad, yes? Beggars, passersby, probably foreign, come here to spend a night. It is disappointing what they do to the place while they are here, while I am elsewhere.”
Stefano remembers the violence against the mattress, the picture. It seemed personal to him.
“We should leave,” says Stefano suddenly.
“In this weather? I won’t try and kill you in your sleep. If I wanted you dead, you would be by now.”
Stefano is wondering what he missed when he came in. Was he here all the time? Was he watching?
Erich stamps the floor in places until he hears a hollow sound. With a fork that he has taken from a drawer, he pokes at a board of wood on the floor until it shifts from its position. He lifts away several planks, reaches his arm deeply into the hole to retrieve a metal pail, then tilts it to show Stefano the contents. Inside is a bottle with amber liquid and a small brown paper bag.
Erich smells the small package and passes it to Stefano who does the same.
“It is coffee. Pure,” says Erich.
“Did you put it there?”
Erich does not look at Stefano while he opens the bottle.
“No. I just know how people think. And they are not much different from one another. They find the same places to hide things.”
Erich puts his nose to the neck of the bottle, and Stefano wonders why squatters would bother to hide these things.
“Whiskey. Good whiskey,” he says, this time directly to Stefano, rather than to the spaces around him. From his smile, he is clearly pleased with the find. He sits on the floor and leans back against the table leg.
“What kind of soldier were you?” asks Stefano.
“A soldier on the front line . . . After we destroyed our enemies, we were often sent into homes to check for people hiding. It was either the floor or the ceiling. If we didn’t find people, it was usually items. The spaces where they hid things were usually in rooms where they stood, as if by standing on top of their precious items they could protect them. They were wrong.”
Stefano wants to ask what happened to the people who were hiding, but he already knows the answer.
“We were the ones to be sacrificed if we were ambushed, blown up,” says Erich. “I was part of a group that was expendable. It wasn’t my choice.”
Erich takes a swig and passes the bottle to Stefano, who sits down also, somewhat reluctantly, with his back against the wall. He is close enough to stretch and reach for the bottle, but he keeps what he thinks is a safe distance between them.