To Find a Mountain

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 clearly.

“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.