Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

‘What do you think?’ asked her nanny – but Svetlana was already writing back.

Five miles away from the grasslands where Benya and his comrades had met up with the Soviet partisans was the hamlet of Radzillovo, which had become a safe little corner of Italy, complete with its tastes and clothes and even its songs, right in the midst of the Russian steppe.

Sitting in the shade of a fruit-laden cherry tree behind a Russian cottage painted in the bright colours of these Cossack homesteads, Nurse Fabiana Bacigalupe closed her eyes and imagined she was home in Venice and had not just suffered a terrible loss.

The heat was soothing and out of the kitchen came the delicious aroma of garlic and coffee and the voice of the lieutenant singing his favourite Piedmontese song, ‘In the shadow of a bush slept a pretty shepherdess’, as he and others in the unit cooked up their polenta, chatting in their different Italian dialects about girls, love, pasta, wine and war. On pasta, it was simple: food was their first solace for being sent to fight in this war and the lieutenant’s rye-grinding contraption allowed them to make perfect penne and sometimes polenta. Fabiana had shown them how to grind real coffee beans in a steel helmet – ‘ Perfetto! ’ they cried – and this had made her even more alluring in their eyes – if that was possible. On war, she could hear them loudly grumbling why were they in Russia at all? Mussolini had sent 235,000 Italians to fight in Hitler’s war and only the most fanatical Fascists, like their commander Colonel Malamore and his élite legions of Blackshirts, believed this crazy war was a good idea or embraced the Nazis’ racial ideas. They had been inserted into Hitler’s Army Group B for this summer offensive, and the Russians had collapsed so fast it had been a bit of a holiday. Fabiana’s units had not lost a man until two days ago when a squadron of wild Russian Cossacks had suddenly fallen on them and driven them out of their village with the loss of several men including Ippolito Bacigalupe, Fabiana’s husband.

‘Do you think the principessa is OK? She seems quiet!’

Fabiana smiled as the men’s voices dropped to stage whispers as they discussed her.

‘Of course she’s quiet! She lost her husband—’

‘But he treated her badly. I heard him slap her once and she had a black eye next day.’

‘Now she’s sad; I saw her crying; she’s a widow and we have to look after her.’

‘Don’t worry about her. Colonel Malamore will marry her if he can… but what would you give for a kiss from her?’

‘A hundred lashes!’ said one voice.

‘Demotion. One rank for a kiss but for a full night, a long night, I’d happily go to the blockhouse for a year!’

‘ Ottimo! Delizioso! ’ She listened to them laughing, somewhat shocked by this, unsure if she was amused or not.

‘Tell me what the principessa is going to do now? Shall we take her a taste of something? The polenta? Let’s see!’

Fabiana was no princess – she was the daughter of a teacher – but she also wondered what on earth she was going to do now. Until two days ago, the war had been somewhat boring and everything had seemed simpler. She had married her husband, Major Ippolito Bacigalupe, back in Venice, and when he was sent to Russia, she had rashly volunteered to serve as a nurse at the front. She could have stayed in Venice and worked at the hospital but she had come to be with him and to see Russia – this was the sort of woman she was.

She soon became the favourite of her husband’s entire unit. They were respectful to her – she was after all their major’s wife – but they discussed (in those loud whispers) what on earth she was doing with this dapper but short-tempered popinjay (whom they nicknamed ‘Il Duce’ after Mussolini – not a compliment) and how to rescue her from his tempers.

The village they stayed in had been charming: blue and red cottages set in a sea of golden corn, black-faced sunflowers and high steppe grass. Then came the day of the charge. They had been cooking polenta and roast goose in the priest’s house and they had seen the dust rising in the rosy dawn and had heard of a suicidal charge by a Russian penal battalion against their own Savoy Celere cavalry, but Fabiana’s husband had been certain that the Germans had wiped them out – until they heard the drumming of charging cavalry, then the clatter of hooves on stone and the thwang of bullets. One of the Kalmyk scouts had ridden fast into the village and reined in his little horse so hard it fell to its knees, shouting that the Cossacks were coming. A pig had run squealing down the street; a camel had broken loose, nuzzing loudly; ‘ Pronti a fare fuoco! Prepare to fire!’ her husband had ordered the men, who pointed the Breda heavy machine guns out of the windows, trying to keep the Cossacks at bay just long enough to allow them to retreat. ‘ Madonna santa ,’ he shouted. ‘ Muovetevi, ragazzi! Move it, boys!’ Fabiana had seen an officer of the Bersagalieri shot down in front of her, and two Savoy cavalrymen had been dragged through the village behind their horses. Then spikes of sunlight had glimmered through the cloud of dust, their swords just streaks of bedazzlement, and a horde of riders emerged out of the haze performing crazy acts of horsemanship – she had even observed some Cossacks slipping to their horses’ side to fire; others had halted and then stood up, one boot in their stirrup and another on the saddle to shoot. And somehow in the chaos, as they were waiting in a doorway to jump into the Fiat and Bianchi trucks, one neat bullet in the chest had killed her husband… and they had had to leave his body in the village.

Much later, Benya Golden would ask Fabiana what she thought when she saw those Cossacks standing in their stirrups, sabres glinting above their heads, mouths open, yelling to hell, and she threw her head back and laughed: ‘What did I think? Prepare to die! Santissima madre di Dio! ’

Now she sat in the garden here and tried to collect herself. She loved to read and she had her books, Leopardi and Petrarca, and Fogazzaro. She was listening to the men in the house when she heard the brisk clip-clop of horses. She stood up and looked out down the lane: it was her commander, Malamore, with a thin German officer, his uniform bearing the lightning runes, and an escort of Cossack and Kalmyk collaborators, all in German uniforms.

Malamore dismounted stiffly from his magnificent sorrel stallion with a ching of spurs and, straightening up, he saluted her. She saluted back. He was their colonel, and he had always made it obvious that he was her admirer, even when her husband had been standing, seething with indignation, right beside her.

He came through the gate and stood looking at her, in no hurry to talk. Malamore was not afraid of silences and he was accustomed to death, and she was a little frightened of him.

‘How are you feeling, Nurse Bacigalupe?’ he asked, removing his fez.

‘Still shocked, consul,’ she replied with a salute and a twist in her ghost of a smile. The way she said ‘ console ’ – using his Blackshirt rank, designed by Mussolini to evoke the Roman Empire – made her hauteur obvious.

‘I am sorry for your loss,’ he said, bowing. ‘This is the message I bring from the Blackshirts.’

She showed him to the other chair in the garden. When he sat, his britches, his high boots, his very bones seemed to creak. In the light, his skin was scaly and rough, and she thought it was like magma that had dried centuries ago. The heat was suffocating and he ran his hand over his grey buzzcut; he offered her a cigarette and took one himself. He lit hers and then his. Butchery and the African sun had hardened him into a sort of fossil.