Simon Montefiore - Red Sky at Noon

Holding the food, Fabiana stepped into the back yard and recoiled. The body of a soldier, a German, lay on the sandy ground, his mouth wide open, with greenish vomit streaked down his cheek and flies buzzing out of his agape mouth.

‘How many dead do we have?’ Malamore asked, holding a lit Africa cigarette, goggles on his forehead, patting a sweat-soaked Borgia on the withers. Under heavy fire, they had made their escape over the hill and into a Cossack village but not all his men were with him.

‘Six dead,’ replied Montefalcone.

‘And seven wounded,’ added Malamore’s young adjutant, Brambilla. ‘Two missing.’

‘ Figli di puttana! Motherfuckers!’ said Malamore.

The Kalmyks rode up. ‘Village is empty,’ they said. ‘And there’s food.’

Malamore noticed Dirlewanger was fritzing and twitching, like the drug addict he was. Malamore himself had survived many ambushes and he showed no nerves even now. ‘All right, place careful pickets all around. The partisans aren’t far away. Collect grapes and apples from those orchards. Bury the dead and dress the wounded.’

Wiping his brow, he led his squadron down into the village, riding slowly, even majestically, hunched craggily in his saddle. When he reached the priest’s house, he dismounted and sat on the verandah in an old basket chair brooding while Dirlewanger popped another Pervitin tablet, then paced up and down, his temples pulsating, and Montefalcone watched him, sipping from a flask – both awaiting further orders as the windows shook from the big guns.

Malamore was chain-smoking and took a swig of cognac. The partisans had ambushed them from their flank on the adjacent hill, and he knew it was his fault. Fabiana had distracted him and he had watched her carefully when they were close to them. She had looked as if she was waiting for an opportunity to escape. The Russian had the weapons. Still it nagged at him. Could she be collaborating with the Russian Jew? Could they even be… no, that was impossible.

Dirlewanger started fiddling with his necklace of trophies, his eyes glittering like red-rimmed pins. ‘Let us shoot every Russian we can find.’

‘It’s lucky these villages are already deserted,’ answered Montefalcone. ‘Perhaps they knew you were coming.’

‘Consul, sir,’ said Brambilla from the doorway. ‘A Wehrmacht captain is here to see you.’

Fabiana chose a house far from the crone’s, in the midst of the village, hoping this would make them less easy to find. They took the horses into the barn with them and closed the door. It was full of hay – and a single old nag, probably a family favourite, abandoned there, looked very pleased to see them. Benya lay on the ground.

‘You must eat more,’ Fabiana told him, and she fed him the crone’s bread and gruel, cherries and the last of the honeycomb. After they had both eaten, they felt better but they were exhausted. It was late afternoon but they agreed not to light a lantern or a cooking fire lest it be the only light in the village, visible from miles away. Benya felt they were a whisper from sudden death, and nothing could be postponed any more.

For a long time they said nothing, both aware they had been run to earth. The hunters were close, yet the horses could go no further, and they themselves were too tired even to put their boots in their stirrups yet alone ride. They might have this night together, or Malamore and his men could burst in at any moment. Benya listened for the whinny of a horse, the creaking of a gate, the clacket of spurs. A wolf started to howl somewhere on the steppe. What had alarmed it? He half expected to hear the voices calling: ‘Send out the nurse. She at least can live!’

Finally he sighed and said, ‘We both know what must happen now.’ He knew that if he survived, he could never admit to ever having known her. She was one of the Fascist invaders fighting on the Nazi side and their very acquaintance, yet alone a physical relationship, would be regarded by the Russian side as treason: both would be shot instantly. To her own side, she had abetted and slept with a Jew, a Russian, a Communist. If they remained together, they would die together. It was not the love that was doomed but the fatal lovers themselves. Their only hope was to part and for him to wipe every relic of her existence out of his life.

She nodded. ‘How long have the bandits in love known each other?’ she asked.

‘Studying history again?’ He smiled sadly. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know, Il Primo? It’s exactly eighty-six hours. Is that need to measure love in every way, the difference between a man and a woman? I think so.’

Night was falling and it was dark in the barn. ‘ Mia adorata ,’ he said, ‘don’t you think sometimes you can live for years and they can count for nothing and then there are special times when every second is so rich, so priceless, so deep that we live with such intensity that every minute counts fivefold, tenfold, a thousandfold. And we call that time “Love”. Sometimes one night is a lifetime.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. That’s what this is.’

A dog barked in the village, and Benya caught his breath. Were the Fascists already surrounding the house? He could just see the glaze of her eyes, dark now, catching the very last light. The air changed between them and suddenly he was overcome and he knew she was too. They had been linked from the moment they had first seen each other after she had removed the bullet. Now the space between them seemed to be crisscrossed with golden threads – like the dew on spiderwebs at dawn. How often does this happen in a lifetime?

Benya reached out for her in the darkness and her hand was there, waiting for him, and he put her fingers against his mouth and kissed them. As she followed the paths of the tears on his face, she started to cry out loud like a child. For a moment he wanted to quieten her – their pursuers would find them – but then he didn’t care any more. Her cries were, he thought, the sound of a life lived intensely and sensitively amidst the cruellest times. Then she was on her knees, holding his face, kissing him with those wide lips with their twist, their lovemaking like the final spasm of a dying body, flotsam on a wave, dust lost in dust.

‘There’s something I’ve got to tell you,’ she said when they were both still, on the edge of a spiky, fluttering mockery of sleep. ‘Something about my past.’

Was she already Malamore’s mistress? Benya wondered.

‘It’s about my husband.’

‘Malamore killed him during that skirmish. I know.’

He could feel her tension in the darkness.

‘You think too well of me,’ she whispered.

‘What are you saying, mia cara ?’

‘Don’t you see?’

‘It was you ?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘During the fighting in the village, Ippolito was panicking; and somehow I annoyed him and he slapped me, knocked me down. When I fell, his holster was right in front of me and I grabbed his Beretta, and I shot him right there. In the heart. He said nothing, just stared at me with such surprise and a sort of awe, and then… and then he died in front of me. The shooting was getting closer and I sprinted behind the cottages through the gardens and made it to where our troops were.’ She took a deep breath, shivering as she remembered. ‘I had to tell you. So you knew who I was.’

A pause.

‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ she said. ‘ Che stupida. ’

Benya’s mind was thrumming. What did this mean? Had she lied to him? What else was she hiding? Was she a murderess? He saw beneath her mantle of civilized velvet, a seam of the fiercest animal spirit. She had loved him and saved his life; and her impulsive deeds of kindness and courage filled him with wonder at her, and that was all that mattered to him. ‘It changes nothing,’ he said after a moment.