Adam Foulds - In the Wolf's Mouth

At dinner that night the fighting was very close. They sat down at the walnut table to the accompaniment of crackling guns. Luisa’s father’s fear was so great that he could not show any sign of it at all. If he once flinched or moaned, he would have crumpled to the floor and crawled away to the cellarage. As it was, he walked in like someone balancing a book on his head and sat with his eyes very wide and unseeing. Luisa found his face very funny. Graziana was also amusing her — her trembling, whimpering progress around the table with the soup tureen. When she started whispering prayers to herself as she ladled out stuttering quantities of soup, Luisa openly laughed.

‘I find it rather sinister,’ the Prince said once Graziana had withdrawn, ‘the way you seem to be enjoying this warfare so much.’

Luisa didn’t say anything.

‘Particularly,’ the Prince went on, ‘given how many friends you have among the Fascists.’

‘I have none. I know some Fascists. That’s a different thing. I’m pleased things are changing. I want the Germans gone.’

The Prince paused with his spoon halfway to his lips and closed his eyes at the sound of artillery shells. ‘But consider how they are changing. I’m not sure if you understand that this is quite real.’

‘That is precisely what I like about it.’

It had taken longer than expected but the British had taken the east of the island and were heading west. Cirò Albanese was with the Americans who were racing to get there first, led by General Patton. They did. In Palermo people came out and cheered. Children stood on piles of rubble shouting and waving. They ran up to the jeeps and trucks. Cirò smiled and waved at them. Like the others, he threw out cigarettes and coins and gum and the children dived for them.

Any fool would have realised that the Strait of Messina had to be cut off but no fool had and the Nazis simply poured north out of the top of the island and up into Italy. They’d be waiting for the next invasion coming after them.

So the fighting was done in Sicily. Ruins and corpses. An apparently grateful population in a state of chaos it was now Will’s duty to calm and clarify. The Allied Military Government was hastening into position and Will was with several others in the wrong place. Deploying the extraordinary powers of their identity cards, they got themselves transport to Palermo.

Having identified the headquarters, Will decided to delay a little longer and go for a stroll. He walked out among the American soldiers and the sunshine, the locals who were silent and stared and the beggars who approached. He looked around for the oriental beauty and the repellent pushing middle classes but he didn’t see them.

Palermo looked like a grand old opera set of a place. There were avenues interrupted with massive piles of rubble where bombs had fallen. Pigeons spluttered from one balcony to another. There was a huge bomb crater near the encrusted cathedral. Hundreds had died there apparently. People in Palermo were used to crowding together. Backstage, so to speak, behind the tall façades, Will discovered a sordid network of streets infested with people watching him go by or calling out to him. Voices shouted from windows overhead. People beckoned and begged. He turned a corner and a small boy ran out to him, fleeing his raging father, a thin man in an undershirt with muscles jumping in his arms as he gesticulated and swore. The boy clung to Will, hiding behind him, pulling at his hand, squirming, while the man shouted. Others were watching. Embarrassed, Will tried to calm the man with an authoritatively raised voice and good Italian but he was too wild. He lunged forwards, bumping Will as he tried to grab hold of the boy who now ran. Will saw him escape, his light bare feet striking the dirty ground. The man, giving up, walked away with his hands in his pockets. It was only later, back in the AMGOT building, that Will discovered his wallet was missing and pieced together what had happened. He was furious and could do nothing.

The thieves had better spend the money quickly. When the new temporary currency was issued, it wouldn’t be worth anything. A couple of Americans lent Will some cash. They went out together to drink and found a hot, wood-panelled place with sour red wine and, annoyingly, an accordionist. Afterwards, the two Americans, who had been in Palermo for a few days, led Will to a kind of courtyard which might partly have been a gap created by a bomb; certainly there was a heap of rubble on one side. The place was gloomy. Light came from the late evening sky and a few candles in glass jars. Little groups of glowing cigarettes hovered and circled together like flies. Women were standing by small piles of tinned foods. The smokers were soldiers. The atmosphere was quiet and serious, disrupted now and again by outbreaks of laughter or grunts and sighs. The Americans Will was with watched his face as he decoded the scene and noticed the figures on the ground. The soldiers were bringing food in exchange for sex. Some had the sex standing up, the soldiers crumpling into the women as though blown helplessly by a gale or bending the women over and shagging them from behind, some even swigging from bottles at the same time as they thrust back and forth. Some lay on the ground and struggled. There was a particularly large group waiting for one woman who proved to be an astonishingly beautiful girl of about eighteen, improbably beautiful, a freak of nature, rich hair around her shoulders, large, soft lips, long-lashed, suffering eyes. ‘Well, her family will be all right,’ Will commented as another soldier put a can on her pile and she wiped her mouth with her wrist then lifted her skirt. The Americans said nothing. They just watched.

No one was stopping this. Will felt himself alone among these animals, alone with his intellect and bitter thoughts. The drink in him made his inner monologue loud and polemical. He was excoriating this depravity to some senior ranking figure, and arrogating the responsibility for dealing with it. Meanwhile, he remembered for some reason the shipload of prosthetic limbs, pilfered from, in the wrong place. Battle was the same. No rules, no limits. Just acting. Just animals. And this was the whole thing. You killed people with guns and machines, smashed homes to bits, and in the ruins you fucked hungry survivors in exchange for tins of meat. Will’s anger and disgust made him drunk. Everything was floating, everything was sliding apart. Then, catching his breath, he dwindled back into himself and felt very bleak. Order would have to be imposed. He would have to do it.

‘I’m going,’ he announced suddenly and walked away. The night air sobered him, as did the concentration required to find his way back. He thought he saw rats running in the darkness. He felt a mawkish solidarity with a starved-looking cat he saw stepping carefully over rubbish.

Back in his room, his bedside table presented him with a choice between De Rerum Natura and The Wind in the Willows . Will had had enough of random collisions and thoughtless matter. He stretched the sheet over his knees and tucked it under his waist and as high up his chest as he could manage so that he was tightly cinched to the bed. He’d done this as a child. It made him feel neat and prepared. His copy of The Wind in the Willows was nice to handle, a humble edition with covers of stiff blue board that were rounded at the corners with use. The paper was soft, golden, mothy. The book smelled of wood. Will lit a cigarette and looked around for a section to read.

Late in the evening, tired and happy and miles from home, they drew up on a remote common far from habitations, turned the horse loose to graze, and ate their simple supper sitting on the grass by the side of the cart. Toad talked big about all he was going to do in the days to come, while stars grew fuller and larger around them, and a yellow moon, appearing suddenly and silently from nowhere in particular, came to keep them company and listen to their talk. At last they turned into their little bunks in the cart; and Toad, kicking out his legs, sleepily said, ‘Well, good night, you fellows! This is the real life for a gentleman! Talk about your old river!’