Fear grips me. Now or then? I am seeing images that have nothing to do with this. Maybe there really were hellcats. They were waiting for me behind a wispy thicket, which I could not see in the fog: there they were, at first alluring (who said they would be toothless old women? maybe they had slits), but later they were going to point their submachine guns at me and dissolve me in a symphony of reddish holes. I am seeing images that have nothing to do with this…
Gragnola was there, and complained that I was late. I realized he was trembling. Not I. I was now in my element.
Gragnola handed me the end of a rope, and we began climbing up the Gorge.
I had the map in my head, but Gragnola kept saying oh God I’m falling, and I would reassure him. I was the leader. I knew how to make my way through the jungle among Suyodhana’s thugs. I moved my feet as if following the score of a piece of music, that must be how pianists do it-with their hands, I mean, not their feet-and I did not miss a step. But he, even though he was following me, kept stumbling. And coughing. I often had to turn around and pull him by the hand. The fog was thick, but from half a meter away we could see each other. If I pulled the rope, Gragnola would emerge from dense vapors, which seemed to dissipate all at once, and appear suddenly before me, like Lazarus throwing off his shroud.
The climb lasted a good hour, but that was about average. The only time I warned Gragnola to be careful was when we reached the boulder. If instead of going around it and rejoining the path, you mistakenly went to the left, feeling pebbles beneath your feet, you would end up in the ravine.
We reached the top, at the gap in the wall, and San Martino was a single invisible mass. We go straight, I told him, down the lane. Count at least twenty steps and we will be at the rectory door.
We knocked at the door as we had agreed: three knocks, a pause, then three more. The priest came to let us in. He was a dusty pale color, like the clematis along the roads in the summer. The eight Cossacks were there, armed like bandits and scared as children. Gragnola talked with the one who spoke Italian. He spoke it quite well, though with a bizarre accent, but Gragnola, as people do with foreigners, spoke to him in infinitives.
«You to go ahead of friends and to follow me and child. You to say to your men what I say, and they to do what I say. Understand?»
«I understand, I understand. We are ready.»
The priest, who was about to piss himself, opened the door and let us out into the lane. And in that very moment we heard, from the end of the village where the road came in, several Teutonic voices and the yelp of a dog.
«God damn it all to hell,» Gragnola said, and the priest did not even blink. «The toadies made it up here, they’ve got dogs, and dogs don’t give a rat’s ass about fog, they go by their noses. What the hell do we do now?»
The leader of the Cossacks said, «I know how they do. One dog every five men. We go just the same, maybe we meet ones without dog.»
«Rien ne va plus,» said Gragnola the learned. «To go slow. And to shoot only if I say. To prepare handkerchiefs or rags, and other ropes.» Then he explained to me: «We’ll hurry to the end of the lane and stop at the corner. If no one’s there, we’ll go right over the wall and be gone. If anyone comes and they’ve got dogs, we’re fucked. If it comes to it, we’ll shoot at them and the dogs, but it depends how many they are. If on the other hand they don’t have dogs, we’ll let them pass, come up behind them, bind their hands and stick rags in their mouths, so they can’t yell.»
«And then leave them there?»
«Yeah, right. No, we take them with us into the Gorge, there’s nothing else for it.»
He quickly explained all that again to the Cossack, who repeated it to his men.
The priest gave us some rags, and some cords from the holy vestments. Go, go, he was saying, and God protect you.
We headed down the lane. At the corner we heard German voices coming from the left, but no barks or yelps.
We pressed flat against the wall. We heard two men approaching, talking to each other, probably cursing the fact that they could not see where they were going. «Only two,» Gragnola explained with signs. «Let them pass, then on them.»
The two Germans, who had been sent to comb that area while the others took the dogs around the piazza, were going along almost on tiptoe, with their rifles pointed, but they could not even see that a lane was there, and so they passed it. The Cossacks threw themselves on the two shadows and showed that they were good at what they did. In a flash the two men were on the ground with rags in their mouths, each one held by two of those demoniacs, while a third tied their hands behind them.
«We did it,» Gragnola said. «Now you, Yambo, toss their rifles over the wall, and you, to push the Germans behind us two, down where we go.»
I was terrified, and now Gragnola became the leader. Getting through the wall was easy. Gragnola passed out the ropes. The problem was that except for the first and the last in line, each person had to have both hands occupied, one for the front rope and the other for the back rope. But if you have to push two trussed Germans, you cannot hold a rope, and for the first ten steps the group went forward by shoving, until we slipped into the first thickets.
At that point Gragnola tried to reorganize the rope system. The two who were leading the Germans each tied his rope to his prisoner’s gun belt. The two who were following each held onto his collar with his right hand, and with his left hand held onto the rope of the man behind him. But just as we were preparing to set off again, one of the Germans tripped and fell onto the guard in front of him, taking the one behind with him, and the chain was broken. The Cossacks hissed things under their breath that must have been curses in their language, but they had the good sense to do so without shouting.
One German, after the initial fall, tried to get back up and distance himself from the group. Two Cossacks began groping their way after him and might have lost him-except that he did not know where he was going either, and after a few steps he slipped and fell forward, and they had him again. In the confusion his helmet had fallen off.
The leader of the Cossacks made it clear that we should not leave it there, because if the dogs came they could follow the scent and would track us down. Only then did we realize that the second German was bareheaded. «God damn those bastards,» murmured Gragnola, «his helmet fell off him when we took him in the alley. If they get there with their dogs, they’ll have the scent!»
Nothing for it. And indeed we had gone only a few meters farther when from above we heard voices, and dogs barking. «They’ve reached the alley, the animals have sniffed the helmet, and they’re saying we’ve come this way. Stay calm and quiet. First, they have to find the gap in the wall, and if you don’t know it, it’s not easy. Second, they have to come down. If their dogs are cautious and go slow, they’ll go slow too. If the dogs go fast, they won’t be able to keep up and will fall on their asses. They don’t have you, Yambo. Go as fast as you can, let’s move.»
«I’ll try, but I’m scared.»
«You’re not scared, just nervous. Take a deep breath and move.»
I was about to piss myself like the priest, but at the same time I knew everything depended on me. My teeth were clenched, and in that moment I would rather have been Giraffone or Jojo than Romano the Legionnaire; Horace Horsecollar or Clarabelle Cow than Mickey Mouse in the House of Seven Ghosts; Signor Pampurio in his apartment than Flash Gordon in the swamps of Arboria, but when you are on the dance floor there is nothing to do but dance. I started down the Gorge as fast as I could, replaying each step in my mind.
The two prisoners were slowing us down, because with the rags in their mouths they had a hard time breathing and paused every minute. After at least fifteen minutes we came to the boulder, and I was so sure of where it was that I touched it with my outstretched hand before I could even see it. We had to stay close together as we went around it, because if anyone veered right they would come to the ledge and the ravine. The voices above us could still be heard distinctly, but it was unclear whether that was because the Germans were yelling louder to incite their reluctant dogs, or whether they had made it past the wall and
