I'm Staying Here by Marco Balzano

Author:Marco Balzano [Balzano, Marco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789545104
Publisher: Head of Zeus

9

One morning some men came to ask why I wasn’t coming back to teach. They asked if I was opposed to the Nazi school.

‘Absolutely not,’ I said.

I’d only just got rid of them when a car stopped outside the farm. Two officers asked for Erich Hauser. I had left the door open and the sun was shining through the house. My cardigan was unbuttoned and one of the officers looked me up and down, from my dressing gown to my calves.

‘I’ll send him to the barracks. Right now he’s out with the animals.’

‘Why hasn’t he enrolled as a volunteer?’

‘Because of me,’ I replied. ‘I’m not well. We decided that our son would enlist and my husband would stay here. He’s already fought for two years; he came back from Greece wounded.’

They checked their list to see if Michael had really signed up and on finding his name they softened a little.

Erich went to the stables to kill the calf. He shot it with a pistol he’d brought back from the front. He skinned the animal and hung the meat up to drain. The cows kicked and bellowed loudly. They were scared for the whole day. Erich brought the meat into the house and I cut it up in pieces and put it in glass jars. A slice of meat, a handful of salt, just like that, until the meat was finished and so was the salt. He led the three cows to his friend Florian’s farm, and left the sheep with another farmer called Ludwig. He asked them to keep them, making up an excuse. They would understand the next day. When he came back in the evening I started frying the meat in butter. I poured the fat over our polenta and we ate. We ate until we were sick. As I looked at the clusters of stars in the night sky, I lost the sense that any of this was real: our escape to the mountains, Ma’s move to Peppi’s in Sondrio. The fact that my son was a Nazi.

‘I worry that they’ll be angry with Michael,’ I said.

‘I worry that Michael will send the Nazis after us.’

‘Stop saying such things. He won’t do that.’

‘And they won’t do anything to him apart from ask a few questions.’

I cleared the table. Washed the dishes in the sink and cleaned the sideboard, the furniture, and finally the floor.

‘Why are you wearing yourself out like that?’ Erich asked. ‘They’ll trash the farm from top to bottom, maybe even burn it. There’s no point in leaving it clean.’

‘Well, I’ll leave it clean anyway.’

Erich shrugged and then put some more things in the bag. He made two sacks of straw for us to sleep in. I went from room to room, making sure everything was in order. I needed to believe we would be returning. That Ma would come back and do her knitting here again, needles at her armpits. Everyone would come home. Peppi and his wife, Irene, the young boys from the village who’d been recruited by the Nazis, Michael, who’d be reconciled with Erich.

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