Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

are they? Where are they?’ Natale saw the stick when it was already high above his head, coming down on him. It was like a flock of ducks exploding in his brain; a flash of red burned deep in his skull. He fell in a pool of cottonwool, numb to the world.
    One of the militiamen who had been in league with them from the beginning, shouted: ‘What have you done? He was a prisoner!’ Immediately people were fussing round the man on the ground whose head was bleeding. The man with the stick was at a loss: ‘How was I to know? With those Fascist trousers he was wearing!’
    Now they had to hurry, the Fascist reinforcements might arrive any moment. The thing was to get the machine-guns, the magazines, the bombs, burn the rest, especially the documents; every couple of minutes someone went to say a word to the hostages: ‘We’re going, are you coming?’ But they were in a frenzy: the general was wandering round the cell in his nightshirt. ‘I’ll get dressed now,’ he said. The pharmacist with the anarchist’s neckscarf was asking the priest for advice. But the lawyer, a woman, was up and ready.
    Then they had to keep an eye on the militiamen they’d taken prisoner, two old men in plus-fours who kept getting in the way talking about their families and children, and the sergeant silent in the corner, his face thick with yellow veins.
    In the end the general began to say that they were there as hostages, that they were sure to be freed soon, whereas it was hard to say how things would turn out if they went with the partisan. The lawyer, around thirty and well-endowed, would have liked to join the partisans, but the priest and the pharmacist agreed with the general and they all stayed.
    The clock was striking two in the morning when the partisans headed off for the mountains, some one way, some the other, taking the two guards who’d helped them get in, a few boys freed from the cells and the three Fascist prisoners shoved along with machine-guns in their backs. The tall man with the stick wrapped the wounded man’s head in a towel and carried him on his back.
    They had just slipped out when they heard shooting from the other side of town. It was that idiot Gek, in the middle of the piazza, firing bursts into the air so that the Fascists would run there first and waste time.
    At the camp the only disinfectant was sulphonamide cream for leg rashes: to fill the hole Natale had in his head would have taken the whole tube. In the morning two men were sent down for medicine to a doctor evacuated from the town.
    Word got around, people were pleased at the night attack on the militiamen’s barracks; during the day the partisans had managed to get enough supplies to give him disinfectant douches on his skull and make him a turban of gauze, plasters and bandages. But with eyes closed and mouth open, Natale was still dead to the world, and they couldn’t tell if he was groaning or snoring. Then, around that point in his skull still so atrociously alive, colours and sensations gradually began to form, but each time it was a wrench right inside his head, a flight of ducks in his eyes, so that he ground his teeth and muttered something in groans. The next day, Paulin, who was cook, nurse and gravedigger, gave them the good news: ‘He’s getting better! He cursed!’
    After the curses came hunger; he began to pour whole mess tins of minestrone into his belly as if he were drinking it, spilling it all over himself. Then he smiled, with a round blissful animal face, in the midst of bandages and plasters, mumbling something, God knew what.
    ‘What language does he speak?’ the others asked, watching him. ‘Where is he from?’
    ‘Ask him yourselves,’ answered his old prison-mates and the ex-guards. ‘Hey, you, where are you from?’ Natale half opened his eyes to think, but then let out a groan and went back to grunting things the others couldn’t understand.
    ‘Has he gone crazy,’ asked the blond man, who was in charge,