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

calling the others, he couldn’t understand why. And, with all the partisans round him shooting their guns in the air and laughing so hard they rolled about on their beds, Natale burst into tears like a child.
    One morning the Germans all woke at once: they came packed in trucks and beat the area bush by bush. Woken by the gunfire, Blondie was too late getting out and went down under a burst of machine-gun bullets in the middle of the meadow. Natale survived by crouching in a bush, sticking his head in the ground every time a bullet whistled by. After Blondie’s death, the band broke up: some died, some were caught, some betrayed others and changed sides, some went on wandering about the area surviving one search after another, some joined the brigades up in the mountains.
    Natale joined the brigades. Life was tougher in the mountains: Natale’s job was to walk from one valley to the next, loaded like a mule, to take turns on watch and on fatigue duty; it was like being a soldier again, a hundred times worse and a hundred times better. And the partisans who laughed at him and mocked him were like the soldiers who’d laughed and mocked him in the army, yet different too, in a way he would surely have understood had it not been for that flurry of ducks in his skull.
    He came to understand it all when he found himself with the Germans just beneath him climbing the road to the Goletta and firing their flamethrowers into the bushes. Stretched out on the ground, he started to fire shot after shot and he understood why he was doing it. He understood that those men down there were the militiamen who had arrested him because his papers weren’t in order, they were the Todt guards marking down his hours, they were the orderly who made him clean the latrines, they were all these things at once but they were also the farmer who made him sweat the week long before he was called up, they were the boys who had tripped him on the pavement the time he went into town for the fair, and they were his father too, the time he’d shown him the back of his hand. They were even Margherita, Margherita who was on the point of going with him, then had turned against him, not exactly Margherita but whatever it was that had made Margherita turn against him: this thought was even more difficult than the others, but at that moment he understood. Then he thought about why those men down there were firing at him, shouting at him, falling under his shots. And he understood that they were men like him beaten by their fathers as children, set to work by farmers, mocked by orderlies, and now they were taking it out on him; it was crazy of them to take it out on him, he had nothing to do with it, and that was why he was firing at them, but if they had all been on his side he wouldn’t have been firing at them but at others, he wasn’t sure who, and Margherita would have gone with him. But how his enemies came to be these people and those, good and bad, like him and against him; why he was here, in the right, they there, in the wrong, this Natale could not understand: it was the flight of ducks; that’s what it was, no more, no less.
    Just a few days before the end of the war, the English decided to drop things by parachute. The partisans walked to Piedmont, they marched for two days and lit fires at night in the middle of the fields. The English dropped overcoats with gold buttons, but it was already spring, and bundles of old Italian rifles from the first African war. The partisans picked them up and pranced wildly round the fire like so many Negroes. Natale danced and shouted amongst them, and was happy.

Love Far from Home
    Occasionally a train sets off along the seafront and on that train there’s me, leaving. Because I don’t want to stay in my sleepy, cabbage-patch village, puzzling out the licence plates of out-of-town cars like a kid down from the mountains sitting on the wall of a bridge. I’m off, bye bye village.
    In the world, beyond my