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Chapter 1 - Barbed Wire Disease
It is less than twelve hours since he arrived and already he has a new name. They call him Joe Lazarus. For half a minute he is put out. Then he sees it is a way for them to include him. Giuseppe Lazaro is not a difficult name to pronounce but how can he judge what is difficult to an Australian tongue? Vincenzo is happy to be Vince instead of Enzo but Carlo is incensed and will not answer to Charlie. Giuseppe decides that a change of name is no sacrifice if it means that he can be released into the world.
It is dawn. He has left the warmth of his bed to explore his new home. He is leaning against a strainer post in the crisp air looking across the paddock to a stand of shiny trees - slim, straight trees around ten metres high with shiny green trunks that spiral like corkscrews, trees he will learn to call gimlets. He can be happy in a place that can create such an elegant structure to make a tree strong. Because he is an engineer, he knows that people invent very little. They observe and copy. He’s had to be a close observer of people in the last two years. Closer than he would have chosen. He needs space and peace now and is willing to work hard to have it. In the wide, beige grassland before him he sees promise. At last he can think about the events that brought him here with a quiet mind.
He remembers the relief and disbelief. It is January 5th, 1941. General Bergonzole has surrendered. They are captured. Forty five thousand Italian soldiers and their groaning wounded. Giuseppe is not thinking of right and wrong. He is not even thinking of survival. He is thinking only of an end to the carnage, and of the heart and lungs of his sergeant that he scraped from the shoulder of his great coat and of the lies he will invent for parents of dead sons, erasing terror and shattered flesh and faeces and hours of slow unattended agony. He has lost all but three of the men in his platoon. Before they died, they had their brief and bloody share of killing. For three days no one rested, except the dead. The living slept on their feet.
North Africa is obliteration. First by sandstorms then by war. They scorned the safety of home for this. They have come to the moon and been captured in a meteorite storm not by green men but by Martians who are taking them back to their outer kingdom. Or else it is true that in the first two months of 1941, one hundred and thirty thousand Italian soldiers have been taken prisoner. The North African Division, all of it. Giuseppe’s battalion was captured by Australians at the Battle of Bardia, on the border of Egypt and Libya. Mussolini called the Australians barbarians, in a broadcast to the troops from Rome and said that they numbered a quarter of a million. There were no more than eight thousand. Mussolini had become an unreliable source of information. This did not surprise Giuseppe. It did not appear to surprise anyone.
The British will have to remove them from North Africa before Germany invades. Most will go to India, and the rest will make a long and shameful journey to Australia. The men fear imprisonment by a people whose soldiers are fierce and bloodthirsty. Giuseppe tells them that Australians are Europeans like themselves and that the Aborigines are peaceful and few. Families from his mountain have been sacrificing the youth of their sons to Australia for a hundred years. They spend their good years excavating mines or logging forests to send money home. He is not curious about Australia. He knows it is a rough place of rock and ragged bushland, but he will not miss the dust storms of the Libyan desert. He will miss the distant Bedou caravans and the plovers in the sage. There are things that stay in the heart.
The three days of battle also stay, in a waking nightmare. Tall Australians coming at them in never ending waves through machine gun fire. “Bullet proof vests,” his men shout. Leather vests, they find when they thrust with their bayonets. We cannot lose this, he thinks, even now reliving it. We are too well entrenched, and reinforced, our minefields impenetrable. They mow them down but they still come to kill them.
Filippo, his friend and fellow Lieutenant, lost his platoon, every last man and has not been able to wash the blood of his men from his hands. The guilt of survival overpowered him, or the shame, or something Giuseppe said or failed to say. In the POW camp, Filippo painted faces that delighted with their likeness but shocked in their exposure of the soul, the sitter’s and the artist’s. His own face was the most interesting. His hair was limp and fair and straight and beneath it shone grey eyes of such warmth and faith. His cheekbones showed the angles of his sensitivity
“What do you know, Giuseppe?” he would ask.
“Nothing at all, Lippo,”
“I will tell you something.” And he would remember something his grandmother had told him. “Sarebbe bello aver amici anche all’inferno.” It is always good to have your friends with you in hell. It wasn’t hell, more like purgatory for Giuseppe but it was good to have Lippo there. Or he would tell Giuseppe about an artist unknown to him: Kokoschka, de Chirico, Tuculescu. He x-rayed personalities with scientific disinterest but he leaned close when they spoke in order to know their ways and wants. He bought grappa with his sketches. He was taken to hospital with food poisoning. The doctor called it alcohol poisoning. A concoction of alcohol and rat poison is still an unpleasant death, even when plenty of alcohol is ingested before the poison is added. One long night, after two years in this camp, he tried it and it worked.
Earlier that evening, they had sat shoulder to shoulder smoking outside their hut, Giuseppe thinking, stupidly, that he was a little happier. But then he said: “You’re smart and you’re a good man, Giuseppe. Learn a few more things and you’ll have a good life.” It sounded like goodbye, but they often had this kind of conversation. So he answered as he probably had done before. Who can remember now?
“You are the one with all the talent Filippo.” He wanted him to feel his responsibility to share, the born duty of the gifted. It was not the moment to deliver a sermon. Why should he not paint for himself, every brush stroke invented by and for him? His death was another work of art. Now his paintings face the wall beside Giuseppe’s bed. He smells the rich oils. They used to nourish him with ideas. He does not want to look at them any more. He can see just the ends of the colours from his pillow, lapping around the edges of the boards and they accuse him. It is the man he thinks about. He wants to sit with him and hear him say things that penetrate the anaesthesia of a day in camp, to draw him into his thoughts and expand his life, make him laugh. Giuseppe had thought his friendship would keep Filippo safe. He is teetering now. His blood is drying in his veins.
The barbed wire disease that killed Filippo has come to Giuseppe. It has been incubating for two years. The camp is an airy cage surrounded by serviceable army green Australian bush and exposed to a broad sky. But to him it is like being suspended in a bell jar in space. He has stopped sleeping. He watches the obsequious white dawn hesitating at the high louvered window of the hut. He has longed for it but he panics that another day of waiting is before him. Nausea squats in his stomach and his throat aches as though he has been punched. The only cure is release into the world. Not knowing how long he will have to wait is eating at the framework of his optimism like cancer at a bone. They are slipping into another bleak winter where no leaves die a brilliant death to make way for the pale shoots of spring. No snow cleans and softens the landscape.
He stands in a metallic cell of loneliness outside the commandant’s door. An inconsiderate wind flattens his trousers against his legs. It does not comfort him that the commandant who is rotund and good hearted reminds him of his grandfather, it makes him sad. They are both veterans of The Great War. Like his grandfather he has few words but plenty to say. Though he tries, he cannot talk Giuseppe out of volunteering for farm work.
“The working men’s quarters on these farms can be primitive. You could be lonely. These people are often prejudiced. The Geneva Convention absolves officers from work. You’ll have to work with other ranks on equal terms. That could mean problems for you Lieutenant.”
It is Giuseppe’s fellow officers who make problems. They do not like his luke warm enthusiasm for fascism and Mussolini, so they’ve stopped speaking to him. He sits listening to the commandant but not looking at him. He stares out the window at the grey corrugated iron huts. From behind these, a streetscape of Bologna protrudes a few metres. Arches and pillars of ochre and cream and their grey-green shadows painted on a line of huts. Even the Australian guards admire and wonder at it. Filippo. He could have been a great Renaissance artist. Filippo Lippi. Not locked in a stone palazzo but a barbed wire compound. He drags his gaze back into the hut. “I must work. I must get outside this barbed wire.” When he speaks he feels a surge of warmth through his body as though his blood has thawed. He has chosen life. Surely this is right. Surely life is good and death is bad.
He goes out into the wind and back to his hut where Filippo’s bed is yawning at him like a grave, mattress folded in two under a neat pile of blankets. He picks them up and flings them at the wall. What comfort did they give his friend? He slept hardly at all. If they could have their last conversation again, then maybe it wouldn’t be their last.
He is given a place on a farm. A gleam of freedom breaks the surface of this lake of tedium. He begins to look forward and plan. He asks to be placed at a farm with Vincenzo Stanghieri, Enzo, because he likes people who laugh. He is addicted to laughter. Enzo is an energetic man, a man of common sense and good will, not tall, but seeming taller than he is, because of his upright athletic bearing . He is always in a group, playing soccer or cards and everywhere he goes, shouts of laughter burst forth.
Giuseppe cannot remember one note of laughter in his father’s house. Without his grandparents, his childhood would have been empty of it. He saw little of his father. His summers were spent in mountain forests with friends and winters with his mother and sister helping with chores. Later, he went down into the valley to live with his grandparents in winter and to go to school. He was glad that he was not Rosa. His sister was kept at home to help her mother.
This country, his prison, is a secular new world. Probably as ignorant and superstitious as his own older world, but here he hopes to find a life without need of holy vision, without relying on the help of the dead, who being blind themselves, want to make others blind also. If it is a place without heaven or hell, perhaps then it is not always falling short on promises, because it makes none. He hopes to find more than he expects and trlies not to expect too much in order to be pleasantly surprised.
The place Giuseppe will call home for the next two years is not what he would have thought to recognize as a home. He will travel towards a vast, flat dryness, every leaf, every blade of grass, struggling against desiccation and death. He will think that the people who work there must be unaware that their work is nothing in such a geography. He will find farms carved out on the very edge of the known world, in an obstinate battle against nature. When he arrives and the wheels of the Control Centre truck toil through the thick gravel of the driveway he will feel that he could be at this place with some peace of mind, that he could try to understand a life like this, a home like this and its people. What he will discover is that his thoughts might expand here into the void that is occupied by noise elsewhere and for the first time he might learn the power of silence to heal and not deaden
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