Leinen went down to the bank and skimmed a stone over the lake. It skipped three times before it sank.
‘Your grandfather taught me how to do that,’ he said, throwing another stone. When he turned round, Johanna had disappeared.
16
On the next day of the trial, the benches for the press and the spectators were crammed. The presiding judge briefly greeted participants in the trial. Then she nodded in Leinen’s direction and said, ‘Please go on.’
Leinen rose to his feet. For the last week he had spent his days in the prison and his nights at his desk. He was glad that the moment had come; he could do no more. He had fallen asleep in the taxi taking him to the courthouse, and the driver had to wake him up. He placed his text on the lectern. As he began to read, he knew that today he was going to destroy his childhood, and Johanna would not come back to him. And that none of that was of any relevance.
At eighteen minutes past ten on the evening of 16 May 1944, all fourteen tables in the Café Trento in the narrow Via di Ravecca in Genoa were occupied. All the guests in the café were German soldiers, as usual, and nearly all of them were serving in the marines. The men had unbuttoned the jackets of their uniforms, they were playing cards, some of them were drunk already. The man who put the bag down beside him at the bar wore a lance corporal’s uniform. He didn’t speak to anyone; he ordered a small glass of beer and drank it standing. He nudged the bag half under the bar with his foot; it wasn’t heavy, only a kilogramme. Before coming into the café, he had crushed the ampoule at the end of the little brass tube with a pair of pincers. As he drank his beer, the copper chloride solution in the bag slowly began to corrode the iron wire. He would have at least a quarter of an hour. They had explained the English detonator to him again and again: as soon as the wire was eaten away a spring inside the tube would be released, and a bolt would strike a percussion cap and produce a spark. They couldn’t have used German detonators: they were too quick and made a loud hissing noise. The man put his empty glass down on the bar, placed money beside it, and went away. Eighteen minutes later the Plastit W detonated at a speed of 8,750 metres a second, a far more violent explosion than TNT. The pressure wave crushed the body of the man who happened to be standing near the bag and tore another man’s lungs apart; they both died instantly. Tables and chairs were hurled through the air, bottles, glasses and ashtrays broke. A splinter of wood entered an NCO’s left eye, fourteen other men were injured, they had splintered glass in their faces, their arms and their chests. The café windows shattered, and the door was torn off its hinges and lay on the paving outside.
The interpreter woke at two in the morning. His back hurt because he had been sleeping on the sofa again; he didn’t want to wake his wife and children early in their small apartment. It had been like this for weeks, ever since the new German had taken over the Nazi office in Genoa and was running it like a business venture. The new German’s name was Hans Meyer. He was supposed to be putting an end to the strikes in this district – local industries were needed for the production of war materiel.
The interpreter lay there for a moment longer. He often thought that he’d rather have stayed in his mountain village above Merano, where he had met his wife at her parents’ inn in the summer fourteen years ago. She had smelled of fresh strawberries. She was much more elegant than the girls from his village: even up there in the mountains she wore high heels. Her parents had agreed to the engagement, he had followed her to Genoa, and for a long time all had gone well. But when the war began her father had fallen sick, and they had to sell everything to pay the doctors’ bills. He dealt on the black market: food, cigarettes, sometimes a little jewellery. He could have gone on living like that; after all, the war must come to an end some time.
Then his luck changed. The Germans had been searching the harbour for ‘bandits’, as they called the partisans. He wasn’t a partisan, he had only been selling his stuff, but he fled with the others and hid in a warehouse. A woman partisan was lying across the entrance; he had simply climbed over her. She was bleeding heavily; the ground around her was black. He waited in his hiding place and heard the woman groaning. After a while he didn’t hear her any more. He went over and looked at her. Then he felt the barrel of a gun in his back.
The Germans confiscated his bags of food and cigarettes, and took him to their HQ with them. When they found out that he spoke South Tyrolese German, they said he must either go to prison or be an interpreter for them.
The interpreter stood up, took his things off the chair and dressed. Half an hour later he left the apartment. He cycled to the Marassi district of Genoa. The head of Department V – criminal investigation – had told him to be at the prison by quarter to three in the morning at the latest. They hadn’t told him what they were going to do. They didn’t need to; he’d guessed it long ago. There had been other attempts to assassinate German soldiers before now, but they couldn’t meekly accept the bomb in the Café Trento. They would respond; ‘uncompromising measures’ would be taken. ‘Uncompromising’: that was the kind of word the Germans liked to use.
He was given the list in Marassi Prison. It was three in the morning. He had to call the numbers beside the list of names out in the corridor. Only the numbers, no names, twenty in all on the list. None of them had had anything to do with the bomb. Then the prisoners were standing outside their cells; a smell of sleep was in the air. The German from Department V stammered when he spoke quietly, but when he raised his voice he didn’t stammer any more. The interpreter had to translate. The men were to get dressed; they were being moved; they could leave their things where they were; they would be sent on. That was a mistake: no one sent prisoners’ things anywhere these days. The prisoners knew at once that they were going to die today. Finally the German checked the numbers on the cell doors and crossed them off his list.
The prison yard was brightly lit: the floodlights on the walls were switched on. People’s faces looked white, as though they were on an overexposed film. A truck stood in the middle of the yard, with its tarpaulin cover folded back. The prisoners climbed in and sat down on benches. Four men armed with sub-machine guns guarded them. They were not staff at HQ; they were in marine uniforms. No one shouted orders, none of the prisoners resisted. The interpreter and the officer in charge of the marines rode in a jeep. At the prison door Hans Meyer got into the back of the jeep. The interpreter was in front beside the driver. He didn’t understand everything the men in the back were saying. Hans Meyer said something about ‘Hitler’s orders’, about ‘General Kesselring’, about ‘reprisals in a ratio of one to ten – ten dead bandits for one dead soldier’. He had been summoned to Florence, said Meyer, in Rome thirty-three German soldiers had been shot by bandits in the Via Rasella. It was all about ‘paying the price’. The interpreter had heard of this incident; the Germans had been military police from Bolzano. In reprisals, General Kesselring had three hundred and thirty-five civilians shot in the Ardeatine Caves; they had had nothing to do with the attack on the Germans, and there had been a child among them. ‘Otherwise a neat, clean military operation,’ said Hans Meyer.
They drove for about an hour, then the road became narrower, and the headlights of the truck stayed right behind them. Once the interpreter saw a deer, rigid and beautiful, eyes like glass.
When they stopped he had lost all sense of direction. Two buses stood at the roadside. There were German marines everywhere, maybe forty of them, barricading the road. The prisoners got out of the truck. The marines tied them together in pairs by their left arms, so that one had to walk forward, the other backwards.