It’s easy to believe the old tales in the middle of the night, as the wind buffets the door and the moonlight slews across the walls and the scratching, rattling thuds continue.
I imagine the door swinging open. I will raise the gun and steady it. I will aim for the heart or the head. My muscles ache. I count to one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand. I eye the hole in the roof, waiting for someone to climb through it. I watch the door, waiting for it to open. But the lock holds and the ragged rent of sky above remains a dark blank.
The wind drops, the scratching stops and, eventually, Con rests her head against my shoulder and I feel her body slump into sleep. Her breath whispers against my neck. I think of all I would do to protect her, everything I would sacrifice.
I try to imagine tomorrow and the days after with Angus MacLeod here and with the souls of a thousand men on the island. I imagine them all breathing into the darkness: the prisoners, the guards and the cooks and the people who will deliver letters and food. It is as if our lives have become a map, which is being folded ever smaller, as the world outside crushes everything together.
‘We’re not alone any more,’ I whisper, to Con, to myself, to the noises in the darkness, to the buzzing of the words circling in my thoughts. ‘We won’t ever be alone again.’
Part Two
It is the way you lean into me
and the way I lean into you, as if
we are each other’s prevailing.
From ‘Orkney / This Life’, Andrew Greig
Mid-January 1942Cesare
These are the things he finds hard in Orkney: the sky, the open space, the weather. The sea, a yawn of water that roars and growls and threatens a cold grave. The ice that gnaws at his bones, day and night. The eyes watching him – the guards watching him dig, or his fellow prisoners watching him sleep in the hut at night. Never alone but always lonely. The anger. He finds the anger hard because there is nothing to do with it, except clench it inside.
Home for Cesare was Moena, in northern Italy. Border country, surrounded by mountains, bursting with green life. It had been invaded time and time again over the years, and had a language unique to the area – Ladin – and flew a Turkish flag. They were outsiders, the people of Moena, but, like the people of Orkney, they were also insiders: they belonged wholly to each other, to themselves. None of this mattered to the small boy that Cesare had been – dark-haired, broad and muddy-cheeked from pressing his face against the ground to watch a procession of ants, or grubby-kneed from crouching to study a spider’s web.
He went to the local school and was a sharp student, but always wanted to be outside. Wild-haired and full of daydreams – his teachers despaired.
My God, Cesare, you must sit still! Late again, Cesare, and will you look at the state of your knees?
But they smiled fondly as they said it for, late as he always was, he often brought them gifts: a picture of a kingfisher’s head, sketched in exquisite detail; a carving of a field mouse, with bright wooden eyes polished to a shine. They ruffled his hair, pinched his cheek. You will be on time tomorrow, Cesare.
He smiled and nodded. And the next day he was late.
At eighteen, much to the disappointment of his parents, who wanted him to work on the family farm, Cesare gained an apprenticeship in the local church, where he would perfect his skill in carving stone and wood, and shaping metal.
His master was severe, used to apprentices who cut corners in order to leave early and chase after women or wine. But Cesare worked hard, and although he was often late and arrived with eyes heavy from lack of sleep, he came clutching sketches, which he then painstakingly copied onto the church walls and ceiling: doves soared in flight; olive branches twisted behind the heavy stone columns. People began to visit the tiny church to marvel at the way the paintings made it hum with life.
Within four years, the master had retired, leaving the maintenance of the church in Cesare’s hands. He carved leaves into the altar legs, engraved little birds along the lectern. Under the pews, he shaped tiny creatures, so that a bored child, half asleep during a sermon, might find a frog or a mole under his wandering fingers and, for the rest of the service, would sit transfixed.
By 1937, Cesare was well-known and well-liked. At least four different women had decided they wanted to marry him and took it in turns to wait for him outside the church, then take him to their parents’ houses for dinner, brushing the wood-shavings from his hair, reminding him of their father’s job and what day of the week it was.
The parents eyed him with a mixture of admiration and suspicion. He had a fine set of shoulders, to be sure, and a strong jaw, and of course his paintings were beautiful. But, my God, what would he be like as a husband? As a father? No child was ever raised on a diet of paint. Besides, the man was far too skinny and, really, was that sawdust in his hair?
War crept in from the north and south. Men in uniform marching the streets, shouting, Il Duce! Some winds carry such a relentless momentum that they sweep everything along with them. Cesare didn’t hold strong political beliefs, but he also didn’t hold with the idea of being called a coward, so he was sent along to North Africa with the other men from his village.
Desert heat. Salt sting of sweat in his eyes. Hot gun in his damp hands as he inched forwards on his stomach, firing into sandstorms and hoping he wouldn’t kill
