Free Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino

bare space around a charcoal pit—linked themselves in his mind to his remotest memories—an escaped goat, a polecat driven from its lair, the raised skirt of a girl. And now the war in these parts was like a continuation of his normal life; work, play, hunting, all turned into war : the smell of gunpowder at the Loreto bridge, escapes down the bushy slopes, minefields sown with death.
    The war twisted closely around and around in those valleys like a dog trying to bite its tail; partisans elbow to elbow with bersaglieri and Fascist militia; each side alternating between mountain and valley, making wide turns around the crests so as not to run into one another and find themselves fired on; and always someone killed, either on hill or valley. Binda's village, San Faustino, was down among fields, three groups of houses on each side of the valley. His girl, Regina, hung out sheets from her window on days when there were roundups. Binda's village was a short halt on his way up and down; a sip of milk, a clean vest ready washed by his mother; then off he had to hurry, in case the Fascists suddenly arrived, for there hadn't been enough partisans killed at San Faustino.
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    All winter it was a game of hide and seek; the bersaglieri at Baiardo, the Militia at Molini, the Germans at Briga, and in the middle of them the partisans squeezed into two corners of the valley, avoiding the round-ups by moving from one to the other during the night. That very night a German column was marching on Briga, had perhaps already reached Carmo, and the Militia were getting ready to reinforce Molini. The partisan detachments were sleeping in stalls around half-spent braziers; Binda marched along in the dark woods, with their salvation in his legs, for the order he carried was: "Evacuate the valleys at once. Entire battalion and heavy machine guns to be on Mount Pellegrino by dawn."
    Binda felt anxiety fluttering in his lungs like bats' wings; he longed to grasp the slope two miles away, pull himself up it, whisper the order like a breath of wind into the grass and hear it flowing off through his mustache and nostrils, till it reached Vendetta, Serpe, Gueriglia; then scoop himself out a hole in the chestnut leaves and bury himself in it, he and Regina, first removing the cones that might prick Regina's legs; but the more leaves he scooped out the more cones he found—it was impossible to make a place for Regina's legs there, her big soft legs with their smooth thin skin.
    The dry leaves and the chestnut cones rusded, almost gurgled, under Binda's feet; the squirrels, with round, glittering eyes, ran to hide at the tops of the trees. "Be quick, Binda!" the commander, Fegato, had said to him when giving him the message. Sleep rose from the heart of the night, there was a velvety feel on the inside of his eyelids; Binda would have liked to lose the path, plunge into a sea of dry leaves and swim in them until they submerged him. "Be quick, Binda!"
    He was now walking on a narrow path along the upper slopes of the Tumena valley, which was still covered with ice.
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    The widest valley in the area, it had high sides wide apart; the one opposite him was glimmering in the dark, the one on which he was walking had bare slopes scattered with an occasional bush from which, in daytime, groups of partridges rose fluttering. Binda felt he saw a distant light, down in lower Tumena, moving ahead of him. It zigzagged every now and again as if going around a curve, vanished, and reappeared a little farther on in an unexpected spot. Who on earth could it be at that hour? Sometimes it seemed to Binda that the light was much farther away, on the other side of the valley, sometimes that it had stopped, and sometimes that it was behind him. Who could be carrying so many different lights along all the paths of lower Tumena—perhaps in front of him, too, in higher Tumena—winking on and off like that? The Germans!
    Following on Binda's tracks was an animal roused from