SNAFU: Wolves at the Door

When the Allies finally arrived, their field guns audible in the distance, the withdrawal of the few surviving Wehrmacht and ragged Werwolf units left an almost tangible vacuum.

Franco and his mother had been safe on the desolate farm, but the boy could not forget what they’d said happened to his father. The nightmares kept him awake, and his mother worried for his health and sanity. In his sleep, he saw the wolves come for him and his family, but instead of being a German werewolf who battered in their door it was his father, jaws slavering and red eyes glaring with hate. And hunger.

One morning, when Maria went to wake the boy, he was gone.

Franco had grown rapidly, and in a few weeks he already appeared years older than his actual age. What he had witnessed, suffered, and lived through had toughened him, but those things had also changed him in ways he could only suspect. Frequently he found himself awash in a rage, yet unable to understand or explain why. Until one day, when he realized that he needed to face his father – the partisan who had become a monster and shattered their small family.

But where could he find Giovanni Lupo? Where would his father have sought refuge?

Instinct and keen insight into his father’s mind brought him back to their old neighborhood. Franco sensed his father would have hidden in their old apartment if he could, perhaps to await their return. Not knowing what he would find, the boy – now just barely a teenager – made his way along the street on which he had grown up. Several buildings had been demolished since the last night he had spent here, and others had been damaged, some walls sheared away to expose their insides like grotesque layer cakes. Mountains of rubble lay at the bases of their surviving structures.

Franco looked at all the places he had played during more innocent times. Everything that had happened since then was a nightmare from which he could not wake.

He pushed open the door of their old apartment and was overwhelmed by the stench of rotted meat and dried blood. Franco stood in the doorway, breathing through his mouth to avoid being sick.

“Papá?” His voice was soft and tentative and echoed in the high-ceilinged space. “Sono io, Franco.”

He heard a shuffling from the kitchen, and stepped into the long corridor that led there. He was reminded of that night, when his father had found him hiding here. A strange reversal. He pushed the memory aside.

“Papá, I’ve come to bring you back home with me. Our new home.”

He held his nostrils. He remembered this same smell in butcher shops down the street. He entered the kitchen. The lights didn’t work, but there was enough light from the balcony door to see the form in the shadows at the far end of the massive room.

It was his father, his clothes ragged and his hair growing wild.

“Papá!” he said, startled by his father’s appearance.

“Hello, my son,” Giovanni said and then his voice broke and he was sobbing. “I knew you would come back to me. I felt it. And your mother…?”

“She’s safe on Uncle Vittorio’s farm, but she sends her love.”

“Dio mio, what a terrible time it has been.”

“Yes, Papá, it has been.”

Giovanni stepped farther out of the shadows. Franco gasped when he saw the bloody smears around his father’s mouth, crusted in the stubble. Giovanni blinked rapidly, as if this was too much light for him.

“I’ve been hiding here for weeks, hoping you would return. I– I’ve changed, Franco, I’m not the way I was. I get these urges; I become hungry as you’ve never known hunger. I become another person altogether, a creature. I try to control this hunger, this cursed hunger, but the moon brings it out in me. Sometimes I think I can control it, but then I cannot, and I do terrible things.” He put his head down and wept.

“Papá,” Franco whispered. “It’s all right.”

“I prayed, you know. I prayed that it would go away and leave me alone. I prayed that I could go back to that day when you were playing with your friend and I was trying to earn some money for food, and if we had both just… just come home. If we hadn’t… But it’s the past now and we can’t change it, can we?”

“No, Papá.” Tears squeezed from Franco’s eyes.

Giovanni came closer to his son. He reached out and touched Franco’s face.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “Things will be better now.”

“Yes,” Franco whispered.

“I hear the Germans are finally on their way out of the city. The Allies are only a few days’ march away. The war is almost over for us.” He spread his arms. “We can be together again, a family. We’ll go and fetch your mother.”

Franco stepped into his father’s embrace. It felt good for a few moments, like it always had. He laid his head on his father’s chest. Felt his father’s heartbeat.

Giovanni kissed his son’s cheek and caressed his face with rough hands.

“My son–” Giovanni’s body stiffened and he began to pull away. “What…? Franco, I feel… Franco?” His voice rose as the fear took him. “My son, what have you done?”