9 September 1943

PORTO SANT’ANDREA

“Mamma,” Renzo Leoni calls, wincing at his own voice. “For God’s sake, get the door!”

He doesn’t expect a reply. She might be at the market, but it’s just as likely that his mother is sitting at the table, content to let him pay the price for last night’s binge.

“Signor Leoni!” the rabbi’s son yells again. “Are you awake yet? My babbo needs ten men for morning prayers, and I’m only seven, so I can’t, so you have to!”

“Your babbo can go to hell, and take the minyan with him,” Renzo mutters. He limps as quickly as he can through an apartment crammed with generations of dusty furniture. Piles of knitting and mending slump beside every chair. Books, cinema and fashion magazines, newspapers, and mail obscure every horizontal surface. Before the race laws, peasant girls helped with the endless heavy housework of middle-class families. Now most Jewish housewives struggle to maintain their prewar standards. Not Lidia Leoni. “It’s a political protest,” she says.

Before Renzo reaches the door, Angelo Soncini has banged on it three more times, kicking it once for good measure. “My mamma says she’ll make you breakfast! Signor Leoni, are you—”

“Belandi, Angelo! Stop it! You’re killing me!” Renzo unlocks the door.

Angelo takes a step backward, staring.

“Inform your esteemed babbo,” Renzo tells the boy in a low and careful voice, “I’ll be there in twenty minutes, but this is absolutely the last time. Tell your beautiful mammina,” he adds with conviction, “that if I come within one hundred meters of food during the next three hours, we’ll all regret it.” Angelo looks blank. “No breakfast, thank you,” Renzo explains. “I’m not feeling entirely well.”

Angelo looks a bit stunned, but he nods gravely and takes off for home. Appalled by the amount of noise a small boy can generate during the simple act of descending a carpetless staircase, Renzo closes the door as quietly as he can and shuffles to the nearest chair.

Pretty girls and handsome women gaze at him in the dim, divided light of the shuttered salon. His mother’s apartment is his father’s Uffizi, its walls a gallery of family portraits, mute testimony to her late husband’s professional talent. Beautifully lit, cunningly composed, the largest photo was taken thirty years ago. Round-faced and chubby, the long-awaited son grins toothlessly on his triumphant mother’s lap. Around these two, the stair-step Leoni sisters are arrayed, elegant as Romanovs in white organdy, their hand-me-downs kept quietly stylish by their mother’s own clever fingers. Rachele, then eighteen and already engaged to Tranquillo Loeb, a successful attorney ten years her senior. At two-year intervals: Bianca, Elena, Debora, and Susanna, each slender and striking, with their mother’s aristocratic bearing and Torinese fairness. Then a sad gap: two miscarriages, both girls, and another daughter who died shortly after birth, followed by sturdy little Ester, four in the photo, a proprietary hand resting on her mother’s arm. And then? When hope had faded, a son and heir for the proud photographer: Renzo, himself. The little prince.

“Renzo flew before he could walk.” That’s the family legend, and it’s very nearly true. With six sisters to carry him like a doll, his feet rarely touched the ground before he was three, and his earliest memory is of sailing through the air.

It must have been spring, and close to sunset. A small boy awakens from an afternoon nap at his grandparents’ home. Downstairs: the high-pitched chatter and squeal of girls, their mother’s imperious orders mercifully muffled. Their father, silent, yearns for the peace of his darkroom, no doubt. The boy squirms onto a rush-bottomed chair in front of an open window. He is alone, and enchanted by a thousand swifts that soar and wheel just out of reach. Dark wings flash against a lavender sky. The birds plunge, disappearing. Sweep upward in tight formation. The rushes prickle his bare feet, so the boy levers himself onto the broad stuccoed windowsill. Squirming forward, he dangles breathlessly, head in the air, rump in the bedroom. The swifts dive again, and in a moment of toddler ecstasy, the boy hurls himself after them, arms wide as wings.

“His maiden flight,” Emanuele Leoni called it with perverse paternal pride, telling the story to anyone who’d listen and admire the plaster casts on his son’s little wrists.

His sisters watched young Renzo more carefully after that. Escaping their vigilance became part of the game. He did so with a fluid combination of bald-faced lies and physical daring, acquainted at an early age with Sant’Andrea’s crowded rooftops and sheer cliffsides. If a few weeks passed without his appearance in the emergency room of the local hospital, the white-clad nursing nuns telephoned to make sure Renzo hadn’t been killed. “You should enroll him in flying lessons,” one advised when Renzo turned fourteen. “Perhaps he’d learn to control his landings.”

In the spring of 1927, over his wife’s objections, Emanuele Leoni’s son became the youngest member of the Sant’Andrea Aviation Club. And while there was no photograph to record Renzo’s initial crash landing, other moments in his son’s career as a pilot were immortalized.

“Look at this!” Emanuele would order clients who came to the studio to document an engagement, a wedding, a bar mitzvah. “That’s Renzo—he was over the harbor in an old Savoia 17 when the engine shaft broke. See this? That’s Italo Balbo himself, visiting my boy in the Benghazi Hospital. Renzo was flying a Macchi 52R with a thousand-horsepower Fiat AS1 engine. He set a new speed record just before one of the wings ripped off. Here he is getting his commission in the Royal Italian Air Force. Renzo joined up the day after we declared war on Abyssinia. That snapshot’s him in a field hospital in ’36. Led a squadron back in a sandstorm. His own engine failed just before he landed, but Renzo didn’t lose a single man. See this? The Medaglia d’Argento. My boy’s a hero!”

In thirteen years as a pilot, Renzo Leoni crawled out of five bloody wrecks. Blinded by fog, deafened by thunder, he’s flown over the Mediterranean and the Alps. He’s been lost and low on fuel above the Libyan desert and trackless Ethiopian wastes, and shot at by Abyssinian anti-aircraft guns. But it was Emanuele Leoni who was buried with that Silver Medal; Renzo took it off the day it was awarded, and never spoke of it again.

The familiar sensation rises in his throat. Renzo pushes himself upright and vectors through the maze of tables and chairs and chests, trying not to add bruises to his shins. Centuries of settling have rendered the marble floor uneven, but the uncompromisingly modern bathroom is only ten years old. And surprisingly clean, given his mother’s attitude toward housekeeping.

Unwilling to increase the glare off the white ceramic tiles and nickel-plated fixtures, Renzo kneels before the toilet without turning on the light. He brings up bad brandy and outraged stomach acid in two efficient gouts. It takes considerably longer to make his crash-battered knees and ankles straighten, but he gets to his feet and hauls down on the chain, relieved that the plumbing still works after the last English air raid. Mouth sour, he unbuttons his rumpled shirt and pulls off the cotton singlet beneath it. With stately deliberation, he gives the cold-water tap a quarter turn. Splashes his face and chest. Brushes his teeth, and spits. Only then does he confront the man in the mirror.

The asymmetries of his chest are familiar: hard knobs of badly healed ribs on the right, a ragged scar on the left where his collarbone punched through the skin. Dark and anarchic, his hair is a chaos of short brown curls above a broken nose that gives a hawkish look to the lined and haggard face. Two years in Abyssinia, three in Ventotene Prison. A total of twenty-nine months in a variety of hospitals . . . Closer to forty than thirty, his face says, lying.

It’s just the hangover, he lies in return, stropping a straight razor.

Friends on leave have carried home lurid tales of drunken parties hosted by German officers. Hitler may be an abstemious health-food fanatic, but schnapps and beer fuel his military, and Renzo can now confirm the stories of prodigious Teutonic boozing. When he got Schramm back to the Bellavista, the German had sobered up enough to drink some more and insisted that Renzo join him. Curious about Schramm, and thirsty himself, Renzo was easy to persuade. They found a tavern near the hotel and sat at a corner table: a comity of two, ignoring the armistice celebration around them.

Night came. The bar emptied. Schramm talked on, and on. He spoke of the eastern front, and the Red Army. He spoke of the Allies, and the Japanese. He speculated about the effect of Italy’s surrender on the course of the war. Then, when the yawning waiter deposited yet another bottle on the table, Schramm spoke, at last, of Germany. “Four long years, we fought the whole world to a standstill. Then we wake up one morning in 1918, and the war is lost!” Schramm shook his head in dazed amazement. “One day the empire’s there, and the next—pfft! Gone. And who presumes to take the kaiser’s place? Friedrich Ebert. A harness maker whose magnificent ambition was to make Germany a nation of bureaucrats! Governments rising and falling like drunks in a gutter. Influenza. That filthy, humiliating treaty! Demonstrations, strikes, riots. Christ! The inflation—!”

“The Jew bankers getting fat while real Germans starved,” Renzo supplied, mashing a cigarette into an ashtray. “That was shit, you know. The kaiser financed the war by printing money. Inflation wrecked the banks, not Jews.”

Schramm never paused. “Everything we had—gone, overnight. Six million men unemployed, and if you had a job, you were paid in worthless heaps of Weimar paper. Then the stock market crashed, and the whole world went to hell!”

“And of course, it was the Jew speculators who did it.”

“Yes, but why?” Schramm asked, surprising Renzo for the first time. “The Jews lost everything, too! The Depression dragged everybody down!”

“Why indeed?” Renzo asked cannily. “This is the subtlety, Schramm. This is the key! For Jews to cause a catastrophe that ruined them along with everyone else makes . . . no . . . sense. So it must be a conspiracy, right? A diabolical Jew conspiracy! I’ve had three years to think about this, my friend.” He poured them both another drink. “Life was shit. Hitler had the most appealing solution. Just get rid of the Jews.”

“Put a stop to all that useless parliamentary crap,” Schramm said, remembering. “March together as comrades! Rebuild the German nation—”

“And reclaim your place in the sun!” Renzo declared, chin jutting, mouth turned down, nodding vigorously at his own rhetoric: Mussolini with dark and coiling hair.

“Aha!” Schramm cried, a spongy cough merging with the exhalation. “You Italians did the same thing. Americans, Russians, the Japanese. We all wanted to march behind men who knew what to do! Your family, your teachers, your friends. Newspapers, the radio! All saying the same things—”

“Democracy is degenerate! Greatness lies in struggle! Virtue lies in blood!” Renzo recited grandly. “Say yes to the leader, and you can wear this handsome uniform. Say yes, and you’re a patriot!”

“You’re part of something big, and new, and powerful! You’re better than you were alone.”

Renzo offered Schramm one of his own cigarettes. “Say no, and you’re a coward and a traitor. Say no, and you’re in jail.”

“Say no, and you’re dead.” Schramm lit up, coughed himself blue, and shoved his empty cigarette case across the table. “Keep it! This’s my last one, I swear! You should quit, too. Tobacco will give you cancer. We proved it years ago.”

Schramm pushed himself up from the table and stood there, slump-shouldered and swaying, far away. “You must learn not to be kind,” he told Renzo finally. “Be as blind and as deaf as you have to be. Feel nothing. Only the heartless will survive.”

Staring at the hollow-cheeked image in the mirror, Renzo lathers his face. Feel nothing. Believe nothing. Do nothing, he thinks. Lots of practice at that—

The banging on the door begins again. The razor blade knicks his chin. Muttering curses, he hurries down the hall, barefoot and bare-chested, wiping shaving soap and blood from his face. The instant he unlocks the door, it flies open, revealing a short, stout man nearing sixty, who points at him furiously.

“Pazzo! Madman! You are going to get yourself killed, and you’ll drag the whole family down with you!”

“Buon giorno to you, too, Tranquillo,” Renzo replies as genially as he can. “Always a pleasure to see my darling sister’s husb—”

“Shut that door! What time did you get home last night? Your mother was frantic—”

“Tranquillo, my mother has never been frantic in her life.”

“We thought you’d been arrested—”

“For what? Taking a tourist back to his hotel?” Renzo slouches toward the dining room and lowers himself gingerly into a chair.

“Then I find out you’re not just drinking yourself senseless again, you’re doing it with an SS officer! You were supposed to be helping your own people! Instead you go off with some Nazi and—”

“Schramm’s not a Nazi, Tranquillo. He’s a combat surgeon.”

“You don’t think he can be both?” Tranquillo pushes the shutters open, grimly pleased when Renzo swears at the light and twists away. “Let me tell you something. German doctors invented the race policy that put you in prison.”

“Tranquillo! Please! Come back and lecture me this afternoon,” Renzo suggests, elbows on the table, aching head in his hands.

Tranquillo sits across from him, round arms crossed above a round belly. “Renzo, we have two, perhaps three weeks before the Gestapo starts rounding up Jews—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, what kind of Jew am I? If my mother didn’t live across the street from a synagogue—”

“Renzo, what exactly do you think the word judenfrei means? The Nazis don’t consult a rabbinical jury to decide if you’re pious enough to arrest! In the next twenty-four hours, our existence will become a criminal offense. Renzo, the Gestapo aren’t like the Blackshirts! The Nazis won’t just force a liter of castor oil down your throat and humiliate the shit out of you, you idiot! They’ll—”

“Tranquillo!” Slender and severe at seventy, Lidia Leoni has shut the door to her apartment as quietly as she stepped through it. “War,” she declares, “is no excuse for vulgarity.”

Startled by her resonant contralto, Tranquillo leaps to his feet, murmuring courtesies. He reaches for his mother-in-law’s parcels, but she offers them to Renzo instead, presenting a lightly powdered cheek for a ceremonial kiss. “Take the groceries into the kitchen and put them away for me, will you, please? I couldn’t find much—there are roadblocks outside the city.” Eyes on Tranquillo, Lidia waits until Renzo has left the room. “You come into my home,” she asks softly, “and call my son names?”

Tranquillo Loeb is a decorated hero of the Battle of Caporetto, a respected attorney from whom Catholic clients seek advice, in defiance of the race laws. His modest stature rarely concerns him, but even now, her height reduced by age, Lidia is taller than her son-in-law, and he takes two steps back to compensate. “I apologize, signora, but someone has to explain to him—”

“Explain? Perhaps.” Lidia unpins a small stylish hat with a short black veil. “Insult?” She shakes her head and sets the hat aside.

“Signora, he has a criminal record! He’s a Communist and a Jew—”

“I wasn’t a Communist! I was a defeatist!” Renzo calls from the kitchen. “I said this war would be a disaster, and I was right! We never had the manpower or equipment, and our supply lines were—”

“You’re on the police rolls! It doesn’t matter why!” Tranquillo’s voice drops. “Signora, yesterday we were Germany’s ally. Today we are an occupied country. The Wehrmacht has declared martial law. The Gestapo will begin by arresting Rabbino Soncini and me. Renzo’s name will be third on the Sant’Andrea list. And don’t think a Silver Medal will save you,” he yells toward the kitchen. “German Jews with Iron Crosses were deported like everyone else!”

Lidia checks her hair, well cut and iron gray, in a gold-wash mirror hanging above an ebonized walnut credenza, the gleam of its surface obscured by dissident dust. Renzo comes back from the kitchen, rumpled trousers sagging on slim hips. “I gave birth to a perfectly beautiful baby boy,” she says to her reflection, “and look what he’s done to himself. Put a dressing gown on, Renzo! You know how I hate those scars.”

Renzo slouches off to his bedroom. Lidia settles into a straight-backed chair. Tranquillo tries again. “Signora, please! Italy has been invaded—”

“Oh, but Italy is always being invaded!” Lidia replies airily. “Lombards, Carthaginians, Vandals.” Propping a pair of reading glasses on a thin-boned nose, she leans over for a sewing basket. “Saracens, Spaniards, Normans. Englishmen. Americans.” She peers down through her lenses while threading a needle. “Renzo,” she calls, “is this the third or fourth time for the Germans?”

Wrapped in a paisley silk robe, he comes into the salon and flops onto the sofa. “Do Goths and Visigoths count?”

“I suppose they would. The point is, we’ve seen them all, and we’ve outlasted them all.”

Tranquillo’s effort to remain calm is visible. “Signora, Rachele’s packing as we speak, and I’m trying to get the Soncinis to leave as well. I have contacts in Switzerland and we can—”

“Switzerland!” Lidia sniffs.

“Terrible food,” Renzo agrees. He picks a two-year-old magazine out of a pile on the floor. “Much too tidy.”

Lidia refuses to take the bait. “Who knows how the Swiss would treat strangers? I’m sure we’re better off among friends.”

“Are you willing to stake your life on that?” Tranquillo asks. “In Poland and France, gentiles couldn’t line up fast enough to denounce Jewish neighbors! Signora, if you won’t leave with us, at least leave the city! Susanna’s in-laws are Catholic. They have a tenant farm up in Decimo, don’t they? You could—”

“Live in the mountains like a goat? Don’t be ridiculous.” She stretches a stocking over an ivory darning egg. “I am an old woman and blameless, Tranquillo. I have lived in Sant’Andrea for fifty-one years. My children were born here. My husband and eleven generations of his family are buried here! Four of my daughters lie with them. No one has the right to tell me to leave. Not you, and certainly not the Germans!

Morning noise drifts in from the street. Most of the bombing has been down near the docks, and this neighborhood hasn’t emptied the way others have. “Signor Leoni! The minyan!” young Angelo hollers, two floors down. “Are you coming?”

With an exasperated sigh, Tranquillo pulls out his pocketwatch and steps onto a small balcony overlooking the synagogue courtyard. “Signor Leoni is ill, Angelo. I’ll be right down.” Returning to the salon, he draws himself up, his bearing still military beneath the weight of his years. “Signora, I have fought and bled for Italy. I yield to no one in my love for my country. I have been married to your daughter almost thirty years. I am a good husband to her, a good father to your grandchildren. I have provided your family with legal advice for three decades. Have you ever had cause to doubt my judgment?”

“You’ve always had our interests at heart.”

“Then believe me when I tell you that every Jew in Italy is in mortal danger, and we have very little time to escape it!”

“I won’t be driven from my own home!”

“If you stay here, I won’t be able to protect you or Renzo.”

Renzo slams the magazine against his thighs. “Who the hell is asking you for protection? Belandi! You, of all—”

“Renzo!” Lidia warns.

Tranquillo takes a breath, retrieves his hat, lifts his briefcase. “Rachele and the children and I are leaving tomorrow,” he says tightly. “I won’t be here for Yom Kippur, Renzo, so if I offended you by offering help, or in any other way this year, I beg pardon.” Tipping his hat smartly to Lidia, Tranquillo makes a short bow. “Signora, I will protect your daughter and your grandchildren, as is my duty. Should you reconsider, there will be a place for you with us in Switzerland. Buon giorno!”

“Three years locked up in Ventotene for him!” Renzo fumes. “And he has the nerve to offer us his protection! That pompous little—”

“Renzo, caro, I’ve heard it all twice now.” Lidia takes a shirt from the basket and begins strengthening a button that’s come loose. “You have to admit there’s an element of opera buffa to be appreciated.” Apparently dumbfounded, Renzo mutters something. “I heard that,” she says, even though she hasn’t. “Stop pacing and sit down.”

He stands still, but refuses to sit. “You never told him.”

“You asked me not to. I keep my word.” She tests the button, clips the thread, tosses the shirt into the ironing basket. “Everything Tranquillo did for those refugees is to your credit.”

He starts to say something, but goes instead to the upright piano Lidia bought when Rachele was six and seemed musical. His back to his mother, he plays standing up. Lidia recognizes the piece. “Good Morning, Blues.” Count Basie. She tries not to hate this kind of music, primarily because the Nazis do, but for a year after Renzo came home from Abyssinia, he did little more than listen to American jazz. Minor keys, mournful melodies. “I wish you wouldn’t play that,” she says. “It makes you—”

He bangs the keyboard cover down and disappears into his room.

“It makes you moody,” she finishes firmly.

Would things have been different if he’d been born a Catholic? Lidia herself is not so much a Jew as an Italian who celebrates Passover rather than Easter. All her children went to Torah Talmud classes, but they also went to schools taught by nuns. Two of Lidia’s sons-in-law are Catholic, a commonplace in modern Italy, where there hasn’t been a functioning ghetto anywhere in Italy since 1870. That Lidia lives so near a synagogue is happenstance. Rabbino Soncini is less a spiritual guide than a neighbor, a man who married a girl Renzo once fancied.

Since Mussolini caved in to Hitler’s pressure in ’38, Lidia has been reminded of her Jewishness constantly by restrictions and regulations that circumscribe her daily life. The race laws are an insulting, but temporary, annoyance. She would certainly never convert, and yet . . . Since he came back from Africa, Renzo’s life has been atonement without hope of absolution.

She rummages through the mending basket and slips another stocking over the darning egg. “Tranquillo is a good man,” she admits, making her voice carry. “He was a great support to me when your father died, but I have never met anyone so inaccurately named! He believes every story the refugees tell him. I’m sure they’ve suffered, but honestly? I think they exaggerate. Understandable, of course. Makes them feel more worthy of charity. Saves their pride.”

Suspiciously jaunty, Renzo returns, with a silver cigarette case she’s never seen before. Casually, he snaps it open and offers the contents to her. “A gift from my new German friend. He’s decided to quit smoking. He’s got a terrible cough.”

Shamefaced, she puts her mending aside and reaches for a cigarette, resting a hand on her son’s wrist as he leans over with a match. She smells liquor on his breath, but this is not the time for a lecture on vice. “How long have you known?”

“That you smoke? Since 1926.”

Machine-made and elegant, the cigarette is a slim and perfect package of oral gratification, nothing like the harsh Italian tobacco people roll in squares of newspaper these days. “This is wonderful,” she murmurs.

“American.” Renzo props his hips against the credenza. “The Germans confiscated a smuggler’s boat off the coast of Rome. Remember the mafiosi Mussolini jailed down in Sicily? The Allies thought they were political prisoners and let everybody out. They’re robbing Patton blind and selling the stuff up here. Cigarettes, oranges, blankets, coffee.”

His voice is light, but Lidia is paying attention. “What else did you find out?”

Renzo turns toward the mirror, smoke curling around his face as he tilts his head from side to side to inspect his temples. “Do you think I’m losing my hair? I don’t mind going gray, but bald—”

“Renzo, caro,” Lidia says wearily, “don’t be an ass.”

He gets a heavy crystal ashtray from the kitchen and brings it to the table. “Tranquillo’s right about the occupation. Schramm thinks Hitler will take the armistice as a personal insult, and he’ll make Italy pay.”

“Then Jews won’t be singled out. We’ll all be in it together.”

“Mamma, the Germans have something like a hundred thousand troops on the peninsula now. Schramm says Kesselring got his men out of Sicily and onto the mainland last month. No matter what Radio London says, that wasn’t a rout.” He taps off a coil of ash. “The Germans expected Badoglio to switch sides—they’ve put eight more divisions into Italy since July. Hitler pulled troops away from the eastern front—that’s where Schramm served. Hausser’s panzer corps took horrendous casualties at Kursk, but those units are back up to strength now, Mamma, and Schramm says their officers are excellent.”

They smoke silently for a few moments, Lidia adjusting her opinions, Renzo watching dust dance on a thin shaft of morning light. “I won’t see Schramm again,” he says. “He only knows my first name. Even so . . .”

“It was foolhardy, but that kind of information is valuable.” Lidia stubs her cigarette out delicately and sets the rest aside for later. “The resistance will need to know what the situation is.”

“The resistance!” He snorts. “Eleven boys in Cuneo printing an underground paper? Six Communists in Milan painting ‘Death to Fascism’ on a wall?” He shakes his head. “Mamma, I just spent three years locked up with hundreds of dissidents representing several thousand political parties. I’ve seen more organization in an alleyful of cats.”

“There were strikes all over the north last spring, Renzo. Huge antiwar demonstrations. I marched in one myself.” He gapes at her. “It was the most thrilling thing I’ve ever done. Twenty-two years of fascism. That squalid little colonial war in Abyssinia—and then an alliance with the Germans, of all people. Five years of being treated like a second-class citizen. My only son in prison! To go out in the sunlight and join with thousands of others and shout, No more!” Her needle stabs at the darning egg, and the edges of a hole draw tight. “We shut the factories down, Renzo. We ran Mussolini out of power.”

“We’ve got a Bolshevik in the family, all right, but it’s not me.”

“There weren’t only leftists in those marches, Renzo! There were royalists, Catholic Action people. The Communists will probably run things,” she concedes. “They’re the only ones organized for an effective opposition. But the whole country’s sick to death of fascism, and everyone hates the Germans for dragging us into this war. Everyone hates the Germans, full stop,” she mutters, biting off the thread. “They’ve always been the enemy! And now there’ll be soldiers, and we’ll fight—”

The ashtray shatters against a wall. Open-mouthed, Lidia stares at the glittering pieces.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” He is on his feet, his eyes opaque. Turning his back on her, Renzo crosses to the window. A fragment of breeze finds its way in from the sea. The curtains flutter weakly. His fingers tap the shutter’s framework in time to some inner rhythm. “I tried having enemies once, Mamma. It was a mistake.”

Abyssinia, she thinks. It always comes back to Abyssinia!

The bronze bells of San Giobatta ring eight. She withstands the chilly silence as long as she can. “All right,” she says evenly. “We know what we are not going to do. I won’t oblige the Nazis by disappearing. You won’t fight. We are left with Tolstoy’s question: what then shall we do?”

He speaks without facing her. “Go back to bed?”

“That’s a plan,” Lidia admits drily, “though not quite as ambitious as I had envisioned.”

His fingers curl into a fist that he touches to the woodwork, once, twice, gently. He backs away from the window and stumbles over a low table covered with books. “This place is a mess!”

“Signor Mussolini is welcome to clean it himself.”

When he returns from his bedroom, the remains of the ashtray have disappeared, and she is back to her mending as though nothing has happened. “That shirt came out well,” she observes. It was his father’s. Renzo lost weight in prison, and she had to cut it down, but the fabric was a pleasure to work with. Checking the collar in the credenza’s mirror, Renzo knots his tie. “You’re rather overdressed for a nap,” she notes.

He shakes out a linen jacket. “I’m going to apply for a job.”

“Really?” she remarks, brows lifted. It’s illegal for Catholics to employ Jews, and for Jews to own businesses, but getting around the race laws is a popular Italian sport. “What sort of job?”

He jerks his shirt cuffs down to provide a centimeter of reveal. “I met a man in prison whose cousin is a member of the Dairy Association. They need drivers. If you can keep a truck with a gasogene rig running, the foreman won’t ask questions.”

“Get him to pay you in cheese. I can trade it on the black market.” She peers over her spectacles. “You do realize that milkmen are expected to be out of bed before noon?”

He turns from the mirror and smiles at her brightly. “Mamma, you and I have two additional tasks before us this morning, and you may have your choice: clean this apartment, or seduce a priest.”

Serenely, she surveys the domestic chaos around her. “How old is the priest?”

Downstairs, the rabbi’s wife props her aching back against the open door and bids each member of the minyan a good day as he leaves. “Buon giorno,” the first seven say, adding, “B’sha’ah tova! May the child be born at a lucky hour!”

Bald and bent, the eighth to leave is Giacomo Tura, but he takes his time about it. With hands twisted by a lifetime of gripping pens and brushes, the widowed scribe waves arthritic fingers over Mirella Soncini’s swollen belly. His rheumy eyes rise slowly, lingering on her breasts before arriving at her wry and smiling face. “Mirella! Chè faccia bella!” he sings in a raspy tenor. “If you weren’t a married woman, O Dio! I’d make you mine!”

Mirella waves off his randy gallantry. In her own clear eyes, the war and her third pregnancy have rendered her shopworn and middle-aged at twenty-six, but she knows what others still see when they look at her: an early Renaissance life model, Botticelli blond, demeanor demure, but with a direct and level gaze.

Reaching into the entryway, she grabs a broom and sweeps the night’s grime from the low stone steps. “’N giorno, Signor Loeb,” she says, when the minyan’s ninth finally appears. “Is your brother-in-law all right? Angelo said he was ill.”

Tranquillo Loeb pushes both hands at the air, miming rejection of Renzo Leoni and all his affairs, and stalks away from the synagogue talking to himself. Mirella decides to go to the source. “Renzo!” she calls loudly. A moment later, he steps onto the Leonis’ small balcony. He’s dressed, but . . . “Your hair seems to have exploded,” she informs him helpfully. “You look like an alarmed cartoon character.”

“And you look like a brood mare,” he replies. “When you pass small children, it must seem like an eclipse of the sun.”

“Diogenes, put down your lantern!” she cries. “I have found an honest man!”

“How are you feeling?” he asks more seriously.

“Huge.” She widens her stance and presses her hands against her lower back. “But everything’s going well, grazie a Dio! Except—” Casting her eyes toward her own door, and then ever so slightly upward, she mouths, “The noise . . .” Every morning, a minyan packs her dining room, waiting for Iacopo to make the tenth. The congregation’s secretary and treasurer arrive next. They’ve had desks in the Soncinis’ salon since the synagogue’s business offices were converted to a school in 1938. They’re followed by refugees queuing for relief money. “Angelo said you had morning sickness!” she tells Renzo.

“An acute but temporary condizion,” he tells her with a German doctor’s accent. “Die Prognose ist gut.”

He’s handsome, in a rather world-weary way, but it’s increasingly difficult to tell world-weary from hungover. “I still have a headache powder saved up,” she offers.

“What he needs is a smack in the head!” Catarina Dolcino mutters, emerging from the apartment lobby. For fifty years, Rina’s been the neighborhood portiere; old age and widowhood have merely increased the amount of attention she can devote to stern surveillance. Left fist on a pillowy hip, right wielding a broom like a bishop’s crozier, she scowls upward. “You’re a disgrace, Renzo Leoni! Everyone in this building heard you come in!”

“Santo cielo!” Renzo’s mother cries, coming to stand at his side. “Who is that dreary old woman shouting like a fishwife in the street?”

“And who raised such a boy?” A gold crucifix dangles between ample breasts swaying under a cotton housedress as Rina sweeps the sidewalk. “Some other old woman, whose son is a public nuisance! Five in the morning, he came in! He woke the whole neighborhood up!”

“You should have been on your way to Mass by then anyway, you lazy thing! I’ve already been to the market, and I got the only decent pears in Sant’Andrea!”

Renzo rolls his eyes and backs off the balcony in a strategic retreat. Lidia Leoni and Rina Dolcino have been bickering for decades. One thin, the other round—Stick and Ball, the neighborhood children call them. Once the game’s begun, it’s impossible to tell who’s hitting whom.

Mirella sets her own broom aside, in too good a mood to be drawn into even the most affectionate of arguments. The war is over, she thinks for the fiftieth time this morning. The bombing will end. The king will repeal the race laws, and Angelo can go to school with the other children. Soon it will be Rosh Hashana, and life will start fresh. Everything will be as it was before. Except for Altira . . .

Her eyes fill, but she blinks away the tears. Altira is gone, but the new baby will arrive with the new year. It is time, she thinks resolutely, to be happy again. “Have either of you been able to find soap?” she asks the older women. “All this smoke! I’m dying to wash the walls.”

“She’s getting close,” Rina says shrewdly. “I always washed walls the night before I went into labor.”

“I have three weeks to go, Signora Dolcino.”

“Verdi’s had soap two days ago,” Lidia says.

“They charge too much,” Rina counters. “Try Alesci’s instead.”

Shops, prices, and the availability of necessities are the topics of the next squabble. It continues long after the rabbi’s wife has gone back inside, until Rina runs out of opinions and gazes at the Soncinis’ doorway. “Oh, Lidia, I hope the new baby is all right! Mirella went through so much with Altira, poor little thing. You know, I thought at the time it was a mistake to keep that child at home—”

“Don’t be morbid, Rina. Mirella has moved on, and so should you!” Lidia leans over the balcony and lowers her voice. “Do you know that new man down at the archbishop’s office?”

“Don Osvaldo? Yes, yes. A Triestino. Stuffy, but a good heart.”

Lidia hesitates. She would trust Rina Dolcino with the lives of her grandchildren, but an unknown priest Renzo barely knows? “I’m coming down,” she tells her neighbor. “Cara mia, we need to talk.”

MARITIME ALPS
FRANCE

Before the war, climbers from Italy and France hiked in these mountains to escape the heat and noise of urban life. After sunset, they’d hear only the hoot of an owl or the leathery hush of bat wings, and the unnerving nighttime silence could keep them awake in their woolen blankets. Claudette Blum, by contrast, has spent a dreamless night in the deep, unmoving sleep of a growing child, exhausted by the day’s exertions, until now.

Her eyelids flutter and snap open in the predawn darkness. All the small noises are near and comforting—her father’s soft snore, the soldier’s deep-chested breathing—but something woke her up. She rises onto an elbow and listens hard. A moment more, and she slumps with relief, matching sound to sight: the pat-pat-skitter-pat of falling autumn leaves.

They’re alone in this small high clearing: Claudette, her father, and Santino Cicala. Most of the refugees spent the night at a mountainside collection point for a logging operation. Their soldiers worked in teams to lift whole tree trunks from a giant’s woodpile and heaved the logs onto a huge blaze, sending a column of sparks and smoke toward the stars. Santino shook his head at the fire. “The Luftwaffe will see it.” He insisted the Blums move on in a darkness that seemed only slightly less menacing than the Germans.

They’d have been warmer by the bonfire, but Claudette is grateful for the soldier’s concern. Her father’s optimism annoys and frightens her, but Santino has relieved her of the need to worry, a responsibility her father has obviously relinquished.

A blush of light tints the sky beyond the mountain. Too cold and hungry to go back to sleep, Claudette sits up. Every morning for months, she’s awakened to her father’s slack face and its gray stubble. He is of no interest, but the soldier is new to her. Santino’s face is lined around the eyes, but his hair is thick and shoe-polish black, so tightly waved it looks marcelled. She cannot guess his age, but he is . . . mature, she decides, not old like Papa. Serious, and silent. Not handsome like Brigadiere Giovanetti, but he has a wonderful smile.

Perhaps sensing her inspection, the infantryman rouses, yawning noiselessly. Mouthing, “Buon giorno,” and then “Scusi,” he rolls to his feet with easy strength and disappears into the woods.

Claudette brushes bits of dried leaf from her hair and rubs her arms to generate some heat. For a few minutes, she sits on one heel, but it does no good. She jostles her father’s shoulder. “Papa? Papa!”

“What? What is it?” he cries.

“I have to go!”

He flops back onto the ground, fingers digging into his eye sockets. “Na, zum Donnerwetter! For this, you woke me up?” Groaning, he pulls off the pair of socks he wore to keep his hands warm and rummages through his suitcase. He locates the squares he cut from newspaper in preparation for this trek—only yesterday? Handing one sheet to Claudette, he points to a bush.

She’s still appalled by the necessity of dropping her pants and squatting, but she’s already learned the first lesson of Alpine hygiene: face uphill. This time, the relief is so exquisite, she forgets to be embarrassed. “That’s really not so bad,” she says, returning to the campsite.

Santino is already back, and he puts a finger to his lips, glancing at her father. Albert chants Shakharis, bowing and swaying, eyes closed. Claudette puts herself to work, preparing a meager breakfast for the three of them.

“That’s Jewish praying!” Santino exclaims when the chant is complete. “What are those things—those little boxes?”

Claudette meets her father’s eyes. This is not a subject she has ever heard discussed. Jews know; goyim never ask.

Unwrapping the long laces of his tefillin, Albert summons his Italian. “The Torah—la Bibbia vecchio, sì? It tells that we should love God with tutto cuore—” He taps on the left side of his chest.

“Tutto il cuore,” Santino corrects solemnly, accepting the little cube of cheese Claudette offers.

“Sì. Love God with all the heart, and tutta l’anima—all our spirit. E tutta la forza—all our strength. The Bible also tells us to bind—legare, sì?—bind these words on our hands and in front of our eyes, so we remember them always.” Albert shrugs. “Who knows what that means? How do you bind words in front of your eyes? So we write the words about tutto cuore, tutta anima, tutta forza, and put them inside the little boxes. Then we tie the boxes to our hands and foreheads when we pray.”

Chewing, Santino nods repeatedly, mouth turned down in thoughtful consideration. “È bello,” he decides. “That’s a good prayer.”

“The Torah says we must put those words by the doors of our houses and on our gates,” Albert adds, waving toward the forest. “No more house. No more gate. Tefillin are all I have.”

“The boxes look like little houses,” Santino points out helpfully. “Is that why they’re shaped that way? What’s wrong?”

Albert is staring at his left hand. “My wedding ring is missing.”

Swallowing her second, and last, mouthful of dry bread, Claudette shifts to German, too. “Are you sure you were wearing it?”

“Of course, I was wearing it—I never take it off!” He combs through low vegetation and dry leaves with his fingers. “Don’t just stand there, Claudette! Help me find it!”

“C’è male?” Santino asks.

“Mein Ring,” Albert says, unable to remember the word in Italian. “Mariage,” he says in French, and then “Moglie!”—wife—in Italian. Albert points to the place where years of constriction have compressed the small muscles of his finger, and makes a circling motion. Santino’s face lights up, then darkens with dismay. Dropping onto all fours, he joins the search.

When a few minutes of scrabbling through the stones and twigs produce nothing but scratches and skinned knuckles, Claudette sits back on her haunches. “We’ll never find it,” she declares, clapping dirt from her palms. “We’ll have to leave it behind.” Fingers raking, her father ignores her. “Papa, the Germans could be right behind us.” She means only to be practical and to justify her impatience, but speaking makes the prospect real. “Papa? Please—let’s just go!”

“Claudette, I don’t expect you to understand, but I do expect you to—”

A loud, unresonant crack! not one hundred meters away startles him into silence. The three of them freeze. Crouched to run, Claudette looks to Santino, who listens, still as a deer. When they hear someone speaking Polish, Santino picks up a branch and mimes breaking it. Smiling reassurance, he gestures for Claudette to resume the search, but she folds her arms across her chest. “That could have been the Germans, Papa!” she insists in a tense whisper. “It’s just a ring, Papa!” Terrified now, clutching her father’s arm, she tries to pull him to his feet. “Papa, let’s go! This is stupid!”

In one motion, Albert Blum straightens and slaps his daughter’s face. “It’s not just . . . a ring!”

It is the home he and Paula made during sixteen years of marriage, his children’s baby photos, mementos of his own youth. It is his orderly office, and meticulously cared-for wardrobe, the reputation he built as an accountant, accurate and scrupulously honest. It is everything that was, and is no more. He’s barely slept, freezing and miserable on a rocky mountainside. Every muscle and all his joints ache from yesterday’s awful climb, and God knows he’s as frightened of capture as Claudette. But months ago, he left his wife and two young sons on a train platform, expecting to see them a few days later. Now they have vanished, like everything else, and Albert Blum cannot—will not—accept another loss.

“It’s not just a ring,” he says again.

Claudette stands. “Fine,” she says, refusing to cry. “Let the Nazis catch us. Let them send us to a camp! See if I care!”

Full sunlight bursts over the mountain and finds its way to the ground. Santino lies flat, resting his head on forearms thick with muscle. “There! You see?” she cries, in tones of furious vindication. “Santino thinks the ring is stupid, too!” She wants her father to be humiliated. She wants him to admit he was wrong to care about the ring, wrong to hit her. She wishes the Germans would smash through the trees and arrest them all, this very moment! She’d rather be right than free.

When the slanting light reveals no telltale glimmer in the leaves, Santino starts to rise, then stops, struck by a thought. Reaching for the socks Albert used as mittens during the night, he shakes one, then the other. A small, bright object falls out. “Ecco, signore! Here it is!”

Hand trembling, Albert takes the ring from Santino’s cupped palm. The soldier smiles at Claudette, who glares resentfully and stomps away. He shrugs, unconcerned. “I have sisters,” he tells her father. “Girls are like that sometimes.”

Santino hefts the suitcases and trudges up the trail behind Claudette. Albert wipes damp eyes, blows his nose, makes an awkward fist with his thumb over the ring. “My thanks I place before you, O Lord,” he whispers, and continues his assault on the unseen summit.

The Alps are not the impregnable fortress walls they seem. Hannibal has passed this way, and Caesar, and Charles VII, and Francis I, and Napoleon. The Romans, the Lombards, the Franks. Russian and Austrian and papal armies have all surged across this mountain range. Ordinary people have fled from one side to the other in times of war, hoping to put high rock and bad weather between themselves and those who’d do them harm.

They’ve all added to the ancient layered repository of possessions that seemed essential at sea level. Treasured books, silver kiddush cups, and heavy brass candlesticks now come to rest above long-buried cuirasses and pikes. Iron kettles rust atop heavy clay pots. Carved stone deities, who might not be so helpful on the other side of the mountain anyway, overlie flint tools and traces of rush baskets that carried dried fish and red ocher. The trail across these mountains has been in use for seven thousand years.

Time after time, the path crests a rise only to descend sharply before ribboning over an even steeper slope beyond. Chestnut and beech give way to pine and fir, which themselves become dwarfish and gradually disappear. Above the treeline, ancient ice has carved a bowl of rock between two peaks. Barren of all but lichen, its surface is scoured yearly by stones and ice, rain and wind. Stumbling exacts an increasing toll.

The back of Claudette’s neck feels charred by the sun. Her muscles are rubbery. Too often, she loses her footing in her father’s slick-bottomed city shoes, coming down hard on hands and knees already bloody. Finally she crumples where she stands, waiting for Santino and her father to arrive at her side before bursting into angry tears. “I can’t go any farther! I never should have worn these stupid shoes! This is all your fault, Papa!”

“What exactly . . . is my fault?” her father gasps. “The war, Claudette? The Alps? Am I responsible . . . for how hard . . . rocks are?”

Santino says something. Reluctantly, Claudette looks to her father for an explanation. “Save your tears, miss,” Albert translates. “You may need them later.”

His own dogged momentum broken, Albert, too, sinks onto the bald stone. There’s been no water since noon, when the path last snaked past a spring. His toenails feel as though they’re being pried off his feet. His swollen fingers look like bratwurst. The ring finger that shrank in last night’s cold now throbs like a second heart, and the word “gangrene” flickers through his mind. Oh, Paula! he thinks, worn out with being the object of their daughter’s frightened peevishness. I should have taken the boys and left Claudette with you.

To make peace, he holds out his puffy hand so Claudette can see how awful his finger looks. “You were right,” he offers. “I should have forgotten about the ring.” Her shoulders relax a fraction, and Albert puts an arm around her. “I miss your mother.”

“I even miss David and Jacques,” she sobs, and laughs at this evidence of extremity. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “They had it easy, sitting with Mama on that train!”

“After the war, you can brag to them. They’ll be sorry they missed this adventure.”

They cling to each other until Albert realizes with his body what his mind has resisted for some months now. She’s nearly grown, and he has no idea what she does and doesn’t know. Shuddering at the idea of such a conversation, he watches a little group tramping down a slope, one gully back. The Brösslers, he realizes. Steffi rides on Duno’s shoulders. Liesl has slowed the family down—too big to carry and too small to climb well. Frieda Brössler could speak to Claudette, Albert realizes. I’ll ask her when we get to Italy.

A few feet away, Santino has hunkered down on the slanting rock face, glad to rest while the Blums pull themselves together. The sky is vast, Madonna blue, and unmarred by clouds. He can see the French countryside clearly. A swarm of Focke-Wulf 190s would have easy work up here, strafing soldiers and refugees with nothing but moss for cover, but there’s been no pursuit. He expects the British or Americans to be waiting on the other side of the mountain, given no more opposition by Italy’s armies. His own self-imposed objective is within reach. The Blums are only hours from safety. I’ll get them settled, Santino thinks comfortably. Then it’ll be south for me. A boat from Genoa or Sant’Andrea. Home.

He looks up, trying not to grimace. An officer told him that the Pass of Aurelius was popular with serious mountain climbers from Italy and France, before the war. The last kilometer is as steep as a ladder against a wall: a challenge for the strong, the experienced, the well-equipped. For the desperate, it’s simply necessary.

“How much farther?” Signor Blum asks.

Santino makes two mountains of his fingers and gestures a short distance over the space between them. “Not far,” he guesses vaguely, “but a lot of climbing first.”

And the mountain begrudges every step. By late afternoon, Claudia has slowed to a crawl, and Signor Blum’s lips are blue. Altitude and sun glare off granite have given Santino a fierce headache made worse by hunger, but he hasn’t complained aloud. The Blums probably think he’s stoic, or naturally quiet. Truth is, Santino’s mother tongue is a Calabrian dialect. He learned basic Italian during his four years of compulsory school. His working vocabulary consists of curses and obscenities, picked up in the army. He does not wish to slip and offend a refined gentleman like Signor Blum with bad language, and yet the moment has arrived: his unhappiness demands expression.

Broad back against the mountainside, he takes a deep breath of thin air to power a heartfelt oration concerning the height of mountains, the weight of other people’s luggage, the unreasonable ambition of Germans, and the direct involvement of pigs and whores in the parentage of Dwight David Eisenhower, whom Santino holds responsible for this disorganized retreat and who is, without doubt, at this very moment engaged in contracting enviable diseases from shameless women who rouge their lips.

Recognizing the sentiment, if not the words, Signor Blum holds up a bruised and bleeding hand. “Santino, you tried. This’s impossible. Leave the valises.”

Santino hates to do it, but shrugs philosophically. The only thing worse than dumping the suitcases now, after lugging them so far, is falling off the side of this stinking mountain while trying to carry them over the pass.

Kneeling awkwardly, Albert Blum opens first one bag, then the other. He removes the Giovanetti passports, a photo of Paula with the children. Both toothbrushes and the can of tooth powder. His razor, the remaining squares of newspaper. His tefillin. All these he wraps in his prayer shawl, making a vagrant’s gunnysack. The small, silver-bound prayer book he hands to Claudette. “Your mother gave me this siddur on our first anniversary. Keep it in your pocket.” He takes out the last of their food—two rolls, a little cheese. Closes the valises, locking them carefully, the better to make them fly. “Prego,” he says to Santino, and gestures down the mountain.

Giggling like a schoolkid, Santino flings one suitcase after the other into the sky. They tumble through the air, bounce against the rock face, and sail off into an abyss while the three of them cackle like chickens, witlessly amused. Someone far below yells angrily, but not even Albert can make himself feel ashamed, and Claudette is convulsed by the barrage of echoing Yiddish curses aimed at them like mortar shells.

Squinting into the sun, they sit to share their tiny meal, breaking into helpless laughter whenever one of them remembers the way the suitcase flew, or how the angry man shouted. When they’ve finished licking crumbs from their hands, they move with new energy, no longer away from capture but toward freedom. Lightweight and more nimble than either man, Claudette takes the lead. Hooking her fingertips into small crevices and pushing upward with her legs, she begins to understand why mountain climbing is a sport, and she scales the wall like a lizard, her nose so close to the hot stone she can smell the rock dust—

The sneeze is completely unexpected. Its spasm loosens her grip. Time slows.

The mountain seems to fall away, lazily tipping eastward while she herself remains suspended in air. I’m going to die, she thinks with a strange detached clarity. I should scream, she decides.

Her shriek shocks time back to its accustomed pace, and before its echo can return, Santino’s hand shoots up to support her trousered hip. In a single balletic move, he reaches for a hold and lifts himself, forming a wall behind her with his body.

“Coraggio,” he whispers, his mouth so close it brushes the fine down of her cheek. He can feel her heart pound through her back, but keeps his own breath steady. “Courage,” he says again. She looks at him out of the corner of an ocean-green eye. When she whispers, “Grazie,” her breath is like a kiss.

Four meters below, Albert calls anxiously, “Claudette, what happened? Are you all right?”

“I sneezed and lost my balance,” she calls back. “Santino caught me.” She still can feel the shape of his square palm, the outline of his short, blunt fingers on her hip. Santino draws back, but before she moves on, their eyes meet once more.

An hour later, the trail levels, widens, hairpins sharply. An abrupt decline reveals a blue infinity of uncountable peaks diminishing eastward toward the darkening horizon. For an endless moment, the three stand silently, between two summits. Santino breaks the spell, stretching into a long, deliberate stride downward. He holds out a hand, steadying Signor Blum as the older man joins him. Then, like a storybook courtier, Santino offers his arm to Claudia.

She is dirty and tired, her hair stringy and her face drawn. Santino’s heart catches when she takes his hand and descends as daintily as a fairy-tale princess stepping from a carriage. “Benvenuti al’Italia!” he says grandly when both Blums have crossed the border, and he cries a little himself as they weep and cheer, and embrace one another. “Welcome,” he whispers, “to my home.”

COLLE AURELIO
ITALY

“Boia faus!” Rinaldo Miroglio swears, watching three tattered figures stumble toward him in the dying light.

“What are we going to do with them, Tenente?” asks the corporal at his side.

Not quite twenty-two, Rinaldo Miroglio has been the acting commandant at the Colle Aurelio border post for all of eleven hours. “What about Val di Ponente?”

“The hotels are full, sir. Might be room in Roccabarbena.”

“That’s too far for them to walk.”

Last night, with a solemnity made tinny by the radio, Marshal Badoglio announced the surrender. “Recognizing the impossibility of continuing an unequal struggle against overwhelmingly superior forces, His Majesty Vittorio Emanuele III has requested an armistice to avoid further calamities to the nation.” Hostilities between Italian and Allied forces were to cease, but Badoglio ended his broadcast on an ominous note. The armed forces have been ordered to resist attacks from “any other quarter.” That can only mean Germany.

Communications to the border station were cut during the night. Early this morning, leaving his lieutenant in charge, the post’s captain left for Cuneo to consult with their superiors directly. And while Tenente Rinaldo Miroglio doesn’t expect to fight the Wehrmacht, he is dealing with an invasion.

Or, rather, an exodus, and a miracle surely! The Maritimes can be impassable as early as August, but the snows have parted for the Hebrews. All day Miroglio has witnessed emotional reunions. People weep with relief, boast of unexpected prowess in mountaineering, laugh giddily as they tell of terrifying encounters with pursuing Germans, who turned out to be squirrels or chamois.

Rinaldo himself has spent hours coordinating arrangements with local hotels. The innkeepers have been magnificent, refusing to discuss payment with people who have nothing but the clothes they stand in. Waiters assuage hunger with the delicacies and fine meals ordinarily reserved for Fascist officials. Bellhops usher footsore fugitives to thermal pools where they could soak in Roman baths before sleeping—safe at last!—between clean sheets. But hotels have only so many rooms!

Sighing, the lieutenant marches out to greet those he hopes will be the last of the poor wretches. An older man whose arms hang from his shoulders like a scarecrow’s shirtsleeves. A pretty girl, all legs and big green eyes. A stocky young infantryman. “Blum, Albert,” the gentleman says, fumbling in the pocket of his suitcoat. “We have documents—abbiamo papiere.”

“Miroglio, Rinaldo,” the lieutenant introduces himself. “Would you prefer Italian or German? Formalities are unnecessary, Herr Blum, but I’m afraid bunks in our barracks are all we can offer. The hotels are full.”

“No room at the inn!” the corporal says.

“A recurring theme in Hebrew-Roman history,” Rinaldo adds.

The old man manages a smile. “Grazie, Tenente. Bunks will be fine—wonderful!”

“I assure you, we’ll find better accommodations tomorrow. Tonight, you may take showers in that shed, and Pansa here will bring you something to eat as soon as you’re ready.”

The stubby soldier watches his Hebrew charges shuffle toward hot water and rest, hardly able to lift their feet. “And you are?” Rinaldo asks.

“Cicala, Santino. Pinerolo Division, First Corps, Fourth Army. We were disbanded, sir. They said it was every man for himself.”

“Sì, sì, sì. The armistice. I understand.”

“Have you heard anything, Tenente?”

“The American Fifth has landed at Salerno. Montgomery’s Eighth is also in the south. Our commander expects airborne landings at Rome and Milan anytime now. Maybe amphibious assaults near Genoa, as well. It’ll be over by October,” Rinaldo predicts. “You’re Calabrese?” he asks, recognizing Cicala’s accent.

“Yes, sir. And if it’s all the same to you, sir, I’m going home.”

“I gambled and lost,” Miroglio admits. “I was going to study law, but when my university deferment ended, I joined the border police to avoid the draft. Now I’m stuck.”

“Borders are borders,” Cicala commiserates, “even when a war ends.”

“Better here than Russia. Many more behind you?”

“The carabinieri said there were about twelve hundred Hebrewsin Sainte-Gisèle. Some stayed behind. Most gave the mountain a try. How many have come over so far, sir?”

“Three hundred at the Fenestre. Twice that at the Pass of the Cherries. We’ve had a few hundred come through here at Aurelio, so there can’t be many more—” A family with three children stagger into view, so tired they’re tripping over their own toes. “Dio santo, let these be the last!”

“Tenente?” a sergeant shouts from the office door. “Headquarters!”

Miroglio catches the eye of a passing private. “You! Go up and meet that family! Cicala, come with me. The captain may want to talk to you.”

They duck through the office door and Miroglio pulls off his cap, tossing it onto a pile of paperwork. Hand over the mouthpiece, the sergeant whispers, “It’s not the captain, sir. I didn’t recognize the name. Some major—”

Rinaldo brings the handset to his ear. “Tenente Miroglio, at your orders, Maggiore.” He gestures for Santino to sit. “I’ve been told a total of twelve hundred, sir . . . Yes, that’s the situation here as well. Most of them are in hotels in Val di Ponente, but some have gone on toward Cuneo . . . I have about thirty in the Aurelio barracks, sir, and more coming—families with children . . . Maggiore, we have a couple of trucks up here, but perhaps you can arrange additional transport? The Hebrews’re in poor condition. I’d hate to see them walk any farther . . . Yes, I’ll wait, of course, sir.”

The office is quiet while Miroglio’s line is rerouted. The sergeant reappears, handing Santino a plate of stew and bread with a tin cup of Barbera. The wine is cloudy with sediment and thick enough to chew, but Santino accepts it gratefully, raising the cup in salute as the sergeant leaves. Swallowing a chunk of gristly meat, Santino gestures toward the pass with his fork. “Maybe for Alpini that climb wouldn’t have been much, but for regular army and these poor damned ebrei? One false step, and we’d have slid all the way to the Riviera—”

Miroglio straightens. “Jawohl! Ja, mein Herr, das ist korrekt.”

Santino’s fork freezes halfway to his mouth.

Miroglio listens for a long time before saying, “Jawohl. Ich verstehe.” When the lieutenant finally replaces the receiver in its cradle, he looks dazed, and very young. “Italy doesn’t have a government anymore,” he says. “Marshal Badoglio and the royal family left Rome this morning. The city is occupied. The Vatican is surrounded.”

Confused, Santino asks, “By Americans or the British?”

“Germans! They’ve stopped the Allies on the beaches. German command has ordered all Italian troops to disarm. We’ll be transported south to reinforce a defensive line close to Naples. Anyone who resists will be shot.” Miroglio’s Adam’s apple works convulsively. “Our post captain was executed this afternoon for refusing to surrender his sidearm.”

“Madonna! Those miserable, shit-eating sons of bitches!”

Miroglio isn’t done. “I’ve been ordered to keep the Hebrews under guard. The SS will be here noon tomorrow—to take care of our ‘problem.’ ” The lieutenant looks sick. “Dio santo,” he whispers. “What have I done?”

“Tenente, you didn’t mean any harm—”

Miroglio stands so quickly his chair tips over. “How long will those people last in a labor camp? I’ve signed their death warrants! What am I going to do?”

They are nearly the same age, both born after Mussolini marched on Rome. All their lives, Rinaldo Miroglio and Santino Cicala have taken orders from fathers, priests, teachers, bosses, officers.

“Tenente? If Germans say noon, they mean noon. Let the Hebrews sleep,” Santino advises. “Then get them out of here early.”

Miroglio walks to the window. “Where? Where can they go?”

Santino comes to his side. The moon is rising, its light gleaming on stone terraces that descend like a giant’s staircase into shadowed ravines. “There must be hundreds of little farms in these valleys. If everybody took a few . . . ?”

“Scatter them around the countryside,” Miroglio says slowly. “Spread the risk.”

“We should hide, too, sir. If the Germans come here and don’t find Jews . . .”

Miroglio looks south. “The Allies promised Badoglio they’d send fifteen divisions into Rome alone—that’s what we heard.”

“Pardon me, sir, but if promises were pigs, we’d have bacon for breakfast.”

“True enough. And if the king’s left Rome, we’re on our own.” Miroglio thinks a moment longer, then rights his fallen chair. Pulling stationery from a desk drawer, he begins to dash off notes. “Rollero, I need you!” The sergeant comes to the door. Miroglio fills him in quickly. “Get a courier in here right away. We’ll need to alert Fenestre, the Pass of the Cherries, and every hotel in the valley. I want all the men in the square now, and be quiet about it! We’re going to pack up the weapons and ammunition and get out of here by dawn.”

Unnoticed, Santino finishes his meal and leaves the office. He shuffles toward the barracks across the square through an anthill of eerily quiet activity as La Guardia di Colle Aurelio begins an orderly if unordered retreat.

Nodding to a sentry, Santino eases the barracks door open, listens to snores and soft sighs, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Alberto Blum lies prone in the bed nearest the door, loose mouth gaping, eyes sunken into purplish bruises. Claudia sleeps quietly in the bunk above her father.

How old is she? Sixteen? Marriageable, in San Vito—the age Santino’s mother was, and prettier, even, than his Mamma in her wedding photograph.

Silently, Santino reaches out and, with one blunt finger, traces the line of her hip in the air above the blanket. His dirt-rimmed nails are ragged from the rocks. Her fine-grained, sunburned skin looks like polished pink marble against the rough army blanket tucked beneath her chin.

She stirs. He snatches back his hand. She does not awaken, but he leaves the barracks quickly, and is halfway across the parade ground before his steps slow.

Hulking mountains blot out half the sky. Santino Cicala grew to squat and solid manhood surrounded by mountains in the rocky highlands of Calabria. A year since he was drafted, and what has he seen in that time but mountains, and more mountains? Up the shank of the peninsula: the Apennines. Here in the north: the Alps, the Dolomites. Everywhere, steep as church spires, Italy’s mountains go on forever. Their roads snake and twist and coil—marvels of civil engineering. Bridges and viaducts, culverts and switchbacks and tunnels abound, and every single one will provide German demolition teams with an opportunity to delay or block an Allied advance. Northern Italy is filled with farms and factories. Food for German soldiers and civilians. Fabric for uniforms. Airplanes, trucks, cars. Labor. The Germans won’t give all that up without a fight.

“Madonna, I’m tired,” Santino whispers. Tired of officers and orders. Tired of marching, and of food that tastes of metal. He wants the war to be over. He wants to go home. He wants to build things, not blow them up. He wants a wife. He wants to raise kids. He wants history to leave him alone.

He stares at his own broad feet, sore and blistered in cheap boots—soles gaping, shoelaces frayed and broken. Seven hundred kilometers, vast navies, and great armies lie between him and home. He thinks of Signor Blum, sick and without a wife or sisters to care for him. He thinks of Claudia, and the shape of her against his hand. He looks to heaven, finds the polestar, and empties his lungs of air. “I’m damned if I’ll dig ditches for Germans,” he tells the night, and enlists in his next war.