March 1944

FRAZIONE DECIMO
VALDOTTAVO

“Where is the other lady?” Schramm asks when the young woman appears two days in a row.

She sets a basin filled with warm water onto the floor, pushes the hayloft shutters fully open, stands outlined by the sunshine. For the first time since they arrived here, the breeze carries no knife. “Signora Savoca took advantage of the weather. She’s down in San Mauro for a few days.”

“The signora is your mother?”

“Stefano’s. The man who brought you here?” she prompts. “Stefano Savoca?”

“He said his name was Renzo.”

She calls herself Marisa. Lovely, even if it’s not her real name. He knows almost nothing about her except that she is gentle, and he is half in love. A weakened man. A pretty nurse who is not contemptuous of that weakness. The situation is banal, and she counters it by making herself sisterly: casual and matter-of-fact in caring for him. Staying windward, she pulls his blankets off and airs them over a laundry line strung between the house and barn. Returning to his bedside, she makes a move for the sheet. Well enough to be startled, he snatches it back.

Dipping a rag into the water, she wrings it out. “Herr Schramm, you are in Italy,” she reminds him, washing his face, neck, chest. “No country on earth is more densely populated by male nudes. Nuns in Florence know more about reproductive anatomy than whores in Marseilles!”

He stares.

“Sometimes I forget you’re German. That was a joke,” she says, resoaping the rag. “Should I have applied for a permit before I told it?” He smiles, and she hands the washcloth to him. “You’re well enough to do the parts that make nuns blush.” She leaves the hayloft with his chamber pot. “How old is your baby?” he asks when she returns.

“Rosina?” Marisa pauses to count. “Six months! Imagine that!” She busies herself, using a clean handkerchief over her hands to collect the dirty ones she’ll boil. “No blood for three weeks!” she notes. “Signora Savoca is right. You’re going to live.”

“Life is full of missed opportunities.” It’s her turn to stare. “A joke,” he says.

“Next time, get a permit!” Marisa stoops to give the washrag one last swish, twists it nearly dry. “I’ll bring soup later,” she says, flinging washwater out the window. The clothesline pulley squeaks as she reels the line in.

“I should begin to walk a little. Tomorrow perhaps.”

She pauses, a blanket over her arm. “Why not today?”

That afternoon, she brings him a paisley robe that must have been Renzo’s and helps him to the edge of the bed. Spent, he sits, rests, then manages a few steps on shaking legs. After his soup he tries again, and with Marisa’s encouragement, he crosses the hayloft to a chair and back before they hear the baby’s waking wail.

“Mamma’s coming, cara mia!” Marisa calls. “If the weather holds,” she tells Schramm, “I’ll open up the house tomorrow. You can come down for a visit.”

The clouds pile up overnight, but the temperature stays warm enough for rain, and a change of scenery is a powerful incentive. With frequent stops, Marisa guides him across the sloping covered passage that connects the barn to the house, through an open door, and across a swept plank floor. Feeble as a good intention, he watches his own feet until she settles him at a table. Propped on his elbows, he wills his heart to slow, concentrating on each breath until he can spare the energy to look around.

“Terra nova!” she says. “Do you feel like Columbus?”

A pedal-powered sewing machine sits on a sturdy worktable under the window, where the pale winter light is best. An oil lamp hangs from a metal chain in the center of the ceiling. Suspended from a tripod in the open hearth: an iron pot. The fire’s been built up, to counteract a chilly breeze through the open door. A cupboard holds a jug of olive oil, a bottle of wine, and three slumping burlap sacks—cornmeal, dried chickpeas, and chestnut flour. Rafters, posts, door, and windowframes—all retain the shape and color of the branch or trunk from which they were hewn. The house is simple, but beautiful in its way. Long ago, someone plastered its thick stone walls, and these have been adorned with trompe l’oeil windows that reveal summer landscapes or the sea—

“Mirella,” his hostess says firmly.

“Scusi?”

“My real name is Mirella. The other lady is Lidia.”

“Grazie,” he says, touched by her trust. He lifts a hand toward the walls. “Are you the artist?”

“More artisan than artist. My father was a stuccatore—a specialist in fresco restoration. He started me on forced perspective when I was very young. My son’s age, now that I think of it. Angelo’s almost eight.”

“I have a boy that age! And another, of six years. They are Klaus and Erwin. Where is your son?”

“In a boarding school. He was safer there, away from the bombing. My husband couldn’t leave his work. He’s still in Sant’Andrea.”

“And this is Rosina,” Schramm says. Her cradle is on the floor, near the fire and as far from the sick man as it can be in this tiny house. Arms flailing, legs pumping at a restraining blanket, she is practicing B’s: “Bub, bub bub.”

“You must miss your family, Herr Schramm.”

“Yes. As you do, no doubt.”

They glance at each other, and Mirella clears her throat. An unspoken agreement is reached: they will not speak of absent family. The emotions are too raw, tears too close.

“Trompe l’oeil is very common in Liguria,” Schramm observes.

“Painters are cheaper than masons and sculptors.”

“It’s also cheaper to employ relatives than strangers, I think.”

She smiles. “My father had me bagging pigments when I was four! I loved the blues: lapis lazuli, cobalt, ultramarine. All I have here are pastels, but the colors please Rosina.”

“Signora Savoca has not returned?”

“No, and I expected her back by now.”

“She hates me, I think.”

“Bub, bub, bub. Bub!” the baby shouts, thrilled by her own volume.

“Signora Savoca lost children to influenza in 1918.” Mirella picks Rosina up and bubs back at her for a time. “She thinks Bayer aspirin was poisoned. Her theory is that Germans were exacting revenge for their defeat in the Great War.”

“That’s absurd!”

She smiles at the baby. “Two of her older girls took the aspirin. They died. The youngest children didn’t. They lived.”

“Coincidence.”

“Probably.” Mirella plants noisy kisses on chubby cheeks, her eyes on Schramm. “Distressing to be hated because of lies, isn’t it.”

He shifts uncomfortably in his chair. “Especially when there are so many legitimate reasons to be hated.”

“You people do keep starting wars,” she says tartly. “Every family in Italy has lost men because of Germany, and this occupation isn’t helping your reputation.”

“I imagine it would make a nice change if we tried tourism.”

She laughs, genuinely amused. “The Allies aren’t especially popular here either. They leveled Monte Cassino a few weeks ago.”

“For God’s sake, why?” Sitting on a hill between Naples and Rome, the fourteen-hundred-year-old Benedictine monastery was the jewel of medieval Italy.

“The Americans said the Wehrmacht was calling in artillery strikes from the abbey. The Germans deny it. Either way, it’s gone.” She jounces Rosina on her knee. “The Allies are still south of Rome. On the other hand,” she reports cheerfully, “the Russians have pushed your panzers all the way back to Poland! And there’ve been huge bombing raids on Berlin and Cologne— Dio mio, I’m so sorry! Do you have family there?”

“They are in Freiburg.”

“Then they’re all right,” she says, awkwardly.

“Probably.” Schramm turns his attention to a hand-carved crutch hanging from a hook by the front door.

“The last tenant was a hunchback,” Mirella tells him. “Tuberculosis of the spine, I think you’d call it. People around here are still frightened of the house. It’s been empty for years.”

“I am probably not contagious anymore, but are you not concerned?”

“My uncle died of tuberculosis when I was fifteen. He lived with us when I was a child.” She sets the baby back into the cradle. Astonished, Rosina produces a scowl of imperial displeasure, large brown eyes following her mother’s move toward the iron pot hanging in the open hearth. “X-rays show spots on my lungs, but they’re encapsulated.” Mirella tucks her apron between her legs, to keep the fabric away from the fire, and ladles thin soup into a thick pottery bowl. “Renzo explained about keeping the windows open and so on. And Rosina is upwind.” She brings the bowl and a wooden spoon to him. “The soup’s very bland, I’m afraid. Salt is like gold these days. Your Italian is quite good. Did you study Latin?”

“Yes, in school.”

“And your accent is Florentine.”

“I spent a year in Florence when I was young. Words come back to me. I worked hard last fall to remember the grammar.” She steps to the window. Light from the setting sun makes a nimbus of her hair. “It must be close to the equinox,” he remarks, waiting for the broth to cool.

“Yes—it’s March already! Friday, the seventeenth, I think. Easy to lose track up here.”

An experimental howl issues from the cradle. Mirella takes an oil lamp from the top of the cupboard and puts it next to the one already on the table. She doesn’t light either, though it’s getting dark. Rosina begins to wail. Mirella stoops to lift her.

“Don’t pick her up!” Schramm says sharply.

“Why on earth not? She’s probably hungry.”

“She should wait. It’s good for her.”

“I can’t imagine how. She’s not a prioress fasting her way into heaven.”

“You should put her on a feeding schedule,” he insists, eyes averted as Mirella tosses a cloth over her shoulder and unbuttons her blouse behind it. “If you pick her up, she’ll cry for what she wants.”

“German babies submit their requests in writing, I suppose.”

Rosina snorts and gulps and snuffles before settling in to nurse steadily. Schramm, too, concentrates on feeding himself. By the time he pushes the empty bowl aside, the spoon feels as heavy as a shovel. Leaning on the tabletop, he gazes at Mirella. “You look so familiar . . .”

Wryly, she strikes a pose with Rosina. “Have you been to the Staatliche Museum in Berlin?”

“That’s it! The Botticelli—”

“Madonna and Child with Angels, 1477. Also the first angel on the left in Primavera, at the Uffizi. According to family legend, my many-times-great-grandmother was one of Botticelli’s models.”

Looking at her, Schramm realizes the full genius of the painter, who captured the ordinary tiredness of a pretty mother who’s breast-fed for six months, and whose Son still wakes up most nights. “The resemblance is strong,” he says.

“It’s a lovely story, but . . .” She shakes her head.

“Inheritance halves each generation,” Schramm agrees. “There would be little continuity over four centuries.” He had forgotten the pleasures of conversation. “So! You don’t like Germans. You don’t approve of the Allies. What are your politics?”

In a singsong voice, she tells Rosina, “Mamma thinks politicians are frauds at best, and tyrants, given half a chance, cara mia, but kings can be decorative and useful!” She smiles at Schramm. “Renzo calls me an anarcho-monarchist.”

“Are you the one who wouldn’t marry him?”

“He told you that?” She seems surprised. “It was a long time ago.” The sated, sleepy baby quiets, and Mirella lays her in the cradle, humming softly. Standing at the window, her back to Schramm, she buttons her blouse. “Sun’s almost down!” she says, shivering.

“I should get back to the barn so you can close these windows.”

“Prego. Stay awhile more.” She brings a loaf of chestnut bread from the cupboard to the table, and then a bottle of local wine and two small glasses. “The bread’s overdone. I haven’t quite grasped the nuances of baking on a hearth.” Snapping a straw from a broom by the fireplace, she presses the end on a coal, then uses it as a match to light the two oil lamps. A tendril of smoke rises when she blows the straw’s flame out. Without a word of explanation, she closes her eyes and holds her hands before them. “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheynu melech ha-olam . . .”

Friday. Sunset. The unfamiliar language. “You’re Jewish!”

Her eyes open. “Sì, certo! Didn’t you know?”

“I thought you must be Catholic. Renzo said you didn’t marry because of religious differences.”

Mirella shakes her head as though to clear it. “I married a rabbi. That could be construed as a religious difference,” she says, pouring the wine. “Ordinarily, the husband says the next blessing, but these are not ordinary times.” Another chanted prayer and she hands Schramm a glass. “Loosely translated,” she informs him, “that one means, Thank God grapes ferment.”

“I’ll drink to that,” he says.

“A moment longer.” She places her hand on the bread and sings a third prayer before breaking the loaf into pieces and giving Schramm a share. “L’chaim!” she says, raising her glass. “To life!”

Schramm reaches gingerly across the table to clink glasses. “If you’re Jewish, then why didn’t you marry him?”

She chews and swallows before answering. “Have you ever read Svevo? Like Balli, Renzo loves women very much, but all of them equally, and only when he’s in the mood.” She sips the wine. “I wanted a more settled life than he was likely to provide. Now look at me! On a mountaintop, in a hunchback’s cabin, with a German officer. Not the bourgeois domesticity I envisioned.” She breaks off a smaller piece of bread thoughtfully. “And when Renzo came back from Abyssinia, he was . . . different. Herr Schramm, do you understand why he drinks so much?”

Schramm puts his glass down. Looks away. “Yes,” he says. “I believe I do.”

The storm that night is silent but relentless. By morning the entire valley is enveloped in the peculiar hush of deep spring snow. With Rosina and Schramm still asleep, Mirella is happy to lose herself in small tasks. She swings the pot of soup back over the coals, and nudges a kettle of water closer to the heat. She did as many chores as possible before sundown last night, but she has to tend the fire or they’ll freeze. The Polish Hasidim would be scandalized, but Mirella suspects that in ancient times women never had a genuine day of rest.

Thanks to Renzo’s contacts, she has real coffee beans and a grinder. She pours boiling water over the grounds and steeps them like a Turk. While they settle, she hurries out to the privy, shuffling through the snow to clear a path. When she returns, the full fragrance greets her, and she pours carefully, savoring the quiet. Thank God for simple gifts, she thinks. I am alive and well rested, with a cup of coffee to warm my hands and raise my spirits.

For nearly a week after Renzo brought the four of them to Decimo, Mirella was all but unconscious. She slept, woke to nurse Rosina, and slept again. A husband, three pregnancies, small children: there was a time when Mirella Soncini could count on one hand the nights of sound sleep she’d had since 1935. When the war began, things got worse.

Screamed awake by sirens, she and Iacopo would leap from bed, grab the children, and run to a shelter. When the all-clear sounded, her relief at seeing her own home intact was always blighted by others’ losses. Iacopo would hurry off to comfort the bereaved, leaving Mirella to face the tedium of clearing away the dust and grit and ash blown in from the harbor, again and again and again.

Even if there was no attack, she had to be up early to do the marketing before everything was gone. Her youth has been squandered in queues, shuffling forward step by step to claim a kilo of greenish potatoes at one store, the children’s milk ration at another, the family’s bread ration at a third. The only thing she could predict was the shortage of something basic: oil, sugar, eggs, salt, pasta, rice. Three meals a day to get on the table, and every one a struggle.

Slowly devotion to family and community condensed to stubborn determination. She would stay at Iacopo’s side, even if that meant huddling in bomb shelters. She would give Angelo the courage to enjoy the excitement of a raid, even if her own heart pounded with fear. She would teach herself to appreciate moments of fleeting peace. The feel of her son’s cheek against her own. The taste of a fresh tomato. The weight of her sleeping husband’s hand on her breast.

Since leaving home, Mirella’s longing for Iacopo and Angelo has been keen and constant, but there are compensations here. Without the demands of congregational life, she’s been free to spend hours with Rosina, gazing at her daughter’s perfect little body, playing with her, singing to her, watching her grow. In this small, safe place, Mirella can keep order and count on a routine. For her, the solitude and silence of the mountain are daily pleasures.

Lidia, by contrast, has been as restless as a dog on a chain, and craves politics more than fresh fruit. Once or twice a month, Renzo hauls supplies up the mountain, including a stack of newspapers: La Stampa, L’Italia Libera, Gazzetta del Popolo, Avanti! As welcome as he is, Mirella dreads his visits. She herself prefers any sort of book to current events and hates the political wrangles Renzo and his mother get into.

She shivers, notices the fire, adds a bit more wood. Pulls the blanket over Rosina’s cradle and opens the shutters to reel in a few diapers, dried crinkly-stiff on the line. Back in Sant’Andrea, Mirella never thought about the peasant laundresses who came into towns and carried off huge baskets of linen. A knock on the door, a shy smile, a few lire pressed gratefully into a rough, chapped palm. A week later, jumbled sheets and shirts and underthings, soiled and smelly, were transformed into neatly folded, beautifully pressed stacks of cleanliness.

Since coming here, her cracked, red hands and aching back have taught Mirella to respect the work behind so many things city people take for granted. “Now you understand!” Don Leto said happily. “You know the people, and you know their labor! When I was young, I kept accounts for our landlord and found out how little his tenants got. The contadini raise rabbits and pigs for his table. They live on polenta. Polenta with beans, polenta with potatoes, polenta with cheese or milk, but always polenta.”

Renzo made her look at things with a shrewder eye. “Peasants aren’t stupid, Mirella. They’ve got rabbits and chickens in pens hidden in the woods. Almost everyone keeps a piglet aside—where do you think they get their sausage? Most of these houses have false walls for wine and olive oil left off the inventory.”

“The padrone steals big, the contadini steal small,” Don Leto said when she asked him about that. “When larceny and lying are a way of life, the sin is the landlord’s. You can see for yourself the effects of poverty. Children grow up stunted in mind and body. When everyone in a family must work so hard, no one can stop to think of a better way.”

Lidia is convinced that the Communists have a better way. From each according to his abilities, to each according to his need. No landlords living off the misery of sharecroppers. Workers sharing equitably in the fruits of their labor. Lidia is thrilled by the courage of factory workers in Milan and Turin. Daring the fascisti to break their strikes, they mean to starve the Nazi war machine. This much Renzo was willing to commend, but when his mother praised the Soviets’ stupendous military production, he snorted. “Do you know how Stalin taught Russian peasants to show up at factory jobs on time? He had the ones who were late shot. So much for the people’s paradise, Mamma.”

What are your politics? Schramm asked last night.

Mirella answered with a joke, but the truth is that she doesn’t trust her own opinions. As a child, she reveled in the pageantry surrounding Benito Mussolini. He was as handsome as a storybook prince, and he rode a beautiful white horse. Her father believed in il Duce’s greatness and in the Fascist drive to make unified Italy a world power. She loved her father, so she believed what he believed, flattered when he talked to her like a grown-up. When someone questioned why Italian sons and taxes should be squandered on an African adventure, her father supported the Abyssinian war. “Italy’s destiny is to rule lesser nations! And let no one question our loyalty! Jews have always been and will always be a part of the national glory.”

For all her father’s political passion, when Mirella turned seventeen, it was not empire that enthralled her but Iacopo Soncini. And it was not war that frightened her but Renzo Leoni. “Mirella, there’s a sky above the sky! Let me show it to you,” he pleaded. There were currents in the ocean of air above the world, he told her. Rivers of wind carving valleys into a countryside of cloud, a geography of blue and gold and white. “One quick flight, Mirella. No barrel rolls, I swear! And I’ll land her like a kiss.”

Why did she refuse?

Above her, the roof slates have warmed. A chunk of snow slides off noisily, hitting the ground with a slushy thud. Rosina wakes up with a wail. Mirella sets her thoughts and coffee cup aside. The day begins in earnest, with all its necessary tasks, Shabbat or not. She has no more time to think while the sun is up.

Hours later, her day ends as usual. She checks on Werner, banks the fire, kisses Rosina’s forehead one last time, and crawls onto her own lumpy mattress, pulling three woolen blankets up to cover her shoulders. Ordinarily she falls asleep with grateful ease, but tonight, she watches firelight on the shallow vaulted ceiling and thinks again of the men she chose between.

Soft-bodied, soft-spoken, the scholar she married now lives like a spy in his native land. Braving checkpoints with false papers, open to denunciation at any moment, Iacopo risks his life to bring comfort and wisdom to frightened foreigners who expect from moment to moment to be found out, sold out, bombed out, burned out of their hiding places. The once-dashing pilot came home from Africa with a hero’s medal, and a thirst for grappa that seems unquenchable. Why had she heard Iacopo’s hesitant proposal of marriage more clearly than Renzo’s call to courage? Was it a failure of nerve or a triumph of common sense? If she had married Renzo, would his life be better, or her own life worse?

God knows, she thinks turning over, but God be blessed: at seventeen, I made the right decision.

BORGO SAN MAURO

“Will you look at that! And her, named for the Virgin!” Adele Toselli whispers, scandalized in gray morning light. “How could her parents let her out of the house in that skirt!”

“She probably rolls the waistband after she leaves.” Lidia moves the curtain slightly. “Watch the soldiers.”

Adele sighs. “Can you remember the last time a man looked at you like that?”

“December 13, 1898.” Lidia lets the curtain fall. “Nobody ever watches old women, and that’s what we can use against them.” When Adele hesitates, Lidia asks, “Do you know what the Germans call us? Alte schwarze Krähen—old black crows.”

Widowed before God gave her children, Adele Toselli has worn mourning and served the priests of San Mauro for over fifty years. There was gossip in the beginning, but the first Father was very old. The second was very holy and cared nothing for women. And Don Leto? “I knew Leto Girotti when he had two legs!” Adele informs anyone who asks, and most of those who don’t.

“You’re sure you know what to do?” she asks Lidia.

“Cara mia, I heard more about engines at my dinner table than I care to remember. That’s all my husband and son talked about!”

Adele drums arthritic fingers on a table she has scrubbed for half a century. “Why not? Why not!”

Lidia turns her back, wraps something in a handkerchief, then slips the little packet into her handbag. Bending at the waist, she smiles hollowly at Adele, who giggles like a schoolgirl and deposits her own dentures on a cupboard shelf. They leave the rectory in lumpy layers of black wool, taking the long way to San Mauro’s central market. Turning down a deserted side street, they age step by step. By the time they reach the crowded piazza, they’re tottering in pitiable anonymity, pinched and wrinkled faces aimed at the cobbles.

Adele tenses, rehearsing what she’ll say if someone recognizes her, but Lidia was right. It’s cold. German soldiers in greatcoats loiter with casual menace in front of what used to be the municipal hall. Wrapped to the eyes in scarves, townspeople want to finish their shopping unmolested and get back inside.

Lidia increases pressure on Adele’s arm, glancing at the latteria. Their unwitting accomplice emerges from the shop with her can of rationed milk. Dimpled knees flashing under the roll-topped skirt, legs pinked by wind and chill, coat unbuttoned despite the cold. The younger Germans grin and nudge one another. The boldest calls out a crude remark, but a blond and haughty corporal stares hard with hooded blue eyes. Favoring him with a sidelong glance, the luscious Maria Avoni slowly raises a hand to brush back heavy mahogany-colored hair, its glory undiminished by anything so sensible as a hat. The movement is intended to press her nipples more firmly against a too tight sweater, and it achieves its purpose. Head high, she feigns indifference to cheers and whistles.

With all that to enjoy, what soldier would waste a glance at two alte schwarze Krähen with their cheeks falling in, clutching each other’s arms with blue-veined and spotted hands? The old crows pass between a pair of BMW motorcycles that lean on kickstands outside the garrison office. One huddles solicitously over her toothless companion, who crouches next to the engines just long enough to . . . oh, tighten the laces of a high-topped shoe, perhaps? Two quick moves, and the ladies hobble on.

March is as shameless a tease as Maria Avoni, with hints of spring and reminders of winter by turns. Overnight the wind shifts, the air warms. Tuesday’s sun heats up the gravel track that leads to Decimo. Lidia Leoni is tired, her feet chilled and sore, but she does not go inside, not yet. She picks her way across the yard to the edge of a high cliff near the hunchback’s house.

“You’re back!” Mirella calls, standing in the doorway. “I was starting to worry. Is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course! Splendid sunset,” Lidia comments, without turning. Casually, she reaches into her handbag, withdraws a pair of ignition wires, and flicks them into the void with a slight movement of her wrist. She faces Mirella and smiles brightly. “Adele sends her regards.”

TABACCHERIA MARRAPODI
VALDOTTAVO

“Where’s the cash coming from?” It’s cold again today, but Tino Marrapodi’s face is pasty with sweat. “Eight years, I run this store, and I never saw so much cash!”

There’s enough of the new postman’s arm below the elbow to serve as a sort of hook, and Pierino Lovera uses it to keep the leather mail pouch open while he paws through its contents with his left hand. “Nnn-n-niente, sssignore,” Pierino announces regretfully.

“Look again. Maybe a postcard, down at the bottom?” The storekeeper’s older boy was sent to North Africa in 1941. Three months ago, his younger was drafted into a Republican army unit that’s been sent to Germany for training. Neither’s been heard from since. “Nobody paid cash before,” Marrapodi says worriedly. “A man would come in for kerosene, tobacco. Some corduroy. He’d pay with lard, cheese. Maybe a basket of eggs. We eat the eggs. Couple days later, I get a stack of wood for the lard. I wholesale the cheese in San Mauro. One time, I ended up with a wagonful of broom straw! What good is a wagonful of broom straw? my wife wanted to know. More good than a ledgerful of scribbling, that’s what I told her!”

The large black sign behind the counter bears the king’s crest and the Fascist sheaf of wheat. “Bertino Marrapodi is the official licensee of a state store,” the sign proclaims, “authorized to sell the monopoly goods of the Italian government: tobacco, salt, matches, stamps, and quinine.” Sale of any other goods is forbidden. To prosper in the midst of poverty, the storekeeper must make two and two equal five in accounts receivable, but only three in accounts payable. Like Jesus, he turns water into wine, making ten liters of nebbiolo into eleven, fiddling the arithmetic accordingly. Tino’s days are spent negotiating complicated deals, his nights rehearsing his defense if someone rats on him. “I have the only store on this side of the valley, Your Grace. The contadini would have to walk all day to get to San Mauro, so I make a few other items for sale. Pots, pans. Safety pins. Pasta, cloth.”

Tino is confident such infractions of his license will be overlooked, but it’s strictly forbidden to sell liquor to the old men who meet here every day to play cards. The law forbids playing cards on the premises, so Tino makes them sit outside in the cold, and they’re resentful. It’s only a matter of time before somebody puts the bite on him: “Pay me off, or I’ll make trouble for you!”

Pierino finishes his rummage through the mailbag. “Nnn-n-niente,” he says again.

Marrapodi presses his fingers into his belly. “Heartburn,” he says. “Keeps me awake all night! How can I sleep with so many worries?” His boys are missing. His strongbox is filled with German-printed occupation lire. There are shortages in the Roccabarbena warehouse. Without a kickback to the wholesaler, his store’s tobacco supply would dry up completely. There’ve been ugly scenes—people shouting, accusing him of profiteering—but he only raised his prices to cover the bribes. “The cash worries me,” he says again, pressing harder into his stomach. “What if someone denounces me?”

Pierino offers his left hand to Marrapodi. “Www-wa-watch mmmy b-b-bi—?”

“Your bicycle? Sì, certo.”

They step outside together. It’s chilly, but the sun is shining through a break in the clouds. The hamlet centered on Tino’s store is just a few small stone houses next to even fewer big stone barns. Tino lifts his chin toward a footpath that leads upward toward ever tinier and poorer places, where the most isolated sharecroppers scratch at thin soil and raise small, skinny children. “The last postman used to leave mail here for them,” Tino says. “You don’t have to take it all the way.”

Pierino shrugs and mugs: I know, but I can’t help myself. I’m a conscientious man.

Taking Pierino’s good arm, Marrapodi draws close. “Be careful,” he warns the postman quietly. “They’re Communists up there.”

In the beginning, war seemed like a good idea. The army was a big new market for produce and grain. Piemonte sent four divisions of draftees to Russia, and the boys got nice uniforms with leather boots. With so many young men drafted, there were plenty of jobs in the towns and cities.

Soon, though, old taxes got higher, new ones more imaginative. The dog tax was infuriating. First a small tax on watchdogs, then a larger one on truffle dogs, and finally an impossible levy on hunting dogs. What’s next? people asked. A chicken tax? A tax on piss, like Vespasian’s?

The war is bleeding everyone dry. The contadini already split their harvest with landlords and their crooked factors. When the Blackshirts started showing up, you couldn’t slaughter a hog without a gang of enforcers demanding a quarter. Resist, and they’d open your scalp. Now it’s Germans sweeping through the valley, dragging anyone in trousers from the fields, taking anything they want. In a good year, the contadini make a bare living, and now they’re squeezed from all directions. The Germans are offering huge bounties for Jews and partisans, and they’re burning out anyone who hides them. Would you blame the contadini for informing?

“Ei! Pierino!” Attilio Goletta yells from his hayloft when the postman comes into sight. “Did you hear? Ocelli’s truffle dog has learned to sniff out fascisti! You know how you can tell when he finds one?”

Pierino grins up at him, waiting for the punch line.

“He shits!” Attilio laughs hugely and tosses his pitchfork aside. Brown, bald, and barrel-chested, the farmer clumps down the exterior staircase in wooden clogs. “How can you tell if a new bridge is good?” he asks, wiping both hands on his pants and offering his left. “Drive over it with a truckload of Germans. If it falls down, it’s a good bridge!”

A tiny six-year-old runs over from the garden to tug on Pierino’s empty sleeve. “Ei! Pierino!” he pipes. “What’s the difference between a dog and a Nazi?”

Smiling expectantly, Pierino shakes his head: I don’t know.

“The Nazi lifts his arm!”

Pierino smiles, and Attilio roars, but gives the kid a shove toward the garden. “Get those rows ready! I don’t want to see any weeds!”

The ground the Golettas work is so bad they need every child, every daylight hour, six and a half days a week, year in and year out, to feed themselves without going further into debt. Attilio’s oldest boy, Tullio, is with the partisans, which makes everything harder. The Golettas aren’t just supporting themselves and their younger kids, either. There’s Florina’s mother, plus Attilio’s widowed sister and her two daughters, and three ebrei besides.

Pierino holds out an envelope, and Attilio grins. “Holy cards from Don Leto?”

Dollars from Hebrews in America become francs in Switzerland. A priest at the border smuggles them to a bishop in Genoa, who turns them into lire. The milkman brings that money to Don Leto, who distributes it to those who come to Mass. Pierino delivers the rest to isolated families like the Golettas and Canobbios and the Ocelli, who’ve taken in foreign Jews the way his own family has.

With his youngest son out of earshot, Attilio leans toward Pierino and whispers, “You hear about Pinocchio? He goes to Gepetto and says, Every time I make love, my girl complains she gets splinters! Gepetto gives him some sandpaper, ne? Couple of weeks later, he runs into Pinocchio again and says, Ei, Pinocchio, you getting along with the girls now? Pinocchio says, Who needs girls?”

Laughing, Pierino hefts his bag. He knows where Attilio’s getting cash, but God knows where he gets his jokes. “Mmm-marrap-podi’s ssssusp-picious. B-b-battista, too.”

“Marrapodi’s a moron. And my cousin’s a sack of shit, just like his father. Battista’s always saying, ‘I’m a Knight of Labor! I worked for everything I got!’ Merda! Battista bought that farm with money that should have been my father’s, and I hope the bastard gets a cancer. Florina!” Attilio yells, fuming. “The postman’s here!”

Florina hustles out of the house with three loaves of bread and a sweater knit from lumpy yarn. People say she was once the prettiest girl in Valdottavo, but ten pregnancies on, Florina is bowlegged and bent, with more fingers than teeth. She wraps the bread in the sweater and slips the bundle into Pierino’s mailbag. “Bring thith to my thon,” she lisps. “Tell Tullio: I pray for him and the otherth.”

Pierino resumes his climb toward the Cave of San Mauro, but he stops when he sees the red thread tied around a certain branch. Removing it, he veers onto a goat track, climbs alone and unobserved for half an hour. He arrives at the appointed place, lets the mailbag thump to the ground, and sits beside it. Still awkward with his left hand, but getting better, he unbuckles the leather flap and pulls out the chunk of cheese and apple Signora Toselli packed for him this morning.

Across the valley, half-buried in snow, the hamlet of Santa Chiara looks like part of the mountainside, its sloping slate roofs as dull as the sky. He hasn’t been home in nearly a month, but Don Leto’s housekeeper looks after him. The rectory has lots of books, and Don Leto likes to talk about them. “I, too, am the first of my family to be literate,” the priest said. “We who love to study are like pigs with wings, ne?”

Or warriors with one arm, Pierino thought.

He has steeped himself in the classics, reading late into each night, until he dreams of battles fought in stately, sonorous words. Like Scipio Africanus, Pierino has set himself to learn from the enemies of Rome.

He is only twenty-one—his education aborted by war, his arm truncated by war, his tongue tied up like a dog by war. Pierino Lovera’s name will never be in a book, but he understands war, and he knows how to win this one. He’s studied the tactics used against Giulius Caesar by Cassivellaunus; understands the trap laid by the German chieftain Arminius, who destroyed the Legions of Publius Quintilius Varus in the Teutoburger Wald. Supplied from the countryside, aided by relatives and neighbors, highly mobile indigenous irregulars have always been able to tie up conventional troops, disrupting and delaying their movement, confusing and defeating much stronger regular forces. History will show that Adolf Hitler is not Caesar but Pyrrhus, who won battle after battle but lost so much each time that he lost his war in the end.

Now, at last, Pierino has found a man who can make others hear what Pierino can only think. The man who has watched him all this time. “Ready?” Jakub Landau asks, stepping into view.

Pierino hoists his mailbag, and leads the way.

CAVE OF SAN MAURO

Duno Brössler hunches on a lump of rock, a dirty blanket around his shoulders, an oily rag draped over his knees. His fingers are blue and he shivers convulsively, but he’s learned to ignore the cold.

Methodically, he takes a 7.65mm RIAF Beretta ’35 to pieces. Removes the magazine, turns the safety on. Locks the slide, pushes the barrel back, lifts it from the rear. He is not worried about being disarmed on duty. He can field-strip and reassemble the pistol in sixty seconds, and he can do it one-handed. Like Pierino.

Duno takes the afternoon watch, because that’s when Pierino’s likely to arrive. Most of the boys loathe sentry duty. It’s lonely, boring, and cold, but Duno doesn’t mind. Pierino was colder in Russia.

Duno detests the Republic of Salò because Pierino detests it. He despises the repubblicani because Pierino despises them. He loathes the Germans on his own account, and Pierino hates them, too, but that puzzled Duno in the beginning. “Why do you hate the Germans so much, and the Russians so little?” Duno asked. “Russians took your arm!”

Duno remembers Pierino’s answer as if the maimed man had spoken with the fluency of an orator. “The Russians were defending their homeland,” he said. “We, too, will defend our homes against the Germans, and against the Allies if they try to rule us. We’ll fight the landlords and the repubblicani. We will defeat anyone who comes to take land we’ve watered with our sweat.”

Pierino was patient with Duno’s struggle to learn Italian; Duno appreciated the time Pierino required to finish a sentence. After Don Leto introduced them, it took the whole of their climb up here for Pierino to explain where they were going. The Cave of San Mauro, high in the mountainside, has hidden fugitives for centuries. When Napoleon invaded Italy, the valley’s women were hidden from the French here. In this war, it’s the young men who are at risk during rastellamenti.

Una rastella is a hay rake, Pierino explained. The Germans descend on groups of potential laborers and rake them up for work gangs: “Un r-r-rastellammmmento.” By the time Pierino got the word out, Duno had memorized it.

Apart from Duno himself, the San Mauro Brigade consists of local kids born in the unlucky years of 1924 and 1925. Draftees could either serve in the Republican army under German command or risk being raked up. Many of the eighteen-year-olds who reported for duty have deserted, bringing home their guns, and stories of German insult and abuse.

Four notes: whistled. Duno stands and returns the notes, higher. Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! The signal was Duno’s idea. He has loved the aria since he was small, when his father booked an opera company touring Turandot. Duno knows now what the lyrics mean. Nessun dorma! No one sleeps! Appropriate, he thought, for those who keep watch.

When Pierino rounds the last switchback, Duno hurries to meet him, Beretta in hand. “Pierino, watch me strip this—!” He skids on the gravelly slope.

Pierino’s not alone. Tall, blond, and powerfully built, the man with him looks like a recruiting poster for the SS. Swallowing his surprise, Duno says, “I know you! I was at Sainte-Gisèle. You’re Jakub Landau!”

Everyone in Sainte-Gisèle knew Jakub Landau’s story. He was a Polish Jew, but one who spoke perfect German and looked so Aryan that a gauleiter actually believed Landau’s claim to be a Volksdeutscher named Hans Obermüller, whose papers had been lost in the bombing of Warsaw.

Landau looks hard at Duno. “Yes. I remember. You’re bigger.” He gestures at the Beretta. “Show us.”

Duno kneels and closes his eyes. His whole body shakes with cold, but he does the job with cool competence, and his chest swells when Landau is impressed. “I can do the Breda, too,” Duno brags, “ma due minuti—two minutes for the machine gun.”

Pierino points to Duno’s right hand: if you lost your left, could you manage with your right?

“Not as fast yet,” Duno admits, “but I will be. I’m learning to shoot, too. We need bullets, Pierino. Some of us need more practice.”

Duno doesn’t mention what the other boys say about him: that he couldn’t hit dirt if he fell out of a wagon. He suspects they’re just teasing him—nobody could see the kind of targets they pick out for him. This leaf, that stone . . .

Pierino unslings the mailbag and pulls out a sweater wrapped around several loaves of bread. He gestures for Duno to put the sweater on. Shuddering with cold, Duno considers it, then refuses. “There are others who have less,” he says stoutly.

“Il postino told me you would be a good comrade,” Landau says, his Italian heavily accented. “Wear it on sentry duty,” he suggests. “Then share.”

“That’s fair,” Duno agrees.

He’s started to put the sweater on when a cautious voice calls from somewhere to his left. “Duno! Who’s that with you? He looks German.”

“That’s my relief,” Duno tells Landau. “Va bene, Nello! Pierino brought him.”

Circling a bald boulder, Nello Toselli reveals himself: short and baby-faced, the sort who’d be a fat kid, given a decent meal even once a day. “I was just making sure,” he says. The rifle he clutches is unloaded, but a stranger wouldn’t know that.

“Good discipline,” the blond man notes, “for boys.”

Nello shoots him a look and is about to say something rude when he notices what Duno is wearing. “Ei! Duno! Nice sweater! Did your girlfriend bring it up here?” It’s only a joke, but Duno flushes. Giggling, Toselli smacks him on the shoulder. “So that’s why you volunteer for sentry duty! You’ve got una bella fica coming up in the afternoons, ne?” He gestures obscenely. “Fare la chiavata?”

“Bastardo lurido!” Duno sneers. “Go to hell with your dirty mind! Pierino brought the sweater, and bread, too.” He waves a loaf in Toselli’s face. “I was going to give you some,” he taunts, snatching it back when Toselli makes a grab for it, “but after that remark—”

“Ei! Duno! I was only giving you a hard time,” Nello whines, making another try for the bread Duno holds just out of reach.

The blond man grabs the loaf and tears off a small piece for Nello. “Sometimes we must impose a tax, ei, comrade?”

“The rest goes into la nonna’s basket,” Duno says, peeling the sweater off. “Whoever’s freezing his coglioni off on sentry duty gets to wear this, understand? Share and share alike!”

The San Mauro Brigade of the First Alpine Division of the Armed Anti-Fascist Resistance, that’s what the boys here call themselves. Their “brigade” is seventy-one short of a hundred-man company and they’re armed with a haphazard collection of shotguns and hunting rifles that belonged to someone’s nonno, but bombast comes naturally when you’ve heard Fascist propaganda all your life. Gangly adolescents slouch against the cave walls or huddle around three campfires, filling the air with talk and body heat. Several wear uniforms, insignia removed. Most wear the clothes they ran away in last fall, when the weather was still warm.

“Comrades!” Jakub Landau calls out, his voice cutting through their murmur. “I ask hospitality of the brigade!”

They leap to their feet at the sight of this blond stranger. A Republican deserter holds a Carcano ’91 at the ready. Landau recognizes Attilio Goletta’s son Tullio from descriptions: he is hairy as a boar, and just as attractive. A tall old woman, slender and severe in black, comes forward to place a hand on Tullio’s gun barrel. “Pierino and I have met with il polacco before, boys. We can vouch for him,” Lidia says, as Landau bows over her hand.

“I am called il polacco because I am from Warsaw in Polonia,” Landau tells the boys.

“Pierino brought this from your mamma, Tullio!” Duno holds the bread high, then adds it to the basket of food la nonna arrived with this morning. Most nights the brigade’s suppers consist of Signora Goletta’s cornbread, and boiled chickpeas washed down with rough red wine. For this occasion, la nonna has supplied a feast: two big tins of tuna and half a wheel of parmigiano-reggiano that her son brought up the mountain last month.

Even here, in a cave, they mind their manners in front of Lidia, making small talk, exchanging pleasantries and news with the stranger until he is ready to explain his presence among them. Wiping his mouth, Landau begins his standard recruiting speech, picking bits of cornbread from his palms, so as not to waste a crumb. He represents a fighting force called the Volunteer Corps of Liberation—led by Italian army officers, manned by demobilized Alpini and regular army, as well as by patriots like themselves. The corps is aided by good men working inside the Republican government, who pass information to the partisans about Fascist military plans. Landau himself is an organizer for a growing coalition of Resistance groups brought together by the Committee for National Liberation. He is trusted precisely because he is a foreigner without local loyalties, untainted by vendettas or jealousies.

His voice is ordinary, factual; his Italian ungrammatical, but adequate. “I have no family,” he says quietly. “The Germans, they kill all my family. My wife, my children, my parents, my brother, my sisters. Why?” He looks up. The boys are listening, wide-eyed. Softly, caressingly, he says, “Because they are ebrei.”

Standing, he speaks now with the tone of a man who expects no reply. “Four years, I was alone. Four years, I was afraid. Four years, I ran. No more.” He points toward the Soviet Union. “Like the sun, an army of patriots rise in the east. In Russia, in Polonia, in Yugoslavia, in Greece—the people rise against fascisti everywhere. I have joined my fate to theirs.”

If the San Mauro joins this corps of liberation, he promises, they’ll become part of a genuine brigade: three companies, each divided into platoon-sized units officered by a lieutenant in command of three squads: thirteen men each with a sergeant and corporal. Company commanders, subcommanders, logistics and intelligence officers will support the fighters.

Tullio Goletta scratches with a furry hand at the lice in his hair. “I had enough of officers when I was in the army.”

“I have heard of Attilio Goletta’s son,” Landau says, looking at Tullio. “People say you and your babbo are two loaves from same dough. Both fearless, both strong. But Babbo’s jokes are better.” The boys all laugh. “In the Corps of Liberation,” Landau resumes, “officers do not order any personal slavery. Italy don’t shine Germany’s boots, and men of the corps don’t shine officer shoes. We tell them, You officers: you clean your own dishes! Wash your own stinky shirts!” When the laughter dies down again, Landau adds soberly, “And you fighters: respect the peasants! They are mother and father, grandparents and sisters of the armed anti-Fascist partisan movement. You do not steal from them! You leave the women pure!”

There are cheers this time, but Tullio points to their flea-market armory. “What we need are weapons, ammunition. Warm clothes, and shoes! What are you offering—besides officers?”

“Lugers. Mausers. Schmeissers. Uniforms. Greatcoats. Boots—good ones. All,” Landau says, “from bodies of enemy.” Tullio snorts, but the Pole knows his audience. These kids are young enough, and bored enough, to believe that they can do anything. Quickly, he outlines a plan.

The effect is galvanic. Arms wave, eyes glow, voices rise in volume, echoing against the glistening stone walls. “I think it could work,” la nonna says judiciously. “I’m willing to do my part, and so is Nello’s zia Adele.”

Nello looks doubtful. “I’m not so sure. Borgo San Mauro could end up like Boves. The Germans burned a priest and an important businessman to death. Twenty-five people were shot. The whole town was leveled.”

“We’ve got to do something,” Duno says. “We can’t just sit up here forever!”

That, Landau suspects, is exactly what Nello would like to do. Attesimo, Italians call the policy. Wait and see. “Comrades,” he says, “this is war, with casualties, with reprisals. Our enemy knows only force. He listens only if we use his language.”

“Pierino, what do you think?” Duno asks.

All eyes turn to the only combat veteran among them: a one-armed reminder of the risks that soldiers run. The postman stands. He makes a humming sound, shrugs, grimaces: apologetic, annoyed, resigned. “M-m-m— Mmmm-mo—” His Adam’s apple spasms, his lips convulse. He jerks his head to break the jam. “Mmmoses!” finally bursts through. Then, as sometimes happens when he is alone, or unself-conscious, the next word slips out with a breath. “Aaaaron,” he says, pointing at Jakub Landau.

At first the boys don’t understand. “He speaks for you?” Duno asks. When Pierino nods, Duno turns to his comrades and says, “That’s enough for me.”

Forgotten in all the talk, the fires have burned down. Duno Brössler reaches for a chunk of chestnut wood. “We fight? The Germans kill.” He holds the wood above one of the hearths. “We don’t fight? The Germans kill.” The firewood drops. Sparks explode into the damp air. “I say: we fight!”

One by one, boys stand. One by one, they toss fuel onto the embers, until the fires blaze. Somewhere in the cave, a sweet-voiced tenor begins to sing, “Nessun dorma.” One by one, the boys of San Mauro join in. “My secret lies locked up within me. No one shall ever know my name . . .”

Closing his eyes, Landau listens silently. He is moved by the melody and the lyrics. Moved by the gallantry of old women and skinny kids who propose to take on the Republican army, the Wehrmacht, the Waffen-SS. Moved almost to tears by the final stirring declaration of a victory that must come from beyond the grave.

The Germans have Tiger tanks, he thinks, but these boys have Turandot, and courage, and history on their side.

A week later, the equinox is past, and the days noticeably longer. Even so, when Lidia returns to the hunchback’s house this time, it’s an hour after sundown. She is surrounded by violet mountains floating like islands in a sea of clouds illuminated by a gibbous moon, but she is blind to their beauty.

Lidia Leoni knows now why men love war. To plan together, to be audacious. To fear, and risk, and win! To triumph over contemptuous conquerors! What could be more thrilling?

The wind shifts. Mirella has a fire burning, and the fragrance brings Lidia to her senses. Shod in awful peasant clogs, her feet are freezing, and she hobbles inside at last. The baby must be sleeping. Mirella sits alone in the firelight.

“Cara mia, wait until you hear what we just did!” Lidia says, unwinding her muffler. “Four ambushes, no casualties! Hardly any of the Germans were hurt either—Nello didn’t want to give them an excuse for reprisals. We got twenty-four uniforms, all good wool, enough for all the boys. Pistols, rifles, even a machine gun! Ammunition.” Stamping her feet, Lidia makes sure she’s knocked the caked March mud off her clogs. “I swear, I feel like a girl again! What’s wrong?”

Mirella, mute and frightened, looks past her to a figure sitting in shadow by the door.

“Signora Savoca. Home at last!” a suave male voice says. “Or perhaps I should call you Gramma? All good partisans should have nome di battaglia, signora, in addition to those on their false papers. I understand your battle name is la nonna.”

Reluctantly, Lidia Leoni turns to face him.

“I’m afraid it really doesn’t do to walk into a house and blurt out your troop strength, signora. People ordinarily have to be tortured to give up the kind of information you just tossed into my lap.”

Standing as straight as she can, Lidia unbuttons her coat and hangs it on a peg next to the hunchback’s crutch. “Renzo, I—”

“Prego, Mamma! Call me Stefano, one last time.” He reaches into his breast pocket for a set of identity papers and tosses them into the fire casually. Mirella flinches. Lidia stares. The pasteboard curls and blackens. “They’re compromised,” he says. “As far as I can tell, everyone in this valley knows Stefano Savoca’s mother is supplying partisans with the food he brings up the mountain.”

“I—I’m sorry,” Lidia stammers. “I didn’t . . .”

“You didn’t what, Mamma? You didn’t think? You didn’t look? You didn’t listen? You didn’t investigate fresh wheel ruts leading directly to your barn? You didn’t notice the trampled ground around your own doorway?”

Lidia feels behind her for the chair and sits, a little harder than she intended.

“Renzo, please!” Mirella whispers, stepping between them. “She’s your mother! Don’t do this—”

“Don’t do what?” Renzo asks with chilling mildness. “Don’t speak harshly to her?”

A knot in the wood pops. The fire flares. Mirella backs away.

“If you are going to play this game, Mamma,” he continues softly, “it’s important to learn the rules. The rules are: partisans are shot. People who aid partisans are shot. People whose houses are used by partisans are shot. People who live near those houses, and didn’t turn the partisans in, are shot. The relatives of those who have been executed are immediately under suspicion. They are arrested, and ungently questioned. If they don’t know anything, they make something up, so the beatings will stop. Anyone they mention under torture will be arrested—”

“And shot! Thank you, caro. You have made your point.” Tears well and spill, but Lidia’s eyes remain level. “Tell me,” she asks with flinty curiosity, “what exactly are the rules for those whose sons ask them to shelter Nazi deserters?”

The door slams behind him. Mirella opens it in time to see him stride unevenly across the yard. Hurrying, she follows him into the ramshackle barn that serves as Schramm’s private sanatorium.

“Go back inside,” Renzo orders, voice low.

She tugs a cardigan more tightly around her but stands her ground.

“Mirella, I am not a quartermaster for the San Mauro Brigade!” Gripping the rear of a wooden mule cart, he lowers himself onto his knees and drags a case of tinned army rations from within a false bottom. “The food I steal is for you!”

He lurches to his feet, but something happens. He cries out in pain, loses his grip on the flimsy crate. Cans and curses roll in every direction. The mule snorts and shies, but Mirella is not intimidated by male anger anymore. Boys, she thinks. Renzo, Angelo, Iacopo. They’re all just boys. “They’re hungry, Renzo, so we share what we have. Everyone around here is taking them food—”

“All the more reason why you should eat what I bring you!” White-faced and furious, Renzo hops toward a bale of stale hay and lowers himself onto it with an involuntary whine.

Schramm’s uncertain voice comes from above. “Renzo, do you need a doctor?”

Renzo shouts, “Verdammte Scheisse, nein! Go back to sleep!” Lowering his voice again, he tells Mirella, “Pick up the cans!”

It’s a plea, not an order. She turns her back and makes a cradle of her apron to gather the tins. Wincing, she listens to the agonized grunt he makes as he does whatever he must to his kneecap. When the cans are stacked, she tries again. “Renzo, your mother just wants to make things better,” she whispers, coming close. “If everyone brings one brick, we can build a new world!”

“Or a new prison.” He glances upward. “Has Schramm ever told you why he became a Nazi?”

She brushes hay from her apron and shakes her head.

“Ask him sometime. The answer’s instructive. God save us from idealists!” Renzo cries softly. “They dream of a world without injustice, and what crime won’t they commit to get it?” Rubbing at his knee with both hands, he mutters, “I swear to God, Mirella, I’d settle for a world with good manners.”

She feels the familiar prickle: her foolish breasts let down milk whenever anything arouses pity or protectiveness. She reaches toward him, but Renzo rises suddenly and takes three lopsided steps toward the mule’s stall. Clucking and murmuring, he coaxes the dissenting animal back into its traces. “It’s dark,” Mirella says. “Stay the night.” He yanks a leather strap, snugs up a coupling. “When did you learn to harness a mule?” she asks, to fill the silence.

“When the milk van was stolen at gunpoint. Or should I say, when it was requisitioned to serve the people? Evidently, children who need milk do not qualify as the people.” He rounds the cart and stands in front of her, moonlight on his face. Her hand moves toward the large bruise yellowing on the side of his forehead. He jerks his head away. “If the partisans don’t like being called Communist bandits, I suggest they stop pistol-whipping people they rob.”

There’s liquor on his breath. “Renzo, why do you drink so much?”

“My legs hurt. Cold weather and high altitude make them worse. Grappa,” he says precisely, “is easier to obtain than aspirin.”

Mirella crosses her arms over her dampened blouse and settles onto a hay bale. “It’s warm in Sant’Andrea.”

He stares, then laughs, then slumps beside her: forearms on his thighs, hands loose between his treacherous knees. “Not a single morning passes without my thanking God that you married Iacopo.”

“Liar.”

He smiles a little. “You were the only one I could never fool.” She puts her arms around him, resting her chin against his back. “Rosina’s beautiful,” he says.

“She’s already trying to walk! She talks, too! No words yet—it’s still nonsense, but she knows what questions and answers sound like.”

“You must be relieved.”

“Yes, except . . . This time the surprises don’t seem so miraculous.”

He draws a little pouch of tobacco from a pocket, rolls a cigarette in a square of newsprint. “December thirtieth, 1935,” he says, as though answering a question. “And they gave me the Silver Medal for it.”

“I’m sorry?”

The match trembles slightly in Renzo’s fingers. “You asked why I drink. I’m telling you.” He shakes the flame out and releases a jet of smoke. “The Dolo raid. That was my squadron.”

“Dolo? But . . . my father said that was British propaganda. He said the British wanted the League of Nations to put sanctions on Italy so they could take our colonies.” She looks into the middle distance, trying to take it in. “The British weren’t lying?”

“No, and neither were we. That’s the hell of it,” Renzo says, his face in shadow. “The Abyssinians were a pack of brutal, thieving warlords who used the Ethiopians as beasts of burden. Haile Selassie’s signature on the Geneva Convention was an obscenity, Mirella. He had prisoners of war crucified! I knew those two pilots—Minniti and Zannoni were friends of mine. They were castrated alive and crucified. So we hit Dolo.”

“But why? Didn’t you see the Red Cross?”

“Mirella,” he says wearily, “the Red Cross was painted on the roof of every brothel and bar in Addis. At Quoram, our planes were hit by AA from gun emplacements marked by the Red Cross. At Harar, the ammunition dumps were in warehouses with hospital signs.”

Hands over her mouth, she looses a shuddering breath. “But Dolo—that really was a hospital? Forty patients,” she whispers. “That doctor.”

“Forty-two patients.” The tip of the cigarette brightens, and he lifts his head to exhale. “The doctor’s name was Lundstrom.”

“The Swedes said a nurse tried to wave you away. Is that true? You dropped the bombs anyway?” There’s no denial. She searches for something to say. “Renzo, it was war. If you hadn’t dropped those bombs, somebody else would have.”

“Yeah, sure. But maybe—just maybe—they wouldn’t have done such a damn fine job of it.”

For a time, he sits silently, remembering: hilltops and hollows veiled in mist, like a woman in bed: asleep, peaceful, erotic. The targeting trance, the long tense descent. The release, the red and orange chaos blossoming below.

“You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, until nothing else does.” Without looking Mirella in the face, he pinches off the end of the cigarette, works his way onto his feet, flexes experimentally at the knees. “As good as they get, up here.” He reaches up to grasp the boards of the mule cart’s frame. Hesitates, then hauls himself up in one quick motion. When the pain’s grip loosens, he says, “Osvaldo Tomitz has a friend in the Vatican. He got a list of the Yom Kippur deportees.”

The change of subject takes her by surprise. “But—no! Your sister?”

“Ester. Her husband. The kids. Nobody will tell Tomitz where they were sent. He’s not . . . optimistic. I can’t find either of my other sisters. Susa’s family was with Catholic friends, but the house is gone. There’s been a lot of bombing in Turin.”

“But Debora lives in Florence! Surely they won’t bomb there!”

“Monte Cassino is a ruin. Who knows where Allied command will draw the line?”

“Renzo, did you find my father and sister?”

“Belan—I’m sorry.” He passes a hand over his eyes. “I meant to tell you right away, but then Mamma— Your father sends his love. Etta says he’s driving everyone crazy, and the neighbors hiding them should be canonized when this is over. But, yes—they’re fine.”

“Susanna probably is, too. And Debora. They’re smart, Renzo. They have Catholic family and friends.”

He clears his throat, then digs into his pocket, and hands Mirella a paper packet, heavy for its size. “Like salt,” he remarks when he can speak again, “my female relatives once seemed an inexhaustible commodity. Trade some of this for eggs and produce.”

She doesn’t ask him how he got the salt. She doesn’t want to know the risks he takes. Suddenly, the constant ache of longing for her family is as gut-twisting as hunger. “Renzo, I need to see Angelo! His teacher wrote—he thinks we sent him to the orphanage because we didn’t love him after Rosina was born. Suora Corniglia explained, and I’ve written, but— I have to see him! And I have to see Iacopo, even if it’s just for a day—an hour!”

She expects an argument: It’s too dangerous, too difficult, too impractical. The checkpoints, the bombing, the arrests. She must be patient, sensible, mature. She knows all that, but she’s desperate for Angelo to be solid flesh in her arms. She yearns to hear Iacopo make an aria of her name. Renzo, she is prepared to plead, Renzo, if you ever loved me—

“I’ll work something out.” He leans over to unwind the reins, then shoves the cart brake loose. “Take care of my mother,” he asks in return. “Tell her about Ester when the time is right.”

He looks over his shoulder to judge the turn he’ll need to maneuver out of the barn. “Mule!” he says sharply, slapping the reins. Ears twisting, the animal complains but squares in the harness and pulls.

Above, forgotten in his hayloft, the late Dr. Lundstrom’s unlikely heir listens to the rumble and squeak of iron-clad wheels and squeaking wooden joints. Listens to Mirella’s footsteps as she returns to the hunchback’s house. Listens until there is nothing to hear but the skittering of barn mice, and wind in the pines nearby.

I knew you understood, Schramm thinks in the darkness. The most appalling things can become . . . just part of the job, and afterward . . . Christ, there are days when you’re ashamed to be sane. Ah, Renzo, God help us both. Scheisse, we’re a pair.

DIVISIONAL HEADQUARTERS,
12TH WAFFEN-SS WALTHER REINHARDT
PALAZZO USODIMARE, PORTO SANT’ANDREA

Minutes before midnight, Helmut Reinecke lays the last report on Erhardt von Thadden’s desk. “Essentially the same as the first three, Gruppenführer.”

In the past nine hours, four company commanders in widely spaced towns were approached by groups of old women declaring themselves loyal to il Duce, and offering to lead the Germans to partisan hideouts. The Reds were stealing food, the women said. They were interfering with girls. Enough is enough! It’s time for i Tedeschi to impose some order!

The commanders dispatched patrols with these elderly guides into the forested hills flanking Valdottavo’s mountains. Each group was led through a particularly narrow ravine, where they had to string out single file. With gestures and pissing noises, the old crows indicated the need to relieve themselves, then disappeared into the woods. Armed partisans stood up along the ridges. The soldiers were ordered to lay down their arms and strip off their boots and uniforms. Officers resisted in three of four cases. One was killed. Two were injured. The humiliated survivors eventually found their way back to base in their underwear.

Reinecke says, “I wouldn’t have believed it, sir.”

Von Thadden tosses the report aside. “At least Franck’s patrol had the sense to wait until dark to slink back. New orders: every company commander clears his decisions with us.” He rises to study the wall map of Valdottavo, where each partisan action has been marked with a red pin. Harassment, mainly. Petty thievery, mostly from the farmers in the region. Without turning, von Thadden asks his adjutant, “What’s their gambit, Helmut?”

With a single exception, the red dots are just east or west of the San Mauro River. Reinecke leans past von Thadden and taps a finger on the north end of the Valdottavo funnel, where the valley ends in a broad band of low mountains. “That’s their stronghold. They’re trying not to draw attention to it.”

“Where would you move to respond?”

Reinecke’s finger falls on the railhead. “Borgo San Mauro.”

“No. Choose six villages, three on each side of the river. Hang five men in each. Burn the buildings, confiscate crops and animals.” The Schoolmaster turns on his heel and smiles brightly, though his eyes are red-rimmed with fatigue. “Explain my strategy.”

Reinecke thinks for a moment. “Let the peasants see what happens when they tolerate Communist bandits in their midst. They’ll do our job for us.”

“The partisans may be driven into Valle Stura or Valle San Leandro, and thus . . . ?”

“They’ll become someone else’s problem.”

“Or they’ll concentrate near Borgo San Mauro in the northern end of the valley, where they’ll believe themselves safe. Much easier to deal with when we’re ready.”

Reinecke collects the stack of reports for filing, but he pauses before leaving. “Sir? Anneliese asked me to thank you for the flowers and all the baby gifts. Very thoughtful of you and Frau von Thadden.”

“Go home, Reinecke! And give that baby a kiss from her papa’s boss.”