April 1945

VILLA MALCOVATO
NEAR ROCCABARBENA

Werner was the first to come under her protection. Then Simon Henley, nearly frozen. Young Claudia was next, and Mirella hoped the girl would stay, but two days after tiny Alberto was buried, the staffetta left to rejoin her brigade.

A destitute old woman with five small grandchildren arrived at the villa that afternoon. Mirella took them in. On that signora’s rundown heels: a Moroccan soldier, completely lost. Nobody understood a word he said. Mirella gave him a meal, and after looking at a map, he went off happily to whatever fate awaited him.

The following week brought a bewildered Sicilian draftee, terrified and begging to stay. The owner of an antiques shop in Genoa, who offered to pay for a meal with a Renaissance figurine carved from ivory. A farmer’s son, desperately ill with pneumonia. A man who’d worked for an English businessman before the war: denounced by one neighbor, warned by another, on the run. Mirella kept the farmer’s son in the villa’s small clinic; the others moved on.

Lavinia Costa-Valsecchi was next. A ninety-year-old contessa, dotty in furs and diamonds, she was dumped at the villa by her chauffeur, who drove off to join the partisans with her auto and its petrol as his dowry. Then a little girl with an even littler baby boy on her hip knocked at the kitchen door. Their mother was dead. The girl heard that Villa Malcovato still had a milk cow. Could they stay here?

District by district, the Germans steal anything of value as they pull back. They burn whatever they can’t carry away, shoot anyone who protests and many of those who don’t. Allied air raids are destroying what’s left. The Germans are hated and Allied bombardiers cursed, but true loathing is reserved for the Italian SS volunteers, and for informants who buy favor with neighbors’ lives.

Civilians are of no consequence to anyone but themselves, and tell stories of pointless destruction and casual cruelty to anyone who pretends to listen. Kindly, naive people arrested for giving a meal to a stranger. A little boy hit by a staff car, deliberately run over by the tanks that followed. Bombs falling on four children herding some geese in a field. A fifty-year-old man tortured for three days before the fascisti realized their prisoner was Giuseppi Pesce, not the Giovanni Pesce they sought.

Villa Malcovato’s population doubled, and doubled again, filling the house, the stables, the barn. A dozen peasant families burned out of their homes. Twenty-three children, overflow from Mother of Mercy, itself inundated by orphans. Exhausted evacuees from Genoa, Sant’Andrea, and Savona, many in a sort of walking coma, speechless and trembling.

Mirella shares her bedroom now with four other mothers, thirteen children among them, and shares the bed itself with Angelo, Stefania, and Rosina. Before falling into stuporous sleep, she takes brief comfort in the way they snuggle around her, warm and sweet-faced, smelling of compost. Each morning she awakens to find another little group of famished people waiting for her attention in the courtyard.

With two hundred or more to feed and shelter, she tells the factor and his men to dig up the last stocks of cheese and flour, oil and salt, buried for safekeeping last fall. She puts older girls in charge of younger children, or sends them to help in the garden. The boys work in the barns or care for livestock hidden in secret clearings. The women cook, spin wool, knit baby jerseys. They make diapers from old sheets, sew children’s clothes from scraps of worn-out fabric, cobble shoes from wooden soles and strips of carpet.

The villa has reverted to its earliest form: a medieval city under seige. The world shrinks to what can be touched, seen, heard. Mental horizons contract to those of the most isolated peasant, and with that narrowness comes peasant skepticism toward all plans for the future. Nothing you were, or are, or will be, is in your own hands. Society is held together by the simplest of human ties. A person in need stands in front of you; if you can help, you must help.

A war of leaflets begins. Paper flutters from low-flying planes. “Anyone who harbors rebels will be shot. Any house in which rebels have stayed will be blown up after all stores of food are confiscated and the inhabitants shot. The German army will proceed with justice, but with inflexible hardness, unless informed immediately of the rebels’ whereabouts.” Leaflets scattered by the Allies give precisely the opposite instructions. “Italian patriots! Continue your resistance with acts of sabotage against the German army. Cut communications, destroy bridges, roads, and electrical plants. The moment for decisive action is near!” Mirella has children collect the leaflets for toilet paper.

After sunset one evening, three Austrian soldiers knock timidly on the door. They’re very young, deserters from the Wehrmacht, trying to get home. Their prospects are poor, but better than at the front, where some great battle is being fought. Mirella gives them some withered apples, shows them the map, sends them on. In the morning, four mortar rounds fall on the villa’s chapel, empty at the time. Somewhere, gunners adjust their aim and the explosions shift away from the farm. Mirella sends the oldest boys to the edge of the woods to dig long trenches, line them with brush, and cover them with tarps. The women stuff sacks with straw for makeshift mattresses, ready to run with the children to the trenches on a moment’s notice. The immediate menace advances and retreats, but this much is certain: the front is no longer in Africa or Russia or France, not in Messina or Rome or Florence. It is here.

“Che sarà di noi?” everyone asks Mirella. “What will become of us?”

No radio, no post, no newspapers, but rumors in abundance. Two villages west, Fascist troops appeared suddenly, blocked off the main street, and arrested everyone. A partisan band took a town south of here, expecting to link up with the Allied advance; the Germans arrived instead, and wiped the partisans out. London has been completely destroyed by a new German weapon. At Villa Senni, three hundred people hidden in the cellar had to flee through artillery fire into the mountains; a hundred were killed—no, two hundred! Thousands of people are dying of Spanish influenza in Bologna. The Allies have landed in strength at Genoa. A German spy has assassinated Roosevelt. The Americans have pulled out of the war.

Inured to the sound of airplane engines, the children don’t even look up when bombers drop their cargo on Roccabarbena, or when small, swift groups of fighters swoop down, guns flashing, on something doomed two valleys away. A new sort of refugee turns up: fugitives from the Italian Black Brigades, begging for civilian clothes and hoping to join the partisans. “You should be more careful,” one tells Mirella. “For fifty kilometers around, people told us, Go to Villa Malcovato.”

A few days later, an Italian civilian appears and takes Mirella aside to tell her about an English paratrooper who needs food and money. There is something about this man . . . “No,” Mirella says. “We have nothing to do with foreigners here.”

“Signora,” he says, moving closer, “this Englishman is a Hebrew. He needs your help.”

She covers her momentary hesitation by looking for one of the children. “Rosina!” she shouts. “Stay out of that mud!” She turns back toward the man, making sure he can see how tired she is. “Scusi,” she says, distractedly. “What were you asking?”

“Are there any farms nearby where ebrei can get help?”

“None,” she says heartlessly. “We have our own to care for.”

Then one bright blue morning, the contessa announces it is her saint’s day. “Signora, there’s no Saint Lavinia,” the housegirl Giovanna tells Mirella. The contessa insists there should be a party in her honor. “Completamente pazza,” Giovanna murmurs, but the weather has improved, and the notion of a festa is so bizarre, the idea takes hold. One of the older girls ties braided yarn around the children’s legs and teaches them to run three-legged races. The contessa, wrapped in a fox stole, urges the children to sing Christmas songs, and caps the day by awarding a pearl necklace to the child with the sweetest voice, and a Mont Blanc fountain pen to the winner of a sack race. That night, the old lady favors Mirella with a Mona Lisa smile and says, “I think that did everyone good, don’t you?”

The low booming of artillery grows nearer. Angelo runs up the rutted drive, more excited than afraid. “They’re coming, Mamma! Eight hundred Germans!” An hour later, the rumor begins to change. Eight hundred become three hundred. Fascisti, not Germans. By evening, the three hundred are eighty, marching south toward Sant’Andrea.

At midnight, Giovanna shakes Mirella awake. “Signora, there’s a partisan with a bullet in his shoulder at the door,” she whispers. “What should I do?”

Mirella pulls a cardigan over her nightgown, goes to the kitchen, dresses the wound. “You can sleep in the stable,” she tells the boy, “but you must leave before light.”

All that night, they hear cannon fire and planes. In the morning, the ground is littered with leaflets in four languages, offering safe conduct, medical aid, food, and removal from the combat zone to any German who surrenders.

A heavily armed man appears out of the woods, begging for a meal. Around mouthfuls, he warns of two German spies. “They’re wandering around east of Cuneo. They pretend to be deserters and ask for help. They were handed on from farm to farm, until they uncovered the whole network of contadini helping the Resistance.” The man washes his polenta down with a glass of watered milk, and stands to leave. “Last Monday, Fascist troops surrounded three small villages and the outlying farms and shot everyone the spies pointed out, including four women and an old priest. So be careful of anyone asking for help.”

Mirella watches him tramp away, trying to remember the Austrian boys she gave apples to. How many were there? Two of them, or three? Three, she thinks. They seemed like nice boys, but who knows? Who knows . . .

A squadron of Allied planes flashes overhead, droning toward Roccabarbena. She watches the tracer bullets from German AA emplacements in the city. Two planes are hit just as the bombs are released. The whole valley seems to explode, just beyond the hills.

At ten the next morning, a German staff car roars up the drive through a steady spring rain. Two officers get out. Without knocking, the commander shoves the front door open and shouts for whoever is in charge. Mirella lifts Rosina to her hip, willing herself to appear innocent and ignorant. Would it be better or worse if her pregnancy were more obvious at five months? Better or worse if her eyes were not sunken in half-moons of purple skin? Better or worse if she looked twenty-eight, not a haggard fifteen years older?

Without such worries, the contessa takes charge, supporting herself on two ebony canes. “How dare you come in here with muddy boots! Who are you?” the old lady demands in imperious German. “What are you doing here?”

“We require billets for a field hospital,” he begins.

“What?” she asks with loud annoyance. “Speak up! I haven’t all day!”

The officer tries again. “We require this property as a hospital—”

“Don’t be absurd. This is a children’s home, you ridiculous man! Kinderheim, do you understand? Children!” The contessa flicks the blue-veined back of her hand at him. “Now go away. And don’t come back!”

The officer mutters something that Mirella takes to be “Loony old bat.” She follows him anxiously from room to room as he inspects the property. “Kinderheim,” she says, taking a cue from the contessa. “This is a children’s home! Do you understand?”

He leaves the house and confers with the other officer, who has evidently inspected the outbuildings. The children have been herded outside into the downpour. Many are crying. Angelo has Stefania by the hand; he glares at the Germans, who don’t notice, thank God.

“Alles,” the commander says, gesturing. “We require the whole farm.”

“But the children? Die Kinder?” she asks helplessly.

The officers climb into the backseat of the car. “We will return tomorrow,” the commander tells her.

Mirella turns her back to the muddy gravel spun up by the staff car’s wheels. Those who’ve hidden until now gather in the courtyard, waiting in the rain for her to tell them what to do.

Il maggiore is trapped in Milan—Allied planes swoop down and strafe any vehicle they spot. There hasn’t been so much as a note from Iacopo since January, and the last time she saw any of Renzo’s men was when Claudia was here. Was his band the one wiped out at Montebianco? Is it time to move everyone into the woods? How much longer will the fighting last? How many babies and old people would die of exposure? Are the woods any safer than the villa?

Mirella hardly notices the strength leaving her legs, but she lets someone take Rosina out of her arms. I’m used up, she thinks, sitting in a puddle. There’s nothing left.

Behind her, the contessa stands in the doorway, watching the German car disappear down the drive. “A Prussian of the worst sort,” she declares before addressing the crowd. “The Germans want this place for a hospital. They want us out by tomorrow.” She waits for the cries of dismay to die down. “My late husband,” she says clearly, “was an admiral when he died. I asked him once why he had chosen the navy and not the army as his career. He said, ‘If you’re going to be killed in battle, it’s better to sleep in a dry bed the night before.’ ” She folds her hands over a small potbelly swathed in silk. “You may do as you please, but I intend to stay right here.”

Shrugging fatalistically, the others disperse, to make whatever decisions are left to them. Mirella leans back, propping herself on her hands, unspeakably weary. “Signora, why didn’t you help before?”

The contessa looks down, brows arched. “You seemed quite capable.”

Too tired for courtesy, Mirella says, “I thought you were crazy.”

“Possibly,” the contessa allows, going back into the house, “but I am not the one who’s sitting in the mud.”

Sometime that night, Angelo jostles his mother’s shoulder. “Mamma? Mamma!” he whispers. “Stefania wet the bed!”

Mirella hauls herself upright, cleans herself and the children, turns the mattress over. Dry bed, she thinks, and falls asleep before she can laugh or cry.

Troops arrive at dawn. Not hospital personnel but trucks, tanks, infantry, along with two donkeys laden with stolen goods, and one goat without much time to live. Germans surround the house and farm. Some fall asleep where they drop. Others tear the place apart, looking for hidden food and valuables, snarling at anyone in their way.

Mirella gets the children up and dressed in layers. “Stay here with the girls,” she tells Angelo, “but be ready to go.”

A young officer sits in the kitchen. Dirty, utterly worn out, he raises his head. “Guten Tag,” he says, and mumbles something she doesn’t understand.

He seems civil and sounds reassuring. “Kinderheim,” she tells him. “Many Kinder. What should we do?”

He looks beyond her. Mirella turns. Angelo is standing on the stairs behind her. The girls clutch his hands, wide-eyed. The officer pushes himself to his feet, approaches Rosina, cups her chin in a filthy palm. He says something Mirella can’t make out, but she catches the word Keller. She points toward the stairs.

Knees buckling from fatigue, the soldier descends partway into the cellar and looks around. “Das ist gut.” He beckons. “Kinder, ja?”

Something whizzes past the kitchen window with an eerie moan, and explodes an instant later in the garden. Shouting orders, the officer pounds back up the stairway and runs outside. A second shell explodes. “Angelo!” Mirella screams. “Take the girls downstairs, and stay there!”

“Mamma, where are you going?”

“To get the other children—they’ll be safer in the cellar!”

“Mamma, don’t leave us!” Stefania begs. “Please, Mamma! Don’t leave me again!”

Mirella’s heart jolts. She lifts Rosina, starts down the staircase. “Angelo, take Stefania’s hand!”

There’s machine-gun fire, shockingly loud, just beyond the kitchen. Another Allied shell hits, nearer. They say you never hear the one that gets you, but how could anyone alive know.