Autumn 1947

MOTHER OF MERCY ORPHANAGE
ROCCABARBENA

Tongue in the corner of her mouth, a little girl glowers in mighty concentration. Determined to master this skill, she sighs heavily and stops to rub at a mistake. The paper crinkles. She looks up, close to tears.

“Va bene, Filomena,” Suora Corniglia says. “You’ve practiced enough for today. Go out and play.”

Filomena adds her worksheet to the wrinkled and deformed stack on Suora’s desk. Nearly every piece in the pile is crumpled or creased or blotted. The children do their best, but the paper undermines them. Parades of nicely ovalled O’s and properly angled P’s stumble over bits of wood embedded in cheap grayish pulp. The older children have fountain pens, and any hesitation in the flow of writing results in a little pool of ink soaking into the paper. The younger ones use pencils, but their worksheets are holed by erasures. “Gently,” she reminds them over and over. “Don’t rub so hard!” But there is something about eight-year-olds and mistakes. Errors must be obliterated. The paper suffers.

At least we have paper, she tells herself. Things are getting better . . .

Rising from her desk, she cleans the board—an eraser in each hand, arms wheeling. Stepping to the nearest open window, she claps the felt blocks at arm’s length, closing her eyes and turning her head from the chalk dust. She sneezes anyway. The breeze shifts, clearing the air and carrying the shouts of workmen repairing the roof of the railroad station.

The classroom windows don’t frighten her anymore. In the dormitories, orphans don’t wet their beds or wake up screaming quite so often. They are better fed, growing again. No one can love them as their dead or missing parents would have, but they know that the sisters care for them.

Autumn light makes the varnished chestnut bookcases beneath the windows glow. From the time she was small, she has always loved the beginning of a new school year. Everything seems possible—

A knock at the door makes her jump. The portress pokes her head into the room. “Sorry to startle you, Suora. There’s someone to see you.”

“Grazie, Suora, I know this gentleman. Rabbino, how wonderful to see you again.”

Left alone, the two of them struggle with emotions they are desperately tired of feeling. Widowed, childless, the rabbi is changed: bone and muscle, shadows and lines. They both know he did everything possible to save Suora Corniglia’s father, but il maggiore was so closely identified with Mussolini . . . Anyone who’d had anything to do with the Germans or the Republic of Salò was likely to get strung up. Even that poor one-armed postman was hanged. He couldn’t stutter fast enough to convince anyone he’d been a partisan all along.

“Prego,” she begins, “have a seat, Rabbino—”

The only adult-sized chair in the room is her own. They laugh, and Iacopo leans against a desktop near the window, but not for long. Filling the silence, he moves from place to place in the classroom, chatting a little too brightly about elections and political scandals, the reparations Italy must pay, the fate of territories taken by France and Yugoslavia. Rome has lost Abyssinia and Eritrea as well, but that may be a blessing. All over the world, the old powers struggle to regain control of rebellious colonies and protectorates. Nearly six years of war. Forty million dead, one way or another. Enough killing, one would have thought, to sicken everyone of the sport, but new conflicts have broken out in Palestine and India, in China and Indonesia, in Nicaragua and French Indochina.

For her part, Corniglia speaks of the school and the children. Aid money from America. The new priest assigned to Don Leto’s old parish in San Mauro. Villa Malcovato.

Somehow, in the chaos after the war, the villa still passed legally to il maggiore’s only surviving child. Suora Corniglia arranged for the land to be broken into individual farms, and much to the bishop’s dismay, gave title to the contadini who’d worked the land before the war. “Has his excellency forgiven you yet?” the rabbi asks, smiling when her dimples appear.

“He’ll get over it,” she says, unperturbed. “Do you remember the German doctor who joined the partisans? There was a letter from him, sent to Villa Malcovato, asking about your family. I wrote back to tell him what happened.”

Another silence. The rabbi stands. His hat brim moves through his fingers, around and around. “I’ve completed my work here,” he says finally. For two years, he has collected names, updated lists, sorting the missing from those gone forever. “We’ve established that nearly all the Italian deportees were sent to a camp in Poland called Auschwitz. A few have turned up, but we have just under six thousand confirmed dead.”

She’s seen photos in the newspapers. People say the newsreels are too terrible to bear. The rabbi steps to the windows, his back to her.

“There’s a saying in Hebrew,” he tells her. “ ‘No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.’ After the Yom Kippur roundup in ’43, people all over Italy helped us. Almost fifty thousand Jews were hidden. Italians, foreigners. And so many of them survived the occupation. I keep asking myself, Why was it so different here? Why did Italians help when so many others turned away?” He shrugs and turns. “I’ve decided to immigrate to Palestine, Suora. To a kibbutz on the coast, near Tel Aviv.”

From one war to another, she thinks. “You will be a great loss to us, Rabbino.”

“It’s kind of you to say so, but I feel—” He looks away. “I feel that life here has been amputated.” He faces her a moment later, and smiles briefly. “Anyway, I wanted to thank you. And to say good-bye. And to return this. Renzo Leoni had it in his pocket when he— The mortician was an old friend of his. This was wrapped in a piece of paper with your name on it. Well, actually, it said Sister Dimples. The undertaker had no idea, but he kept it, and last week it occurred to him to ask me about it.”

She holds out her hand. The rabbi drops a rosary into her palm. Plain black beads with simple silver links. Father Clown, she thinks. Father Clown . . .

“Thank you, Rabbino,” she says when she can speak. “I will pray for him.”