VALDOTTAVO
NEAR FRAZIONE SANTA CHIARA
“Papa, we should go back down,” Claudette says at first light.
She is, her father thinks, almost incapable of silence. Just as she had to crawl and walk and climb when she was little, she has to hear her own voice now, to argue, to test her strength.
“We won’t be giving ourselves away, Papa. Someone already knows we’re here.”
Sitting up, Albert digs crust from the corners of his eyes with numb fingers, and rubs his palms together briskly.
She pulls his topcoat more tightly around his shoulders, defying him to yell at her for being nice. “Look at those rocks.” She points at pebbles he was too worn out to brush aside last night. “How could you sleep on those?”
“I didn’t,” he grumps.
“We’re almost out of newspaper,” she warns, and leaves to relieve herself.
In Sainte-Gisèle, Albert had a library to visit, and other adults for companionship. Here, there’s nothing to read but their diminishing supply of toilet paper, nothing to do but fret and argue. They haven’t seen another soul since Santino Cicala left them in the charcoal maker’s shack a week ago.
Then, yesterday, two apples materialized. Russet red, mottled with lemony yellow, they’d been placed in the center of a flat rock just outside the hut. Albert insisted that they leave the shack and move farther up the mountain, where they’ve spent a wretched night.
“You look like one of those scraggly Poles who never shave!” Claudette says when she returns.
You’re no vision of loveliness yourself, he thinks.
“Papa, what if it was Santino?” she asks.
He rolls creakily to his knees, and pulls out the velvet tefillin bag. “What if it was Germans?”
“Germans wouldn’t leave apples.” She watches him wind the tefillin strap. “Papa, what if the Allies—”
“Claudette, please! Five minutes of peace!” He tugs the dirty tallis over his eyes, grateful for this small symbolic tent to hide within. Blessed be our desert fathers, he thinks, and loses himself in prayer.
“I would kill for a newspaper!” Claudette says the moment he’s finished. Oblivious to his mood, she glowers at the town that straddles a river far below, visible through half-bare branches. “I’m not joking. I would actually, truly kill somebody for a newspaper,” she says. “And I’d torture somebody for a radio!”
“Where would you plug it in?”
It’s a good point, but she won’t admit it, any more than he’d admit he’s as starved for news as she is. This is what I’ve been reduced to, he thinks. Childish games with my own daughter.
Her tone changes. “Papa? Do you remember what Mama looks like? Without looking at a picture, I mean.”
“Of course,” he says a bit too quickly.
“I wish I had a photograph of Santino. I think I remember, but he’s sort of mixed up with John Garfield.”
More like Edward G. Robinson, Albert thinks.
“I’m sure Santino left the apples! He’s looking for us, and we’re up here freezing and starving for nothing!”
“Why would he leave us apples without so much as a buon giorno?”
Albert slips the tefillin into their bag and folds the prayer shawl neatly, remembering the day, years ago, when he was shocked by a newspaper account of a woman who killed her four children and then herself. “How could a mother murder her own children?” he asked Paula. “The mystery,” his wife informed him, after a long day with their three, “is how many of us don’t.”
Claudette stomps around, rubbing her arms. “I can see my breath! Papa, you never listen! We can’t stay up here! It’ll be winter soon—”
“Oh, for the love of God, Claudette! Will you please shut up!”
Claudette whirls, ready to shout, “Mama told us never to say ‘shut up’!”
The words die in her mouth. For an instant she sees a dimly remembered grandfather: Zeide Blum, pallid and pasty under a gray stubble, his lips as blue as his eyes. Something’s wrong, she realizes. Not like before. Something else.
“This is stupid,” she mutters. “It’s not the Germans.”
Ignoring her father’s strangled shout, she sets off through beeches that glow like gold, their yellow leaves filtering the autumn sunlight. Dirty hair slapping at her neck, she stumbles and slides through glacial gravel and thin crumbly dirt, suffused with a reckless confidence that does not waver until she nears the shadowy edge of the woods.
The ground drops away abruptly. She cannot see the shack from here, but while there’s nothing she can interpret as an ambush or trap, caution seems less absurd now that she’s alone.
She reties her father’s oxfords, crouches slightly, sucks in a nervy breath. Giving herself no more time to think, she explodes from the forest, sprints through the meadow, vaults a fallen tree trunk, dashes through clumps of high, stiff autumn grass. “It’s not the Germans! It’s not the Germans!” she huffs, but she veers and ducks like a cinema cowboy dodging arrows, knees lifting high. Suddenly the shack comes into view. She alters course, sprints straight toward it. Mouth open, lungs bursting, she skids to a pebbly halt.
The apples are gone.
She groans, crumpling with disappointment. Hands on her knees, she bends to ease the cramp under her ribs, and sees two pears and a good-sized chunk of pale cheese wrapped in white muslin, on a makeshift plate of leaves. “Santino!” she shouts. “Hello? Anybody?”
Nothing. Not even birdcalls.
Working quickly, she gathers a loose bouquet of hardy wildflowers still blooming near the hut and swaps this token of thanks for the fruit and cheese. “Molte grazie!” she says loudly, just in case, and scampers up the wooded mountainside, laughing with excitement.
“Whoever it is, they decided we don’t like apples!” she yells when her father comes into view. “And they know there are two of us,” she says more quietly when she sees his face.
Hand trembling, he points with a combination of fury and relief. “Don’t you ever do that again!”
“But Papa, they left us food.”
“The people in these mountains are illiterate peasants! They’re ignorant, Claudette. Priests have been filling their heads with Christ-killer lies all of their lives!”
She bites into one of the pears and moans. “Oh, Papa! Oh, this is beautiful! This is the best pear I ever tasted!”
“They think we poison wells! They think we murder babies and use their blood to make matzoh! They hate us—”
“Name two.”
Albert blinks.
“Whenever we said ‘they,’ Mama told us to name two.” Claudette divides the lump of cheese, handing half to Albert. “Mama said if you can’t name two actual real people, then you’re just being prejudiced. So name two peasants who hate us.” She takes another bite of pear, holding his eyes with her own: ocean green and guileless in a dirt-smeared face. “Mama said.”
Albert sighs. “All right,” he says, capitulating to hunger, and to a heart-deep weariness, and to the ethical precepts of a wife whose face is more difficult to conjure as each day passes. “All right, but just this once.”
There are pears again the second day, and more of the glorious creamy cheese; tomatoes and crumbly yellow bread the following morning; a jar of milk and a pile of wild mushrooms next. Claudette pays for each small meal with a fistful of wildflowers, and on the fifth day, there is more than food.
“Papa, look what they left last night,” she calls, lugging a thick woolen cape of military green up the mountainside. “Pity it rained last night, but it didn’t get too wet.” Without waiting for a response, she flaps the blanketlike cloak and snugs it around her father with a practical dispatch that has begun to feel natural. “I saw footprints in the mud this morning,” she reports, using the handle of her toothbrush to spread the soft cheese over the cornbread’s rough surface. “It’s a child, I think, bringing us things.”
Their anonymous benefactor has been miraculously faithful, and Claudette has found windfall apples and even raspberries to supplement their diet. They have water from a little creek, but there’s never enough food. They’ve both had awful diarrhea. Her father is thinner and more silent with each passing night. Sunken into craters of bruised-looking skin, his eyes flick toward her, then away. He’s still wearing his tie, the knot drawn close to keep a little of the chill out.
Claudette tucks blue-nailed fingers into her armpits in a useless effort to warm her hands. “Papa, look at me!” she pleads softly. “Papa, are you sick again?”
“I–I saw Germans in that town down there,” he whispers through cracked lips, stiff with cold. “Soldiers, taking people away. The war’s not over… I— we won’t survive the winter up here. I don’t know what to do.”
She is, for once, speechless. He raises the army cape with a trembling arm so she can snuggle in beside him. For a long time they stare in silence at the river: a man of forty-nine, a girl not quite fifteen, weighing bad choices.
“We have to trust someone,” Claudette says quietly. “Whoever’s bringing the food— even if he’s only a child, he wants to help us. Let’s go down, Papa. Not all the way to the town. Just to the shack.”
“All right,” he says finally. “All right. If you think so.”
They gather their few belongings, and Claudette leads the way along the path she’s worn through vegetation crisp with frost. Often, as they descend on numbed and clumsy feet, Albert puts out a hand to steady himself on his daughter’s shoulder.
After days in the open, the ramshackle hut seems palatial— warm and windless and dry. Carefully Claudette lays a fire with plenty of tinder to catch the flame of their last match. “The war can’t last forever,” Albert whispers as she pulls the cloak around him. He is asleep before she can reply, his chest rising and falling in great heaves, laboring for breath even at rest.
All her short and willful life, Claudette Blum has tried to make her father listen to her, and now he has. Whatever happens next, she thinks, it’s on my head. She swallows hard and settles down to wait. Save your tears, she tells herself. You may need them later.
NEAR FRAZIONE GORE
Herrmann Brössler is on his knees, pointing through the hayloft window. “Duno, use your eyes!” he shouts. “Look at the woodpiles! Stacked to the roof on three sides. Why is that house attached to this barn by a second-story passageway? Because the farmer has to get to his animals, even when the snow is chest-deep! The winters here are terrible!”
“The partisans can survive in the mountains,” Duno shouts back. “And I’m going to join them!”
“You’re still frightened of bees! You’re going to be a soldier now?”
Hugging herself with thin arms, Frieda Brössler takes no part in the argument. She does not notice the mule that snorts and shifts uneasily in the stall below. She does not listen to her husband or her son. The voice she hears is her mother-in-law’s. “De optimists, dey died in a vork camp…”
When Rivka was widowed a second time, Frieda and Herrmann were pleased and proud to make a home for her. The Brösslers were respected members of the community. Herrmann gave liberally to civic charities and raised funds for the restoration of a lovely old theater in the center of Vienna. Duno and Liesl went to a wonderful school, and Steffi would, too, when she was old enough. Their large, airy apartment was filled with sunlight, art, books. Frieda held lovely receptions for Europe’s finest musicians and most famous singers. Important Christians attended her parties. And yet, whenever things went especially well for Herrmann— when he had just booked a popular opera company or presented an exceptionally good Liedersänger in a concert the critics loved, Rivka’s stories would begin again.
“We had nice house, nice furn’ture. Just like you and my Herrmann,” she’d say, her voice tired and thready. “My fader, he alla time helped oders. Good man! Everybody like my fader! But when I got t’ree year old, dey come und took everyt’ing. Even fork! Even spoon! Dey put us ina keller. My mudder, my fader, my bruders. Dey put us ina keller, and set fire! Set fire, with us ina keller. Gott safe us wit’ a rainstorm, ’n we got out, but dey want us to burn.”
“We have no Cossacks in Austria, Mama Brössler—”
“Den dey come again anodder time, but we got not’in’ for steal. Not even fork! Not even spoon! So dey kill my oncle. Jus’ spite. Spite absolutely! ’Cause we got not’in for steal.”
“It’s not like that here,” Frieda would soothe.
“Den dey come again. By dat time, my fader, my bruders, my first husban’, dey got nice li’l business, moving furn’ture. Wit’ horse, wit’ cart. Nice li’l business. Dey come again. Take everyt’ing. My mudder had li’l box of jewel’ry. Li’l box,” Rivka would say, palms a few centimeters apart. “Dey take dat. Take furn’ture— we sleepin’ on da floor. Take horse, take cart! How we ’sposed to live?”
“That was the Communists, Mama Brössler. The Communists will never take power in Austria.”
“Dey’ll come again,” Rivka would say. “A Jew got somet’ing, goyim gonna take it. Dey don’t care ’bout dat Jesus. Dey just t’ieves and murderers.”
“Mama Brössler, Vienna isn’t like the Ukraine—”
“You an optimist,” Rivka would tell her sadly, “jus’ like my husban’. We start over. We be all right. But dey arrest him. For not’in! For not’in, absolutely! Dey take my husban’ ’n my bruders to Siberia. De optimists— dey all died in a vork camp.”
Herrmann’s voice cuts through Frieda’s memories. “Duno, if we don’t turn ourselves in before the deadline, we’re Vogelfrei—birds free for the shooting! Anybody can denounce us for a reward. We have no papers. We don’t speak Italian.”
“I do!”
“Buon giorno? Arrivederci? How far is that going to—”
“I know a lot of Italian. I learned from the carabinieri, and from the farmer. Papa, we don’t have to give up. We can go back to the mountains.”
“I don’t wanna go up the mountain again,” Steffi wails.
“Mutti, make them stop!” Liesl pleads.
The Brösslers have been fortunate. The Calabrian soldier found them a farmer who was willing to give them food and shelter. The mule and two cows warm the barn at night. Not even the girls complain about the smell anymore. A week, maybe two, and the Germans would leave the valley, that’s what everyone expected.
This afternoon, the farmer brought them a newspaper from Borgo San Mauro. Maps and numbers and arrows told the story: the Allies were bottled up at Salerno, far to the south. In the center of the front page was an article headlined UN PROCLAMA DEL COMANDO GERMANICO. Duno made a great show of reading it, probably guessing at most of the words. The same phrase appeared after a variety of offenses: sará fucilato secondo la legge marziale.
Then the farmer showed Herrmann a flyer printed in German and in Italian. “By 1800 hours, 28th September 1943, all Jews present in the district of Valdottavo must report to the German SS commanders at reception areas in Roccabarbena or in Borgo San Mauro. Those surrendering in accordance with this order will be resettled in the East, where work for adults and schools for children will be provided. After this deadline, Jews who fail to report will be shot on sight, as will be anyone upon whose premises they are found.”
The farmer murmured something soothing as he laid a callused hand on Steffi’s fine fair hair, looking across the valley, talking at length about Attilio. “He’s talking about the Huns,” Duno said confidently. “Attilio means Atilla.”
When Herrmann looked up from the notice, the farmer sighed, “Mondo cane, ne?” Kneeling, he scratched the boot of Italy into the dirt with a stick. In the northwestern corner of the map, he drew a triangle pointing south. “Valdottavo,” he said, looking toward the valley. A twisting line down the center of the triangle was declared Fiume San Leandro: Valdottavo’s main river. A dot poked into the broad end of the triangle was Borgo San Mauro, the railhead town they could see. A bigger dot at the narrow end: the city of Roccabarbena.
“I Tedeschi,” the farmer said, drawing SS runes in the dirt, over and over. “Genova. Sant’Andrea. Savona. Roccabarbena. Cuneo. Milano. Torino.” The farmer looked at Herrmann before making one last mark in the dirt: Borgo San Mauro.
Herrmann and Duno have been arguing ever since.
“If he wanted to denounce us, he would have already!” Duno yells.
“What if one of his grandchildren says something? What if he’s got a neighbor with a grudge? Duno, if that farmer’s shot because of us, it would be as though we pulled the trigger ourselves!”
“So we should put the gun to our own heads?”
“If we go now, nobody will be shot.”
“You have a touching faith in the Nazis, Papa!”
Frieda looks up in time to see the flat of Herrmann’s hand hit Duno’s face. The boy’s hair swings from his temples and falls around his ears. For a moment, her son is five years old again. Frieda closes her eyes to his stunned shock.
Chickens scratch and chuckle. Cows comment, their voices breaking comically: basso profundo into soprano. The rhythmic thunk of the farmer’s ax does not falter. Firewood piled to the rafters, and still a need to lay in more. Clouds have settled like a woolen blanket over the valley. Mountain peaks gleam with snow.
“We’re leaving tomorrow morning,” Herrmann says raggedly. “Go now, and we live. Delay, and we’ll be killed, and we’ll take innocent people with us.”
“Fine,” Duno says at last, his voice lower than Frieda has ever heard it. “Go with the women and children, Papa. I’ll take my chances in the mountains.”
“Duno! Don’t you dare walk away from me! Duno!”
Frieda does not realize that she is crying until Herrmann puts his arms around her. “He’ll be back,” her husband says. “I used to fight with my father all the time! He’ll be back, Frieda.” Herrmann gathers their youngest into his lap. “It won’t be so bad,” he tells the girls. “There’ll be a kindergarten for you, Steffi— they won’t make little children work. Liesl might have to, but you’re a big, strong girl, aren’t you, Liesl? We can get through this as long as we’re together.”
He smiles at Frieda, but she cannot rally. De optimists, she thinks. Dey died in a vork camp.
Tears hot on his stinging cheek, Duno clambers higher, determined to leave all evidence of human existence behind. He’ll find a cave. He’ll hunt and fish. He hates everyone he can think of, but most of all he hates his father. “Fuck you, Papa! Eat shit!” he yells, cursing aloud for the first time in his life. “Fight! Why won’t you fight?”
Hands clawing, toes digging, he drives distance between himself and humiliation. We should have fought, right from the start, he thinks. Friends— people you really believed were your friends—stopped looking at you. Eyes skimmed past the star on your armband. They were embarrassed for you— by you.
Stop seeing real Jews, and it’s easy for people to believe lies. Jews are lazy. Jews are ugly. Jews are evil. Day after day. Year after year. Jews are capable only of crime. Jews are only clever enough to cheat good Aryans. The mere presence of fat, hairy, bowlegged Jews fouled public swimming pools. Their hideous, misshapen faces were depraved and disgusting. The only right Jews had was to disappear from the face of the earth!
Legs aching, lungs bursting, he stops to catch his breath, and hears a faint roar that sounds like a river. Mouth gaping, he looks up. A small, hard avalanche peppers his face with stinging dust and pebbles. “Ow! Shit!” he cries, spitting and coughing as the dirt dances past. “Bastards! Shit-eating bastards!” he sobs. “Goddamned, shit-eating, goddamned Nazi bastards!”
When the crisis passes, he sucks in snot and wipes his eyes with grimy hands. Papa’s right about one thing, he thinks bitterly. We’re Vogelfrei, just like Steffi’s stupid canary when it got loose. And how do you catch a cage bird, Papa? You close the door to keep it in one room. You draw the curtains over all but one window. Cage birds aren’t strong. You chase them from one place to another until they’re tired. They move toward the only light in the room, and sit on that windowsill. Then you just scoop them up. Somewhere there’s a happy Nazi shit eater thinking, Stupid Jews. Chase them till they can’t run anymore, then offer them a school! They’ll trample one another trying to turn themselves in!
He can see Colle Aurelio across the main valley. The pass seems impossibly high, nestled between two great mountains. Shadowed gullies and crevasses look small from here, but Duno knows their immensity with the muscles of his legs and the air of his lungs. How, without wings, had anyone crossed such monstrous terrain?
Put one foot in front of the other, he tells himself fiercely. That’s how!
The mountains turn gold, then pink, then blue. Bone-rattling cold sweeps downward, sinking off the snowfields. Sweat chills on his skin, raising chicken flesh. “I’ll never go back,” he says aloud, to harden his resolve. The life he knew is over. He will never take over his father’s business or have a bourgeois apartment or buy season tickets at the ballet or have money in the bank. He won’t give parties for people who eat his food and mock him behind his back, then spit in his face and laugh when he’s kicked into the gutter.
He won’t miss his family either. He is done with them. Forever. But he wishes he’d brought some food.
CASA DI GOLETTA
VALDOTTAVO, PIEMONTE
Battista Goletta sets another chunk of beechwood on the stump. “They left a few days ago. I said I’d bring ’em across the valley to my cousin Attilio. He’d’ve taken ’em. They didn’t understand what I was saying, I guess.” Battista brings the ax down. “Their boy, Duno, ran off to join the Communists. More balls than brains.”
The soldier shifts despondently from foot to foot. “Have you heard anything about an old gentleman with a girl about sixteen, signore? I left them in a carbonaro shack up here somewhere. I’ve been trying to find them, but all the ravines look the same.”
Battista leans over to toss a few more splits onto the pile of firewood. “There’s ebrei over with the Cesanos. No girls, though.”
“Madonna. I hope they didn’t turn themselves in.”
“A lot did,” Battista says. The valley was filled with families living in barns, under bridges, in the open. Worn-out women, trying to hold families together. Men, pauperized and impotent. Kids sick, scared of bugs and snakes. Those were the ones who gave up.
“I found a priest,” the soldier says. “He said he’ll help if I can find them.”
“Don Leto?” The boy nods. Battista grunts, unsurprised. “The padre’s a Red, just like my idiot cousin Attilio. Landlords. Communists. Priests.” He brings the ax onto another piece of wood. “None of ’em work, and they all want something for nothing! Me? I work for everything I got, and I don’t owe nobody nothing. Damned Communists… They came through here a couple of days ago. Stole two wheels of cheese. Left me a receipt! Thieves.” His tone changes. “She pretty?” The soldier frowns. “La ebrea! Your sweetheart! Is she pretty?”
“She’s not my sweetheart,” the boy mumbles, “but she’s pretty.”
Sweating even in the chill of autumn, Battista swabs his tanned bald head with a thin rag. His sister spun its wool the spring before he married Rosa. His mother wove the fabric, and made a shirt for his wedding after the grape harvest was in. He wore that shirt for the baptisms of his children, and on every Sunday for fifteen years. It served for work ten years more, and then Rosa made squares of it. Carefully hemmed, the handkerchief will do another decade of duty in Battista’s pocket. “Looks don’t last,” he warns the boy. “Can she work?”
“She knows a lot of languages. She could be a teacher.”
Battista snorts. “Most of what’s wrong in the world is because of educated goddamned fools.” Far below, a train whistle wails. They can see the window of its locomotive flash as it pulls domed wooden cattle cars along the riverbank. Battista sends his ax thunking into the stump. “What’s your name, kid?”
“Cicala, signore. Santino.”
“You hungry, Cicala? You could work it off.”
Santino walks over to the toolshed, stretching and bending to study its construction. Battista kneads his aching back, and sees the farm with a stranger’s eyes: house, barn, outbuildings, fences, all built with flat stacked stone. Walls buckle where the ground has settled away from them. The door to the toolshed hangs on one hinge. The barn roof has been patched and patched and patched.
“Whoever built this skipped the hearting,” Santino calls. “It’s cheaper not to, but you have to pack the wall’s core, or it’s got no strength. That’s why you’re getting water damage.”
In the thirties, this place produced ten times what the Golettas could eat, and Battista’s name was listed among the Cavalieri del Lavoro: the Knights of Labor. Mussolini himself honored the virtue of men whose patriotism was measured in productivity and sweat. Now Battista does all he can to keep the place up, but it’s a losing battle. “Me and Rosa, we’re alone,” he explains. “Boys’re in the army. Girls’re married, troubles of their own. I’m getting old.” He claws thoughtfully under a whiskered chin. “I could use some help. Can’t pay you anything, but you’d have food and a roof against the snow.”
The ugly young face contorts uncertainly. “I told Claudia I’d come back.”
“Keep wandering around the countryside looking for her, Germans’ll pick you up… Course, if you were here working, I could ask around.”
Battista’s hair is gray, what’s left of it. His skin is rutted as a road, but those shoulders are heavy with fifty-odd years of ax-muscle. Santino shakes his head. “They’d grab you, too, signore.”
Slyly, Battista stoops and twists, manufacturing a hump worthy of Rigoletto. “A crippled old shit like me, Your Grace?” he whines. “No good to anyone, Your Honor. Just a poor old cafone trying to sell a few vegetables.” With a pirate’s grin, Battista straightens, claps Santino on the shoulder, and jerks his head toward the house. “Rosa!” he yells. “You’ve got men to feed! C’mon, kid. Let’s go eat.”