MOTHER OF MERCY ORPHANAGE
ROCCABARBENA
Everybody thinks Isma is a half-wit, but Angelo Soncini is pretty sure she’s Jewish.
At first, Angelo thought he was the only Jew in the orphanage. Then one time he was doing chores, and scrubbing circles on the floor made him hum. Riccardo came over and whispered, “Quit that!” Angelo thought he wasn’t supposed to scrub anymore, but when he started to get up, Riccardo said, “No, stupid! Just shut up! You were humming ‘Hatikva’!”
After he knew about Riccardo, Angelo looked for other kids pretending to be Catholic. He watched at meals to see who kept kosher, but that didn’t work. There’s never any meat, so there’s nothing you can’t mix with milk, so everything’s pareve. Mostly there’s zucchini, or potatoes, or polenta, or rice in watery soup, and a little bread after school. You might get an egg if you’re real sick, but you have to have spots or something. The sisters can tell when you’re faking it. Sometimes there’s soup with real old pasta, and little worms floating in it. Worms are definitely not kosher, but everybody picks them out, except the biggest boys, who eat them to make the girls scream and get in trouble.
You have to be quiet all the time, except at recess and on Sunday after Mass. You have to act real serious like the sisters. You have to walk in lines, two by two, and you wear dark blue uniforms with white shirts if you’re a boy, and white blouses if you’re a girl. You have to be obedient, and you can’t have anything that belongs to you alone, so you have to be careful with everything. Because it’s not yours, it’s just “for your use.” When you outgrow your pants or something, you turn them in and get bigger ones. For your use. If you talk or get out of line, you’ll get a smack from Suora Paola. Suora Paura, everyone calls her: Sister Scary.
Sister Scary always yells, and she calls you by your last name, and sometimes Angelo forgets that his name is supposed to be Santoro, and he gets in trouble because he doesn’t answer right away. After he figured out about Isma, Angelo snuck up and told her, “Watch out for Suora Paura— she’ll smack you one if you do something wrong!” Isma just stared at her feet and said, “Isma glai,” or something like that. That’s all she ever says, so that’s what everybody calls her: Isma.
“Suora Paola has to be strict,” Suora Corniglia told Angelo. “If soldiers are coming, you have to do exactly as we say without asking why, or somebody might get hurt.” Suora Corniglia always explains stuff, and she never ever yells. Not even soft. Suora Corniglia calls everybody by their first names, like a mother, and she’s pretty, and nice, and she has dimples. Angelo is going to marry her when he grows up, because she’s always kind. She’ll wear pretty dresses then.
But she can still go to Mass.
Sometimes Suora Corniglia hides half an apple in her big sleeves, and she secretly gives a quarter to Angelo and a quarter to Isma. Suora Corniglia is real careful that nobody else sees. That’s another reason Angelo thinks Isma’s Jewish.
Plus, another reason is, Sister Scary let Isma keep that stupid doll. It’s just a china head and a rubber body with the arms gone. The hair is all scrabbly. It’s ugly, and nobody’s allowed to have private stuff, but when Sister Scary tried to take it away, Isma screamed so much you could hear it all over the school, and everybody thought their ears were going to fall off. “It’s all the poor little thing has,” Suora Corniglia told Sister Scary. And then they looked at each other real serious. That’s how Angelo figured out for almost sure that Isma is Jewish. If she was a Catholic kid, she could’ve screamed until she turned blue. Sister Scary still wouldn’t have let her keep that doll.
A lot of girls cheat, though. They make little, tiny dolls out of a stick and a scrap of cloth or a leaf or something. They hide the dolls in their uniform pockets. At recess the girls take the dolls out and make them talk to each other in real high squeaky voices. It makes Angelo sick.
Most of the time the boys and girls are apart, so Angelo doesn’t see Isma much, except at recess. And Mass. Everybody goes to Mass together at 6:30 every morning, which surprised Angelo a lot the first time. In synagogue, ladies and girls had to sit up in the gallery, but in church, they sit right in with men and boys! Angelo understands that now. In the synagogue, the women always came late, and then they talked too much, and the men would always be looking up and glaring at them, and when the women got noisy, Signor Tura would hiss like a snake. But Catholic girls know how to shut up. The sisters teach them that in school.
Angelo likes Mass, except for the crucifix, which is scarier than Suora Paura. One time, when Angelo went to visit Don Osvaldo at San Giobatta, Babbo told him, “In the old days, the Romans did that to anyone who made trouble. There was a slave called Spartacus who fought for freedom, and the Romans crucified six thousand of his followers, all along the Via Appia.” When Angelo asked Suora Corniglia what kind of trouble Jesus made, she said, “He died for our sins.” Which still doesn’t seem fair, even though Suora has tried real hard to explain it.
Mass is mostly very nice. The candles are like when Mamma lit the candles for Shabbat. Near the end, the priest chants, “Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!” just like when Babbo chants, “Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh!” And the priest wears fancy stuff that looks like what Aaron wore in the Tent of Meeting in the desert— Angelo had a picture book about that when he was little. Plus, the singing is good.
Angelo likes school, too. There aren’t many books, so they memorize a lot. Multiplication tables, case endings, trees, stars, how to use punctuation. Angelo has a good memory, but sometimes he pretends he doesn’t know an answer because there’s this big kid named Bruno Ceretto. Bruno’s older, because he got held back. He’ll twist your arm real hard if you show off. Bruno hates show-offs, but he’s more show-offy than anybody.
The whole school has recess after lunch. Angelo doesn’t play with Isma, but he watches out so nobody picks on her. Once Bruno took Isma’s stupid doll away from her, and Angelo slugged him in the stomach so hard Bruno couldn’t even talk, and then recess was over. Bruno leaves Isma alone now, but then he started kicking Angelo whenever he got the chance, so Angelo would punch him. Sister Scary caught them fighting, and made them both kneel for an hour on pieces of real hard, dry corn, which hurt worse than getting kicked, and made marks in his knees that are still there! So now Angelo just says, “Girls kick. Are you a girl, Bruno?” Bruno gets mad, but he can’t do anything because Sister Scary is watching them all the time with real fierce eyes.
Someday his parents will visit, and Angelo is definitely going to tell them how mean Sister Scary is. Angelo got a secret message that he was going to see Babbo at Passover, but he didn’t come. When Angelo cried, Suora Corniglia said it was too dangerous at Passover because the Germans might suspect. But still.
His parents will visit pretty soon. Angelo is almost practically sure of that. He’s going to tell them they should adopt Isma. They can change her name to Altira because Isma’s not a real name. It’s a pretend name, like Angelo Santoro. Or Sister Scary.
“You can come and live with my family after the war,” he promises Isma at recess every day.
Isma just hugs her stupid doll and looks at her feet. “Isma glai.” That’s all she ever says.
Long white fingers grip a wooden-handled brass bell at 5:15 A.M., and Suora Ursula calls, “May Mary’s immaculate heart…” From every cell, the responsum comes: “… be forever praised.”
Suora Corniglia pulls off a plain cotton nightgown and dresses as she has each morning since she became a postulant: in a fog of half-remembered dreams. Hands clumsy, she ties the laces of stout black shoes, then pulls a blue-violet gown over white cotton undergarments. She tightens the belt around her waist, adjusting the soft pleats of the gown. There are more pleats now than ever. She’s never been a large person, but since the occupation began weight has fallen off her and the other nuns like leaves from a tree. They are bone-tired and always hungry, but this is no more than anyone else suffers, and much less than many endure. Together, she and her sisters in Christ remember Jesus in the desert, and join their hunger to His.
A plain woolen scapular goes over her head, falling almost to the floor in front and behind. Beginning to wake up, she kisses the silver crucifix and slips its long chain around her neck. In the corner of the cell, propped overnight on a mop pole: the white coif and cape with its new black veil. She settles it onto a forehead grooved by the stiffly starched headband that sits just above her brows, and fastens its laces at the back of her neck. Muffling sound, the fabric embraces her face, and she adjusts the drape of the cloth that covers her shoulders.
Her clothing, like the cell she sleeps in, is merely “for her use.” The practice of poverty is meant to free the mind and heart from concern for worldly goods, but before she came to the convent, she never thought so much about material things as she does now. She conserves the tiniest slivers of soap. She is aware of each millimeter of candlewick burned. In spare moments she repairs hems, patches holes, mends stockings for the children. The fabric is old. Careful stitches come apart. Sometimes it’s all she can do to keep from weeping.
Turning back loose outer sleeves the prescribed twelve centimeters, she stands and waits. The bell rings a second time, and she joins her sisters in procession to chapel. She used to pray for the end of the war, but she suspects God doesn’t need a nun to nag Him about that. These days she prays for patience with the children and the mending, with her superiors and herself.
Ite, Missa est: Go, the Mass is ended. Older orphans shepherd littler ones to a refectory where peasant women dish out polenta. The nuns return to the convent to share a breakfast hardly more substantial than the communion wafers they have just received. When the bell rings again, Suora Corniglia stands for the two-by-two procession with the other teachers to the school.
The classroom for her use is large and high-ceilinged, floored with gleaming chestnut. Whitewashed walls reflect the light pouring through enormous windows that look out over an old Roman bridge. On the eve of its third millennium, Ponte Ligure seems determined to carry people and goods across the river forever, but British bombardieri cannot let this insult to their manhood stand. They return for round after round in a lunatic boxing match: twentieth-century explosives versus first-century stonework. At least once a week she has a nightmare about the classroom windows. In her dreams, they’re shattered by concussions, and the children are cut to pieces.
At 8:00 the students file in, two by two, their lives as regulated by brass bells as her own. They take their places next to scarred wooden desks bolted to sleighlike iron runners, shortest to tallest, so the ones in the back can see over those in front. When Bruno Ceretto arrives at the last desk in the far corner, they chorus, “Buon giorno, Suora Corniglia.”
They are unsmiling except for Angelo, who sneaks a grin at her like a secret lover. Embarrassed by the thought, Suora Corniglia frowns when she replies, “Buon giorno, children. Bruno, will you lead us in the Credo?”
Prayers are recited in singsong Latin. Permission is granted to be seated. Floor bolts creak as small bottoms hit wood. The boys know the schedule as well as she does, but they wait for her cues.
Religion. History. Grammar. The morning passes. Desktops bang open, slam closed. The boys wait. She nods approval and faces the blackboard in a swirl of dark blue wool. Raising her arm, she places a centimeter-long stub of chalk against the blackboard. “When subtracting a—”
Two planes flash by, level with the hillside school. For an instant, she sees a pilot clearly. Machine-gun fire spits in both directions. Bombs bounce off stonework into the river. Water erupts into the air. Boys surge toward the windows.
“Get away from the glass!” she shrills, seizing Angelo and Bruno by their shirts. She can hear the planes’ engines as they climb and bank to reapproach German gun emplacements. Fabric gives way as she flings the boys toward the door. “Into the corridor! All of you! Now! Now! Now!”
“Did you see him?” Angelo asks Bruno excitedly. “The pilot looked right at us! Did you see him?”
Trembling uncontrollably, she wants to slap the child for not being terrified, but by the time she has the whole class crouched along the edges of the hallway floor the attack is over, and someone is tugging on her sleeve, announcing, “Suora! Mario peed hisself!”
Mario stares at his lap, fat tears slipping down thin cheeks. “O poveretto!” she sighs with exasperated sympathy. “Don’t make fun!” she orders sharply, glaring until nervous laughter lapses into suppressed giggles. “Bruno! You and Angelo take Mario to the dormitory. Ask Suora Idigna to help him clean up and change. Get clean shirts for your use and bring the ripped ones to me for mending. Be back here in ten minutes! The rest of you: into your seats!”
The three boys march off: Mario bowlegged around the shamefully stained trousers, Angelo and Bruno tattered and torn from her own assault. Next time, she tells herself, grab arms, not collars.
The balance of the day is uneventful, until the school portress knocks. With a stern look toward the boys, Suora Corniglia lays down her chalk and goes to the classroom door.
“Sorry for the interruption, Suora,” the portress whispers. “There’s a Padre Righetti here to see you. He’s waiting at the convent.”
She glances at the wall clock. “Grazie, suora. Ask him to forgive me, but I can’t leave until recess.”
There are, in the event, two additional minor crises to manage. Sweeping into the convent receiving room, she says, “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, Padre. One of the boys—”
The priest turns from the window. Suora Corniglia’s mouth drops open. So does the visitor’s.
“You’re Angelo’s teacher?” He snaps his fingers twice, trying to recall where they met. “You— you were scrubbing the floor at San Giobatta!” he says. “September eighth, right?”
“Yes!” she says with quiet excitement, placing him now. “You helped with the broken glass! You’re the—” She stops herself.
“The Jew who went off with the German. I see you got a promotion.” His eyes flick toward her black veil. “You’re an officer now! How have you been, Sister Dimples?”
“It’s Suora Corniglia,” she says primly, hands under her scapular. “And if that’s a costume for Carnevale, you’re a little late in the season. What are you doing in a cassock?”
“Trying earnestly not to get arrested.” He holds up the biretta’s square crown, with its three shark fins and pompon, and puts it on his head, vamping like a Parisian model before sitting at the table. “I borrowed the ensemble from Osvaldo Tomitz, who was carrying a doctor’s bag last time I saw him.”
“Not getting arrested seems to be Italy’s national sport,” she remarks, feeling a great deal less tired now. “I need to get back to the students in fifteen minutes. What was it you wanted, Padre?”
She expects him to laugh at the title, but he sobers instead. “I’d like to meet with Angelo, if that can be arranged.”
There’s something about his tone. “But— no! His parents?”
“His mother and baby sister are safe. His father’s been jailed as a hostage.” He holds up a hand when the nun gasps. “For the moment, everything is fine, but I’d like to speak to Angelo. I led him to believe I could arrange a visit, and I want to explain. Is there any way I can talk to him without arousing suspicion?”
“If he were older, you could pretend to hear his confession, but his class hasn’t had First Communion yet.” She thinks for a moment. “On Sunday afternoons, the children are allowed to hike up toward the monastery. Within reason, we let them do as they please for a few hours. They can play or read. Most of them hunt for mushrooms or berries— there’s so little food. If you were to wait by the monastery gate, I could steer him toward you.”
“Do you think I could stay with the brothers until then?”
“Ask for Fra Edoardo. You won’t have to explain anything to him.” She hesitates. “When Angelo comes to you, he’ll bring a little girl along. She’s only three, or maybe four. We think she might be one of the refugees who came over the Alps last year.”
“What’s her name?”
“We don’t know. She’s almost mute, poor thing. The children call her Isma. The only thing she ever says is, ‘Isma glai.’ ”
“Isma glai…? Ist mir gleich? Is that what she says?”
“I suppose… Yes! That could be it— nursery German for ‘I don’t care’?”
“Don’t say anything to her yet. Let me talk to her first.” Fussing with unfamiliar fabric tangled around his legs, Renzo stands. “Until Sunday, then, Suora Fossette.”
“Until Sunday. And don’t you dare call me Sister Dimples in front of the children!”
A slow grin forms above the Roman collar. “The thought,” he lies, “never entered my mind.”
Wrung out by five minutes’ effort fueled by a diet of poor-quality starch, spring chard, and not much else, Suora Corniglia leans against a terrace wall to muster strength and catch her breath. Beside her, tiny brown lizards dart into crevices between stones. Fig trees bake in the basil-scented warmth above meticulously tended vineyards that crisscross the hillside. The Mediterranean is a stripe of silver between gray-green foothills, and when the wind shifts, the astringency of pine from nearby mountains is replaced by the barest hint of salt and seaweed.
The breeze carries Angelo’s heartbroken angry wail as well, and Corniglia aches for him. In her first year of teaching she’s learned that the emotions of eight-year-olds are as outsized as their new front teeth, big as barn doors in their little faces. Frowning curiosity, stunned surprise, and joyous vindication appeared in rapid succession on Angelo’s face when she said quietly, “Take Isma to the monastery gate. A man is waiting to see you there.” Before she could tell him the visitor was not his father, Angelo took off up the hillside, Isma running after him, china-faced doll flopping in her hand. “I knew it!” Angelo yelled. “I told you, Isma! I told you Babbo would come!”
Leaning forward to take better advantage of rubbery muscles, Corniglia climbs again until she reaches two small children and the ersatz priest, sitting on a bench shaded by the brothers’ grape arbor. Gravely, Renzo Leoni shifts Isma from one black-gowned knee to the other. “Suora Corniglia! Permit me to introduce Signorina Stefania. Stefania is this many,” he says, holding up four fingers, “and lived in Austria when she was little. Angelo was just telling me about a squadron of British pilots who strafed the school yard on Friday. Blow,” he says, holding a large white handkerchief over the little boy’s nose.
Face blotched by the purple stigmata of childish rage and anguish, Angelo swallows. “What I meant was, they didn’t really strafe us.”
“Well, they might have,” Renzo allows, his sincerity less specious. Switching to German, he asks Stefania quiet questions. She starts to cry, and he pulls her close. “Of course, you were scared! Planes are scary!” He winks at Angelo. “Just like Suora Paura! Angelo, Suora Corniglia has a nickname, too! It’s—”
“— very likely to get Angelo in a lot of trouble if he uses it,” Sister Dimples warns.
Stefania holds up her doll and whispers. Renzo brings his ear closer to her mouth. Stefania repeats something almost inaudibly. “I am requested to tell Suora that Antoinette is also from Austria.”
Word by word, with frequent asides to Angelo and the nun, Renzo draws the little girl out. As the conversation progresses, infant allegiance to her mother tongue begins to loosen and it becomes clear that she understands more Italian than she’s been willing to admit. Gradually, Renzo brings the questioning around to the painful topic of parents. All he can get from Stefania is “They went away.”
Angelo, by contrast, is voluble on the topic, hurt and angry that his parents haven’t visited either. “Angelo,” Renzo reminds him, “I told you— your babbo can’t come yet. He’s locked up, but he’s in a safe place—”
“Well, you should just go and get him out!”
Above the starched white collar, Renzo’s eyes rise to meet Suora Corniglia’s. “It’s not that simple, Angelo.”
Abruptly, Renzo lifts Stefania off his lap, plunks her onto the bench, and limps toward a bicycle leaning against the monastery wall. Between grief and grievance, Angelo stares open-mouthed at his neighbor’s back. Just as stunned, Suora Corniglia’s lips part. You can’t just leave! she thinks, appalled. You can’t just walk away.
As if in answer, Renzo stops and takes a deep breath, willing the fun back into his face. “But wait! I almost forgot!”
Drawing something from a rucksack draped over the handlebars, he returns, hands concealed behind his back. “Which?” he asks. Angelo points to his right. Crestfallen, Renzo moans his dismay. “Too bad! I thought you’d like to have this.”
He reveals a left-handed miracle: an orange. Horror-stricken at having guessed wrong, Angelo’s face falls. Renzo lets him suffer for an instant before tossing it. The fruit, heavy with juice, drops into Angelo’s palm with a thwack, and he tears the peel like a ravening wolf. “Share it with Stefania!” Renzo orders.
Angelo rips the fruit in half and hands Stefania her portion. With the bliss of a soul ascending directly to heaven, the little boy bites into a segment and staggers with pleasure as the juice slides over his chin. Stefania may never have seen an orange before, but the item is demonstrably edible, and she too stuffs orange segments into her mouth, one after the other.
“Suora Corniglia,” Renzo says sternly, “you’ve neglected the subject of table manners.”
Suddenly dizzy, the nun closes her eyes, but summons enough presence of mind to say, “In my defense, there is very little for us to practice on.”
“Sit,” he says quietly. “Put your head down.” She leans over, and hears his footsteps as he walks to the bicycle and back. “Drink this,” he says, handing her a silver flask. She shakes her head. “Don’t argue,” he says, “unless you fancy me carrying you back to the convent.”
Hesitantly, she takes a swallow, coughs, eyes tearing, and hands the flask back. He takes a healthy swallow himself and sits next to her. “There is a special place in hell for the man who invented bicycles,” he says, massaging his knees. Tucking the flask away, he rummages in his pack, produces a second orange, and digs his nails into the peel. The world contracts to the size of the fruit in his hand. She stares, motionless, struggling to keep her head clear. “Eat this,” he says. “Now.”
She does as she’s told. The juice is acid and sweet. When it hits her stomach, she retches. He hands her a canteen of water from his rucksack. This time, she drinks deep. Then she finishes the orange.
He makes the children drink as well, and when they’re done, he folds his handkerchief to a fairly clean spot, wetting white linen with the last of the water. Feinting left, he anticipates Angelo’s dodge to the right. Doing the same for Stefania, Renzo says, “Let’s see if the sisters have done a better job with your religious lessons than with your table manners. Angelo, who were the first man and the first woman?”
Angelo rolls his eyes at how easy this is. “Adamo and Eva!”
“And when were Adamo and Eva created?” Renzo asks, busily cleaning juice from Stefania’s fingers.
Angelo cries, “On the sixth day!”
“Right. And what happened next?” Renzo asks cagily.
Staggered by this evident contempt for his biblical acumen, Angelo yells, “God rested!” with a great show of exasperation.
“Wrong!” Renzo yells back triumphantly. Suora Corniglia blinks, and Angelo scowls. “God rested on the seventh day,” Renzo admits, handing Corniglia the damp handkerchief, “but what happened before that?” Silence reigns. “Before the evening of the sixth day,” he informs them patiently, “there was the sixth afternoon! And what happened on the sixth afternoon?”
Wiping her fingers and refolding his handkerchief neatly, Suora Corniglia bats her eyelashes in a parody of flirtation. “Do tell, Padre! We are breathless with anticipation!”
“I should think you would be,” he says huffily. “On the sixth afternoon, Adamo and Eva and the animals were all sitting around in Eden enjoying the lovely weather when something strange happened.” He pauses dramatically. “The big round yellow light up in the blue place—”
“The sun!” Angelo hollers. “In the sky!”
“Well, you know that, but Adamo and Eva had just been created, remember, and hardly anything had a name, and they didn’t know how anything worked! So when the big yellow thing started slipping down the blue place toward all that green stuff, Adamo wondered, ‘Why is the big yellow thing doing that?’ Eva said, ‘You’re asking me? I just got here myself.’ So Adamo asked the animals, ‘Why isn’t the big round yellow thing sticking up there in the blue place?’ And the animals said, ‘We were hoping you’d tell us!’ ”
“Except,” Suora Corniglia breaks in, “there was one little mouse who just looked at her feet and said, ‘Isma glai!’ ”
Stefania giggles, a tiny silvery sound, and lies back against the black worsted cassock, relaxing into the story. “The big round yellow thing disappeared,” Renzo continues, pulling Angelo onto the bench. “Eden got dark and chilly. Adamo and Eva and the animals were all cuddled up to keep warm, just like this. Santo cielo!” he cries wickedly. “No one is cuddling with Suora Corniglia!”
“Grazie, Padre,” she says smoothly. “I am quite warm enough!”
“Are you sure?” he asks. “Because I’d be happy to—” Stefania tugs the crucifix hanging around his neck and whispers something. “You’re right. I’ll finish the story. So there they were, all cuddled up. Adamo said, ‘I wish God had let us keep that big round yellow thing.’ But Eva said, ‘Well, those new little twinkly things are pretty, too.’ ”
“Stelle,” Stefania whispers.
“Stars! Exactly! But nobody knew that then. One by one, the animals went to sleep. Adamo whispered, ‘What a lot of trouble for God, making that big yellow thing for such a short time.’ But Eva said, ‘He’s the Boss.’ ” Renzo’s tone changes. “What do you think happened next?”
“The sun came back!” Angelo yells.
“The sun came up! The animals stretched and started walking around, mooing, and roaring, and so on. Adamo said, ‘Look, Eva! God made another big round yellow thing, but this time He put it over on the other side of the garden!’ ” Renzo lifts Stefania from his knee, his fingertips meeting across her little back. “What do you think, Stefania? Does God make a new sun every morning?”
She looks at her feet. “I don’t know,” she says. Not, Suora Corniglia notes, “I don’t care.”
“It just goes around to the other side!” Angelo tells her. “You can’t see it, but it’s still there!”
“Yes,” Renzo says softly. “The sun is still there, even when you can’t see it. And your parents love you, even when you can’t see them.” Out of the corner of his mouth, he mutters to Suora Corniglia, “Even when you can’t stand them.”
Corniglia smiles. Renzo stands, groaning when he gets up. “I can’t promise to bring your parents to you,” he says, “but I can promise I will try. Before I go… Angelo, take Stefania over to the bicycle and look in the other bag.”
The children race off. “That was beautiful,” Corniglia says.
“It’s midrash: a story behind a story in the Torah. My oldest sister told me that one when she left home to get married. She was killed last October, trying to get to Switzerland.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Chocolate!” Angelo shouts, dancing with a candy bar. “Chocolate, Suora!”
Renzo looks over his shoulder. “Angelo, you little savage! Offer Suora some!”
“Just share it with Stefania!” she calls.
“Thank you,” Renzo says quietly, “for taking care of them.”
They are not my children, she thinks, but they are a son and daughter for my use. Renzo looks at her so searchingly that she turns away, her veil shielding her eyes. “You’re not a bad fellow,” she hears him say, “for a nun.”
She glances at him. “And you’re not a bad fellow, either. For a fake priest.”
Once again, a slow grin transforms the mournful Renaissance face. Pleased, but aware that she is skirting sin, Suora Corniglia regains custody of her eyes, and keeps them on the path as she strolls with him toward the bicycle.
“Angelo,” Renzo asks, “do you have a message for your mammina?”
Angelo scrunches up his face. Teeth brown with chocolate, he looks at the monastery wall, at the ground, at the arbor. At Stefania. He squints up at his neighbor. “It’s a secret.”
Renzo leans over. Angelo rises on tiptoe, putting grubby little hands around the man’s ear. “That’s a good message,” Renzo says, when the whispering ends. “I’ll tell her that.”
Below them, at the school-yard gate, Suora Ursula rings the brass bell. Well trained, the children race down the hill, knowing the day’s outing is over. Suora Corniglia returns to the bench and retrieves Stefania’s doll, forgotten in the excitement. “You, too,” she tells Renzo, coming nearer. “Get going!”
Not caring if anyone can see them, the black-gowned Jew takes her hand and kisses it, watching her reaction. Challenged, she refuses to pull away and meets his eyes, unflustered. Vanquished, he clutches at his heart and staggers backward, as though struck by an arrow.
“Pagliaccio! Clown!” she says with affectionate reproof, as though he were one of her eight-year-olds. Hiking up the cassock, he throws a leg over the bicycle seat. While he’s busy fitting a clip around his pants leg, she impulsively removes her rosary. “To complete your disguise,” she says.
He holds out his hand, and she drops the plain black beads with their simple silver links into his palm. After a long moment, he says, “Take care, Suora Fossette.”
“I’ll pray for you, Padre Pagliaccio.” She watches him push off, her rosary in his pocket, bicycle tires grating on gravel. “Don’t get arrested!” she calls. He raises a hand without looking back, and disappears over the crest.
THE HUNCHBACK’S HOUSE
FRAZIONE DECIMO
Drying laundry snaps in the breeze. Ravens squabble in the treetops. The garden is green with seedlings. Content in his high-backed chair, Werner Schramm turns his face toward the late-spring sun. The women wear faded cotton frocks, and though he himself is wrapped in woolens to guard against a chill, he feels remarkably well. As long as he doesn’t raise his arms, there’s no chest pain at all.
He’s begun to take short walks, an ambition little Rosina now shares. Plump hands in her mother’s firm grasp, she lumbers with baby industry between Mirella’s legs. “You shouldn’t make her walk too early,” Schramm advises. “Her legs won’t grow properly.”
“Nonsense! She loves it!” Mirella bends to kiss her daughter’s silky curls, and returns undaunted to her topic. “Anyway, you don’t have to be Freud to work it out. All those stiff, raised arms. All that talk about how hard he is. He’s covering something up!”
“You’ll have to excuse Signora Soncini, Herr Schramm.” Lidia pops peas into a bowl and drops the pod into the apron stretched across her lap. “Like everyone who takes Doktor Freud seriously, she seems to have only one thing on her mind. Thank God, her husband will be visiting soon.”
“Babbo’s coming, cara mia!” Skirt ballooning, Mirella swings Rosina up and around. “He’ll see how you go flying!” she cries, delighted when the beaming baby repeats, “F’ying!”
Halfway down the mountain, a church bell tolls. Sunday Mass is over, but the parish choir is rehearsing for some saint’s festa. A polyphonic hymn floats up through air so clear and light so true, Schramm dreams again of painting. Lidia’s dark eyes in their spiderweb of parchment-colored skin. The crescent curls of Rosina’s red-gold hair. Mirella’s cheeks, like ripe peaches beneath freckles she earned planting their kitchen garden. Focus on the near, forget about the distant. War becomes a memory, a rumor, a myth…
“Admit it, Werner,” Mirella says. “Doesn’t the Führer seem sort of— I don’t know… prissy?”
Werner blinks and straightens. “He isn’t married, but there is a woman. She is never spoken of in public—”
“So every girl in Germany can dream that the Führer would choose her,” Lidia says cannily. “My grandmother was in love with Bonaparte.” She reaches into the willow basket for more peas. “She saw him once when she was twelve. He was young then, and dashing. He smiled down at her from his white charger, and she very nearly swooned. Later, he gained weight and lost charm, but for several years, she was enthralled, and kept a scrapbook of his battles.”
Schramm knows these two women better than his own mother or his wife. After months in this isolated house, no topic is off-limits. Female combativeness no longer shocks him, but he still hasn’t decided if it is an Italian trait, or Jewish, or simply Lidia and Mirella. His own wife, Elsa, is a bland, blond memory, but he wonders now if he ever really listened to her.
Looking up, the baby buzzes her lips like an airplane. “Airp’ane, Mamma!”
“Say prego!” both women correct reflexively, and when she does, Mirella rewards her with another swoop through the air.
Rosina is tiny but seems startlingly precocious. She can already tell birds from planes. “My boys didn’t speak so well until they were two,” Schramm says.
“Girls talk early.” Lidia hands the baby a pea pod to gum, to give Mirella a rest. “Renzo had almost nothing to say until he was almost two and a half. He’s made up for it since.”
Refusing to be sidetracked, Mirella asks, “Has Hitler’s secret woman had any secret children? Are there any little Überkinder fathered by the Führer?”
“No,” Schramm admits, “there are no children.”
“Heavens!” she says archly. “He denies his own superior germ plasm to the nation, when it’s every good Aryan’s duty to breed?”
“I think what you suggest of him is not quite correct,” Werner says delicately. “But all his energy is—” He makes a gesture suggesting a funnel. “He puts everything into his speeches. To hear him is almost— scusi, ladies, but it is almost pornographic. He begins very gently. He takes the crowd into his confidence. He speaks, and you think, He speaks to me alone. The others disappear. I have felt this,” Schramm confesses. “Thirty thousand around me, but I felt alone with him. He is like a strong friend who knows your secret thoughts, who is more experienced, more wise. Everyone moves toward him. Your heart is faster, your eyes see only him. His voice rises. He—”
He swells, Schramm thinks. He grows tumescent— larger, more powerful— before your eyes. Your heart and soul open to him, like a girl’s legs. He fills you. Nothing in the world exists but this man, his words, his voice, his power to make you believe, to adore him, to let him do as he pleases with you.
Schramm comes to himself, and clears his throat. “When the speech ends,” he says quietly, “it is a climax. For him. For us. A seduction, and a climax.”
For some reason, Mirella will not meet his eyes, but Lidia is judicial. “ ‘The serpent deceived me,’ ” she quotes aridly, “ ‘and I did eat.’ ”
“I met him once,” Schramm says. “I was invited to the Berghof— his villa in the mountains. He is less impressive in private, except for his eyes. They are not beautiful, precisely, but extraordinary. Hypnotic! But he can be so boring! The same stories, over and over. ‘When I was a soldier… When I was in prison…’ He talks and talks. All night, every night, when others want only to sleep. He knows a great deal about medicine and biology, but much of what he said was not correct.”
Or was simply absurd. A Turkish porter can lift a piano by himself. Humanity depends on the whale for nourishment. Fifty thousand Irishmen went to America in 1641. No one in the Middle Ages had high blood pressure. When their blood rose, they’d fight with knives; now, thanks to the modern safety razor, the world’s blood pressure is too high. Anyone who paints a sky green and pastures blue should be sterilized. Roosevelt’s a Jew. Jesus wasn’t. The Czechs are really Mongolians. Look at the way their mustaches droop. Roman legionnaires were vegetarians and had magnificent teeth.
Rosina starts toward the garden on little hands and knees. “And no one argues with him?” Mirella asks, retrieving her daughter before she can crawl over the zucchini.
“Not twice.” Schramm shudders at the memory. “He said to me— it was very late, about three in the morning— he said, ‘Uncooked potatoes will cure beriberi in a week.’ I said beriberi is unknown among those who eat sufficient meat. He was—” Dumbfounded, Schramm thinks, but he doesn’t know the word in Italian, so he mimes Hitler’s astonishment. “I thought, Wunderbar! He is impressed with my knowledge! So I said also that potatoes do contain some thiamine, but that vitamin is unaffected by heat. Ergo: potatoes need not be raw.”
Brows up, Schramm invites comment. The women shrug: So?
“He began to scream at me!” Schramm says. “There were ten of us that night. No one could move! I was—” He mimes his shock, eyes bulging with astonishment and fear. “For two hours, three hours, he screamed and screamed about the evil of meat, and the absolute necessity of not cooking the potatoes to cure beriberi! I thought he would have me shot!”
“It wasn’t the potato. It was the contradiction,” Lidia says. “Men like that want everyone to marvel at their power and superiority, but they’re terrified of competition. When such a man proposes a footrace, he intends to begin by battering his opponent unconscious with a rock.” Lidia sets the bowl of peas aside. “Tell me, Herr Schramm, what did you do to merit an invitation to the Führer’s exalted presence?”
“I wrote a public health pamphlet on the importance of mother’s nutrition during pregnancy for the fitness of the infant. That was my medical speciality before the war. I made a study of the causes of incorrect infants. He heard of my work.”
Gripping Mirella’s skirt, pulling herself upright, Rosina thumps her mother’s legs. “Mamma! Up!”
Mirella ignores her. “What do you mean by incorrect infants, Herr Schramm?”
“Osteogenesis imperfecta, pes equinus. Meningocele, spina bifida. Pardon— I know these terms only in Latin. Hydrocephaly, microcephaly, anencephaly: heads very large from water on the brain, or very small heads, or without a brain. Also— very small people. Blind, deaf. Such conditions might be an error of heredity, but if good seed falls on poor soil, the results are disappointing. Hitler was interested in this idea.”
“Tell me, Herr Doktor,” says Lidia. “Is idiocy among the defects caused by poor nutrition?”
Mirella flinches, but Lidia’s brows are raised in calm curiosity. “Some forms, yes,” Schramm tells them. “Cretinism and goiter are often together. Both result from deficiency of iodine.”
“P’ego! Up!” Rosina demands.
Mirella pulls her skirt from Rosina’s fingers. “Wait,” she says, first walking, then running toward the hunchback’s house.
Bewildered, Rosina watches her go. “P’ego up! P’ego up, Mamma!”
Schramm asks, “Did I say something wrong?”
Lidia takes her apronful of pea pods to the compost heap and tosses them on top. She says nothing, waiting for the younger woman to return.
When Mirella reappears with a photo that trembles slightly in her hand, Schramm needs only a glance. The anatomical atavisms are unmistakable: almond eyes with medial epicanthic folds. Midface insufficiency with pronounced saddling of the nose. Fat pads like an orangutan’s around the face and neck. If he could examine the child, its palms would surely present the diagnostic undivided crease. “A younger sister, perhaps?”
“My second child.”
“Ach. Unusual for such a young mother. The condition occurs once in, perhaps, fifteen hundred births among women under thirty.”
“Is there something I could have done? Something I should have eaten, or not eaten?”
What can he say? When Langdon Down described the syndrome, the Englishman believed it represented reversion to prehuman stock. Others say such children are evidence of Mongol ancestors, who raped their way across Europe. Modern authorities blame mothers too feeble or exhausted to bear healthy offspring. Wishing to be kind, Schramm says, “The condition is not associated with malnutrition. I know of nothing you could have done to prevent this tragedy. Where is the child?”
Ignored, Rosina begins to cry in earnest.
“There was an accident,” Lidia tells Schramm when it’s obvious Mirella can’t. “Altira died when she was three.”
He draws himself up in the chair, familiar with the sensation of being across the desk from a devastated parent. “Mirella, you must not grieve: I assure you that a mongoloid idiot is better off dead—”
The slap is so sudden, so unexpected, Schramm can only stare.
Mirella snatches back the photograph. She tries and fails to say something. Scooping Rosina up, she stalks away, slamming the hunchback’s door behind her.
Lidia sighs. “Go in there and apologize, Herr Schramm.”
Schramm stands, astonished. “Apologize! For what?”
Lidia leans over to retrieve the wrap that’s fallen from his lap. Shakes its dust out. Folds it loosely in her lap. “You insulted her child.”
“I spoke as a physician, signora! There were many worse things I could have said!” Swept by an ancient anger, he jabs a finger in Mirella’s direction. “Mothers like her— they think only of themselves! They are the ones— they don’t see! They refuse to see!”
“To see what, Herr Schramm?”
The wrecked families. The broken dreams. The teeming institutions, like satanic zoos filled with every sort of biological failure.
Approach the children’s yard: mongoloids and cretins would rush the fence, faces contorted in caricatures of human emotion. Grunting, tongues protruding, their mouths issuing wordless shrieks or meaningless, mindless babble. When they saw you had nothing for them, they’d wander away, sit cross-legged on the ground, clustered together. Drooling, laughing horribly at nothing. Picking up pebbles, eating bits of debris, tugging at the few remaining tufts of grass in the barren courtyard.
There was an entire ward for the hydrocephalics. White plaster walls, white iron cribs, white cotton sheets, and on each white pillow an enormous head. Immense egg-shaped domes tapering to tiny wizened faces connected by birdlike necks to emaciated bodies. His sister Irmgard’s withered little hand would reach through the guardrail to touch his fingers. “I hope it’s sunny tomorrow,” she’d whisper, her voice like a breeze passing through dead leaves. “We go for a walk when it’s sunny.” A walk? Schramm wanted to cry. Hospital attendants pushing high-wheeled baby carriages like peddlers’ carts, laden with grotesque vegetables.
And the nurseries— Christ! The nurseries were filled with the worst that could happen to human zygotes. Babies with gaping holes where their mouths and noses should be. Fragile little skeletons wrapped in a thin layer of blue-white skin the color of watered milk. Spastic, or rigidly immobile. Children so crippled they’d never leave their cribs. So impaired they’d never learn anything. Their only communication was the ceaseless, tearless, wordless moan of those trapped for years in a life of unspeakable, inescapable pain. Free me. Free me. Free me—
“Herr Schramm? Herr Schramm!” Lidia says sharply. “Are you all right?”
“Those children are like a bomb!” he says raggedly. “A bomb that kills the whole family, that breaks everything in a home! All the mother’s time and attention go to the weakest. She deprives her other children of her care. She neglects also her husband. It is natural that he should leave! And for what? A child who will never contribute anything to society!”
When Lidia speaks, her voice is emotionless, factual. “Yes. I knew a mongoloid when I was young. A neighbor’s child. His nose ran constantly. He never used a handkerchief. Disgusting. His tongue was always out. He couldn’t learn to control his bowels.”
“They never do!” Schramm declares. “A proven fact!”
Lidia raises her hands, adjusts a hairpin, tightening the iron-gray chignon. “When Altira was born, everyone told Mirella the condition was hopeless. Some of us also believed—” She hesitates. “I believed the child would reflect badly on the Jewish community. It would give comfort to those who believed us an inferior race.”
Schramm looks away from the level eyes, dry beneath lined and looping eyelids.
“Mirella stood up to us,” Lidia recalls. “You’ve seen how she can be. I told her she was being unreasonable. She said, ‘The world is filled with unreasonable hate. What’s wrong with unreasonable love?’ Sentimental nonsense, I thought, but she kept Altira. Mirella treated that hopeless child like any other beloved baby. The results were…” Lidia pauses to choose her word. “Stunning.”
The wind carries the scent of rock and warming soil. A few meters from where they sit, a hawk rides heat from sunlit crags. Feathers rippling in the wind, the bird lifts one wing and wheels.
“I was surprised by Altira’s sweetness,” Lidia continues, voice light, controlled. “She was often rather boring. All small children are boring, frankly. They love to do the same thing over and over. Altira had a capacity for repetition far beyond the limits of my patience. Even so, there was a light in her eyes.”
The breeze shifts. The hawk rocks slightly, working to maintain his position, yellow eyes sweeping the tangle of spring-green vegetation at the edge of the hunchback’s terraces.
“When I was thirty-four, I had a child— not like Altira, but not … right. When she was born, I swore she’d never be ridiculed as that neighbor boy was. We told everyone the baby died. My husband took her to the Cottolengo Institute near Genoa. She lived there for seven years.” Her chair creaks as she eases sparely fleshed bones on the unforgiving surface. “I never went to see her.”
The hawk stalls for a breathless moment, folds his wings, plummets. In the silence, they hear the brief, small cry of his hapless prey.
“Regret changes nothing.” Lidia waits until Schramm’s eyes meet hers. “Go to Mirella,” she says. “Beg pardon, Herr Doktor.”
Inside, dripping rag in hand, Mirella scrubs furiously at the trompe l’oeil drawings on the wall. When Schramm appears in the doorway, she plunges the rag into the bucket of washwater and wrings it like a chicken’s neck.
“Doctors! Doctors like you— She won’t live, that’s what they told me. But she did. She’ll never talk, but she did, Schramm. Not clearly, I admit that, but lots of three-year-olds are hard to understand! And she understood what we said to her. She was not an idiot!”
A chalk ocean disappears. Rosina sobs. Schramm sinks onto the stone platform near the fireplace.
“They said she’d never walk, but she did. Yes, she was clumsy. So what? Not everyone is a ballerina. She was sick a lot, but everybody gets colds. And yes! I probably did neglect Angelo, but he didn’t need me as much as she did.”
“Mirella, please—”
The washrag, filthy with land and sea, smacks against his shoes. “It’s Signora Soncini to you!”
“Signora, no parent would wish for the kind of children I have— I have seen. If such conditions could be prevented—”
“The race would be improved?” Mirella wipes her nose on the back of her hand. “Homer was blind. Beethoven went deaf—”
“Signora, you don’t seriously believe that a mong— that your daughter could have been a composer?”
“We don’t know what she could have been! She died before we found out!”
Frightened by her mother’s anger, Rosina crawls to Schramm. He bends stiffly and takes the baby onto his lap. Mirella snatches Rosina away.
“Doctors,” she says contemptuously, oblivious to the child wailing on her hip. “You look at people for ten minutes, and you think you know everything about them!”
Less, Schramm thinks. Ten seconds, perhaps? Five?
“Airp’ane!” Rosina sobs, pointing.
“She wasn’t a tragedy, Werner! She was a little girl. She was my daughter. And she loved to dance.”
Rosina squirms out of her mother’s heedless embrace. “Airp’ane!” she cries, patting at the door.
The noise outside grows. A shift in tone: acceleration. “Mein Gott,” Schramm whispers.
“You’re not even listening!” Mirella cries, aghast. “You doctors never—”
They have, perhaps, half a minute. He grabs Rosina, thrusts her at Mirella, flings the door open. “Get out!” he shouts. “Get away from the buildings! Run!” he yells to Lidia, pushing Mirella out the door. “Run for the trees!”
The first Stuka shrieks by. Mirella makes for the woods, the baby clutched to her chest. Head between his shoulders, Schramm runs toward Lidia, grips her arm. A second gull-wing shadow sweeps over the ground. They both stumble when the engine backblast hits them.
Mirella crouches, shielding Rosina with her body. Rosina’s terrified screams join the high-pitched wail of the Stukas, and the rattle of their machine guns. The first concussion nearly knocks Lidia off her feet. Schramm staggers but keeps his grip. The second bomb explodes farther up the mountain.
Fifty meters into the forest, they scrabble sideways, skirting the mountain’s incline, scrambling over vines and rocks. Keep track, he tells himself. Center-mount 500s, away. Four SD70 fragmentation bombs on the wing racks. How many left?
Schramm spots an ancient chestnut. Thin mountain soil has eroded away from a snaking tangle of tree roots, creating a little cave. Pointing, he gasps, “In there!” He takes Rosina. The women crawl through an opening like a Gothic arch made of roots as thick as Rosina’s body. One of the planes lets its rack of 70s go. Stones and dirt shower down through treetops. He hands the shrieking baby in to Mirella.
“Get in!” Mirella shouts. Schramm shakes his head. She and Lidia move to the edges of the little space. “Get in!” Mirella yells again. “There’s room!”
A second rack of bombs falls. The detonations merge into a single titanic blast. He squirms under the tree and wedges himself between the women. “Luftwaffe! They want the partisans, not us!” They nod, trembling. He puts his arms around them.
Another pass: explosions are replaced by the rattle of machine guns and answering small-arms fire. Engine noises doppler away. Six, perhaps eight minutes after the raid began, it’s over.
For a time, only the baby’s hiccuping sobs break the forest’s stunned silence. The adults stare straight ahead, gathering their wits.
When cramped muscles demand movement, Schramm delivers himself like a breech birth, feet first. Mirella hands Rosina through, crawls out on her own, takes the baby back. “Wasn’t that exciting, Rosina?” she cries, voice high with forced cheer. “Santo cielo! What a racket!”
Lidia accepts Schramm’s help, and doesn’t release his hand as they pick their way back through the forest. “They know about San Mauro,” she whispers.
“It was a message,” Schramm says. “We know where you are.”
Mirella, a few steps ahead, holds Rosina close. “Yes, cara mia, those were bad airplanes, but they’re all gone!” she soothes. “You’re such a brave girl! Everything is fine now.”
The hunchback’s house is still standing, and the ramshackle barn no worse. Schramm collapses onto his chair. Lidia sits next to him, equally drained. They watch, slack-jawed, as Mirella swoops the baby through the air.
“What noisy airplanes!” Mirella cries. “Wasn’t that fun?” she asks a doubtful Rosina, whirling until the baby’s short, sharp terror begins to yield to her mother’s insistent merriment and her own sunny nature.
“Extraordinary,” Schramm says, shaking his head when Rosina repeats her mother’s “Flying!” with increasing conviction.
Lidia extracts a handkerchief from her apron pocket, presses it against a flushed and dirty face. Eyes sidelong, she considers the winded German beside her while dabbing at the trickle of sweat slipping down her crepey throat.
Schramm looks down the gravel path that leads toward San Mauro. “Someone’s coming,” he says.
“It’s Don Leto!” Mirella shouts joyously, swinging Rosina around and around. “That means Babbino’s in San Mauro, cara mia! We’re going to see your babbo again, and your big brother!”
A black-clad figure is hobbling hurriedly up the gravel path, and there’s something familiar about the man, but— “That’s not Don Leto,” Schramm says. “The limp is wrong.”
Lidia shades her eyes with both hands. “Old as I am,” she notes drily, “there are occasions when I am forcibly reminded that I have not yet seen everything. That’s my son. In a cassock.”
Renzo waves to them briefly before Mirella reaches him. Hands on her shoulders, he speaks quietly and at some length. Mirella puts the baby down, and sits heavily on a tree stump. Rosina babbles. Mirella sketches a smile, her face crumpling as Rosina crawls off to play.
“Her husband,” Schramm supposes.
“Poveretta,” Lidia whispers.
Leaving Mirella, Renzo approaches, limping heavily. “Schramm! You’re looking less cadaverous! And Mamma.” He kisses the thin-skinned downy cheek Lidia offers. “Pale, but otherwise undamaged?”
She reaches out to grip his hand. The long, uneven breath he exhales is the only sign of the dread that drove him to sprint the last half kilometer up this mountain. “Iacopo?” she asks.
“Arrested. Just bad luck: he was raked up with forty other hostages.” Still trying to get his breath back, Renzo unbuttons the cassock and tosses the sweaty woolen garment over the laundry line. “Mamma, exactly how bored are you—?”
“Don’t move,” she says.
Schramm and Renzo follow her stare. Half-buried in the soft soil of the garden, the bomb’s stablizing propeller rotates slowly in the breeze. Straddling it, arms wide, Rosina makes buzzing noises with her lips. “Airp’ane!” she announces happily.
Lidia fastens a clawlike hand on Renzo’s arm. “She doesn’t know you. I’ll go. Keep Mirella away.”
Mirella hears her name, sees Rosina, rushes toward her. Renzo blocks her path. “No!” she screams, struggling as Renzo lifts her off her feet. “Rosina, no!”
Lidia moves steadily through the garden. When she is close enough to hear ticking, she glances over her shoulder. Schramm and Renzo have manhandled Mirella behind the hunchback’s house. Bending at the knees amid feathery carrot seedlings, Lidia points toward the sky. “Rosina!” she says. “See the airplane?”
The baby looks up. Lidia seizes the child under the arms, steps over the bomb, and starts for the stone barn. The ticking pauses. The baby is heavy but Lidia hurries, thin old legs stumping along decisively.
They’re just inside the door when the blast lifts her off her feet for a weird, short sail through the air. There is no sensation of impact, only the need to keep Rosina in her arms. Her shoulder goes numb when she hits a bale of hay, but she hangs on, curling around the baby while they’re pelted by stones and dirt.
Straw is still falling when the others reach her. Schramm stoops to feel along Rosina’s limbs. The baby is crying, but there’s no blood, and she’s safe now in her sobbing mother’s arms. Ears ringing, Lidia reads Schramm’s bleached, anxious face, his moving lips: She’s fine. She’s fine! Are you all right? “Yes, I think so,” Lidia says, faintly amazed by the whole experience. She will be badly bruised, no doubt, but she’s too keyed up to feel pain.
Renzo helps her stand, holds her briefly. Schramm looks more shaken than she feels, and says something. Lidia taps her ears and shakes her head. “I can’t hear you!”
They make her sit on a hay bale. She paws bits of straw from her hair while Schramm examines her. Renzo spots her spectacles, straightens the frames, and puts them on her face. Still laughing, she catches sight of the view beyond the barn, and her face loses its shape.
The garden is a crater. The chairs she and Schramm sat in a minute ago: vaporized. The laundry posts have remained upright, the rope bizarrely in place. Renzo’s cassock lies twenty meters away, unscorched, in the weeds. Diapers smolder nearby. Smoking-hot chunks of metal are everywhere: jammed between the stones of the house and barn, embedded in trees, littering the ground. “A miracle!” she says, stupefied. “A miracle.”
Werner Schramm has witnessed the phenomenon in others many times: the buckling knees, the helpless weeping. Under fire, your training takes over. When the danger’s past, the shaking and crying begin. Renzo stands behind Lidia, his hands on her shoulders, both of them taking in the devastation. Mirella’s forearm makes a seat for Rosina’s bottom. Her other hand cups the back of her baby’s head, fingers lost in red-gold curls. So ordinary. So normal. But they might have died half a minute ago…
Schramm wipes his eyes, ashamed of going to pieces. “Cataplexy,” Schramm tells the others, tears spilling. “It’s nothing. Reaction. Truly. Just reaction.” But the recoil intensifies as he looks from face to face. Lidia. Renzo. Mirella. Concerned. Understanding. Sympathetic. The faces blur. He knows who they are, but he cannot see them. They become, with terrifying ease: items, categories. Jew, too old to work. Jew, able-bodied. Jew, with child. Left. Right. Left.
Sinking in a heap on the packed dirt of the barn floor, he gives himself up to the weeping, until he hasn’t strength for more. Finally, exhausted and empty, he pulls himself together and sees two adolescent boys. Out of breath from their long run, they stare at what’s left of Mirella’s garden. Lidia goes to them. A hurried conversation, and she points to Schramm. They come toward him, their anxious faces pinched by shock. They take his arms, lift him to his feet, pull him toward a path that leads to the Cave of San Mauro.
“You have to come!” they are saying. “We need a doctor!”
The sun has dropped behind the mountains on the other side of the valley when Renzo emerges from the hut with the household’s sole remaining chair. He settles it onto a patch of level ground, making a courtier’s sweeping gesture, and Lidia accepts the seat. They are alone. Rosina is napping, Mirella beside her. Schramm, depleted by the events of the day, has sent word from the cave that he’ll stay tonight with the San Mauro Brigade, which has sustained its first casualty.
Renzo shakes a cigarette from a package of Nazionales and offers it to Lidia. “What happened to that silver cigarette case?” she asks.
“Sold it.” He leans over with a match. “I sold Zia Elena’s credenza, too.”
She dismisses the news with a queenly wave. “All that carving! Made me think of skin diseases.”
Cigarette dangling in the corner of his mouth, he lowers himself to the weedy ground, using his hands to ease his knees as he stretches out. She holds her own breath until he leans back on his elbows and his face relaxes. Smoking in companionable silence, they watch a flock of swallows dive murderously through clouds of insects.
“I saw Angelo a few days ago,” Renzo says, tapping ash. “He has a little girlfriend. Austrian, probably Jewish. About four. I asked Angelo if he had a message for his mammina. He wants his parents to adopt Stefania. He said he was ‘practicing up on being a big brother.’ ”
“Eight-year-olds can be rather sweet little people. Does he miss his parents?”
“Yes, and—” Renzo shakes his head at his own foolishness. “I may have a way to get his father out of jail, if you—”
“Very.” Lidia sends smoke upward.
“I’m sorry?”
“Just before Rosina and I took our first flight,” she reminds him drily, “you asked how bored I am. Very,” she repeats. “I am very bored, and I want to go home!” They are both surprised that her voice is shaking. “Well, look around!” she cries, waving at the bomb crater. “How much more dangerous could a city be? I can help you, Renzo. Old women are practically invisible, and that gives us a kind of power.”
Who else is there? He is a member of no group, working alone, making things up as he goes. He pulls out a flask. “To the death of chivalry!” he says before offering it to his mother.
She sips delicately, returns the flask. Steadier, she asks, “So what do you have in mind?”
He watches the sky turn from gold to pink, and waits for the liquor to do its work. When benign indifference has claimed him, Renzo gestures carelessly at the twilight. “What color would you call that? Would you say that’s ultramarine or—”
“Renzo, darling,” Lidia says wearily, “don’t be an ass.”
“Mamma,” he says grandly, “we have two tasks before us, and you may have your choice of them. One of us will go to jail, while the other blows up a building.”
Lidia Segre Leoni was the first woman in Sant’Andrea to ride a bicycle in public. She started smoking in 1916 and kept it secret for a decade, even from her son. She has faced down German officers and led their soldiers into ambush. She reaches for Renzo’s flask and tips the last of its contents into her own mouth. Eyes watering, she hands it back. “Going to jail, as I recall, is your speciality.”