PENSIONE USODIMARE
PORTO SANT’ANDREA
The office is makeshift: a cheap desk pushed into an entry that was once a modest receiving room for a prosperous family. After the war, Antonia Usodimare intends to fix the place up again, but for now it’s good enough. Her boarders are lonely men, too weary and dejected to care about threadbare upholstery and derelict draperies. She moves heavily on puffy, leaden legs, cooking plain meals for them, doing their washing. Between bouts of housework, she knits with red and swollen fingers, knobby knees splayed beneath the skirt of a faded black dress, bunioned feet stuffed into a pair of her dead husband’s slippers.
This morning, she aches worse than usual. After all the boarders left, she added a long climb to the garret to her ordinary work, then punished her joints further by kneeling in the corner, prying up the boards, retrieving a bundle of clothing. One flight down, she wrapped the bundle in a thin towel, collected a few shirts, stuffed them into a sack with stinking underwear and socks. Layering them, like a nasty lasagna. Slowly, pausing on each stair tread, she made her way back down to the office, tucked the sack under the desk, and settled down to wait.
She’s been promised that a staffetta called la vedova will give her an entire package of British cigarettes in exchange for the bundle. A princely payment, but justified by the risks Antonia takes for the resistance. The Gestapo will arrest anyone, even old women. If they search the Pensione Usodimare and find what hides under her desk, Antonia Usodimare will pay with her life.
At midmorning, a young peasant knocks politely on the open door but stays just outside, one hand balancing the large basket she carries on her kerchiefed head. “Prego, signora,” she says with a slurry mountain accent, “have you any laundry for me today?”
Antonia frowns suspiciously. She was expecting someone her own age, not this pregnant green-eyed girl. “I usually do my own.”
“Prego, signora, I’ll do a good job, and I don’t charge much. I need the money. I am all alone. A widow.”
As she realizes that la vedova is not just a nickname, the landlady’s lumpy old face changes. “Poveretta,” she murmurs, bending to retrieve the sack. The girl lowers her basket, secreting the bundle amid the sheets and shirts she’s already carrying. “Grazie tanto,” she says. “You are very kind.”
She passes the cigarettes to Antonia when the old woman embraces her. “There are too many widows,” Antonia whispers. “Too many mothers alone.”
“There will be more.”
It is a promise, not a threat. Antonia draws back, chilled. La vedova pauses at the open door. “I’ll have the laundry back by Tuesday,” she says in a voice meant to be heard. “Mille grazie, signora.”
At roadblocks and checkpoints, she can play her pregnancy either way. Italians, either sentimental or in collusion with the resistance, allow the weary young Madonna to pass without a thorough search. Germans are more dangerous. Their eyes linger on her swollen breasts. They pretend to be suspicious. Italy is filled with girls who survive by doing soldiers a favor for a few lire, a couple of cigarettes, a little food. To them, Claudia is a slut stupid enough to let herself get knocked up, as bitter and embattled as they themselves. “What have you got in that basket?” such men always ask. Sometimes she flirts with them. “A bomb,” she jokes. “Want to search me?”
Sant’Andrea’s early spring has softened into real warmth; her blouse is half open beneath a rust-red cardigan. The waistband of a flowered skirt is shifted above her belly, and raises the hem over her knees. She shuffles forward in the queue, watching the older of two soldiers.
Stepping up to the barricade, she glances at a gang of undersized urchins loitering just beyond. Ragged, barefoot, fearless. “Zigaretten,” such boys beg at every German checkpoint. For sport sometimes, soldiers flick a butt to the cobbles and make bets as children fight for possession. Claudia leans over to set her basket down. The older German watches a trickle of sweat slip between her breasts. She hands over her identity card.
He may toss a cigarette toward the boys, beckon to her, demand a “toll” for her passage. He may see the signs of alteration on her papers and arrest her, or simply shoot her in the head because he’s hung over and knows the war is lost. She will not know why she died, except that she is following her orders: collect the uniform, deliver it to Schramm.
“What’s in there?” He means the basket, but he’s looking now at her belly.
“A little bastard,” she says in Schramm’s Italian-accented German. “Want to search me to be sure?”
Pawing through the laundry, he gives the opportunity some thought. She’s pretty, even six months along— “Scheisse!” he hisses, leaping back as though his hand had been bitten by a snake.
She apologizes, feigning surprise and dismay. Explains that such cleaning is part of her job. He swears again, face twisting with disgust, and tells her to move on. God knows how many people this man’s killed, but rags soaked with menstrual blood have the power to horrify him.
She clears the barricade and follows a boy named Riccardo down a narrow alley, through a low plank door. The other kids filter in, delivering stolen purses, wallets, and guns. Riccardo decides what he can fence in town and what he’ll sell to la vedova. The bargaining is swift. Two packets of British cigarettes for identity papers. He wants two more for the guns, but she shakes her head. “One pack,” she says. “We’ve got plenty of guns.”
“Bene.” Riccardo lights up.
“Next Tuesday,” she tells him. “The Genoa gate.”
The child’s cheeks hollow as he takes a drag. He coughs and nods, then raises a grubby hand in farewell. “Next Tuesday,” he agrees. “Ciao, bella.”
NEAR BORGO SAN MAURO
VALDOTTAVO
Tonio lugs lead batteries. Maurizio totes the cumbersome generator. The twelve-pound wireless transmitter bumps against Simon Henley’s own chronically bruised back. Twenty-some men form a guard around the precious radio equipment. When the sun comes up, the tracks of this mixed multitude will be plain as day through melting snow and the mud beneath it. “Won’t the Germans follow us?” Simon Henley asks his guide.
“Of course not,” Maria Avoni says.
“Why not?” he asks in sincere ignorance.
“Because they might find us.” She stands still, listening. Gets her bearings, and points. “There is a spring. We will drink some water and rest.”
Mirella Soncini seemed an angel of mercy who made his first day in Italy warm and safe. Maria Avoni is an altogether different example of Italian womanhood. Last month, at Renzo Leoni’s order, Maria appeared at Villa Malcovato toting a machine gun, with ammunition belts criss-crossed over her lovely bosom: Boadicea as dressed by Pancho Villa. “How was your flight?” she asked Simon, as though he were a tourist on holiday, not a paratrooper behind enemy lines. “I will show you to your first camping place,” she said. “We will have an enjoyable walk.”
She commands a band of two dozen partisans instructed to facilitate the British signalman’s work. Her English is competent, but Simon was bemused by her phrasing until she mentioned that her father was a mountain guide before the war.
She picks out a flattish rock to use as a picnic bench, and extracts panini from a backpack. The other partisans nudge each other, smirking, when Simon sits next to her. He wishes their vulgar assumptions were correct. He’s spent hours pretending to care about Maria’s nature talks, watching her hips as she climbs in the moonlight.
She is smart, and knowledgeable, and has volunteered for the thankless task of teaching him a bit of her language. Tonight’s topic has been the bewildering variety of Italian politics. As near as he can make out, the Garibaldi Brigades divide their time between ambushing Fascists and preparing for a Communist revolution after the war. Matteotti Socialists are left-wing laborites, but not Communists; they support trade unions and peasant agricultural cooperatives. Christian Democrats want to restore normality, a rather cloudy concept these days. Catholic Actionists differ from Christian Democrats in some way that even Maria is hazy about. “I think they’re more religious” was all she could come up with.
The Committee for National Liberation’s brief is to coordinate the actions of such groups for the common good— broadly defined as making the Germans leave Italy. The British SOE’s mission, in turn, is to encourage CNL cooperation with the Allies by dropping medical supplies, weapons, ammunition, money, and cigarettes, all in exchange for intelligence on enemy troop movements. Simon’s own orders are to transmit said intelligence, an activity the German SS and Italian Black Brigades wish devoutly to discontinue. By day, squads of them comb the district on foot or motorbike, searching in general for partisans and in particular for an Englishman with a wireless. Maria guides him to a new transmission location every seventy-two hours.
“And what are your political views?” he asks Maria, trying to sound worldly while chewing a cheese sandwich.
She licks olive oil from her fingers. “See those two farms? There, and there.” Hints of a rosy dawn flush the eastern sky. He can just make out the blackened ruins high on either side of the main valley. “The Fascists say Attilio Goletta helps the resistance. The Communists say Battista Goletta is a Fascist informer. Broken clocks are correct two times a day. The Black Brigades and the Garibaldini— they are both correct this time.” She shrugs, and with an act of will, he does not watch her breasts move beneath her battle jacket. “Most of the time, they are wrong. Fascisti think all peasants help the partisans, so they burn houses. Communisti think if a farmer’s house isn’t burned, he must be a collaborator. So they burn houses.”
“And your group?”
“We just want all these bastards to leave us alone. Germans, Fascists, Communists.”
Relieved the British are not yet on her list of bastardi, Simon clears his throat self-consciously. “Maria, I heard that there will be a dance. A lot of the partisans are inviting staffette… I was wondering if you would—”
Her face goes still. She moves her head from side to side, listening to a faint thumping on the other side of the low mountains to the south. Mortars, a valley or two away. “I’ll dance when the war is over.”
She stands, giving orders. Maurizio does as he’s told, hefting the generator, but Tonio mutters “Rompacoglioni” in a tone intended to provoke. Maria replies, a whiplash in her voice.
Simon straps the wireless onto his back but looks to Maria for an explanation of what just happened. She pumps the air near her crotch with both hands and jerks her head toward Tonio. “Ambidestro,” she says with a sneer.
He stifles a laugh when he works it out: two-handed wanker.
“He calls me ballbuster,” she tells Simon casually. “I say to him, ‘Lucky I hate the Germans more than I hate pricks like you.’ ” She studies Simon, knowing— the way women always seem to know— that his intentions are every bit as dishonorable as those of any other man. His tactics, at least, are more gentlemanly. “When war came, there were fewer tourists, and my father’s business went down. After the Germans? No tourists at all. From then on—” She meets Simon’s eyes with a level gaze. “I supported my whole family. Parents. Nonna. Three brothers, a sister.” She watches his reactions. Admiration. Puzzlement. The shock of understanding. He searches for something to say, but she says it for him. “I was a whore, but I am also their superior officer. So they obey.”
They have begun to climb again when a small girl appears out of nowhere. She chatters and points toward a farm building about a mile down the mountainside. Simon sees a German soldier exit a barn.
Unconcerned, Maria sends the child off and leans again into the slope. Simon stumbles, looking over his shoulder. There are several Germans now, heads bowed over a map. One raises binoculars. “Maria,” Simon says with all the urgency he can muster, “if they spot us, they’re not likely to mistake this for a shepherds’ convention.”
“You worry too much,” she says, her pace unaltered. “They will stay there and have a breakfast.”
He has never been in combat. Maria has led ambushes, survived firefights, won skirmishes. She knows the country and the people. He trusts her judgment. With the war nearly over, many ordinary German and Italian soldiers merely go through the motions of pursuing partisans, but the SS have lost none of their zeal for hunting down unarmed Jews. In the past few weeks, Simon’s seen massive operations sweep through valleys like this. Barking mad, really, given how much those troops are needed elsewhere.
Suddenly, and for no reason he can identify, he feels… exposed, and very frightened. He sidesteps, not knowing why, moving to Maria’s left just as the machine guns open up.
Startled by the noise, he dives for cover, rolling behind a log in time to see Maria’s blouse stitched in red by a neat row of bullets. Four more partisans are hit before she topples to the muddy ground.
Three rounds zip over the log, their draft riffling Simon’s hair. They’re shooting at me, he thinks stupidly. Those people are trying to kill me. In the next instant, all the tedious months of SOE training and discipline take over. He looses a burst from his Marlin in the general direction of the gunfire and motions for Maurizio to move uphill.
Wide-eyed, Maurizio tightens the generator’s straps, scrambles through the muddy melting snow, then fires a burst of his own while Simon runs crouched and at top speed. Soon all the partisans are moving upward in pairs, alternately keeping the Germans’ heads down with covering fire and scrambling like hell for cover on higher ground.
They’ve made fifty meters when the noise and the immediate danger begin to recede. Mouths open, they pause to reassess their line of retreat. The ground suddenly leaps to life beneath Tonio’s feet. A machine gunner on their left flank quickly corrects. Tonio screams— legs, thighs, hips spattered with slugs. Another partisan grabs his arm, trying to pull the wounded man along. The gunner finishes them both.
Sprinting now like startled goats, the surviving partisans dash toward the trees on their right, struggling through the treacly surface. A third machine gun opens fire directly in front of them. Three men go down, shot or maybe only slipping in the mud. Simon scrambles into a shallow gully with Maurizio. Maurizio yells to the others. A few shout back. Simon tries to count the voices. Seven left? Eight? Scattered over a fifty-yard field of overlapping fire. In the numberless western serials Simon watched as a child, this was when the 7th Cavalry would gallop over a ridge, bugles blaring, sabers flashing.
The shooting becomes sporadic. Partisans periodically pop up to keep the Germans at bay. The Jerries return fire halfheartedly, knowing they need only remind their quarry they’re still pinned down. Eventually, the Italians will run out of ammunition.
It’s going to be a beautiful spring day, Simon thinks as the sun rises. He can see a small copse of chestnut trees in a rubble of boulders, about two hundred yards uphill.
He nudges Maurizio and jerks his head toward the trees, hoping that eyes and expression can convey his thoughts: Stay here, and we’re fish in a barrel. Run, and we’ll be cut to pieces. Understanding, Maurizio shrugs, pulling the corners of his mouth downward as if to say, Six of one, half a dozen of the other. “Andiamo,” he says.
They take another count of the survivors and relay the plan to make a run for it. Tensing, Simon has gathered himself for the dash when the noise suddenly triples, and military clichés explode around him. Withering fire. A hail of bullets. All hell breaking loose. A vaguely familiar voice shouts in English from somewhere uphill. “Ei! Simon! Get ready! We give you cover!”
Laughing crazily, Maurizio directs Simon’s wild-eyed gaze toward a man waving behind a tree stump. It’s the one who visited England. What was his name? Something Shakespearean…
Before Simon can remember more, Renzo Leoni strolls out from behind a boulder. (Cool as a cucumber. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.) With the Germans preoccupied by this astounding display of joie de morte, Simon jumps up to spray the woods with his Marlin, thinking, Run like a rabbit. Run for your life.
Vaulting a fallen tree behind a low rock outcrop, he flops onto his belly and watches for muzzle flashes. This time he aims and picks off a man feeding ammo into one of the machine guns. Rewarded with a scream, he feels for the first time the sheer unholy joy of survival at another’s cost, and looks for someone else to kill.
A partisan scuttles over and hides behind the rocks with him. “Ei! Simon! Remember me?” he asks cheerily. “I am Otello. I visit England for one year!”
Living proof that God protects drunks and lunatics, Renzo Leoni joins them, groaning like an old man when he kneels. He speaks in a low, quick voice, his appraising eyes on Simon. “The boss is happy you still have the radio,” Otello translates. “He says: you did well. He says: a corporal in the paratroops is worth a colonel in any army!”
Surprised and gratified, Simon can think of no way to reply, and in any case, Renzo seems to forget him in the next moment. “He will count to three,” Otello says, watching the silent orders the boss is conveying with an Italian’s manual eloquence. “The others will cover us, and you will run with me, over the hill— that way. Run very fast, understand?”
On “Tre!” they take off amid a thunderstorm of gunfire. Knees pumping, crouched like a crone under the weight of the wireless, Simon expects a bullet in the arse, but minutes (hours, centuries) later, he and Otello clear the crest safely and slide down behind it.
Maurizio is next, flinging himself and the generator over the hilltop and into the declivity beyond. Three more partisans follow, leaping like Olympic long jumpers. One of them has retrieved the batteries from Tonio’s body. Another grins and offers a bottle of red wine. Simon stares, astounded by the idea of carrying wine into battle, but he takes a slug and passes it on.
Otello and the others confer quickly. Two partisans nod and leave. Silently, the others wait, watching their Englishman’s chest heave. “Are you better now?” Otello asks solicitously. “Can you walk?”
Insulted, Simon puts his primitive Italian to use, maligning the mating habits of Otello’s entire family. Laughing, they get on their way, teaching him several additional terms for such behavior as they follow the scouts.
The gunfire grows fainter as they cross hills, cut through fields, and skirt hedgerows, moving at a steady pace that seems to indicate a long journey ahead of them. The day turns warm. Birds sing. Suddenly, the scouts come running back, calling out in hoarse whispers, motioning: Down! Down! Down!
Everyone dives for cover, and Otello pulls Simon into the freezing waist-high water of a high-banked stream. A German half-track trundles over the horizon. Shivering, sweating, they wait in absolute silence while the vehicle rumbles past, close enough for them to smell its exhaust.
When it finally disappears around a hill, they scramble out of the stream. Simon shrugs out of the radio rig, determines that it hasn’t gotten wet, and tries to empty his boots without taking them off. Otello holds a whispered conference with the scouts, who take positions about fifty yards ahead. “We go where the Germans came,” Otello says. “Do you understand? The Germans make a radio signal to headquarters that says, ‘All clear. No partisans here.’ So, no more Germans will come that way.”
For the balance of the day, they meander through the countryside, their only objective to avoid contact with the enemy. Three times they see German patrols in the distance, and once they duck behind a hedgerow. A platoon of Decima Mas Republicans passes: ex—motor torpedo boatmen from the defunct Italian navy, limping morosely in bad boots.
By dusk Simon is thoroughly lost, and therefore utterly unprepared when they arrive at the very spot where the ambush began. He stares at Maria’s body, forgotten until this moment. Sitting beside her, the same small girl who warned them this morning, a lifetime ago.
The child is sent away with a few quick orders. The partisans draw straws. Maurizio loses. While the others draw off to a safe distance, Maurizio checks their comrades’ corpses for booby traps. When nothing blows up, Otello says, “This is safe for us tonight. The Germans think no one will come back.”
Alerted by the little girl, two short, thick women arrive bearing shovels on their shoulders, baskets of food on their heads. Shaped like potatoes, with faces of genial toughness, they cluck their tongues over the fallen while handing chestnut bread and skins of harsh red wine to the living. Famished, the partisans eat, talking quietly, then take turns digging in rocky mud. The women shake their heads. “Poveretti,” they say. “Poveretti.”
Simon slumps empty-headed beside Maria’s body, listening to the shovels’ crunch and slop. For the first and only time, he reaches out to touch her face; startled by her cold flesh, he draws back. When the time comes, he helps lay her and the other corpses into their shallow graves. Otello cuts branches from some sort of conifer, placing fragrant sprays of green over the slack and empty faces. Maurizio starts to fill in Maria’s grave but stops when Simon asks him to. Removing the little compass hidden in one of his buttons, Simon shows it to the others. They nod with approval when he closes Maria’s fingers around it.
The peasants depart with their baskets and tools. Otello posts a sentry. The others pass wine bags from hand to hand, but no one sings tonight. When the skins are empty, each man makes a pile of pine boughs to lie on, above the freezing mud. A childhood prayer runs through Simon’s mind. Now I lay me down to sleep. If I should die…
Tomorrow, he’ll be escorted to one of the many tall stone watchtowers built into the slant of Piemonte’s hilltops. Seven feet on a side, the upper level ten feet above a cellar downslope, they always afford a panoramic view of Valdottavo.
Otello and Maurizio will stay with him, to help with the batteries and generator. Over the next few hours, they’ll watch activity in the valley. Identify high, quiet places within a few miles of the hideout. Hike to the best spot for the first transmission. There Simon will open the radio case, fit a stone into a loop at the end of a fifty-foot copper wire, and fling it over a nearby tree branch. He’ll tune to Algiers, and be amazed once again by how easily such a primitive arrangement brings in QSA5 signals.
With a onetime code pad, index finger tapping thirty errorless words per minute, he’ll deliver the intelligence he’s gathered in the past two weeks. “Partisan strength est 23,000 / disciplined under fire well-led / main German withdrawal hwy estimated 150 lorries destroyed / 200 KW 50 POW / partisan losses light / civilian reprisals heavy.”
He’ll ask to be released from the mission he and Major Salvi were supposed to have carried out in Milan. He’s already with a group of autonomous partisans who deserve all the help they can get. He’ll request airdrops of plastic explosives, of Stens, Brens, and automatic rifles, of ammo and spare parts for all the weapons. He’ll ask for more signal flares, for salt and cigarettes, for penicillin, sulfa drugs, plasma, sterile bandages, and morphine.
Then he’ll break to receive, taking down his own orders in Morse, to be decoded when he gets back to the stone tower. He’ll have under an hour from start to finish— the time it would take for two German direction-finding vehicles to get a fix on him.
Today he learned he can rely on his training, rely on himself to do his duty, and do it well, under fire. In the morning, no doubt, Simon Henley will feel like a blooded veteran, ready for whatever the war can throw at him. But tonight? Lying on a bed of pine boughs near the grave of a young woman he barely knew, he thinks of the short, hard life of Maria Avoni, and he cries. Like a baby.
VILLA MALCOVATO
NEAR ROCCABARBENA
They are the bravest of the brave, these girls. The chances they take, the risks they run. The more Mirella learns of them, the more awe and sadness she feels.
When the occupation began, the Resistance printed pamphlets for wives and mothers. “Your greatest contribution to the nation is to open your door and let your men go— to fight!” But who risked arrest and rape and death to distribute those pamphlets? Girls. Women.
Staffette carried letters, documents, intelligence. Then medical supplies, then dynamite, ammunition, and grenades. They knew their fate if caught, so they learned to load and fire pistols for their own protection. Soon they joined brigades and assault groups, and now they fight beside the men. Constantly on the move, traveling on foot in the awful cold, sleeping in cellars, on concrete floors, in barns or open country. Hungry, wet, lice ridden.
No wonder, then, when a widow of sixteen becomes the mother of an infant boy born many weeks too soon.
Mirella hears a quiet knock at the door, and opens it to Werner Schramm. “The doctor is here,” she tells Claudia.
Mirella moves to the fireplace, listening to Schramm’s soothing murmur as he examines mother and child. In a voice as small as her baby, Claudia asks, “Will he live?”
Schramm’s eyes briefly meet Mirella’s. “Your son is very small, very weak,” he tells Claudia gently, “but babies can surprise us.”
“Why won’t he suckle?”
“He is tired from being born, signora. He needs rest and warmth. As you do.”
A few years ago, Werner Schramm would have whisked this doomed infant away. Out of sight, he’d have done nature’s work, granting the child a quick and merciful death. He is a different man now, but it is very difficult to watch the little chest heave spasmodically, working hard for air.
Across the room Mirella refills a cooling scaldino with hot coals and slides it under the bedding near the girl’s feet, tucking the blankets around her. Together she and Schramm step away from the bedside.
“You can try feeding him with an eyedropper,” he suggests quietly. “The skin is very fragile. Perhaps some olive oil, to protect it. Keep him warm. That is most important.”
Duno Brössler is in the kitchen, pacing as nervously as a young father. When Claudette went into labor, Duno sent for Schramm immediately, but the baby was born so soon… “Your young friend will live,” Schramm says, “but her son won’t last the night.” Duno sags. “You did well to save one of them,” Schramm tells him. “You should go to medical school when this is over.”
Duno runs his fingers through lank and dirty hair. “Is she awake? May I go in?”
“Yes. She will like to see a familiar face, I think. Send Signora Soncini to bed. She needs rest, or she may lose her own pregnancy.”
Duno steps quietly into the little room, speaks to the rabbi’s wife, who kisses the infant’s forehead on her way out. Duno draws a chair near, sitting close enough to stroke the dying baby’s fine, dark curls. He looks more like an organ-grinder’s monkey than a human child, but Duno says, “He’s beautiful, Claudette.”
“Thank you,” she says, believing him.
“Have you chosen a name?”
“Alberto, for my father. That’s what Santino wanted.”
“That’s a good name,” Duno says. “Rest now. I’ll stay with you, Claudette.”
Once they knew that Osvaldo Tomitz was in a Gestapo prison on Via San Marco in Porto Sant’Andrea, the hours of discussion yielded only one good plan. “I’ll say I was sent to check on his condition,” Schramm argued. “My friends, you must allow me to save lives. That is a doctor’s duty, is it not?” Eventually even Renzo was persuaded: Schramm could do by stealth what would otherwise require a full-scale attack on a fortified position in an occupied city.
He unwraps the bundle of dirty cotton sheets delivered at such cost by la vedova. Shakes the wrinkles from the uniform, holds the jacket to his shoulders with a sense of unreality. Who wore this? Werner Schramm shares a name with that man, and a biography to a point. To wear the uniform now is to put on a mask in a Greek tragedy, but Schramm is ready to assume his role.
He leaves a note of thanks and farewell for Renzo. Urges Mirella to take care of herself. She cries, and kisses him on both cheeks. A partisan escort waits outside.
They hike across pastures and through woodlands, snake along bends in the winding river, take cover in a vineyard. A church bell strikes nine. Across the road, at the top of a slight rise, Tullio Goletta waves, taps his ear, and puts his finger to his lips. Wind rattles the branches of nearby trees. Tullio raises one finger, makes a T of his hands. Tedeschi: Germans.
The noise grows. A camouflaged Wehrmacht command car lumbers into view, slowly dodging craters left by British bombs. Half-amused by how predictable German schedules are, Schramm brushes dirt and leaves from his uniform, squares his shoulders, and walks out onto the road. The lines come back to him. The posturing, the presumption. Herr Doktor Oberstabsarzt Werner Schramm of the Waffen-SS commandeers the car, demands to be driven to Sant’Andrea. He is obeyed by a very young, very inferior officer.
Schramm blusters and bullies his way through roadblocks and checkpoints, and arrives at his destination in early afternoon, sweating in the early warmth of the coast. Surrounded by barbed wire, sandbags, and giant iron stars, the building’s windows are bricked almost to the top, leaving just a few centimeters open for ventilation.
Boot heels ringing, Schramm enters, shouts, intimidates. The jailer is a well-fed Italian toady eager to mollify bad-tempered Nazis. Grabbing his keys, he is happy to lead the way down a twisting set of stairs cut into living rock. The air is moist, damp, cooler by the step.
“A relief from the heat outdoors, ne?” the chatty jailor remarks. “Until your joints start to ache. Of course, these bastards have more than their joints to think about! Down this way, signore. These used to be storerooms, I don’t know what for. Must have been valuable, though. Look at those doors!”
Wide, heavy planks, reinforced with iron bands. Two long rows on either side of a stone corridor. Behind one door, a man weeps and begs. Someone yells at him, voice harsh, words garbled. A third man cries, “Coraggio, camerati!”
“Courage, comrades!” the jailer mocks. “That one must be new.” He glances over his shoulder. When the German fails to share his amusement, a scowl automatically replaces the grin. “Shut up in there!” the toady shouts, banging on doors with his truncheon. Halfway down, he sorts through keys, opens the door, steps aside. “In there,” he says unnecessarily.
Illuminated by the borrowed light of the hallway, the room is narrow. Like a tomb. Like a sepulcher. The walls are tiled with porcelain-faced bricks, as a bathroom’s might be, but there are no facilities beyond a galvanized bucket in one corner.
Curled on the bare basalt floor, the man inside does not rouse. Eyes swollen shut, lashes buried in purpled pulpy flesh. Broken teeth visible through torn lips. Both shoulders dislocated; vast bruises speak of ripped blood vessels. The abdomen, too— hideously bruised. Testicles blackened. Blood in a drying pool of voided urine: ruptured kidneys, a torn bladder.
A thousand years of artwork have prepared Schramm for this body. Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece. The damned of Bosch’s hell. The crucifix in every church. Look without flinching at atrocity, they instruct the faithful. Imagine what the saints endured, and envy them. Behold what the Savior suffered for your sake. But not everyone learns the intended lessons; some dream of hammering the nails.
Blinking, gagging, Schramm takes a handkerchief from his pocket and holds it over his nose; not even the greatest artwork can convey the smell of ammonia and shit. “This is Tomitz? You are certain?”
“Oh, yes, sir! Absolutely!”
Voice low and controlled, Schramm asks, “Who is responsible for his condition?”
The jailer shrugs. “PierCarlo Innocente, I suppose. The Gestapo made the arrest, but Innocente specializes in priests. He says priests and Communists are the hardest to break. They believe in a better world to come. This one didn’t look like much when they brought him in, but he still hasn’t talked—”
“Christ! Look at his mouth! If he wanted to talk, how the hell would we make out what he’s saying? Get Innocente, now!”
“I–I don’t know where— He’s off today.”
“Find him, or I’ll hold you responsible.”
The jailer hesitates. “I should lock up.”
Schramm points to what’s left of Osvaldo Tomitz. “Do you suppose that is going to escape?”
The jailer hurries off. Just as quickly, Schramm kneels at the priest’s side, bending to bring his lips close to the torn ear. “Father,” he says, “I’ve come to help.”
Spongy eyelids flutter. Bleeding fingers twitch. One must be ordained to give extreme unction or to hear confession, but one of the partisan priests has provided Schramm with what he needs, and given him instructions. He opens a medical bag and withdraws a small, round case that looks like a gold pocket watch.
“Receive my confession, Lord,” he whispers for Tomitz. “Savior of the world, O good Jesus, who gave Yourself to death on the cross to save sinners, look upon me, most wretched of all sinners. Give me the light to know my sins, true sorrow for them, and a firm purpose of never committing them again.”
He’s probably getting the prayers wrong, but he doubts that God will mind. “Pray with me, Father,” he urges. “O my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee, and I detest all my sins because of Thy just punishment, but most of all—”
The priest’s split and crusted lips begin to move, and together they finish the Act of Contrition. Opening the gold case, Schramm brings the consecrated Host close enough to touch the swollen lips. Throat clogged, he whispers, “Corpus Christi.” The priest’s tongue reaches forward to bring the dry and nearly weightless wafer within his battered mouth.
The ritual is complete, but not the task. “Osvaldo Tomitz,” Schramm asks, “do you believe in Jesus Christ, who died so that others might live?”
Tomitz nods once, twice. Slowly: again, again, again.
“This day, you shall be with Him in heaven. Father, pray for me!”
Exchanging the gold case for a syringe, Schramm finds the intercostal space, depresses the plunger. A moment later, the suffering ends. A thousand Jews, the people who harbor them, and God knows how many Resistance cells are safe.
Schramm should leave now. Just walk home, to his sons and to his wife. War changes men, but it changes women, too. He’s spent the better part of two years in the company of Italian women running households in the midst of war. If, by the grace of God, he lives long enough to reach home, and if Elsa is alive when he gets there, Werner Schramm is determined to make a better job of it than his own parents did after the Great War.
But somehow, he cannot bring himself to move. Slumped against the wall, next to the body of the soul he has just released, Schramm thinks, You understand now, don’t you? You are with God now, Father, but after what you went through, surely you no longer believe it’s a sin to prevent suffering. We were right in the beginning, but— the borders kept moving. Perversion, vagrancy, gambling, theft became diseases. Dissidents, Communists, Gypsies were carriers of disease. To be a Jew was to be disease itself. At the trains, I tried to choose the best, the strongest, the most likely to survive awhile. It was like a juried art show— inferior work was rejected. Yes, I know. Judge not, but…
We were afraid. We were all afraid. There wasn’t enough of anything, and if there isn’t enough, you’re afraid someone will take the little you have. They’ll hurt you, steal from you, and laugh at your weakness and stupidity afterward. That’s what everyone believed. We were all locked away in our separate fears, and then… the Führer came out of his prison with a key. He would turn our selfish, despicable fear into a kind of glorious selflessness if we obeyed him, if we dedicated our lives to the Reich. If our blood was pure.
There’s no point in lying, Father. With Irmgard in my family, it was judge or be judged. If I joined the Party, if I did as I was told, there was no question of sterilization. Exceptions were made. Goebbels has a clubfoot, you know. And my children— they’re such fine boys. Strong and handsome. I miss them so much….
Schramm’s eyes fill. He tries to get a grip on his emotions, but when he sees the small cross scratched in the mortar between the stones, there’s no holding back the tears. Tears for what he meant to do, tears for what he did. Tears for his broken family, his broken life, his broken nation. Sobbing, he crawls to the little cross, and places his fingers on the symbol of salvation, of love that is more than enough, love that is the antidote to all fear. Remorse claws at his lungs, his guts, his heart.
Father, I was afraid, and weak. And wrong. And I am so terribly sorry! I’ll do penance, Schramm swears, choking on a laugh when he thinks, Not just rosaries, either, Father! For the rest of whatever life I am granted, I will try to make amends.
The old words come back, prayers he learned as a child. Misere mei Deus: Have mercy on me, O God, according to the multitude of thy tender mercies. Blot out my iniquities, and cleanse me of my sin. Lord, I am not worthy that You should come unto me, but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed—
Footsteps. Voices. At the other end of the long corridor, the jailer jabbers apologies, explanations, excuses. Another man growls ill-tempered rejoinders. Schramm clambers to his feet, drags a handkerchief from a pocket, wipes his eyes, blows his nose. He feels as though he has drained a swamp of sin, but there is no time for contemplation.
A tall man with a lantern jaw and a luxuriant mustache flings the half-closed door wide open. Schramm points to Tomitz. “You are responsible for this?”
The bastard’s head tilts back. Arrogant, unashamed. It would be so easy, Schramm thinks. One in the body, one in the head. Send this hound to hell, and step over his corpse without a backward glance.
Go, said Jesus to the harlot, and sin no more. There is hope, Suora Marta said, even for a pig like you.
“Innocente, you are an incompetent swine!” Schramm snaps. “Clean up the mess,” he tells the jailer. “I’ll find my own way out.”
Blinking in the sunlight, he gets his bearings and looks for the quickest route out of town. He’s hardly walked a block when the quiet is broken by explosions, gunfire, screams. Civilians around him cry out, clutch children, race for cover. Schramm grabs a skinny woman’s arm. “I am a doctor! Tell me: where is the hospital?”
She points, shouting half-coherent directions, and breaks away.
Schramm asks twice more before he finds the place. A harried nursing sister in the midst of a crowd sees his uniform and snarls. “No, you don’t! Not here! Not in this hospital!”
An ambulance team pounds by, carrying a stretcher with a wide-eyed old man who holds a shaking hand over a ragged gash in his forehead. Schramm unbuttons his jacket, tossing it into a corner. “I am a doctor, Suora! I want to help!”
Maybe it’s because he’s speaking Italian. Maybe there is something in his face that convinces her he is not there to kill. She shows him where to scrub. Their first patient is lifted onto the table. An eight-year-old boy, breathing in short, grunting coughs. “One gunshot,” another nun reports. “Hit from behind in the left shoulder. The exit’s just below the right nipple.”
Schramm taps the chest with the tips of his fingers. Below the left clavicle, the chest resonates like a drum. Lower down: a dull sound, like tapping a stone. The second sister hands him a scalpel and murmurs to the little boy: this will hurt, he must be brave. Quickly Schramm slices through the resistance of the exquisitely sensitive pleura, ignoring the child’s shriek as he widens the knife track. The wound bubbles. Schramm holds out his hand. A drain appears in it. He pushes seven centimeters into the cavity. Blood gushes through the chest tube into a bowl held by a nun.
The child gasps and coughs in the cold sweat of agony. The basin overflows. An orderly mops it up. The nun connects the drain to a bottle on the floor. Half-filled with water, that will act as a simple one-way valve. With each wailing exhalation, air and blood burble from the submerged end of the tube. The boy’s lung begins to expand. Already the next casualty is being carried in.
In the hallway, a temporary receiving station is set up to assess serious cases and assign an order of treatment. Occasionally the triage nurse has a case stretchered directly into surgery, hoping immediate intervention might save a life. Hour after hour, Schramm digs out shrapnel, opens abdomens, sews up perforated bowels, removes crushed limbs. Time stops. There is only the flesh beneath his fingers.
When the last patient has been carried off, Schramm is lightheaded from dehydration. Exhausted, but exhilarated. He pulls off his gory shirt and trudges to a sink to wash away the blood, lifting handful after handful of water to his face, head, shoulders, chest. Drying off, he asks the nurse, “Is there someplace I could stay, Suora?”
She doesn’t answer. He lowers the towel from his face. The nun is as white as her coif. A Wehrmacht officer stands in the scrub-room doorway, imperious in full if filthy uniform. “There is a German doctor here.” He frowns at Schramm. “You?”
Startled, Schramm stammers, “Sì— jawohl. Yes, sir. I was cut off from my unit—”
“You’re needed. We’ve got casualties.”
There seems to be no choice. Schramm tosses the towel aside and shrugs into his uniform, a soldier again. “Are we going to the front, sir?” he asks as they climb into an open staff car and head north.
Gray in the face, the other officer looks blank. “Going to the front? Scheisse, man! Where do you think you are? We’re pulling all the field hospitals back. The Allies have broken through.”