The city feeling of Rome enveloped Tom quickly: fractious, noisy, exciting. It was still terribly hot. Laundry hung limp from the balconies and across the roads; even the fleshiest geranium leaves were going a little brown and brittle at the edges; donkeys leaned into slivers of shade at midday, pining for autumn. The women were unbearably beautiful, and the house too small for the grown children and the unspoken conflict inside it. It all made him nervous. The former ghetto was quieter, cautious. Dark-eyed girls smirked up at the young toughs on whose arm they hung; shopkeepers kept more indoors than he remembered. There did seem to be fewer people around.
The day before the family had gone back to London, sitting out on the low wall by the river, Tom had had a conversation with Riley. He said, ‘The paper says they can use me here. I’m going to get my Italian really up to scratch before I go down to Palermo. It’s ridiculous, really, that my tenses are so limited. I practically only operate in the present, like a Buddhist …’
Riley had said: ‘Are you sure?’ to which Tom could only say, ‘Yes.’ Riley did not like the plan, Tom was sure of that.
‘It makes sense,’ Tom said. ‘The paper’s really happy about it – their correspondent here is very political, so they want a bit of more social reporting. I’ll do some vignettes of everyday life, that sort of thing. What the man in the street thinks. They say I can use a nom de plume.’ (This was not the complete truth. The foreign desk had already liked, and printed, his piece on the dilemma of ‘Armando, the Fascist Jew of Rome’.) ‘They won’t pay much and there’s no guarantee about the job when I go home after Palermo,’ he said. But this way, he felt, he could achieve … something.
‘And your real reason for staying?’
‘That,’ Tom said. ‘Plus I’m going to make them to come to London.’
Riley looked across to the low glow of Trastevere.
‘Are you in love with her?’ he said.
‘Good Lord, Riley!’ said Tom. ‘Course not. We hardly talk.’
‘That’s why I ask,’ Riley said, drily.
‘How could I be in love with a girl who’s besotted with Mussolini?’ Tom said, and tried to laugh.
Riley looked at him.
‘You don’t have to stay in love with the same girl all your life,’ he said.
‘I’m not in love with her!’ Tom’s face now was scarlet, he could feel it, and there was nothing he could say which wasn’t protesting too much. ‘She’s my sister. And I’m responsible for her.’
‘But she doesn’t seem to be taking it in.’
‘Well perhaps we’re wrong!’ Tom said. ‘Perhaps this isn’t leading anywhere. I have to try though. Don’t I?’
Riley smiled.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose you do. And if it doesn’t work, this is what you do: you give up, and come home. Set a time limit on it.’
*
So, he had to try. He registered with the Prefettura, found a tutor with a thorough knowledge of irregular subjunctives and the future perfect. He studied, he wrote, he made friends with some chaps at Reuters, he filed stories. He was staying at Johnny’s again but he visited the cousins regularly; chummed up a bit with Stefano and Vittorio. Summer burnt out into autumn: something Tom had never seen in Italy. There was something real about being there out of holiday season. He tried to hold on to that, because almost everything else felt frail and artificial. Autumn, yes, felt more genuine: working, buying socks and a jacket like an actual man. He had not realised that he did not feel like an actual man. He lifted cigarettes to and from his mouth; felt the solidity of the china of his coffee cups. Inhaled, exhaled. He let Nenna ignore him, and he waited.
Late in September he was surprised when Susanna made him dip apples in honey before dinner.
‘It’s Rosh Hashanah,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you heard the shofar today? Or see the people emptying their pockets into the river? Apples and honey, chicken polpettine with celery. Happy New Year! And I’ve ordered a mullet for Yom Kippur.’
‘I thought you weren’t Jewish like that,’ he said.
‘Some things you needn’t change,’ she said. ‘Everybody likes chicken polpettine. And cakes. I’ve made sfratti.’
‘They’re shaped like sticks,’ said Nenna, coldly. ‘For bashing Jews with. It’s traditional.’ She had herself been to the cemetery with Susanna, and placed stones on Aldo’s ancestors.
Several times he was overtaken by a profound inability to do anything at all. It was following one of these that he bought the jacket. Tweed was not available, so he got something in a curious substitute from Corsica. Rome’s September had been as far as could be from the aching chill of his recent autumns in Cambridge, the east wind over the flat lands, but by October the evenings were offering the damp that settles into your bones, and the darkness creeping in earlier and earlier.
*
A few days after Rosh Hashanah, Nenna came over to Johnny’s to wave a newspaper at Tom.
‘So what about this?’ she cried out. ‘No war! Look! It says so right here. The Duce has negotiated a peace – just in time for Yom Kippur. You see? Peace with honour, your Chamberlain says.’
‘Let’s go out and celebrate,’ Tom said, but she refused. She had only come to make her point.
*
Johnny, when he came back that evening, said to Tom, with a mixture of embarrassment and anger, ‘You can’t really stay here, old boy, if you’re going to be visiting them all the time and having them visit you. It’s not entirely safe.’
‘How do you even know she was here?’ Tom asked.
‘Exactly,’ said Carmichael.
‘So are you asking me to move out?’
‘I’m asking you, again, to make up your mind.’
‘You know what side I’m on, Johnny.’
‘Act like it, then.’
*
Peace with honour. The sigh of relief across Europe moved like the wind, and for a moment Tom too let himself breathe out. But then, in its wake, the follow-up presaged by the Racist Scientists’ Manifesto began to make itself known. As if the peace agreement had given it permission, he thought. The Duce growing bold on this diet of approval. Tom did not believe in this peace. In its existence. There is no peace. There is stalemate.
He went to the island the day the next announcement was made, ready to catch her if she gave him a chance. She came home in tears, bewildered, suspended: new laws said Jews could no longer go to school. Nor could they be employed in any capacity in any Italian school, from nursery to university. ‘Papà!’ she cried again, and again Aldo went into the recital, the words stale by now, but as comforting as a nursery rhyme for her. This time there was a new verse: ‘We are Discriminati! The Duce has said so, you see, I was right! As I was wounded in the war, and as a founding Fascist, of course this does not apply to us! And anyway, the women are setting up a Jewish school. You can teach there. Everything is all right my darling. Have faith.’
‘But where am I to study?’ she asked, and Aldo told her to be patient, he would sort it out, there was some paperwork, of course she would be going back – and so she was patient. Some of her friends – Jewish friends – who had matriculated already were told they could stay on. Those who had not were not admitted. She waited. Not for long. In October came the government’s Declaration on Race, which the entire family ignored. It didn’t have anything to do with them. They were after all discriminati.
Tom stood alongside, and stared in disbelief as yet again she closed her eyes and let her father hug her.
Then she looked at him, and said, ‘What? Your know-all eyes are full again – what is it now?’
‘So it’s all right to throw other Jewish children out of school?’ he said. ‘If their father wasn’t wounded, or if they’ve only been here three hundred years, not two thousand? As long as it’s all right for you?’
She went very pale. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘But this is the world. This is the real world.’
‘Your head has been poisoned,’ he said, and she started to shake.
‘I didn’t make any of this,’ she said.
‘Exactly,’ he said.
*
He found himself staring at adults, proper adults, men and women in their forties and older. All these people have known war, and they’re just carrying on about their business. And at young people too: all these people, their parents were in it, one way or another – do they talk about it? What have they been told? In the English bookshop he found copies of All Quiet on the Western Front, and Goodbye to All That, read them all. Oh, Dad, he thought, over and over, just that phrase. Oh, Dad. You were younger than me now. He realised he meant both Peter and Riley, and that he somehow meant Aldo as well.
He had developed the habit of reading the foreign papers at the agency: you couldn’t get them anywhere else, and the local press was uniform in its Fascism and its bellicosity. Nothing looked good. Nothing.
On 11 November – Armistice Day! – Tom picked up the Washington Post, and read, ‘The greatest wave of anti-Jewish violence since Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 swept Nazi Germany today.’ The diplomat who had been shot in Paris a few days before had died. Tom read of the riots across Germany and Austria which had followed – ‘as a result’. The Hitler Youth, the Gestapo and the SS had been out smashing up synagogues, robbing and burning and destroying Jewish shops and factories and businesses, and murdering Jewish people, and taking them away. Thousands of them.
He picked up another paper: ‘Mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction. I have seen several anti-Jewish outbreaks in Germany during the last five years, but never anything as nauseating as this. Racial hatred and hysteria seemed to have taken complete hold of otherwise decent people. I saw fashionably dressed women clapping their hands and screaming with glee, while respectable middle-class mothers held up their babies to see the “fun”.’
A slow heat started to skulk about under his skin. A full physical weakness crept up him, and the unanswerable questions – what am I doing about this? How can I stop this? How can I find those people and bring them back to their families, how can I stop those women, comfort those babies, bury those dead, rebuild those buildings? How can I do anything?
He knew perfectly well what he could do. He, like the boy Greenszpan who had shot the diplomat, could go over there with the silver bullet and put it through the head of this monster … or he could go out today and try – and no doubt fail – to shoot Mussolini.
I’m no better than Nenna, he thought. There is going to be a war. Hitler’s just pushing it because he thinks no one will stop him. Mussolini’s pushing it because he’s in love with Hitler. But – if Chamberlain didn’t put his foot down for the Czechs in the Sudetenland, why would he for the Jews? For Germany’s own Jews? Well then Chamberlain will have to go, because there is too much anger now.
Is Aldo, across town with his fake coffee, reading this? Will this open his eyes? Will Susanna stand up, finally? Will Vittorio or Stefano? Will Nenna?
Will I?
There was a photograph of Greenszpan in a cheap suit and a pale raincoat, hair slicked down like an adult, looking terrified among French policemen. He had lived in the same arrondissement as Nadine’s family. He was much younger than Tom. His story dripped out over the next days and weeks, in the newspapers and magazines. Tom read all that he could find. Herschel was an immigrant eastern boy, not a native Sephardi like Nadine’s family – the wrong kind of Jew, by Aldo’s standards. He had been born in Hanover in ’21, his father a Polish tailor with three children dead already out of six. Herschel was clever and lazy with a good memory and a hot temper. He was dark, sickly, religious, proud. On the Sunday, he’d had a big fight with his uncle Abraham, known as Albert, of Maison Albert on the rue des Petites Ecuries. Herschel’s papers had expired. Papers were essential but no one would provide them. He wasn’t German, though he had been born in Germany, and he wasn’t allowed to be Polish though his parents were, and though living in Paris he couldn’t be French because France wouldn’t have him. Without papers he had to leave but nowhere – including where he’d come from – would let him in. Also, he needed money: he was forbidden to leave France with it, or to arrive anywhere else without it. But even if anyone had any to send him, it couldn’t be brought in. At every turn, he could not do x without y being in place, but y was banned to ‘his kind’.
Paris seemed much closer to Tom than Germany, or Poland, or Czechoslovakia. The French were neighbours; the Germans were the old enemy. You expected better of the French. And it’s right there, between Rome and London. Between here and home. Right here.
Herschel had been staying in the chambre de bonne of the flat that Abraham had left because it wasn’t safe for the family to stay there unless they threw the boy out – and they couldn’t do that. Why? Tom asked himself, and looked at the picture again, and thought: well, look at him, 100 pounds, if that, imagine him, vulnerable and furious, with his eyelashes and his ulcer and his won’t-work-on-the-Sabbath and his four-days-to-leave-France. It would be a hard-hearted uncle who could bring himself to throw him out. Then a postcard had come from a cousin Bertha at Zbaszyn on the Polish border: Herschel’s family in Hanover had been grabbed from their homes with nothing and dumped there – thousands of people dumped there, foisted on the Poles before the law could be changed – nothing to eat – in the woods. Bertha had apparently crossed out where she had written, could they send money? Well, she’d known they couldn’t send money.
So Herschel had stormed off, and his friend Nathan went after him to calm him down, and they spent the day together till Nathan had to go home. Herschel went to a place called the Tout Va Bien – the All Is Well – for something to eat – Abraham and his brother went there looking for him, later, but the waiter said he’d left an hour before. He had gone to a little hotel in the boulevard Strasbourg. The staff remembered him, so young. They noticed his lamp on, late into the night in the little room. On the Monday he drank black coffee and smoked and went and bought the gun. When he asked at the German Embassy, the clerk told him he was in the wrong place, to go to the Consulate. Herschel – he must have been so used to being in the wrong place, so used to perfectly good places becoming the wrong place by dint of his presence in them – declined the advice and insisted, so the clerk in the end sent him up to see Ernst vom Rath, he could deal with him. Herschel shot vom Rath, five times.
Symbolic, pointless, mad, magnificent, Tom thought. And the result! Five shots in Paris; thousands of people in Germany and Austria. The day vom Rath died, two days after the shooting, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Nazi Party. Many dinners and celebrations were being held. And so, when the news broke, it was simple for the Nazi leaders all telephone each other and unleash this spontaneous patriotic response. Which, by that logic, ‘the Jews’ had brought on themselves.
Tom visited the island that evening, and left the paper there, on the table where any of them could see it. When it disappeared, he had hopes – but Susanna had used it to light the stove. It is all marching on, he thought. Until it happens, whatever it is, there is no proof that it will, and every time something does happen, the goalposts are shifted about … Christ, this has been building up for a long time.
*
Tom dreamed that night about Herschel Greenszpan’s cousin, Bertha. He pictured her in an abandoned horse stall at Zbaszyn, sitting on concrete steps outside, to avoid the old damp straw within, the dirty smell of which seeped through her clothing – the only clothing she had, not nice after two weeks, but they had no opportunity to bring anything else, only some food which they had eaten and the cash which had been taken from them at the border … Waking, he wondered if she even heard what her cousin had set off.
*
Johnny Carmichael said, over a glass of red in a dim bottega, that about 11,000 people had been sent to a place called Buchenwald, and 11,000 more arrived in the three days after Kristallnacht, and were put in a separate part, with barbed wire in between. He said ‘My Country Right or Wrong’ was written up over the gateway.
‘They are systematically removing from daily life all active members and officers of any other party, and any other people they don’t want in their new world order. They are classifying them politicals get a red triangle; criminals a green one. The workshy – i.e. gypsies and people who refuse to be moved about for munitions work – get a black one. People who didn’t want to move house! The International Bible Students get lilac. Sexual perverts get purple.’
‘So what is it,’ Tom said. ‘The removal of undesirables from the ideal society: political persecution as social planning?’
‘They’d call it state planning for the benefit of the community,’ Johnny said. ‘With forced labour, but they’re not clear what it’s for. Could be building and extending the camp. They thought it was for POW camps, or giant hospitals.’
‘At least at the Agro Pontino it wasn’t forced labour …’ Tom said.
‘No, but they were moving people around, and paying them hardly anything, and destroying everything so they could start their social experiment on a blank canvas. What about the people who lived there before? They’ll tell you there weren’t any. What about the locals who weren’t offered any of the land? It all went to impeccable Fascists from the north.’
‘But it was about housing war veterans.’
‘Of a certain type,’ said Johnny. ‘But yes, the Nazis are worse, and not only for being more efficient. This could be about labour policy: future slave-labour camps using populations from invaded territories. It’s not new. The Spartans did it, with the Helots. Thus other races would be destroyed, morally, spiritually, economically and physically, and Germany would repopulate Europe and ultimately the world.’
‘You’re making this up,’ Tom said, a little nervously.
‘No I’m not,’ Johnny said. ‘Three-stage Nazi war. One, get Germany. Two, get Europe. Three, get the world. During each stage, train men up in grand-scale cruelty to be able to effect the next stage.’
Tom fell silent.
‘Tom, do you really think I’m making it up? Because if you do, if you can just sit there and say that, you need to go elsewhere, Tom. You really do.’
Really?
‘Nobody’s happy about you being here. You’re a risk to us and to be frank you’re a risk to your cousins as well. I did say. Personally, I think you should just go back to London.’
‘I’m not going back to London.’
‘Wrong answer,’ Johnny said. He glanced sideways. ‘The right answer would have been along the lines of, “No, of course, I hate the Nazis and the Fascists.” You’re rather hogging the grey area, Tom.’ Johnny gave a little snort, and gathered himself. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘it would be best if you go back to your Fascists. Or somewhere – anywhere. Just don’t be here. End of the week.’
Oh.
*
Damn damn damn damn damn.
Not that he blamed Johnny. Johnny was right. He could honestly say he hated Fascism, but he didn’t hate all Fascists, did he? No, he didn’t.
He moved into a tiny hotel room he couldn’t afford, and thought about Chamberlain, with his piece of paper ‘symbolic of the desire of our two countries never to go to war again’. He thought about Riley and Peter. He thought about Nenna and Aldo and Susanna and the boys, and of how Europe was becoming a swamp-like thing, untrustable. But full of real people, as real as him, all living their lives and suffering. Some more than others. It seemed to him that there was far too much, now, just too much happening, everything wrapped round everything else, intertangled like a ball of serpents. This did not look to him like something which could be disentangled. Once, long ago, Peter had explained to the children the concept of the Gordian knot. Tom thought about clean swords, and immense cannons, and the judgement of Solomon. Those things looked good to him.
I wonder what you do, he thought, when what happens makes less sense than what doesn’t happen. When reality takes the path of the surreal.
He had a fair amount of time to brood. But I’m going to need to be strong … He took to exercising in the parks and gardens. Autumn was red-leaved with the lowering sun. His body wanted and needed something. You should just go home. Johnny’s right. But he couldn’t. He had forgotten Riley’s advice: set a time limit on it.
*
Just a few days after Kristallnacht came a new announcement. New laws: for the Defence of the Race. They forbade Jews from having most things a contemporary human being might want or expect, from wirelesses to the right to work, they restricted property ownership, forbade inter-marriage and the placing of newspaper announcements, expelled foreign Jews, revoked citizenship. They covered all aspects of what it was to be normal. They were familiar enough, from Germany.
And again Tom went straight round to the island, sniffing the possibility of a crack through which sanity might creep into their minds. Perhaps this time – surely. Revoking citizenship?
But no. At the dinner table, Aldo, charisma gleaming, still smiled and said: ‘Don’t worry, my chicks. It doesn’t mean us! The Duce will never let us down.’
Tom wondered if Aldo was actually going insane.
The boys and Susanna turned to their plates. Tom could almost see the delicate smoky coils of their unspoken fears rising on the air, curling magnetically towards Aldo, and evaporating in the glow of his confidence. That, he thought, is why strong leaders are so attractive. People like me are sitting and thinking and rationalising and fearing and taking into account and trying to work things out; someone like Aldo, or the Duce, is smiling broadly and saying ‘But everything is fine! There is no problem!’ Of course people like that. They can give up responsibility. But it’s a lie. These leaders are like psychopaths – they don’t see results. They have no long-term relationship with reality. One light source …
‘But you are no longer allowed to be in the telephone book,’ Tom said. ‘The telephone book!’
‘Oh my dear boy,’ Aldo said, joshing, sweetly. ‘The telephone book! Of course we are – as if they would take the trouble to print new ones. It’s all going to be fine.’
‘Then why have the Orvietos left?’ Susanna said suddenly. ‘And the Setas? Why are people taking themselves off the register at the Union?’
‘What union?’ Tom asked. This was new.
‘Of Italian Israelite Communities,’ she said. ‘People don’t want to be Jewish.’
‘Cowards!’ Aldo said. ‘Converting! No faith of any sort.’
Tom hoped Susanna would continue, but she just darted a look, and sort of slid back, and was silent again.
‘Even the definition of what is a Jew has changed,’ Tom said. ‘To be honest, it’s so complicated it must be hard for people to know whether they count or not.’
‘Like the Roman aristocracy!’ Aldo crowed, and laughed, and then threw him a look.
‘You know people are leaving,’ Tom said.
‘Cowards and fools are leaving,’ Aldo intoned, with impatient patience. ‘And of course foreign Jews. There is nothing to fear. These are the over-reactions of those who have …’
Oh for crying out loud!
‘Papà,’ Nenna said. ‘Even if it’s not us, it’s someone.’ And that, perhaps, was the moment.
Aldo squinted at her, confused.
At this, Tom leaned gently against Nenna, sideways, and murmured, quietly: ‘You can leave. Come to London.’
She turned in shock to stare at him, and her glance quickly quartered the table like a bird of prey: her brothers, her sister, her father, her mother. ‘No!’ she said. ‘Of course not!’
‘Of course not what?’ said Aldo.
‘I am inviting you all to come to London,’ Tom said. Quietly. Clearly. Even Aldo could not read this as an invitation to go on holiday.
But Aldo only gave a little smile of polite bewilderment. ‘Why?’ he asked.
Tom looked up at him. Be bold and courteous. Be truthful. ‘Many people,’ he said, ‘think it would be wise. Under the circumstances.’
Aldo leaned forward, glared under his eyebrows – he even banged his fist on the table. ‘And by that, they prove that they are not Italian!’ he pronounced. ‘Or worthy to be Italian. Of course we are not going to leave our country. This will all be—’
‘Oh for Christ’s sake Aldo!’ Tom cried.
Susanna smiled nervously.
Tom stared at her. How can they still pretend to be reassured? Are they all completely mad?
‘Your rights are being curtailed,’ he said carefully. ‘Even in Germany Jews are still allowed to go to school. Nothing here has improved in the past year. Perhaps travel will be next.’
‘Why would we want to travel?’ Aldo said benignly, holding his hands out, palms to the heavens. ‘Masino, please. Don’t insult us!’
Tom took hold of Nenna’s wrist under the table and held it very tight in his fingers, pressing almost till it must have hurt her, till she turned her head.
I can’t bear this, he thought. He smiled quietly, and pressed a button inside himself to start the thing.
‘Aldo,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, but you are wrong.’ An aerated feeling ran down his arms.
‘My boy,’ Aldo said, smiling.
‘Stop that,’ Tom said. ‘You’re deluded. They all trust you because you are a wonderful man in many ways, but you are very wrong and it is very important that you open your eyes.’
‘Don’t speak to me like this, Masino, at my table.’
Tom stared at Aldo, seeking for any sign of doubt in his eyes. There was none.
‘You have deceived yourself, Aldo, and you are not admitting it even to yourself. Don’t you speak to your family like this, lying to them.’
‘Tommaso!’ Aldo cried, and stood.
‘Is every other Jew leaving Italy a fool?’ he said, nervous, loud. ‘And only you the clever one?’ Oh, no, I am shouting. Ah well – so let the shouting begin. ‘You know what is happening in Germany, Aldo. And tell me – tell your wife, and your children – has the Duce written back to you? Has he? In all these months? To say, Oh don’t worry Aldo, everything’s all right? No he hasn’t. Nenna, has he? No. And if he did, why would you – any of you – believe him? He says anything he thinks will work for him! He’s happy to sacrifice you and every Italian Jew to suck up to Hitler …’
He was becoming incoherent, but it didn’t matter because Aldo was shouting back, and Susanna was crying, and the boys had stood up, a chair had been knocked over and it was all turning hopeless.
‘I love you,’ Tom was shouting. ‘I love you all and I want you to be safe!’
Nenna was staring at him, her face paralysed with shock, suspended in time.
‘You’re bloody idiots the lot of you, stupid fools stuck in the headlights and Aldo, you—’
‘You rat,’ Aldo said. ‘Our guest, our friend, our family. Like our son. You’re a filthy slimy little rat.’
*
Ten days later, two policemen came to the little hotel; tall fellows in smart coats. News had reached their ear that an unregistered foreign Jew was living there.
‘That’ll be me,’ said Tom, affably: six foot two, blond, cornflower-eyes, lilac smudges under them and a sleepless look. He smiled, and made his Italian accent more English. ‘Do come in,’ he said. ‘Tea?’
Had Tom been living with the Jewish family Elia Fiore?
Yes he had, though not for a while.
Was he a relative? Nephew, they gathered?
Tom started laughing.
The taller man held Tom’s papers between thumb and forefinger.
‘Not by blood,’ Tom said.
They thought about that.
He was damned if he was going to explain it to them. He smiled, and stood, while they murmured, glancing up at him from time to time.
They requested that he let them know, should he move.
‘But of course,’ said Tom. ‘Thank you so much.’ He was due in Palermo anyway. He closed the door, and he was breathing shallow.
Someone has told them to find me, he thought, because I am, on some level, a foreign Jew.
It was a very nasty feeling.
I’m a free-born Englishman, he thought. This is the twentieth century. And if I were a foreign Jew it would still be the twentieth century.
He had in his English mouth a nebulous aftertaste, the ghost of a possible future, a parallel universe swerving perilously near. They just want to know who I am, and where I am. They’re not going to do anything bad to me … And as he said to himself, of course not, that’s nonsense, he heard the words in Aldo’s voice, and he felt Aldo’s excuse: they don’t mean me. And he felt his own argument back: so that makes it all right, does it?
And Nenna had said that. Even if it’s not us, it’s someone.
Bertolini’s uncle.
Tom had done nothing to merit ill treatment by the Fascists.
Perhaps it’s time I did.
*
The following day a letter arrived from the university, saying that as he was of the Hebraic race under the new laws the post provisionally offered to him was no longer available.
Even me! he thought. Neither Jewish nor Italian, but I am on some list somewhere.
And with that he realised that after all it was he who was going to have to leave.
But without them? Without her?
No.
*
He tracked down Bertolini.
‘What can I do?’ he asked. ‘Is there anyone who can use me?’ And Bertolini said, sympathetically but decisively, no. ‘You’re too tall, you’re too blond, you’re too English. You’re too visible. Your family are founding Fascists.’
‘But,’ said Tom.
‘You’re known,’ said Bertolini. ‘And anyway, I don’t know anyone. And don’t go round acting like a fool. The wrong people will hear you and the right people will see your idiocy.’
I should go home, Tom thought. My own country could use me.
Or I should shoot him. Provoke a crisis and let the detritus fall where it will.
He thought, for a second: Come on war, hurry up. Let’s get on with it.
*
He went to see Johnny at the Consulate.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Of course I’m with you. I’ll stay away, but I need us to be friends. And I’m taking her with me. Is that fair? Tell me, how can an Italian citizen – well, a revoked citizen – come to Britain?’
Johnny, relieved, was full of information until he ascertained that the revoked Italian citizen in question was not herself inclined to go.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Can you give me a certificate or a formal letter saying I’m not Jewish? Because they’ve got it into their heads that I am.’
‘Tom,’ said Johnny. ‘Calm down.’
*
Mid-December, on a dingy morning of a type he would never have imagined happening to Rome, Tom went back to the island and banged on the door.
Susanna answered.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ he said. He said ‘addio’ – ‘to God’ – not ‘arrivederci’ – till we meet again. He stood in the hall, thin and pale. ‘And I wanted to say, to say formally, for the third time: Please come with me. If you say you will come, I will stay, and I will arrange it. I’ll do everything I can. The boys,’ he said. ‘Marinella. Aldo too.’
Susanna kissed him on both cheeks, and breathed out a little sigh through her nose. ‘Buon viaggio,’ she said. ‘Aldo will never agree!’ as if it were a little joke, Aldo and his little ways … ‘Next summer by the lake!’ she said, in English, their old end-of-holiday greeting, and his eyes filled with tears.
Nenna came down behind her, a dark figure on the white marble stairs. She reached for her coat from the hook behind the door.
‘I’ll come with you to the station,’ she said. He looked at her in wonder, picked up his suitcase, and said, a wild and stupid gesture, ‘Bring your passport. We can get you a ticket at the station, and clothes in London.’
‘Masino,’ she said, cautioning, and shook her head. But they walked out together, across the bridge and into the old Ghetto. It was both cold and warm; odd slithery weather. He could smell her coat: lanital.
‘Nenna,’ he said. ‘Did you read about the attacks in Germany and Austria? Now that Mussolini is aping Hitler he is moving faster than Hitler did. He has legislated against you having a life at all. Your father …’
‘… is a fine man,’ she said, quite quietly.
‘But he is wrong about this,’ Tom said. ‘In fact he is wrong about almost everything in the wider world. And you are old enough to look at the wider world, Nenna. It’s not just about the fact that he loves you and you love him.’
She stopped for a moment, on the corner before Piazza Mattei. The stone tortoises and the fountain glowed and played for all the world as if it were a sunny day in summer long ago.
‘I feel,’ she said, ‘that I have grown in a garden where I was planted, a beautiful garden, and that you want me to climb up and look over the garden wall.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do. Because you are growing anyway and will see over soon enough, and even if you didn’t, those walls are coming down. Or—’ He was about to go off on another image, something biblical, expulsion from the Garden of Eden …
There was no need. She knew. It was in her face, her eyes. He looked at her, properly. Her cheeks were thinner, her eyes darker. Her mouth held a shape he had never seen before.
He was terribly, terribly relieved.
‘Then come,’ he said. ‘Please.’ His eyes caught hers, and held them. It seemed years since they had actually looked at each other.
‘I know he is fair, and kind, and good,’ she said. ‘I understand about everything, and yet. And yet.’
She was crying, of course. He thought: she loves him the way I love Riley. Imagine if Riley fell to pieces before my eyes … The thought made him feel weak.
‘I am very afraid,’ she said softly.
He stopped her, and folded her in his arms. How often must she have looked the truth in the face and turned from it, intelligent girl that she is. Tom had ignored the truth himself, and been able to avoid it just by staying away from them. I’ve been a coward, he thought. I’ve let her down.
He had always known that he would never be as strong as Riley; as brave as him, either on the battlefield or in the life that followed it. No one could be. He used to assume he would never get a chance to be – but now all that looked different. And right now, his arms full of a weeping girl, he felt strong.
‘I have been dreaming about him,’ she was saying. ‘I see him wearing a golden shield, a woven armour, chain mail, glowing and shining, and then through it starts flakes of rust, a corroded spot, here or there, something eating at the fabric from inside. I want to touch it but I can’t touch it in case there is worse beneath, like a rotten wall beneath rotten paper. If I touch it this armour will fall apart, and the body behind it will be rotten.’
‘Oh dear,’ he said.
‘I always thought,’ she went on, ‘it is right to put yourself with the strong, to support the government. Certainly when you have a family! If he hadn’t, how would he have worked, and earned a living? Only a – a fool would go against society.’
‘It depends on the society,’ he said, and she looked up at him, and said quietly: ‘How is England?’
‘We have elections,’ he said. ‘People laugh at Fascists in the street. There are all kinds of things wrong but you can say what you want about anything.’
‘Masino,’ she said. ‘I can’t talk about this to anybody.’
And that, said on the public street under the sky, iron wheels rattling over cobbles, a policeman’s whistle, was to him like a horse’s kick of reality. She can’t. She really can’t.
There was a silence, in which he willed her to continue. ‘You can talk to me,’ he said.
‘You’re leaving,’ she said.
‘So come with me.’
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘Not now.’
‘It will be more difficult later on,’ he said.
She shook her head and gave a weak laugh. ‘Oh, I can’t leave my family. Never mind my father – my mother! And the boys – and Marinella!’ ‘If you come, perhaps they would be more likely to follow you,’ he said, seeing even as he said it how the suggestion sank under the might of its own unlikelines. Anyway, ‘Nenna didn’t even acknowledge it.’ ‘Everything will be all right. She cried. Attesismo!’
‘What’s that?’
‘Waiting,’ she said. ‘A Roman speciality. A Jewish one too.’
‘You can’t!’ he cried.
‘Oh, I must,’ she said. ‘Go on. You’ll miss your train.’
‘But—’ he said, and
‘Oh—’
And the law of not missing the train came bearing down on them; the obligatory continuation of normality, and they had to say goodbye, so they did, because heaven forbid that anyone miss a train trying to turn the life of someone they love in a different direction, he thought, as he turned away and walked along the platform – and then turned back, in one movement, a swerving realisation that for Christ’s sake he had his own capacity to do what he wanted, what he thought was right. We’re all sleepwalking, he thought, wake up! WAKE UP! – and he walked back, back down the platform, back on to the concourse, back out the tall stone entrance and across the road to where the tram he knew she would be taking would stop. She was standing there in the street, small and alone.
‘Nenna,’ he said, and put his hand on her arm.
‘I thought you’d gone!’
‘There’s one thing,’ he said.
She smiled at him, confused, and in itself there was something loverlike about that. But I am not in love with her …
‘Marry me,’ he said.
She turned her head sideways, mistrustful.
‘You don’t love me,’ she said.
‘I—’ he said. ‘It will help, later on. When I come back for you. It will give us a claim on you. And Marinella. When you change your mind.’
She shook her head.
‘You’re changing it already,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see?’
She wouldn’t acknowledge it.
‘And I do love you,’ he said.
‘Not like a man and a woman,’ she said.
Does she want me to? Is that what she’s asking? Should I – Can I?
She’s a fish on the line, I mustn’t scare her away—
‘We don’t have to be like a man and a woman,’ he said. ‘But where can we find an official to give us a certificate to say we are brother and sister? And that I am sworn to you? Nenna,’ and here he held up his finger, with the fine white scar on it. ‘Look,’ he said. She smiled and held up her own.
‘Come what may,’ he said, ‘and that’s all very well but it won’t wash with any border police or Blackshirts.’
He gave her a moment. Then he said: ‘All right?’
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. ‘If you insist. Though I think it’s mad. I think.’
*
From a café he rang Johnny, who was willing to try to ease the issuing of a copy of Tom’s birth certificate and a nulla osta – a declaration that there was no legal impediment to Tom’s marrying. ‘But they won’t marry you, old man,’ he said. ‘Not if she’s Jewish.’
‘That’s why I’m asking you,’ Tom said. ‘It’s only because she’s Jewish that I need to marry her.’ He knew that he had left it too late; that the web he wanted Nenna to escape had already quietly slipped into place around them.
‘Welcome to modern Europe,’ said Carmichael, and Tom thought damn I’m a fool, and again Herschel Greenszpan spun across his mind, younger than him, driven mad.
‘But they think I’m Jewish,’ he said. ‘I’m on some list – the police came round. Give me a letter saying I am Jewish, and we’ll marry on that.’
‘Last time I saw you you wanted a letter saying you weren’t Jewish,’ Johnny said. ‘Make up your mind!’
‘Or, as I’m British, couldn’t we marry under British law? Couldn’t the ambassador marry us?’
‘I’ve a feeling there’s a limit to how many lies the Embassy can issue on your behalf,’ Johnny said.
‘So let’s just work out which one would be most effective, and stick to that,’ said Tom. ‘Eh?’ He leaned in to the receiver. ‘Johnny,’ he said. ‘She’s changing her mind. She doesn’t fully understand what is happening. I am afraid for her safety in this country. It’s my cousin.
‘I did work out that it’s your cousin, old man. I’m not a complete nit. And you understand that if you take her to England and there is a war, sooner or later she’d probably be interned for being Italian?’
Tom shook his head. Every way you look …
‘Could Father Harkness help? At All Saints?’
‘It’s a Christian church!’ Johnny said. ‘She’d have to convert. Which I suppose is rather exactly not the point. And it would still need to be under someone’s law.’
‘But if we can’t have a religious marriage in either religion then we must have a civil marriage and a civil marriage by Italian law has to be by Italian law.’
‘Yes.’
‘So it would have to be by British law.’
‘I’ll see what we can do,’ Johnny said.
Before he rang off, Tom asked, ‘Is there much of this sort of thing?’
Johnny said, ‘You’re the first!’
*
Down by the yellow river, Tom leaned and waited for her.
‘It’s going to take a little longer than I thought,’ he told her. ‘Christmas is getting in the way. And there’s the Banns …’
‘Banns?’
‘Pubblicazioni di matrimonio,’ he said. Today’s new phrase, and one he wished he’d never heard. Twenty-one days! He was terrified she would change her mind. He’d thought – what, that he could just buy a few bottles of good prosecco for the officials, and five white roses from the Sicilian on the bridge?
Yes, he’d thought something along those lines.
*
The day before Christmas Eve, Johnny said he could manage the nulla osta and a copy of Tom’s birth certificate, ‘some time in the New Year’. ‘But we can’t give you anything saying you’re Jewish because A, you’re not, and B, HMG doesn’t see a chap’s religion as their business any more, so there’s nothing we issue which would have it on,’ he said. ‘You could apply for Italian citizenship and say you’re a Jew, but I don’t imagine that’s the route you have in mind, is it?’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘And anyway they’re revoking Jewish citizenships, not handing them out.’
‘If you could find a ship’s captain who’s also a judge or a registrar you could marry at sea. But I’ve asked around and there doesn’t seem to be such a person in Rome just now.’
‘No,’ said Tom.
‘So if you lied to the vicar you could have at least a religious marriage – Rev Harkness is a nice fellow, and I very much doubt he can tell a Roman Jew from a Roman Gentile on sight. Would Nenna pretend to be Christian? It still wouldn’t be legal, but it would be something, and you could formalise it later at home. But we can’t pull off British law in Italy, I’m afraid.’
It’s such a simple thing, Tom was thinking. I just want to get married.
‘But look, don’t lose heart. I’m intrigued by this now – I’m sure there’s a way. Of course if you could get her to come to England …’
Tom laughed, but not.
It couldn’t be done, and even if it could it couldn’t be done quickly, and even if it were done, it would mean nothing under Italian law.
*
Tom bought two bottles of good prosecco anyway, and five white roses from the Sicilian on the bridge. He took one of the former to Johnny in thanks for his efforts and got invited to Christmas lunch, and the latter to Nenna, who he met in a café behind Piazza Navona.
‘We can only marry in England,’ he said. ‘We’ve looked and looked for a way. Can’t be done.’ He found that he felt ashamed of himself. He had wanted to be able to act on this marvellous noble whim, and for England to offer a wonderful swift manly solution to this rising chaos.
‘So we can’t be married,’ she said, holding the roses and looking sad. For a moment it seemed absurd. Tom and Nenna! They had never wanted to marry anyway. Their decision had been purely circumstantial, and yet here they were, minding.
He glanced down at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said, and it seemed far from sufficient comment. ‘Johnny’s still looking into it,’ he said, rather hurriedly, ‘but – if you came, if you would just come to England—’
‘Do you want us to be married?’ she said.
‘I want you to be safe,’ he said.
‘But you’re not in love with me or anything?’ she asked, looking at him, straight and serious.
‘No! Lord no,’ he said, automatically. And felt confused. Because—
Jesus, am I lying?
‘You’re not in love with me, are you?’ he said. He was smiling. We’re talking about love!
‘No,’ she said brightly. ‘I love you but I’m not in love with you,’ and at that they nodded, serious, believing profoundly in that great artificial distinction so important to the very young. They caught eyes, each trying to look more sensible than the other, then suddenly found that they were terribly embarrassed, and looked away.
‘But I wanted to be sure,’ she said, ‘because—’ and she smiled again, and then held something out to him. A piece of paper, folded.
He opened it out and read it. It told him that on September 1, 1938, the marriage had taken place between Thomas Ellington Locke of London, British citizen, and Fernanda Fabia Elia Fiore of Rome, Italian citizen, at the Comune of Santa Ippolita in Puglia. It was stamped and signed and sealed and reeked of officialdom. And it was post-dated.
‘Puglia!’ he exclaimed.
‘Far from any border we are likely to cross,’ she said.
‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘But—’
She leaned in and whispered to him: ‘When a girl is stopped from doing anything, she has to find something to do.’
He still didn’t get it.
‘You opened my eyes, Masino,’ she said. ‘And now they are open. Sometimes people need papers they don’t have. And my handwriting is – flexible. And my friend Tullio has a little press.’
He was astounded.
‘So, we’re, um, married?’ he said. The term gave him a little sexual thrill. Sposati.
She laughed. ‘Are you pleased?’ she said.
He found he was.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Bouquet,’ gesturing the roses. ‘Prosecco. Congratulations, darling.’ How had she done that? How had she turned so quickly, from her father’s lamb to a forger? Look at her! She’s so pleased!
‘Congratulations to you too,’ she said, looking right at him, with her open eyes – and she leaned across the table to kiss him – and as she did, her hair, her cheek – it struck him like cold silver water all over his skin, shivery and brilliant – he wanted her to kiss him. He wanted to kiss her.
He moved his head. He took her kiss with his mouth – surprised her. And suddenly everything was very different.
As they came out of it, she said cautiously, ‘But we’re not in love.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Odd.’
They looked at each other.
‘Odd,’ he said again. ‘Puzzling. Or perhaps just—’
He shook his head, as if shaking water out of his hair, and looked at her.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I—’
This is it, he thought. This is something.
‘Come on,’ he said, and as they left the café he took her face in his hands and kissed her, properly. Properly properly. Long enough for some wag to shout an incomprehensible bit of Romanaccio as he walked past them.
Nenna pulled away.
‘Ah!’ she said. And Tom said ‘ah’, in a very surprised way, and then turned sideways and took her arm in his. Fraternal. The street felt suddenly too small for them.
They walked together. After a moment they had to unlatch their arms.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘If we’re married now,’ and he grinned, ‘you have to obey me. Come to London.’
‘Marinella,’ she said.
‘Bring her.’
‘My parents,’ she said, her eyes bright.
But it was different now. Why? Nothing had happened. A forgery, and a surprising kiss. And, of course, her acknowledgement of the truth.
They both felt as if anything were possible. They were a team. Finally on the same side again.
He smiled at her so broadly, like an angel’s wings.
‘Who keeps the certificate?’ he asked.
‘Oh, you can have that one,’ she said. ‘I made two.’
He folded his up and tucked it into his inside pocket. ‘You’ve broken several of Mussolini’s laws with this,’ he said, gently. ‘Um …’ he said, wanting to ask, but tentative. But wanting to be sure.
She looked up. ‘You want to know? What’s going on in my heart? Just ask, Englishman, just ask. I’ll tell you – bitterness. Confusion. Fury. Loyalty. Confusion. But, to be clear: I have pulled my head out of the sand. Look, you can see it streaming from behind my ears. I have’ – and she closed her eyes for a second, giving the words their due weight – ‘torn the Duce from my heart. I hate him, what he has done to my family and my country. I fear him. I would come with you, Tommaso. I would! But now that I understand, I can’t leave my family alone with him. Irony, yes? What you have revealed to me makes it impossible for me to come away as you want me to. You should have just seduced me, left out the politics.’
‘I probably would have,’ he said. ‘If things had been different.’ Then they laughed at some length, at the concept of ‘if things had been different’.
*
Later, he took her to meet Johnny, who was sceptical but quietly encouraging.
‘She’s seen the light, Johnny,’ Tom said.
‘She was born and bred in Fascism,’ he replied. ‘Do you think that can change overnight? Even for your lovely blue eyes?’
‘It really hasn’t been overnight,’ Tom murmured. ‘It’s been years, actually. But now I just want to get her to England, and we’ll deal with the rest of them from there.’ But he knew he hadn’t been able to help them from there before. And it wasn’t as if anything was getting easier.
He would persuade her. It would just take a little time. Long haul.
*
Walking Nenna back to the island through the empty dark stone streets, Tom trod quietly, feeling the echoes of other people’s lives from behind the closed shutters. The occasional voice, calling; a little dog yapping, a shaft of light as someone adjusted a shutter or a curtain. Clouds were scudding around the moon, between the high walls, and a light chilly rain started. He put his arm around her and the cobbles beneath their feet began to gleam.
After a while, without breaking step, he murmured, ‘So, Nenna, are you my girl?’
And for the rest of his life he regretted that he had not turned to look at her and see the expression on her face. She stopped, she turned to him, and suddenly she was weeping and kicking him and bashing his chest like a girl in a silent movie, though she was far from silent, she was yelping and hiccupping, and he had to enclose her in his arms and hold her until with her ear against his heart and his hands holding her, she said, to the cloth of his coat, ‘You idiot, you idiot.’
‘Is that yes?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was always your girl. Stupid man.’
When they walked off, the angels’ wings had spread to his feet.
*
She didn’t sleep that night. She left her shutters open and moonlight fell on her bed, and it filled her. I give up, she said to the moon. How can I make this choice?
The moon didn’t care.
At around three in the morning, a thought skipped across Nenna’s mind, like a water boatman across a calm dark pond. It’s not just Mussolini you hate. It’s your father. Perhaps your mother too, for not protecting you. Your brothers, for not opening their eyes. Let them rot, all of them, before they kill you with their fear and stupidity.
It is only Tom who has come back over and over, to help you.
Across the bedroom, Marinella mewed in her sleep.
I can take her with me.
*
Alas there was no time. Someone, it seemed, had been noticing Tom’s articles in the Chronicle. He, his foreignness, his anti-Fascist opinions, his nom de plume – fake identity, as they saw it – and his putative Judaism – had been identified and added up into a diagnosis of undesirability. The policemen – God knows which of the myriad forces they were from – returned and invited him, as an alien, a Jew – ha! The irony – and a spreader of lies about the Duce, to—
Bertolini’s uncle
—leave the country. On the next train.
His first thought was of his own idiocy. I should have expected this.
The tall one was strolling round his little room, glancing at things, picking them up and putting them down again in a mildly insulting way. Tom was so surprised by the sudden immediacy and reality of these men being in his room, saying and doing these things, and so simultaneously relieved that they weren’t punching him or bundling him down the stairs, that he wasn’t even able to make up his mind whether or not he should be demanding to take his wife with him. If I do, will that simply bring her and the family to their attention? What if she still says no? What if they find the friend’s press – what if she is in danger already? And that is why they’ve come for me? The what-ifs tumbled around him; he could not get his hands on any of them long enough to see it properly, and part of him was still thinking this is all nonsense, things like this don’t happen, not to English gentlemen who have done nothing wrong …
And thus, he thought, it moves. More real every day.
They allowed him to step into the café to ring Johnny, and tell him briefly what was happening.
‘Try to let her know,’ he said. ‘Tell her I’ll be back.’
Then they put him on the train north, sat down with him, changed with him at Milan.
*
Their fellow travellers avoided his escorts, looking away and taking distant seats. At the border, these same people queued with them: families and couples, small suitcases, overcoats, misty breath hanging on the air. It was cold; the mountains in the distance snow-topped. He was following the general movement when the short one tugged his elbow, steered him round a corner of the station building and swiftly, effectively, knocked him to the floor.
Tom was still wondering how he got there when he felt the first blows, heavy swipes to his ribcage, a thud on the back of his head, a powerful kick in the small of his back and one to his belly. Pain, nausea, inability – and the two men stood back.
‘We have plenty more for next time,’ the tall one said. The short one was slipping something back into his overcoat pocket, and the word came to Tom: manganello.
‘Show the bruises to your mother,’ the short one said. ‘Now come along!’ – and he sighed impatiently as Tom took his time trying to stand up, trying not to vomit.
‘That way!’ the short one said, and the tall one handed him his hat, with a smirk, and Tom rejoined the queue almost as if nothing had happened.
‘Plenty more, any time you like,’ the tall one cried, and Tom realised this was absolutely nothing, to them. Absolutely nothing. A way of amusing themselves during a boring job. He raised his head, and bit his lip. I have a lot to learn. Self-discipline. Patience. How and when to apply physical courage.
He thanked the thug for his hat, and put it on at a gangster angle, tipping it just so. He didn’t brush himself down. He turned and put out his hand to each of them, his eyes as blue and clear as they could be. ‘Thank you for accompanying me,’ he said. ‘I’ll be all right on my own now. Goodbye – till we meet again. Arrivederci’ – and he went up into the crowd around the desk, where someone was saying, ‘All owners of Austrian passports who cannot show an entry visa to Switzerland are to be turned back,’ and, ‘These passports were issued after 15 August 1938 …’ as if that explained everything, why these families were standing here and could go no further. One guard was calling for advice. ‘Should I telephone the Police Department?’ Tom heard his boss murmur, ‘One can assume that the holder is a Jew, if the passport is valid for only one year.’
He didn’t look back, and his companions did not come after him. He thought he heard a chuckle, but he was trying to breathe through what felt unavoidably like a broken rib or two.
As he came to the front of the queue, the mother of the group in front of him was examining the document which had been returned to her. ‘Turned back,’ it said, and a stamp saying ‘COMO’, crossed out.
Tom had no visa, but his passport was old and British, he was tall and blond, and no doubt his companions had some arrangement for the chucking out of foreigners. Cleared and checked, he wanted to return to find the woman, and ask her where they would go, what they would do now. But he had been handed over, his suitcase thrown after him, and was being steered through to customs dogana douane zoll. Pyjama bottoms, he felt, would be the best thing to try to strap himself up with. He smiled politely. What else could a chap do, at this stage?
*
It was, to Aldo, a simple matter. If somebody is damaging the unit, well, it’s like in war. Or as with Matteotti. You don’t keep and protect someone who is betraying the brigade. You get rid of them. Just as well that the Orivietos and the Setas have gone. A curse on the other fainthearts who insult me. May they all go. Good riddance.
Tomaso, I am not an idiot. There is a limit to how much trouble you can cause in my household before I throw you out. You think I don’t know what you are doing when you go on about Kristallnacht, about war, about passports, about Herr Hitler? You think I haven’t noticed? How you undermine my authority, how you insult the Duce, and try to break our loyalty, which is our strength?
And Tommaso. Do you think I don’t know my daughter? Do you think I don’t see how she ebbs and flows around you? How this summer she hated you, and now she comes home with you, her eyes alight, laughing like the full moon? You think I am blind?
White roses, Tomaso? Please.
He conceded it would have been more honourable to throw Tom out of the country himself; to beat him up a little or frogmarch him to the border personally. But he remembered the scene on the riverbank and the look on Nenna’s face that night. It was clear he would have to get someone else to do it. He could not have Nenna looking at him like that. That would be self-defeating.
All your talk of trouble to come, Tomaso – this is one trouble which will not come. If there is war, it must be very clear which side we are on. You go on about Jews being in danger! Our loyalty and our Duce are our strength and our safety, they are, they are. And my girl will not be in love with a boy who is on the other side. You won’t dismantle us, Tomaso, and there will be no Romeo and Juliet here.