Lugano was surrounded by mountains. Rosa’s train reached the outskirts of the town a few minutes before ten o’clock. The sky was pure blue and the sun shone on the freshly swept streets. Window boxes brimming with geraniums and crimson begonias decorated the houses. Despite the town being only thirty miles north of Milan, the difference in mood was obvious as soon as she stepped onto the station platform. Even with the growing number of refugees who were fleeing there, Rosa did not sense in Lugano the fear and tension that seemed to be present everywhere in Italy these days. The town’s ambience was as pleasant and light as the mountain air that permeated it.
Rosa looked around for Antonio’s cousins, Renata and Enzo, hoping that she would recognise them. The photograph she had found in Antonio’s album showing an elegant middle-aged couple was nearly ten years old.
‘Mamma!’
Rosa’s eyes darted amongst the people on the platform as she tried to determine from which direction the voice had come. Then she saw her: Sibilla. Her daughter was wearing a neatly pressed dress and standing with a couple who looked like the people in the photograph. In her free arm, she carried the Lenci doll that Rosa and Antonio had sent for her birthday. Sibilla had grown since Rosa had last seen her and her features were more defined. She was the image of Nerezza. Rosa’s heart was torn in two directions: between her longing for her daughter and her painful alienation from her past.
Sibilla moved towards her and Rosa recovered from her inertia. She squeezed between people, apologising when she bumped or knocked them. Sibilla displayed no such patience. She darted between the passengers and shoved other children aside until she reached her mother and threw herself into her arms.
‘How I’ve missed you,’ said Rosa, embracing her. She relished the warmth of her daughter’s body pressed against her own.
‘Where is Babbo?’ Sibilla asked. ‘Zio Enzo said that he can’t come this time?’
A pain jabbed Rosa’s heart. She had prepared herself for this moment. ‘Babbo is held up by work but will come as soon as he can.’
Sibilla gripped Rosa’s hand and tugged her towards Renata and Enzo.
‘The boys are with Giuseppina at the apartment,’ Renata said, greeting Rosa with kisses. ‘They are well and thriving.’
‘Come,’ said Enzo, welcoming Rosa with a warm embrace and taking her bag. ‘It is not far to our apartment. Everything is close here.’
Renata and Enzo’s apartment building faced an Italianate piazza with cobblestones and a linden tree in the middle with benches surrounding it. Rosa offered to help Enzo with her bag, which was awkward to carry up the narrow stairs, but he chivalrously refused.
Rosa was greeted by the excited voices of Lorenzo and Giorgio. If not for Lorenzo’s resemblance to Antonio and Giorgio’s to her, she would not have recognised them. Despite the scarcities the war in Europe had imposed on the inhabitants of Lugano, the twins had grown rapidly. Their legs poking out from the pants of their sailor suits were sturdy. That Rosa had missed their development the past year struck her with such force she began to tremble. If not for Renata’s reassuring hand on her back, she might have broken down. She dropped to her knees and clasped the twins to her as if she would never let them go.
‘Come see!’ said Lorenzo, breaking away and urging Rosa towards the table where Giuseppina had been giving them a drawing lesson. He held up a picture of an orange train filled with blue passengers. ‘We drew you and Babbo coming to see us.’
‘Babbo will come later,’ Rosa told him, kissing his golden head. ‘Meanwhile, we have so much to catch up on.’
She hoisted Giorgio onto her hip before kneeling again to pat Ambrosio, who had come to greet her with licks to her fingers, and Allegra, who sauntered over from her sunny spot on the windowsill to rub against Rosa’s leg.
Rosa was so overwhelmed by seeing her children again that she didn’t notice how small the apartment was until she went to the bathroom to wash her hands. Apart from the dining room, which also served as a piano room and sitting area, there was a compact kitchen, two bedrooms and a closet. There wasn’t any room to spare. Rosa guessed that Giuseppina must be sleeping on the sofa in the dining room, and realised how generous Renata and Enzo had been to take in her children, their nursemaid and the family pets. Despite being over-populated, the apartment was spotless, with no dust anywhere and fresh towels arranged on the bath’s edge.
When Rosa returned to the dining room, Giuseppina was making tea. Renata laid out plates and a platter of almond and chocolate biscuits on the table.
‘Sibilla baked these,’ she said. ‘She often makes us treats.’
Rosa smiled at her daughter. ‘I’m so proud of you,’ she said, pressing her cheek to Sibilla’s. Rosa was delighted and saddened at the same time: she had wanted to be the one to teach her daughter to cook.
The morning slipped by quickly while Rosa listened to her children’s chatter about their year in Switzerland and the school they attended, Sibilla’s ballet lessons, and the sojourns Enzo had taken them on into the mountains. The discussion continued until the lunch of polenta and bean stew Giuseppina had made was served. Afterwards, Enzo suggested that they should take a walk around the lake. Rosa sensed that he and Renata were keen to ask after Antonio.
‘Parco Ciani,’ Enzo explained to Rosa when they arrived at Viale Carlo Cattaneo, ‘is one of the most beautiful parks in Switzerland.’
Rosa agreed that it looked like something from a postcard. The glistening lake with its backdrop of mountains was stunning enough, but the park was also landscaped with flowerbeds of azaleas and roses and shaded by laurels, oleanders and magnolia trees. Sibilla and the twins ran along the paths that crossed the green lawns and wove around statues and pavilions, pulling Giuseppina along with them. Ambrosio bounded after them, much to the dismay of the Swiss who walked their obedient Saint Bernards on leads.
‘I didn’t think they would react so warmly,’ Rosa confided in Renata and Enzo. ‘A year is a long time for children. I was afraid that they would be shy with me.’
Enzo directed the women towards a shaded path. ‘We talk about you and Antonio every day,’ he told Rosa. ‘At dinnertime we take turns at guessing what you might have done that day, and every night before bedtime we say prayers for you. You and Antonio are always in our hearts.’
‘Thank you,’ said Rosa.
Renata linked her arm through Rosa’s and walked in step with her. Rosa was taken with the older woman’s stately beauty. She wore no jewellery, although her ears were pierced, and her dress, while stylishly cut, was not new. It wasn’t artifice that gave Renata her graceful appearance, but something inside her.
‘We’ve kept a diary of what the children have been doing each day,’ she told Rosa. ‘They grow so quickly at that age and we knew you and Antonio wouldn’t want to miss a thing. You can take it back with you. I am sure it will comfort Antonio.’
Rosa was too moved to reply immediately. She was fortunate that her children were in the care of such a kind couple. She had heard of aunts and uncles, grandparents and even nursemaids and governesses trying to win the affection of children they were caring for at the expense of the children’s relationship with their parents. But Renata and Enzo were not like that.
‘I don’t know how we will ever repay your kindness,’ she said, finally able to look at Renata and Enzo without wanting to cry.
‘Kindness doesn’t ask for repayment,’ said Renata.
She led Rosa to a bench to sit with her while Enzo went in search of Giuseppina and the children.
‘But you’ve taken in my children, a nursemaid and a dog and cat,’ said Rosa. ‘You’ve sacrificed so much for us.’
Renata looked genuinely surprised. ‘But I don’t see it as a sacrifice at all,’ she said. ‘I find comfort in their company. And they are good children.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Rosa. ‘They seem to have borne all that has happened well.’
‘As long as their parents look at ease, children seldom worry,’ replied Renata.
Enzo called the children back to the lawn in front of Rosa and Renata, and he and Giuseppina played a chasing game with them. Lorenzo squealed with delight when Enzo caught him, making Rosa and Renata laugh.
‘My son is in the United States,’ said Renata. ‘He is a grown man with a family but I have some idea of what you and Antonio are feeling. Please tell me, how is our favourite cousin?’
The thought that Antonio was in a dank and dismal prison while she was enjoying this beautiful scenery tugged at Rosa’s heart. How she wished that he could be here, sharing her joy in seeing the children again.
‘He puts on a brave face,’ she said. ‘And I try to tell myself that at least he wasn’t sent to the front.’
Renata clucked her tongue. ‘We’ve always been fond of Antonio, although he is some years younger than Enzo and his father moved the family to Florence when he was only a boy.’ She turned her gentle eyes on Rosa and smiled. ‘And when he married you, we were so pleased. His father had been concerned about Antonio’s happiness for years.’
‘This terrible war,’ Rosa said, thinking of Antonio’s imprisonment again. ‘They say it will be even worse than the last one.’
Renata picked up a leaf and spun it between her fingers. ‘The difference about living in a neutral country…well, we hear things that we never heard in Italy.’
There was something ominous in Renata’s words.
‘You mean what’s happening with the Jews?’ Rosa asked.
‘In Italy they were only rumours, but the newspapers here report that in Poland and Austria Jews are being shot in the thousands.’
Rosa’s stomach turned. In wars people were killed defending and attacking territory. But shooting civilians like that wasn’t war, it was genocide.
‘The Germans have been setting up posts in all the Italian cities,’ she told Renata. ‘We might be allies but it looks to me as though they intend to invade us. I tried to tell Antonio to leave Italy a year ago but he wouldn’t hear of it. Now he is in prison and can’t go anywhere.’
‘When you return to Italy,’ Renata said, looking Rosa in the eye, ‘you must get rid of any evidence that Antonio has Jewish ancestry.’
Rosa saw that Renata understood the danger her husband faced. ‘So you think so too?’ she asked. ‘You think Germany will take over Italy?’
Renata pursed her lips. ‘I’m learning to live with uncertainty,’ she said. ‘Anything is possible. When Mussolini brought in those wretched racial laws, Nino tried to get us visas to go to America but our application was rejected. So we came to Switzerland instead. One can’t forget that we are still next door to Germany.’
‘Luckily Switzerland is neutral and likely to stay so,’ said Rosa. ‘You are much safer here than in Italy.’
Renata shook her head. ‘Look at where this country is on the map. Switzerland is not some island in a faraway ocean. It will be impossible for it to remain neutral and avoid invasion. Germany may save us until last, but they will eventually get to Switzerland as a gourmand eventually gets to dessert—and then they will gobble us up whole.’
‘Is that what the Swiss think?’ Rosa asked. ‘Is that what you think?’
Renata looked at her with pitying eyes. ‘All we have on our side is time. Perhaps this attack on Russia has bought us some more.’
Rosa’s month in Switzerland passed quickly. She tried to savour each moment with Sibilla and the twins. On her last night in Lugano, she lay awake agonising over whether she should take the children back with her to Florence. If what Renata had said was true, then Switzerland was in as much danger of invasion as anywhere else. If they had to face danger, wouldn’t it be better that they faced it together?
Rosa turned over and gazed at the sleeping faces of the twins and Sibilla. They were crowded into one bed along with Ambrosio and Allegra. Renata had said that Switzerland had more time than Italy. Rosa brushed a strand of hair from Sibilla’s forehead. Maybe time did count for something now that Hitler had decided to attack Russia. Hadn’t those fearless Slavs repelled Napoleon?
By the next morning, Rosa had made her decision, although leaving the children behind gave her a bitter feeling in her blood. Lorenzo and Giorgio skipped along as the party made its way to the station, confident that their mother would return soon. Only Sibilla guessed the truth and cried floods of tears.
Rosa dried her daughter’s face with her handkerchief. ‘You’ve been so brave,’ she told her. Her voice faltered but she remembered what Renata had said about the fortitude of children: that they would remain composed as long as their parents did. ‘I love you, Sibilla,’ she said, kissing her cheeks. ‘I always have and I always will.’
Sibilla calmed with her mother’s reassurance, but by the time they reached the station Rosa was feeling ill herself.
‘Here, take this,’ said Enzo, squeezing Rosa’s arm and giving her a book of humorous stories. ‘It will help pass the time.’
Time, Rosa thought. It was both a friend and an enemy. Time might save Switzerland from the Germans, but it would also rob her of sharing her children’s most important years.
Before the train departed, Rosa glanced in the direction of the mountains and then at her children standing on the platform with Enzo and Renata. Dear God, keep them safe, she prayed. Keep them safe for me.
When the train reached the Italian border, the customs officer checked Rosa’s papers and drew red lines over her travel pass before handing it back. ‘No more trips abroad, signora,’ he said. ‘Italy is at war and things are getting worse. You will have to stay in your own country now.’
In Florence, it was apparent that the euphoric anticipation of a quick victory that had pervaded the population at the beginning of the war had dissipated. The tranquil autumn weather was at odds with the gloomy mood of the city.
‘From what you say, it seems to finally be dawning on people that Mussolini’s propaganda overestimated Italy’s ability to wage war,’ Antonio told Rosa when she went to visit him. ‘Unless Il Duce can produce one of these secret weapons he’s been boasting about, Italy is doomed.’
‘I hope it won’t come to that,’ Rosa said. She and Antonio spoke in hushed tones but she sensed the guards had long ceased to care what they said to each other. ‘It would be better for Italy to surrender than cause any more destruction.’
Rosa knew what had been meted out to Germany at the Treaty of Versailles, but this time Italy would have to bear the humiliation. Perhaps the Allies would consider that it was Mussolini who had foolishly led the Italian people into this war and punish him rather than the people themselves.
Despite his depressing predictions, Antonio was in good spirits. Rosa’s stories about the children amused him and his face lit up when he saw the diary Renata and Enzo had made. He was also pleased with the book Rosa had brought him.
‘I’ve always wanted to read War and Peace,’ he said, grinning. ‘But isn’t it ironic? How did you get this past the guard? I didn’t think Russian literature would be allowed.’
Rosa shrugged. ‘I only thought of it as a classic. The guard looked at it but let me through. I’ve also brought you a novel by George Eliot, who was British. Maybe they no longer care what we do and read.’
‘Something is in the air,’ observed Antonio. ‘Only a year ago you couldn’t sneeze without someone having to put a fascist slant on it.’
Rosa reopened the shop for two afternoons a week and saw customers by appointment. Despite the pessimistic atmosphere, the ever-dwindling rations and the ever-increasing shortages, there were still people with enough money to fill their homes with fine things. The war seemed to have little impact on the privileged unless they had family members serving overseas.
Rosa tried to fill her time with reading, as Antonio did, but she was restless. She was only allowed to visit him twice a week and, with the children away, her days were long and empty. The nights of weary silence were worse. Ylenia had no family to go to and would have difficulty finding employment elsewhere, so Rosa kept her on although she hardly produced enough work to justify a fulltime maid. Rosa needed something useful to do but didn’t want to return to the Dead, Wounded and Missing office now that Signora Corvetto was no longer working there. When she passed by the hospital one day, she saw a notice calling for volunteer nurses to take up the places of those who had been sent with the military overseas. I could do that, she thought.
‘What makes you believe you would be a good nurse?’ asked the matron, looking up from Rosa’s application form. ‘Do you have any experience?’
‘I have three children,’ Rosa offered.
‘You are married?’
‘My husband is…away.’
The matron ticked some boxes on Rosa’s form and passed it over to her to sign. Being inexperienced and married would have made her an unlikely candidate in peacetime, but the hospital was desperate for help. Nevertheless, she thought she had better explain the enemy of the state classification on her personal documents in case the matron checked.
‘I don’t want to know,’ said the matron, waving her hand dismissively. ‘I don’t care if my staff are fascists or not. I turned into an enemy of the state myself when they forced me to dismiss my Jewish nurses.’
Rosa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She’d been discriminated against for being an orphan, she’d suffered after Maria’s death because of her supposed anti-fascist activities, and she’d been snubbed as an unwed mother. Suddenly, no-one cared what she was as long as she was useful to the war effort.
‘You have training lectures twice a week,’ the matron told her. ‘Otherwise you start at six o’clock each morning.’
‘When do I commence?’ Rosa asked.
The matron raised her eyebrows. ‘You start tomorrow.’
Rosa was puzzled. How could she help unless she went to lectures first? ‘But I haven’t been trained yet,’ she said.
The matron sucked in a breath. ‘Signora Parigi, someone will show you tomorrow how to sluice a bedpan.’
The work of a trainee nurse was arduous but Rosa was thankful for it because it kept her mind occupied. Many of the hospital’s nurses were serving overseas and most of the orderlies had been conscripted, so the remaining staff were harried and put Rosa to work without hesitation. Even before she’d had her uniform made, she was cleaning bottles, scrubbing bedpans and washing soiled sheets. She performed all these activities without complaint but her favourite task was making up beds. There was something meditative about the feel of linen between her fingers as she stretched the sheets taut and mitred the corners. It reminded her of her time in the convent, where daily tasks were performed with reverence. It was a shield against her worries and distracted her from the danger looming from the outside world. But her menial tasks did not protect her from harsh realities for long.
‘Nurse, could you come here, please.’
Rosa was folding linen and placing it in a cupboard. She looked up to see a doctor standing in the doorway of the ward where critical patients were nursed. The bombing of Milan and Genoa had left many of the hospitals in those cities inoperable—either as a result of being directly hit or because of the loss of gas, electricity and water supplies. Patients considered able to be moved were sent to Rome and Florence. The ward was full after the last bombing raid on Genoa.
Rosa was unused to being referred to as ‘Nurse’ and didn’t realise that the doctor was addressing her.
‘Nurse, this is urgent! Please hurry!’ he said.
She closed the linen cupboard and followed the doctor into the ward. ‘Excuse me, dottore, but I’m only a trainee…’ Her voice caught in her throat when she saw the patient lying on the bed before her. It was a boy of about twelve years of age. He was missing part of one arm and both legs. The boy’s head was bandaged but his eyes were open. Rosa could barely bring herself to look at his torso, which was a mass of black tissue oozing with fluid. Until then, her main contact with patients had been to help the nurses feed the elderly and the children. She hadn’t witnessed an operation yet. The sight of the boy’s wounds was a shock. It took all her strength to remain upright. The smell of charred and rotting flesh brought bile to her throat.
‘You’re only a trainee?’ said the doctor, slipping on gloves and picking up a pair of scissors. ‘Well, you’d better get up to speed fast. We are going to see more of this before the day is out. This boy is the only survivor of an entire street. Everyone and everything else was blown to smithereens.’
The doctor was young, in his thirties. He had a trim moustache and fine hands. Rosa saw from his tag that his name was Dottor Greco. He wasn’t being arrogant with her, only matter-of-fact. When she realised that he intended to cut away at the dead flesh, she offered to administer the morphine.
‘I have been trained to give injections,’ she said.
Dottor Greco pursed his lips. ‘That won’t be necessary,’ he said.
Rosa stared at him in horror. ‘No morphine? Are we that short?’ she asked.
He shook his head. ‘Dealing with the dressings is going to be a daily matter. We can’t give this patient morphine every time.’
Rosa’s hands trembled when she passed the instruments to Dottor Greco as he called for them. The matron had said that the nurses should see things from a medical perspective, but Rosa could not forget that it was a young boy lying there in the bed, in dreadful pain, able to hear but unable to speak. She did her best to comfort him although she could see in the boy’s eyes that every incision the doctor made caused him agony. Even the one arm left to him was so badly burnt that he couldn’t move it. He was immobile, shut in a living hell.
When the ordeal was over, Dottor Greco rebandaged the boy’s torso. Rosa was bathed in sweat. Dottor Greco looked directly at her for the first time when he had finished dressing the boy’s wounds. His grim face showed the anguish he felt too, although his voice was steady. ‘I’ll get the sister to show you how to clean his eyes,’ he said. ‘I need someone diligent.’
At Dottor Greco’s request, Rosa was transferred from auxiliary duties to working in the most difficult ward of all. But when the matron asked Rosa if she would prefer to be replaced with someone more experienced, she declined. In the weeks that followed, she gradually moved from being horrified by the lipless faces, fingerless hands and twisted flesh of the bomb victims to seeing the people beneath the wounds. With all the hell these disfigured patients had suffered, and would suffer for the rest of their lives, she made it her mission that at least none of them would lose their sight due to neglect. She cleaned the area around the patients’ eyes every four hours with a saline solution, and impressed upon the night volunteer the importance of doing the same.
There were two senior nurses who worked with Rosa in the ward: Nurse Mazzetti, an extroverted woman in her late twenties; and Nurse Tommaselli, who was petite with a wide forehead, minute nose and a pointed chin. She looked like a mouse and twitched like one too.
One day when Rosa was helping Nurse Mazzetti remove stitches from a man’s arm, the patient turned to them and said, ‘Why aren’t you two married?’
‘Nurse Parigi is married,’ Nurse Mazzetti told him, winking at Rosa. ‘It’s me who’s looking for a husband.’
‘Why is she here then?’ the patient asked.
‘My husband and children are away,’ Rosa explained. ‘I wanted to put myself to good use.’
‘Well, no-one can change the sheets like you can,’ the patient said to Rosa. ‘You’re the only one who doesn’t make it feel like my skin is being ripped off again.’
‘Changing sheets with the patient still in the bed is my speciality,’ said Rosa with a laugh. ‘I was awarded ten out of ten for my bed-making exam.’
Nurse Mazzetti glanced at Rosa and smiled. ‘And Matron doesn’t give perfect scores often,’ she said in a tongue-in-cheek tone. ‘In fact, until Nurse Parigi arrived it was unheard of.’
Rosa was glad for the camaraderie she felt with Nurse Mazzetti. It was a comfort because, despite the dedication of the nurses in the ward and Dottor Greco, they lost a patient a day. Some days they lost many more.
‘It’s septicaemia,’ Nurse Mazzetti explained to Rosa one day when they were washing down a bed with carbolic acid. ‘Despite all the care we take, infection in burns injuries is difficult to avoid.’
She flicked her head in the direction of the boy Rosa had seen on her first day on the ward. He couldn’t speak to tell them who he was, so the nurses had named him ‘Niccolò’, after the patron saint of children. ‘How’s he progressing?’ Nurse Mazzetti asked.
‘His vital organs are intact,’ Rosa said. ‘He should be able to eat on his own soon.’
‘Well, he’s in good hands with you looking after him. Everyone admires your dedication. Even Dottor Greco commented on it.’
Rosa didn’t tell Nurse Mazzetti, who scoffed at religion, that she prayed for Niccolò every day. Rosa intended that when the boy was better he would come and live with her. She couldn’t bear to think that after all he had suffered, he’d be sent to an orphanage.
‘The worst pain for the bomb victims,’ the matron had told the volunteer nurses in one lecture, ‘is not the horrific physical injuries they’ve suffered but the psychological ones.’
When Rosa arrived for work a few days later, she knew from Dottor Greco’s averted eyes and the pained expression on Nurse Mazzetti’s face that another patient had died overnight.
‘Who?’ she asked.
Nurse Mazzetti squeezed Rosa’s shoulder. ‘You know it’s for the best.’
‘Niccolò?’
Nurse Mazzetti nodded, and Rosa felt something inside her grow cold. The boy’s death was for the best, she knew. Despite all the love and care Rosa and her family would have lavished on him, his injuries would have left him with a miserable life. But it wasn’t fair that he should have suffered in the first place. What sort of army dropped bombs on civilians? Rosa looked around the ward. Most of these pitiful, mutilated people were doomed. What was Italy at war for? What was all this suffering accomplishing?
Rosa turned back to Nurse Mazzetti, fighting her tears. ‘Has he been laid out?’
Nurse Mazzetti shook her head. ‘We waited for you.’
Rosa’s legs were leaden as she made her way to Niccolò’s bed. The curtains around it had been drawn. She remembered the many mornings when she had approached the bed apprehensively, fearful that the boy had died overnight. She’d always been elated when she’d discovered him breathing. Now the day she had dreaded had come. Niccolò was covered with a sheet. Rosa gently lifted it and looked at his ashen face.
‘You’re with your Mamma and Babbo again now,’ she whispered through her tears. ‘With your brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, your neighbours and friends, and your pets. They will be happy to see you again.’
Nurse Tommaselli appeared. ‘I’ll take him to the mortuary,’ she said to Rosa. ‘It might be hard for you. I know you were fond of him.’
Rosa was grateful for Nurse Tommaselli’s kindness. Most of the time they were all so rushed off their feet there was no time to stop and support each other. The three nurses lifted the boy onto the trolley and Nurse Tommaselli wheeled him away. Rosa stripped the bed. It was her way of dealing with grief when a patient died. Only this time her emotions got the better of her and tears spilled from her eyes.
‘When we finish our shift, we’ll have a cigarette together,’ Nurse Mazzetti said to her.
‘I’ll come with you to the canteen but I don’t smoke,’ Rosa replied.
‘Lucky you!’ said Nurse Mazzetti. ‘When I worked with tuberculosis patients, the ward sister told me to have a cigarette after each shift to kill germs. Now I’m hooked. It’s killing me because I can barely get a cigarette a day because of this confounded war. My mother has been drying oak leaves for me. Can you imagine? The smell is disgusting.’
Rosa could imagine. She didn’t like Antonio smoking even normal cigarettes in the house or shop.
‘Seriously,’ said Nurse Mazzetti, ‘you need to talk about this, Nurse Parigi. It’s been a tough morning.’
When Rosa arrived at the canteen after reporting Niccolò’s death to the matron, Nurse Mazzetti was already there with Nurse Tommaselli.
‘None of this formal stuff,’ Nurse Mazzetti said. ‘We’ll save that for the ward. I’m Gina and this is Fiamma.’
‘You’re doing very well,’ Fiamma said, fixing her intense eyes on Rosa. ‘I don’t know how you manage to study on top of it all.’
‘Without my family I have a lot of time on my hands,’ Rosa told her.
‘It’s good of you to have volunteered,’ said Gina. ‘And then to have ended up in our ward after just a few weeks…’
‘Many experienced nurses can’t take it,’ agreed Fiamma. ‘They can’t stand the smell or the sight of the injuries, let alone changing the dressings…It’s like we are torturing our patients rather than helping them.’
‘I remember when I came to the ward,’ said Gina, lighting one of her oak-leaf cigarettes, ‘I thought I’d seen it all. Then one day Dottor Greco was unravelling the bandages from a burn patient’s head and the man’s ears came off. I fainted.’
The women shook their heads and chuckled. There was nothing humorous about a man losing his ears, but the thought of Gina fainting in front of Dottor Greco amused them. They needed something to laugh at to stop them losing their sanity. The three women talked about the patients and staff. They didn’t speak about the war. It was obvious things were getting worse. In some of the wards, rationing was so severe that the nurses handed out hot-water bottles to relieve the patients’ hunger pains. The nurses were supposed to be given a free lunch each day. Lately Rosa, Gina and Fiamma had been sharing their food with their patients, unable to bear seeing the sick and suffering going without.
‘You know, the worst thing I ever encountered,’ said Fiamma, her eyes growing dark, ‘was a young woman from Milan. Her arms and legs had been blown off in an Allied bomb attack. She’d lost the sight in one eye and all her teeth from the impact. I was on the night shift and every time I went to check on her, she begged me to end her life. “I’ll never marry, I’ll never have children. They’ll put me in an institution.” We had to drain her wounds every day and she was in agony. The woman was suffering so much that…well, one night when she was sleeping I nearly did put a pillow over her face. But that would be a sin, wouldn’t it? Mercifully she died a few days later.’
Rosa shuddered. She still believed in God, but the war and working as a nurse had made her question some of the Church’s teachings. Could it really be a sin to show mercy to another human being who was suffering that much?
In the visiting room at the prison, Rosa put on her brightest smile for Antonio. ‘Ylenia made some gnocchi for you,’ she told him. ‘And I’ve brought Gorky for you to read.’
‘I’ll be fat and Russian by the time they let me out,’ Antonio said, grinning at her. ‘How are things at the hospital? Are you still enjoying what you are learning?’
Rosa told him about her training lectures. She did not tell him about Niccolò or the other patients who had died that week. She didn’t tell him there was barely enough food to feed everyone and that she had heard from one nurse that in the mental asylums the inmates were being left to starve. Rosa kept her feelings to herself; she did not want to burden her husband. Then it occurred to her that maybe Antonio wasn’t telling her everything either. He was cheerful when she came to visit him and cleanshaven. He assured her that he was being treated well and given sufficient to eat, but she could see that, despite the extra food she brought him, he was growing thin. Yet from his outward demeanour one could be fooled into thinking that his prison term was nothing more than an opportunity to catch up on his reading. Rosa knew it wasn’t like that. We are both acting, she thought. Doing our best to paint a bright picture so as not to upset the other one.
When Rosa climbed into bed that night, she longed more than ever for her family. If she had Antonio near and could hug her children and pat Ambrosio and stroke Allegra, then somehow, she thought, she might even forget that there was a war on and embrace everything that was good about life again.
In December 1941, Japan, the third point of the axis with Italy and Germany, attacked Pearl Harbor and brought the United States into the war.
‘That attack only served as a diversion,’ Antonio told Rosa while they shivered one day in the prison visiting room at the beginning of 1942. ‘Everyone knows the Germans are losing in the Soviet Union. After the initial successes the bitter Russian winter is slaughtering them.’
‘There’s a train of injured people from Genoa arriving today,’ the matron told Rosa when she reported for duty. ‘You are going to the station with Dottor Greco and some nurses from the casualty ward.’
It was the second trainload of new patients in the last week. Rosa wasn’t sure how they were going to cope. The matron told her that some buildings in Florence had been selected to house patients who couldn’t be treated in the main hospital, and that she was recruiting more volunteers.
When the train arrived, Dottor Greco instructed Rosa to attend to the last carriage. ‘They have some Allied soldiers to be transported to the prisoner-of-war hospital. They’ll need someone who can speak English to check them over.’
Rosa rushed past the stretchers and people on crutches to the last carriage, which was guarded by soldiers and police. Two other nurses who could speak some English came with her to help. Rosa heard a man moaning.
‘Nurse?’ a soldier in a blue uniform called out to her. His leg was bandaged and he stood on crutches near another man laid out on a stretcher. The prostrate man had an amputated arm and was writhing in agony.
‘When was his surgery?’ Rosa asked, kneeling down beside the man.
‘Yesterday,’ the soldier on crutches told her.
Rosa hesitated, not sure that she had heard him correctly. The hospital in Genoa couldn’t possibly have sent out a patient so soon after major surgery! She didn’t want to remove the man’s bandage in these unhygienic conditions but from the shape of the cut it was a guillotine amputation, the kind that was performed in a hurry.
‘I’m going to give your friend something for the pain,’ she told the soldier on crutches.
She opened her kitbag and took out a syringe to draw the morphine. After a few minutes, the man with the amputation stopped writhing. The morphine wouldn’t get rid of the pain completely but she could tell he was feeling relief. He was going to need further surgery. Rosa knew he had a slim chance of surviving.
‘You’re a good woman,’ said the soldier on crutches. ‘The nurses on the train wouldn’t even give him a sip of water.’
Rosa wasn’t supposed to engage in conversation with the prisoners beyond assessing their medical needs. But she looked up and noticed the soldier had a disarming smile. All the men in that uniform seemed to share the same square-jawed faces and tanned skin. They were about the same age as Rosa, perhaps younger. She looked over her shoulder. The police and Italian soldiers were occupied getting the patients on stretchers into the waiting ambulances.
‘Which part of England are you from?’ she asked the soldier. ‘I don’t quite understand your accent.’
The soldier laughed and his periwinkle-blue eyes seemed to turn even bluer. ‘I’m from the very southern part of England,’ he said. ‘It’s called Australia.’
Rosa understood the joke and smiled. ‘Ah, Australia,’ she said. ‘Yes, I know it.’ She remembered the woman with the Schiaparelli belt. ‘You have kangaroos. When you go home, tell the people not to shoot them any more. They are beautiful. They should be taking care of them, not slaughtering them.’
The soldier’s face turned serious. ‘When I return home, I won’t be shooting anything,’ he said. ‘I’ll put my uniform and gun away forever. You can be sure of that. I’ve had a gutful of killing.’
An Italian policeman called out an order and Rosa and the Allied prisoner stopped talking. Two army orderlies picked up the man on the stretcher and the other prisoners who could walk were marched to the trucks. Rosa watched the soldier depart and wondered what kind of treatment he would get in the prisoner-ofwar camps if the nurses on the train wouldn’t even give his dying friend water.
She turned to signal to the other nurses to rejoin Dottor Greco who was still busy assessing the civilian patients. She was shocked when one of the nurses glared at her before spitting at her feet.
‘English-lover!’ the nurse growled. ‘Whore!’
Rosa recoiled at the words. Had the woman lost her mind?
‘You wasted morphine on that sheep farmer,’ the nurse said, her eyes blazing, ‘when there is a shortage of it for our own people!’
Rosa answered with genuine surprise: ‘May I remind you that as nurses we have pledged to give aid to all who need it. That man was in agony.’
‘Really?’ the nurse retorted, her lips curling into a snarl. She pointed at the civilian patients. Most of them were women and children. One infant was wailing and the sound of its distress was sickening. The nurse turned back to Rosa. ‘Do you know who those men are? They are the downed pilots who bombed Genoa. They’ve killed and inflicted unspeakable injuries on innocent women and children and you want to give them morphine to ease their pain! Why didn’t you slit their throats!’
What happened at the station affected Rosa more than all the other horrible events that had occurred since the war broke out. Finally her veneer of cheerfulness in front of Antonio broke. She couldn’t hide her tears. She had no idea how to reconcile her feelings of compassion for the Allied prisoners with her anger at what had happened to the children blown apart by their bombs. She had since learnt that downed Allied pilots were transferred to German prisoner-of-war camps where the conditions were harsher. The Australian pilot she had seen probably wouldn’t survive the war.
‘Rosa, what else could you have done?’ Antonio said when she told him about it. ‘It’s your duty as a nurse to care.’
‘I feel like I’m going crazy,’ she said. ‘They didn’t look like cold-hearted killers. They looked like decent young men.’
‘They probably are decent young men,’ he answered. ‘You’ve got to understand that we are doing the same to them. Their nurses are trying to put together innocent English children who have been blown to bits by our bombs—and we still expect the British to treat our pilots well!’
‘The whole thing is a mess,’ Rosa said.
Antonio reached out and touched her wrist. The guard didn’t stop him. ‘You know, once war breaks out there are no decent men and no morals any more,’ he said. ‘If people start thinking that way they will be defeated. What all the decent people need to do before war even breaks out is say “No!”. That is the time to be decent. That’s the only time it will do any good. But that’s not what we Italians did. We either cheered Mussolini on for our material gain or tried to ignore him. Now we pay the price.’
Rosa sat back and thought of the things Luciano had said against Mussolini and the fascists all those years ago. He had been right. But the memory of it made her cry even harder.
In May the following year, Rosa arrived at the hospital to find the doctors and nurses milling around in shock. The Allies had just bombed Rome.
‘I never believed that could happen,’ said Fiamma. ‘I thought all the Catholics around the world would object because of the Vatican. What next?’
Rosa realised that she and Fiamma were thinking the same thing: if the Allies could bomb Rome, then there was nothing to stop them bombing Florence. The tension amongst the hospital staff intensified when they realised that what had happened to the patients from Genoa and Milan could happen to them. The junior nurses changed the light bulbs to blue ones and checked the blackout curtains. When Rosa left that day, she saw volunteers sandbagging the hospital’s ground-floor windows.
When she got home, she, Ylenia and the remaining neighbours in their apartment building stocked up the cellar with supplies and blankets, although Rosa knew from the patients she had been treating that a cellar wasn’t much protection if a building was hit. When she climbed into bed that night she couldn’t stop thinking of Antonio in Le Murate prison. He had assured her that the guards would move the prisoners to the cellars and bomb shelters if Florence was attacked, but Rosa didn’t believe it. She was sure that if there was an air raid, the guards wouldn’t release the prisoners. They’d be left in their cells like sitting ducks.