THIRTY-TWO

Francesca

March 23, 1944

Francesca passed a line of people, women mostly, queued up for water at an emergency public fountain. The line snaked all the way around the block, the waiting women toting an array of canteens and jugs, their dented sides glinting in the spring sunshine. Recent bombs had fractured the city’s already damaged utilities, leaving Romans with even less of everything. Clothes hung off the people Francesca passed, standing propped against walls, shifting from foot to foot, squinting in the light. The nauseating odor of lice medicine wafted among them. As if being hungry wasn’t enough, Rome was infested with lice. The scent of the ointments, ubiquitous now, seemed like the scent of despair.

Francesca’s stomach growled, and she sighed. The latest bombs were obviously meant for the train stations flanking Rome, but a few pilots always seemed to miss. The convent’s windows had been blown out by a bomb falling on a house nearby, terrifying Lucia and everyone else hidden there. Another had fallen on a queue just like the one Francesca left in her wake now. That bomb hit a line of people waiting for water, ripping through bodies like a machete in the brush. Rumors flew afterward: women had been beheaded, thrown up onto telegraph wires, buried in rubble. Fear darkened everyone’s eyes, competing only with exhaustion.

Francesca was afraid as well, but not of bombs, not now. In a pocket under her robes, tapping lightly against her bony hip with each footfall, was a bottle of pills. She’d walked the city all morning, tracking it down on the black market in exchange for Lucia’s jewelry, her own heart constricting at the thought of Matteo in his bed. He wasn’t her child, not even related, but when she looked at him, the world seemed to narrow, reassembling its hierarchies until questions rang in her mind. What was most important? What had she been fighting for, these many months, if not the future? This morning she’d touched the future’s own forehead, listened to the feeble inflation of his lungs, and left in a hurry with pearls in her pocket.

She passed the steps of a church, and as always, refugees called out to her. She clenched her jaw and walked on, wishing they understood. They saw a nun ignoring their desperation, but what they couldn’t see was the message written on tissue paper crinkling against her chest. She had this last errand to run, and then she could hurry home with the medicine for Matteo.

She turned off the main road onto a narrow alley. Glancing up and down, she fished the tissue from her brassiere. The paper was thin enough to be eaten should she be stopped, but up ahead a gray-haired man in black materialized from an alcove, and she knew it would be another successful pass. She walked straight for him, exchanged a nod, and slipped the tissue into his waiting hand. He bent, tucked it into his shoe, and walked the other way. Francesca barely broke stride. She spilled out on the opposite side of the alley, job done.

She heaved a sigh, allowed herself to close her eyes for a second, and savored the sun on her face. She never read the messages, but she had an idea of the information she carried: the number of German vehicles someone had counted on a strategic road, the position of troops, the location of supplies. The tissue paper messages would help Allied bombers find the right targets, hastening their victory, hastening liberation. Francesca glanced at another huddle of starving refugees. Liberation couldn’t come soon enough.

Revived a little, she turned up Via del Tritone, aiming for home. It was the second day of spring, and the weather had finally warmed. The pill bottle tapped her hip, and she felt lighter than she had in some time, nearly optimistic. She was about to turn another corner off the main road when a bang sounded, freezing her step. It grew exponentially, the thud and thunder of an explosion. She spun in place as the air shook with the concussion, the cobblestones vibrating underfoot. Had a bomb dropped? She wheeled again, scanning the sky for planes. It was a cloudless day, the kind people had begun calling, “una giornata da B-17,” optimal for lumbering American bombers. But there was nothing. She listened, cocking her head and stilling her body so she could hear the sweep of her own lungs. Gunfire burst to life, somewhere close.

Questions came to her in a jolt. Why had today’s message drop been arranged for this neighborhood? Why hadn’t they intersected at their usual meeting place? The strike. No sooner had the words slid through her mind than another series of explosions shook the streets. Her contact must have had reason to be in this neighborhood, playing some other role, and in an instant she understood.

Screaming and gunshots split the air over the neighborhood, and Francesca wheeled again, trying to locate the source of the noise. She couldn’t think. Blood pounded in her brain as the shooting continued. People began running toward her, civilians streaming down Via del Tritone, their hands holding hats to their heads, bags thumping hips, eyes wild. What had the partisans hit? She tried to think, to command her mind to focus, but instead it skipped off in a frantic whir, and before she’d harnessed a single coherent thought, her legs were moving. She trotted into her limping run, one fist holding her robes aloft, the other pumping in time with her feet, her breath coming fast. Tommaso had spoken of a column of Germans. “Madonna,” she said aloud, running faster. “Madonna mia.”

She turned onto Via del Boccaccio, a narrow road connecting others, black robes flapping. She moved at a mechanical clip, devoid of thought, following sounds like a bat tracking a scatter of insects. A shot rang out. Another. Still, people streamed past her, ducking into doorways of shops and apartments, veering up side streets, faces feral. Gunfire spit, growing closer, and finally, her mind snatched at questions, holding them before they streamed on by. What would she find at the scene? Did anyone need help? What could she do?

It wasn’t until she was nearly under the gunfire that her mind fully caught up with her legs. What was she doing, running into the scene of an attack? She slowed so quickly her robes tangled around her ankles, heart hammering in time with the shots. The road she paused on intersected with another, not ten strides away. She crouched, crab-walking the final steps toward the intersection, careful to stay hidden between a building and a trash can. Just see if anyone needs help, she told herself, holding her breath. The scattered shots died out, replaced by German shouts, and she took a final step to glance up and down the street.

She sickened. Bodies littered the narrow lane, thrown like heaps of dolls. Blood spattered buildings up and down the street. It ran downhill in trickles, slicking the cobblestones. A woman hung from a three-story window, shot in her bathrobe and caught on a railing. Francesca blinked, looking among the corpses for partisans, trying to hold on to some scrap of coherence, and her eyes fell to a blond head and shoulders, not far away, rolled up against the curb. It was a boy’s head, a little older than Matteo, blown clean off its body. Vomit rose in her throat so fast she had to bend over and retch against the stucco wall she clung to. Her empty stomach heaved, its meager contents splattered at her feet, and she fought a wave of dizziness. She had to get out of here. Her eyes moved on their own, once again skating over the bodies, the surviving SS soldiers wandering among them a little way up the street, shouting. Gunfire shattered the synapse of quiet, ricocheting out of nowhere, and her senses flooded in like cold water. Get out of here, a voice whispered in her mind. There was nobody she could help. Run.

Francesca took off, slipping in her own vomit before catching her uneven stride. Shouts rang out behind her, but she scurried on, tensing for the bullet that was most certainly coming for her spine, sobbing through her bellowing breaths.

A side street appeared, and she careened up it, struggling to run, struggling to push the image from her mind that hung there now, like an omen. A boy’s head, severed. Dead eyes, so young. Forever staring up at a cloudless day.

She collapsed against a wall, heaving. She couldn’t breathe. Her own words came back to her, spoken on the first warm day of the year.

Tommaso, if you don’t stop this strike, we’ll be in un mare di merda.

But it was so much worse than a sea of shit. She saw the dead boy’s eyes, held them in her mind, and bent to retch again. She already knew she would see that poor boy for the rest of her life.